Jaycut (http://jaycut.com/), a fine suite of cloud-based video tools is essentially dead. It looks like it died in vain. 
The company was acquired by Research in Motion (RIM) in July, 2011. CEO, Jonas Hombert announced the sale in typically vague and useless corporate double-talk,
“ The value proposition for my team and me was simply awesome: we can stay creative and we get to focus solely on developing great video editing tools, which has the potential to be used by many millions of users. Finally, we come into a context where our expertise is both valued and wanted.
So what will happen now? Well, even though I would love to tell you about all the brand new stuff we’re working on with RIM, you know I can’t. 
There are still many decisions to be made, but what is certain is that you’ll soon see some really cool and creative stuff coming out of this now established Stockholm enclave of RIM.”
PC world’s Stephen Lawson wrote this on the acquisition: http://www.pcworld.com/article/236375/rim_buys_videoediting_vendor_jaycut.html
What happens now is the product is dead. The team that developed the technology sold out, made a ton of money and a promising tool has gone the way of the dodo. The website no longer displays the Jaycut tools, does register allow new customers, and inquiries are met with ‘Thanks for checking us out, we’ll get back to you’ language that only a three-year old would believe. The Jaycut website is a place holder.
RIM plans to integrate JayCut video editing to the PlayBook, a tablet vying for market share in the iPad universe. Unfortunately this will end the tool’s availability to educators and students and quite probably everyone else too as a four-day outage has spawned lawsuits and customer disillusion. Market share is dipping into the single digits, product margins are being squeezed, and RIM is running on cash reserves. One analyst, quoted in the linked article above, describes the Playbook as “nothing short of a disaster.” With RIM in such dire straits, it seems likely that Jaycut died for nothing.
Why does an EdTech blogger care?
First, because a promising, cutting edge Web 2.0 tool has been mothballed and probably killed as a result. Jaycut had enormous potential for integration into the classroom in both the K-12 and higher education arenas.
Second, even if RIM survives and integrates Jaycut’s technology into its tablet platform, the technology will only be available to a very tiny fraction of users; (see an article on the Playbook’s shrinking market share here: http://techland.time.com/2011/09/16/rim-playbook-and-smartphone-sales-tank/) those (very few) loyal Blackberry customers who love their Playbooks. Tp provide an idea of the RIM’s limited market, RIM shipped 200,000 Playbooks last quarter, compared to the 9.25 million iPads Apple shipped over the same period (about 2%). How much longer will the Playbook survive if the trend cotinues? And if the Playbook dies, Jaybut dies along with it.
RIP Jaycut. Born 2007 – Died 2011
