I read on Tom Keating's blog that Worldgate, the maker of the Ojo Videophone was in trouble. Apparently Worldgate has been short or out of money for about six months and industry insiders tell me that they have high expenses and the revenue just wasn't there to support it all.

A while back, the company started to have good success calibrating their phones for the hard of hearing and deaf but it seems this market did not bring the ROI in a timely fashion due to the delays associated with government funding.

I agree with Tom that this phone is an incredible device/service and it is a shame to see these problems.

Some think that once the government money comes in, that the company will be in better shape but it seems that once news like this gets out, it becomes that much more difficult to become a viable entity again.

I have heard the reason the company hasn't done better is that they decided that their video quality has to be very good and subsequently the cost of the devices and service was very high. This of course reduced the number of people who could afford the product/service.

According to sources in the know, the potential investors who considered throwing a life-line were put off buy the fact that the company did not reduce the functionality of the device so it could interoperate with cheaper devices. Instead, customers needed to have all Worldgate devices and this reduced the viability of the company being successful.