AOL starts swinging the axe

According to a report by Silicon Alley Insider, sackings for AOL's workforce-decimation scheme have begun, says The Register.

AOL workers began receiving e-mails yesterday afternoon from management asking them to attend an "important meeting Tuesday" - predictably where the axe awaits.

Time Warner's failing Internet division expects to lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 700 people, mostly by the end of March. The company announced the cuts in January, saying the US recession has made online advertisers cut spending by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Online abuse of the world's top brands is rising, reports the BBC.

Cyber-squatting - in which someone registers a domain name with the aim of selling it on at a later date - remains the most common form of abuse.

Cyber-squatting rose by 18% in 2008, to 1 722 133 reported incidents, according to brand specialist MarkMonitor.

At the first public discussion of the Obama administration's much heralded broadband plan, government officials offered virtually no hard answers to the hundreds of people who gathered in person and the 2 500 more who participated via live Web video, says Business Week.

For almost every substantive question about how the billions will be allocated, officials said they are looking for guidance from the public. Bernadette McGuire-Rivera, NTIA associate administrator, said the government is seeking input on "nearly every facet of the programme".

The lack of answers proved frustrating for some participants. Charlie Mattingly, chief executive of Broadband Rural, a small Internet service provider in Texas, was taken aback that the meeting was not more productive.

Rumours are once again swirling that Apple is planning to build a netbook. However, one Apple reseller thinks the computer maker's plans will be a lot less conventional than simply following the herd of vendors now making cheap, lightweight notebook PCs, reports CRN.com.

"I think that it's interesting how this [rumour] has come out not that far after pretty strong indications from Apple corporate on their financial call from last quarter that they still don't believe they can make a laptop cheap enough to both call it a netbook and still call it Apple," says Michael Oh, founder and president of Tech Superpowers, a Boston-based Apple partner.

Sources have reportedly told several Taiwan-based media outlets that Wintek, a maker of small and medium computer displays, and Quanta, the builder of Apple's MacBook and iMac computers, are working with Apple on a 10-inch netbook with a touch-screen display that could be released in the second half of this year.