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Gigaom Closes Shop
Presto Vivace writes "What a loss for the tech community," linking to this announcement at Gigaom that the site is shutting down: Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time. As a result, the company is working with its creditors that have rights to all of the company's assets as their collateral. All operations have ceased. We do not know at this time what the lenders intend to do with the assets or if there will be any future operations using those assets. The company does not currently intend to file bankruptcy. We would like to take a moment and thank our readers and our community for supporting us all along. — Gigaom management
Reader bizwriter adds a link to this story on the shutdown.
Can someone summarize what it's value was to the tech community?
The proprietor was a self-styled tech elite asshat. He impressed some people, but not enough apparently. He always struck me as a phony. Gigaom as a site had enough insider scoops that they were useful for breaking news in the actual tech industry (not the consumer tech industry that gets hashed and rehashed by Engadget, Slashdot, and a dozen others) so it had a little value, but it was never the tech thought leadership paragon that it pretended to be.
Until this story, I'd never heard of them. Would it have hurt to included a brief sentence or two in the summary as to why it's "a loss for the tech community"?
Gigaom is a media company (mostly news aggregation and blogging) founded by writer/journalist Om Malik, who turned out to be the company's only asset. After he left for greener pastures in 2014, the site slid quickly into obscurity.
Gigaom was a good site for tracking telecommunications news for several years, founded by Om Malik, who wrote a very good book on the 2000 Bubble called Broadbandits, which focused on telecomm giants -- including giant scams like MCI. Malik was a perceptive analyst and writer, and I read it frequently in the 2000s. Its demise reminds me that I hadn't visited it of late. It also reminds me there are a lot of tech websites out there, and a new wave of companies turning out what apparently are tech news apps specifically for mobile apps. As the Inc. article says, "Once again there's a bit of that old aroma of burning money in the air."
Though I'm sure he'll land somewhere.
I'm sure he landed somewhere else about a year ago.