A web based chat service Lingr announced its closing down at the end of May 2009.
We’re sad to announce that Lingr will be shutting down on May 31, 2009.
It’s been great pleasure that so many wonderful people have joined and gotten to know each other here at Lingr. We want to give our wholehearted thanks to everyone who gave us compliments, suggestions, and criticism- Lingr couldn’t have existed without your feedback.
Lingr Blog: Announcing Goodbye from Lingr
Lingr was developed and run by Infoteria USA, San Mateo based American company, which is a subsidiary of Inforteria Corporation, Tokyo Japan.
Making a real time web chat system over web/http protocol is not as easy as you might expect, especially if you want it to be scaled out. Lingr used latest technologies and software such like COMET, Ruby on Rails, Jetty, etc. for it.
Infoteria, a young enterprise software company specialized in XML based data handling system, is on Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers [Code 3853] since 2007. Infoteria USA is planned to be closed around June.
Kentaro Ejima, who is well known by his successful career as a star engineer of Inforteria, describing himself as a Philosopher, is also a very influential blogger , has been leading the project by moving himself from Tokyo to USA. He has been writing about this challenge on his blog and many Japanese web entrepreneurs and engineers hoped his success in US/English market will be the best practice for Japanese web startup and person going oversea.
On his popular blog [J], Ejima looks back his 4 year struggling in US company, with retrospective assessment including that HR cost was almost doubled in compare with Japan.
Luckily for he himself, he has just got a green card recently, and he tells he stays in USA to do another project, which maybe around iPhone. I wish his every success in his new challenge.
See Also:
Announcement of the service end of Lingr and Rejaw / Kenn’s Clairvoyance – CNET Japan [J]
Another bay area resident Japanese Hacker Tatsuhiko Miyagawa made a long interview with Kentaro Ejima / Gihyo.jp [J]
Kentaro Ejima(江島健太郎) search on Google [J]
