Twitter originally started as a side project of podcasting company Odeo. Post-It Notes were accidently invented while the inventor was playing around with a new glue. Sometimes, businesses end up with a product that is much more interesting than what the company originally set out to create. FanDuel was created as an application of the HubDub engine, and it appears that the founders have decided that the road to the promised land is with FanDuel and not HubDub. HubDub announced that the site will cease to exist as it founders have decided to focus on FanDuel, which specializes in daily fantasy sports games.

This comes on the heals of FanDuel announcing a partnership with Philly.com to host a branded version of HubDub’s game on its site. This is a very big move for Philly.com since it provides it an opportunity to create new revenue from a market that it previously could not address. If it is popular, it wins. If it fails, it does not lose anything since FanDuel is doing all the heavy lifting and Philly.com just shares in the profit.

Something to be noted here, is that Philadelphia is a very enthuastic sports market, which makes for an ideal partner for FanDuel. It is a great market to succeed, and possibly enable FanDuel to create similar relationships with other local newspaper sites. If FanDuel had partnered with a paper in a city like Miami, Denver, or Oakland, it may take longer for the partnership to be successful, perhaps too long. If this is going to succeed, Philadelphia is a great market for it and will provide a great benchmark for other cities.

The ability to shift focus is a sign of good leadership. In the examples mentioned above, the companies involved could have plowed ahead and made the original businesses or ideas work; however, they saw opportunity to make an even better idea work. Think about the cliche, “When life give you lemons, you make lemonade.” In this case, life gave them lemonade, so they took it.

Of course, this could just be a well-played PR move, as the leading question on HubDub.com is asking, “Is the Hubdub Closing news a hoax? (to force people to spend their Hard earned Hubdub$$?).” If it is, then HubDub has succeeded in getting attention to its site, as a number of technology and sports blogs have picked up on this latest bit of news. (Just search “FanDuel” on google news if you don’t believe me).

Either way, it is hard to disagree with the move that HubDub has taken. Congratulations to the HubDub/FanDuel team on making a very hard and risky decision.