Sneakers-up is a play on the idiom belly-up, "of or relating to a failed or bankrupt company." Replacing "belly" with "sneakers" is a reference to the relative youth of the entreprenerds who launched many of the newly-dead dot-coms.

This phrase also affords me the opportunity to unload all the words and phrases related to the ongoing dot-com slaughter that I've gathered over the past few months:

dot bomb
dot-carnage
dot-com Darwinism
dot-coma
dot-commode
dot-compost
dotcom-uppance (or dotcomuppance)
dot-dead
dot-gone
dot-goner
Not com

Thanks to subscribers Julie Felner and Mark Worden for passing along a couple of these words.