Roundup: Layoffs at Sitoa, GrandCentral gets knocked offline, and more

Venture Beat — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:36:37 -0700

Here’s the latest action:

Big layoffs at Sitoa? — San Mateo-based Sitoa has laid off approximately 40 out of 70 employees in order to get to breakeven, we’ve heard from a source. The company has over $20 million in revenues, but fees are only 10% so the company has always operated in the red. They have been trying to raise more money. Positioned as an e-commerce solution provider that gives retailers access to more products without worrying about inventory, Sitoa is having (or rumored to have) its own inventory problems due to high rates of returns and shrinkage. They have only two clients; Sears is one of them. There have recently been a flurry of LinkedIn updates and recommendations among remaining and former employees.

Power issue knocks GrandCentral offline — The online phone company which Google bought last year was down for most of this morning, TechCrunch reports. While the company blames a power outage on the service going down, it speaks to a larger issue as more everyday services move online — what happens if one of these services goes down? With traditional phone services, if there was a bad storm, you might lose service and understand why. With a server power issue happening in the middle of nowhere, the service can go down and you don’t even know it — you just don’t get your calls. Find our recent coverage on Grand Central here and here.

Google TV ads close to launching for the public — The service, which is currently in a closed trials, will allow anyone to buy advertising time on television stations that have a deal with Google (including A&E, Bravo, CNN, others) through Dish Network, according to Multichannel News. While much is made about of an overall shift to online advertising, Google knows how big of a business advertising on television still is, and is looking to transfer its success online to TV. The public should be able to use the service in the next few weeks.

AdMob’s March mobile metrics data — The mobile advertising company says it served over 2.85 billion ad requests last month. Clearly, the mobile advertising market is healthy. Nokia lost some of the mobile marketing share while companies like Motorola, RIM (makers of the Blackberry device) and Apple (makers of the iPhone) rose. We previously wrote about AdMob’s statistics here.

Torrent searching site YouTorrent looking to sell — The popular torrent (a file transfered online, usually by way of many users) searching site has decided to clean up its act — it will now only index and search sites which host torrents, meaning most copyrighted material will be left out. The site, which has over 10 million unique visitors a month, hopes this move will allow it to be sold, TorrentFreak reports.

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Roundup: Layoffs at Sitoa, GrandCentral gets knocked offline, and more