VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Big layoffs at Sitoa? — San Mateo-based Sitoa has laid off approximately 40 out of 70 employees in order to get to breakeven, we’ve heard from a source. The company has tens of millions in revenues, but fees are only 10% so the company has always operated in the red. They have been trying to raise more money. Positioned as an e-commerce solution provider that gives retailers access to more products without worrying about inventory, Sitoa is having (or rumored to have) its own inventory problems due to high rates of returns and shrinkage. They have a handful of clients; Sears is one of them. There have recently been a flurry of LinkedIn updates and recommendations among remaining and former employees.

Power issue knocks GrandCentral offline — The online phone company which Google bought last year was down for most of this morning, TechCrunch reports. While the company blames a power outage on the service going down, it speaks to a larger issue as more everyday services move online — what happens if one of these services goes down? With traditional phone services, if there was a bad storm, you might lose service and understand why. With a server power issue happening in the middle of nowhere, the service can go down and you don’t even know it — you just don’t get your calls. Find our recent coverage on Grand Central here and here.

Google TV ads close to launching for the public — The service, which is currently in a closed trials, will allow anyone to buy advertising time on television stations that have a deal with Google (including A&E, Bravo, CNN, others) through Dish Network, according to Multichannel News. While much is made about of an overall shift to online advertising, Google knows how big of a business advertising on television still is, and is looking to transfer its success online to TV. The public should be able to use the service in the next few weeks.

AdMob’s March mobile metrics data — The mobile advertising company says it served over 2.85 billion ad requests last month. Clearly, the mobile advertising market is healthy. Nokia lost some of the mobile marketing share while companies like Motorola, RIM (makers of the Blackberry device) and Apple (makers of the iPhone) rose. We previously wrote about AdMob’s statistics here. You can access the report here.

Torrent searching site YouTorrent looking to sell — The popular torrent (a file transfered online, usually by way of many users) searching site has decided to clean up its act — it will now only index and search sites which host torrents, meaning most copyrighted material will be left out. The site, which has over 10 million unique visitors a month, hopes this move will allow it to be sold, TorrentFreak reports.

Some investors tell us there’s not enough opportunity in music-related innovation to merit their money. But apparently, others disagree. OurStage, one of many sites that tries to nurture budding artists, has raised $13 million from a consortium of angel investors through Signature Capital LLC. Another, mTraks, has raised $550,000 from an unnamed investor.

OurStage is in some sense trying to duplicate traditional music charts — but for unknown artists. First, bands upload their tracks and videos to the site, then they try to get fans to vote their works up OurStage’s chart of top acts. Winners get prizes, like performance slots at music festivals.

OurStage is making money by selling ads on the site, particularly branded channels for specific types of music, and for individual artists. It counts AOL Music as a partner, and it’s hoping to work with record labels, to offer professional channels for bands that rise through its ranks. To help show a label the rising-star status of an artist, it also offers metrics on traffic that an artist draws on the site.

Earlier this week, we covered a somewhat similar site, called SellaBand — where users actually help pay for the production of a budding artists’ album, and get free music in return.

MTraks, meanwhile offers a place for artists to create their own profiles (which is basically like MySpace and many other, larger sites), but focuses on independent acts. The San Diego, Calif.-based site lets you buy music by the song — free of digital rights management — or pay $9.99 per month to subscribe and listen to any song on the site.

Established competitors that are experimenting with new forms of giving music away for free including iLike (see its launch of R.E.M.’s latest album ), Imeem, Last.fm and others. Three months ago, Last.fm began letting users preview some entire songs before buying them. Today, it says these tracks have seen a 119 percent increase in CD sales and downloads through its partner, Amazon’s online music store — although CBS-owned Last.fm isn’t releasing figures for how many tracks and how much money that adds up to. More here.