Since the last time we gave an update at the beginning of the month there have been 20,171 layoffs at tech and media companies added to our Layoff Tracker. That brings the total to 58,709 tech layoffs over the past two and a half months.

One previously unreported layoff we have been able to confirm is 10 people at classifieds search engine Oodle, which occurred last week and represents a 20% reduction. Another layoff happened at Rearden Commerce, which trimmed about 40 people, or 10 percent (and Rearden just raised $100 million, showing that no company is immune).

The biggest layoff this month was announced just today by Sun Microsystems, which will be reducing its headcount by 5,000 to 6,000 (15 to 18 percent). Other big tech companies also announced cuts earlier this week, including Applied Materials (1,800 layoffs), Nokia Siemens Networks (750), and National Semiconductor (330).

We have stumbled across a severe flaw in iPhone security that allows third party developers to update and execute arbitrary code from their applications at will, totally circumventing Apple’s App Store approval process. Normally, applications (and all of their updates) have to go through a lengthy review process before they’re posted to the App Store, as Apple combs through them to ensure they don’t do anything malicious or otherwise violate its Terms of Service. This exploit may give developers free reign.

The exploit stems from a benign trick that would otherwise seem trivial to most iPhone users. Whenever you launch an iPhone application, an image called ‘Default.png’ is briefly displayed while the app loads in the background. Applications developed in-house by Apple are able to use dynamic ‘Default.png’ images, which can be modified to do a number of things, like show the current date or display the contents of the app before it’s done loading. Until now third party developers have been stuck with static ‘Default.png’ images that could not be changed after the app had been installed. To get around the restriction, developer Patrick Collison figured out a workaround that tricks the iPhone’s code signing mechanisms into giving devs access to these dynamic launch images.
Source:TechCrunch

Christos Cotsakos has the opposite of the Midas touch. Everything he touches seems only to implode. This happened to E-Trade back in 2000-2002 when he was the CEO. Cotsakos was famously replaced after enriching himself with a $78 million pay package during a year the stock tanked 53 percent. He had to give back some of that money, but kept enough to live lavishly in Florida and pour millions of dollars into an ill-conceived social network for international swingers called Moli.

Never heard of Moli? Don’t worry. It also just imploded. Moli was a me-three social network that was founded in 2006 way after that train had left the station, and didn’t launch publicly until January 2008 at DEMO. The main differentiating factor, if you can call it that, was the ability to show different profiles to different sets of contacts (personal, business, family). The site never got above 2.5 million visitors a month, according to Compete (see chart above). And we have learned from several former employees that most of its staff has been laid off, from a peak employment of about 55.

There was a big round of layoffs last September, when all but 15 or so people were let go. Last week, most of the remaining employees were cut loose. The site is still up, but it seems like there are only a handful of people left keeping the lights on hoping for a sale. That is unlikely to happen. We are placing Moli in the deadpool. (And something tells me many more social networks are headed there as well).

We regret to inform you that iKobo is discontinuing services. Effective immediately, no further money transfers to your iKobo account will be allowed. Your card issued by Palm Desert National Bank will continue to be active until November 13, 2008. Your card will no longer work after this date. However, the card funds are safe and guaranteed, even after the card is de-activated.

The rest of the e-mail after the jump.

WorldFriends is walking a fine line between being a platform for dating, language exchange and making international friends. At first sight, WorldFriends actually looks much like a heavily internationalized version of your average dating site. The profile page, for example, features a member slide show (showing only female users if that is what you said you are interested in when signing up), a “New photos”-container (again girls only) and an “Your Ideal Match”-list.Source:TechCrunch

Since our last update a week ago, we’ve added 18,885 job eliminations at tech and media companies to our Layoff Tracker. That brings the total to 38,538 layoffs across 108 companies over the past two months.

Some of the bigger reductions this week came from Motorola (3,000), Qwest (1,200), and Electronic Arts (600). Among startups, there were job cuts at Revision3 (10), Emusic (10), Sugar Publishing (9), Aliph/Jawbone (25), matchmine (42, deadpool), and Gizmos (10). We’ve also started adding media companies facing disruption from the Internet, including Gannett (3,000), Time Inc. (600), and Conde Nast (32), whose Portfolio magazine laid off nearly all of its Website staff.

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article. (For those more interested in who is hiring, check out our job board).

Here is the full list of layoffs from the past week:

Two weeks after laying off 30 percent of his employees, Jaxtr CEO Konstantin Guericke finds himself out of a job. He is being replaced by vice president of engineering Bahman Koohestani (former CTO at Cyworld and Orbitz), who will be acting as “interim” CEO.

Jaxtr offers VoIP calls to both your regular and mobile phone. Its last round was a $10 million Series B in June. Investors include Lehman Brothers Venture Capital (yup, they are still around), August Capital, Mangrove, Mayfield, DFJ, and angels Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman. (Guericke was part of the founding team at LinkedIn).

The company is obviously going through a rough time, but Koohestani still spins it as a “very healthy” business. He offers the following partial stats:

Bootstrapped by Pete Field and based out of Whistler, B.C., Canada, HearWhere is a search engine for live music which was launched in May 2008 but has managed to stay largely under the radar.

