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.
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The disc opens to a folder containing 23 construction kits ranging from 80 to 180 bpm, with most hovering around 120. I'm immediately impressed by the scope of what's offered: everything from dream-pop, robot music, techno-goth and early Ministry-like electro industrial (minus screaming guitars) to erotic '80s house and even a cool downtempo new-wave rap beat