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Compressed video isn't enough to live on

It's a nice idea that tomorrow's high-bandwidth ubiquitous clients might be able to be emulated on today's slow GSM and CDMA phones; but the idea hasn't worked for Israeli company JiGami, which has had to close down.

According to Simon Buckingham at wirelessclueless JiGam's 3Gate product compressed content and dynamically allocated bandwidth, so that carriers could send rich content over limited-bandwidth wireless networks. And another similar product, Jigami MB, offered similar benefits to enterprises.

The site originally described "JiGami's state-of-the-art technology" saying that "it enables digital cellular operators to provide TODAY 3G applications over the existing 2G infrastructure and mobile devices such as PDA's, mobile phones, notebooks, etc."

Buckingham's analysis is: Jigami was unabile to raise additional capital, hence the company closed. "It is likely that the company was too early with such solutions which are starting to find operator interest in the multimedia messaging world."

It may be more likely that investors noticed huge competitors such as Kodak starting up in this area and were unable to see any way of defending JiGam's technology against the threat of embedded systems from established corporate giants.