A quick update on the Mobuzz saga (the Spanish online video entertainment startup turned to asking for user donations to keep its head above water): they’re now officially in the deadpool.

From the website:

It is with deep regret that we inform our friends and fans that MobuzzTV has closed officially today. We need to take some time to see how best to reorganise our project. We have been talking with many interested parties but unfortunately we have not been able to financially sustain our operations until the agreements were closed.

The company has made it clear that all donations will be returned, and that the video archive built up over the last 4 years will remain online.

Even Google is getting into the downsizing spirit. It just announced that it is killing Lively, its browser-baseed virtual worlds that could be embedded into other Websites. Lively launched just last July. The death notice on the site says it will shut down on December 31, so we are adding Lively to the deadpool.

Lively just never took off, and was extremely far afield for Google. We should have known something was up when we noticed that it didn’t work with Google’s own browser, Chrome.

What else is being cut at Google?

AOL is on a product-cutting spree. In addition to the shuttering of XDrive, AOL Pictures, MyMobile And Bluestring, the company will also be shutting down the AOL Video Uploads service starting this week.

Users must move their videos prior to December 18, when the service closes for good and the videos will no longer be available. AOL is recommending that users transfer videos to Motionbox, a New York based video sharing and editing startup that we first covered in 2006.

The FAQ that AOL will distribute to users this week is below. This change doesn’t appear to affect AOL Video itself, which focuses on professional content from Hulu, CBS and other sources.

AOL Video Uploads

Q. When will the AOL Video Uploads close?

Effective December 18th, 2008 , AOL Video Uploads (uncutvideo.aol.com ) will be closed and all videos stored will no longer be accessible through AOL Video Uploads. AOL has evaluated several personal video offerings, and believes Motionbox, a leader in online personal video, to be the best suited to handle the needs of AOL Video Upload users. Motionbox is FREE and includes some great features.

We are recommending users go through a simple transfer process to move their videos to Motionbox, and also giving them the option to download or delete videos stored on the site.

Since the last time we gave an update at the beginning of the month there have been 20,171 layoffs at tech and media companies added to our Layoff Tracker. That brings the total to 58,709 tech layoffs over the past two and a half months.

One previously unreported layoff we have been able to confirm is 10 people at classifieds search engine Oodle, which occurred last week and represents a 20% reduction. Another layoff happened at Rearden Commerce, which trimmed about 40 people, or 10 percent (and Rearden just raised $100 million, showing that no company is immune).

The biggest layoff this month was announced just today by Sun Microsystems, which will be reducing its headcount by 5,000 to 6,000 (15 to 18 percent). Other big tech companies also announced cuts earlier this week, including Applied Materials (1,800 layoffs), Nokia Siemens Networks (750), and National Semiconductor (330).

Christos Cotsakos has the opposite of the Midas touch. Everything he touches seems only to implode. This happened to E-Trade back in 2000-2002 when he was the CEO. Cotsakos was famously replaced after enriching himself with a $78 million pay package during a year the stock tanked 53 percent. He had to give back some of that money, but kept enough to live lavishly in Florida and pour millions of dollars into an ill-conceived social network for international swingers called Moli.

Never heard of Moli? Don’t worry. It also just imploded. Moli was a me-three social network that was founded in 2006 way after that train had left the station, and didn’t launch publicly until January 2008 at DEMO. The main differentiating factor, if you can call it that, was the ability to show different profiles to different sets of contacts (personal, business, family). The site never got above 2.5 million visitors a month, according to Compete (see chart above). And we have learned from several former employees that most of its staff has been laid off, from a peak employment of about 55.

There was a big round of layoffs last September, when all but 15 or so people were let go. Last week, most of the remaining employees were cut loose. The site is still up, but it seems like there are only a handful of people left keeping the lights on hoping for a sale. That is unlikely to happen. We are placing Moli in the deadpool. (And something tells me many more social networks are headed there as well).

Atlanta, GA-based iKobo, a company that provides a worldwide money transfer service, is discontuining its operations, effective immediately. In an e-mail to its users, the company writes:

We regret to inform you that iKobo is discontinuing services. Effective immediately, no further money transfers to your iKobo account will be allowed. Your card issued by Palm Desert National Bank will continue to be active until November 13, 2008. Your card will no longer work after this date. However, the card funds are safe and guaranteed, even after the card is de-activated.

