CEO of Ringside Networks Bob Bickel reported on his blog last week that the company is ‘winding down’ and that those involved with the company would ‘move forward.’ The company’s website is still live and an inquiry as to whether or not the company has officially ceased operations has not yet been answered. But it appears that the start-up, which had planned an open source ‘social application server,’ is done. Bickel blames the company’s outcome on distraction due to potential acquisition by a ‘non-evil’ company — he provides some interesting detail, it’s worth a read.
We profiled the company back in April at the time of its fairly high-profile launch (451 Group clients can see that profile here). Its plan, to enable site owners to create mini-apps that would integrate with public social networks like Facebook, seemed a good one and its management team, mostly ex-JBoss and Bluestone Software execs, was certainly experienced. Our best wishes to Bob and the others involved — I have a feeling this isn’t the last we’ve heard from these guys or, probably, of this software.
This is the second recent enterprise open source social software / collab failure that pops to mind. I also profiled German start-up Mindquarry last year (here for clients) that had some slick open source team collaboration software with all the social bells and whistles. It also failed to get sufficient funding and the company founders eventually joined Day Software to develop the (proprietary) social software components of its Web content management line.
Update 9/30/2008 – Bob Bickel wrote to let me know that details on company operations are still be sorted out. The Ringside open source code is still available on Sourceforge and will continue to be.
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