Ajax Girl

Last Friday, when I reported that a small team of about 30 people at Yahoo had lost their jobs, I hinted that “more substantial layoffs are around the corner.” In fact, we had it on good information that the board was set to meet two days before the next earnings announcement on Jan. 29 to decide whether or not to lay off 10 to 20 percent of the workforce (i.e., at least 1,400 people).

But before we could write that bigger story, Henry Blodget scooped us. (Damn you, Blodget!). And now it is all over the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and San Francisco Chronicle. I guess the lesson here is never hold a story more than a few hours.

But as I read the newspaper accounts, I definitely get the sense that there is some damage control going on, with all the newspapers uniformly reporting that the layoffs will number in the “hundreds” instead of the 1,000-plus we understood to be on the table. The truth is, nobody really knows. Unless that Jan. 27 board meeting has been moved up, the final decision has not been made yet. It could be 500 or 1,500 or more. That 1,500 figure, btw, comes to about 10 percent.

Nobody likes layoffs. But if you are going to bother, you might as well make it financially meaningful in Wall Street’s eyes. Doing some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations, let’s assume for arguments sake that each terminated employee costs an average of $100,000 in salary and benefits. Then cutting 500 people would only save Yahoo $50 million, whereas cutting 1,500 would bring $150 million to its bottom line. To put that into perspective, Yahoo’s entire net income in the third quarter was $150 million.

That’s the sort of equation Jerry Yang has to work with. He no doubt would like to save as many jobs as possible. But if he wants to please Wall Street and get his stock up (and ultimately boost employee morale), he can’t be seen to be taking half measures. The risk of cutting too little is to sacrifice those “few hundred” jobs in vain, with both the stock and morale continuing to plummet afterwards. The risk of cutting too much is to go beyond the bloat and hamper future growth. It is not an easy choice for Yang & Co.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/220780594/

Database software provider Greenplum has taken $27 million Series C is a round led by Meritech Capital Partners that included Sun Microsystems and SAP Ventures.

Greenplum leverages open source database software and incorporates a “shared-nothing architecture that employs parallel processing on commodity hardware.”

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz said that the investment, in conjunction with their recent acquisition of MySQL, provided further evidence of Sun’s commitment to the open source database community and marketplace.

The company has previously taken two rounds of $15 million each in March 2006 and February 2007. The new funding will be used to continue development of Greenplum’s database software, as well as to expand the company’s sales and marketing efforts.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/220781209/

We’ve been looking at different ways of using video in relation to startup reviews. I’ve always told people pitching us that they should absolutely have an embeddable demo video because a demonstration speaks louder than any words…and they cant be edited and spun by us either. Another way of using video is for a direct to camera elevator pitch. Here’s a few new startups pitching to camera as part of a small scale test. If you like the idea of direct to video elevator pitches, or hate it, let us know in the comments. I’d note that direct to camera like this is very raw, and hence they’re not that polished, so try not to be too hard on those featured.

Blogonize

This is one very good looking hosted blogging solution that competes with Wordpress.com and TypePad. The founder is 16 as well:

(more…)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/220755734/

This guest post was written by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

Most of us know the Digg story. All it took was a scrappy-looking kid with an idea, and lo and behold, online news discovery and aggregation were changed forever. Digg wasn’t the first social bookmarking (now social news) site, nor was it the first to popularize the concept. It was, however, the first site with a story that touched people, and helped the site outgrow all its competition and become an industry (and even mainstream media) darling.

So why does the Digg story sell so well? Here’s a look at 9 elements that make a good story - one that people embrace and propagate through their networks - and how Digg has taken those principles to heart:

1. A great story rings true.

Digg tells you a story about a world where the media is controlled by a select few. Whether it be mainstream media, or fringe media online, the story outlines a hierarchical system where a few people decide what is important and subsequently feed that to the audience. True here doesn’t mean that it has to be factually true (though the story of Digg is). David and Goliath is a great story but some would say it isn’t necessarily true. True here means that it is authentic and it is consistent. That the story is believed by those who create it and by those who propagate it.

2. A great story makes a promise.

After outlining the limitations of the existing model of news aggregation, Digg makes you a promise. The promise is that the site will put power in your hands. You get to decide what content is submitted to the site, and you collectively decide which submissions are important enough to be promoted to the site’s front page. With everyone getting an equal say, the content that is promoted is the one that appeals to a majority of the people on the site (or at least the most active users on the site). The site promises to reject any hierarchical system or spoon-feed any content to the community.

The promise is a bold one. It goes against conventional wisdom and as the underdog, the site promises to fight all odds.

(more…)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/220727383/

Pownce, a service that lets users send messages, files, links, and events to friends, first launched into private beta over six months ago. It was founded by Leah Culver, Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka (Rose and Burka of Digg fame).

Tonight at midnight PST Pownce leaves private beta and anyone can join. There are 150,000 or so users in the service now - users have been waitlisted so that the sole developer, Culver, could maintain site performance. The site is still run with Culver as the only full time employee.

A number of new features are also being added to the service. A new version of their desktop client has is part of the release (version 3), built on the Adobe Air platform. The new version also allows users to directly respond to messages from friends. Previously users had to go to the websites to respond, making conversations more difficult. Burka says this feature allows users to “respond freakishly fast.”

Users can now bypass the tedious process of adding new friends to yet-another-social-network. The new version allows users to import friend lists from any/all of Digg, Flickr, Twitter or Facebook. More services will be added regularly, Culver says.

