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The main thing anyone ever knew about Edgeio, an online classifieds startup, is that it launched Michael Arrington's career at TechCrunch. Desperate to find out more information about this "Web 2.0" thing he kept hearing about, Arrington started blogging, and eventually left Edgeio, swapping a 10 percent stake in TechCrunch for a 10 percent stake in Edgeio. Arrington's stake is now worthless — which I think would actually make Teare the savvier businessman here — and Edgeio's assets have been sold at auction.

The auction for the assets closed at $280,000, just $30,000 more than the open price, with only two bidders. This despite Teare's optimistic claim that: "a buyer will get a huge bargain at almost any price up to $6m. We had term sheets within the last 2 months and interest at valuations around $10m."

The winning bidder was LookSmart, which has itself been struggling to remain relevant after its early success in Internet advertising and search ten years ago. Arrington, who claims he has tried to avoid discussing his investments on TechCrunch, provides his own positive spin, saying he's "happy to see the assets move to a company with the resources to move the ideas forward." Of course, it's unclear what these so-called ideas are. Can anyone explain, really, what Edgeio did? At that price, LookSmart may well have just been bidding on the servers, office furniture, and links to the domain name from TechCrunch.