ReadWriteWeb

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.

Once a company gains widespread popularity, scaling is often its biggest problem. Public familiarity with the Twitter Fail Whale is our proof. To keep up with the pace of demand, many companies including Twitter have found unique and inexpensive ways to manage consumers transactions. One such solution, Puppet, just earned Reductive Labs a $2 million dollar Series A round with True Ventures.

According to Dan Primack on peHub, Geni, the popular genealogy and social networking site founded by PayPal's David Sacks, just raised another $5 million in a Series C round backed by Charles River Ventures and The Founders Fund. In early 2007, Geni raised a total of $1.5 million in a series A round led by The Founders Fund and another $10 million is a series B round led by Charles River Ventures.

While Geni itself is a popular service, a lot of attention has lately gone to Yammer, a side project that grew out of the same company and which is a Twitter-like service geared towards enterprise users. It is not clear if any of the money raised in this latest round will go towards expanding Yammer.