Barnes & Noble has quietly shuttered its how-to site Quamut. The site, which was launched back in late March 2008, was a mix of professionally produced how-to guides and user-created wikis, the latter of which are no longer available.
What remains are the 1,685 guides which will continue to be sold both at Barnes & Noble's online store as digital downloads, and at brick-and-mortar stores as laminated paper reference guides. These range anywhere from $2.95 to $5.95 depending on what format they're in.
There's no word yet on whether the company will continue to invest in the creation of more guides, or if its user-generated how-to guides will once again be made available. For now, the only way to access them is through a Web cache like Google.
Barnes & Noble also continues to run in-house ads for the site on its online store, despite the change.
A Barnes & Noble representative could not be immediately reached for comment.
Barnes & Noble has shut the doors on its how-to Web site Quamut. What remains are digital and physical guides in its stores.
(Credit: CNET)
Five-year-old start-up SplashCast Media will be shutting down in the next few weeks. Co-founder and CEO Michael Berkley put out a company blog post earlier this week detailing the various directions the company had taken, going from an enterprise content management tool, all the way to a video player that was integrated with social networks like Facebook and MySpace--none of which were enough to keep it afloat.
"At each turn, we moved from what ultimately proved to be a declining market opportunity to a larger opportunity," Berkley said. "We have a lot to be proud of. In addition we have a lot of lessons learned to humbly take with us as we move on."
Berkley noted that one of the leading causes for the demise was publishers not wanting to pay to use its technology, which had previously been offered for free. He also said that the VC community was not willing to "bet" on the company, despite it picking up a $4 million Series A funding in late March last year.
SplashCast's Social TV player would let users watch TV shows and embed them on their social-networking pages.
(Credit: CNET)Between becoming a social TV service, and its start as a CMS for enterprise users, one of the company's most interesting products was its consumer publishing platform. This would let anyone grab all types of media and mash them up into a single player that could be syndicated in various channels--regardless of the content type. This meant you could mix videos, photos, audio clips, and even RSS feeds.
It was one of the few products at the time that would actually let you get away with such a hodgepodge in a single package. This later developed into a professional publishing platform the company was unable to charge for, which definitely serves as a good example for other companies who may one day expect to charge for services that are currently being offered free of charge.
Previous coverage:
SplashCast: Share everything in one place
SplashCast gets a little more social, bird-like
SplashCast and NPR do podcast player, Facebook app
SplashCast launching ultrasocial video player tomorrow
SplashCast launches MyPodcastNetwork
Microsoft has decided to close down Windows Live Events and will be focusing its development efforts on building event planning and management tools for Windows Live Calendar instead. Beginning next month, users of Windows Live Events will be unable to create new events. And sometime next year, the site will simply redirect to Live Calendar instead.
In the meantime, Microsoft is encouraging users to download any photos or documents they have stored in their events, either to their hard drives or to Windows Live SkyDrive. The service has also long had a way to export events to other services including Outlook, Google, and Yahoo calendar, as well as Apple's iCal.
Windows Live Events was launched as part of the Windows Live rebranding back in late 2007. Designed as an Evite competitor of sorts, it let users create events that could be shared publicly. It also made use of other Microsoft services like Live Spaces and Live Messenger to let party goers and planners alike communicate.
In case you had forgotten that microblogging and file-sharing social network Pownce is shutting down in mere hours, here's your friendly reminder.
If you were a user of the site, now is a good time to go back and take one last look at all your past quips, shared files, and discussion threads, since they'll soon be wiped clean.
As mentioned before, there is an escape hatch to take everything you've posted to the site and bring it elsewhere--the only catch is that you have to request it before the site shutters. You'll get a download link to the data file e-mailed in "a few days," but you must begin the process from this page while it's still up.
There's a post on the official Pownce blog about what to do when you get your hands on the data, in the form of import instructions for Vox, TypePad, and WordPress.
Most of my Pownce contacts seem to have left for Twitter or Vox. There's also a room in FriendFeed called "Pownce Exiles" with just fewer than 200 members. It's hard to believe that there was a time in which invitations to this site were fetching cold, hard cash on eBay.
Update: Pownce has now shut down completely, although the export page, along with the links to download exported user data files remains. Of note is that my data export from earlier today only took a couple of hours, instead of days as the site stated. One reader also wrote in to let us know ex-Powncers can export their identity to Soup.io, although I'm not sure if this works since Pownce's site is no longer there to serve up the data.
Pownce users can export their user data to another network before the site shuts down. The exported data takes a couple of days to show up elsewhere, though.
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