Disruptive Telephony

This one hurts. There have been many failures in the tech media industry, but the death of Gigaom is one that hurts. The word started filtering out early last week from people such as Mathew Ingram:

This hurts more than I can say: I was just told Gigaom is shutting down -- it has run out of money. We tried our best, but it wasn't enough.

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) March 10, 2015

And then there were the confirmations from people such as Om himself:

Just walked out of Gigaom for the last time. Thank you everyone. I will miss you all for rest of my life! http://t.co/IBOhRuZ4DZ

— Om Malik (@om) March 10, 2015

And the starkly worded message on the main page of Gigaom that said in part:

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.

"All operations have ceased."

And there it was... the end of this particular dream of Om's. He followed with his own post, ending simply "Goodnight sweetheart, I still love you!"

MUCH has been written in the past two days. Some of the posts:

• http://www.techmeme.com/150309/p39#a150309p39
• http://mediagazer.com/150309/p23#a150309p23

I struggled about whether to write anything... but I felt I needed to.

The "VoIP Bloggers"

I say that "this one hurts" because I watched Om grow Gigaom from the beginning. Back in the early 2000's when "blogging" was still new, there was this whole cadre of us who wrote about "voice of IP" or "VoIP" and how the Internet was fundamentally changing telecommunications.

There was Andy Abramson with VoIPWatch, Jeff Pulver with his various VON sites, Martin Geddes with Telepocalpse, me here with Disruptive Telephony, Tom Keating with his "VoIP and Gadgets Blog" at TMC, Aswath Rao, Alec Saunders, Stuart Henshall and so many more...

But perhaps the most prolific of all of us was Om with his site simply titled "Om Malik on Broadband." He brought his incisive reporting and his way of helping put news in context of the larger picture.

In those glory days of blogging we read each other's posts... commented on them... excerpted them... trackbacked... pingbacked... learned from each other... and so much more...

But Om had grander ideas...

Gigaom

I was impressed to watch the growth as "Gigaom" was born and soon became about so much more than just one person. Om added more writers... more topic areas... just more content in general.

It was impressive!

And in a sea of so many tech media sites I always enjoyed reading Gigaom. It was one of the "go to" sites I visited when I wanted to learn more about a topic.

In particular I enjoyed the work of Mathew Ingram who gave such great coverage to the way that the Internet is changing the ways in which we communicate - a topic I find so fascinating and write about both here and over on Disruptive Communications. I enjoyed his writing... as I did Stacy Higginbotham and so many of the other writers.

I watched the expansion into events and in particular into research. I was extremely intrigued by the "Gigaom Research" idea of paying a basic fee for the year and getting access to all sorts of research.

And Then

And then... suddenly... it ended.

"All operations have ceased."

In the days that have followed, there have been some reflections emerging with more details. A few I found more interesting and useful:

• Mathew Ingram (one of the main Gigaom writers I followed): "Gigaom is dead. Long live Gigaom"
• Michael Wolf (former head of Gigaom Research): "Gigaom: The Life and Death of a Venture Funded Media Startup"
• Peter Kafka at Re/Code: "The Long Story Behind Gigaom’s Sudden Demise"

All really point to some of the financing, and particularly the debt, as the challenge the business faced and in the end couldn't solve.

I do, though, like what Mathew Ingram said in his "exit interview" with the Columbia Journalism Review:

"There’s a sort of barbell effect: If you are super small and super focused and super niche you can succeed, arguably. And if you’re super huge and mass and gigantic and growing quickly, you can succeed. But in the middle, is death. The valley of death. So arguably we got caught in that valley of death."

The whole piece is worth a read!

Goodbye, Gigaom...

And now it's gone. Nothing left but to wind down the final operations.

I have to think that most of the writers will land on their feet. They were excellent and have to be receiving job offers ... other media companies would be crazy not to try to snatch them up!

I will miss the site. What I enjoyed most was that Gigaom did NOT try to go after views with click-bait headlines or other gimmicks. They tried to just give us solid news with context.

Thank you, Om, for creating the site - and for aspiring to lead journalism in new and different directions. Thank you Om, Mathew, Stacy and all the others for all the news your wrote.

Thank you.

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An audio commentary on this topic is available:

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It seems this month is a month for VoIP/Communications-related bloggers to move around... Beyond Jon Arnold, Ken Camp has announced that his regular blogging relationship with Realtime has come to an end and that he will no longer be blogging at the Realtime Unified Communications Community that has been his blogging home for the past three years. Ken's a great guy and a friend and I do wish him all the best in whatever comes next. For now his writing can be found at the Stardust Global Ventures site that he and his wife Sheryl Breuker maintain. He promises to let us know of some of his new ventures in the next little while.

