Sampa Closing Down

Sampa, a family-oriented blogging platform and media-hosting and -sharing platform, has announced it will be closing its doors in one month, on August 17. Founded by Marcelo Calbucci, a former Microsoft development manager, and launched in 2006, the site failed to gather the resources necessary to continue and is now advising its users to move to other platforms.

“Sampa is closing its service on August 17, 2009. Like many startups, we tried to change the world but didn't succeed. We tried to make it easy for people to share personal stories and pictures with friends and family, and although the product worked and we amassed tens of thousands of happy customers we weren't able to pay the bills to keep the service running,” the announcement on the site's homepage said.

After being launched in 2006, the site started gaining some traction and attracted a $1-million investment in early 2008, but changes to it and different revenue models failed to generate the resources necessary for it to continue, and, by fall 2008, it was clear that the company couldn't go on in its current form. A second round of investments was unlikely, so Calbucci set out to find companies interested in acquiring Sampa. After all of the candidates backed out, the company had no other option than to close down.

“On Friday, June 1st, 2009, our last chance was gone. The partner with the highest value to Sampa decided they are not ready to do anything on this space yet and this was the final blow to Sampa's existence. We'll be shutting down our servers for good in August (which will give our customers many weeks to export their content) and liquidating the corporation,” Marcelo Calbucci wrote on his blog.

The site is offering its customers options to export their entries and is proposing other services as replacement for its features with websites like TotSites, Cozi and Wordpress.