Big Apps that Flopped

call programs apps. I think that really started to become a thing upon the ascent of the consumer smartphone, which was sparked by Apple, which was then cranked up by Android, and that we really had the era of the app. At that point. We used to, like I said, call them programs. Now they are applications, whether it's for a phone or a computer. I guess app stores sounds better than program emporium anyway. For thousands of entrepreneurs, the dream is to build an app and to be come rich

beyond your wildest dreams. Right, You design an app and then the money rolls in. Maybe it's because some bigger fish out there, like some Google or Apple or Meta, decides that you're just too good to be left unacquired, and then they spend a bucket load of cash on you. Hopefully ten times more than what you're actually worth. Or maybe you actually figure out how to be profitable all on your own, you actually have a business plan and

you have a way of generating revenue. You would be the rare Silicon Valley project that actually works as a business on its own. That again is the dream. But dreams don't always come true, and sometimes even apps that seem to be strapped to a rocket for success end up blowing up and going up in flames. So this episode is about apps that fall into that category, apps that at one time seem like they were a sure thing,

only they flamed out down the line. One of the apps I originally planned to put on this list was four square, but as it turns out, that app and the company behind it is still chugging along, just in a slightly different role than it was before. See I remember when four square launched and folks would use it to check in to locations that they were visiting in

the real world. So some places would even start to offer special discountsl right like twenty percent off your first drink if you check into the bar via four square. Because it was seen as a kind of viral marketing. Other folks worried about the privacy issues of this kind

of behavior. In fact, some folks created a website called Please rob Me, and this site satirically would scrape data off Twitter for four square check in notifications, so please rob Me would then list people who were saying they

were not currently at home. Now, the whole point wasn't to actually inspire a way of burglaries, but rather show why it's dangerous to broadcast your location to the world in general, and it might not be a good idea, and maybe people should think harder about their personal privacy. In twenty fourteen, for Square actually changed dramatically. The company

launched a companion app called Swarm Now. This app contained all the social networking features that for Square used to have, so all the check in stuff, all the geolocation stuff that was kind of seen as the critical element of force Square and the one that you should be worried about that went to Swarm. For Square meanwhile became four Square City Guide, which became a discovery and recommendation app, and it would help you figure out places that maybe

you should visit based upon your past experiences. Right. It would say, Okay, I see that you're in downtown New York and because of the places that you used to go to in your hometown, here are some places we think you should probably check out because you'll really like them. You didn't have to use both of the apps if you didn't want to, but they did compliment one another, so if you used Swarm, four Square would tap into that check in data to help inform what recommendations it

should give you. Those apps are still available today. Like I just thought that four Square had come and gone because I haven't personally used it in a decade, But the fact is it's still a thing. One really interesting thing to me is that, forour Square's business largely involves licensing its technology to other companies, which include Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat, and lots more. The check in feature that four Square

developed powers numerous other apps. So while our perception was that four Square was a relic of the past, that's just not true. That's totally my misconception there, and again it's because I have really paid at digital four Square in a decade. But it is interesting to me that, you know, they found success in a different way than what they set out to do. I still don't have any real desire to read download either four square or Swarm. However, on a related note, there is also the story of

yik yak. Now, this app actually did flame out, but then it was resurrected again just a few years ago, so for those of y'all who do not know the story, a couple of guys launched an anonymous location based messaging platform back in twenty thirteen, and the way it worked was that you would open the app and you would

connect via putting in your phone number. This would end up allowing you to post to the platform, but you would only be able to read messages that had been posted by people within a certain distance of your physical location, such as within a five mile radius, and you could post a message anonymously, and again, only people who are in a five mile radius of your lowtion would be able to read your message. So as you would travel around, you would see new messages, while ones that were now

out of physical range would disappear from view. The focus on geolocation, coupled with anonymity, made the app extremely popular with school campuses, and yakyak largely catered to that audience. This also meant there was a lot of abuse. There was no accountability right there was no connection to a specific person, so people could post to the platform and

they could bully other folks or worse. So there were these stories popping up all around the United States about how the app was bringing out the absolute worst in

people and endangering folks. Right Like, let's say that you belonged to a minority population in a particular campus university of Even if someone's not specifically calling you out, it might be easy to figure out who people are talking about, which could definitely hurt your mental health, or they could even be calling for more extremes that could endanger your physical health. So pressure built against the company, and eventually

yakyak cave to it. So in twenty fifteen, yakyk made a massive change and required users to register a handle with the site, So all messages now would be attributed to a handle. They wouldn't be fully anonymous. Now, it was still a handle, not your name, so it wasn't exactly the same thing as signing your name to your own words, but it was a lot closer than what

had come before. Hardcore users hated this change, and eventually yak yak kind of backed off a bit and made it an optional feature, but by then the user base had been alienated and had dwindled, and in twenty seventeen, the company announced that the app was shutting down due to that dwindling user base. They actually did a sell off Square, the company that is behind online payment systems.

