Boxee presented their social media center last night at the NY Tech gathering. Boxee is a desktop app currently available for mac and linux and offers a slick way to browse your movies, music, photos and other media. Rather than view movies by name, Boxee shows you images of the covers similar to browsing at Blockbuster. Photos can pull from your local drive or from Flickr. Music comes from your library and iTunes (non-DRM). The social aspects come from sharing between friends. Boxee helps you share recommendations with your friends in all media categories and this is where the business plan comes into play. If you decide to order a movie on Netflix or Amazon, they get an affiliate cut on sales.

If you would like a Boxee beta invite, click here.

More CN Coverage:
– FriendFeed
– Amie Street
– Startup Tips

Source:CenterNetworks

NY-based Buzzd and Virgin Mobile have announced a new partnership that will bring the buzzd local city guides to the Virgin Mobile customer base. The service is named "buzzd on Virgin Mobile" and will provide event information to major cities around the U.S., Europe and India.

Using the location features of the mobile device, buzzd can provide information about the location you are currently at and find hot events near you. The new service reminds me of another location-based service we covered, Sense Networks. The content on buzz comes from sources including Flavorpill, TimeOut and Zagat.

Standard text and data rates apply when using the Buzzd service. My mother uses Virgin Mobile and her screen is TINY - how she could use a city guide on the phone is beyond me. In fact, if I remember when I picked out the phone for her, all of the Virgin Mobile devices have small screens.

Virgin Mobile announced today that it has inked a deal with Buzzd, a location-based city guide and social network, to equip Virgin Mobile handsets with the ability to allow local entertainment information to be broadcast and shared among Virgin Mobile customers in the same general proximity.

Dubbed “buzzd on Virgin Mobile,” the new service will run on the carrier’s WAP deck and deliver event and venue information. as well as reviews and ratings on restaurants and other popular places from people around them.

Is any company as prone to fits of overenthusiastic hiring and then desperate firing as AOL? Even in the go-go ’90s, America Online binged and purged on employees. A veteran employee who claims to have survived 35 — 35! — rounds of layoffs throughout the years put together a partial listing of some of the bigger cuts. But from everything we hear, next week’s bloodletting will be, as they say, off the chart. The list, after the jump.

• November 1996: 300 (AOLwatch)
• March 1999: 850 (Mozillazine)
• January 2001: 750 (ZDNet UK)
• August 2001: 1200 (ZDNet UK)
• July 2003: 50 (ZDNet UK)
• December 2003: 450
• December 2004: 950 (Slashdot.org)
• October 2006: 700 (Maya Reynolds)
• December 2006: 500 (CRN)
• December 2006: 450 (Washington Post)
• February 2007: 600 (Washington Post)

Know of more? Leave a comment.

Source:Valleywag

Some IPOs — like Google and Vonage, which has fallen 85 percent since going public — fall flat. Virgin Mobile, with its cherry brand name and backers, should have had a sparkling debut. And yet it didn’t.

Virgin Mobile, unlike the big carriers, rents a wireless network rather than owning one, essentially gussying up and reselling Sprint’s service under its own name. It’s a challenging business model, known in the trade as being a “mobile virtual network operator” or “MVNO.” Disney and Amp’d, among others, have failed to make a go of it.

Renting one’s network means lower capital costs, and according to the Wall Street Journal, Virgin has 4.83 million subscribers and actually made a small profit this year. Virgin Mobile has plenty of revenue, but with a flat IPO today and loads of debt, it is unclear if it can make itself into a viable company.

Disney Mobile shut down last month and Amp’d burned through hundreds of millions of dollars with nothing to show for it. History does not look good for Virgin, but with strong name recognition among their target market and clever advertising, we don’t put it past Sir Richard to succeed where others have failed.

(Photo by AP/Jacques Brinon)

A joint venture of Sprint (S) and Richard Branson’s Virgin […]