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Gavin O'Malley, Yesterday, 1:35 PM
The First Cut Is The Deepest: AOL Axe To Fall Harder Than Expected
Wall Street Journal et al.
As part of its broader cost-cutting initiative, AOL was expected to ask a few good employees to step forward and take one for team. Exceeding the most aggressive estimates, however, CEO Tim Armstrong told employees Thursday morning that he's looking for "up to 2,500 volunteers" to soon quit or commit to early retirement. Putting that number into perspective, its represents a whopping third of the soon-to-be-independent company's payroll.
"This is lousy news for employees, who are faced with a 'jump now or wait to be pushed' decision, but it is designed to cheer investors," writes MediaMemo. "AOL says the cuts will drop its annual operating expenses by $300 million."
Just in time for the holidays, the voluntary layoff program is slated to begin on December 4 -- a few days before the company plans to spin off from Time Warner.
"Ok, so in this crappy job market you are asking someone to either volunteer to move on or just wait and see if they will be told to move on," writes Marketing Pilgrim. "What I didn't see was what would make that kind of move better than rolling the dice and hoping that you don't get axed?"
"Interestingly, rank and filers are being offered a weaker deal than their recent colleagues over at Time Inc." notes Valleywag. AOL will pay them three months severance, whereas Time Inc.-ers get that plus two weeks for every year of service ... Apparently unions are nice things to have in situations like this."
Last month, news broke that AOL had hired consultants Alix Partners to orchestrate the company's broader layoffs. A knowledgeable source told The Wall Street Journal's Business Insider blog that Alix was helping AOL with a "top to bottom" look at the company in terms of "process efficiencies, cost structure, and strategy," but had yet to come up with an exact number of layoffs.
Separately, in an effort to offload some unwanted assets, AOL has hired bankers to sell off its ICQ messaging service, and is "considering" dropping MapQuest and other properties, according to MediaMemo.
In late May, Time Warner's board of directors authorized plans to spin off AOL as an independent, publicly traded company by the end of the year.
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Apple Tablet Rumors Run Wild
Fast Company
The Apple Tablet rumor-mill is a ragin'! AllThingsD is reporting that Condé Nast is already tweaking its digital magazine publishing format to suit such a device, despite the fact that it has yet to be publicly confirmed. The struggling publishing house says it will have a digital tablet-ready version of Wired first, sometime around the middle of next year, and follow with versions for all its 18 titles.
Condé will perhaps be using a custom package from Adobe, which already makes the software that the publisher and many of its rivals use to design their print versions. Digitimes, meanwhile, is reporting that Apple has changed its mind about the screen technology it wants for the tablet, which apparently jibes with earlier reports about Apple's tie-up with LG to supply $500 million worth of displays.
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YouTube Adds Auto-Captioning
Read Write Web
Making life easier for both the hearing impaired and video search engines alike, YouTube can now automatically generate captions and subtitles for videos in English. At present, the feature is only enabled on a handful of partner channels, but Google plans to make it available to everyone eventually. YouTube now is also offering an "automatic caption timing" feature for all new uploads, which is designed to makes it easier to add captions manually.
Users can upload a text file with a transcript of the video and Google's speech recognition technology will figure out when those words are spoken and create captions based on this information. YouTube's users currently upload over 20 hours of video every minute, and most of this video isn't accessible for users with hearing impairments. While uploaders could always add captions to their videos manually, only a small percentage ever did.
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Judge Denies AT&T's 'Map For That' Suit
eweek
AT&T's request for Verizon to pull its five "There's a Map for That" ads have been denied, though attorneys will have another shot to argue their case. A federal judge in Atlanta denied AT&T's request that competitor Verizon Wireless pull its series of "There's a Map for That" ads, according to a November 18 report from the Associated Press. The judge has scheduled a December 16 hearing, in which attorneys for AT&T will have another chance to argue their case. Verizon has said that AT&T's lawsuit is totally without merit.
"AT&T did not file this lawsuit because Verizon's 'There's A Map For That' advertisements are untrue," read a previous court filing. The battle between the two carries has implications or their device partners, particularly now that Verizon Wireless's Droid is competing directly against the AT&T-supported Apple iPhone.
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Study: Gmail & Twitter Draw Similar Crowd
Read Write Web
Gmail has more female users than male, and Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than any other Web mail service, according to a study by social media data company Rapleaf involving the demographics and online behavior of Web mail users. The study looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Web mail services, and found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board.
More interesting, though, is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo Web mail services, Facebook only had a small lead. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Your guess is apparently as good as the researchers.
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Scam Ad Suit Targets Facebook
Business Insider
Facebook and gaming startup Zynga are the defendants in a federal class-action lawsuit filed this week seeking upwards of $5 million for social network users scammed in online game ads. The Sacramento-based firm of Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff has reportedly been looking for victims of scam ads in games like Mafia Wars and Farmville to potentially file a class action suit. The firm's suit has now hit federal district court in Northern California.
Neither Zynga nor Facebook actually originates the ads in question, according to The Business Insider. Instead, other companies take out ads in Zynga's games, which run on Facebook's network, and the two companies make what is reported to be large sums of money from the offers. Some of the ads are largely believed to trick users into signing up for unauthorized cell phone charges or expensive mail-order products like educational CDs, typically by disguising them as "free" offers or "free trials," or as part of an "online quiz."
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