The remaining assets of San Diego’s Veoh Network, which shut down in February after years of litigation with Universal Music Group, have been sold to Los Angeles-based social video startup 2Peer, according to a report today in VentureWire. Veoh had raised some $70 million from Boston-based Spark Capital as well as Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, Intel Capital, and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

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Zeemote, a Chelmsford, MA-based startup that developed a handheld game controller for use with games on mobile handsets, has closed its doors and is putting its assets up for sale, according to a story today in Mass High Tech. Founded in 2005 by Boston-area entrepreneur Beth Marcus, the company worked with handset manufacturers Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, and RIM to make its Bluetooth-based device compatible with their phones. Mass High Tech spoke with a partner from Zeemote backer Commonwealth Capital Ventures who confirmed the closure but offered no further details.

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TipJoy, an Arlington, MA-based startup that created a micropayment system designed to allow Web users to reward content providers with small tips, announced on its blog yesterday that it is shutting down.

Launched through the Y Combinator startup incubator program, TipJoy collected a Series A venture investment of nearly $1 million less than a year ago. Founders Abby and Ivan Kirigin said in their blog post that the company had failed to gain enough traction to justify raising additional capital.

In fact, they questioned the practicality of TipJoy’s business plan to provide a third-party system that would use existing social networking platforms such as Facebook as a medium for reimbursing writers, artists, musicians, and other digital content creators.

“We strongly believe that social payments will work on a social network, provided that they’re done within the platform and not as a 3rd party,” the Kirigins wrote. “‘Simple, social payments’ is *the* philosophy needed to do digital payments right, but once a service groks that, they need only to implement it on their own. We’ve been the thought leaders in this space, we see the hype and excitement, and yet we know very intimately the difficulties in gaining actual traction. The only way to get around this is for the platforms themselves to control payments—then all people wanting to operate on that platform would have to play along. We believe that a payments system directly and officially integrated into social networks such as Twitter and Facebook will be a huge success.”

People who were earning micropayments through TipJoy can still log into the system and cash out their funds, but the collections side of the platform has been turned off.

TipJoy’s investors included New York-based seed stage investor Betaworks as well as the Accelerator Group, David Shen Ventures, and private investors Chris Sacca, Taavet Hinrikus, and Ron Bouganim.

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Orange Labs in Cambridge, MA, France Telecom’s East Coast research outpost, will reportedly close down as of October 30. Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe first reported the story this morning; a France Telecom spokesman told him the Cambridge lab duplicates the functions of other Orange labs in France, Japan, and Silicon Valley. Michael Cappelletti, the Cambridge lab’s director of operations, tells Xconomy that he can’t comment on the report. “The information has not been officially published,” Cappelletti says, but “It has been publicly discussed.”

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In an online photo mini-apocalypse, three Web 2.0-era photo sharing and management services—BubbleShare, Riya, and PicMe—announced late this week that they’re shutting down operations.

The closings aren’t entirely coincidental. Greg Raiz of Raizlabs, the Cambridge, MA-based software development house that built PicMe, says he accelerated plans to mothball and hopefully sell the application after he learned about the other shutdowns. “We had seen a number of other photo companies close shop and felt that if someone was ‘shopping’ for technology we should toss our hat in the ring now while the opportunity was hot,” Raiz says.

But the bigger picture, so to speak, may be that a few big players—names like Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, and Google (with its Picasa application)—have sucked all the oxygen out of the photo management and photo sharing market. “Ultimately it’s very difficult to be in the consumer photo space,” says Raiz. “Google, Flickr, and Facebook essentially set the bar and give away their services for free or close to free. While we still feel certain aspects of our solution are better we can’t compete in a feature war and we can’t out-market them.”