They purchased essentially the IP but really more like they purchased the engineering talent of Yaka and brought them on board. And it was for reportedly like just a million dollars, which is still a lot of money. Don't get me wrong. A million dollars is a lot, but it's nothing compared to what yik yak was valued at a few years earlier. And so yik yak effectively stopped being a thing in twenty seventeen, and it stayed in the grave for four years.

But then in February twenty twenty one, a group of new owners who remained mysterious and unnamed. Like everywhere I look to find out who the heck owned yak yak between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty three, didn't have information about that anyway, They purchased yik yak and announced plans to relaunch, and sure enough, late in the summer of twenty twenty one, the app came back. Now two years later, in twenty twenty three, another company called side

Chat scooped up yik yak. Now side chats. Shtick was essentially the same as yik yak. Side Chat had an anonymous posting platform that largely was targeting college campus side Chat was not as popular as yak yak. A lot of yak yak users felt that side Chat's user interface was inferior, and initially yakyak users were getting messages where they were being urged to migrate to side chat and

they hated it. Eventually that would change, where yak yak would remain a thing, but effectively transformed into side chat. You know, its interface became more of side Chat's interface. By the way, I based this all off of blog posts and articles and message boards because I wasn't on yik yak at the time, so I had no idea what was going on. But while the initial yak yak was popular with campuses, this new version specifically focused on

university students, like almost like exclusively. As opposed to it being a community based thing or a regional base thing. It was specifically a campus based thing, and occasionally it sounds like it would even make mistakes and accidentally assign someone to a university that was not the one they actually went to, which could be really hairy, right because if I were to join yik yak and it suggested I was a student at Georgia Tech, that's fighting words

because I attended the University of Georgia. Now that probably means nothing to most of you, but just know those two schools have had a long standing rivalry that goes between being you know, good natured ribbing and genuine, deep seated loathing. So if you had one student misidentified as going to the other school, that could be fighting words. Now I should say that yaikyak currently is only back

for iOS users as I record this podcast. Now, the relaunch did at one point include Android, and apparently it was only active for a very short while before in the spring of twenty twenty three, the company said that they were shutting down Android support in order to focus on building out features for the iOS version. Now, again, I can't check this app out. I'm an Android user. Plus I'm not a college student, so I have to rely on articles and Reddit posts to read up on it.

And it sounds to me that in the past you could register for yik yak just with your phone number, but now since the side chat acquisition, you have to supply a university email address to create an account university or college email address, and if you don't have one of those, you can't have an account, and that has upset a lot of users because it meant that they're one. If they're not in college, they can't be part of

this anymore. Though honestly, I don't see why you would necessarily want to be, But then that's probably because I feel a lot of empathy for the folks who were bullied, but it also is a reason. One reason they don't want to do it anymore is because their actual identity would be associated with their account, maybe not directly, like the actual posts would be anonymous, but the site would know who you were because you would have an email

address tied to your identity to register for the site. Arguably, you could say the same thing is true because for the old version, because you had to supply a phone number, so unless you're buying burner numbers just for yaekiyak, it would be pretty easy to figure out who you were. But it also means that if you're not a college student, or you're not on faculty or staff, then you're completely out of the loop. There's a lot of competition in

the anonymous message board space these days. Seems to me that a lot of the companies behind these apps typically will reach a level of success that brings more attention to their activities and perhaps their flaws, let's say, and then they feel pressure to change things in order to make their apps less prone to abuse, because now people

are paying attention to them and calling them out. And then subsequently, after making these changes, the apps decline in popularity because it turns out the user base the stuff that they really liked happened to be the same stuff that also facilitated abuse. Not to say that users all enjoyed and piling on folks and abusing people, but that the same features that made it easy to abuse folks were also the features that people just really liked. That kind of seems to be the life cycle for these

