Startup Failures in 2010

The dot-com era's most prestigious interactive agency — fell 95% in value and merged into obscurity.

Ask Jeeves wanted to answer questions naturally. Google answered better. Jeeves retired.

The search engine with a butler that Barry Diller's IAC ran into the ground while owning it.

9,000 stores. Turned down Netflix for $50M. Filed for bankruptcy.

Claimed to out-index Google on day one — returned meaningless results and died in two years.

South Korea's Facebook — 27 million Korean users — tried to conquer America. Zero Americans wanted it.

Andy Rubin's pre-Android startup — built the iconic T-Mobile Sidekick, sold to Microsoft for $500M, and watched its work become the Microsoft Kin: a phone discontinued 48 days after launch

A social networking platform designed to help conference attendees connect before and after events.

EventVue was a social networking platform that helped conference attendees connect online before and after attending events.

Frid.ge was a group messaging online platform.

Google built the future of collaboration in 2009 — nobody understood it, so they killed it in 2010

Creator of Fallout and Baldur's Gate — filed for bankruptcy after selling the Fallout IP to Bethesda for $1.15M and failing to complete a promised Fallout MMO

Apple paid $80M to kill the future of streaming — then rebuilt it as iTunes Match.

200 million installs, a $105M settlement, and a federal court order — the file-sharing giant that lost the legal war.

One of the web's first search engines. Sold to a Spanish telecom for $5.4 billion at peak dot-com. Sold again for $95 million four years later.

Microsoft's leaked dual-screen tablet concept generated years of hype — then Steve Ballmer cancelled it a month before the iPad launched.

48 days on sale. The shortest hardware product life in Microsoft history.

GoTo.com invented paid search. Yahoo paid $1.63B for it. Google used the same idea to build a $100B business.

The creator of Crackdown launched APB — a $100M online shooter with subscription pricing — and went into administration 79 days after launch.