Archive for November, 2008

Remember Lycos? It was once an unavoidable name on par with the Facebooks and the Twitters of the current world, but things change fast on the Internet. Its European arm, Lycos Europe, is shutting down after being unable to return to the path of profitability and/or find a buyer.

The company, consisting of a web portal and web hosting business, will liquidate its assets and return around 50 million euros to the shareholders. However, 500 to 700 people will lose their jobs. The US-based Lycos Inc. is a different company and is not directly affected by the demise of Lycos Europe, but it’s also a far cry from its glory days when its front page was the most visited portal on the web. (Mashable)

Regardless of however you spin it, if you are firing 20 percent of your work force and have no real business model to speak of, you are in trouble. That certainly is true of Fring, an Israeli Mobile VoIP startup, which has cut 10 of its 50 employees. CEO Avi Shechter told TechCrunch that his company is doing well. In addition to $13 million it raised in the past, Avi says the company has raised an undisclosed amount of money in its Series C financing. (GigaOm)

We tried Fring. It sucked.  Get better voice quality from citizens band radio.

Google has been quietly laying off staff and up to 10,000 jobs could be on the chopping block according to sources. Since August, hundreds of employees have been laid off and there are reports that about 500 of them were recruiters for Google. (WebGuild)

Simply put, the IT spending projections for 1st Quarter 2009 are abysmal – the worst ever for a ChangeWave survey dating back to 2001. An unprecedented 45% of respondents say their company’s IT spending will decrease (or there will be no spending at all) in the 1st Quarter – 16-pts worse than our previous survey. (ChangeWave)