With all the hubbub on the smartphone space, let’s take a short break and look into the recent happenings in the feature phone market. Out of nowhere, we have a local phone company called Starmobile launching a stable of new non-smartphones that have a rather interesting twist to the typical offerings.
Bad news for the relatively huge blogging community of i.PH. Straight from Joel Disini’s mouth, i.PH is closing its blogging service. He’s giving bloggers 6 months to export their blog posts to other services.
Unfortunately, he said that he will be closing down i.ph soon so it would be best for me to start copy pasting all my posts and blog files. I couldn’t believe it. He said i.ph is no longer making profit and he’s giving us bloggers around 6 months before it fully shuts down.
Well, it was bound to happen. I’ve talked to many friends working for this company, (the mother organization owns the rights to the .ph registrar) and I’ve observed that while there were so many great ideas in the boiler room (i.e. mirroring services like SquareSpace, premium services, etc) none of these ever shipped. And in this industry, shipping is really important.
And it’s really not just about i.PH itself but the presence of so many other great blogging platforms — Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, SquareSpace.. competition is fast improving services while domain registration and hosting is getting cheaper by the day.
Thus far there is no official word on the i.PH blog. This piece of information comes from an encounter with Disini. If the news is 100% true (and it looks like it is), sad to see it go. Here’s a way to go out with a bang: have the community do one huge “transfer” party where everyone exports their blogs at the same time to other services.