PC4Media: Lessons from Kiko's Ebay Auction

August 20, 2006

Lessons from Kiko's Ebay Auction

The Kiko news is making the rounds on the internets. It's gotten caught up in some really dumb tubes, though.

CNET blogger, Mike Yamamoto, quotes Darmesh Shah, blog owner at On Startups. They are drawing some really bunk conclusions from this. Like that the Kiko guys quit because there's no sense in competing with Google and that this is a sign of the bust of another bubble. Come on. Let's not be retarded, people.

So, to be contrarian for the sake of sanity, here is what the Kiko sale does and doesn't mean:

It doesn't mean that you can't compete with Google. In fact, Google's calendar has extremely low marketshare. If anyone is the competition in calendar software, its Microsoft. And if there is competition for online calendaring, it starts at Yahoo! Nevertheless, there's room for innovation and there's millions of people in the world. There's room for lots of online calendar products, especially if they are interoperable. And because events are so dynamic, there are about 6 different potential business models. If you can help people manage their time, you have a lot of influence over a lot of potential revenue streams.
The term, "Web 2.0", should be reverse auctioned on ebay to the lowest bidding trash hauling company. Come on, people. If you insist on categorizing the it-changes-every-millisecond-internet by years-long-movements, than you should prepare for extinction. This isn't evolution at Nature's speed. There's no such thing as a Metazoan internet. We're moving much faster. There will always be companies that fail. There will always be companies that change the game. Stop trying to categorize it into movements.
The Kiko guys are great developers. They're versed in the hottest framework, Ruby on Rails, and they know how to use it. If we were all still in high school, they'd be the popular girls getting all the attention at the 7-11, because they've developed faster than the other girls.
The Kiko guys didn't develop a revenue or business model. As the eBay auction states (and I didn't know when I wrote this), they didn't even have ad revenue. I'd guess that their intention was to create an enterprise product. Obviously, they didn't execute. I could guess why they didn't execute. Most of them were fresh out of school with no business development experience. Or maybe they realized they couldn't bootstrap that strategy. Who knows. Only they do. They don't seem to want to share that, which is understandable.
The Kiko guys are doing the right things for their investors. They aren't confident in their ability to execute a business out of the cool application they built. Instead of shutting down and wasting the "SMALL" amount of cash their investors spent, they are trying to recover it. Emphasis on small. If anything, these guys showed how inexpensively an awesome service could be built.
The Kiko guys are doing the right thing for their users. They always have, actually. But, they recently launched features so that users could extract their information and move it elsewhere.

That's it.

Update. I am not too far off. Richard White, a member of the Kiko team, responds to the misinformed, with a little less venom and a lot more facts.

Update II: I'd still like someone to buy me Kiko for my Birthday. However, I think there's a few better potential outcomes. 1) Marc Canter buys it and makes it open source. Installs it for his big-internet-player consulting clients, like AOL. Kazaam. Interoperable open source calendaring for everyone. 2) 37 Signals buys it. I've been using Basecamp a lot lately. Their To-Do Lists aren't ideal ways of managing and tracking time or prioritizing what I need to do each day. An integrated time-tracking, project management and calendaring tool would be ideal.

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