Europe 2.0

The story of AllPeers looked like thoses we’d like to cover more : a great concept, in touch with today’s pulse (P2P filesharing right from your browser), an A-list of investors and advisors (Mangrove Capital and Index Ventures, the same fairies that were at the cradle of Skype), and a shelve-full of awards ( mentions in Webware 100, CNET, Wired, etc.)

Unfortunately, the service was shut down abruptly this March, 3rd (announcement on the aptly named company blog “PeerPressure”). Lack of funding, itself linked to lack of user take-up, are the early explanatory reasons for this failure, which was amply covered by TechCrunch (formerly quite hot on the company), Ars Technica, CNET, etc.

I find it more interesting to look at it after the dust has settled a bit, a read from Matthew Gertner, one of the founders and CTO about his lessons learned :

• raise as much as you can
• be pessimistic about the technical challenges
• question the advantages/challenges balance in the case of P2P for consumer services

Lastly, Matt praises the open source side of the adventure :

On a more positive note, a decision I will never regret was our choice to implement AllPeers as an open source product on top of Mozilla.

For those who wondered, the founders have apparently no hard feelings towards their VC, Mangrove :

This shouldn’t be construed as a criticism of Mangrove Capital Partners, who led our series A investment round. They are a fantastic group of individuals whom I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to any entrepreneur seeking funding, and a classic example of a VC who really does offer much more than money to a budding startup (something they all claim to do).

All in all, the founders seem to have keep their entrepreneurial spirit intact through this rough wave, quoting Obi-Wan Kenobi : ““If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.“

Update: Truthful to the last sentence, Matthew Gertner is coming back with an in-depth analysis of bridging the web and desktop applications, with a review of Single-Site Browsers, compared to Adobe AIR. A hint of things to come ?