If you haven’t heard about the Kiko calendar calling it quits, here’s a quick summary: Kiko was/is a pretty cool online calendar. A few days ago on their blog they offered their final post, a farewell saying they were calling it quits because they couldn’t keep up the product. They decided to put the site up for sale on eBay. Good ole’ eBay to the rescue, again. It seems that it’s becoming a trend for companies that are on the fast track downwards to bail out on eBay.
On August 23rd the auction went up. With 111 bids and a few newbies fighting for the win, a user by the name of “powerjoe1998″ won the auction at $258,100.00 Not too bad of a payout for calling it quits– although according to Richard White of Kiko they won’t gain much from it as they try to ”recoup investors money”. eBay even has a category for websites up for sale, I love it! I think it’s the new hot thing to sell on eBay.
Now of course just to stir the pot a little: If you’ve sold a few things on eBay, you’re probably aware of how easy it really is to get that final value credit fee back. Could this have been a publicity stunt? It would have been so easy to just buy it themselves and submit to get the final value fee back and they would have been out the listing fee only. Think about how much attention they just received in the last week. Some of you probably haven’t even heard of Kiko up until now. Publicity stunt or not, what a good way to get some quick attention thrown your way!
Okay, okay, maybe that’s a little far out there. Who knows what the deal really was. I’m sure it’s played out just as they said it has. Congrats to Kinko simply for trying. I give them an ”A” for effort. I’m sure it’s been no easy journey. Kiko may have jinxed themselves with their slogan: “Kiko is a great, dead simple calendar you can use right in your web browser.” Kiko is now considered to be in the “deadpool” as they call it.
Hopefully the new proud owner will take what they have been given.. uhh I mean purchased for a pretty penny and make it even better. I’d love to see it turn out to be a great investment for the lucky winner and see the dedicated users benefit as well. They’ll have the opportunity to make it, or break it and if it’s the latter, we may see it up for round two on eBay.
A very interesting story. My question though being on this topic. Who knows of a really great online calendar? I have tried a few and while they have been decent, I can not get any of the calendars reminders to work. Google has a nice calendar, however, I tried a few test items with notification, but never got any notifications. Does the calendar have to be active? My impression was that it would email the notification.
This is the only reason that I do not use an online calendar. I would really like to switch to an online calendar if I could find one that works.
Go into the notification settings on the Google Calendar and check the “Email” box. By default they do not email notifications.
Also, I just checked out [alexa.com] and it definitely looks like the auction helped their stats.
It would make quite a good eBay scam as well – as we all know eBay can recoup your money if a product never arrives, but depending on what was offered (website/server passwords) there may have been no transfer other than some digital information. Kiko could take the cash and then claim they sent the product and they’d be over £100,000 richer!
DOH!!! I do not know how I missed this. probably because it was staring me in the face!
Thanks for the info. Time to move my calendar.