P.S. You don't need to worry about me joining this trend... I own this domain and it's hosted on TypePad, so as long as I keep paying that annual fee.... ;-)

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A little bit ago, Andy completely surprised me with a call via Skype (it was 8pm-ish on a Saturday night and I just happened to be at my computer printing out boarding passes for tomorrow's flights) with some terrible news.

As Andy relays in his blog post, fellow VoIP blogger Russell Shaw passed away suddenly in his hotel room in San Jose sometime over the past couple of days. Russell was out there to attend eComm 2008 and Andy said that several folks were wondering where he was as he never made it to the actual show.

I've enjoyed Russell's writing on his IP Telephony blog at ZDNet and while I never really worked with him in any way, I would often run into him at the various VoIP conferences (and often at Andy's famous dinners). He was "one of us"... those who choose for whatever reason to write about VoIP/IP Telephony/Unified Communications/whatever... and so it is definitely sad to learn of his passing.

My thoughts right now are certainly with his family, wherever they may be, as they come to grips with this very sudden change.

Rest In Peace, Russell... you will definitely be missed!

P.S. ZDNet's Editor, Dan Farber, also has a nice post up about Russell.

Technorati Tags: russell shaw, voip, zdnet, voip bloggers, bloggers, life, death

I was rather shocked today to learn that Om Malik is recovering from a heart attack! The good news, based on his post, is that he is recovering!

My thoughts are certainly with Om. Ever since I started paying attention to the VoIP blogosphere a good number of years ago, Om was one of the folks to whom I always paid attention. I wish him well and hope for his speedy recovery!

And yes, as he notes, it's a good reminder that we all need to watch our health. (Something I've been thinking a lot about lately.)

Technorati Tags: om malik

In learning about the new "NoJitter.com" blog recently, I also learned from Eric Krapf that Business Communications Review, commonly known simply as "BCR", was joining the ongoing exodus from the print publication business. Effective January 1, it will no longer be published in print form and, in fact, the name will retired for publishing purposes. They will continue to use the name for their training business, which is apparently going very well. The publishing focus for the BCR team will apparently be this new NoJitter blog, which I mentioned in my last post.

Personally, I'm sorry to see them go. I definitely do understand that the economics of print publishing today are quite difficult, but I did value the work that BCR did, particularly in their comparisons of products and services. It will be interesting to see, too, how well their current readership makes the switch with them. I know personally that once InfoWorld folded its print edition, I know longer paid as much attention to their writing as I once did... except when it randomly came up in searches. I'm not currently a BCR subscriber, so if anything this move may mean that I see more of their writing.

In any event, I wish them all the best with moving to the online world with NoJitter.com and look forward to seeing how that site evolves.

Technorati Tags: magazines, business communications review, bcr

Back in mid December when I received the latest copy of the "VoiceCon ENews" email newsletter, I noticed that Eric Krapf had a new signature to his post:

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

Naturally, I had to see what NoJitter.com was about...

It turns out that NoJitter.com is a new site launched by CMP to provide a focus on IP Communications/IP Telephony/Unified Communications/VoIP/whatever-we-are-calling-this-space-today. Eric, will, in fact, be the "lead blogger". I've had the opportunity to work with Eric in a few small ways (such as a VoIP security panel at Interop/VoiceCon New York in October) and look forward to seeing what he and the others there will be doing with this new site. (Hey, he already gets a "+1" from me for having "VoIP Security" as one of the navigation categories in his navbar!)

Welcome, Eric and the NoJitter team, to the VoIP part of the blogosphere!

Technorati Tags: blogs, IP communications, puppy, puppy, puppy, unifiedcommunications, voip

I've long enjoyed Richard Zhao's posts at "Telecom, Security and P2P" because, living in Beijing and working for Lenovo, he brings a distinctly different view into the global conversation.  For instance, earlier this year he posted about Chinese security standards, something that few of us outside the country would probably have noticed or commented on.  However, as he mentions over on his Chinese language blog (in English), access to Wordpress.com, where he previously had the blog, is apparently being blocked or degraded in China.  So he has now moved his blog to:

http://sbin.cn/blog/

As the title states, he covers primarily telecom and security.  Do check him out...

As I noted in my Voice of VOIPSA post today, Mark Collier (of hackingvoip.com fame) took some time in December to give www.voipsecurityblog.com a graphical makeover. He's got a cute new header image and an updated picture of himself. Although, Mark, I really have to say... you are violating the security "code of dress"! Don't you know that all good security people are supposed to wear black? Preferably a black turtleneck? Come on, now, you're going against the motif!

Ah, well... in any event, if you haven't checked out Mark's blog, it's a good one... even if he is wearing white. :-)

Technorati Tags: security, mark collier, voip, voip security, voipsa, voipsecurity