There’s currently a thread on Techmeme based on this blog post from Pingdom about the downtime of most of LiveUniverse’s services for the past couple of days. We’ve been getting tips about this since last Thursday, and tried contacting founder & CEO Brad Greenspan (also the founder of MySpace) for an explanation to no avail.
Pingdom caught the fact that the light has gone out for the websites Revver (which we’ve declared dead or at least struggling for life before), LiveUniverse.com and PageFlakes, but missed other unreachable properties such as Peerflix. The only websites that seem to be holding up for the time being are LiveVideo, Yikers, Glumbert and MeeVee, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for those to stay online for much longer either.
Update: per comment below, PageFlakes is back, may I suggest you back up your data if you’re an active user?
Update 2: Revver’s back too, with a message saying that they’ll be down 5PM PST January 28 but they’ll be back up in the evening. We now know that didn’t happen. → Read More
Some companies go out with a whisper, others with a bang. In the case of online animation community MyToons, we’d call it the latter.
Not only do we know the startup has laid off its entire staff except for the founders (which equals 20 to 27 people depending on who you ask) because the lead investor refused to pony up more cash, but we’re also hearing stories from multiple sources who claim that the company’s management has all but thrown VC money out the windows, leading to the current unfortunate situation.
Among the allegations put forward by former employees who wish to remain anonymous: grave mismanagement, a complete disinterest from the company’s co-founders to turn MyToons into a revenue-generating business along with more serious accusations that the executives have been misrepresenting the company’s financial and operational status to their investors and moreover wasting VC money on personal purchases like trips to Hawaii, fancy dinners with relatives, home electronics for personal use and so on. We realize this could be simply a case of disgruntled ex-employees looking to discredit their former employers, but we currently consider the tips to be as reliable as they are detailed. → Read More
Bemba Media, a Dutch startup that introduced a nifty browser plug-in / bookmarklet that enabled users to quickly share and bookmark stuff from across the web and particularly social networking sites in a very straightforward way, is shutting down. The site will no longer accept new users as from today and completely fade out per February 8.
The Bemba Media Team made this tough decision because the amount of Bemba users is not growing fast enough to pay our expenses. We are especially sorry for those of you who have been using Bemba actively.
Fox Interactive Media is eliminating more than just free lunches. News Corp’s digital arm is trimming nearly 100 jobs across several business units, including Photobucket, MySpace, Scout Media, Rotten Tomatoes, and corporate. The total comes to a little under 5 percent of FIM’s domestic U.S. workforce, and about 3 percent of its global workforce of 2,900. We have added the amount to our Layoff Tracker.
Although MySpace employs 1,600 of those workers, a check with sources close to FIM suggests that the vast majority of job cuts (80 to 90 percent) are happening elsewhere. One of the hardest hit business units is Photobucket, where 22 people are losing their jobs. The corporate offices are also absorbing a substantial portion of the layoffs. → Read More
When technology focused video blog WebbAlert, hosted by the lovely Morgan Webb, launched in August 2007, we said it could be a winner. Almost a year and half further down the road, we have to come back on that now that Webb is shutting the vlog down.
Webb will be focusing her efforts on her TV show X-Play, which has expanded to five weekly episodes instead of three, and “make a little time for life itself”.
I really appreciate all the support you’ve shown me over the past year and a half, and I’ve had a great time making WebbAlert and sharing my love of technology. When I started WebbAlert, my TV show X-Play only taped three episodes a week so I had the time to dedicate my video blog. At the beginning of the year, X-Play expanded to five episodes, and the last year has been a lot of work trying to keep up with both projects. I finally decided that I need to make a little time for other opportunities, as well as make a little time for life itself. Thanks for understanding and I hope to bring you a number of new projects in the future!
After layoff activity in the tech industry quieted down around the holidays, it’s come back with a vengeance in January. According to our Layoff Tracker, 80,076 job eliminations have been announced or completed since the beginning of the year. The total number of tech layoffs since we began tracking in late August is now 195,856.
