Fluent bites the dust

Summary: The Aussie start-up that developed the Fluent Gmail service has shut down, with its founders all going their separate ways.

Australian technology start-up Fluent has closed its doors, despite generating great public interest with a product it developed for Google Gmail users.

Launched by three ex-Google employees, Fluent developed a Gmail integrated service six months ago that turns emails into a stream, similar to a Twitter feed, to easily manage user inboxes.

The service had been well received. According to the company's Tumblr page, 70,000 people had signed on to use Fluent, but were not able to get the prototype add-on.

"There are many things that cause start-ups to rise and fall: fund raising, runways, scaling and other promising opportunities — they all played their part," Fluent said in a Tumblr post. "We feel that we couldn't keep running the service as it is, and now's the time to move on."

Fluent will pull the plug on servers supporting the service on 17 August at 5pm, and all stored data will be deleted.

Fluent founders Cameron Adams, Dhanji Prasanna and Jochen Bekmann are each embarking on new projects.

The company was started three years ago.

ZDNet has contacted Fluent, but has yet to receive a response.