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Since the last time we gave an update at the beginning of the month there have been 20,171 layoffs at tech and media companies added to our Layoff Tracker. That brings the total to 58,709 tech layoffs over the past two and a half months. You can mouse over the iChart above to get a sampling of some of the companies that are downsizing.

One previously unreported layoff we have been able to confirm is 10 people at classifieds search engine Oodle, which occurred last week and represents a 20% reduction. Another layoff happened at Rearden Commerce, which trimmed about 40 people, or 10 percent (and Rearden just raised $100 million, showing that no company is immune).

The biggest layoff this month was announced just today by Sun Microsystems, which will be reducing its headcount by 5,000 to 6,000 (15 to 18 percent). Other big tech companies also announced cuts earlier this week, including Applied Materials (1,800 layoffs), Nokia Siemens Networks (750), and National Semiconductor (330).

The big tech and media companies account for the biggest number of layoffs, but when you look at the percentage of total employees being laid off, startups are cutting just as deep if not deeper. For instance earlier this month, Spot Runner cut about 30 percent of its staff (115 people), Dash Navigation eliminated 65 percent (55 people), and BitTorrent got rid of 50 percent (18 people). This past week we saw a 38 percent cut at Jobster (15 people) a 15 percent cut at Metacafe (11 people), a 10 percent cut at Current TV (40 people), and the complete shutdown of CBS Interactive’s Juke (5 people).

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article. (For those more interested in who is hiring, check out our job board).

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Source: Erick Schonfeld

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Atlanta, GA-based iKobo, a company that provides a worldwide online money transfer service, is discontuining its operations, effective immediately. In an e-mail to its users, the company writes:

We regret to inform you that iKobo is discontinuing services. Effective immediately, no further money transfers to your iKobo account will be allowed. Your card issued by Palm Desert National Bank will continue to be active until November 13, 2008. Your card will no longer work after this date. However, the card funds are safe and guaranteed, even after the card is de-activated.

Please use your card at an ATM or to make purchases between now and November 13 to spend down the balance of funds on your card. Any remaining balance as of November 13, 2008 will be refunded to the sender, the US resident, as stated in the bank cardholder agreement (https://www.ikobo.com, link at bottom of page to “US Program Terms and Conditions”) .

We will assist you in any way possible. If you have any further questions regarding the above notice please contact us at info@ikobo.com.

It has been a pleasure serving you and we appreciate your business. We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause.

Sincerely,
iKobo

iKobo was founded in 2001 and used an open network of VISA merchants and ATMs numbering more than 25 million which was supposedly more convenient and safe to send and receive money than a closed network of independent agents. iKobo enabled consumers to use credit cards, debit cards, or bank accounts online to send a re-loadable Visa Prepaid Card to recipients.

iKobo is a privately held corporation backed by venture capital firms, according to their website, but we’ve been unable to pin down which investors funded the company.

Update: doh. It’s right there on their website: the money came from Total Technology Ventures, Council Ventures and Greenhill SAVP. Its most recent round was a Series C to the amount of $4 million in October 2006, and commenter Seth says the total amount of funding was $13 million.

(Hat tip to Branden)

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Source: Robin Wauters

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Since our last update a week ago, we’ve added 18,885 job eliminations at tech and media companies to our Layoff Tracker. That brings the total to 38,538 layoffs across 108 companies over the past two months.

Some of the bigger reductions this week came from Motorola (3,000), Qwest (1,200), and Electronic Arts (600).  Among startups, there were job cuts at Revision3 (10), Emusic (10), Sugar Publishing (9), Aliph/Jawbone (25), matchmine (42, deadpool), and Gizmos (10).  We’ve also started adding media companies facing disruption from the Internet, including Gannett (3,000), Time Inc. (600), and Conde Nast (32), whose Portfolio magazine laid off nearly all of its Website staff.

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article.

Here is the full list of layoffs from the past week:

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Source: Erick Schonfeld

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Users who hadn’t already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing to communicate to users what is going on or when it might be fixed.

Even Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher, who sold the company to Ask.com in 2005, is ready to jump ship. In a Twitter message yesterday he said “Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.”

The problem is that Bloglines isn’t updating feeds from thousands of blogs, including this one (about a third of the feeds I follow have errors). This has been an ongoing problem. Meanwhile, those feeds are quite readable in other feed readers like Newsgator and Google Reader. The most recent TechCrunch post our 25,000+ Bloglines readers see is from May 14.

So what do you do if you are a Bloglines reader and ready to throw in the towel? Easy. Click the “Export Subscriptions” link on the bottom left of the page on Bloglines when you are signed in, and then import it into any feed reader you choose. Problem solved.

A few more Twitter users who are fed up with Bloglines:

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Source: Michael Arrington

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One thing investors don’t really like to see is founders abandoning the startups they funded. But that is exactly what Ted Dziuba is doing with his startup PressFlip.

In a blog post Dziuba wrote that he was leaving the company “mostly because I’m going to be a father in March and need some stability, but also because I’m tired of the fight.”

Earlier this month Dziuba restarted his blog, Uncov, which generally mocks startups and entrepreneurs. The blog was shut down just a few days before Pressflip (then called Persai) originally launched.

