Visitalk.com

» see visitalk.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

If you lived somewhere that international phone calls were expensive, free calls from a computer was the most interesting promise on the internet in 1999. I was fifteen, on a 56k modem in Turkey, and I knew the category long before I could have named a company in it. The ones that reached me were the ones you could download. NetMeeting came with Windows and CU-SeeMe got passed around, and the whole thing worked badly enough to stay a hobby instead of a utility. Visitalk was never one of the names that got here. It was an American answer to the same problem, and the problem it picked was not the audio.

Visitalk.com was founded in September 1998 in Phoenix, Arizona, and its idea was addressing. Internet calls in 1998 worked if both people were online at the same time and one of them knew the other's IP address, which is to say they did not work. Visitalk handed every member a permanent twelve-digit number and ran what it described as the first clearinghouse for assigning those numbers and routing calls between them. A phone book with a dial tone attached, sitting on top of the open internet. The tagline was "communication with vision", the company gave away a twenty-dollar headset to anyone who joined, and the help section had pages for CU-SeeMe users, NetMeeting users, AOL users and Cox @Home subscribers, which is a decent portrait of what connecting to the internet looked like that year.

By autumn 1999 about 50,000 people had taken a number. The service did PC-to-PC calls worldwide for free and PC-to-phone inside the United States, and around that it stacked voicemail and voice chat rooms, with instant voice messaging and later videomail on top. For a company whose whole product was a telephone network with no telephone company behind it, that is not a bad first year.

The money ran out in the second. Job cuts started in September 2000, the headcount fell to between twelve and fifteen people, and a $3 million round failed to close. On 29 November 2000, Visitalk.com, Inc. filed for Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Arizona, case 00-13035-PHX-RTB, estimating assets and debts somewhere between one and ten million dollars against about fifty creditors. CEO Michael O'Donnell said the company was evaluating all its options to maximize the returns for creditors and investors, which could mean a reorganization with additional funding, or a sale.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the trust went looking for ~

Neither of those happened. The plan that came out of the bankruptcy did something else: it assigned Visitalk's claims against its own former directors and officers to a trust set up for the creditors, the Visitalk Creditors Trust, with Biltmore Associates LLC as trustee. The trust then pursued the people who had run the company, and the Ninth Circuit's 2009 opinion in Biltmore Associates v. Twin City Fire Insurance preserves what the trust's lawyer told the insurance company he was claiming.

He said the officers and directors had looted it. The specifics in the opinion: grossly excessive expense charges for personal items and lavish trips of no value to the company, no financial controls in place to stop any of it, unnecessary software bought, corporate opportunities taken for themselves. And one more, which is the allegation that does not fit the ordinary shape of a failed startup, that the directors had paid one officer over a million dollars to cover up the inappropriate issuance of warrants to buy Visitalk stock.

Biltmore and four of the officers and directors settled for about $175 million, against a company that had told the bankruptcy court its total assets and debts were somewhere under ten million, and the whole appeal was then about whether anyone would pay it. The policy carried an insured-versus-insured exclusion: if Visitalk sued its own directors, the insurer owed nothing. The Ninth Circuit held in July 2009 that the exclusion applied. Nine years after the filing, the creditors had a settlement and nobody behind it.

~ nine years of a signup page ~

The website did not notice any of this. The front page kept serving the same 3,800-byte pitch it had been serving since mid-2000, with "Videomail messaging (New!)" still flagged as new and unlimited worldwide PC-to-PC calling still on offer, under a copyright line reading 1999-2001. The Internet Archive crawled it hundreds of times between 2002 and 2010 and the byte count barely moves. Membership pages behind it started returning server errors by 2006 while the front door stayed cheerful.

Nobody wrote a shutdown notice, because nobody was left to write one. The page simply ran until the hosting arrangement lapsed and shrank to 991 bytes around 2012. By 2017 the domain had been recycled into a British affiliate blog writing about Arsenal and bet365. Today visitalk.com answers 200 with 114 bytes of parking javascript. Skype launched in August 2003, solved addressing with usernames instead of numbers, and became the thing Visitalk was describing to people five years too early.

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