kinds of applications. They launch, they go viral, they get really big, folks notice that sometimes really awful people are using that app to do really awful things. The app then ends up making changes in an effort to not be held accountable for these things, and then it alienates the user base, both the good and the bad users. It then declines in popularity, then it fades into memory, your rentse and you repeat. Now, I can't say for

certain that's what's happening with Yak Yak. There are a lot of users who say that it's not as good as it used to be, that they don't see the appeal. The fact that it doesn't it's not available for Android users is a huge thing. It means that a large amount of the population can't even access it. Maybe the company will manage to relaunch for Android and regain some momentum, or maybe it's on the path back toward obsolescence. Okay, we've got more failed app to talk about. Before we

do that, let's stop for a moment and thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. So no list of failed apps would be complete without Quibi. Holy cats. This was a massive whiff with a whole lot of money and some really heavy hitters in both the entertainment and tech industries at the wheel, and it still crashed and burned. It was the brainchild of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had forged a legendary career in Hollywood.

You know, he became really well known at Disney and then created dream Works, and Quibi was hoping to tap into that same magic that Hollywood success and also the same magic that TikTok boasts. That was the key was can we make something inspired by the success of TikTok, and that was namely short form content, And in the case of Quibi, the short form would be videos that would last ten minutes or less. However, unlike TikTok, Quibi

productions would have some serious money behind them. We're talking about really high production values, stuff that you would see that would be akin to a television or film studio. And if TikTok can knock them dead with DIY shorts created by just any Yahoo out there, surely an entertainment app with serious Hollywood credentials could make a killing right now. On the tech side, former HP CEO Meg Whitman was on board, and Whitman and Katzenberg brainstormed the structure and

execution of Quibi. They also are argued a lot. Witman would later essentially say that Katzenberg would undermine her decisions and was micromanaging, and there seem to be a lot of bad blood at the top levels at Quibi, which was just one of many problems. But the company signed on various actors, directors, writers, and associated people to create content for the site. They poured approximately a billion dollars

to that effect. Some of the content created consisted of standalone short videos right like it was just a one and done ten minutes or less video, but some were actually serialized. They were longer pieces and divided up into

ten minute long chapters. This, in turn was a really tricky because, like, if you're gonna divide a movie into ten minute long chapters, you need a way to entice people to continue after a chapter is over, and in my opinion, it becomes like a Dan Brown novel where every chapter ends in a cliffhanger to try and incentivize people to go to the next chapter. And personally, I find that kind of narrative exhausting and not very satisfying.

I am not a Dan Brown fan, nothing against him, I just it doesn't appeal to me to end every few pages with another cliffhanger. Anyway, they also made a really odd decision when it came to framing, because the whole point of Quibi was that it was intended to be consumed on smartphones, and as I'm sure you're aware, we're used to watching television programs in landscape format, that is, the picture is wider than it is tall, right, But for phones, we often hold phones in portrait mode, where

it's taller than it is wide. Otherwise you have to turn the dang phone on its side, and there's a chance you'll end up watching a tiny video with huge black bars above and below it. So one choice Quibi's founders made is that all content should be viewable in full screen, whether the user was holding their phone in portrait or landscape mode, and that you could switch back and forth. So you could hold it in portrait mode and then say you know what, I want to see

this in wide screen, turn your phone landscape. It would switch, and in both versions the image would completely fill the screen of your phone. That's a big deal, even though it might not sound like it, because if you're a director or cinematographer, part of your job is making sure all the important information for the viewer is available within

the frame. Obviously that's going to be different if the finished product is to be viewed in portrait mode rather than landscape you need to figure out how are you going to frame the image so that it works in both formats, or you might have to use things like pan and scan or switching views to get the information across. Right, Like, you might have a scene where you have two characters, one far left and one far right on the screen.

