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deathwatch
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deathwatch
deathwatch
Internet-TV startup Akimbo meets its iceberg
One anonymous source has now become three, so we're calling it over for Akimbo, the TV-over-the-Intenet startup which no amount of new CEO Thomas Frank's winning smiles could save. Writes an ex-employee:It's true. I used to work for them over 2 years ago and all of my friends that were there are now gone. They laid off the last of them today. It's sad but LONG OVERDUE. Akimbo is now officially dead although the heartbeat died over a year ago.So who's left to move the deck chairs? More details on the sinking of the startup, which had raised $47 million in venture capital, after the jump. More »
deathwatch
Hard-up Herring shakes down startups
At Red Herring, every startup is a winner — but publisher Alex Vieux is the one who takes the prize. Indeed, handing out prizes seems to be the main way Vieux is keeping it afloat. The once-vital technology publisher, which Vieux has all but run into the ground, no longer prints a magazine. A tipster says healthcare for its workers has been cancelled for nonpayment. Its website, which used to mostly carry wire copy, now produces a pitiful handful of stories each day. But the Herring is still flopping around with an events business. The next one, Red Herring 100 North America,due to be held in San Jose later this month, will celebrate 100 startups of Vieux's choosing. How does he choose them from a list of 204 finalists. A come-on email and phone call one startup received is revealing: More »
rumormonger
Will the last Akimbo employee please turn out the lights
Akimbo has laid off nearly everyone except for its executives, according to a tip we just received. An early entrant in the TV-over-Internet field, Akimbo saw its original CEO Joshua Goldman leave for the luxury of investing in other video startups. The company dumped its set-top box business to sell Internet video-on-demand software to other hardware manufacturers. So far $47 million has been poured into the company by the likes of Cisco Systems, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Kleiner Perkins' William R. Hearst III, who serves on Akimbo's board. Any Akimbo employees out there want to confirm or contradict our tipster's impression that CEO Tom Frank and COO Neil Goldberg are mismanaging the aging startup?
CNET's Caroline McCarthy pours water on Web 2.0 hotheads
After a week of browsing booths and attending parties in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo, New York-based tech reporter Caroline McCarthy rained on the local bubble's annual hype parade. [News.com] (Photo by Brian Solis)
exits
Jeff Pulver resigns from eponymous tradeshow producer Pulvermedia
Jumping ship from a company that had already lost the confidence of its investors, Jeff Pulver, the pioneering VOIP promoter, has left Pulvermedia, the company he founded to put on tech tradeshows like VON.Just wanted to share the news that I have resigned as a director from Pulvermedia. And I am not able to say anything else nor can I address any questions about this.Silence implies that either it was offered in exchange for something, or that lawyers are involved and lawsuits are pending. (Photo by Randy Stewart)
deathwatch
Ex-Yahoo Russell Beattie blames industry trends, not self, for startup's failure
If at first you don't succeed, cast your failure as part of an industry trend. That's the exit strategy of Russell Beattie, who launched mobile startup Mowser after being fired from Yahoo in 2006. Fired, mind you, when Yahoo was firing very few people. Beattie's tale of woe explains Mowser's failure thus: Designing Web pages for cell phones was always a short-term game, and his bet came out wrong. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington plays right into Beattie's hand, arguing about the future of the mobile Web instead of asking why Mowser failed. He encourages Beattie to launch a new startup building applications instead of a mobile Web browser. More »
deathwatch
CreateDebate launches to add yet more argument to the Internet
I ignore most startup pitches. It's a truism that 9 out of 10 startups fail; relentlessly covering every one of them is mathematically a fool's game. But on occasion, I get one so bad that I feel obliged to share it with my readers, if only as a cautionary tale. CreateDebate, founder Bryan Orme informs me, "is a social networking site where users can create a debate about any topic they are interested in." His concept, in other words, is to compete with the entirety of the Internet. Feel free to debate the rest of Orme's startup pitch, reproduced here: More »
deathwatch
Sharper Image chairman quits but wants to buy bankrupt company
Sharper Image chairman and former CEO Jerry Levin resigned today, just short of two months after the company declared bankruptcy. Not satisfied with just how far he's helped run the icon of '80s yuppie excess into the ground, Levin reports that he and some investor buddies will buy some or all of the company's assets. If you're lucky enough to be one of Levin's friends, you can probably count on a massage chair or three this holiday season.
