Mashup Startup Teqlo Shuts Down After Struggles

Written by Anne Zelenka
Thursday, November 8, 2007 at 9:08 AM PT

Wow. I remember having these guys on the top of my mashup competitor watch list while as the product marketing mgr at JackBe. Slow leak in the 2.0 bubble here as GigaOM's Anne Zelenka writes. I believe so. She also continues to say what I believe is indicative of any cycle bubble when technology drives products and not market needs. Anne mentions, "Even in the best of times, many companies fail to find a match between what they’ve built and what customers want to buy.

The killer app is is anything you want it to be, except what I have found is that people just want to be told or given something rather than worrying about building something so they can then go do their job. I believe that there is great potential but some companies need to do a serious do a market need inventory to ensure or readjust their offerings are meeting real market needs.

If sales and revenues are pouring in like an open water spicket than you can say I'm wrong, but if not and you're selling more fluff than licenses, well than maybe there might be some truth to this. Just my two cents though.

Update: Rod Boothby over at Innovation Creators, a great blog if you haven't checked it out before, knows more about Teqlo than the most of us ever will and has added some more thoughts about this happening.

Techcrunch was a bit more direct: Making my point that it is hard to make money from mashups, investors have pulled the plug on Teqlo. The startup, backed by Peter Rip, was originally focused on being a widget-based tool for creating mashups, competing with Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, and OpenKapow. Then it tried to morph into a vague “Web-based workflow” company, and lost its CEO. Founder Jacoby Thwaites tells GigaOm:

We had great investors, great people and great technology, but we ran out of time working out what the killer product could be!

Time’s up, buddy. Teqlo is now in the deadpool.