They're talking to each other, and in landscape mode, that's fine, you can see it, but you switch it to portrait mode and now there's not enough room on the screen to get both characters in frame. What do you do? Do you have an empty frame where both characters are off screen, one off screen left and one off screen right. Do you just focus on one character and then you switch whenever the dialogue changes so that you get a different view when character one speaks versus character two? Do

you pan back and forth? Which is that swimmy effect you often get if you watch like old old home video, not home video, but you know videos that were made for home video use. You will often get that scanning feature. Because televisions were in the old four to three aspect ratio and they couldn't incorporate a wide screen picture unless they did the bars at the top or bottom or both, and a lot of people hated those. They wanted to have the image take up the whole screen, So you

end up having this digital panning, which I absolutely detested. Well, you have to make those decisions, or do you end up blocking all of your shots so that all the relevant information can be seen in one view, even if it's portrait, in which case you might just have a lot of unused space, like negative space in the frame if you're watching it widescreen, or maybe you shoot with multiple cameras so that way, one camera is taking the landscape version of the shot, one camera's taking the portrait

version of the shot. Like, there's a lot of complex things you have to think of behind the scenes from a content creator standpoint, beyond just the technology of if you turn your phone, you want the frame to be completely full. So this was a real issue that goes a technical challenge, and they did not have enough time to figure out how to deal with that in a way that was satisfying anyway. That whole design decision became a big hurdle. But another hurdle was that Quibi was

meant to be mobile only by design. It was not intended to be an app that you would access on a computer or smart television or streaming box or anything like that, and something that was outside the control and not predicted by the folks at Quibi when they were putting together their business plan was the COVID nineteen pandemic, which took a lot of us totally by surprise. So Quibi was really intended to be used for a world

that was on the go, right. The use case was that you would be out in the real world and you would have time to kill. Maybe you're waiting in line of the bank, or maybe you're sitting on a subway and you're on your way to work and you just need something to distract you from the tedium of life. Boom Quib is there to save the day. High production value scripted entertainment or you know, like game shows or whatever, but still high production value, not the type of stuff

you would see typically on a site like TikTok. Except the app launched just as the world was shutting down and going into quarantine in twenty twenty, so the use case for the app was no longer relevant, at least not for the several first months of the app's existence.

Plenty of critics said that even without the pandemic, Quibi would have just totally failed, But certainly the lockdown was a massive blow to the service when there were plenty of other options folks could act when they were at home. Why use Quibi if you have access to Netflix or one of the billion other streaming services that are out there now. The Verge has an article going through other

reasons why Quibi flopped. The writer Julia Alexander argues in that piece that one big reason is that none of the shows on Quibbi were particularly good, and that is a really tough problem. It is hard to convince folks to flock to your streaming service if the stuff you're streaming isn't very entertaining or compelling. Alexander actually says, quote most titles felt like jokes straight out of thirty Rock

end quoteff if you don't know what that means. Thirty Rock was this sitcom, a satirical sitcom about creating a late night comedy variety show a kin to Saturday Night Live. And often the show was joking about different shows that the network was launching, and they were always ridiculous, and you know, you would never really expect to see such a show in the real world well, Quibi apparently brought

those kinds of shows to the real world. Initially, Quibi offered a free subscription for a few months to early users, kind of a trial period, but once that trial period ran out, users were then given the option to subscribe to the service either for five dollars a month, which was an ad supported experience, or eight dollars a month

if you wanted to be free of ads. But since, as Alexander points out, there really wasn't much compelling content on the streaming service, most folks declined the offer once it stopped being free. They're like, that's it, I'm out, there's nothing here to keep me here. Julia Alexander also argues that Quibi was doomed even if there had never been a pandemic, and it's quite possible that she was right, because, as we do know, Katzenberg and Whitman were at odds

with each other. There was a lack of good content on Quibi. There were a lot of other competing services already out there, and there weren't a lot of good arguments to say, why use Quibi when there are these other alternatives? Right, And to Alexander's point, the people at Quibi never really settled on what Quibi actually was, or what it was for, or what its mission was. And because there was this lack of clarity, there was really

little chance of success. Now we'll never know if Quibi would have succeeded had there not been a pandemic, or if it would have survived, but we do know that Quibi launched on April sixth, twenty twenty, and it was shut down by December of twenty twenty. It didn't even make it a full year. And considering how much money was behind that app, like, remember, this is an app that spent a billion dollars just on the content, that's

not even on the engineering or anything else. Well, that's a massive flop, like big time flop in the tech world. And while we're on the subject of short form entertainment, let's talk about a pre sir to TikTok, something that kind of was forging the path that other services like TikTok or Instagram reels would follow. And I'm talking about the venerable and missed app Vine, at least it's missed by some people, including me. So in twenty twelve, Don Hoffman,