The rest of the e-mail after the jump.

Dash Navigation is getting out of the hardware business and cutting 55 jobs, or 65% of its workers. The startup, which is backed by both Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, makes the Dash Express car GPS device. This is a network-connected GPS that pools the location and speeds of all nearby Dash owners to give them back real-time traffic reports. It also supports geoRSS feeds, and other GPS apps.

Despite its novel features (I am a big fan of the device) and the $71 million the company has raised, going into the hardware is business looks like it was a wrong turn. Dash will now pursue a strategy of partnering with other device manufacturers, including cell phone-makers, to add its software to their devices.

Since our last update a week ago, we’ve added 18,885 job eliminations at tech and media companies to our Layoff Tracker. That brings the total to 38,538 layoffs across 108 companies over the past two months.

Some of the bigger reductions this week came from Motorola (3,000), Qwest (1,200), and Electronic Arts (600). Among startups, there were job cuts at Revision3 (10), Emusic (10), Sugar Publishing (9), Aliph/Jawbone (25), matchmine (42, deadpool), and Gizmos (10). We’ve also started adding media companies facing disruption from the Internet, including Gannett (3,000), Time Inc. (600), and Conde Nast (32), whose Portfolio magazine laid off nearly all of its Website staff.

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article. (For those more interested in who is hiring, check out our job board).

Here is the full list of layoffs from the past week:

Two weeks after laying off 30 percent of his employees, Jaxtr CEO Konstantin Guericke finds himself out of a job. He is being replaced by vice president of engineering Bahman Koohestani (former CTO at Cyworld and Orbitz), who will be acting as “interim” CEO.

Jaxtr offers VoIP calls to both your regular and mobile phone. Its last round was a $10 million Series B in June. Investors include Lehman Brothers Venture Capital (yup, they are still around), August Capital, Mangrove, Mayfield, DFJ, and angels Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman. (Guericke was part of the founding team at LinkedIn).

The company is obviously going through a rough time, but Koohestani still spins it as a “very healthy” business. He offers the following partial stats:

San Francisco based PowerReviews, which has raised over $21 million in venture financing, has let 30% of staff go, say multiple sources. Among those that left is VP Marketing Jay Shaffer.

The company let retailers include Amazon-like product review features into their websites, for free. PowerReviews then aggregates reviews from their client retailers on their own customer-facing site called Buzzillions.

The company had at least 42 employees before the layoffs. We’ve contacted them for confirmation and have added them to the Layoff Tracker.

Massachusetts based MatchMine, which raised $10 million a year ago, has shut down operations.

The company created media recommendations that categorizes and analyzes your media likes and dislikes in order to serve you content that is more to your taste.

In a blog post today CEO Michael Troiano talks about the shutdown, and encourages others to hire the team, but he gives few details about the reason for the failure.

He suggests there’s some drama behind the scenes: “I could not have imagined this last Thursday, let alone earlier. It is one thing to be failed, quite another to have been deceived.” My guess (and it’s only a guess) is he’s pointing the finger at his investor, Kraft Group. Either a promised bridge funding fell through, or Kraft pulled what was left of their previous investment out of the company. That’s the only explanation for how the CEO didn’t know the company was shutting down a day before it happened.

The bomb-shelter mentality among startups is now so severe that even companies raising money are announcing layoffs in response to diminished economic prospects. Boston-based Helium just closed a $17 million series A financing about ten days ago, and then cut 30 percent of the organization (18 people) last week. CEO Mark Ranalli tells me:

We expect a deterioration of overall ad rates, and a slowing of the economy in general. Our approach was to take a third of every group across engineering, customer service, and sales.

Ranalli has been raising the $17 million piecemeal over the past year from hedge funds, family trusts, and wealthy individuals. The last $2 million came in two weeks ago. Combined with the current cuts, Ranalli believes he has enough to make it to profitability.

This has been a brutal month or so for tech layoffs. According to our Layoff Tracker, there have been 19,683 job eliminations at tech companies announced since mid-September, and we’re not even counting the 24,600 people at Hewlett-Packard who are being eliminated as a result of its merger with EDS.

