E.digital really did make some memorable history in some people's minds ten years ago. It may not be good memories to a lot of folks, but hopefully it will rise again.

Is Twitter a failed business?

Bankruptcy, failed business, poor execution, dead startup, these are not the terms commonly used to describe Twitter, but the fact is that Twitter has zero revenue and has no valid plans to make money, hence the organization, like all other businesses have no way to continue unless they generate some cash to pay the bills. You cannot live on Venture Capital for the next 20 years, something has to give.

Twitter earlier this year raised an additional 35 million in venture capital. Not a bad sum, but most likely all goes into webhosting for this beast. Unless some revenue is found, eventually that venture capital will dry up and twitter will be face with some hard decisions.

We noted prior that everyone but Twitter is making money from Twitter.

Even stock twits, a company that is nothing more than a souped up blog attached to twitter got nearly a million in seed money.

10 years ago this happened. There is even a movie called startup.com that that showed the disaster of how a well funded startup lost their shirt and went under due to lack of revenue model. Most of the mid to late 1990’s were filled with Twitter clones, sites that got hugely popular and then shut down due to lack of revenue. Wikipedia has a good outline showing some of the firms that went bust..

* Boo.com, spent $188 million in just six months[19] in an attempt create a global online fashion store. Went bankrupt in May 2000.

* Broadcast.com was a web radio company founded as “AudioNet” in September 1995. The organization hugely capitalized on the Dot-com bubble. Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock. Yahoo! split the services into separate services and discontinued its functionality. As of May, 2009, | broadcast.com simply redirects to yahoo.com.

* e.Digital Corporation (EDIG): Long term unprofitable OTCBB traded company founded in 1988 previously named Norris Communications. Changed its name to e.Digital in January 1999 when stock was at $0.06 level. The stock rose rapidly in 1999 and went from closing price of $2.91 on 12/31/99 to intraday high of $24.50 on 1/24/00. It quickly retraced and has traded between $0.08 and $0.20 in 2008 and 2009.

* eToys: share price went from the $80 reached during its IPO in May 1999 to less than $1 when it declared bankruptcy in February 2001.

* Freeinternet.com – Filed for bankruptcy in October 2000, soon after cancelling its IPO. At the time Freeinternet.com was the fifth largest ISP in the United States, with 3.2 million users. Famous for its mascot Baby Bob, the company lost $19 million in 1999 on revenues of less than $1 million.

* GeoCities, purchased by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in January 1999. Expected to shut down in late 2009.

* theGlobe.com – Was a social networking service, that went live in April 1995 and made headlines by going public on November 1998 and posting the largest first day gain of any IPO in history up to that date. The CEO became in 1999 a visible symbol of the excesses of dot-com millionaires.

* GovWorks.com – the doomed dot-com featured in the documentary film Startup.com

* Hotmail – founder Sabeer Bhatia sold the company to Microsoft for $400 million; at that time Hotmail had 9 million members.

* InfoSpace – In March 2000 this stock reached a price $1,305 per share, but by April 2001 its price had crashed down to $22 a share.

* The Learning Company, bought by Mattel in 1999 for $3.5 billion, sold for $27.3 million in 2000

* Think Tools AG, one of the most extreme symptoms of the bubble in Europe: market valuation of CHF 2.5 billion in March 2000, no prospects of having a substantial product (investor deception), followed by a collapse.

* Xcelera.com, a Swedish investor in start-up technology firms.

This list goes on forever, and it’s filled with Twitters …. dozens of them….

Twitter’s office in 2 years if they don’t find revenue fast, nothing but empty desks..

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