Fold.com
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Fold.com was an Ajax-powered customizable start page, one of a wave of Web 2.0 homepages that let users assemble widgets and feeds on a personal dashboard. It entered private beta in February 2006, worked only in Firefox at first, and had an API for third-party widgets in development.
02 / Fold.com FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Fold.com entered an already crowded field of Ajax homepages including Netvibes, Pageflakes and Protopage, with no clear differentiation. As contemporary coverage noted, building a web application was proving far easier than getting users to try it and keep coming back, and Fold.com never built a lasting audience before going dark.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Private beta
Fold.com enters private beta in February 2006 as an Ajax homepage with third-party widget support in development.
- Shutdown
By June 2006 the beta goes dark and the domain is listed for sale; Fold.com has folded.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Fold.com shut down around June 2006, roughly four months after its private beta.
- 02
No funding or loss figures were ever published.
- 03
No reliable loss figure with a clear subject, period and basis exists, so no loss amount is recorded.