Back in 2006, when Wi-Fi was all the rage, we saw many startups paint a future in which we’d be able to hop from one hot spot to another seamlessly, sharing the bandwidth for free when we could and buying it when we had to. Well, the future turned out to be entirely different.
Whisher, a Wi-Fi company that launched with much fanfare at DEMO in January 2007, sold itself to WiFi.com, a hot-spot services company, sometime earlier this year, according to founder and Chief Technology Officer Mike Puchol. The sale came close on the heels of the firing of CEO Ferran Moreno in October 2008. Now while for most companies, such a sale would signal the end of the story, with Whisher it was the start of a new one. As part of its preparation to merge operations with WiFi.com, Whisher launched an internal audit that turned up certain irregularities, which in turn led to a full-blown investigative audit. What it discovered wasn’t good. Continue »
Updated: Whisher has sent this special offer to our readers. They are giving away WiFi Out credit to GigaOM readers, and 
If you thought eBay taking a hefty writedown for its mistake — I mean Skype was shocking — then Sprint’s Nextel deal writedown is going to leave you awed. Sprint Nextel reported a $29.5 billion loss, scratched its dividend and lost 683,000 customers. The company wrote down $29.7 billion of the $36 billion it paid for Nextel in 2005. 
