LocalUncle has called it quits after a two-and-a-half year run that included a name change from Loqize.me (TLabs here).
The co-founders, Philip Estrada Reichen and Philipe Fatio, announced the closure on the company's blog, under the headline "Sunsetting LocalUncle."
From the post:
"The time has come for LocalUncle to answer its last question. LocalUncle will be shut down in the next couple of days. Unfortunately, we haven't seen the expected uptake for LocalUncle to be a sustainable business."
The startup was attempting to deliver real-time answers to location-related questions. By addressing the "local search" problem - or finding the best things to do around you in real-time - both travelers and locals would be able to learn about the happenings at locations near them.
The idea being that there's an inefficiency when trying to find out which spots are popular at any given moment - and using this information to drive destination decisions before leaving the house.
By allowing the community to pose questions publicly, the relevance would theoretically be vastly improved.
The founders still believe in the utility of their product, as they highlight in the farewell note:
"We still think that an app like LocalUncle will one day be a must-have app on every mobile phone. We might have been too early, we might have done it wrong, or an app like ours might simply have to be built by a bigger company."
All data will be deleted permanently, and the co-founders did not reveal another project in the pipeline.