HP woes continue as 5,000 more employees face the axe (updated)

It certainly won't be a happy new year for thousands of HP employees -- not when the company has increased its layoff numbers yet again. Hewlett-Packard already adjusted the number of people it needed to let go from 27,000 to 29,000 a year ago, but it's now added another 5,000 to the total. According to HP's new SEC 10-K filing, cutting off 34,000 positions will save the ailing firm $4.1 billion per fiscal year. Since the company's only done removing 24,600 people, it's bound to let go of 9,000 more until October 2014. The good news (for everyone left anyway) is that CEO Meg Whitman has promised that this will be the last big round of layoffs. HP's undergone several management changes and restructuring efforts these past few years, though, so here's hoping Whitman's words hold true.

Update (01/01/14): An HP spokesperson reached out and clarified that the company has known it'd likely go beyond 29,000 since early 2013. A SEC filing from March last year states that "the total expected headcount reductions could vary as much as 15% from

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Berlin Startups Continue Consolidation, As Moped Crashes Into 6Wunderkinder

Back in the Summer we saw the first signs of Berlin’s startup hot-house begin to consolidate. Amen has been the most high-profile company to throw in the towel and merge with a fellow Berlin startup, after an almost Herculean effort to get acquired by a big US company.

Others, like the Toast app and Gidsy also withered or were acquired (in Gidsy’s case). The latest is Moped, a messaging startup which was somewhat ahead of its time, prior to the explosion of similar such apps in the latter part of this year. On Moped, private messaging with the same useful hashtags you find on Twitter was integrated with Dropbox. Later it pivoted into the enterprise space with a product for teams.

Founder Schuyler Deerman has confirmed to users in an email that Moped had been acquired by 6Wunderkinder, the makers of Wunderlist and would be shutting down on December 31st. After that Moped will no longer be available. All Moped users are eligible for a free month of Wunderlist Pro, which lets you have conversations inside their to do app. He declined to comment further. 6Wunderkinder – which raised $19M in a Series B funding this month – has in turn confirmed that the acquisition was for the messaging technology only, and no Moped staff will be joining.

The move is probably a good one, since Wunderlist Pro is all about teams, so in theory the Moped tech will come in handy.

Moped had previously raised $1 million from SV Angel (Ron Conway), Lerer Ventures, Betaworks and Earlybird Capital.

Only last Summer Moped was continuing to iterate its product, allowing users to sign up within LinkedIn and saying that it was going after the “sweet spot” of sharing files over messaging.

AdvertisementAdvertisementCrunchBase6WunderkinderFoundedSeptember 2010Total Funding

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