As any industry analyst will tell you, since its two journalists were returned from North Korea, Current.tv has been woefully overstaffed. The company simply doesn’t require that many employees to edit YouTube clips for its audience of jobless hipster doucheballs who have fallen asleep in front of the television.
And so it wasn’t entirely surprising this week when TechCrunch reported on a ‘bloodbath‘ at the company, with 80 people being laid-off across all departments.
Current’s COO Joanna Drake Earl (who is herself three separate people) insisted to Leena that the layoffs aren’t a ‘cost-cutting measure’ but rather a ’shift in programming strategy’. In most other companies, this would be classic corporate bullshit, but in Current’s case Joanna, Drake and Earl might actually have a point. After all, by creating 80 new unemployed people – unemployed people who actually know what Current is – they’ve just doubled the target audience for their programming. How’s that for a convenient truth?
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[UK] Adfonic, a London-based global operator of what it refers to as a self-service mobile advertising marketplace, has raised $600,000 (£360k) in its first round of financing. The funding comes from cleantech entrepreneur Gordon Shields, founder of Shields Environmental.
In a statement, Adfonic says Shields will not only provide capital but also ‘leadership and mentoring’. It’s unclear if butter cookies were also part of the deal.
As Microsoft shed its beta tag for the launch of the UK version of Bing today, TechCrunch Europe has learnt that it held a secret meeting with a group of big European publishers, mainly newspapers.
The meeting came literally days after Rupoert Murdoch said he was considering withdrawing his vast newspaper empire from Google’s index, despite the possibility of losing a lot of traffic.
What was discussed provides a glimpse of what newspaper publishers may do next, and how Bing will collude in this new war on Google.
[Ireland] This is big news for people who experienced the dotcom crash, survived and brought home a t-shirt: Boo.com, once an online fashion retail outlet that went spectacularly bust in early 2000 after burning through approximately $135 million in VC money in about a year and a half, just got acquired (once again).
Actually, it’s Boo.com’s latest parent company Web Reservations International that was purchased by affiliates of private equity investment firm Hellman and Friedman for an undisclosed amount. But it’s Boo.com, people!
Dave McClure has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for almost twenty years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, blogger, and internet marketing nerd. He currently runs a seed-stage investment program for Founders Fund. He is an advisor or investor for several companies including Mint, RichRelevance, Simply Hired, SlideShare and Twilio, among others. He’s also founder of Startup2Startup and GeeksOnAPlane, a tech tour that connects global tech entrepreneurs. I spoke to him at the recent global geek meetup, Rethink Hawaii about his impressions of the European startup scene following his recent travels here.
Microsoft is shedding the beta tag for its custom Bing search engine that caters to users in the United Kingdom with a localized offering.
At the same time, the company is releasing Bing Maps UK and thus no longer redirecting users to Multimap.com.
[Germany] Hamburg based business social network Xing, similar to LinkedIn in Europe, continued to grow revenue and EBIDTA in the first nine months of 2009 while profits were smaller than last year.
Total revenues from January to September amounted to €33.2 million – or $49 million – up 32 percent from the same period last year (€25.1 million). But the cumulative group profits were lower than those for the same period last year (€2.5 million for 2009 vs. €4.7 million for 2008), due to “investment costs and the assignment of €1 million in one-off tax reserves for Q3″.
IMImobile has closed a $13 million round of financing. The financing round was led by Sequoia Capital India and includes participation from existing investor FirstMark Capital.
The significance for European venture is that IMImobile is the largest portfolio investment of SPARK Ventures, the UK-based early stage VC. SPARK did not participate in this round of financing but already holds a 28% stake in IMImobile, with a book value of £13 million. Sequoia already has interests in india including SKS Microfinance and Naukri.com.
Whether you’re a fan of Twitter’s new list feature or not, it has proven to be a great way to discover people of interest one can mass-follow. But keeping track of Twitter lists can prove cumbersome and overwhelming.
Recently, Listiti launched, combining the concept of Google Alerts with Twitter Lists by sending out e-mail notifications based on the appearance of keywords in tweets from lists you keep track of. This is particularly useful for marketers who’d like to keep track of conversations about a company, product or brand, but only from a specific subset of Twitter users.
Listiti just pushed a new version of the service live, and has added a useful new feature that makes it even more worth checking out: badges.
[Germany] It seems that social gaming is where the action is right now, and we’re not just hearing that from the kids. Following Electronic Arts’ $300 million acquisition of Playfish, and the just-reported $43 million further investment that Playdom has raised, we’ve caught wind that Berlin-based wooga has secured €5 million ($7.5m) of additional funding. The round is being led by Balderton Capital, although earlier investor Holtzbrinck Ventures has also participated.
