On the Gigaom Shutdown: Speculation and Reactions

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On the first day of this work week, the tech community was met with the sad news that the highly respected site Gigaom has shut down due to its inability to pay its creditors. In short, it has gone bankrupt.

gigaom shutdown
Source

The official statement released:

A brief note on our company

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

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I Would Pay for In-Flight Wi-Fi, But Leg Room Is More Important

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For someone making a living writing, traveling is frustrating when on a deadline. That is the primary reason I always travel by train if possible and the time loss isn’t too great. There’s room to write, and always wifi when traveling in Sweden. Airlines are a different matter. Cramped and no wifi isn’t ideal for working. Obviously I’m not alone in wanting to get some work done traveling, at least according to a Wi-Fi Alliance survey, conveniently wrapped up by GigaOM.

Still, of the 480 travelers surveyed by the Wakefield Research on behalf of the Wi-Fi Alliance, 55 percent were willing to move their flight times by one day in order to catch a plane with web access. Seventy-one percent would rather have Wi-Fi than a meal. For those who have not used Wi-Fi in-flight, 87 percent expected they would use it to tackle email, and 63 percent said they would to sign into other online productivity tools for work.

Personally, I would pay for wifi on a flight, and reschedule to make it happen. I would, however, demand leg space first so that I could actually fit the MacBook Air to get some work done.

Would you pay for in-flight wifi?

The Ad Heavy Feed Footers

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It was bound to happen, ads hitting the RSS feeds. It’s not even anything even remotely new, popular services such as Feedburner (pre-Google) offered advertising solutions for your feed, and does now too, thanks to Adsense. Other players in the feed sphere did it too, and don’t forget the publishers themselves – adding something at the end of the RSS feed isn’t even all that hard. And I’m not even mentioning the fact that if you put an ad in your blog post, it’ll go right along in your feed.

It makes sense. A lot of us like to read, or at least glance, stories in the feed reader. We might not visit some sites in weeks, despite being regular readers.

Enters the ads in the RSS feeds. Problem is, where there is plenty of opportunity to make it look splendid and great on a website, the feed doesn’t have the same possibilities. Which makes it ugly. [Read more…]

GigaOm Pro: $79/Year For Analysis Community Membership

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The GigaOm network is growing, and the latest addition is a subscription service. That might make some of you shake your heads and wonder what’s up with the WSJ treatment, but although one could compare the two, it really isn’t the same thing. GigaOm Pro, which is the $79/year subscription service’s name, offers reports and analysis that competes with market research firms if anything. They’re starting out with 17 of them, and spreads their content across four verticals: Green IT, Infrastructure, the Connected Consumer, and Mobile. These in turn have sub-sections so that you can find what you want and need.

However, this is not just a directory of reports, it is also something of a community. This from Michael Wolf, from the launch post on the GigaOm Pro blog:

But even as market research analysts adapt to the new models, we at GigaOM believe there is room in the market for a new way to experience informed opinion, one that combines our best asset — our large and enthusiastic community of smart readers — with technology and market experts in an approachable and interactive format.

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GigaOM, VentureBeat, and ReadWriteWeb Content on NYTimes.com

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Giga Omni Media have closed a deal with NYTimes.com, which means that content from the GigaOM network will be available on NYTimes.com come early October. They are not alone in this, but rather a part in redesigning the Technology channel at NYTimes.com. Other heavyweights that inked a deal to have their content available through this are ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat.

This is the third heavy weight syndication deal for GigaOM, with BusinessWeek and CNNMoney already in the bag. Meanwhile, VentureBeat’s content is available on IDG’s Industry Standard. As far as I know, this is the first syndication deal for ReadWriteWeb though, although I might have missed something. [Read more…]

Om Malik talks with Lijit

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Om Malik, over at Gigaom, interviewed Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit, about their startup and their plans for monetization over time:

The company’s widget is used by more than 4,500 publishers, mostly blogs, with 60 new ones joining every day. So far, they are seeing about 330,000 searches a day, and the company plans to build an opt-in ad-network around these searches.

Vernon explained that since the company has more contextual information -– such as the topic of a blog and the very content being created by the blog writers — it can target advertising at a more granular level and, as a result, get better click-throughs.

Lijit recently raised $7.1m in a second round of funding.

jkOnTheRun Joins GigaOm Network

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Om Malik of GigaOm fame has announced that his company, Giga Omni Media, have acquired mobile gadgets blog jkOnTheRun. No amount have been specified.

The reason for buying the blog is of course that it is a great one, filling an empty space in the GigaOm network. The choice was to either build a blog in this niche from scratch, or buying one. With that in mind, the deal was and is probably a no-brainer. [Read more…]