6. Dodgeball

What Was It: Mobile social networking.

Launched: 2000.

What Went Wrong: Unavailability of iPhone and Facebook. Also, everything happened via text message that was not that very user-friendly.

Who Adopted The Idea Later: Google acquired Dodgeball and started with Google Latitude. Dodgeball 2.0 is known as Foursquare and is widely popular.

Summary: Riding on a futuristic idea, Dodgeball was a company that introduced the world to mobile social networking. Though the idea was brilliant but the lack of knowledge among people about the importance of location updates acted against it. Also, it was a text-based app that was not seen to be very user-friendly.

5. GO Corp.

What Was It: First to introduce pen-based computers

Launched: 1987

What Went Wrong: Fierce competition from Microsoft and Apple.

Who Adopted The Idea Later: Microsoft and Apple. Go Corp.’s pen-based computers are often viewed as predecessors of Palm Pilot, iPhone and iPad.

Summary: GO Corp. in 1987 came up with the futuristic idea of pen-based computers that in time became very popular. But it could not withstand the competition that Microsoft and Apple posed. Though, it is considered as the predecessor of touch screen devices by many.

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