The clean up continues at HearMeOut (ASX:HMO), employer of the ‘cash me ousside’ girl and Larry King, as the board insists the voice-activated ‘social network’ still has legs.

The new board took control after the final handover from the Israeli founders was finalised in December last year.

The annual report released late yesterday shows they made $6,706 in 2018, but from interest on cash only. In 2017 it booked $11,820, also only from interest.

  • Scroll down for more tech news >>>

The company managed to book a $368,909 profit for the year, but only because it paid a range of people with $2.1m worth of share payments instead of cash. It still has almost $1m of cash.

A deal signed in late December with Indian company AvidSys Infotec Private, which has licensed the software for Asia for four years, has them on the hook for royalties of 5 per cent on profits — but the app has never managed to turn a profit.

Crucially, AvidSys gets all of the IP and ownership of the platform in Asia and India if HearMeOut goes bankrupt or is wound up, putting pressure on the board to maintain the company as an ongoing entity.

Part of the clean-up has been to pay out the former management in cash, and cancel 43m of performance options held by them.

Thought bubbles and the cash me ousside girl

HearMeOut listed in 2016 with a Twitter-like app that allowed people to record 42 seconds of audio and post it to the in-house ‘social network’.

Posts are not timestamped in the app but comments are, and a quick scan through the 33 topic channels available to post in shows many were made more than 20 weeks ago.

The idea developed into a car-friendly hands-free social app featured as one of the 10 available for Ford cars, although the app itself only allows comments on posts to be written as text and requires the user to physically click on different clips in order to hear them.

The company itself is infamous for the bizarre decision to sign 15-year-old Danielle “Cash Me Ousside” Bregoli, who rose to viral infamy off the back of a Dr Phil episode and has since gone on to become a rapper named Bhad Bhabie, to the platform, alongside 85-year-old broadcaster Larry King.

But back in July the company went off the grid, shuttering the doors and sacking a heap of staff. Prior to that, it had used $4 million worth of shareholders’ money without ever taking any customer receipts.

In November, the board said it wanted to keep trying to get the app to make money.

The stock has not traded since May last year.
 

In tech today:

The ASX wants to know why equipment manufacturer Zicom (ASX:ZGL) didn’t tell the market about a “Large Order”, revealed in late January, it’d booked in December. Zicom said although it’s “Large”, one new contract doth not a cyclical change make (they’re in a low point), and therefore it didn’t warrant telling shareholders.
 
Investor in unusual locales Frontier Digital Ventures (ASX:FDV) unleashed an annual report on the market today, showing they’ve cut about $9m off the full year loss. It’s mostly off the back of their investments in Latin American and Philippines buy-sell-advertise websites.
 
And Bigtincan (ASX:BTH) says cash receipts increased 19 per cent in the March quarter compared to the previous period to $5.4m, representing the largest cash collection quarter in its history.

Featured Companies

You might be interested in