The SF Chronicle is reporting that the layoffs are in progress and represent 8 percent of Adobe’s global workforce. They will affect all regions and business units. Adobe plans to offer more details Dec. 16 during its regular earnings conference call.

“The global economic crisis significantly impacted our revenue during the fourth quarter,” Adobe’s president and chief executive officer, Shantanu Narayen, said in a statement. “We have taken action to reduce our operating costs and fine-tune the focus of our resources on key strategic priorities.”

Narayen said the chief cause of Adobe’s problems is weaker-than-expected demand for the company’s latest software, Creative Suite 4, which began shipping in October.

The suite combines several tools used by illustrators and designers and is central to Adobe’s plans to create software that can connect the Web with PCs and phones.

Everything you wanted to ask Google is in an interesting presentation prepared by FaberNovel, a french consulting firm. This presentation gives a high level overview of the company’s overall strategy and insight into its success. It attempts to shed light on some key questions such as:

1. Why won’t Google be touched by the crisis?
2. How is Google going to change the mobile world?
3. Why isn’t YouTube a portal?
4. Why does Microsoft fear Google?
5. How Google wants to compete with Facebook?
6. Why does Google buy satellites?
7. How does Google buy traffic?
8. Why has Google acquired DoubleClick?
9. Why doesn’t Google monetize all of its services?
10. How does Google capitalize on Open Source developers work?
11. How did Google capture the offline advertising market?
12. Why is Google stealing our voices
13. Why isn’t PageRank an efficient obstacle against rival entries on the market?
14. How does Google turn advertising into information and performance?

A social cause that we support, donate to, and are very passionate about at the WebGuild are animals. Recently, a local ranch - owned by the City of San Jose - for which we had spent two years working to improve the conditions for animals, was shut down leaving the fate of 200 cats in jeopardy. Animal Services were to euthanize the cats. To prevent this atrocity, we enlisted the help of a local no-kill animal rescue organization, TownCats, to aid in saving the lives of these voiceless animals whom had become the victims of an unfortunate human situation. The news media including CBS, ABC, KTVU, and the San Jose Mercury all covered the story and donations, adoptive homes, and volunteers came in. A local vet generously provided a temporary shelter to house the cats and we are happy to announce that on Saturday, December 6, TownCats and the City of San Jose will be holding an Adoption Fair to find the cats good, adoptive homes. So, if you are looking for a new best friend and to improve the quality of life of an animal, please check it out.

Adoption Fair
************
Saturday, December 6, 2008
10:00 am to 4:00 pm
1820 Hillsdale Avenue, San Jose (Across from Target and next to Flames Coffee Shop)
Adoption Fee: $50 (All the cats have been neutered and vaccinated.)

The software is relatively straightforward, offering a way for iPhone or iPod Touch owners to browse through all the products offered by Amazon.com, as well as by third-party retailers like Target and Macy’s that make their products available online through Amazon.

There is, however, one unusual and noteworthy aspect of the app called Amazon Remembers, which Amazon is calling “experimental.” The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program, who will try to match them with products for sale on Amazon.com. The results will not be instantaneous (between 5 minutes and 24 hours, the company says), but the idea is to entice consumers to buy products from Amazon instead of its offline rivals. Continue Reading

For much of its 10-year history, Google spent money at a pace that was the marvel of Silicon Valley. It hired by the thousands and dished out generous perks, including three free meals a day, free doctors, ski trips and laundry facilities, and subsidized personal trainers. It let engineers spend 20% of their time pursuing pet projects. The company’s goal was to develop new products that would reduce its nearly total reliance on selling ads connected to Internet searches. Continue Reading>>

Related: Google Layoffs - 10,000 Workers Affected

Yahoo has published their top 10 searches for 2008. The list very much reflects American pop culture and popular themes for the year including the presidential elections. And while John McCain might not have been able to beat him, topping the list for four years in a row and seventh time topping the list, was none other than comeback pop princess, Britney Spears. President elect, Barack Obama, came in at number 3.

Here is the top ten:
1. Britney Spears
2. WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment)
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

The list is generated based on factors including absolute volume and growth versus previous periods, to see which themes and trends bubble to the surface. As Yahoo explains it:

People tend to use the search box like a shorthand address bar, so they type in navigational searches like www.youtube.com (or just plain youtube), and those rarely change year after year. The top 10 reflect the top non-navigational searches.

Search isn’t a gauge of popularity. But looking at a bazillion searches helps to gauge patterns in what society finds important or compelling: hence, the top trends like politicians or Olympians.

Why aren’t the American elections the top news? Remember, searches are discrete keywords rather than concepts. The presidential election is a huge storyline that involves people (e.g., Mike Huckabee), events (Super Tuesday), concepts (electoral college), and so on. Complex events can get boiled down to shorthand, such as “iraq” or “china.” But even that, of course, doesn’t cover every related search (“iraqi jobs,” “beijing olympics.”)

Larger in-house and agency settings often present internal walls built between each department, along with classic pros and cons of specialization vs. becoming fragmented.