Colin Kroll, and Russ Yusopov developed and launched the app Vine. Now, for those of y'all who have never experienced Vine, it was a short form video app where you could record and then post a six second video clip and it would automatically loop once it reached the end, so it would play out the six seconds or however long it was. It could be less than six seconds, and then once it was at the end, it would start over again

until you scrolled to the next you know, Vine. And this made the app ideal for meme worthy content, so it was great for stuff like pranks or funny visual gags, or amazing feats of skill, like if someone was, you know, shooting a basketball from half court and sinking it perfectly nothing but net perfect Vine, right. And it also meant

that folks started to get really creative. They started to look at Vine as sort of a challenging platform and they wanted to create content specifically for it, and they would create six second long stories, typically comedic. Right. You'd have a setup and then a punchline and it would all take place in six seconds, but sometimes it would include things like scene changes. This was not easy to do in Vine because there were no real editing tools

to speak of. Within the app, you could record, then you could pause recording, and then you could start recording again. But you had just that six seconds to do everything, and you couldn't cut and edit clips together. So if you had like a really good take in the first three seconds of one verse and a really good conclusion in the last three seconds of another version, you couldn't

pair those together. You had to get it all done in one go, which meant if you made a mistake, your options were either post the imperfect version or keep trying till you got it right. Even so, with these restrictions, folks flocked to Vine to make some pretty amazing short videos, and they ranged all over the place. I mostly think of the comedic ones, but there were other ones too.

There were some that weren't, you know, comedic. They were like heartwarming or you know, they might make you weepy, depending upon the content. Vine was a phenomenon shortly after launching in June of twenty twelve, and it was enough to convince Twitter to acquire the company in October of twenty twelve for thirty million smackaroos, which is not bad

for a newly launched app. A couple of years later, in twenty fourteen, some successful Vine creators all banded together to move into an apartment complex which became kind of a ragtag collaborative studio in a sense, and they found further exposure on mainstream media. Like their success on Vine translated to larger platforms like classic ones on television. But even by twenty fourteen, things were starting to get rocky for Vine. One major reason is that Vine was in

trouble due to hefty competition. You see, the same year that Vine launched, back in twenty twelve, Meta which at that point was just known as Facebook, acquired Instagram for a billion smack a roos. That's really a princely sum. And then in twenty thirteen, Instagram introduced the ability to post video clips of up to fifteen seconds in length, so already more than twice as long as a Vine.

Instagram also already had a huge user base, which was made even larger by Facebook's integration, and it took a big old gulp of Vine's milkshake as a result. Now, this move should not have surprised anyone, because even back then, Facebook already had a reputation for scooping up companies that could otherwise distract Facebook users. Instagram was actually a great

example of this. Instagram was one of those acquisitions where Facebook says, Oh, this other app is starting to get people's attention, which means their attention isn't on our website, which means we're not making money from them. I don't like that. Let's fix it. And Facebook typically had one of two ways that they would fix this problem. They would buy the company and incorporate it into Facebook's corporate structure, and thus it became a bonus. It was adding to

Facebook's value. It was no longer taking away. Or they could copy it, and if they copied it, then they get undermine their competitor, and in the case of Vine, Facebook shows that option. They would just mimic the defining features of the co competitor, either in Facebook or in one of their other properties, and they would try to sap the user base back over to Facebook without having to buy the competition. That's kind of what was going

on with Vine, and it worked. The money began to shift from Vine to Instagram, and that money was largely coming out of marketing departments. So brands were partnering with popular creators in an effort to manufacture some viral marketing campaigns, and these could be really cost effective, right, Like, if you're a creator, a deal might land you a ton of money, but that ton of money would still be tiny compared to what a traditional mainstream marketing campaign would

cost a company. So then there you go. That's where the money was for Vine. But then Instagram was offering a longer form factor, right, more than twice as long as what a vine was, and that was far more attractive to a lot of marketers out there. Like when you're talking fifteen seconds, you're talking half of a traditional television commercial. So the shift of money and influence meant that creators would also jump ship from Vine to Instagram

or in some cases to other platforms like YouTube. Now, not everyone did it, but it was really challenging to go in for that small pool of money that was still available for Vine creators. And it was also scary to port your work from one platform to another because there was no guarantee the audience would follow. Right, just because you were popular on Vine doesn't mean you're going to find the same success if you move over to

