SonicMountain Buys FireAnt
SonicMountain, a company best-known for buying the assets of podcasting startup Odeo, has acquired video player startup FireAnt for a “mid six-figure” sum.
FireAnt had gained early acclaim for its Mac and Windows apps that helped users subscribe to, download, and play video podcasts. The company, founded by Josh Kinberg, Jay Dedman, Daniel Salber, and Eric Radmall in 2004, was a first-wave thought leader in the Internet video space, gaining some 400,000 downloads of its media player and paving the way for projects like Veoh and Miro. But internal turmoil caused the company to flounder — it failed to raise money, putting itself at risk of bankruptcy.
Update: Dedman says the company sold for $400,000.
While the buyout price isn’t much to speak of, it’s a welcome new chapter for the startup. FireAnt will be combined with Odeo and relaunched circa December under the Odeo name as an audio and video podcast player and community. Kinberg will run product development; the other founders had previously moved onto new projects.
FireAnt and Odeo have more than a little in common; their founders had actually met at the jet-setting TED Conference in 2005, where Dedman, Kinberg, and Odeo founder Ev Williams were invited to preview the new era of digital media. While that new era came to fruition, the two companies were left by the wayside. Interestingly, the SonicMountain deal actually came about as a result of the TED connection, with Williams (who is now involved in Odeo only in an advisory role, as he has moved on to Twitter and other projects) introducing Kinberg to SonicMountain.
SonicMountain is run by Rick Arturo, a podcasting hobbyist who made his money as an early employee at Sun Microsystems (JAVA) and then Cisco (CSCO), and is now seeking additional funding for the new Odeo property. SonicMountain had some business management difficulties of its own recently come to light, when a company by the name of the Amergence Group falsely announced it had finalized an agreement to acquire it. SonicMountain also has its fair share of naysayers, who invariably appear in the comments of any article written about it. Arturo said he attributes the ill will to an ousted CEO who left on bad terms.
SonicMountain is also looking to purchase Blogdigger.com, a blog and podcast index and search engine, for the Odeo project.
On a related note, we’ve been tracking down a report that another digital media player startup, Instant Media, may have shut its doors. It’s possible the site is just down for maintenance, but when the company contact email address bounces back — as it did to us this morning — that’s a bad sign.
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Best wishes to Josh and team – they deserve it.
It’s great to see to early market leaders like FireAnt and Odeo bring their technology together to build something even better. Looking forward to future announcements and seeing what good things are ahead for the new Odeo.
Start-ups are never easy and sometimes trying something different or something new is the best way to find out what works well.
Best wishes!
The Instant Media website has been down for at least a week (if not a lot longer) without notice or any information of maintenance.
I’m pretty certain it is dead – it certainly hasn’t had much traffic for some months and would be operating at a loss with no sign of improving.
Ah memories.
It was an amazing time. being able to watch everyone else’s video back in 2005.
Every… single… video… that everyone else made.
Working with Daniel Salber on FireAnt for the Mac was a great experience. New features and bug fixes that I suggested were always implemented quickly.
Being able to work that closely with a developer was lots of fun.
Sadly the Macintosh development didn’t keep up with the PC development and I ended up dropping FireAnt and moving to Miro.
During this period, my Mac crashed and I ended up starting over and subscribing to fewer feeds.
What’s happening now is that I only subscribe to about 13 RSS 2.0 feeds with media enclosures. Others I subscribe to, but go watch online.
I find many new videos via Twitter, Email, IM and Facebook.
Another thing I frequently talked to Jay about was getting the ability to be able to see what others using Fireant were subscribed to, and beyond that, see what videos they liked or recommended.
That feature would have been cool.
Good luck with Odeo Josh. I’m interested in seeing what happens.
–Steve
http://stevegarfield.com
We know we have our work cut out for us but the plan is in place — video, mobile, search. FireAnt brings so much more to the table beyond their existing technology. Everyone knows it’s the people that make or break a company. Josh and crew will help strengthen Odeo significantly. Thanks to Evan for the hooking us up.
Yeah after Daniel Salber and Jay Dedman left the Fireant Team, it all went downhill. I used fireant for a solid 2.5 years but now am looking for other options. If This new version of Fireant for the Mac does all the things it should (keeps the standards of the old mac version with additions of things like playlists) then I might bite, but for now, I am looking into Miro…
I went off Fireant back when they decided not to go opensource after all, and then became defensive whenever someone asked about a broken feature. Then information started to dry up, ending up with the usual sort of sad situation where it becomes safe to presume that updates of the mac version had ceased due to someone leaving, leaving only disappointment where once there was joy.
So despite the undeniably vital and glorious contribution that fireant made to the beginnings of videoblogging and videopodcasting or whatever you want to call it, I have had no emotional attachment to their product for a long time.
I must admit that Ive always been surprised that more video aggregator apps werent released, whilst they are not completely trivial to write, they arent the most tricky thing to program either. I wait with interest to see if Adobe Air will cause a new generation of cheap & easy to make video aggregators appear on the scene, especially since the h264 announcement. Though I havent actually studied whether the features of Air make it totally suited to video aggregators, probably the likes of FireAnt could still maintain an advantage in terms of number of different video formats supported, and sync’ing with devices, etc.
I was slightly alarmed by the murky rumors I found when looking up SonicMountain, though much of that seemed connected to the Amergence buyout that apparently fell through, though there isnt exactly a mountain of detailed info on this available. Its all too unclear for me to digest accurately as it seems like lots of the discussion is on finance boards where the motivations of many posters are unclear. Lets see what ahppens, I hope that SonicMountain have the vision and resources to create a decent new chapter in the lives of FireAnt and Odeo.
Thanks for the interesting post. I give a lot of credit to people who take the risk to start companies and then have to make decisions one way or another. Wish all of the start-ups could be Facebooks or Youtubes or Google, but it just doesn’t work that way. I’m always on the lookout for good insights into why companies do or don’t make it. It’s usually first about having a team that works well together and then having product vision that matches the team. Sounds like the new Odeo has both. Best of luck to them!
Liz, this is a very accurate post about FireAnt. As one of the founders, I simply expanded on some of the backstory.
http://www.momentshowing.net/2007/09/project-complet.html
Arturo fails to mention what alittle birdy in NYC told me.
The CEO of Odeo/Sonic Mountain is his old boss Dick Moore at Sivault. He just bankrupted their former company Sivault to the tune of $47m in debt.
OBTW, he has a few skeletons in his closet:
http://tinyurl.com/322f7y