In July I reviewed Pressflip and gave it a thumbs down, saying “Pressflip is far from launch ready, and under normal circumstances we’d add a page on Crunchbase for them and move on until it became interesting or went into the deadpool.” I also noted that it was much harder to build a startup than it was to simply criticize them, and wondered if Dziuba and his cofounders would have what it takes to keep fighting:

Pressflip/Uncov is a perfect illustration of The Man In The Arena quote from a 1910 Theodore Roosevelt speech given in Paris. It’s awfully easy to criticize the work of others but incredibly difficult to build something unique yourself. The Uncov guys are now in the arena, and failing. We’ll see if they have what it takes to take their hits and keep fighting.

I guess we now know the answer. At least for Dziuba, the answer to whether he has any fight left in him for Pressflip is a resounding no.

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Source: Michael Arrington

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Uber, a publishing platform that was cofounded by artist Glenn Kaino and his cousin, former Friendster CEO and NBC West Coast president Scott Sassa, has called it quits. A notice on the site’s homepage states that Uber is latest victim of the US’s current economic woes, and that the site will shut down entirely on September 29.

The direct cause of the shutdown has been attributed to an in-progress funding round that fell through because of investor distress over the economy. Past investors in Uber have included media networks Universal Music Group and Discovery, as well as Sterling Stamos Co-Investors Fund. The site reportedly closed a $7.6 million Series B round in May.

Uber was originally founded in 2006 as a social destination, but later shifted its strategy to become a publishing platform while still retaining some of its social roots. Users were able to craft slick webpages (primarily blogs) that included drag-and-drop rich media like YouTube videos and photographs. The platform developed a dedicated following, but never reached a large user base - traffic data leveled off and hovered at less than half a million users a month (though Sassa pegged that number at around 2 million users).

Sassa previously was CEO at Friendster, which he joined in 2004, and subsequently left less than a year later. Before Friendster, Sassa held a string of executive positions in media organizations, doing stints at Fox Broadcasting, Time Warner, Marvel Comics, and NBC (he reportedly didn’t leave these on his own accord).

Uber has been added to the Deadpool.

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Source: Jason Kincaid

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When Thoof launched in July 2007 a lot of people gave it a good chance of success despite the fact that it was entering into the dreaded personalized news space. Sure, the market was littered with failed startups, but Thoof was founded by former Revver cofounder Ian Clarke, and was well backed by Austin Ventures, Ron Conway and others.

Thoof aimed to deliver tailored news by looking at what you click on, and nothing else (vote buttons and other tools weren’t a true indicator of intent, Clarke argued). From our first post on Thoof:

Thoof determines what you like based solely on what stories you click on to read. Asking for specific feedback, like voting or rating of stories, is too much to ask of users, Clarke says, noting that only a very small percentage of people who watched videos on Revver ever actually rated them. By analyzing what you tend to click on, Thoof will return results that it thinks you are more likely to click on than others. The result, over time, is a perfectly tailored news page for an individual.

The site peaked in October, but by January the wheels were coming off the car. We heard at that time that the company would continue to limp along and see what happened. But in the last couple of days the site has been redirected to Reddit, and Clarke officially moved on to another project in April.

We’ve asked Clarke and Austin Ventures for a comment, but it’s pretty clear Thoof is in the deadpool, joining competitors like Searchfox (deadpool, assets acquired by Yahoo), Findory (deadpool), Spotback (change in strategy) and Feeds 2.0 (no idea what their status is, site is live).

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Source: Michael Arrington

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After a tumultuous history including lost data, upset users, and seemly endless name changes, TheLinkup (aka MediaMax) has shut its doors. Users of the storage site will be unable to access their files after August 8th.

The company has a long (and extremely confusing) history. In our last post on the site, Charlie Jackson, one of the company’s investors, left a comment explaining the following (we’ve added links to relevant events):

The original entity was Streamload. The product name was changed to MediaMax and it was still the same service. Steve Iverson, the founder, was still CEO. Patrick Harr was brought in to be CEO and to help raise money, Iverson was moved to being CTO.

When a C round investor was found, Mission Ventures, this venture firm wanted nothing to do with the consumer service of MediaMax, only wanted to be in the back-end business. The C investor allowed a spin-out to be done, and the new company was allowed to take the name MediaMax and the consumer customers, but no software, no servers, no data. The front-end software was licensed to the spin-out, but for a limited time. Steve Iverson took over this company, while the existing company, with all the servers and data, was re-named Nirvanix. Virtually all the employees stayed with Nirvanix. Nirvanix is trying to compete with Amazon’s S-3 service.

Around the time this spin-out was happening, Nirvanix engineers screwed up royally and accidentally deleted half the files. Most were recovered over time, but it took months, and there was never 100% recovery (I never got some of files back).

MediaMax wrote new front-end software and recently changed its name to TheLinkup. Nirvanix wrote new back-end software, but had trouble migrating all the MediaMax files from its old software to its new software.

MediaMax/TheLinkup coudn’t make all its customers’ files available, ran out of money, and not having a viable business anymore, had to shut down (the C investors never put any money into the spin-out).

The company’s latest venture, TheLinkup, was supposed to be a social network centered around storage, but it barely managed to get off the ground. This could be considered a blessing in disguise, as a storage-centric social network would have probably had a difficult time building a substantial userbase, and may have simply resulted in more lost time and money.

We’ve added the TheLinkup to the Deadpool.

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Source: Jason Kincaid

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