Here at Crenk we are looking to expand our writing staff. Currently we have openings for writers on the following topics:
If you are interested in any specific topic then it would be great to hear from you. If you can send over a brief intro with some previous work, then we can discuss the finer details.
Thanks, Crenk Team.
Digg has finally made some critical changes to the way they are doing business. It has been reported by various sources this morning that Digg has fired about 10% of their staff and are hiring a direct sales team. I know this statement is probably bitter sweat for some of the employees fired, but Digg really needed to change the way they were doing business or eventually everyone there was going to be out of work.
This all comes on the back of BusinessWeek recently disclosing that Digg’s revenue was just $4.8 million in 2007, and through the first three quarters of 2008, $6.4 million. These results meant that they lost about $2.8 million 2007 and $4 million in 2008.
Digg are making these changes for one reason and that is to find a buyer! In my opinion Digg has to make a profit to have any chance of a acquisition. I think the team Digg have really taken the site as far as they can, because they had so many opportunities to implement Digg into a white label solution which would bring in million in license fees, but they were too busy trying for an acquisition based upon heavy loses. Is it just me or does this sound like a stupid business model. I know these days most tech startups don’t have a business model when they first start and they seem to be very reluctant to even add some advertising to at least generate some revenue. In this current climate that kind of business acument really doesn’t boad well for an acquisition!
Where do you head to find technology company information? Currently, there are a lot of technology blogs that provide company directories, but I think there are two key players that stand out in this sector and I’m sure their pageviews will sore in the coming months and years. Those two players have to be Crunchbase and Tradevibes.
Crunchbase is the company directory from the superblog Techcrunch. Crunchbase is build on a wiki type system and instead of just writing about companies and collect data, Michael Arrington thought it would be a good idea to actually put it all together and make some more money from it. Crunchbase has a great look about it and it brings together information from some of the most well-known companies. On Crunchbase you can find descriptions of the company, funding information, location and telephone numbers, competitors and staffing information. I would like Crunchbase to find new ways to make money apart from advertising, like a highlighted company feature.
Tradevibes has a bit of a different layout, but essentially it is the same concept with the type of wiki development. Tradevibes provide a similar set of information as Crunchbase but it also has additional features, such as a fantasy exchange game, voting system on companies, and forums. The design on Tradevibes is actually a bit cluttered and there seems to be a lot of products that have simply just been put together to add features, instead of developing something in house that matches the site. For example, the job board in the left column from SimplyHired.
Both of these companies are leading the way in this niche, however there still seems to be a lot of issues in terms of design and integrating information that is actually needed, without information overload. It would also be nice to see integration with several technology blogs to provide news about each of the companies in the database, but so far even this seems to be limited.
The big news yesterday was that AOL has released approx 20% of its entire staff. That is about 2,000 people. AllthingsD received an email from AOL CEO explaining what they are trying to achieve and why restructuring was necessary.
AOL has purchased3 key advertising networks this year: Tacoda, AdTech and Third Screen Media. These networks will be tied in to AOLs main advertising network, Advertising.com. The overall aim for AOL must be to either, merge these networks and then sell or IPO. However, with the downsizing they have been doing will they any staff left by the time they sell or IPO?
I have just read an article this morning on News.com, which outlines that Snocap has axed about 60% of its workforce. It is also reported that Snocap might be for sale and that Snocap has received interest from several companies. It looks like there might have been more than meets the eye with the termination last week of CDBaby from their Snocap partnership.
This is not the best new for one of the companies within our group, RouteNote. Snocap is a founding partner with our new service that will launching in the coming months.
