Dot Com News from Week of August 6, 2001

• 8/10/01 - Rhythms NetConnections Inc., which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, said it will shut down service and lay off about 700 employee, or 75% of its work force.
• 8/10/01 - BlueLight.com said that Kmart has cut more staff at the San Francisco-based Internet division. A BlueLight representative declined to say how many jobs had been cut, and Kmart was not immediately available to elaborate.
• 8/10/01 - An online currency touted as the perfect Internet gift certificate is seemingly no longer redeemable. The New York-based Flooz.com Inc. said it had suspended operations and is seeking a merger partner.
• 8/10/01 - Senior managers at Creative Technology's Singapore headquarters, known for its Sound Blaster cards for PCs and Nomad Jukebox MP3 players, have agreed to take a 10 percent to 20 percent pay reduction. The company is also starting a hiring freeze globally to help return the company to profitability. The salary cuts follow Creative's cost cutting in March, when it laid off 10 percent of its 5,500 staff worldwide and closed a plant in Pennsylvania.
• 8/10/01 - Networking equipment maker Advanced Electronic Support Products Inc. said it lost $1.2 million in the second quarter from a profit a year ago, and that it had cut 11 percent of its work force as a reaction to weaker growth prospects.
• 8/10/01 - Siemens is deciding whether to toss out 3,000 employees to milk more savings from its struggling telecommunications division. The company had already announced over 10,000 job cuts earlier this year.
• 8/10/01 - Back in the news, drug and chemicals company Bayer has announced it would cut 2,200 employees including 1,800 declared yesterday. The company said the total job cuts would reach 4,000 by 2005.
• 8/9/01 - Online music site Listen.com handed out pink slips to 30 of its 95 employees. This week saw the third round of layoffs for the company this year. In January, Listen.com axed 42 people. In April, another 35 employees were let go. The cuts were across the board, and were necessitated by a change in the company's direction said a Listen.com spokesman.
• 8/9/01 - Iomega Corp. said it will cut roughly 1,250 employees from its global work force during the second half of 2001 and will take a third-quarter restructuring charge of between $55 million and $65 million in an effort to bring its costs in line with revenue and improve cash flow. The company said the job cuts will trim its work force to 2,050 from 3,300 and that affected employees have already been notified.
• 8/9/01 - Flooz.com mysteriously took down its service Wednesday night leaving only the message "We are currently unable to process your transaction". A spokesman from the company said the company planned to issue a statement later today. Partner sites that use Flooz's currency including Barnes & Nobles.com and Outpost.com, declined accepting Flooz money.
• 8/9/01 - Drug and chemicals company Bayer announced it will eliminate 1800 jobs worldwide and cease operations at 15 production sites in order to reduce costs. This comes one day after pulling its drug Lipobay/Baycol from the market due to concerns over side effects.
• 8/8/01 - Safety rating company Underwriters Laboratories Inc. said it is cutting 375 jobs in a bid to make the company more cost-effective. The not-for-profit organization has been under restructuring since March, when its new president and chief executive Loring Knoblauch came to the company with plans of streamlining UL's testing and expanding its functions.
• 8/8/01 - Hotel chain Wyndham International Inc. has laid off 850 headquarters staff and hotel managers already this year - about 3 percent of its work force - in response to a downturn in business travel caused by the slow economy.
• 8/8/01 - Serena Software will be laying off 12% of its staff amid lowering its second-quarter revenue and earnings forecast. The company blamed the harsh economic environment.
• 8/8/01 - Lucent Technologies is again reducing its workforce, this time in France. The company will be tossing 550 of its 1,300 French employees out in an effort to lower costs and restructure their global operations.
• 8/8/01 - Computer maker Gateway plans to cease its operations in Ireland and the United Kingdom. This move would effectively remove its operations out of Europe and remove 1,085 of its employees. The company has had three consecutive quarters of losses forcing them to rethink their business strategy possibly cutting prices to gain market share. Gateway is also considering ending its operations in Asia where they experienced a 52% decline in sales.
• 8/7/01 - Blastcast.com announced that it has abandoned its Internet media business plan and has placed the company up for sale. Blastcast's principal assets include a Canadian subsidiary, the trademark "blastcast" and top-level Internet domain names for .com, .net, .org, .ca, .jp, .de, .co.uk, .tv and .cc.
• 8/7/01 - Partly in an effort to save an annual $8,000,000, WJ Communications will be trimming 20% of its staff. The company designs, develops and manufactures broadband communications products for fiber optic, broadband cable and wireless communications networks.
• 8/7/01 - Application service provider Apptus Inc. filed for Chapter 7 liquidation. This move will allow a court trustee to sell the company's assets to pay creditors claims while the company ends operations. The company owned creditors a total of $667,168.
• 8/7/01 - Broadband Internet service provider Covad plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection by mid-August in order to erase debt reaching about $1.4 billion. The company said this restructuring plan would allow the company to become debt-free by January of 2002 and it would not affect business operations, its DSL service or any other customer services.
• 8/6/01 - CacheFlow plans to cut 18% of its workforce. The job cuts are targeted towards its sales and general and administrative divisions as well as redundant and overlapping positions created by the acquisition of companies Springbank and Entera. The company said its expects first-quarter revenue to be about $20 million whereas analysts expected $21.6 million.
• 8/6/01 - 700 employees of United Business Media received pink slips as a result of its technology advertising income dropping sharply over the last year. The company is a parent company to CMP Media and PR Newswire. About 500 of the now ex-employees are in the media group which publishes Information Week and Internet Week.
• 8/6/01 - Previo in a reorganization effort will reduce its workforce by 40 people and focus its marketing and sales efforts exclusively on North America after a surge in North American online registrations. The company creates products and services that improve business information technology.