This past week alone, substantial layoffs were announced by Ericsson (5,000), Intel (6,000), and Microsoft (5,000). The biggest job loss by far is the 34,000 employees of Circuit City, which announced it is going out of business last week. → Read More
On a day when Microsoft announced 5,000 layoffs, the 7 or so people losing their jobs at Digg may seem like a drop in the bucket. But that represents about about 10 percent of Digg’s 75-person workforce, whereas the 5,000 at Microsoft represents 5 percent. We have added Digg to our Layoff Tracker.
This move follows layoffs last October at sister company Revision3, which was also founded by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson. Adelson writes in a blog post that his goal is to become profitable in 2009, and he is hiring a salesforce to sell ads directly, in addition to trying to make Digg’s advertising partnership with Microsoft more fruitful. The paring back at Digg comes along during a brutal advertising recession, and flattening growth at the site. → Read More
In the midst of declining earnings, Microsoft announced today that it will be laying off up to 5,000 people over the next 18 months, or about five percent of its total workforce. Of that amount, 1,400 are losing their jobs today. Microsoft also says that it will continue to hire and that the net headcount reduction over the next 18 months should amount to between 2,000 and 3,000. The layoffs, along with salary freezes, the elimination of contract workers, lower marketing spending, and other measures are expected to reduce operating expenditures by $1.5 billion this fiscal year.
The company reported revenues of $16.6 billion in the quarter, a two percent increase but $900 million lower than it had expected. The stock is down 7 percent on the news. Also, in an admission of the great economic uncertainty facing all companies, Microsoft is no longer giving guidance for future earnings. → Read More
We’ve contacted the company to confirm, but former engineer of the Israeli startup Aviran Mordo is reporting on his blog that the social search company Delver has failed to secure follow-up financing due to the drought in VC activity and will be closing shop in 30 days unless they find a buyer.
The company has raised $4 million from a single investor, Carmel Ventures, and was – according to Mordo’s blog post – unable to raise a second round between $6 and $8 million from the firm or other venture capitalists.
Update: I just got off a call with Delver’s co-founder CEO Liad Agmon, who confirmed all of the above. → Read More
Until today, we weren’t even aware of the fact that San Francisco startup Fuzz operated a social network / music discovery destination website besides its (awesome) spin-off Blip.fm, the “Twitter for music“. We only found out about that now that we’ve learned that the service, Fuzz.com, will apparently cease to exist shortly.
Here’s the notice, which can be found on their blog and was also e-mailed to its registered users:
Sadly, we are contacting you to announce that Fuzz.com is shutting down on February 13, 2009. Between now and then you may want to take the opportunity to post your forwarding information to fellow Fuzz users. It was with a heavy heart that we finally made the decision to turn off the lights, but because of increasing operating costs and flat revenues it simply no longer makes sense for us to keep Fuzz.com running. We offer our heartfelt thanks for being a part of it, and we’d like to give a special added thanks our avid, core users — true music fans who made Fuzz their home-base, and created a real sense of community.
Please note that once the site is shut down on February 13, 2009, the band and user accounts, and all other content on Fuzz.com, will no longer be accessible. For artists who have used the site to sell music, we plan to make a final payout within 60 days of the shut down.
Looks like troubled Lycos is killing more than just Lycos Mail and Tripod. The company is also shuttering Jubii, a service that was never covered by TechCrunch, although we did mention them as a competitor to Zenbe when that company took the beta tag of its social communication platform.
Jubii was a former Danish search company acquired by Lycos Europe in 2000 which was ultimately relaunched for the U.S. market with a social software product that integrated chat, text messaging, file-sharing, storage, blogging, e-mail and mobile communications (Webware reviewed the service extensively). The name Jubii was chosen because Lycos Europe was barred from selling itself in the States using its own name (more information in this March 2007 article by the New York Times). → Read More
Troubled Internet company Lycos Europe, which is owned by Telefónica, is shutting down its email service and website creation and hosting service Tripod, the company is saying via emails to users that begin with “We regret to inform you that our parent company has decided to discontinue all unprofitable activities.” Both services will be discontinued as of February 15 2009.
