BlackBerry lays off 250 new product testing staff

Blackberry is laying off 250 employees, or around 2 percent of its workforce, at its new product testing facility, the company said on Friday.

"These employees were part of the New Product Testing Facility, a department that supports BlackBerry's manufacturing and R&D efforts," BlackBerry said in an emailed statement. The employees, all working in Waterloo, Canada, were informed of their termination on Tuesday, the company said

"This is part of the next stage of our turnaround plan to increase efficiencies and scale our company correctly for new opportunities in mobile computing. We will be as transparent as possible as those plans evolve," the company said.

Although BlackBerry reported a 9 percent year-on-year rise in revenue for its most recent fiscal quarter, ended June 1, the company is struggling to maintain profitability, reporting an US$84 million loss for the period. The company disappointed analysts with sales figures for its Z10 and Q10 smartphones running the new BlackBerry OS 10. It sold 6.8 million smartphones in that fiscal quarter, almost a million fewer than analysts had expected. In the course of year it saw its smartphone market share more than halved, from 6.4 percent in the first calendar quarter of 2012 to 2.9 percent a year later.

The latest staff cuts are minor compared to those BlackBerry has made in recent years. In 2011 it laid of 2,000 staff, or a little more than 10 percent of its workforce at the time, leaving it with 17,000 staff.

Then in June 2012 it said it would lay off approximately 5,000 employees by March this year. The layoffs were part of the company's Cost Optimization and Resource Efficiency program that focused on delivering annual operational savings of at least $1 billion. By March it had slimmed down to around 12,700 employees.

New AOL Reader product teased just days before Google Reader's shutdown

Once-mighty America Online appears to be working on a new RSS reader product, with about a week to go before Google pulls the plug on its own Reader.

“All your favorite websites, in one place,” the product’s landing page proclaims. The reader is currently in private beta; people can either request an invitation online or enter a code to use the service.

AOL Reader will launch and become available to everyone on Monday, a spokeswoman said. On the AOL Twitter feed, a Vine video was posted Friday afternoon depicting the landing page on a computer monitor. A series of sticky notes were pasted on top of the screen. "Yes, the rumors are true," one of them said.

No other information about the product could be gleaned from the AOL site or obtained from the company.

Besides AOL, a number of other companies have been promoting their own RSS reader services since Google announced in March that it would be shutting down Reader and some other products by July 1.

In its announcement, the company said it needed to focus on new opportunities, rather than spread itself “too thin and lack impact.”

One of the other reader players is Feedly, which earlier this week switched on its own RSS API (application programming interface) to let users transfer over their existing feeds to Feedly’s own back end.

Digg is also working on a Google Reader replacement, which is slated to go live next week, according to a company blog post.

Google Reader launched in 2005 to help people stay on top of their favorite websites using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.