

Remember the dead pool? No, not Clint Eastwood's fifth and final Dirty Harry movie, but the internet graveyard that became a byword for failure during the last dotcom crash. In the lowest days of 2000 and 2001, the topic of who would be next to sink into the dead pool became a Silicon Valley obsession, with websites like FuckedCompany gloating over the collapse and closure of scores of startups.

These days, with the recession starting to eat away at the industry once again, echoes of the dead pool are bouncing back - but this time startup entrepreneurs are trying for a more dignified exit.

Earlier this week Pownce, a messaging startup that let people share messages and files, announced that it would be closing - but only after selling its assets to Six Apart, the makers of blog software including TypePad and Vox. In what was described as a "bittersweet" decision, Pownce's technology and its employees are being folded inside Six Apart's engineering team for an undisclosed sum. Users of the service, meanwhile, will see it cease to exist on December 15.

The move came despite the site's early buzz, largely gained through celebrity co-founder Kevin Rose (who also founded news aggregator Digg) and lead programmer Leah Culver's links to a string of high-profile dotcom entrepreneurs.

Such moves are known as asset acquisitions - buying up the technology and talent inside a company rather than its shares. It's often the least profitable way to get out of a company, and is rarely seen as a successful end to any startup's story.

Pownce isn't the only company taking this path. Last week Twitter bought in Rael Dornfest, founder of productivity software company Values of N - which also closed. Dornfest, something of a totem in the tech community after his stint as chief technology officer at O'Reilly Publishing, had been working on his own smart internet applications without much success.

Asset acquisitions are a dignified, if unexciting, exit for struggling companies and allow entrepreneurs to keep at least a few of their ideas alive. But they are generally the domain of big corporations, which use them to hire superstar developers hitched to underperforming businesses; Google has a record of buying small companies and then shutting them down, for example. But this new phase of asset acquisitions by smaller companies could prove a hallmark of Crash 2.0. After struggling to break into the big time - and facing a lack of further funding thanks to the harsh economic climate - moving sideways could appear to be the best option all around.

After all, at least this way entrepreneurs can say that they dipped their toe in the dead pool, but lived to fight another day.