A big part of Pownce is event invitations, although previously users could only view events via a mini-list embedded in the right sidebar of the site. Events are now also broken out into their own page, with public views as well as lists of a user’s events that they are holding or attending. They can then be downloaded into Google Calendar of iCal format. See last screen shot below.

The most interesting new feature is a group of lists that highlight interesting users. This isn’t just a list of top users by number of friends or number of posts, but a more editorialized list of people who might be interesting to follow. These are called “Featured Powncers” - you can see how they are highlighted in the top screen shot.

Pownce isn’t a Twitter clone, as Culver says repeatedly. To me it’s more of a Twitter “plus” (see our now-dated comparison from last July), since it incorporates file sharing and event invitations as well as simple messages. Pownce also skipped the mobile integration that Twitter is focused on. So they clearly aren’t a clone - but the real question is whether users will be likely to choose just one, or use both. My guess is the vast majority of users will only want to be on one of the platforms.

Pownce is still a distant second to Twitter in terms of traffic, but given that they were in private beta the comparison wasn’t entirely fair (the number of users was highly regulated). The real question is whether users flock to the service starting tomorrow, when the gates are open to all. And remember that Pownce, with a tiny burn rate, doesn’t need to hit Facebook-like numbers, or even a fraction of that, to be a success. They can grow at their own pace. Who knows, they may be here long after many of today’s “hot” startups are a distant memory.

Pownce

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/220663198/

The organizers of the DLD conference in Munich put on a great show today. One of the more lively sessions was called “Humans Disrupting Algorithms” and featured Wikipedia/Wikia Search’s Jimmy Wales and Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis, moderated by Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick.

Jimmy and Jason each gave a brief overview of their human powered search engines. Jason railed on Google and other big engines, saying algorithms have failed to control spam and SEO gaming, and that humans must be involved to get good results. Jimmy was more circumspect, and spent most of his time arguing that large numbers of people will be willing to spend time helping Wikia Search develop good results.

Perhaps the most interesting moment, however, was when Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer commented on human v. algorithmic search results from the audience.

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, who didn’t attend, has a good basic transcript of the session (proving to me once again that it is often easier to cover a conference remotely instead of batting crowds and dealing with terrible Internet coverage). I was able to take some video of a couple of interesting segments, though, embedded below.

In the first segment Wales gives the audience his overview of Wikia Search, and Calacanis jumps in with a few observations as well. The second is Marissa’s comment on what she sees as a false dichotomy - Google Page Rank, she notes, is based on real humans linking to sites on the web. Listening to her felt like a cold shower after a night of heavy partying.

As an aside, the DLD conference is clearly one of the better events I’ve attended in the last few months.

Wikia

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Mahalo

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/220631443/

Event and venue-centric social network IPartee, which we have compared to a crowd of other online event services, has released a widget that allows users to share event details through their blogs, social networking profiles, and websites.

We have embedded a widget below for the Crunchies ceremony that took place on Friday. Were we to have used iPartee for our invitations, you could have used it to see the event’s guests. Even though we didn’t use it for this purpose, you can still comment and review the event using the widget; you can also view photos taken at the event.

The widget adds to the ways IPartee extends its presence across the web. You can also syndicate IPartee event information to Facebook, Wordpress, Typepad, and Blogger.

iparteeWidget = {
eid: 3781,
s: “MjAwOC0wMS0wOCAxNjoxNzozOQ”
};

IPartee

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/220683274/

Web metrics service Quantcast has closed $20 million Series B in a round that included Founders Fund and Polaris Venture Partners.

Quantcast offers a “new media measurement service” that competes with companies such as comScore, HitWise and Alexa. Quantcast combines directly measured audience data with panel-based estimates to deliver third-party metrics on websites for advertisers or others seeking traffic data. Participants in Quantcast’s direct measurement program include Fox, CBS, Belo Corporation, AccuWeather, Slide, and IDG.

As part of the deal Ken Howery of Founders Fund and Mike Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners will join Quantcast’s Board of Directors. The new funding will be used “to support burgeoning demand for its direct-measurement audience service and related solutions.”

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/220674672/

Ad supported music download service We7 has taken $6 million Series A is a round led by musician Peter Gabriel and Spark Ventures, with Eden Ventures also participating.

Oxford, UK based We7 offers free music and video for download that is ad supported. The company notes that their model is “artist friendly at all times,” by making sure that rights owners get paid and artists maintain control over their Intellectual Property

The services currently have just shy of 100,000 users who have downloaded over 1 million tracks.

we7

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/220662507/

In a move that will no doubt put pressure on competing blog platforms TypePad (from Six Apart) and Blogger (from Google), WordPress (from Automattic) is boosting free storage for all the blogs it hosts from 50 MB to 3 GB. Founder Matt Mullenweg notes that is three times as much free space as Blogger currently offers, and that you’d have to pay $300 a year to get as much storage on TypePad. The increase is made possible because WordPress uses Amazon’s S3 storage service, and it is passing on increased efficiencies on to its customers.

This is a big deal. Free storage is the new arms race in online services. Blogger and TypePad will have to respond to remain competitive. It also goes to show how Web-scale infrastructure can benefit consumers directly.

(WordPress/Automattic won both the “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Best CEO” categories at the Crunchies on Friday).

Automattic

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/220621539/