Today’s Baltimore Sun has a story about the departure of Aether, Baltimore’s hottest dot com company back in the bubble. The story also outlines what happened to some of the other Baltimore area dot com bubble companies and the Digital Harbor idea.

Aether was once the darling of Baltimore’s “New Economy.” A wireless communications innovator, it employed more than 1,000 and hoped to lead a shift from the city’s old-line, buttoned-down central business district to the new, tech-savvy “Digital Harbor.” Its founder, at least on paper for a brief while, was richer than Oprah.
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Now known as Aether Holdings Inc., the company announced yet another incarnation. Aether, whose market cap once hovered near $7 billion, said it has acquired boutique investment banker UCC Capital Corp. for $10.3 million and will move its corporate headquarters to New York. Aether founder David S. Oros will become board chairman but will no longer run the day-to-day operations.

Aether founder Oros was a UMBC alumnus (Math ‘85) and gave UMBC a generous stock gift once valued at over $10M. Aether also funded a number of joint UMBC-Aether research projects on wireless and mobile computing and hired many of our students before the bubble began to collapse.

Aether had a good vision, strong technical people and a lot of money. It was sad to see them abandon technology and put what cash they had left into mortgage investing. The latest vision is

to transform companies by outsourcing manufacturing to ensure the cheapest production and then focusing on managing the intellectual property by plowing profits back into marketing and research and development.