Dot Com News from Week of January 7, 2002
- 1/11/02 - Gadzoox, a troubled maker of networking hardware used to join servers and storage systems, has laid off an undisclosed number of employees, shut down some facilities and eliminated some contractor jobs in an effort to become profitable.
- 1/11/02 - Philips Electronics will close one of its plants at the end of 2002 seeing the termination of 1,200 of its employees. The plant manufactures television picture tubes. The company is taking this step to remain profitable.
- 1/11/02 - Automaker Ford Motor Co. will eliminate 35,000 of its 345,000 employees across the planet with 21,500 employees being cut from North America alone. This is being done due to slowing sales in a weak economy. Ford also plans to close manufacturing plants in the next several years and will discontinue four of its car models.
- 1/10/02 - CNN is cutting more jobs as it plans to sack its struggling sports network. The Atlanta-based cable news operation told sports news workers Wednesday that many of them will lose their jobs later this year as it replaces CNN-Sports Illustrated with a new sports network. About 200 people work for the sports news operation. The exact size of the future cuts is unclear, but it is likely to be the biggest at CNN since it eliminated the jobs of 400 employees, or 10 percent of its staff, a year ago.
- 1/10/02 - CMP Media's Internet Week has ceased publication as of its Jan. 7 issue, according to sources inside the company, making it the latest technology publication to fall victim to the dour advertising market. Staff members at the weekly magazine were notified Thursday of its closure. However, it is unclear how many employees will be laid off.
- 1/10/02 - SignalSoft Corp., a developer of location-aware software services that identify where a caller is located, said it will cut 30 jobs, or about 11% of its work force, to save money.
- 1/10/02 - Motorola Inc. said it will cut 2,000 manufacturing jobs as it consolidates production in fewer sites around the world to cut costs. The layoffs come from four of the mobile-phone and silicon-chip maker's operations: two in Sendai, Japan; one in Austin, Texas; and a previously announced layoff of 800 in Hong Kong. No plants will be shut, and no more manufacturing layoffs are planned in 2002. The 2,000 manufacturing layoffs follow hard on the heels of a company announcement that Motorola will lay off about 20% of its top 600 executives.
- 1/10/02 - Forrester Research Inc., a market-research company, said it plans to eliminate about 125 positions, or 22% of its work force, blaming continued weakness in the technology sector.
- 1/10/02 - Motient Corp., one of the two U.S. networks that supports Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry wireless e-mail product, filed for Chapter 11 protection.
- 1/10/02 - Burlington Industries plans to lay off as many as 4,000 workers. The textile maker, which is in Chapter 11, cited foreign imports and the weak economy.
- 1/9/02 - Financial services firm Merrill Lynch announced it has eliminated approximately 9,000 employees. The company partially blamed the events of September 11 for the cuts and expects its net revenue to be 8% lower than its last quarter revenue of $5.15 billion.
- 1/8/02 - Barksdale Group, a venture-capital firm founded in 1999 at the height of the Internet bubble by technology pioneer Jim Barksdale, is breaking up. The four partners of Barksdale Group, who came together through their involvement with Netscape Communications Corp., are going their separate ways.
- 1/8/02 - Northern Light Technology, one of the oldest search services on the Web, says it is closing the curtains on its free public Web site Jan. 16 to focus solely on licensing its technology. The company will focus on licensing its content library to enterprises and creating search services for corporations.
- 1/8/02 - General Motors plans to offer early-retirement incentives to thousands of white-collar workers in hopes of eliminating about 5,000 jobs.
- 1/7/02 - Vizzavi, the ballyhooed Internet joint venture of Vivendi Universal and Vodafone Group, announced 100 layoffs and the resignation of its chief executive, signaling a retreat from its ambitious plans to compete with AOL and Yahoo.