I've enjoyed using Kwiry to text myself reminders and then subscribe to the RSS feed of items I sent in my Netvibes dashboard. When the service first launched it sent you an email with search results for the text of reminders you sent yourself by SMS. You could add movies to your Netflix queue using Kwiry and SMS. Other people did all kinds of things with it, like use it to turn off their computers remotely. In the end, it looks like only a few thousand people probably used the service regularly at all.

$1 million isn't that much for a software startup, and perhaps working with SMS made the money go even faster, but poof there they go awfully quick!

It's great that the company is offering .csv downloads of customer data but that's only the case for the next 10 days. We hope anyone who needs it will come and get it within that time frame.

The lesson here could be that you could build a full-featured service, get some money from respected investors and still see your whole endeavor go up in smoke one year later. None of the reminder services online are catching on like the huge breakout hit born from SMS, Twitter, is. Twitter serves a universal need that's more fun than remembering obligations (communicating with people) and it's dead simple - all the bells, whistles and do-dahs are built by 3rd parties and are fully opt-in, not at all confusing.

It's too bad about Kwiry, though. We wish the team there well in their next endeavors.

Most interesting perhaps is that the service is entirely open source, offering anyone a full copy of all its source code. Customers will pay for hosting, a Service Level Agreement and customer service. Today 10gen compares itself to Google App Engine and offers hosting for server side Javascript and Ruby.

Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson is one of the most publicly visible venture capitalists in the market and his backing is sure to lead to interesting connections. USV + open source in cloud computing may or may not work well - but it won't be boring. 10gen was founded by Kevin Ryan, the former CEO of DoubleClick, the massive display ad company that Google is currently going through court trying to buy.
Above, versions of the 10gen SDK currently available.

Other open source cloud computing platforms include Toronto's Enomaly and UC Santa Barbara's Eucalyptus. There's a good round-up of coverage on this topic over at Gigaom.