Comments on: Akimbo’s End: An Insider’s Account

By: Michelle Smyth

Michelle Smyth — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:35:02 +0000

So Tom Frank shuts the doors of Akimbo…moves on to a former Akimbo competitor CinemaNow and six months later shuts the doors on that place as well…who is the next dupe to hire this guy?

By: Another Insider

Another Insider — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:36:38 +0000

Alfred, as another former employee, i can say that the original model was not flawed. The model we shipped was. The original model had Akimob being a content agrigator, like flik’r or YouTube, except that instead of providing public content, we were to provide private content. Originally we didnt need terrabytes of servers to house our own content as it was going to be the content owners responsibility to house and stream the content. We were going to simply be a media hub, a grocery store for videos… but we ended up encoding video for all of the content providers and while we tried, the content was not HD, it often was buggy and the process as a whole was tedious and eating away at the bank account. We ended up having to host all of the content on our servers, file sizes were huge, download speeds were slow for users, content owners set exhobinant prices for their content and we were forced to give up portions of our monthly subscription fees to get the content. We licensed content from owners then gave them cuts of the few purchases that were made. Our marketing never made any market penitration and our customer base remain stagnent and usage of the few devices we sold or gave away was for the most part non-existant. the company was doomed.

By: Alfred Collins

Alfred Collins — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:15:45 +0000

Akimbo was a flawed concept from the start. Charging customers for the STB, then charging them a monthly subscription fee, then charging them a pay per view price on content. Incredibly expensive for content that was of questionable value. The investors should be looking to sue Tom Frank and his predecessors.

By: Ed Gubbins

Ed Gubbins — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:01:20 +0000

I should mention that I excised small portions of that former employee’s original email — both to protect that person’s anonymity (removing passages that contained clues to the author’s identity) and to reduce the likelihood of me or my employers getting sued (the author had some blunt but subjective assessments of specific individuals that I felt uncomfortable reprinting and that are probably extraneous to the above edited text anyway).

By: sad end Goreyeb

sad end Goreyeb — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:02:26 +0000

Chazz: Give me a break. The insider wrote a thoughtful account of a well-funded venture that didn’t make it. There’s no reason to insult him. Poor taste, my friend.

To the insider: Good on you.

-another former Akimbo employee

By: not tom

not tom — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:35:48 +0000

Chazz- you speak in oxymorons. One of the best CEOs of all time would never act in the best interest of the workers – it would be for shareholders. I don’t doubt this article is biased and wrong in substantial ways, but your claim about Tom is strange at best. In addition to him probably not really doing ‘everything’ for the workers he also (IMHO) can’t be one of the best CEOs of this time since his company just folded. He should have either done more due diligence and not gone there, or ended up with some win for the share holders – if he is as good as you say.

By: Chazz mickel

Chazz mickel — Sat, 31 May 2008 01:30:53 +0000

tom frank is one of the best ceo’s of this time he did everything in the intrest of the company and tried to help the company who ever wrote this is a jerk and probally a terrible slacker stupid worker so you shouldnt be bitching about tom he did everything in the interest of you the worker