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Digital Railroad to shut up shop

I’m sorry to hear the news that Digital Railroad looks set to close.

I first heard about Digital Railroad in New York in 2005 and was fortunate to meet with founder Evan Nisselson briefly before he gave a promotional talk at the Apple Store there. He struck me as a guy who would lead the company onto great things and I admired their philosophy.

However, it seems curious to me how they could have spent tens of millions of dollars in investment capital so quickly and not managed to make the company profitable. But that’s all way above my pay grade.

The only consolation for Digital Railroad users is that Photoshelter, their main competitor, is offering a discounted membership for those left out in the cold if and when Digital Railroad closes.

Posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 10:48 pm. Filed under: Technology Tags: , RSS 2.0 feed.

2 Responses to “Digital Railroad to shut up shop”

  1. Jack Kurtz says:
    October 29, 2008 at 10:51 am

    Gavin (and others),

    Like Gavin, I have my archive at PhotoShelter (http://pa.photoshelter.com/user/kurtzjack) and for what it’s worth I’ve been very happy with the service. At this point I am mostly using it as an archive for my most important bodies of work, but I hope in the very near future to start directing editors and clients to my PhotoShelter archive to look at photos. If you were with DRR, you should take a look at PhotoShelter.

    thanks,
    jack

  2. Gavin Gough says:
    October 30, 2008 at 2:08 am

    I see that Digital Railroad gave contributors only 24 hours to retrieve their images before shutting the servers down.

    That’s shockingly bad, as discussed by Vincent Laforet (http://blog.vincentlaforet.com/2008/10/28/digital-railwreck/)