In late April, Owen Van Natta became the new CEO of MySpace. Since that time there has been a lot of shaking up of company executives. About 30% of MySpace employees were laid off last month too.
Now there is a list going around of all the MySpace executives that have either been laid off, stepped down, or shuffled around within News Corporation.
Below is the list:
Max Engel – Top Engineer at MySpace resigned
Tom Andrus – SVP Product Management resigned Travis Katz – MySpace Internetional head resigned Jamie Kantrowitz – MySpace Music SVP of Strategy and Global Marketing resigned Dan Fawcett – President of FOX Digital Media moving to News Corp. Ulf Waschbusch – Director of Mobile Product resigned Ming Chen – Produt Manager working on products for Tom Anderson resigned CJ Chaney – worked on MySpace Developer Platform in Seattle resigned Eric Novins – Engineer for MySpace photos resigned Allen Hurff – SVP of Engineering resigned
Redfin is a real estate website that conducts real estate transactions at a rate that is less than the industry rates. The industry rates take about 5-6% of the sales price of homes and splits it between buyers and sellers. Real estate broker fees on the sale of a million dollar house could be up to $60,000.
The company recently hit profitability as the run rate is about $15 million. In 2007, Redfin made about $5 million and in 2006 the company made $1 million. In 2006 real estate agents started learning about Redfin’s business model and threatened or stalked the employees of Redfin.
In 2007, Redfin redesigned the website and logo to avoid litigation threatened from Move.com. The logo Redfin had before was a house within a circle. The CEO of Redfin is Glenn Kelman and he was the co-founder of Plumtree Software beforehand. Plumtree was backed by Sequoia and went public.
There is something viral about using babies in an advertisement performing adult-like tasks. E*TRADE used babies trading stocks as a viral advertisement. The babies trading stock have millions of views on YouTube. Now Evian has created a hit viral video in the with dancing babies on roller skates.
In about one week the video received about 5 million views and Ad Age reported the video as 2nd place on the viral views chart for the week of June 29. The first place video was given to Air New Zealand for a video in which the airplane staff had uniforms painted on their bodies.
By embedding a link to Evian’s website on the YouTube videos, this may have given the company a major traffic boost over the last week.
Betty the gosling goose was found orphaned and with a broken leg in Watermead, Buckinghamshire. Veterinarians did not want to put the baby goose down so they decided to perform the world’s first gosling bionic leg operation.
Betty was given a leg brace with steel pins, buts, and bolts. At the Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital, the gosling has already started walking again with the help of the brace. Betty is expected to check out of the hospital in about 3 weeks.
Its a good thing Betty’s vet doctor was not a quack (pun intended).
Last week a winner emerged for the bidding war of Data Domain Inc. EMC agreed to buy Data Domain for $33.50 per share which ended a bidding war with NetApp. Data Domain paid a $57 million termination fee under the tems of agreement with NetApp after they cancelled a merger deal.
Through the acquisition, EMC will be challenging Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett-Packard may even make an offer to buy out NetApp, the loser of the bidding war. NetApp said that they gave up on Data Domain because they would not be able to justify the escalated bid to shareholders.
The total amount for EMC’s acquisition was $2.1 billion in cash. NetApp went as high as $1.9 billion.
Around various areas of Washington D.C. there are about 290 red-light and speed cameras. This is about 10% of all traffic cameras that exist in the U.S. But now there are GPS and iPhone applications such as PhantomAlert that alerts a driver when they approach the speed traps and the police isn’t too happy about that.
“I think that’s the whole point of this program,” stated D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier in an interview with The Examiner. “It’s designed to circumvent law enforcement — law enforcement that is designed specifically to save lives.” Lanier added that using the devices was a cowardly tactic to break the law for people that will get caught in one way or another.
PhantomAlert works similarly to a radar detector which is illegal to use in D.C. and Virginia. PhantomAlert CEO Joe Scott said that 9 out of 10 police departments across the U.S. support his software. “If police come against us, it’s going to make them look like they are only [after] revenue,” stated Scott. From 2005-2008, the city of D.C. made $1 billion in revenue from camera-related citations. This fiscal year, Montgomery County alone will make $29 million from red light and speed cameras.
Tariq Krim, the founder of Netvibes has been working on a new project for well over a year now called Jolicloud. Jolicloud is an operating system intended for use on netbooks. The company has raised $4.2 million in funding from Atomico and Mangrove. Niklas Zennström of Atomico, Gilles Samoun (fotopedia CEO), and Michael Jackson (Mangrove partner) have joined the Jolicloud Board of Directors as a result of the funding.
The Jolicloud operating system utilizes a web application and cloud service interface. Krim sees Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS as a validation for what he is trying to achieve with Jolicloud. Krim left Netvibes on a full-time basis this past May. Netvibes is an RSS reader website built on a cloud that has built in web applications. In a way Jolicloud and Netvibes complement each other. Jolicloud wants to be your default OS on a netbook and Netvibes wants to be your default homepage.
The user interface of the Jolicloud OS is similar to the iPhone operating system. The icons of applications are large and there is very little hardware needed to keep Jolicloud running smoothly. Jolicloud will also support touchscreens.
A few days ago, Gizmodo blogger Adam Frucci wrote a post called the Seven Types of Employees You Meet at Best Buy. The seven types of employees include car audio thug, marginally cute customer service girl, grizzled old home theater/computer sales lifer, pervy Geek Squad guy, sad department manager, slick careerist manager, and terrifying loss-prevention guy. This blog post got the attention of some of Best Buy’s top brass because the Best Buy CMO Barry Judge retaliated to the blog post.
Below is an excerpt from Judge’s blog:
“We couldn’t resist taking a stab at classifying the seven types of Gizmodo bloggers, but then we realized there’s really only one type of Gizmodo blogger. Here’s that description:
You’ll find this guy on his couch, sporting an ironic t-shirt with a delivery-food stain of some kind. He ‘commuted’ minutes earlier by rolling out of bed and over to his laptop in his shoebox-sized Brooklyn (Williamsburg) apartment littered with empty Redbull cans. He came to Gizmodo 9 months ago after deciding that “traditional media” wasn’t edgy enough (read: required pants and didn’t like it when he powered down walls of TVs). He only puts on pants in order to put electronics down them, and he gets very upset if you mess with his Star Wars legos. He genuinely believes that the hot PR girl is into him and not just trying to get a post. He overuses the word ‘fail.’”
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