MediaMax/TheLinkup Closes Its Doors

After a tumultuous history including lost data, upset users, and seemly endless name changes, TheLinkup (aka MediaMax) has shut its doors. Users of the storage site will be unable to access their files after August 8th.

The company has a long (and extremely confusing) history. In our last post on the site, Charlie Jackson, one of the company’s investors, left a comment explaining the following (we’ve added links to relevant events):

The original entity was Streamload. The product name was changed to MediaMax and it was still the same service. Steve Iverson, the founder, was still CEO. Patrick Harr was brought in to be CEO and to help raise money, Iverson was moved to being CTO.

When a C round investor was found, Mission Ventures, this venture firm wanted nothing to do with the consumer service of MediaMax, only wanted to be in the back-end business. The C investor allowed a spin-out to be done, and the new company was allowed to take the name MediaMax and the consumer customers, but no software, no servers, no data. The front-end software was licensed to the spin-out, but for a limited time. Steve Iverson took over this company, while the existing company, with all the servers and data, was re-named Nirvanix. Virtually all the employees stayed with Nirvanix. Nirvanix is trying to compete with Amazon’s S-3 service.

Around the time this spin-out was happening, Nirvanix engineers screwed up royally and accidentally deleted half the files. Most were recovered over time, but it took months, and there was never 100% recovery (I never got some of files back).

MediaMax wrote new front-end software and recently changed its name to TheLinkup. Nirvanix wrote new back-end software, but had trouble migrating all the MediaMax files from its old software to its new software.

MediaMax/TheLinkup coudn’t make all its customers’ files available, ran out of money, and not having a viable business anymore, had to shut down (the C investors never put any money into the spin-out).

The company’s latest venture, TheLinkup, was supposed to be a social network centered around storage, but it barely managed to get off the ground. This could be considered a blessing in disguise, as a storage-centric social network would have probably had a difficult time building a substantial userbase, and may have simply resulted in more lost time and money.

We’ve added the TheLinkup to the Deadpool.