An executive from social-music site Imeem told CNET News just days ago that the company would not be going through a round of layoffs.
Well, not quite.
Imeem's vice president of marketing, Matt Graves, said the question was actually "whether we had done layoffs, not whether we were going to," and that he answered accordingly. Sneaky! He proceeded to confirm a report from PaidContent that a quarter of the company has been laid off.
"There's not as much money floating around the market, and we had to cut our costs to accommodate," Graves said. He added that the layoffs are companywide--"finance, marketing, communications, product, technical operations"--clarifying the PaidContent assertion that the layoffs had been primarily "on the technical back-end side."
He would not comment on the other half of PaidContent's report--that Imeem is planning to shop itself to prospective buyers. PaidContent's Rafat Ali added that Imeem's projected valuation is more than $200 million, a figure that many media and technology companies might not be willing to fork over at this point.
Imeem has taken venture funding from Sequoia Capital, a firm that has advocated extreme caution and frugality amid financial panic. Another Sequoia-backed company, Jive Software, cut a third of its employees within days of the now-famous letter from the venture firm to its portfolio CEOs.
This post was updated at 12:23 p.m. PDT with comment from Imeem.
Another day, another clump of Facebook financial dirt.
Kara Swisher at All Things Digital wrote early Tuesday that "according to sources," Facebook is considering the possibility of a massive new investment round. If this turns out to be true, it could lift the company's much-talked-about valuation even further into the stratosphere. Facebook's last investment round, a $25 million bounty in 2006, pushed its pre-money valuation to about $525 million. This rumored new round, which Swisher claims is "well beyond" that scope, could solidify Facebook's position in the $6 billion to $10 billion club (where, thus far, only speculation has placed it).
Swisher also speculates that Microsoft could be one of the potential players in this murky new investment round; Microsoft, after all, is responsible for the advertising contract that makes up a considerable chunk of Facebook's revenue, and it's also one of the names that pops up the most as buyout rumors surface and resurface.
"While its revenues are growing strongly, insiders report, so are its costs," Swisher's post explains, "as it ratchets up headcount and features and services. Thus, it will need a lot of investment to kept competitive, including increasing its international profile."
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