CITATION(olivier101)
Ce serait bien que vous trouviez quelques links pour que tout le monde se fasse une idée là-dessus en toute objectivité...
En dehors du link donné par Magic, celui ci est pas mal :
http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_Story.a...=3038&MODE=FLAT
( ce sont surtout les commentaires qu'il faut lire )
Sinon, je pense qu'on doit pouvoir trouver plein de "trucs" avec les moteurs de recherche...
Lesmessages les plus intéressants, néanmoins, seront introuvables car postés sur des mailing lists privées et non archivées : j'ai regardé si j'en avais gardé certains, mais je suis désolé, ce n'est pas le cas ( dès que j'ai appris comment se comportait Handango, j'ai retiré les softs que j'avais chez eux et me suis désintéressé de tout ce qui a pu etre dit ensuite sur eux... )
Par contre, j'ai gardé certains messages postés par Kenny West ( boss de PalmGear ), dont voici des extraits ( c'est assez long, désolé ) :
Subject: PalmGear.com info, Important!
Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 10:55:08 -0700
(...)
As you may be aware, PalmGear.com has recently encountered some minor
difficulties with regard to its finances. For those of you who have been
with us from the beginning you know PalmGear.com takes pride in promptly
paying its vendors and software developers who make PalmGear great.
Recently that became more difficult as PalmGear experienced a dramatic
increase in its legal costs as it was forced to defend a lawsuit brought by
Q Ventures, one of Handango's venture capital backers, against PalmGear.
Many of you know that we are self funded and not venture funded and we have
never incurred any long-term debt.
We are pleased and proud to announce that PalmGear.com recently won the
lawsuit brought by Q Ventures. On June 1, 2001 a Tarrant County (Ft.
Worth), Texas jury unanimously found in favor of PalmGear, completely
vindicating PalmGear and Kenny West. I would like to direct your attention
to an article posted on our home page titled "PalmGear wins two-year
struggle with Q Ventures."
The URL is:
http://www.palmgear.com/news/shownews.cfm?resID=13232
After reading this article, we hope you will better understand our current situation.
Due to the suit we have been unable to secure any funding as it was a
serious detriment to our efforts to do so, and in fact made it impossible.
(...)
Subject: RE: PalmGear payments
Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 14:56:58 -0700
(...)
As many if not most of you know we just emerged victorious from a long and
drawn out (approx. 2 1/2 years!) legal battle with Q Funding/Q ventures. Q
is a VC firm here in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area we were in discussions with
that then ended up filing a suit against us. We won on ALL counts in every
way that was possible. Quite frankly the legal fees for this were incredible
(over $1 Million) and due to the litigation we had been unable during the
last 2 1/2 years to get any outside funding. We are now finally able to do
so and are as quickly as is possible. In fact we have engaged a firm to do
this. Some of their duties are, without the titles, advising in areas that
would be considered COO and CFO type issues. During the last month or so
while we gathered the necessary business, management and financial data on
us for them some of the core areas we had managed have been slowed down. I
can only offer our apologies that this did indeed affect the processing of
payments to some of the developers for software sales at our site.
(...)
Subject: Note from Kenny West, President; PalmGear.com
Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 16:45:07 -0500
(...)
I want to take a moment to personally thank you for your continued support
of PalmGear.com and myself. It is through relationships such as ours that we
can continue building the Palm OS community of developers and users. This
letter is an attempt to bring you, as one of our key partners in the
business, up to speed on the company and where we are going.
As you are probably aware, we recently emerged victorious from a 2 1/2 year
legal battle with one of the main financial backers of Handango, Q Funding.
Although we won the suit, it redirected the energies of many of us here for
quite some time and drained considerable financial resources from the
company. The lawsuit also had what we feel was the plaintiff's desired
effect of our getting outside investment in PalmGear.com quite impossible as
I am sure you can imagine. In spite of this we have continued unabated and
fully expect to continue!
The good news is that with the lawsuit finally behind us, we are now able to
seek outside funding so that we may continue to grow the business and much,
much more. To that end, we have identified several priorities of the
company:
1. Since January of this year, we have spent well over $1 million in
system and software upgrades. These upgrades, some of which are already on
line, will improve the users' experience with the site and reduce
inconveniences and outages.
2. We are actively pursuing strategies that are intended to increase
traffic and, more importantly, drive revenue to products such as yours. You
will see some of these changes in the next several months.
3. We have retained a new Controller and an outside consulting firm to
help us with corporate organizational issues. Between these new additions,
we expect many of the typical COO and CFO functions for a company such as
ours to become more organized and institutional. By way of example, they
have developed a cash management system that will make us better able to
process invoices and respond more quickly with checks to our developers.
We are making great progress on bringing our payables current. It still is
a job that will take us several months to get through it. So, please
continue to bear with us. You are of course our first priority!
4. We are cutting excess costs, in order to free up cash flow to pursue
the various initiatives we are pursuing. In order to personally demonstrate
my commitment to the company's financial success, I have voluntarily reduced
my salary.
5. As one of the first tasks of our Controller and consultants, we are
"clearing" most of the "over 90 day" column of the company's payables this
week. Further, we will retire around half of the "over 60 day" payables in
the next two weeks. Frankly, many of you have been patient and have had to
put up with our short term financial problems long enough. We appreciate
your working with us, and I pledge to you to do everything in my power to
make your dealings with PalmGear.com work as smoothly as you should expect.
There are a number of other exciting opportunities before us that I hope to
detail to you in my next message. Suffice it to say that we are refocused
on our business and our relationships. We expect great things in the future!
(...)
Voilà, j'espère qu'avec ça vous en savez maintenant plus sur PalmGear & Handango !