At Red Herring, every startup is a winner — but publisher Alex Vieux is the one who takes the prize. Indeed, handing out prizes seems to be the main way Vieux is keeping it afloat. The once-vital technology publisher, which Vieux has all but run into the ground, no longer prints a magazine. A tipster says healthcare for its workers has been cancelled for nonpayment. Its website, which used to mostly carry wire copy, now produces a pitiful handful of stories each day. But the Herring is still flopping around with an events business. The next one, Red Herring 100 North America, due to be held in San Jose later this month, will celebrate 100 startups of Vieux's choosing. And how does he select them from a list of 204 finalists? A come-on email and phone call one startup received is revealing:

Akimbo has laid off nearly everyone except for its executives, according to a tip we just received. An early entrant in the TV-over-Internet field, Akimbo saw its original CEO Joshua Goldman leave for the luxury of investing in other video startups. The company dumped its set-top box business to sell Internet video-on-demand software to other hardware manufacturers. So far $47 million has been poured into the company by the likes of Cisco Systems, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Kleiner Perkins' William R. Hearst III, who serves on Akimbo's board. Any Akimbo employees out there want to confirm or contradict our tipster's impression that CEO Tom Frank and COO Neil Goldberg are mismanaging the aging startup?

After a week of browsing booths and attending parties in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo, New York-based tech reporter Caroline McCarthy rained on the local bubble's annual hype parade. [News.com] (Photo by Brian Solis)

Jumping ship from a company that had already lost the confidence of its investors, Jeff Pulver, the pioneering VOIP promoter, has left Pulvermedia, the company he founded to put on tech tradeshows like VON.

If at first you don't succeed, cast your failure as part of an industry trend. That's the exit strategy of Russell Beattie, who launched mobile startup Mowser after being fired from Yahoo in 2006. Fired, mind you, when Yahoo was firing very few people. Beattie's tale of woe explains Mowser's failure thus: Designing Web pages for cell phones was always a short-term game, and his bet came out wrong. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington plays right into Beattie's hand, arguing about the future of the mobile Web instead of asking why Mowser failed. He encourages Beattie to launch a new startup building applications instead of a mobile Web browser.

I ignore most startup pitches. It's a truism that 9 out of 10 startups fail; relentlessly covering every one of them is mathematically a fool's game. But on occasion, I get one so bad that I feel obliged to share it with my readers, if only as a cautionary tale. CreateDebate, founder Bryan Orme informs me, "is a social networking site where users can create a debate about any topic they are interested in." His concept, in other words, is to compete with the entirety of the Internet. Feel free to debate the rest of Orme's startup pitch, reproduced here:

Sharper Image chairman and former CEO Jerry Levin resigned today, just short of two months after the company declared bankruptcy. Not satisfied with just how far he's helped run the icon of '80s yuppie excess into the ground, Levin reports that he and some investor buddies will buy some or all of the company's assets. If you're lucky enough to be one of Levin's friends, you can probably count on a massage chair or three this holiday season.

Personalized homepage startup Pageflakes will be broke soon according to sources cited by Om Malik, though while CEO Dan Cohen admits the company is for sale, he denies that it's running on empty. The company, founded in 2005, has raised a total of $4.1 million but with a reported $300,000 monthly burn rate and scant revenue, it does sound like just a matter of time. A few weeks ago I went to meet an acquaintance at a company party in SOMA. So I didn't look like a total idiot, I tried to access the site to see what the company was all about just in case — and got a page not found error. Which I'm still getting today. Must be hard to generate income when users can't even access the site. Update: Brad Greenspan, the guardian angel of failing companies, will add Pageflakes to the roster of companies LiveUniverse will probably continue to mismanage reports TechCrunch.

Hold the phone: Voice-over-Internet startup Ooma is flailing, despite — or perhaps because of — a viral-video marketing campaign directed by Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher. Ooma launched its product, a $400 device which offers unlimited phone calls, last year, with a splash of press. Starstruck tech bloggers like TechCrunch's Michael Arrington gave away Ooma gadgets to readers in exchange for some facetime with Kutcher — and asked few questions about its nonsensical business model, which had it charging high upfront prices for hardware and giving away phone service. Now, we're told, its high-school-dropout CEO, Andrew Frame, has seen a host of executives leave.

A source tells us San Francisco-based blog network Green Options Media will shutter by June, having burned through at least $800,000 in a little under two years. Blame cofounder David Anderson. This "arrogant wankhammer wantrepreneur," in the source's colorful description, funded the blog network with an early inheritance from his father, who now plans to pull the plug on the operation. Still clinging to hope, Anderson is said to be frantically trying to raise money as the blog network burns through $60,000 a month. Problem is: monthly pageviews across the entire 14-blog network have yet to pass 600,000. Update: David Anderson responds in the comments below.