I reviewed PicMe way back in my very first World Wide Wade column in April 2008. The cool, unique thing about the downloadable desktop program is that it shows your digital photos in 3-D stacks, with one stack for each folder on your hard drive. It lets you flip quickly through the photos in each stack, as if you were riffling through a pile of physical photo prints. To quote myself, “It’s a very nice way to browse through a big photo collection, and is a bit reminiscent of other recent interface innovations such as the Cover Flow feature on iPods and iPhones.” The program also offers drag-and-drop photo sharing: to e-mail or post a photo (or a whole stack of them) you can simply drag them onto the right icon in your contact list.

PicMe gained a respectable following through word of mouth, but Raiz was never able to line up the right partner to help spread PicMe more broadly. “As a small company we couldn’t get a desktop application licensed or distributed,” he says. “We talked to all the large desktop software players: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Kodak, Adobe, HP, et cetera, and they just were not interested. Or rather they were interested but not enough.”

At the same time, Raiz says, the company’s focus was shifting toward mobile app development, especially on the iPhone. Raizlabs did key development work on the Runkeeper app from Boston-based FitnessKeeper, for example. Even before Raiz decided to cease support for PicMe, “we had already decided internally that for now we wanted to spend our time working on Mobile apps,” he says. The company might build a mobile photo application at some point in the future, he adds.

“We’ve seen so much more success on the mobile side in just a year that we’d rather focus on what works,” Raiz says. “There are still companies trying to make a play for the consumer desktop such as ILovePhotos so we know it’s a valid opportunity, it’s just a really, really hard one to monetize.”

Both BubbleShare and Riya—which I reviewed in two articles for Technology Review‘s website in March 2006—were largely moribund, so the news of their shutdowns does not come as a huge surprise. BubbleShare’s big innovation was an easy way to record an audio clip to go along with each photo you uploaded, then assemble the photos into a narrated slide show. The Toronto startup behind BubbleShare was purchased by Canadian media firm Kaboose in 2007; the BubbleShare technology became part of Disney Online when that company acquired some of Kaboose’s assets this April. Disney posted a note yesterday on the BubbleShare website saying that the service will close down as of November 15. All photos stored on the site will be erased.

Riya, based in San Mateo, CA, was probably a bit better known than BubbleShare, at least among the digerati, for its face recognition capabilities. After a bit of training, the site’s software can identify the faces of people who show up in multiple photos, offering a nice way to organize family albums. Riya founder Munjal Shah sent an e-mail to users this morning (reproduced at TechCrunch) explaining that similar capabilities are now available from Picasa and Apple’s iPhoto software, and that Riya will shut down as of August 21. In any case, Shah and the rest of the team behind Riya had long since shifted their efforts to Like.com, a shopping site based on similar color and pattern matching technology.

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Judging from an IDG News report published in PC World on Friday, Cambridge, MA-based Dataupia is spinning down permanently. The maker of high-speed computing appliances for handling large business datasets has gone through yet another round of staff cuts and is putting its assets up for sale, the report says.

Xconomy reported in June that Dataupia had laid off nearly two-thirds of its staff in an attempt to conserve cash while it sought new investors. At the time, Dataupia representatives denied that the company—which has raised approximately $40 million in venture capital from the likes of Polaris Venture Partners, Fairhaven Capital, and Valhalla Partners—was in the process of shutting down. Samantha Stone, then the company’s vice president of marketing, said the existing investors had advised Dataupia to “to seek out additional funding from other sources” and that the company was scaling back operations in the meantime.

Apparently, that search has failed. Stone told Chris Kanaracus of the IDG News Service that the company’s assets are for sale, and that the staff has been reduced to a “small team” working on customer support and searching for potential acquirers. Stone was one of those laid off.

Dataupia did not immediately respond to Xconomy’s request today for confirmation and comment.

Dataupia’s servers are designed to support large-scale data warehousing and data analysis. The company’s founder, Foster Hinshaw, also founded Cambridge, MA-based Netezza, which unveiled a new line of data warehousing appliances this month that are far cheaper than its previous products. Dataupia’s most recent venture infusion, a $10 million extension of the company’s B round, came at the end of 2008.

