Seeqpod, the ill-fated startup behind the kick-ass media search technology used by many music streaming and playlist services and social networking applications, appears to have cracked under the weight of litigation.
At the end of last month, we broke the news that the Emeryville, CA-based company filed a petition for Chapter 11 with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California. Now it looks like the service, which many third-party developers use as the underlying foundation for their own offerings, has gone completely dark for the past couple of days.
Update: site just went back up with a maintenance notice, about 5 minutes ago (10 AM EST)
Apparently, after going down Friday afternoon Seeqpod at one point claimed on its website that it was having server issues and that the service would be restored once the technical problems were solved, but the site went down again 45 minutes after the notice was published and has been unavailable since 10:30 PM EST Saturday night.
There’s still no 100% certainty that Seeqpod has in fact permanently closed shop. In fact, MP3 Newswire in a post says it has been in touch with Seeqpod CEO Kasian Franks yesterday and that he reportedly stated the company is merely moving servers. Furthermore, MP3 Newswire quotes Franks as having said that the company is in acquisition talks with a “large media company that was a competitor to Apple”.
This could of course be a well-considered strategy to let people know it’s up for sale at all (which under the circumstances, would not be much of a surprise), hoping to squeeze a deal out of say, Sony or RealNetworks. In case this is all just talk and an acquisition never happens, things are not looking too good for Seeqpod, who despite the fact that it claims not to host any files on its own servers has become the target of multibillion dollar lawsuits by music labels like Warner Music, Capitol Records and EMI.
The company has raised $7 million from undisclosed angel investors to date.
