Tech companies - a quicker death

If you doubted that this is a real recession, unlike the stock market mini-crash of 2001-2, one thing should change your mind.

In 2001-2, despite the high levels of competition and failure to create revenue, tech companies kept staggering along as long as they could. There was continued investment in online from 'bricks and mortar' businesses. And while valuations fell, many online businesses continued to see high growth - and gradually extricated themselves from the red ink.

This time round the thousand flowers are not being given time to bloom. Scoopt has just closed. That was the site that provided amateur photographers with a chance to sell their snaps as photojournalism. Great idea - citizen journalism meets business smarts - but didn't work. Quickly and effectively closed down.

HeadlineProperty, a service that distributed PR around property journalists, has also closed. Needless to say the property market is hardly easy right now; a number of clients have not renewed accounts, and the service has become unprofitable. Centaur Publishing launched it on Feb 15, 2007, so it has been slaughtered before it gets to two years old.

I wouldn't mind betting on consolidation and closures among some of the Web 2.0 businesses, either. The winners will be polarised - either huge all-encompassing networks like Facebook, or really, really niche ones, together with those like Last FM that have a special appeal, something they do that others don't. LinkedIn might survive; eCademy might not.

In media, I don't think we're seeing increased integration between print and online media for any idealistic reasons. It's purely a matter of cost cutting. No one can afford to produce separate content for separate media any more. We'll see more of this, I am certain.

But it's going to be very difficult for online businesses to survive on their own. The knives are out.