Ajax Girl

I’ve spoken to a lot of CEOs this week who are going through layoffs or who are thinking of going through going through layoffs. The list of those who’ve pulled the trigger gets longer every day, and the unparty seems to just be getting started based on the email flow that we’re seeing.

Why are companies doing this now? Based on the CEOs I’ve spoken with, it isn’t just about cutting costs in preparation for a downturn. Some CEOs see this as a once-in-a-startup opportunity to get rid of the deadwood in the company.

These companies see the Wall Street meltdown and a string of very public statements by venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Ron Conway as a way to avoid the negative press and attention around letting employees go.

Back in the 90s and before companies could shed workers without any real fear of publicity unless they were large companies making large cuts. A young startup letting a third of employees go wouldn’t get much - or any - press at all. But in the age of everyone-is-a-publisher it takes just a second after someone is walked out the door for them to post about it on Twitter or their blog, and it spreads from there.

A company that has made layoffs is branded a loser, and it becomes very hard to get positive press, recruit new talent and close new rounds of financing. Until now that is. Companies that have made layoffs in the last week are generally being given a pat on the back for being financially prudent.

When we heard that MySpace, for example, was laying off 5% of staff in July, the companies COO spent a great deal of time explaining to me that it wasn’t a sign of financial weakness. Rather, they just wanted to fire the 5% of staff that weren’t really pulling their weight or putting in the effort.

Now companies don’t have to go to the trouble of explaining themselves when they shed workers. They just get lumped in with the others who are also “thinking ahead.”

Clearly not all, or even most, of the layoffs are hidden terminations of non-performing employees. But many of them are, CEOs are telling me off record. It’s not like the names are being drawn out of a hat at random. The superstars tend to stay.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ZU9dsPrv_nE/

With the economy apparently descending into oblivion and wave after wave of depressing layoffs, the next few months (or years) are looking pretty bleak. Fortunately Noomii, a startup that launched two weeks ago, is here to help you get your life back on track. The site aims to help friends pair up and life coach each other in an effort to set and achieve their goals more effectively than they would on their own.

For the uninitiated, Life Coaches are people who specialize in helping others achieve their goals and dreams. Unfortunately these professionals can run hundreds or thousands of dollars a week, making them primarily accessible only to the wealthy (Noomii notes that they are especially popular among celebrities). But Noomii says that while these professional Life Coaches are certainly worthwhile, anyone can be a Life Coach with a little help.

To begin using the site, you first have to find a friend that you’d like to coach (and who’s willing to coach you). Once you’re paired up, you both fill out a survey that gauges which parts of your like you’re happy with, as well as the goals that you’d like to achieve (you can set sub-goals for each of these goals). Then the site presents these goals in an intutive panel with checkboxes next to each goal.

The idea is that because both partners can see the others’ goals, you’ll feel more motivated to get things done. The site also recommends meetings once a week in person or online to discuss how much progress has been made and what needs to be done. It seems like a good idea, provided you pick a good friend to pair off with, though I could see it straining a relationship if one person refused to keep up with their goals.

The site is free, and plans to monetize in the future by offering access to professional Life Coaches online (presumably for a much smaller fee than they’d charge in person). For now you’re forced to pair off in friends in real life, but the site will eventually allow people with similar goals to pair off over the web.

For another site specializing in self-improvement, check out watchMEmelt, a weight loss site that we covered here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/zmEOS5pXk5A/

This promo video for SoundCloud shows how much style you can inject into a screencast. You can tell they are speaking directly to a certain audience through their attitude, visuals and music. I particularly like how they intentionally show some purple desktop background around the browser window. Screencasts often look the same when you don’t see anything beyond the edges of the browser window. Well done guys!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1322-this-promo-video-for-a-hrefhttpsoundcloud

This promo video for SoundCloud shows how much style you can inject into a screencast. You can tell they are speaking directly to a certain audience through their attitude, visuals and music. I particularly like how they intentionally show some purple desktop background around the browser window. Screencasts often look the same when you don’t see anything beyond the edges of the browser window. Well done guys!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1322-this-promo-video-for-soundcloud-shows-how

Twitter appears to have an unassailable lead in users and their resultant Follow clouds. Though Track is dead and IM is postponed indefinitely, the service has added a political track page with a company-selected keyword cluster around the political race. The result: a rapid flow of unmoderated comments with no social graph or conversational elements. As a commercial for Twitter’s dominant market share, it underlines both the potential and the uselessness of the product for its contributors. In other words, can I get you a pillow for your spot in our trunk….

