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Zagat the restaurant reviewer lays off 19 employeesYesterday

Zagat the restaurant reviewing website that contains over 40,000 restaurants worldwide, has laid off 19 employees, which is 14% of the overall workforce. Earlier this year, Zagat tried to put itself on sale but couldn’t meet the desired value of $200 million. Last June the company gave up on the sale and now its focusing more on developing mobile products.

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The New York Times website covers India-Pakistan conflict on front pageYesterday

In an effort to keep readers coming back The New York Times opened up to ‘outside content’, putting the recent Indian accusations on its front page. The New York Times also launched Times Extra – a service that incorporates content from other news sources and blogs. This comes as more and more people look to the Internet as a source of news, and efforts to remain in the top ranks sees news services opening up to new trends.

The New York Times also removed the condition of paid subscriptions so they could have more readers coming on to their site frequently. The site is using Blogrunner (a news aggregator owned by NYT) to incorporate third-party content onto its site. Marc Frons the chief technology officer for digital operation at NYT states:

The days when content sites were afraid to link to other s

CNBC also to fire employees?Yesterday

According to the New York Post, CNBC might be affected by NBC’s cost cutting move. The company may have to lay off around 80 employees. NBC earlier announced a plan to cut costs up to $500 million in October. Also at that time NBC Universal’s CEO Jeff Zucker asked all departments to make 3% cut in expenses. There is still no word from the company on this matter.

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Seesmic to go for a major updateYesterday

Video conversation site Seesmic will be have a major update tomorrow. The update is scheduled on December 5th between 0800GMT to 1900GMT. Though users will be able to watch videos but won’t be able to record them.

According to the site:

The site should have very limited downtime, but will be in read-only mode for several hours towards the beginning of the update. While in that state, you will still be able to play but not record videos.

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Wireless security company Roc2Loc raises $2 million in Series AYesterday

The San Francisco, California based wireless security and monitoring company Roc2Loc, has raised $2 million of the expected $5 million in the first round of funding. The rest of the $3 million is expected in the next couple of weeks. The amount is raised from Claremont Creek Ventures and will be used in testing sensors. The system provides short term security and monitoring solution for a wide range of businesses such as mobile storage, construction sites, truck releasing, etc. The company plans to launch the system by May, 2009.

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