Dot Com News from Week of March 12, 2001

• 3/16/01 - Metricom, Inc., a high-speed wireless data company, said it is cutting 179 of 800 employees nationwide, about 28 percent of its staff. At the same time, the company, which builds the wireless Internet Richochet system, announced the resignations of its chief financial officer and senior vice president of engineering and manufacturing.
• 3/16/01 - Utility.com, an online discount energy provider, will shutter its Web site just months after changing its business model. The 3-year-old company will abandon its recently adopted ASP (application service provider) business model, as well as its consumer services: energy, general Internet access and DSL, and long-distance telephone. The company simply racked up too much debt from the skyrocketing energy prices that have plagued Californians in recent months.
• 3/16/01 - Aperian Inc., a Web hosting and Internet infrastructure services provider, said it plans to cut its work force by about 20%, or 39 positions. The company said the move refocuses it on its core business of providing Internet-related data-center services.
• 3/16/01 - Talk City Marketing Group said it cut its work force by another 30% and reduced discretionary and other spending as part of a restructuring to a fee-based marketing services model. Talk City also is spinning off its Internet advertising unit, talkcity.com, as a separate business unit.
• 3/16/01 - Exabyte Corp., which supplies tape-storage services for the data application and database server markets, said it will lay off about 250 people world-wide to trim its work force to under 800 employees.
• 3/16/01 - Concero Inc., an information-technology consulting firm, plans to trim 130 employees from its work force as part of cost-reduction measures expected to shave $17 million a year from the firm's operating costs.
• 3/16/01 - Computer Sciences Corp. plans to cut as many as 900 jobs - about 1 percent of its worldwide work force - and said it will miss earnings forecasts by a wide margin this quarter, blaming a drop in demand for traditional information technology consulting.
• 3/16/01 - Primedia, which publishes niche magazines and recently bought About.com, said that it was eliminating 140 jobs in its Intertec unit, which publishes technical and trade journals. Another 20 jobs are being eliminated at IndustryClick, an industry information site.
• 3/16/01 - Xerox Corp., which is battling steep financial losses, is delaying annual pay raises to most of its employees until July.
• 3/15/01 - Applied Materials Inc., a chipmaking equipment leader, says it will ask up to 1,000 employees to leave the company on a voluntary basis as part of continuing cost-cutting efforts.
• 3/15/01 - Texas Instruments Inc. plans to close its chip-making plant in Santa Cruz, Calif., by the end of the year and 600 employees will lose their jobs. The company, which last month announced cost-cutting measures, said that it will consolidate operations in Santa Cruz into plants in Dallas and Houston.
• 3/15/01 - Houston-based Compaq expects to take a restructuring charge of $125 million to $150 million. The company also plans to cut 7 percent of its work force, or about 5,000 jobs.
• 3/15/01 - Grassroots.com, headed by former White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry, has laid off 13 employees--about 22 percent of its staff. The layoffs were among measures to preserve cash to carry us into 2002.
• 3/15/01 - Zero-Knowledge said that it laid off between 60 and 70 employees out of a staff of more than 250 people as part of its efforts to restructure the company. Zero-Knowledge has developed software, dubbed Freedom, which lets people conceal their identities online.
• 3/14/01 - Homes.com, the leading provider of marketing and productivity solutions for real estate and home services professionals, announced that it is laying off approximately 150 employees in an effort to preserve cash and allow the Company to move toward positive cash flow from operations. The layoffs, which represent approximately 40% of the Company's employees, are in the areas of sales, product development and administrative staff.
• 3/14/01 - Cable & Wireless plan to drop 4,000 workers. Costs at the firm will have to be cut, with 50 percent of the 4,000 layoffs expected to be in the UK. The 4,000 layoffs, which will be staged over the next 12 months, account for around 50 percent of Cable & Wireless' core workforce, but 22 percent of its global employees.
• 3/14/01 - Internet magazine Salon.com said that it has trimmed employee salaries and postponed some audio plans in a continuing effort to brace itself against the dot-com downturn. Salon is implementing pay cuts in the neighborhood of 15 percent for some employees. It also has cut at least three people from its yet-to-be-launched radio show.
• 3/14/01 - Eazel, the company trying to make Linux as consumer-friendly as the Macintosh, has let go more than half its staff in an attempt to secure more funding. The company, which launched last year by veterans of America Online and Apple Computer, laid off 40 employees, leaving it with around 35.
• 3/13/01 - TMANglobal.com, an Internet-based company that had operated one of the world's largest Web sites devoted to the martial arts and health/fitness industries, announced that Chairman & CEO Tony Interdonato and President Ron Tramontano have resigned their posts with the Company. The Company had recently shut down its Internet Web site and sold all martial arts-related components back to its parent company, The Martial Arts Network, in exchange for the cancellation of all remaining debt to the Network.
• 3/13/01 - Britannica.com cut its staff by one-third, mostly from the online encyclopedia's free Web site, to concentrate on pay services. The online advertising slump led the company to pink-slip 68 of its 220 employees and place a stronger emphasis on subscription services.
• 3/13/01 - Razorfish says it is implementing more job cuts, on top of the 20 percent job cuts the Internet consulting company announced last month as part of its global restructuring plan.
• 3/13/01 - Mobile phone manufacturer Motorola said it is cutting 7,000 jobs in its global cell phone unit to reduce costs in its wireless handset business during a time of sluggish sales.
• 3/12/01 - After close to 2 years of continuous service and over 2 million registered users, Firetalk Communications is preparing to shut down the Firetalk Service towards the end of March, 2001. Firetalk has found it difficult to realize enough revenue to justify the continuance of its popular consumer services, Firetalk Basic and Firetalk VQ.
• 3/12/01 - Evite said it will sell its struggling online invitation site to Citysearch, the unit of Ticketmaster that runs an online city-guide service.
• 3/12/01 - CDWorld.com, one of the world's first online music e-tailers, is closing its virtual doors at the end of this week due to a lack of profitability. The firm said that despite being one of the pioneers in e-commerce going back to 1995, it will shut down on Mar. 16.
• 3/12/01 - Web networking giant Cisco Systems says the rapidly changing economic environment has forced it to adopt cost-cutting measures, including the lay-off of as many as 8,000 workers.