deathwatch
Pageflakes running on empty
Personalized homepage startup Pageflakes will be broke soon according to sources cited by Om Malik, though while CEO Dan Cohen admits the company is for sale, he denies that it's running on empty. The company, founded in 2005, has raised a total of $4.1 million but with a reported $300,000 monthly burn rate and scant revenue, it does sound like just a matter of time. A few weeks ago I went to meet an acquaintance at a company party in SOMA. So I didn't look like a total idiot, I tried to access the site to see what the company was all about just in case — and got a page not found error. Which I'm still getting today. Must be hard to generate income when users can't even access the site. Update: Brad Greenspan, the guardian angel of failing companies, will add Pageflakes to the roster of companies LiveUniverse will probably continue to mismanage reports TechCrunch.
deathwatch
Ashton Kutcher-backed startup Ooma is falling apart
Hold the phone: Voice-over-Internet startup Ooma is flailing, despite — or perhaps because of — a viral-video marketing campaign directed by Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher. Ooma launched its product, a $400 device which offers unlimited phone calls, last year, with a splash of press. Starstruck tech bloggers like TechCrunch's Michael Arrington gave away Ooma gadgets to readers in exchange for some facetime with Kutcher — and asked few questions about its nonsensical business model, which had it charging high upfront prices for hardware and giving away phone service. Now, we're told, its high-school-dropout CEO, Andrew Frame, has seen a host of executives leave. More »
deathwatch
How to burn through $800,000 of daddy's money on a blog network
A source tells us San Francisco-based blog network Green Options Media will shutter by June, having burned through at least $800,000 in a little under two years. Blame cofounder David Anderson. This "arrogant wankhammer wantrepreneur," in the source's colorful description, funded the blog network with an early inheritance from his father, who now plans to pull the plug on the operation. Still clinging to hope, Anderson is said to be frantically trying to raise money as the blog network burns through $60,000 a month. Problem is: monthly pageviews across the entire 14-blog network have yet to pass 600,000. Update: David Anderson responds in the comments below.
deathwatch
MeeVee's board slaps "for sale" sticker on company
Taking corporate transparency to a new level, MeeVee's board issued a press release offering the company up for sale. Email the director of engineering, Steve Hughey, if you're interested — he's one of only seven employees left at the company. MeeVee was originally launched as an online TV listings website, and has received $24 million in funding since 2000. Sadly, the two circles on the Venn diagram of people who still need television listings and people who go online don't actually intersect anymore, and the company's efforts to rebrand themselves as an online video search and discovery tool apparently didn't work out.
deathwatch
BlackBerry doormat Visto cuts London staff by a third
Visto CEO Brian Bogosian likes to tell reporters to expect an IPO soon. But first: layoffs. The mobile email company will cut its London workforce by a third, laying off "senior IT staff, development, product services and pre-sales workers," reports the Register.
deathwatch
Red Herring video team quits en masse
Why is Red Herring hiring five videographers for its already launched Red Herring TV? Because the current team, led by journalist Sean Wolfe, pictured here mid-interview, quit on publisher Alex Vieux. The mass resignation was prompted by another one of Vieux's tirades, but Wolfe and his colleagues also cited erratic pay and a decline in journalistic standards. Their claim: Vieux was trying to turn the video group into a production house for promotional clips custom-made for event sponsors. Anyone thinking about taking the video gig at Red Herring TV would do well to read their resignation letter: More »
jobs
Technorati needed a new systems adminstrator, like, yesterday
Rocketboom's Andrew Baron is fed up with Technorati, and switching to Google. Could the blog search engine's problems be due to the fact that there's no one minding the servers? Because the company is offering an "IMMEDIATE" postition as a contract senior sys admin. Considering how long it took for the company to find a new CEO, this could get ugly. Managers are a dime a dozen — competent sys admins are a much rarer breed.
deathwatch
Pulvermedia falls, may not be able to get up
New York-based VOIP trade publisher and event organizer Pulvermedia has been written off by investor TICC Capital Group according to sources cited by GigaOm's Om Malik. In a classy move, TICC allegedly shut down the company's bank accounts while founder Jeff Pulver was proselytizing in San Jose at Spring VON, resulting in a string of bounced checks. Ouch. (Photo by Jonathan Klinger)
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