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[Update 12:30 a.m. 6/30/09: We've revised this story after speaking with a Yahoo official.]

A report Monday in TechCrunch asserting that Yahoo is killing off its Cambridge, MA-based video hosting company Maven Networks just 16 months after acquiring it for $160 million is inaccurate in some respects, but accurate in others, according to the company.

A spokesman at the troubled Internet portal company, reached by phone late Monday, confirmed—as TechCrunch reported—that the company plans to shut down the service introduced by Maven under which it publishes online videos for third parties such as Fox News. That decision is part of a reprioritization effort that “will allow us to focus our resources on the continued improvement of our core video offerings,” the company said in a statement that the spokesman shared with Xconomy by e-mail.

However, the technologies Yahoo acquired when it purchased Maven aren’t going away—in fact, they’re integral to the company’s new video player and its video ad server technology. And contrary to the TechCrunch report, the Maven division has not been singled out for mass layoffs. While members of Yahoo’s video divisions have been among those affected by several waves of staff reductions at Yahoo—including a recent 5 percent across-the-board layoff—talent from Maven continues to lead video initiatives across the company.

The TechCrunch report, citing unnamed tipsters, said that “Yahoo has effectively decided to shelve Maven, firing most of its employees in a move packaged as a restructuring.” Xconomy relayed that report—which now appears to have been unjustified—while attempting to contact Yahoo for confirmation and clarification.

While the report of mass layoffs may have been wrong, however, recent months have brought many signs of downsizing and attrition across Yahoo’s video operations, including Maven. Former CEO Hilmi Ozguc, who founded Maven in 2002, left Yahoo last September, six months after the acquisition. Internet video news site NewTeeVee reported in early May that “many members of the [Yahoo Video] team have quit or been laid off amidst a lack of strategic direction,” and reported later that month that the head of company’s video platform division was leaving. The site even asserted that Yahoo planned to phase out Maven altogether—not an outlandish prediction, given that other Yahoo video services Yahoo Live, a live video streaming service, and JumpCut, an online video editing tool, have already been shut down.

But while Yahoo has been scaling back its investment in some areas of online video, it says it has been increasing them in others. Video initiatives “remain a priority for Yahoo, both for its consumer and advertising experiences,” the company says.

The full statement we received from Yahoo is as follows:

Since acquiring Maven Networks in 2008, Maven has played an important role in our video strategy, providing essential talent and core technology that has helped Yahoo! to enhance its consumer and advertising offerings. Maven technology is used in the Yahoo video player, as well as in the Yahoo Video Advertising Platform that is being used to serve both on- and off- network advertising for Yahoo! partners.

While video initiatives remain a priority for Yahoo!, both for its consumer and advertising experiences, we are increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others. After careful consideration, Yahoo! is planning to wind down its Maven Networks customer base. This decision will allow us to focus our resources on the continued improvement of our core video offerings, such as enhancing the consumer video experience on Yahoo!.

Since Q4 2008, we have closed or announced our intention to close, nearly twenty Yahoo! services– such as Yahoo! 360, GeoCities, My Web and Yahoo! Briefcase. We continue to evaluate our portfolio of products and services on a regular basis, and plan to share details of further changes with people who use our products in the months ahead.

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Clear, a five-year-old biometric passenger identification service intended to speed air travelers’ passage through security checkpoints, shut down last night. According to the service’s website, parent company Verified Identity Pass of New York, NY, was unable to obtain credit to continue operations. Boston’s Spark Capital led a $44.4 million Series C venture funding round for Verified Identity Pass last August. Syncom Venture Partners, Lockheed Martin, Baker Capital, GE Security, and Lehman Brothers also joined that round, which brought the company’s total funding at the time to $116.4 million.

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Greenfuel Technologies, the Cambridge, MA, biofuels startup that closed its doors last month after running out of venture cash, is trying to scrape together some money for its creditors and investors through a sale of intellectual property and other assets.

