Roundup: Dow drops 680 points, Palm revenues crater, Trutap shutting

Venture Beat — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:26:22 -0800

Here’s the latest action:

The Dow drops 680 points: The U.S. stock market tanked on Monday as concerns mounted about the global economic crisis. The Dow closed at 8149.09, down 7.7 percent. With oil down below $50 a barrel and markets worldwide suffering the jitters, investors are running out of places to run. The Wall Street Journal has more.

Palm’s revenues crater: The maker of Treo smart phones reports that its revenues will be $190 million to $195 million, or 41 percent lower than what analysts expected. Palm’s phone are out of favor compared to Apple’s iPhone and HTC’s G1 phone with Google Android software.

Sumner Redstone unloads stake in Midway Games: After a long, unprofitable tenure, the chairman of Viacom has sold off his stake in Midway Games, the money-losing video game company that gave the world Mortal Kombat.

Hackers boot Linux on iPhone: But they still haven’t come up with a good reason for why they want to do it.

Mounting layoffs take a toll on tech: Silicon Valley was far from the epicenter of the financial chaos, but layoffs are becoming the norm.

Game companies circling in on an acquisition: Game publisher Eidos is about to launch its Tomb Raider Underworld game, but the maker of the game franchise that made Angelina Jolie a superstar is itself the target of potential acquirers such as Electronic Arts.

Trutap shutting down: The mobile social network and instant messenger gateway company has laid off 80 percent of its staff after failing to raise a new round. Tudor Group was one of the backers when we wrote about them last year.

Is the open source model broken? Business Week says so in this description of one kind of open-source business that isn’t working anymore.

Clearwire investment finishes, service renamed Clear: Clearwire closed its $14.5 billion investment Sprint Nextel deal on Friday and announced today that it will get rid of the name Xohm, which was Sprint Nextel’s name for the wireless broadband service. The new service will be named Clear.

Virgin Media chooses Yahoo oneSearch: Yahoo scored a deal to provide mobile search for Virgin Media in the United Kingdom.

Google reveals plan for Chrome extensions: In the future, Google’s own web browser will have new features such as the ability to block ads.

Intuit buying Entellium assets: Intuit is buying the assets of the financial site, whose former CEO is in prison on fraud charges. TechFlash has more.

BMW embraces Microsoft Surface: The German car maker will allow customers topick their own car preferences using Microsoft’s gesture-based Surface computing tables.