VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Pansonic lays off 15,000: The consumer electronics giant shed 5 percent of its work force. It joins NEC, Sony, Hitachi and other Japanese companies in announcing major layoffs.

Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media teams up with Slide on new series — The show, called KatalystHQ, is the first sponsored web series to premiere on Facebook.

Steve Wozniak takes a job at storage startup Fusion-io — The Apple co-founder already sat on the Salt Lake City company’s advisory board, but today Fusion-io is expected to officially name Wozniak its chief scientist. Its technology can transfer movies in two seconds, from a solid state disk with a network ability that can transfer at 1.5 gigabytes per second (the company launched at the DEMO conference; video here).

THQ stock tanks on weak results – The video game publisher blamed the poor results on “this challenging environment.” The company will lay off 30 percent, or 600 employees.

Warner Bros. picks up a game studio — Newly-acquired Snowblind Studios’ past games include “Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance” and “Justice League Heroes.” Terms were not disclosed.

Microsoft shifts execs to Windows Mobile group — Can a Zune phone be far behind?

Cisco reports weak earnings, may lay off 2,000 — Although chief executive John Chambers claims, “We are not going to consider layoffs at this time.” See, if there’s a “realignment” that happens to involve the elimination of 1,500 to 2,000 jobs, well hey, that doesn’t count.

LinkedIn launches German competitor to Xing — Professional networking site LinkedIn currently has 9 million European users.

Bill Gates unleashes mosquitoes on TED audience — Gates’ rather unorthodox method to illustrate the importance of malaria prevention prompted eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to declare (via Twitter): “That’s it, I’m not sitting up front anymore.” Speaking of the highly exclusive TED conference, you can read liveblogs of the various talks here.

Next Story: Social network hi5 aims its 60 million users at casual games
Previous Story: Image Metrics makes it easier and cheaper to put real faces in games

Tags: co:Cisco, co:Fusion-io, co:katalyst media, co:LinkedIn, co:microsoft, co:Slide, co:Snowblind Studios, co:thq, co:Warner-Bros, people:Ashton Kutcher, people:Bill-Gates, people:John Chambers, people:Pierre-Omidyar, people:Steve-Wozniak