Dot Com News from Week of June 18, 2001

• 6/22/01 - The Dow Jones Co. says it will make more staff and expense reductions, conceding $120 million in annual cuts announced in the first quarter were not enough to get the company through the current economic slowdown.
• 6/22/01 - Microsoft Corp. plans to shutter its free e-mail newsletter service ListBot in order to draw users to its paid service. In an e-mail sent to users, the Redmond-based software giant, which bought ListBot as part of a larger acquisition in 1998, said the service would be shut down in August.
• 6/21/01 - iVillage is cutting nearly half of its staff, just days after it completed its merger with former rival Women.com. The layoffs, which will shrink the staff of the combined companies from about 350 to less than 200, come on top of two previous rounds of job cuts at Women.com and iVillage in the last two months. The latest cuts are part of an attempt to rein in costs and reach profitability.
• 6/21/01 - Teradyne Inc., a maker of semiconductor-testing equipment, said its second-quarter results will miss expectations by a wide margin and that it will lay off 180 additional workers, bring its total layoffs for the year to 1,200, or about 12% of its work force.
• 6/21/01 - Discount fashion e-tailer Iyou.com is closing shop. The company has notified customers that it will be shutting down by the end of the month and is offering a 50 percent discount on its remaining inventory. Iyou is closing down because of a lack of funding, said Robert Tran, who directed production and operations at the company.
• 6/21/01 - Maxtor Corp. announced an additional reduction of 1,500 employees, or 14% of its work force, beyond its previous cutback of 570 employees in April. The disk-drive manufacturer, citing weak demand for hard-disk drives, attributed the work force reduction to efforts to reduce expenses following its merger with Quantum HDD.
• 6/21/01 - Wolf Camera Inc., an Atlanta specialty-photo retailer, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Wolf has 5,000 employees and 500 stores in 20 states. The company attributed its troubles to its 1998 acquisition of the rival Fox Photo chain from Kodak.
• 6/20/01 - Chipmaker LSI Logic said that it will lay off about 3 percent of its global work force of 7,700 as part of ongoing cost-cutting measures.
• 6/19/01 - YellowBrix completes its acquisition of troubled rival iSyndicate. ISyndicate filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in San Francisco as part of a deal whereby YellowBrix will acquire its assets, rather than the company as a whole. The acquisition is contingent on the approval of the bankruptcy court. ISyndicate laid off half its staff in April and had been looking for a buyer.
• 6/19/01 - Bluefly, an online apparel and home-accessories retailer, said it would cut 32 jobs, or 34 percent of its work force, to achieve profitability by the fourth quarter of 2002. The New York-based company, which sells clothing by designers such as Prada and Polo Ralph Lauren at discount prices, said it will also take a pretax charge of about $600,000 in the second quarter relating to the cutbacks.
• 6/19/01 - Infinium Software Inc. said it will lay off 120 employees, or about 24% of its work force of 500, in a cost-cutting move. It will record a related charge of $10 million to $12 million in the fiscal third quarter ending June 30.
• 6/19/01 - Intel said that it plans to stop selling its own brand of general-purpose routers and switches--a move that will lead to several hundred job cuts at a facility in Denmark.

• 6/18/01 - Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest newspaper company, is cutting 1,700 jobs to cope with a sharp drop in advertising sales. The number of cuts, which come on top of about 400 jobs eliminated earlier this year, is equivalent to slightly less than 10 percent of the company's work force of about 22,000.
• 6/18/01 - Level 3 Communications announced layoffs and a massive overhaul to its financial projections, as it struggles to survive the economic downturn. Its management has also agreed to halt selling of company shares. Level 3 plans to cut 1,400 employees from its payroll, or about 25 percent of its 5,900 employees.
• 6/18/01 - DigitalConvergence, a maker of digital scanners, said that it reduced its staff by about 44 percent as it looks for new financing. The Dallas-based company laid off 60 full-time workers and 50 contract or temporary workers. Overall, the company had more than 250 employees.
• 6/18/01 - PurchasePro.com Inc. shares tumbled after the troubled business-to-business company announced layoffs of about half of its employees and announced the resignation of its president. The company said it will implement cost-control programs and focus on selling software products to increase revenue. The job cuts will bring the company's work force to under 300 people.
• 6/18/01 - Interactive computer game maker Humongous Entertainment has laid off 82 workers--more than 40 percent of its staff. The remaining 117 staffers will focus on the company's "Backyard" series of children's sports games.
• 6/18/01 - This following note appears on the Zing.com Web site: "With the greatest regret we must inform you that, as of July 2, 2001, the Zing.com service will be shutting down permanently. After this date, your photos will no longer be available on Zing.com. We understand how important your pictures are to you, and are pleased to announce that we have arranged for Ofoto, a Kodak company and the leading online photo service, to be the ongoing resource for all your future online photography needs.