|
|
Space and science news site Space.com is replacing its chief operating officer and cutting nine employees. Space.com promoted its CFO, John C. Ferrara, to fill the spot that COO Mitchell Cannold has vacated. Turnover is nothing new at Space.com: Two presidents and multiple vice presidents and staffers have fled in recent months. The layoffs are grounded in precedent as well, arriving three days after an undisclosed number of firings. And in September, Space.com fired 22 people, roughly 20 percent of its work force. Company officials claim that the management reshuffling and layoffs will slash expenses – a necessity in the wake of continuing losses and the recent purchases of the Space News newspaper, spacenews.com and Florida Today’s Space Online site. Space.com, which was co-founded by CNNfn president and "Moneyline" host Lou Dobbs and Rich Zahradnik , himself now a former COO and president.
NY Times Digital axes 17% of its staff
The New York Times’ internet branch has become the latest big-name casualty of the dot.com downturn, announcing over the weekend that it has laid off 69 people, or 17 percent of its staff. Employees at NYTimes.com, Boston.com and the Abuzz network are reported to be among the just-fired at New York Times Digital. The unit, which projects that the firings will save it $6 million, has yet to turn a profit despite a 150 percent jump in revenue in the first three quarters of 2000. New York Times Digital blames its financial woes on a deceleration in online ad sales. The company canned its plans for a stock offering last fall thanks to the tech stock slump that began in April. Association with old-economy companies has not guaranteed spun-off dot.coms’ survival. For example, News Corp. did away with its internet branch entirely at the end of last week.
Barron's: Third of all dot.coms
will burn their cash
Expect more than one-third of public internet companies to use up all
their cash by the end of the year, warns financial newspaper Barron’s.
The Barron’s study notes that the 335 publicly traded dot.coms it
examined spent $2 billion in 2000’s third quarter, about the same as
what they spent the quarter before. The first 15 companies on the list
were actually supposed to run out of money in the fourth quarter of 2000,
but scored emergency funding in the form of debt offerings or cash
infusions from external sources. Barron’s commissioned Pegasus Research
International to examine publicly traded dot.coms such as clothing e-tailers
Fashionmall.com and Bluefly, postage stamps and services vendor Stamps.com
and e-commerce firm Internet Commerce & Communications.
Vault career site sends
its own
staff job-hunting
Vault.com, a web site that helps people find work, has shown the door
to a third of its 100 employees. In cutting the 33 positions, Vault.com is
attempting to reduce expenses. The privately held dot.com, which produces
an "insider’s guide to the workplace," has been struggling to
compete against better-known competitors such as Monster.com and
HotJobs.com. The three-year-old
company's biggest achievement so far appears to be that it was cited by Deloitte & Touche
as one
of the 50 fastest-growing internet companies in the New York City area last year. In announcing a mass
firing last week, Vault.com joins a long list of struggling dot.coms for
which layoffs appear to be the first step down the slippery slope to
bankruptcy.
Between December 1999 and December 2000, more than 40,000 people were laid
off from internet companies.
A new search engine, and
a hot one indeed
Erotica still rules the web. At least,
that’s what it looks like, judging from the reception that
Hunt4Porn.com, a new search engine for online pornography, has gotten.
Hunt4Porn.com attracted 50,000 registered members via word of mouth--and
it doesn’t even launch officially until later this month. In the only
official promotion done so far, 2,000 fliers about the site were distributed in London’s Camden
section; about 1,000 of them got a response. Registration is free, and
users may be further attracted by the fact that the site
doesn’t take banner ads, sparing them the aggressive pop-up
windows that characterize most online porn networks. Wunderkind web mogul Benjamin
Cohen, who also founded Jewishnet and search engine/portal CyberBritain,
launched Hunt4Porn.com. Hunt4Porn marks another incarnation of
CyberBritain’s earlier adult search engine, dotadults.com. The new site
plans to make
money off premium content, video sales and database marketing.
Karaoke for the
painfully shy
Stage fright-stricken songbirds can now
belt out karaoke tunes without leaving the house. Paltalk.com, a dot.com
that provides video- and voice-enabled chat services, has experienced an
unsolicited, spontaneous boom in chat rooms specializing in karaoke.
Paltalk began offering voice conferencing in July. Shortly thereafter,
some of its members came up with the idea of plugging their home karaoke
machines into their computers. Paltalk.com has 2.2 million registered
users, and about 1,000 of the chat rooms have popped up over the last few
months. The company purports to be surprised by the trend. The chat spaces
bear names such as "Tennessee Blonde’s Country Karaoke Party,"
and span most musical genres. Paltalk users click on a hand icon to sing,
and the audience can type in their "applause" once the singer
has finished. Several other sites, including Bored.com, also offer online
karaoke.
Send to a
Friend| Printer-Friendly Version
Cover Page | Contact
Us
© 2001 Media Life
