RealNetworks announced today to lay off 130 employees or about 7.5 percents of its workforce "to bring expenses in line with current and prospective economic realities", cited Bill Hankes, VP, Corporate Communications, from the company blog. In addition, the Seattle-based company is cutting 30 contractor positions and consultants. "Telling someone that you're eliminating their position is among the most difficult conversations a manager can have," Bill Hankes says on the blog post. The company allows departing employees to "conduct job searches for other ...

The download site of the infamous Firefox add-on "Pirates of Amazon" which offers users a download link to pirated copies of products from The Pirate Bay when you visit Amazon online store is offline now illustrated with a sinking ship. After installed, the add-on will add "Down 4 Free" button into the Amazon product page when the same title is also available at The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay, however, has no relation with the add-on owners. "We are not affiliated ...

Adobe System said this afternoon in a statement that it will cut its revenue outlook for fiscal Q4, 2008, citing the impact of the global economic crisis. The company also wants to cut costs by firing 600 full-time employees, about 8 percent of its workforce. The company's Q4 revenue target range was $925 million to $955 million but will be able to deliver between $912 million to $915 million only. The main cause for the revenue deficit, cited, was weaker-than-expected demand for ...

Some pictures of the latest smartphone from Finnish mobile phone maker: the Nokia N79 phone, which may be a true response to iPhone's thread. More details by Engadget: The N97 packs a 3.5-inch, 640 x 360 pixel (that's a 16:9 aspect ratio) resistive touchscreen display with tactile feedback and QWERTY keyboard into this sliding communicator with an "always open" window to favorite internet or social networking sites. Nokia calls it the "world's most advanced mobile computer." To back up the claim ...

Yesterday, Six Apart announced to acquire micro-blogging startup Pownce and to shut down Pownce's service in two weeks. Leah Culver and Mike Malone, Pownce's main developers, will join Six Apart's team on similar roles. Backing by Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, Pownce is considered the second-best-known micro-blogging service around after Twitter. Its service even offers more features than Twitter that allows user to share not only short text messages but also photos, video and mp3. However, Pownce's traffic never took ...

Michael Wolff, the author of the new Rupert Murdoch bio "The Man Who Owns The News", has revealed how he is seeing the future of MySpace, the US most popular social network, in a talk with BusinessWeek's Jon Fine. Here are some interesting points from the discussion: MySpace is going to zero facing competition from Facebook that is technically more advanced and has better educated users. MySpace is for poor, backwards "cretins". "Connections" may not save MySpace as many think.

Good OS, the California-based company who is most famous for the gOS, a Linux distribution that debuted last year on the $199 Everex gPC selling at Wal-Mart, announced another operating system called Cloud on Monday at the Netbook World Summit in Paris. Different from other quick-start software that allows users to check mail or play music almost instantly after turning on their computers, Good OS has created "a wrapper that enables you to perform all your major rich-client applications from within ...

[CNET] -- CNet is reporting that a Dutch software dealer filed a complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft, arguing the company charges more in Europe than it does in the United States, a policy that violates Europe's antitrust laws. "At this stage, we are asking the court to accept that there has been a violation of the relevant European law," Samir Abdalla, company owner, said on Friday. "Clearly, the commission does not enter into a discussion at this point." [...]

Sources from both Microsoft and Yahoo confirm that a Sunday Times of London story suggesting 20 billion dollars partnership between the two about to happen is "fictitious wholly". The story details the deal that Microsoft would obtain a 10-year operating agreement to manage the search business and it would also receive a two-year call option to buy the search business for $20 billion leaving Yahoo to run its own e-mail, messaging, and content services. Jonathan Miller, ex-chairman and CEO of American ...

Grappling with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, US online shoppers tend to spend more on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday for better prices. Yesterday, comScore reported that, for the holiday season-to-date, shoppers has spent $10.41 billion online, 4% decline in comparison to the corresponding days last year, while Black Friday saw $534 million in online spending, up 1%. Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, commented: Early reports suggest that Black Friday sales in retail stores were slightly better than anticipated in ...