The first sign of the downsizing fever was seen last week when Google announced to shut down 5-month old service: Lively. Now it is said that Google may be preparing to cut thousands of jobs. Probably as much as 10,000 workers (and counting) will no longer enjoy the air of Googleplex.

In fact, according to internal source, Google has been quietly fired hundreds of employees in the past few months without reporting to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or publicizing the layoffs that appears being required by law.

Google has managed to avoid the legal requirement by classifying a number of the employees as “temporary operational expenses,” which means their positions are not official and could be eliminated without public notification. These employees were hired without full time benefits such as health coverage and insurance too, yet ironically many of them have been working there for five or even seven years.

“Google has hundreds of lawyers figuring out how not to get caught,” said Daya Baran, WebGuild President. “One of them is by moving workers from job to job every few months so that their status remains temporary. That is why you probably have never spoken to the same person twice at Google and that is also why there is somebody new on the job and most times you know more about their job than they do,” he supposed.

Google’s most recent filling with SEC shows only 20,123 employees being officially hired. But if counting the contractors the number comes out closer to 30,000, and this means the layoffs would cut about 33 percent of its staff in comparison to 10 percent cut by Yahoo announced recently when Yang planned to step down.

Without doubt, the economic downturn is hitting Google hard and with the slowdown in online advertising, the downsizing fever seems just begin getting heat

Ruby on Rail (RoR), the popular web application framework, had an upgrade to version 2.2 last Friday. This version features better internationalization (i18n) framework and stronger HTTP validators. RoR now supports i18n by default - the feature developers have desired for long to create multi-language websites easier. The framework adds better supports for etag and last-modifed validators freeing expensive server-side processing if the client the client already has the latest contents. Also featured are thread safety and a connection pool for the ...

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Struggling with less than 10% search share, Microsoft plans to rebrand Windows Live Search next year, according to an internal source. It is reported by LiveSide that Microsoft has taken over the Kumo.com domain and has started redirecting some of its servers to it (accessible to some internal employees only). Kumo means "cloud" and "spider" in Japanese, you can see the traditional men's kimono pictured below for a "Kumo" look-and-feel. [caption id="attachment_152" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Japanese man in traditional kimono named "Kumo""][/caption] So, does it ...

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Personnel from Mogulus discovered Saturday that YouTube Live live concert event was streamed by Akamai's CDN (Content Delivery Network). By monitoring live stream metrics for full network published by Akamai, they found at the peak of the event at 9:10 EST YouTube Live served about 700,000 concurrent viewers. This is an excellent result for YouTube's first live streaming event indicating great potential of live streaming for the internet. Google, though having its own very good CDN for text/image contents, has to rely ...

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Responding to recent losses, Palm announced to trim its workforce of 1050 employees. Lynn Fox, Palm Inc's spokeswoman, said the layoffs began this week, but she declined to specify how many jobs would be cut. "The goal (of the layoffs) is to consolidate resources and focus our efforts more effectively," said Fox while it is reported that the move comes as Palm focuses on its Linux-based "Nova" operating system, as well as a device on which the platform will run. Palm, maker ...

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It was noticed today SearchWiki - new feature that allow users customizing Google search results at their own tastes - no longer appears. Though the feature is obviously useful for many people, some find it somewhat annoying and want the default search results back but it appeares there is no option to turn SearchWiki off unless users logged out from Google's account before performing searches. Mike Arrington, TechCrunch, e-mailed Google for a comment and received a reply explaining this was just a ...

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Verizon Wireless reported on Thursday night that some of its employees have "accessed and viewed" President-elect Barack Obama's  personal cellphone account with no authorization. The account, said, has been inactive for several months and was tied to a flip phone, probably a Motorola Razr, not a smart phone like the BlackBerry Obama has also been spotted. "All employees who have accessed the account - whether authorized or not - have been put on immediate leave, with pay," Verizon announced. "As the ...

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It was discovered that Apple's new MacBook and MacBook Pro takes a huge hit in performance when users remove battery running the notebooks off AC power. While Gearlog's Zach Honig benchmarked a 2.53 GHz MacBook Pro using a multiprocessor test called Cinebench R10 with third-party RAM, he noticed an usual 37% plunge in processing power. It turned out RAM was not the cause but the battery he had removed before. Re-benchmarking, the MacBook Pro showed a score of 5,549 with battery, ...

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Long Term Evolution (LTE) describes the latest standardization work by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in the mobile network technology tree that promises to deliver a better user experience with ultra fast broadband and very low latency with lowest cost per bit for data services. Motorola claimed it has completed the first over-the-air Long-Term Evolution (LTE) data transfers in 700-MHz spectrum. The demonstration used its LTE Radio Access Test Network and LTE eNode-B platform along with a prototype LTE device. The ...

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HP launched its multitouch-capable TouchSmart tx2 yesterday hailing it the world's first multitouch consumer notebook. TouchSmart tx2 boasts a 12.1-inch swivel display (LED-backlit), 3GB DDR2 RAM, an AMD Turion X2 dual-core processor, a bezel-mounted fingerprint reader, integrated webcam with microphone, Bluetooth / WiFi, stereo speakers, a 5-in-1 multicard reader and a LightScribe SuperMulti DVD burner. The notebook comes loaded with Vista Home Premium OS and HP's own MediaSmart 2.0 software. It weighs around 5 lbs and sells for $1149 currently. Here are ...

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