Several new reports and rumors filed in today:
Pandora laid off 20 employees yesterday.
Cisco planning to lay of 129 in Dallas.
Tesla, the electric car company, lays off "dozens."
.. and perhaps most startlingly Yahoo plans to cut 3,500.
Zivity lays off 1/3 of their staff.
And on the flip side of things, there are a number of new hires going on around the industry as well.
Twitter, is still hiring, and doing a Chinese fire drill with the executive management.
Digg is rolling out lots of new code, and is actively seeking new developers to help.
Hi5 is laying folks off, but is also doing active hiring as well.
For that matter, we've a pretty well populated job board.
In other good news, Google is doing quite well, as we learned from their quarterly earnings report today. There's been an unusually high number of funding announcements, both in the green and tech industries in the last week or two.
Perhaps most interestingly is the uptick we've seen in terms of startup news. There's usually a pretty steady stream of startups that pour into our editorial inbox, but the number of pitches per day had slowed over the Summer and hadn't quite picked up to the levels they were last Spring.
The last two weeks, as the market seemed to drop, there was an inverse ratio of pitches in the inbox. Even my personal inbox found itself home to pitches, which hasn't really happened with a degree of regularity since we put on hiatus the interview podcast here at Mashable. This week alone has shown at least six to fifteen pitches a day, and in the last couple of days, I've even had them track me down over instant messenger.
Obviously there are probably a number of theories you could put to paper for an explanation, but it's a clear (if only anecdotal) line of evidence backing up Pete's theory that "recession is the mother of tech invention."
All in all, I won't go so far as to say that the entirety of Web 2.0, but I think that today's Google news coupled with what we're seeing here at Mashable (not to mention what we've predicted), we're going to see a lot more of this sort of shuffling around, but it is by no means going to be the death of our industry.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen the question: "When's the next big thing coming?" It's a valid question - a contributing factor to the general malaise in our industry prior to the downturn revolved around the fact that all the news seemed to be about Digg, Twitter and FriendFeed, and then a bunch of clone services. While that's an exaggeration, the truth is that there has been a lot of incremental innovation and a lot of distribution.