In a post on its website today, the company said it’s entertaining offers for its basic algae production technology—big tanks designed to be installed next to facilities such as cement plants that emit lots of carbon dioxide, which can be captured and converted into plant matter through photosynthesis.

The company also said it’s selling intellectual property related to “downstream processing” of the algae, thin film technology, algae selection and optimization techniques, and “Generation 1 and 2 bioreactors (tubular).” The company is planning a sealed bid auction for the assets, and says a detailed description and bid sheet is available to interested parties.

According to an e-mail tip received from “Anon GreenFueler”—presumably, a former employee of the startup—there are “several interested parties currently vying to bid for the trade secrets, know-how, and equipment held by GreenFuel.”

Greenfuel struggled for eight years to commercialize its algae production system, which was intended to produce material that could be converted into either protein-rich feedstock or ethanol for cars and trucks. But the company was unable to raise the Series C funding it needed to build its first planned industrial-scale production facility in Spain. The company laid off about half of its staff in January and shut down entirely on May 13.

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SiCortex, a six-year-old startup building energy-efficient supercomputers in Maynard, MA, has shut its doors. The company ran out of working capital and was unable to raise more from its venture investors, according to a report that surfaced yesterday in HPC Wire, a trade publication in the high-performance computing industry.

Xconomy obtained confirmation of the shutdown news from John Mucci, the founding CEO of SiCortex, who was replaced 10 months ago by current CEO Christopher Stone. Stone himself was not immediately available for comment.

“It is a sad day for all… less competition, unemployed seventy some workers…” Mucci said in an e-mail.

SiCortex had raised $42 million in venture capital, including a $21 million Series A round in 2004 contributed by lead investor Polaris Venture Partners and syndicate members Flagship Ventures, JK&B Capital, and Prism Venture Partners. All of those investors returned for the company’s $21 million Series B round in 2006, with the addition of new lead investor Chevron Technology Ventures. Bob Metcalfe, a Polaris partner frequently quoted about SiCortex in the past, said this morning he had no comment about the shutdown.

According to the HPC Wire report, which was based on information from an anonymous source close to the company, most of the company’s employees have been let go, and a sale of the company’s assets is underway.

SiCortex had been in the process of raising additional working capital; according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 13, it planned to sell $1.1 million in subordinated convertible promissory notes. It’s not known whether that debt fundraising was completed.

SiCortex had developed a line of large, multiprocessor, parallel computers that saved electricity by using somewhat slower processors, but made up the speed difference using an advanced internal communications network for shuttling data between processors. The company targeted customers doing technical computing work in areas such as geological exploration, climate simulation, and intelligence. Sales were apparently brisk; the company had announced record growth in the first quarter of 2009. The Royal Military College of Canada was one recently announced customer.

SiCortex had also been emerging as a leader in the field of “green” high-performance computing. Last November it introduced the “Green Computing Index,” a list that ranked the world’s largest supercomputers not according to their sheer speed but according to their power efficiency (expressed in billions of floating point operations per second per kilowatt consumed).

We expect to obtain further details about the shutdown later today.

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[Updated 7:30 p.m., 5/13/09, with input from former GreenFuel interim CEO Bob Metcalfe, see below.] Cambridge, MA-based GreenFuel Technologies, which struggled for eight years to commercialize an industrial-scale process for growing algae that could be turned into biofuels or food, is closing down for lack of financing and selling off its technologies. Greentech Media broke the story earlier today.

Duncan McIntyre, an associate at Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners, which participated in several venture rounds that raised more than $70 million for GreenFuel, told Greentech that the company could not raise the funds needed to build planned test facilities in Spain. “We are closing doors. We are a victim of the economy,” McIntyre told the publication.