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/TMEmVQMkfeY/

It’s Elevator Pitch Friday, which means another startup has created a video that’s worth showing you. This week’s presentation comes from Marcellus, a startup that wants to dramatically reduce the cost for companies to deliver video on their websites.

Marcellus wants to make delivering video cheap, easy, and on demand, by offering video delivering through the Software-as-a-Service model. This greatly reduces both the infrastructure costs and human capital needed to deliver video on websites, while making it far more flexible and scalable for companies to use. And, because Marcellus charges companies a metered rate for delivering video, companies can use as much or as little of Marcellus’ service as needed.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/n0BzXbovZjA/

This enormous and allegedly unsolicited blog entry by an “ordinary Joe developer” (is he related to the plumber?) details some of the under-the-hood stuff that’s going on with Windows 7 development. Although Ballmer has described 7 as being “Windows Vista with clean-up in user interface [and] improvements in performance,” this guy seems to think it’s a little more than that. I nursed my hope that 7 would be a completely different experience for a while, but now it seems less and less likely by the day.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Kxgq19vIHLc/

Jaxtr, a startup that offers VoIP serivce as well as a social network, has laid off 13 of its employees and has been added to the layoff tracker. As of June 2008 the company had 35 employees (we’ve asked the company for the current count). Update: The company now has 30 full time employees.

CEO Konstantin Guericke says that the company is well positioned to weather the economic downturn, as it has not yet spent any of the $10 million Series B round it raised in June. He says that along with the company’s revenue streams and growth, the cash will be enough to sustain the for at least 18 months, and that it will continue to hire for essential positions like web developers and system administrators.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/6qnxRyZ1zXE/

For many students, the academic portion of college consists of a four (or more) year quest to find the easiest professors on campus. College may be a time to learn new things, but graduate schools don’t tend to care how much you’ve broadened your horizons - to them, GPA and test scores are all that matter.

There have been a number of popular sites that ask students to rate their professors to help highlight the best (or easiest) ones, but most of the reviews on these sites tend to be highly polarized - students tend to either love a professor or hate them. The same is true for user-submitted grades, as students are more likly to share that they’ve flunked or aced a class than if they’ve done so-so. CampusBuddy, a new Facebook application that launched last week, is looking to take some of the bias out of these ratings. The company has gathered grading records from 250 schools nationwide, allowing students to accurately get a feeling for just how generous a professor is at the end of the term.

Every record in the CampusBuddy database comes from public schools located around the country, as these are legally obligated to release their grades upon request. Pick-A-Prof, a similar rating site, helped pave the way for this kind of database, going as far as suing UC Davis for access to their records. CampusBuddy CEO Mike Moradian acknowleges that the two sites are similar, but says that Pick-A-Prof charges a $10 annual fee while CampusBuddy is free (the site plans to use advertising to generate revenue). He also says that while anyone could conceivably create their own database using this public information, it is very time consuming - some schools have taken up to 8 months to comply with a request.

The CampusBuddy Facebook application also includes some community features, which Moradian says serve as a replacement for the Facebook Network pages that have been eliminated. Users can see other students that are in their classes, leave comments about their school with prospective and current students, and upload and download files from old classes. The app also supports schools that it doesn’t have grades for, as well as high schools. In the next few months CampusBuddy will launch a website to complement its Facebook app, though Moradian says this will depend on when Facebook Connect is finally launched.

The site will see stiff competition from established rating sites including PickAProf and RateMyProfessors. The site will also have to face off with Koofers and Check My Campus on Facebook, both of which were just chosen as winners of cash grants from fbFund.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/f_QncjyuNNY/

Our writer Doug Aamoth is currently in protective custody after the High Fructose Corn Syrup Council sent an email to us informing us of “incorrect” “facts” about “deadly” and “obesity-causing” high fructose corn syrup.

Their beef?

If you drink a fair amount of soda, carbonated water, tonic, and the like, then the Home Soda Maker is a god-send. It’ll save you from running to the store constantly and you’ll be creating far less waste, if that’s important to you. Plus, the non-diet soda flavors are made without high fructose corn syrup and the diet flavors are made with Splenda instead of aspartame. So if you don’t want to quit drinking soda cold turkey, this machine provides a relatively reasonable alternative.

That’s right. He didn’t directly disparage the syrup in any way, instead suggesting its less refined cousins would be doing the hard job of making things sweet.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/8P9IoRUWvUw/