Shaquille O'Neal, Mike Piazza and DeLisha Milton's Dunk.net
Launched in 1999, Santa Monica startup Dunk.net was supposed to promote Shaq's shoes and sports apparel with marketing help from a pre-Mets Mike Piazza and WNBA great DeLisha Milton. But within months of founding, Dunk.net laid off its entire staff and replaced the CEO with a marketer tasked with resuscitating the company. Didn't happen. Now Dunk.net is owned by a domain squatter.

John Elway, Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky's MVP.com
Back in 2000, chairman John Elway and board members Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzy piled their cash together to launch MVP.com, an online store. They pledged to spend $50 million marketing the site over the next year. A couple of years later and several rounds of layoffs later, MVP.com, owing some $120 million folded as a failure into CBSsportsline.com.

Mets reliever Billy Wagner and sports author Burton Rock's ChatWithAStar.com
After writing a bestselling book about Yankees outfielder Paul O'Neill and his father, author Burton Rocks convinced Wagner, another New York baseball star to help fund ChatWithAStar.com, a celebrity blog portal, featuring such well known voices as Miss USA 2006, Tara Conner. The site, launched with a party at one of Jay-Z's bar in 2006, no longer exists. We're still holding out for the company's "blogmobile," though.

"Redlasso is an online media center for bloggers that records video and audio at the request of the participants of Redlasso's private beta from publicly available signals, such as cable, broadcast and satellite television," rep Saskia Sidenfaden explained. In other words, Redlasso servers watch the closed captioning signals for search terms set up by invited users to notify them of "newsworthy" clips and items. The company then distributes those clips from its own servers to embedded players on third-party sites.

Unlike other sites which rely on the DMCA's takedown provisions — under which users can post copyrighted content, but the site must take it down if copyright owners complain — Redlasso is relying on a "fair use" defense, a provision of copyright law which carves out exceptions for some kinds of reporting and commentary. Fair use rules are often unclear, though, and one question that comes up is whether the use unfairly exploits an existing market for the work. Until recently, it wasn't. But then News Corp. and NBC Universal started up Hulu — which also allows for users to search for clips which they can then embed on third-party sites.

A Redlasso investor explained on background that the startup had been talking to the networks for at least two years, and promised them the ability to track and control usage of their clips as they spread across the Internet — something Google's YouTube couldn't, or didn't want to do. Presumably, the company could have sold their technology to the networks, or formed content partnership agreements.

Hulu offers the same control, but it's run by the networks and offers many of the same features as Redlasso to users, though with significantly more limited content. CBS would have been a great target for possible sale, but CBS recently started working with Hulu, too.

Hence, the company's best hope is to strike a deal before too many more lawyers get involved, especially since it's still planning to close another $15 million in venture investment on top of the $9.4 million already raised. (Photo by AP/Richard Drew)