Xconomy is seeking comment on the reported closure from GreenFuel CEO Simon Upfill-Brown. But Bob Metcalfe, a Polaris partner who was GreenFuel’s interim CEO prior to Upfill-Brown’s hiring and is its current board chairman, confirmed the shutdown in an e-mail message. “Simon Upfill-Brown and Holly Flesh [the company's vice president of business operations] are now working to sell GreenFuel’s technologies,” he wrote. “You could help by sending potential buyers their way.”

GreenFuel’s ride was a bumpy one. The company built its first field bioreactor, using specially bred strains of algae to capture carbon dioxide emissions and rapidly convert them into biomass through photosynthesis, at MIT in 2004. In 2005 the company hired energy industry veteran Cary Bullock as CEO to lead efforts to scale up the process. But in 2007, the company had to shut down its third-generation bioreactor facility in Arizona after the plant produced more algae than the company’s equipment could handle. At the same time, the company learned that its algae harvesting system would cost twice as much as expected. Some 25 employees, about half the company’s staff, were laid off as a result of the plant shutdown.

Metcalfe relieved Bullock as CEO after the setback, and spent the next year coordinating cost-cutting efforts, raising cash, restarting the Arizona bioreactor, rounding up strategic partners, and recruiting new leadership.

Things seemed to be looking up for the company by mid-2008. In March of that year the company signed a deal with Spanish cement maker Aurantia that was expected to bring up to $92 million to the company. (Cement plants are a huge source of carbon dioxide.) New CEO Upfill-Brown joined in July, and the company obtained additional Series B funding and began work on a fourth-generation algae bioreactor in Cambridge. By October, GreenFuel had finished the first phase of its work at the Aurantia plant, a 100-square-meter prototype greenhouse and harvesting operation. A 1,000-square-meter facility was to be ready by 2010, and the company was beginning to collect some of the funds promised by Aurantia.

But the startup was hit hard by the economic crisis and by the decline in petroleum prices from their 2008 peaks, which took much of the bloom off the biofuels rose. Upfill-Brown was not able to raise a Series C investment round on the timetable that he and Metcalfe had originally projected. In January, the company laid off 19 people—again, just under half of its staff—and decided to outsource the design and engineering work on the Aurantia project.

“We’ve got to weather this economic storm as best we can…” Upfill-Brown told Bob at the time. But he said he was optimistic about the company’s direction: “We pretty much feel GreenFuel is ahead [of other biofuels companies]…We’re going to keep plugging away, stay ahead.”

Apparently, the company could no longer keep its head above water. Which could become an increasingly familiar story as biofuel startups—none of which have come close to producing ethanol or other fuels at prices comparable to those of fossil-based fuels—burn through their cash and look to empty-handed investors for additional capital rounds.

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[Updated, see below.--WR] Our stories last week about the shutdown of Innovative Spinal Technologies, a Mansfield, MA, company that raised $75 million in private funding to market devices for stabilizing injured spines, prompted a number of IST’s former employees and business associates to contact Xconomy to help flesh out the details of the company’s demise more fully. A picture is now emerging of an organization hobbled by management decisions that distanced it from its founding scientists in Texas, impaired its ability to sell its products to surgeons and hospitals, and exhausted its capital too quickly before it could get traction with enough sales of its spinal devices.

In particular, several sources I interviewed blame the company’s failure on IST president and CEO Scott Schorer. He’s a 40-year-old serial entrepreneur, real estate developer, and former Army Ranger who joined IST in 2002 when it was spun off by the Texas Back Institute under the name MusculoSkeletal Research Corporation. It was Schorer who transformed the company from a research incubator into a standalone medical device manufacturer, and Schorer who single-handedly raised the company’s crucial $39 million Series B venture funding round in 2005, sources agree. But the same person ultimately “drove this plane into the ground,” says Stephen Hochschuler, a spine surgeon who co-founded the Texas Back Institute and was a member of IST’s board until 2006.

IST “would make a great Harvard Business School case study of what not to do at a startup,” Hochschuler says.