Taking corporate transparency to a new level, MeeVee's board issued a press release offering the company up for sale. Email the director of engineering, Steve Hughey, if you're interested — he's one of only seven employees left at the company. MeeVee was originally launched as an online TV listings website, and has received $24 million in funding since 2000. Sadly, the two circles on the Venn diagram of people who still need television listings and people who go online don't actually intersect anymore, and the company's efforts to rebrand themselves as an online video search and discovery tool apparently didn't work out.

Visto CEO Brian Bogosian likes to tell reporters to expect an IPO soon. But first: layoffs. The mobile email company will cut its London workforce by a third, laying off "senior IT staff, development, product services and pre-sales workers," reports the Register.

Why is Red Herring hiring five videographers for its already launched Red Herring TV? Because the current team, led by journalist Sean Wolfe, pictured here mid-interview, quit on publisher Alex Vieux. The mass resignation was prompted by another one of Vieux's tirades, but Wolfe and his colleagues also cited erratic pay and a decline in journalistic standards. Their claim: Vieux was trying to turn the video group into a production house for promotional clips custom-made for event sponsors. Anyone thinking about taking the video gig at Red Herring TV would do well to read their resignation letter:

Rocketboom's Andrew Baron is fed up with Technorati, and switching to Google. Could the blog search engine's problems be due to the fact that there's no one minding the servers? Because the company is offering an "IMMEDIATE" postition as a contract senior sys admin. Considering how long it took for the company to find a new CEO, this could get ugly. Managers are a dime a dozen — competent sys admins are a much rarer breed.

New York-based VOIP trade publisher and event organizer Pulvermedia has been written off by investor TICC Capital Group according to sources cited by GigaOm's Om Malik. In a classy move, TICC allegedly shut down the company's bank accounts while founder Jeff Pulver was proselytizing in San Jose at Spring VON, resulting in a string of bounced checks. Ouch. (Photo by Jonathan Klinger)

Podango, a podcast advertising network, acquired GigaVox Media in 2007 and launched several shows including Girls Gone Geek. Michael Arrington had the exclusive report on the news. "Something tells me it's going to do okay," Arrington wrote. That has turned out not to be the case. At least, that's according to one Podango employee who tells us he's had trouble getting paid. "I was a developer for podango.com for 2 years," the tipster writes. "I left Podango 3 weeks ago due to lack of funding." The tale continues:

The Montreal-based social network that's teetering on the edge of extinction was a family affair, both in the nepotism sense and allegedly in the mafia sense. That's according to a former employee who sent in an epic tale of sex, drugs and shady business dealings under CEO Luc Verville, pictured here in happier times. His brother Michel, a cofounder, was kicked out of the company — but not before generating some serious ill will among employees:

Capazoo, a Canadian social network which promised to pay users for signing up friends, is is going under. The company has fired its 60-person development staff, which took two years to launch the site, and ended up attracting a little over 10,000 users. The best part of the site, by far, is its deadpan Web infomercial, where users like Corey Vidal, pictured here, talk about how they didn't make any money off MySpace or YouTube. TechCrunch reports that founders Michel and Luc Verville allegedly took $2 million out of the $25 million in venture capital the company raised. It doesn't mention what they spent it on. Here's the report from a company insider:

Biometrics payments firm Pay By Touch shuttered for good yesterday. The last remaining client retailers will unplug their Pay By Touch fingerprint payment machines Thursday morning, a tipster tells us. He goes on to say, "I hope that piece of shit John Rogers goes to jail." Wishful thinking: Past run-ins with the legal system don't seem to have taught him anything.

The longevity of troubled tech publisher Red Herring was a mystery until one ex-employee enlightened me: Publisher Alex Vieux simply doesn't pay his bills. What a brilliant way to achieve positive cash flow! Alas, Vieux has encountered a creditor who won't be stiffed: the IRS. The agency is looking into Vieux's Herring for what may be $2 million in unpaid payroll taxes, ex-employees who have been contacted by investigators have told me. Vieux is experienced at dodging the taxman: Farley Duvall, a longtime lieutenant, told colleagues he'd fled French police seeking to seize company documents in Paris, and drove in the middle of the night to Switzerland, where he rebuilt the Herring's European operations. Now Swiss authorities are asking questions about — you guessed it — unpaid taxes. But it's the American taxman who may put Vieux behind bars.