The live-performance search engine claims to list over one million music shows. The service tells you who is playing nearby, but also plays the associated music, and subsequently links to the artist’s MySpace page. You can add widgets from artist pages and redistribute them to your accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Netvibes, and other places thanks to a nifty integration with Clearspring. It’s unclear how Field plans to make money from the service, but he will likely try and a combination of advertising and affiliate revenue from mp3 and ticket sales.Source:TechCrunch
PowerReviews, which has raised over $21 million in venture financing, has let 30% of staff go, say multiple sources. Among those that left is VP Marketing Jay Shaffer.

The company let retailers include Amazon-like product review features into their websites, for free. PowerReviews then aggregates reviews from their client retailers on their own customer-facing site called Buzzillions.

The company had at least 42 employees before the layoffs. We’ve contacted them for confirmation and have added them to the Layoff Tracker.Source:TechCrunch
raised $10 million a year ago, has shut down operations.

The company created media recommendations that categorizes and analyzes your media likes and dislikes in order to serve you content that is more to your taste.

In a blog post today CEO Michael Troiano talks about the shutdown, and encourages others to hire the team, but he gives few details about the reason for the failure.

He suggests there’s some drama behind the scenes: “I could not have imagined this last Thursday, let alone earlier. It is one thing to be failed, quite another to have been deceived.” My guess (and it’s only a guess) is he’s pointing the finger at his investor, Kraft Group. Either a promised bridge funding fell through, or Kraft pulled what was left of their previous investment out of the company. That’s the only explanation for how the CEO didn’t know the company was shutting down a day before it happened.

Bootstrapped by Pete Field and based out of Whistler, B.C., Canada, HearWhere is a search engine for live music which was launched in May 2008 but has managed to stay largely under the radar.

The live-performance search engine claims to list over one million music shows. The service tells you who is playing nearby, but also plays the associated music, and subsequently links to the artist’s MySpace page. You can add widgets from artist pages and redistribute them to your accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Netvibes, and other places thanks to a nifty integration with Clearspring. It’s unclear how Field plans to make money from the service, but he will likely try and a combination of advertising and affiliate revenue from mp3 and ticket sales.Source:TechCrunch
PowerReviews, which has raised over $21 million in venture financing, has let 30% of staff go, say multiple sources. Among those that left is VP Marketing Jay Shaffer.

The company let retailers include Amazon-like product review features into their websites, for free. PowerReviews then aggregates reviews from their client retailers on their own customer-facing site called Buzzillions.

The company had at least 42 employees before the layoffs. We’ve contacted them for confirmation and have added them to the Layoff Tracker.

This has been a brutal month or so for tech layoffs. According to our Layoff Tracker, there have been 19,683 job eliminations at tech companies announced since mid-September, and we’re not even counting the 24,600 people at Hewlett-Packard who are being eliminated as a result of its merger with EDS.

But only five big companies make up more than 90 percent of the layoffs: Xerox (3,000), Dell (8,900), Yahoo (1,500), eBay (1,500), and German chipmaker Qimonda (3,000). The other 33 companies are mostly startups, and collectively account for 1,683 layoffs. Although three more companies (Sony Ericsson, Nvidia, and TicketMaster) account for an additional 1,110 job losses.

After stripping those out, you get closer to a pure number of layoffs at tech startups: 573Source:TechCrunch

In July we wrote about AOL’s plans to shutter a number of services based on an internal email from EVP Products and Marketing Kevin Conroy.

Next week, AOL says, they’ll begin to communicate the news to consumers around the shutdown of three of those properties - AOL Pictures, BlueString and Xdrive.
AOL Pictures will close in December, and users will have the chance to move photos to American Greetings PhotoWorks, download photos to a personal computer, or purchase an archive of photos on DVD. Photos will be available until June 2009.

XDrive and Bluestring will close on December 31. Users can download files or purchase a DVD until that time. After that, it sounds like the files will be deleted.

A FAQ is reprinted below.

This has been a brutal month or so for tech layoffs. According to our Layoff Tracker, there have been 19,683 job eliminations at tech companies announced since mid-September, and we’re not even counting the 24,600 people at Hewlett-Packard who are being eliminated as a result of its merger with EDS.

But only five big companies make up more than 90 percent of the layoffs: Xerox (3,000), Dell (8,900), Yahoo (1,500), eBay (1,500), and German chipmaker Qimonda (3,000). The other 33 companies are mostly startups, and collectively account for 1,683 layoffs. Although three more companies (Sony Ericsson, Nvidia, and TicketMaster) account for an additional 1,110 job losses.

After stripping those out, you get closer to a pure number of layoffs at tech startups: 573

Fred Wilson brought this up almost two years ago when he criticized our coverage of failed companies as well. A year ago Louis Gray said similar things. Our response is the same now as it was then: Don’t shoot the messenger.

Reporting on layoffs or a dead company isn’t tabloid journalism. We do not take pleasure in seeing companies fail. But it’s inevitable that most will. And not only is it news, but readers have a right to know about it.

Eight months after acquiring San Diego-based startup Goowy, AOL has decided to shutter its Yourminis personalized homepage. Notice that the two-year old Flash-based service would be shut down entirely on October 27th went out to users today in an email. It encourages them to export their OPML files and content for migration over to myAOL, iGoogle, or Netvibes: