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- Sunshine, a company started by former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, is reportedly shutting down.
- It made Shine, a photo-sharing app, which never really caught on.
- Now, a new Mayer company is looking to create an AI personal assistant. That’s a crowded field!
Once upon a time, way back in 2024, a promising new app was launched. It was called Shine, and it was a way to share photos with a group of people who were at the same event.
It was brought to us by former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. And I wrote about it back then. My first reaction to Shine was: What in the gosh–danged 2009 is this?
Why would I want this in 2024? Aren’t there lots of other ways to do this? You wonder. But now: I press my finger to your puzzled lips and whisper, sssshhhhh. This was, in fact, a great idea. It is annoying to try to share photos with a group of loose acquaintances, despite all the options we have at our current disposal.
But you ungrateful swine never saw the beauty and use of this AI-powered tool, which had been given to us, as I just mentioned, by none other than Marissa Mayer.
Mayer’s startup called Sunshine is shutting down, according to a WIRED report based on internal emails. Sunshine’s assets will be transferred, along with its current employees, to a new company owned by Mayer called Dazzle, which WIRED reports is likely to be an AI-based personal assistant.
Sunshine seemed plagued with problems. Just a few days after the announcement of Shine, its cofounder, Enrique Munoz Torres, quit the company (not a great sign). Shortly after, Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer for Platformer published a long look at the small company, where they reported employees were frustrated by the work culture and Mayer’s wandering vision:
The app evolved as Mayer tested it out with friends and family on vacation or at parties, employees said. Product changes were “explicitly about her social life,” one employee said.In January, Mayer and her family went on a ski vacation in Wyoming. Mayer’s friend took some selfies on the trip — and was embarrassed when the photos automatically uploaded to a shared album on Shine, which Mayer had presumably created.When Mayer returned to the office, she told employees that photos taken with the front camera that only contained a single face should be excluded from shared albums.
Personally, I would love a smarter, AI-enabled contacts manager and a better way to solve the loose-acquaintances photosharing puzzle. These are real problems in my life! And sure, I’d love an AI personal assistant (if that is, in fact, what Dazzle will be making). Reps for Sunshine did not respond to emails for comment.
But AI personal assistants have some of the same problems that the online invites and photosharing products from Shine faced: There’s already a lot of services out there that already do that thing, and the most popular version is baked into your phone already. Tough field! But best of luck to all involved!
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