The sudden rush of company failures could be, as some people have suggested, because 2007 is the show-me year for startups which raised money from 2005 on. Though that's no doubt true, I do wonder whether some ventures have closed down quietly in the last few weeks, in the hope that, during the holidays and the new year tradeshows, nobody would notice. Tough. Here's the list.
Guba's founder and other senior executives left the company after acknowledging that Youtube had "won the big prize". Om Malik is reporting the company's now on the block.
Browster's founder tells Michael Arrington in a web documentary that we've learned from the last bubble. A scant four months later, the browser plugin startup goes offline.
A couple of key execs have left Wallop, the social network that sprang out of Microsoft's labs.
Filmloop laid off most of its staff after losing out in the photo slideshow market to Photobucket and Max Levchin's Slide.
Two of three founders at Revver, the online video site, are out. Revver helps users publish video, and sell ads. But it competes, vainly, with Youtube in the first activity, and Youtube's acquiror, Google, in the second.
As Valleywag reported today, Tagworld's founders haven't logged into their social network site for a month, and are said to be both "out of town". On the website, the company's management page is down. Tagworld, like Revver, received investment from Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Insider Pages, a competitor to Yelp's online bar and restaurant listings, has laid off two-thirds of its staff, according to Techcrunch.
Peerflix, a DVD swapping service, is refusing to tell Venture Beat how many people it's laid off.
Jobster, a venture which tried to use tagging to revolutionize online job postings, confirmed two-fifths of its workforce had gone.