As we’ve already reported, IST used much of its venture money to relocate to facilities in Massachusetts and to hire more staff, eventually growing to more than 100 employees. But disappointing sales of the company’s pedicle-screw system—marketed as a minimally invasive way to fuse or stabilize spinal segments in patients with damaged intervertebral discs—evidently meant it couldn’t sustain itself at that size. It shed staff drastically in 2008, shrinking to no more than 10 employees before finally closing its doors on January 23.

Executives tried to avert a shutdown by selling the company, and were close to a deal with Biomet Spine, a subsidiary of Warsaw, IN-based Biomet, according to one source I spoke with last week. But Biomet backed off in the end, the source says.

And now, according to a confidential IST memo shared by one source, IST is requiring customers to return all implants and surgical equipment to the company.* The memo from IST vice president of quality assurance Brian Callahan, issued January 23 (the day the company closed down), says all IST customers must immediately send back their inventory while the company works through “strategic and financial issues” and seeks a “different corporate partner” to sell the technology. Because the equipment is no longer supported by the company, the memo continues, anybody who uses it could be liable for civil and criminal penalties. It’s not known how many of IST’s devices were implanted in patients. [*Updated, 8:00 pm, 2/3/09: The first two sentences of this paragraph were edited for clarification.]

I reached Schorer by phone today, asking him about the state of affairs at IST and soliciting his responses to the criticisms lodged by former employees and associates. Contrary to an assertion from one source quoted in my January 27 story, the company has not filed for bankruptcy protection, Schorer says. “We hope to avoid that,” he says. “Obviously we’re trying to sell assets in order to take care of our liabilities and obligations to all of our constituents—the creditors, the shareholders, and the employees.”

Schorer said that as long as these negotiations were going on, he will not be able to respond in detail to questions or criticisms about the path the company has taken. “I’m happy when we are done with the process to come back and talk about what happened,” he says. “I just don’t want that to interfere with the process or cause issues for the process.”

“We have nothing to hide here,” Schorer continues. “I’m fine after we’re done with all of this for the truth to come out about what happened here, and shed a more credible and balanced light on what happened, as much as I can.”

If the criticisms of Schorer’s decisions were coming from a single source, it might be easy to write them off as the opinions of a disgruntled former employee. But a great many people seem to be disgruntled about IST’s fate. And the twists and turns in that story seem to merit further exploration, considering how much praise the company won for its early engineering efforts and how much money it eventually burned through before shutting down.

Hochschuler and other surgeons at the Texas Back Institute hatched MusculoSkeletal Research in 2002 with the idea of earning a financial return on the extensive research going on inside the institute. “Initially we kind of gave all our technology away through our non-profit research foundation,” Hochschuler says. “But after a while we said, ‘this is crazy—we have so many ideas, and we’re so connected in the spine world, why don’t we do something for-profit that would still help the community.’ ”

Hochschuler says Schorer, who had scored a big success by selling his previous company, a medical device shopping site called CentriMed, to Global Healthcare Exchange in 2000, approached TBI together with an associated named Fred Moll about investing in MusculoSkeletal Research. At that time, the organization was funded by investments from big medical-device companies such as GE Healthcare. Says Hochschuler, “I met with them and I liked them and I said, ‘We’re not taking any individual investments, but Scott, if you will become the CEO, I’ll let you guys invest.”

Schorer accepted the post, and the company was soon renamed Innovative Spinal Technologies. In 2003 the company raised a $6.2 million Series A funding round that included investments from device companies ANS, Orthofix, Synthes, and GE. But the company’s big break came two years later, when … Next Page »

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[10:00 a.m. 10/28/08: Update and clarification included below.]

In an entry cross-posted on the company blog and his personal blog this afternoon, Mike Troiano, CEO of Needham, MA-based recommendation technology startup Matchmine, said the company is shutting down, effective immediately. The failure of the company, which raised $10 million in venture financing just last year, throws at least 40 software engineers, product managers, and business development executives out of work.