Instagram or to YouTube. Some folks could do that, and maybe they would lose some of their audience, but they would have enough to be able to not lose too much momentum. For others, it would mean having to start from scratch, and there's no guarantee that you'll strike gold twice. But since that pool of money was getting smaller and smaller over at Vine, most creators didn't need a lot of convincing. They had to switch or else they weren't

going to make any money anyway. So Vine went into further decline, and in twenty sixteen, Twitter announced it was going to shut down Vine, which happened in early twenty seventeen. And we can still feel the influence of Vine today in the form of Instagram reels and TikTok videos, and it's possible that neither of those things would have happened without Vine. And I know lots of folks who to this day limit the loss of Vine. So farewell Vine.

We hardly knew. Yee, Okay, we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back. We've got a couple more examples I really want to talk about. Okay, let's talk about some more failures. And this next one is one that I absolutely loved, even as I recognized that it was a hot mess from the get go, and it probably wasn't a practical solution for ninety nine percent of the

population out there. So I'm talking about Google Wave, And honestly, I could do a full episode just about Google apps that have come and gone, and in fact, I actually have done that at least once or twice in the past. But Google Wave has a special place in my heart. So Google launched this bizarre app back in two thousand and nine, and it was a real time online collaborative tool and it was kind of like a Frankenstein's Monster

of features. There were elements of email worked in there, Instant messaging was worked in there, online word processing, and lots more. So you could create a document in Google Wave, you could invite online collaborators and all of you could work within that document at the same time, and you would be able to see what others were doing in the document, like word by word. You could watch as

they made typos and corrected and stuff. It was all going at the same time, and the app would also keep a history of all the changes made to the document. So maybe someone's going off the rails right and you're like, no, wait, we can't none of this is working for this document. You could actually wind things back to an earlier version. I only used Google Wave with one other person, who

was my former co host, Chris Pillette. We used Google Wave to build out a run of show for a streaming video series we used to do way back in the day. So once a week we would do a streaming video that was kind of like a tech news program live on TV in the middle of the day Eastern time, and we would use Google Wave to organize our show and even to make changes on the fly while streaming our video content. And it was an ideal

tool for that situation. The trouble was, I couldn't figure out any other use case where it would really make sense for me, just this one thing I would do once a week for my job, and for a lot of folks out there, they never found a good use for Google Wave. By the way, I really miss that

streaming video show. One of the fun things that we used to have in that show is that occasionally either Matt Frederick, one of the hosts of Stuff they Don't Want You to Know, would do this, or some some times Tyler Klaig, who's now like the head of our podcast production. Both of them are still with the company. I would do a tweet of the week segment and they would hold up a little bird on a stick.

They would be out of frame and they would poke a bird of stick to be in front of my face and they would make a tweet sound, which just shows how far those guys have come since we were doing the streaming news show. Anyway, features in Google Wave would eventually find their way into lots of other Google applications, but Google Wave itself was just not very long for

this world. Google supported it for about a year. Then they essentially said, you know what, this isn't working for us, and they shifted it off to the Apache Software Foundation in twenty ten. Folks suggested that Google's decision was due to lots of converging reasons, ranging from just a confusing interface that was turning away new users to internal conflicts that were happening within the development team, especially at the

leadership level. There were stories that there were leaders who were disagreeing on what Google Wave was even supposed to be, which meant that the development team was put in this really difficult position in the middle to try and create all things for all people, which was impossible, so they ended up creating something that was for nobody. But even

the Apache Wave version is no more. The nonprofit group had Wave in an incubator status for almost a decade, but in twenty eighteen the Wave became still Waters because development ceased and Wave just never graduated out of that incubator status. Now I can't say that I would still be using Wave to this day if it were still around, but that's mostly because tech stuff is a pretty simple project.

