Launched in 2000 and discontinued in 2001, the Sony eMarker allowed you to mark songs that you heard on the radio so you could buy them later. This $20 keychain had a button and small LCD display. When you heard a song on the radio you wanted to r ...
Launched in 2016, Joy was a digital picture frame to upload, share, and curate photos. However, other devices such as Alexa were cheaper, could be used for more than a single function, and were also multi-modal allowing for video, text, and voice. ...
Geotek Communications, who provided mobile communication for fleets of trucks and vans, filed for bankruptcy in 1998 after having gone public. The company struggled to enter the dispatch market and was unable to develop a wireless communications pro ...
Minitel, a French telematics service, faced a "failure" not in its technical capabilities, but in its inability to compete with the rise of the internet and the way it was perceived by the public.
LivingSocial was a daily deals website that launched in 2009 and was discontinued in 2016 after having raised $930M and having a peak valuation of $6B. The company failed due to intense competition from Groupon, expanding too rapidly to multiple geo ...
Founded in 1999, TiVo was a digital video recorder that optimized TV watching. Users could find and record shows that match their interests by title, actor, director, category, or keyword. The TiVo could store far more shows — hundreds of hours in ...
Launched in 2011 right after Eric Schmidt became the new Google CEO, Google+ went head-to-head with Facebook who launched 7 years earlier. Google saw that Facebook was consuming progressively more of users’ time. However, people preferred Face ...
GoBots was a line of transforming robot toys produced by Tonka from 1983 to 1987. The GoBots toys were part of the robot "sensation" that swept the nation for a short time. The line sold well initially but was overtaken by Hasbro's Transformers.
Launched in 1984, Forever 21's fast-fashion business model, which was based on quick-turnaround designs that could be inexpensively mass produced, proved wildly popular with young customers who didn’t have much money to spend but wanted the latest l ...
Drugstore.com, founded in 1998, was an early e-commerce platform for health and beauty products with over 60,000 items. It quickly rose to prominence, going public in 1999 and acquiring millions of customers. Despite its early success, Drugstore ...