The Matchmine website is no longer available, and redirects visitors to the blog, which is headed by Troiano’s message, entitled simply “Fin.” Troiano says Matchmine employees were informed of the shutdown this morning. While the company’s doors are already closed, “a few of us will stick around to try and support our partners through a transition, and notify others affected by the closing,” the post says. The company’s partners should expect calls soon, Troiano said.

Matchmine, as I explained in a profile last September, was in the midst of rolling out a system that automatically recommends music, movies, and other types of media based on the individual tastes of users, as encoded in personalized mathematical representations known as “MatchKeys.” Funded mainly by the Kraft Group, which also owns the New England Patriots, Matchmine had established partnerships with several Web-based media companies, including Fuzz, Filmcrave, Peerflix, Odeo, Blogdigger, Blogged, and MediaMelon; the companies were incorporating the MatchKey technology into their own sites’ product search and recommendation systems.

Matchmine’s path was not untroubled. In an April story following up on my original profile, I recounted how the company was forced to scrap the original system it developed for building MatchKeys as too complex and forbidding for most consumers. After the company’s public debut at the Demo conference in September 2007, six months elapsed before the company got its recommendation service working on the first two partner sites. In that time, “We made a bunch of headway and uncovered a bunch of opportunities as well as a bunch of problems with the product side of things,” Troiano told me at the time.

And while the company continued to sign up new retail partners over the summer—including ffwd.com, Pixsy, Podcast.com, Videocast.com, Muzic.com, and MP34U.com—it never scored the kind of big customer win (on the scale of a company like eMusic, say) that would have put it on the map in the digital media retailing sector.

In his blog post, Troiano indicates that while the company had been hit hard by the recent financial turmoil, its sudden shutdown was completely unanticipated. Troiano hints, without explaining, that he had been misled in some way about the startup’s financial situation. [see clarification below]

“The nature of our financing meant that the financial market crisis overtook us more abruptly than most,” Troiano writes. “To my team and their families, our vendors, network partners and prospects, I can only say that I am deeply sorry for the way this comes to a close. And I don’t mean ‘press release sorry;’ I mean really, personally sorry. Please know that I could not have imagined this last Thursday, let alone earlier. It is one thing to be failed, quite another to have been deceived.”

[Update and clarification, 10/28/08: In a response today to my inquiry about that last sentence, Troiano says he was not trying to imply anything about the company's financial backers. "That sentence...was not about the Krafts at all," Troiano wrote to me this morning (see my followup story). "I was concerned that the partners we were engaged with---and the prospective partners we were still pitching as late as Thursday---might feel deceived by us. We may have failed them, in good faith, but that’s different than lying through our teeth knowing we were going to shut the company down on Monday. Hence the failure vs. deception distinction."]

The bulk of Troiano’s post, however, is devoted to a list of Matchmine’s employees, whom other companies “smart enough to be greedy while so many are scared” would do well to snatch up, he argues. These include Trent Adams, the company’s founder and “Chief Innovator,” who first conceived the recommendation technology behind Matchmine’s system while working directly for the Kraft Group.

It’s possible that Matchmine’s recommendation technology will again see the light of day: Troiano says in the post that the company’s intellectual property is now for sale. “We’re open to selling the IP and patent portfolio, and just as willing and able to protect it,” he writes.

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NextWave Wireless (NASDAQ: WAVE), a San Diego company that makes embedded multimedia software for mobile devices, said this week that it’s shutting down Israeli Wi-Fi equipment subsidiary Go Networks as part of a global cost-cutting effort. Earlier in the month, NextWave arranged $100 million in new debt financing and announced a series of cash-conservation moves, including 67 layoffs among its San Diego-based workforce. NextWave’s business has been impacted by delays in adoption of next-generation telecom equipment made by its subsdiaries, according to the San Diego Business Journal.

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