Monday, December 18, 2000		Latest in IT world

Dot.com lay-offs continue

The dot.com scenario seems to be heading towards troubled times with more portals announcing cuts in pay rolls. The popular technology portal techies.com, which provides career advice and job postings for more than 5,70,000 registered information technology workers has recently announced laying off of some 120 employees— nearly 40 percent of its total strength, under pressure on profitability issue. The portal has even laid off employees working on an ongoing project of creating a second finance based Internet portal. Following the move by techies, bigstep.com has also announced to lay off 20 per cent of its work force, under pressure to secure a long-term growth. Bigstep offers a suite of Web hosting services to small businesses wanting to build and market e-commerce sites. Joining the bandwagon is yet another extremely popular portal askJeeves.com, which has announced to cut down employee strength by 180 employees from its payrolls — amounting to 25 percent of its work force. Internet portal askjeeves.com is a very popular portal that offers very good search capabilities. The company is reviewing its profitability and going in for financial restructuring.

Intel to launch low budget 1.3 GHz
Pentium 4 processor

After receiving a much below than expected response from the computer users for its most awaited chip of the millennium – Pentium 4, Intel has been forced to consider launching a variety of new chips for consumers in the budget segment. Intel plans to dole out the 1.3 GHz version of its newly launched Pentium - 4 processor in the first quarter of 2001 at a cost of under US $1,500. The company is also planning to introduce an improved version of its Celeron processor running at 800 MHz. The popular Notebook chip Transmeta would be introduced in lower power rating on a frequency of 500 MHz for Pentium III notebooks. Moreover the new versions of the XScale chip will also be introduces in the first quarter of 2001. The company has also planned an new strategy to take on AMD, which has gained a strong foothold in the consumer PC segment. Intel has for long dominated this segment, but now with cost effective and more powerful processor from competitors, Intel has suffered a blow in this segment. Infact the launching of Pentium 4 – 1.3 GHz is aimed at bridging the gap between Pentium III and Pentium 4, where AMD has created a niche market for it’s products. Recently Intel announced a cut in the prices of Pentium 4 processors to boost its low-end processors. Intel has been in the eyes of storm during the past few months due to downward trend in PC sales and lower profitability warnings by analysts.