BrightKite (acquired by Limbo)

Oct 11, 2013

Forkly is about to stick a fork in it. After three years of trying to stake its claim in the field of culinary apps, Forkly has all but suspended operations. Launched in 2010, Forkly was the brainchild of development team Martin May and Brady Becker, whose prior credits include the location-based social networking service Brightkite. During its five years in operation, Brightkite innovated the social commerce sector with its combination of local, mobile and interactive elements – a template that has since been employed with greater success by Foursquare. However, lightning didn’t strike twice when the team launched Forkly – an iOS app that allowed users to rate foods and build taste graphs of favorite dishes at local eateries. Though it secured $900,000 in seed funding between May 2011 and March of last year, Forkly was unable to distinguish itself amongst a swarm of similar apps like Foodspotting, not to mention the growing spate of review platforms like Yelp, Instagram and Foursquare. Forkly gained 300,000 iOS users, but never got around to launching a proposed Android version that had been slated for a roll-out last March. Apparently, things just weren’t moving steadily enough for the app or its enterprising team, which has been down to one since May departed for Push.io in September. In recent App Annie figures, Forkly languished in iTunes’ Food & Drink section at no. 320. TechCrunch function win1(id) {console.log(id); window.open("widget_win.php?cid="+id,"Get Widget","status=no,scrollbars=no,menubar=no,width=500,height=200,toolbar=no");}