Microsoft’s quarterly target – the numbers it’s planning to report for revenue and profit – could end up lower than their original expectations thereby forcing the gentle giant to shed “thousands of jobs,” according to Reuters.
Wall Street is looking for quarterly revenue of $17.1 billion, according to Reuters Estimates, also short of Microsoft’s own target of $17.3 billion to $17.8 billion.
This correction could cost Microsoft 6,000 to 8,000 jobs, about 6 percent of its 95,000 strong workforce. There could be more cuts later this year or there could be no lay-offs and they would lose the number by attrition and a hiring freeze. Either way, Microsoft’s salad days are over. → Read More
About four months since launch, web video editor Cuts.com has been acquired by Rifftrax, a site featuring DVD commentary by Michael J. Nelson of MST3K. No word on the price. The online video editing space has become increasingly competitive. Click.tv recently joined the deadpool, with plans to reorganize. On their blog post about the acquisition, CEO Evan Kraus says that since launch Rifftrax “has all but taken over our site”. The acquisition may play into the long term plans for full length movie remixing Kraus has alluded to before. Cuts differs from other movie editing projects that angered Hollywood by not changing the underlying movie, instead Cuts stores meta data that directs how to play through the movie and overlay effects. Post acquisition, Rifftrax will run Cuts.com, with plans to add features and the ability to remix Nelson’s commentary. → Read More
Ever since the social video market boomed through 2006, some video services have sought to differentiate themselves by adding online editors. Jumpcut and Motionbox launched their editors last April and Jumpcut was acquired by Yahoo! 5 months later. Eyespot launched its editor a month before Jumpcut, last March. Last December Gotuit launched their SceneMaker video mashup app. Photobucket recently coming launched its own video/audio/photo editor for premium members (full release next month). Today, Cuts is launching its editor into public beta. If you’re already working with video on the web, an online editor is fast, easy and free. In theory, these services could bring video editing to people who would otherwise never engage in it. People already engaging in video editing can benefit from automatic software updates and the sharing made possible by online communities. Here’s a look at each of the services, followed by a more in depth chart comparing features. Cuts “Simple and easy, when you need edits now” Cuts is the new kid on the block and is all about remixing viral video. They don’t host content, but instead take videos from other sites (YouTube, Google, Myspace). With Cuts you can trim, loop, add preloaded sound effects, and insert captions to enhance the original. Editing is straightforward, consisting of changes to the sound, caption, and navigation levels for the video. Every edit can be re-cut, embedded, and emailed. In the future, Cuts will be expanding into simple editing for digital movies and TV shows. See also our early look at Cuts a few weeks ago. Gotuit “For slicing and dicing scenes” Gotuit Scenemaker is for slicing out scenes from videos on other networks. After importing a video into the program via URL, you can select a start and end for one or more scenes on the video, title, tag, and email the scenes to friends. Unfortunately I couldn’t use it to slice up Gotuit content. Eyespot “Mashups with effects, transitions, and titles” Eyespot is a solid editor that lets you mix together your own Motionbox content or scenes from their promotional media packs. It has a simple drag and drop interface that lets you manage a wide variety of effects and transitions for both the audio and video layers. Eyespot lets you add your own audio and mix in photos as well. While you can’t grab video from other networks, Eyespot’s white label editor is becoming available → Read More
We first heard of video startup Cuts.com a year ago, although details were scarce. After spending over a year in development, the company is just about ready to launch to a small group of beta users, and expand from there. They let us take a quick look at the current product last week – look for an expansion of their private beta in two weeks or so. Like Jumpcut (acquired by Yahoo) and Motionbox, Cuts aims to help users edit video online using the latest Flash tools. Cuts lets you pull in and cut apart videos from sites like YouTube and Myspace, with wider support upon launch. To edit a video, you just need the URL of your favorite video or click a bookmarklet to cut the video on your current page. Cuts imports the video and takes you to their editing suite. As of the private beta, Cuts will let you add captions, add a group of sound effects, loop sections of video, and trim out parts of the video. Each of these functions runs on a separate track you use to sync the effect to a time frame in the video. Not only will you be able to cut up a video once, but each video made with Cuts will also be able to be cut up again, and again. It’s sort of like the video version of music remixing sites JamGlue and SpliceMusic. Cuts will add a few more bells and whistles after their public launch. Check out some screen shots of the service below, or sign up for the beta on their site. We’ll be waiting for YouTube’s response to Cuts, as users begin to take YouTube videos and start to remix them. YouTube hasn’t been shy about protecting its turf in the past, and they are not going to like what they see at Cuts. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
