Sorry, little outburst.

Loic Le Meur, french founder of Seesmic, some time ago, wrote a very antipatic article about Hictu (that was a competitor project in which I was involved).
Now, after 12 million dollars of investments (fired) he announced that Seesmic is putting the video micro blogging service on hold and focusing on the development of their Twitter client.

http://www.lucafiligheddu.com/2009/06/w ... ailed.html

We stop Hictu developments two years ago, with a very low investment.

Epic failure, Loic.

I think they had been rash with theire investments. I know nothing about web development, but imho, with more care of theire money, they may could did better (firing less money).

1) People don’t like using video for video conversation
2) People don’t like using video communication

Now i ask you, Muze, when you started Hictu, didn't you inquired about this points?

When Hictu was launched, I was just a developer. I received specifications, and I just realized what they told to me.
But we were the first company that "tested" the video-microblog, in times in which the videoblogging seemed to have some success. After 18 months of unsuccess, we decided to stop new developments.

This is the meaning of "investment": time and money spent at own risk.

But there's investment and investment: the pay for 2-3 developers (50-60k euros), and 12 million dollars.

And then, success or failure / epic success or epic failure.

Definitely.
Loic Le Meur paid some videobloggers for the service launch, and he though than that was true user traffic? Hictu lives (survives) just with a few users that cross-post from other services (HelloTxt) or the Hictu Widget.
So, his first victory was a "Pirro victory": he was burning dollars to do what people should do for free.

http://www.downloadblog.it/post/4923/seesmic-il-video-twitter-di-loic-le-meur
http://www.downloadblog.it/post/4318/hictu-un-po-twitter-un-po-blog-multimediale

According to this two articles, Hictu was created after Le Meur's Seesmic.
Reeding about the "adventures" of Loic, i think he tough ( ) his name could garanteed him success and popolarity on web.

According to this two articles, Hictu was created BEFORE Le Meur's Seesmic.

I can absolutly assure that my mistake was for the wrong reeding of the articles