We’re big advocates of “flat projects,” which means marshaling whatever channels are necessary to accomplish a client’s goal, with as few preconceptions regarding tactics as possible. Yes, many of our jobs are either/or and usually multiple agencies are involved. Still we appreciate the small business SEM thinking of flat projects, especially when applied to big business.

As a starting place for your creative process, here are 5 terrific ways to meld PPC, social media, and SEO for greater impact: Continue Reading >>

US advertising spending could drop between 5 percent and 8 percent in 2009, according to Steve Lanzano, Chief Operating Officer, MPG Group. MPG advises its clients where to spend their advertising dollars.

He says local advertising will likely be hardest hit, including radio, TV, newspapers and traditional billboards. Opportunities are in new media such as video game advertising and some social media although it will be difficult, iPhone related and video games.

He said cut backs in automotive advertising will hurt the sports franchises heavily. The NFL is considering asking the government for a bailout due to the short fall in revenue due to advertising cut backs and lower ticket sales.

Michael Wolff: MySpace. They [meaning News Corp] know they have a huge problem. They’re quaking in their boots about MySpace. It always was a little rustling when I was there, there was this rustling—

Jon Fine: What do you identify as the problem?

MW: Facebook.

JF: OK. But Facebook is still smaller in America, and—

MW: Absolutely. But you know the rhythms of the Internet business, which I think are still, at this point, immutable. Something else comes along—a better technology, a better flavor of the month—and you, the former, are downgraded. Possibly to the point of being downgraded out of existence.

JF: I think there you are falling into a fairly common thing. Facebook—it’s a better experience than MySpace. But the traffic on MySpace and the people on it…

MW: All of the growth now in MySpace is international.

JF: Sure. Because once you get to 75 million in the US, where are you gonna go?

MW: I know they recognize this: “We got to monetize this thing. We got to get this thing off the books.”

JF: Your magazine or my magazine would give both ears to get to $750 million in revenue [which is, very roughly, what MySpace’s revenues are]. The funny thing about MySpace . . .

MW: What they understand, is their $25 billion to $30 billion valuation.—

JF: But that’s [expletive]. We both know that’s [expletive].

MW: It doesn’t make any difference. That’s gonna go down. What they are looking at is the distinct possibility that it can go down to nothing.

JF: How do you find that plausible? It’s not even a utility like—-the anti-Google argument is this: If someone builds a better search engine tomorrow, I have zero switching costs. If I am on MySpace, I have 500 friends. I use it to communicate with people. You can’t just move. It’s a pain in the ass. All your stuff is there.

MW: But that’s exactly what they said about AOL.

JF: You did not develop that relationship with AOL.

MW: You did. You exactly did.

JF: How?

MW: Your email was there, because your friends were there. I mean, AOL operated actually as the community of its day. There were all of those—

JF: But besides the email and, OK, the—

MW: There were the infinite number of chat rooms. Layer upon layer upon layer of sex chat rooms.

JF: Of course. And I give you credit for having pointed to that as the secret driver of its success. But, all you need is a different chat room. You don’t have pictures up [on AOL]. You don’t have your history up there. You don’t have—

MW: It doesn’t matter. What they saw at the time was that [users] were absolutely wedded to AOL. That was Time Warner’s bet on that.

JF: AOL was monodimensional in a way that MySpace is not. I don’t think that’s particularly debatable.

MW: I don’t think that’s true. I think it is–if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.

JF: [unsuccessfully stifling laughter] I don’t mean to get all Murdoch’s-kids on you [an obscure reference to an earlier part of the conversation], but if you are in a band, you are on MySpace. You have to be on MySpace. That’s a powerful driver. And second of all– if I am to accept your reasoning, even though I don’t–as the success of [News Corp’s British tabloid] The Sun will tell you, there are lot of cretins out there and you can make a lot of money off cretins. By appealing to their essential–

MW: No! That is the difference. And that is one of the interesting points of Murdoch. He wants to make money off of what he rightly saw as a rising lower class. He came to this country and he sees, that’s just not really true. No one really identifies with being lower class [in the US]. As soon as it comes to you—‘I am lower class’–you run, and you have to rehabilitate all of your aspirational identifiers.

Today, the Monday after Thanksgiving known as Cyber-Monday, when consumers have traditionally hopped online to take advantage of holiday sales, is expected to be less than stellar. Compared to previous years which experienced double digit growth around 19%, this time around comScore predicts online spending for the holiday season will be flat. In an interview with NBR, Jim Friedland, Internet Analyst with Cowen & Co. said “Everything in online retail looks bad as well. Relative to traditional retail, it looks great. But, we’re still expecting a very, very poor season.” Others are suggesting a 12% increase which seems overly optimistic to me but regardless of what you believe, the numbers can’t be good. Official confirmation came in today from the National Bureau of Economic Research that we have been in a recession since December 2007.

Online shopping only accounts for about 5% of overall retail sales. The online sector is considered a little more immune to the economic valleys because retailers don’t need to carry inventory until orders are placed and people who own computers are considered to be in a higher income bracket.