Below is the email sent to Lycos mail users. The company says it is working on “finding a solution to provide you the service through another provider,” but don’t hold your breath. After February 15, all data is history. Paid Content has the Tripod news. Blogstorm reported the email news. → Read More
At Google, when it rains, it pours. In the wake of announcing its first round of layoffs this afternoon, Google has released several blog posts detailing the upcoming shutdown of a number of services (compiled here by Danny Sullivan). Included among the upcoming closures are: Google Notebooks, Google Catalogs, Dodgeball, Google Video, Google Mashup Editor, and future development of Jaiku (though the service will live on). → Read More
Hearst Corporation unit UGO Entertainment has agreed to acquire 1UP.com, a property attracting a gamer audience along with its associated sites including GameVideos.com, MyCheats.com and GameTab.com. There had been rumors about a pending acquisition for a couple of weeks (more specifically, reported by Joystiq), but yesterday evening the company released the official news.
The acquisition deal is structured as an asset purchase between UGO Entertainment, which itself was acquired by Hearst Corp back in July 2007 for a reported $100 million plus, and the Ziff Davis Games Group who owned the 1UP Network. Sadly, the acquisition also meant a number of lay-offs at 1UP, with the ’1Up Yours,’ ’1Up FM’ and ’1Up Show’ podcasts being terminated. → Read More
When AppLoop launched its self-service platform for tracking and advertising on mobile applications last July, we were quite impressed. Leveraging the iPhone 3G’s native GPS capabilities, AppLoop’s geo-aware mobile ad network was able to tell when a consumer was close to a specified business address and serve up ads for that business accordingly.
Last October, the startup came out with the App Generator, a nifty tool that turned any online publication with an RSS feed into a separate iPhone application.
Now, we’re hearing rumors that the startup is in trouble, and they appear to hold some truth. For one, the company’s website has been down for the past two days. Worse, a quick glance on Twitter suggests that the service’s downtime is also causing iPhone apps using AppLoop libraries to crash. → Read More
Blogging platform JournalSpace (which I’d never heard of to date) has ceased to be, following a wipe-out of the main database for which there was no back-up in place. According to the JournalSpace blog, the database was overwritten as a result of a malicious act from a disgruntled ex-employee.
It was the guy handling the IT (and, yes, the same guy who I caught stealing from the company, and who did a slash-and-burn on some servers on his way out) who made the choice to rely on RAID as the only backup mechanism for the SQL server. He had set up automated backups for the HTTP server which contains the PHP code, but, inscrutibly, had no backup system in place for the SQL data. The ironic thing here is that one of his hobbies was telling everybody how smart he was.
More information is available here. → Read More
It’s not a good time to be a print magazine right now. Even a crowdsourced magazine with a stripped-down staff that relies on the contributions of its more talented readers. JPG Magazine and its parent company 8020 Media is shutting down after running out of money and not being able to find any new investors. The seed investment had come from Cnet founder Halsey Minor, who apparently also did not want to put in any more.
JPG was an attempt to create a photography magazine that relied on its readers for its content and included them in the editing process. Nearly 200,000 photographers have submitted photographs for consideration to JPG, many of them via Flickr. The site itself was able to attract about 300,000 unique U.S. viewers a month (Quantcast), but its business model relied on selling print ads. And that’s a business you don’t want to be in right now, especially if you are a startup with an artsy photo mag that was never very appealing to advertisers. → Read More
The digital mixtape is dying on the Web. The RIAA is killing it just like it tries to kill anything that smacks of consumer-driven innovation. Digital mixtapes are nothing more than shared playlists. Sites that make it easy to create and share music in this fashion are shutting down left and right. Muxtape bowed to legal pressure from the RIAA earlier this year, and now Mixwit is shutting down as well. The service will cease to exist before the end of the year.
In a blog post announcing the imminent closure, Mixwit does not specifically mention any legal action by the RIAA, but it is not hard to put two and two together: → Read More
Yahoo is definitely on a cutting spree: after shutting down both Y!Live and Jumpcut, as well as selling off Kelkoo, it’s now time for Yahoo Kickstart to pay a visit to the deadpool.
Kickstart was launched in April this year and aimed to connect students and alumni at specific colleges and universities and also help them connect on a professional level. → Read More
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