ST. LOUIS – Once a glowing ember of St. Louis dot-coms, StreamSearch.com finally filed for Ch. 11 bankruptcy protection Tuesday after almost entirely axing its 200-person staff last December.
Fewer than 30 people remain now, who are charged with the sole and difficult mission of finding a buyer.
Having raised $31 million total, the streaming media aggregator listed $10 million in assets and $50 million in debt – owed to some of the bigger names in the computing world.
Among StreamSearch's unsecured creditors are Compaq, which is owed $2.4 million; Internet equipment maker Cisco, which is owed $338,000; and Web portal AskJeeves.com, which is owed $125,000, according to a document StreamSearch filed Tuesday in St. Louis bankruptcy court.
As reported by ePrairie on Dec. 9, StreamSearch told employees that black Friday that its 11th-hour effort to raise new funding had failed and it would be shutting down operations.
StreamSearch founder and CEO Robert Shambro hoped his firm would tap into a pool of consumer demand for music and movies, as well as other content streamed over the Internet.
The company built a database of streaming media so Internet consumers could search for the music and movies they wanted to see. He planned to generate revenue for the company through advertising, sponsorships and supplying multimedia to portals such as AskJeeves.com and Go.com.
Shambro was a founding management team member at SAVVIS Communications Corp., an Internet service provider to businesses that is now based in Creve Coeur (a county within St. Louis) and Herndon, Va. Shambro, a top national salesman for SAVVIS, left SAVVIS and launched StreamSearch in Jan. 1999.
In its infancy, StreamSearch hired in-school teens who aggregated audio and video media from around the Web and "verified" them according to a standard. The firm paid up to 50 cents per verified link, which each took about a minute to do.
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