Lost for Breathe and there goes the Sun

The philanthropy of GUS - owners of the Argos chain - should see around 80 out of 140 jobs saved at the ISP, and its half million or so users breathe a sigh of relief (breathe - geddit?). Assuming most of them haven't already decamped to a rival already.

GUS paid £1.4m for the company (which could be a bit of a bargain), although it expects it to make a loss of between £4m and £7m this year.

(Sorry, we used the word 'philanthropy' just now. We did, of course, mean to say: 'the hard-nosed business sense of GUS...')

Meanwhile, Advertising.com, Kozmo.com, and MVP.com have all joined the ranks of dot-coms shedding staff. We reported in August that Kozmo.com, a US internet delivery company, was laying off 40 staff. It's now made a further 120 redundancies. According to the Wall Street Journal, MVP.com has just got rid of half its employee base. And Advertising.com has made 72 redundancies. Women.com, the portal aimed at, err, women (presumably), is now facing possible de-listing from Nasdaq following its decision to boot out a quarter of its workers late last year. The online arm of the New York Times too has given the heave-ho to 17 per cent of its staff in an attempt to reach profitability by 2002 (serves 'em right for trying to charge for content).

And staying in the vague area of online publishing, the Express newspapers' websites have bitten the dust once and for all. The Express Group - which published the Daily and Sunday Express, and the Star - was bought by Richard Desmond in November. He decided the loss-making online operations had no future, and sold them for a nominal free (£1 to be precise) to SP Investments. SP has been unable to find a buyer, so, as of this week, it's hasta la vista for the sites - and the staff which ran them.

Desmond is also the proprietor of Northern and Shell, the ever-so tasteful publishers of, among others, Asian Babes and Big Ones (and, even worse, OK!). So presumably he shut down the Express sites because they'd tarnish the image of his other classy online assets. The performance of his online porn properties continues to look distinctly pert though.

Incidentally, journalists at the Daily Express aren't all that happy about their new paymasters. Private Eye reports this week that an Express hack managed to get into print a leader on organic farming last Saturday in which the first letter of every sentence spelt out the message: 'F**K YOU DESMOND'.

Nothing like maintaining the good will of staff in a takeover, is there?

But it's not all doom and gloom in the dot-com world. Online introduction service dateline.co.uk has made a profit (yes, that's PROFIT) at the end of its first year in business. Quite how much they won't say, but it is, according to the company, a "substantial" amount. So it appears that if you're into love or porn (in purely business terms) you're onto a winner. Maybe one day, people won't think about porn when you mention the web, but we're not holding our breath.

Bush (that's George W, of course) has been having a pow-wow with some IT bigwigs, including Craig Barrett (Intel), John Chambers (Cisco), Michael Dell, Carly Fiorina (HP) AND Lou Gerstner (IBM).

They talked about education, free trade and regulatory relief (which has nothing to do with Richard Desmond), and the possible creation of a technology office within the White House.

Carly's presence is particularly note-worthy. All the other names mentioned are full-on Bush fans. Cisco CEO Chambers was one of the Republican Party's top contributors in the run-up to the election, giving approximately $500,000 of his own money to the party and its candidates. He also held a fund-raising shin-dig at his home, which netted $4m.

But Carly was far more lukewarm about Bush. But it's clear that she is, at heart, a pragmatic businesswoman.

The Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) is holding the 'Internet Oscars' on 7 February. One of the 15 categories is the Internet Villain Award. ISPA's rules state that the sponsor of an award cannot win it - which makes sense. Unless BT happens to be the sponsor... but don't worry folks. BT this week pulled out at the last minute (sorry, it's all that porn stuff), claiming that what should have been a 'bit of fun' had become rather too personal for its liking. And it had nothing to do with BT's enormous debts of course.

The shortlist for the award is now:
Dave Edmonds, director general of Oftel; home secretary Jack Straw; and (drum roll please) Sir Peter Bonfield, CEO of BT.

We know who our money's on.

See http://www.ispaawards.org.uk for more information about attending the event.

We got a press release this week from a PR executive called Kate O'Nions of Harvard PR. We think she should pitch for the Sage account. (Bet she's never heard that one before).

And finally, a wee bit of news about ourselves. If it weren't for a particularly heroic all-night shift by our over-worked and under-appreciated IT department earlier this week, you wouldn't be reading this now. In fact, you wouldn't be able to read anything we publish. A couple of merry pranksters broke into our building and ran off with two Sun servers last weekend, which, as you can imagine, slightly hampered our ability to function on Monday. But normal service was resumed by late afternoon on Tuesday. Apologies to anyone who tried to access the site when it was down, and thanks to all those who emailed us to welcome us back - apart from the back-up and security vendors who have rather shamelessly used this as an excuse to pitch their products.

Oh, and our security's been beefed up a bit now. Indiana Jones would have trouble getting through our defences. So to any would-be thieves out there: sod off, OK?

We'll be back next week, come hell, high water or, indeed, burglary. Til next time...