Roundup: Ashton’s new show, Woz’s new company and more

Roundup: Ashton’s new show, Woz’s new company and more

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… Continue Reading

How Woz woke up the bishop

How Woz woke up the bishop

Remember the story about prankster Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, and how he hacked the phone network with his so-called BlueBox?

And how he woke up the pope? In his new book, Woz finally tells the story in his own words, and we’re left wondering if the pope really was woken up. He did wake a bishop, though. Here’s a snippet that ran in the Mercury News:

..So I started by using the Blue Box to call… Continue Reading

Roundup: Slim Devices, ChaCha, Digg, eBay ibank of Web 2.0, more

Roundup: Slim Devices, ChaCha, Digg, eBay ibank of Web 2.0, more

SlimDevices to release latest Squeezebox — The come-out-of-nowhere Mountain View start-up sells a device that lets you play your music anywhere in the house, and hooks up with all kinds of services, from Pandora to Rhapsody. Its latest one will sell for $2,000 device; the NYT has the scoop. This scrappy company is run by 20-somthing Sean Adams, and to our knowledge he has made do with a mere $330,000 from angels (though he may have… Continue Reading