AOL LLC will be laying off 700 employees, cutting costs in several online services by shutting them down, and will be closing several lifestyle blogs.  A lot of the job cuts were made because there has been a slow down in advertising revenue and management hasn’t been making the best decisions with the company.  At the bottom of this post, I have pasted an e-mail that AOL CEO Randy Falco sent to the company.

Some of the Weblogs Inc. blogs being shut down in February include Gadling, ParentDish, and SlashFood.  Weblogs Inc. is a company that AOL bought for about $25 million.  Weblogs was started by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey.  Unfortunately, AOL won’t be selling any of the blogs back to Calacanis according to his Twitter account.  As a matter of fact, AOL hasn’t really responded to his emails either.

On top of the lay offs, AOL is getting rid of raises and will be consolidating some of their facilities.  AOL’s valuation has plummeted from $20 billion to $5.5 billion since 2005.  This is why Google has to write down their $1 billion investment in AOL.

Below is the e-mail from the AOL CEO:

In AT&T’s 4th quarter results, they have announced that 1.9 million iPhone 3Gs were activated.  About 40% of these activations were new customers, indicating that about 760,000 people switched to AT&T just because of the iPhone.  In the last half of 2008, AT&T activated about 4.3 million iPhones.  iPhone customers also deliver the highest revenue per user for the telecommunications company.

Students UC Berkeley will be able to earn college credits to play StarCraft, a popular strategic computer game.  StarCraft players take control as a military leader of one of three specific species’: Terran, Protoss, and Zerq.  The objective is to defeat the opposition militaries before they come after you.

NBC Local Media has decided to go extra local by launching a Neighborhood News Pages (NNP) on nine of their owned-and-operated markets.  Of the nine markets that NBC is launching this platform on, seven of them are in the top 10 most populated cities in the nation.  The local markets include WNBC New York, KNBC Los Angeles, WMAQ Chicago, WCAU Philadelphia, KNTV San Francisco, KXAS Dallas-Ft. Worth, WRC Washington D.C., KNDS San Diego, and KTIS Hartford.

Neighborhood news will aggregate news from local NBC TV affiliates and organize the news and information by neighborhood.  This includes sports, health, local news, weather, traffic, and local events.  This is bad news for local newspaper company websites.  NBC clearly has the advantage by having a bigger budget to take on traditional news media companies.  There will be a lot of advertising poaching in the local markets as well.

“Our new Locals Only sites enable our users to be true insiders and to fulfill on that promise we need to deepen our coverage in local communities,” stated Brian Buchwald, SVP of local integrated media at NBC. Buchwald added that the NNP would “create more targeted ad impressions at a fraction of the cost.”

The news pages created for the NNP is based on Outside.in technology.

[via MediaPost]

Digg cut about 10% of their workforce last week and announced that they wanted to expand upon their sales team in order to lean towards profitability.  This is why Digg has hired Tom Shin as their new head of sales.  Shin comes from Yahoo! where he was one of the top salesman in the Northwest region.  Shin’s job will be to manage the relationship with Microsoft and find leads for direct advertising.

While Shin was at Yahoo! he helped Yahoo! Mail grow from $20 million in revenue to $300 during the 7 years that he was Director of Product Marketing for the division.

I believe that with Shin on board, Digg will be able to achieve profitability based on Shin’s track record.  Given Digg has 35 million users and many are tech-savvy, this gives Shin a lot to work with in terms of pitching advertising campaigns to Fortune 500 companies.  Now hopefully we’ll stop seeing ads like these:

GMail users will soon be able to compose messages and check e-mail without having to be connected to the Internet.  Google is building a platform on Google Gears that will allow GMail users to cache messages, read your inbox, label messages, and write replies without being online.  Then when the system connects to the web, the changes will be automatically applied.

This new feature is currently in beta and available in GMail Labs.  This feature will be rolled out slowly to everyone and won’t be rolled out right away.

“Offline Gmail is still an early experimental feature, so don’t be surprised if you run into some kinks that haven’t been completely ironed out yet. We’ve been using offline Gmail internally at Google for quite a while (I’ve read thousands of messages and answered hundreds en route to visit my son and my daughter). And it’s saved me more than once when my home network connection ran into issues (we have squirrels at home that love to chew through outside cable wires),” wrote Andy Palay, a GMail engineer.

To see if you have the feature available, log in to your GMail account and click on the Settings link.  After that click on the Labs tab and click Enable next to Offline GMail.  Click Save Changes.   When clicking on Save Changes, you’ll notice a Offline^0.1 link at the upper left.  Click on that link and you’ll be given instructions to set up GMail offline.

HealthCentral.com is a medical content website that syndicates content from Harvard, A.D.A.M., HealthDay, Thomson PDR, etc.  Later today the company will be announcing that they have acquired Wellsphere.

Wellsphere is also a health-related information website that raised about $3 million in funding from Gemini and Woodrow Myers.  HealthCentral has about $50 million in funding from Sequoia, Polaris, IAC, and the Carlyle Group.  Wellsphere has aabout 300,000 health articles, 250,000 health images, and about 20,000 health videos in their archives.

Wellsphere was started by Ron Gutman and Dave Kashen.  Gutman and Kashen both received their MBAs from Stanford’s Business School.

[via TechCrunch]

As an avid gamer, I spend quite a bit of time checking out cases, hardware, monitors, gaming mice, speakers, etc.   In a gaming PC, all the components have to work in perfect harmony to offer the best performance possible.

A number of custom gaming manufacturers do not understand the importance of quality hardware.  But CryoPC is different.  Cryo Performance Computing designs and builds quality high-performance custom built PC systems.  CryoPC makes custom gaming PCs and professional workstations with high-end graphic cards and fast processors.

Cryo Performance Computing is a small business of experts and specialists in high-performance custom built PC’s. These guys know what they are doing when they build custom PCs.

CryoPC most extreme performance design products include the Cryo Extreme, the Cryo Velox, and the Cryo Octane.  The Cryo Octane features Quad core Cryo boosted processors for 8-way computer power, retailing at £2855.  The Extreme is £2600 and comes with a 4.2 GHz Intel Core i7 965 Extreme HT.  The Cryo Extreme comes with an Intel Core i7 965 4GHz Extreme processor for £1900.

Below is a picture of the Cryo Octane (in red) and the Cryo Tetrad (in black and blue).  The Cryo Tetrade starts at £1500 and comes with an Intel Core i7 Extreme processor.

To learn more, visit CryoPC’s Product page [here].

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