Sampa, the start up company best known for allowing families to upload and privately share pictures, blog posts and other milestones is closing its doors. In a letter sent to RWW, CEO Paul Gross explains, “There is no big story behind it, just the simple version of we ran out of money and the business models we tried didn’t work out.” RWW first covered Sampa in June 2006 and the service certainly evolved since then. It went from being an overly techie-looking blogging platform to a user-friendly family tool with built-in family tree, baby countdown timer and import functionality from Flickr and YouTube. Sponsor While the company did manage to raise $1 million dollars in the Spring of 2008, they were forced to realize the sad reality that by the Fall of 2008, they were unable to build the company they’d envisioned. Said Sampa co-founder Marcelo Calbucci,”One by one [our] potential partners started to fall off our whiteboard, because they decided to built in-house, or they acquired a similar solution to Sampa, or because they weren’t ready to do the deal

original Source : Cat’s in the Cradle: Family Websites Long Forgotten?