Valleywag: Bankruptcy

Larry Page's hapless brother could lose his company

Owen Thomas — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:40:00 PDT

Zvue, a maker of video players and operator of websites like eBaum's World and Dorks.com, has a post-Halloween deadline to make $1.9 million in payments to a hedge-fund lender. Also owed money: The company's chief technology officer, Carl Page, the older brother of Google cofounder Larry Page, who has loaned his employer at least $4.9 million, including $1 million in July. Could bankruptcy be in the cards? If so, it would be quite a reversal for the elder Page.

A decade ago, Carl looked like the more successful brother, having sold eGroups, a company he cofounded, to Yahoo for $432 million. But Carl's efforts to repeat his success, and come anywhere close to Larry's, have made him a buffoon. Zvue shut down its San Francisco Web operations in July, leaving its collection of funny-if-you're-15-years-old websites to Eric Bauman, the creator of eBaum's World. Bauman is also owed millions by Zvue, for fare like "Ass Cream Vendor."

John Rogers's Pay By Touch finally falls apart

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:40:15 PST

Here's John Rogers. He's morally and financially bankrupt. He's a once-convicted felon with addiction problems and a taste for threatening strangers and lovers. And his dream is dead.

Solidus Networks, which does business as Pay By Touch, sold its two "noncore assets," and plans to auction the main business, the biometrics payment business, on March 14. One subsidiary, which Pay By Touch purchased for $82 million, sold for just $4.2 million. The other, bought for $30 million, went for $600,000. Now all that's left are questions.

Print magazines about tech prove a bankrupt idea

Mary Jane Irwin — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:20:41 PST

Jason Young, CEO of technology publisher Ziff-Davis, couldn't solve the company's $225 million debt problem. That means a round-trip back to bankruptcy court, whiled it restructures yet again. What it has left to restructure is an utter mystery.

It's already sold off the database, market research, and enterprise group. All it's got left is PC Magazine, its game group (which recently restructured itself, merging print and online, to the mass confusion of all), ExtremeTech, and the DigitalLife conference. Young insists the company's making great progress. Why doesn't he just file for Chapter 7, the liquidation kind of bankruptcy? That seems easier.

Creditors attempt to block Pay By Touch shutdown

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:00:53 PST

A tipster tells us top management at Pay By Touch, the biometrics payments firm run into the ground by felon John Rogers and now struggling in bankruptcy, has auctioned off its "core assets" in an attempt to pay off creditors. That may not be the case: On Friday, a party of creditors filed a restraining order with a court in Los Angeles to prevent management from "shutting down the operations of Pay By Touch Payment Solutions" — its main business. A shutdown, presumably, would only come after a failed attempt to sell the operation. How touching that someone still wants Pay By Touch to stay in business.

Bankrupt Sharper Image to haunt gadget lovers

Owen Thomas — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:40:16 PST

The news that Sharper Image, the San Francisco-based gadget-vending chain, has filed for bankruptcy has sparked a wave of premature nostalgia. Naive sorts think that Chapter 11 means a swift farewell to a company. Nothing of the sort. Sharper Image, buoyed by a loan from Wells Fargo, will stay open, continuing to hawk Ionic Breeze air purifiers while it sorts out its finances. Too bad. As a creative concern, Sharper Image went out of business long ago. It fired its founder, Richard Thalheimer in 2006, and is besieged by lawsuits; SF Weekly has an excellent retelling of that tale. The tragedy here is not that Sharper Image will soon roll up its windows; it's that it takes so long for a good idea gone bad to give up the ghost.

Afternoon news: Memeorandum goes Newspeak

Nick Douglas — Mon, 08 May 2006 14:25:35 PDT

Yahoo gets an NYT section cover story for, um, improving its ad program. Thrilling. [NYT]
Cry baby cry: Apple (the White Album one) loses its case against Apple (the White iPod one). [BBC]
The New York Times starts its E3 coverage. A week of coy euphemisms for "booth babe" commences. [NYT]
Tech Memeorandum is now Techmeme. Given that creator Gabe Rivera lives with TechCrunch creator Michael Arrington, this is all kinds of wrong. [Techmeme]
Big-time graphics firm Silicon Graphics Inc. goes bankrupt, just a couple months after picking a new CEO who cut an eighth of the team. One assumes the government won't be subsidising SGI to protect the economy. [CNET]