Fonpods in DeadPool

Oh yes it will!
http://blog.roam4free.ie/allfr.....-deadpool/

It’s a shame about Fonpods, but there are perfectly legit ways to provide this great service. Take Earkive (www.earkive.com) for example: No kickbacks nor any poaching from Qwest, but instead a sponsored service offered for free to the podcasting community, and better functionality.

I am very hopeful of disappointing you on this one Mike,, should have news on Weds. Has anyone come out of the dead-pool before?

Be nice to see Tech Crunch have a full listing of Dead Pool companies instead of having to scroll through so many pages!

naive stupidity to think one could build a solid model based on a loophole

Well on November 13, 2006, I posted “I’m calling services like Fonpods dead on arrival.” but admittedly, I expected it to happen differently.

Congrats to the Fonpods team have having the courage to start a company, regardless of what the outcome ends up being. As I’ve posted about in the past at the Lightspeed Blog (click on my name in this comment to read the post), if Fonpods does not emerge from the deadpool, then I look forward to the second act from its founders and employees. They do not deserve the mean spirited comments listed above - no entrepreneurs do.

Jeremy: Outside of the comment by “some Drifter” I don’t see anything mean spirited. I wouldn’t disagree that it takes some courage to start up a company, but let’s not forget that there are quite a few startups where the founders take little risk because they raise money and build the business without putting their own finances on the line. Not all founders are created equally. Some bootstrap to success, others bootstrap to the point where they’ve exhausted their personal financial resources and others just take outside investment as quickly as possible. I don’t know Fonpod’s founders or how they were trying to build the business so I can’t comment on them.

It’d be naive to deny that there are “entrepreneurs” who start businesses for the sole purpose of raising money, hoping they’ll strike it rich and if they don’t, hopping on to a new business that can raise money. I also think it’d be naive to deny that there’s no room for a critical look at startups. Let’s be pragmatic. Just because somebody had the courage to start a business doesn’t necessarily mean they started one that is likely to be successful, or that even makes any sense. Obviously comments like the one posted by “some Drifter” are taken for what they’re worth (nothing) but that doesn’t mean that there’s any problem with us armchair critics throwing in our two cents. Who knows. Maybe some startup profiled on TechCrunch has taken some of the comments into consideration when building their business.

I agree with Drama 2.0 completely. Jeremy’s comment amounts to a naive, carte blanche endorsement of anyone who starts a company. Are entrepreneurs not accountable for their actions? Is courage to be praised just or its own sake? I thought courage was to be tempered by thoughtfulness, creativity, accountability, and ultimately profitability…?

To be clear this has nothing to do with Fonpods. I wish ‘em the best of luck. But Jeremy’s comment is remarkably naive.

A question Drama; Would Qwest have sued them if no one was using the service?

I’d guess no.

Seems like the product was popular enough that their termination fees were costing qwest money. So while you were correct that they were going to go out of business, your estimation of the viability of phone based podcasting was way off.

EKS: We don’t have usage stats so we can speculate all we want. Because other companies relying on these loopholes are being caught and shut down, it looks to me like there is a crackdown on any services abusing them. As such, I wouldn’t necessarily infer from this action that they achieved some sort of critical mass. Certainly getting profiled on TechCrunch and other popular tech blogs increased their visibility.

Snapvine terminates in 712, they’re much higher profile as Fonpods. Doesn’t seem like they’re going after them.

RadioHandi also terminates in 712.

There’s lots of Iowa terminating services that they’re not persuing.

Again, we can speculate all we want. We don’t have usage statistics and don’t know the politics or intimate details of what loopholes they may have been violating. Perhaps you are correct and Fonpods was on the verge of taking over the podcasting world and Quest wanted to shut them down. Or perhaps there’s more to the story than we see. Given the podcasting market numbers, I’ll stick to my estimation that, at best, Fonpods and its competitors will remain niche services with a small overall percentage of the market for the forseeable future. Until somebody can actually come out and say that a service like this handled xx million unique calls last month, which to my knowledge has not yet happened, it seems like a marginal business opportunity.

I don’t get it — why is this company letting something like this take them offline? Everyone is calling IN to Fonpods — they’re not calling out. So what is the cost to Fonpods? Furthermore, does it really matter what area code they use? I’d be willing to be about 99% of the people who use this service use it from a cell phone with free long distance, which means that as long as the area code is in the continental U.S., there’s no cost for them to call Fonpods. Maybe I’m missing a critical point here, but it seems to me like Fonpods didn’t need to use a loophole — they just needed a better way to support the cost of running the incoming phone lines.

I have a similar idea I would like to do. Where do you think we be a good place to get it going? I tried the big city data center and the costs were enormous.

Jordan

I’d speculate that the qwest’s suit asked for compensation for the previous termination. Fonpods is angel funded at best, they couldn’t pay. The suit killed their ability to raise additional funds, so they turned over the site.

Given that qwest didn’t even allow them to put up a “thanks, we enjoyed building Fonpods but now we’re gone” page up I’d say they were a bit pissed off.

FCK DAT TRIP GANG