But only five big companies make up more than 90 percent of the layoffs: Xerox (3,000), Dell (8,900), Yahoo (1,500), eBay (1,500), and German chipmaker Qimonda (3,000). The other 33 companies are mostly startups, and collectively account for 1,683 layoffs. Although three more companies (Sony Ericsson, Nvidia, and TicketMaster) account for an additional 1,110 job losses.

After stripping those out, you get closer to a pure number of layoffs at tech startups: 573

In July we wrote about AOL’s plans to shutter a number of services based on an internal email from EVP Products and Marketing Kevin Conroy.

Next week, AOL says, they’ll begin to communicate the news to consumers around the shutdown of three of those properties - AOL Pictures, BlueString and Xdrive.
AOL Pictures will close in December, and users will have the chance to move photos to American Greetings PhotoWorks, download photos to a personal computer, or purchase an archive of photos on DVD. Photos will be available until June 2009.

XDrive and Bluestring will close on December 31. Users can download files or purchase a DVD until that time. After that, it sounds like the files will be deleted.

A FAQ is reprinted below.

In a post on his blog, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has announced that his human powered search engine has laid off 10% of its staff. Along with the layoffs Calacanis writes that the company will be doing some “smart things” to help cut costs, including outsourcing much of its editorial department to freelancers instead of in-house staff. Calacanis pegs the number of full-time staff cut at around 5 or 6, but that number could change depending on how well the freelancers work out for the company.

From his blog post:

While I anticipated and prepared for the ‘internet winter’ we’re now facing (you’ve read my posts and e-mails about the startup depression I’m sure), I failed to realize how bad the situation would get. It’s much worse than I thought it would be, and ignoring market conditions today would only mean deeper cuts down the road.

It’s my responsibility to make this hard decision and I don’t take it lightly. To the people impacted I’m very sorry that I wasn’t able to anticipate this better. It’s my fault and I’m sorry that you’ve got to bear the burden of my inability to better prepare.

Ok, here we go again. As soon as people get tired of blaming the venture capitalists for the downturn and layoffs, they start to point the finger at bloggers and journalists who write about them. In a blog post, SocialMedian founder Jason Goldberg criticizes us for our coverage of layoffs and deadpooled companies, saying it’s “sensationalist journalism,” adding “there’s no need to go tabloid when startups go sideways or don’t make it.”

Fred Wilson brought this up almost two years ago when he criticized our coverage of failed companies as well. A year ago Louis Gray said similar things. Our response is the same now as it was then: Don’t shoot the messenger.

Reporting on layoffs or a dead company isn’t tabloid journalism. We do not take pleasure in seeing companies fail. But it’s inevitable that most will. And not only is it news, but readers have a right to know about it.

Eight months after acquiring San Diego-based startup Goowy, AOL has decided to shutter its Yourminis personalized homepage. Notice that the two-year old Flash-based service would be shut down entirely on October 27th went out to users today in an email. It encourages them to export their OPML files and content for migration over to myAOL, iGoogle, or Netvibes:

Users who hadn’t already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing to communicate to users what is going on or when it might be fixed.

Even Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher, who sold the company to Ask.com in 2005, is ready to jump ship. In a Twitter message yesterday he said “Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.”

The problem is that Bloglines isn’t updating feeds from thousands of blogs, including this one (about a third of the feeds I follow have errors). Meanwhile, those feeds are quite readable in other feed readers like Newsgator and Google Reader. The most recent TechCrunch post our 25,000+ Bloglines readers see is from May 14.

One thing investors don’t really like to see is founders abandoning the startups they funded. But that is exactly what Ted Dziuba is doing with his startup PressFlip.

In a blog post Dziuba wrote that he was leaving the company “mostly because I’m going to be a father in March and need some stability, but also because I’m tired of the fight.”

I’ve spoken to a lot of CEOs this week who are going through layoffs or who are thinking of going through going through layoffs. The list of those who’ve pulled the trigger gets longer every day, and the unparty seems to just be getting started based on the email flow that we’re seeing.

Why are companies doing this now? Based on the CEOs I’ve spoken with, it isn’t just about cutting costs in preparation for a downturn. Some CEOs see this as a once-in-a-startup opportunity to get rid of the deadwood in the company.