I research, write, and record all the episodes, and then super producer Tari she edits and publishes the episodes, so there is collaboration there. Tari and I do collaborate, but it's divided really neatly into a production phase and a post production phase. Perhaps if I were more actively working on shows that had multiple collaborate I would feel Waves loss more keenly. But I really liked using it, even

while I recognized how weird and janky it was. Now this list could go on much much longer, but I figure I'll conclude with a rock Star like story, and that story involves a company called pay by Touch Will. Most of the apps I've talked about so far were ones that you would either use on your phone or

on your computer. Pay by Touch was different, okay, it was an app that was a service, and this service would let you pay for purchases at a point of sale, primarily in places like supermarkets here in the United States, and all you had to do was swipe your finger on a fingerprint sensor at the cash register, and your biometric data would correspond to your pay by Touch account and an electronic transaction would take care of your grocery bill by deducting it from your checking account or from

a credit card, and you could go on your merry way without ever having to hand over cash or write a check or use a cra card physically. Just swipe your finger, good to go. This was the future, and it was all in two thousand and two. The idea of having your financials directly tied to your own identity was one that had been around for a while but

not really accomplished. So again, it was really considered to be convenient, and you could even tie your biometrics to things like a store loyalty account, so by using your fingerprint, you could then apply discounts or coupons to whatever it was you were buying, and this was coming out in two thousand and two, you know, like five years before

we would get the first iPhone. So these days, you know, obviously we have lots of contactless payment solutions, mostly tied to mobile phones, But back in two thousand and two, this was really revolutionary. Now, the services did face challenges. One big one was that folks were a little anxious about having their money tied to their fingerprints. There seemed to be something invasive about that. Heck, if you're the type of person who prefers to use cash for your transactions,

it absolutely goes against your references. Also, the thought of a third party company potentially having insight into your purchase history seemed creepy. But despite the slow going and low adoption rate, pay by Touch did grow and got lots of investors. It expanded its business into various supermarket chains. But then the company would ultimately declare bankruptcy in two thousand and eight. So what happened, Well, part of what happened was a failure to communicate to the public the

benefits of this system. Just really bad marketing and education. The concept again, including things like tying biometrics to loyalty programs and stuff that just didn't really get communicated effectively in most locations, and some stores were just using the system for loyalty programs and customers would still pay for

their purchases using more traditional means. So there was this element of distrust that the company was never able to overcome, possibly for good reason, because another big reason for the company's failure was in its leadership. The CEO of the company was a guy named John P. Rogers, and he had had some trouble with the law that largely went

unnoticed when he was getting investments for his company. At least a couple of women had accused him of violent behavior, one saying that he had abused her, the other saying he had trashed her home. Both of them had been connected romantically with him. He had also been pulled over by police and arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence of cocaine, and apparently he was known to have

had issues with drug addiction. Investigation suggested that Rogers had been rather extravagant with corporate funds, that he had spearheaded efforts to convince those with really deep pockets to invest in pay by touch that paid off in dividends. He raised around three hundred and forty million dollars, but by two thousand and eight the coffers were empty, and the investigation suggested that one reason for this was that Rogers appeared to have been dipping into corporate funds to pay

for an extravagant lifestyle, complete with drug use. And when I say extravagant, I mean that the investigation suggested he was burning around eight million dollars a month, which is a lot of money. And it would turn out that Rogers had a history of failed businesses, something that no one had really noticed when Pay by Touch was just getting off the ground. He had managed to keep his history kind of out of the spotlight, and investors didn't

ask any tough questions. They just were excited about this potential opportunity to completely revolutionize the way we pay for stuff at retail locations. Obviously that was key to him securing investments. Ultimately, Pay by Touch went couput. Some investors pursued civil litigation against the company and against Rogers, but he never faced criminal charges for how things went down, which is kind of wild. I wasn't there, so I

don't know. Maybe the evidence was all circumstantial. Maybe there was not a solid case against him, but it does seem to fall in line with the perception that the rules are different depending upon who you are and your station in life. I don't know if that's actually the case in this particular instance, but on the surface it seems to reinforce that idea anyway. That is just a quick list of some major apps that received a lot of attention but ultimately flamed out. As I said, we

could go on much much longer with this list. There are tons of other examples, and I'll probably do more episodes about them in the future. And you should expect these kind of things, right because again, creating an app is seen as one of those gateways toward insane success in Silicon Valley. Like it seems like everyone in Silicon Valley is behind some sort of app, and we might only hear about a small percentage of them. Some of those cases are because the app is just so incredible

and useful that it's undeniable how valuable it is. In other cases, it might be that it's a peculiarity and it gets some momentary notice and then ultimately that doesn't stand the test of time. And in a few cases it may just be notorious and infamous, as I would argue the pay by touch story ultimately became once the history of Rogers became more public knowledge. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you are all well, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech

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