The local food movement has been all about buying seasonal food from nearby farmers. Now, thanks to the Web, it is expanding to include far-away farmers too.

A new start-up, Foodzie, is an online farmers market where small, artisan food producers and growers can sell their products. Foodies in Florida, say, can order raw, handcrafted pepperjack cheese from Traver, Calif., or organic, fair-trade coffee truffles from Boulder, Colo.

“You get a similar experience to a farmers market, when you get the opportunity to meet farmers, but it is much more scalable and you get a better selection,” said Rob LaFave, a Foodzie co-founder. “Ninety-seven percent of the country does not have this kind of access to artisan foodmakers.”

Foodzie was started by Mr. LaFave and two of his friends, who met during college at Virginia Tech, where they would frequent farmers markets. Last year, while living in North Carolina, one of them, Emily Olson, now 24, came up with the idea. She was working as a brand manager for a gourmet grocery chain and realized that other foodies who did not work in the business had no way to discover artisan foods outside their local farmers markets. Small farmers had no way of finding or selling to far-flung customers, either. Read more…

So much for sacrificing your Facebook friends for a free hamburger.

Burger King has shut off the grill on Whopper Sacrifice, a popular Facebook application that offered users a coupon for a free Burger King sandwich if they dumped 10 of their Facebook friends.

A spokeswoman for Burger King said the company elected to discontinue the campaign Wednesday after Facebook asked developers to tweak one of the main features.

As Facebookers deleted the 10 unlucky friends deemed to be worth trading for 37 cents’ worth of fast food, the application sent a humorous notification to each of the banished friends, bluntly alerting them that they were abandoned for a free hamburger. The messages were similar to the alerts received when a Facebook friend is added or a comment is posted to a user’s message board.

A Facebook spokesman said the company was concerned the de-friending notification would disrupt users’ privacy expectations. Typically, no notification is sent when a Facebook user removes a friend. Read more…

UPDATED 1/16/08 11:10 a.m.: Correcting details of T-Mobile’s unlimited calling plan.

If you pay $100 a month or more to AT&T or Verizon Wireless on your wireless bill, don’t expect your bill to drop in half quickly. But the new $50-a-month unlimited wireless calling plan from Sprint’s Boost Mobile brand may well set off some significant price-cutting by wireless carriers.

Sprint is starting a price war as a way to wring value from the underutilized network of Nextel, the wireless company it disastrously bought in 2005. Nextel’s claim to fame was its push-to-talk feature that let people communicate with other Nextel phones without paying per-minute rates. Now that most wireless operators offer plans that let people call anyone else on their network at no additional charge, demand for this feature is dropping. The limited selection of phones that use Nextel’s iDen technology also has discouraged customers.

Boost Mobile is a Sprint brand that mainly sells prepaid wireless service meant to appeal to young people, who talk a lot but are very price-sensitive. Boost had 3.9 million customers at the end of last September. (Prepaid service is less expensive to operate than more traditional postpaid service, where customers get a monthly bill for use after the fact, because there are no credit losses. In addition, carriers don’t subsidize the purchase of handsets and often spend less on customer service.) Read more…

Wall Street didn’t take kindly to comments by Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s new chief executive, made at a companywide meeting Wednesday. After reports that Ms. Bartz wasn’t sold on the idea of selling Yahoo’s search business to Microsoft, investors sent Yahoo shares plunging 6.5 percent on Thursday.

Ms. Bartz, of course, did not say she was or would be opposed to a deal. And she also said she had held informal talks with Steven A. Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, since being tapped for the top job at Yahoo.

Analysts cautioned investors not to read too much into Ms. Bartz’s comments.

“I don’t get the sense that she is the kind of person who is dismissing things on her first day on the job,” said Ross Sandler, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “She is going to assess the situation and decide what’s best for Yahoo.” Mr. Sandler said many traders and hedge funds had bought Yahoo shares in anticipation of a quick gain following Ms. Bartz’s appointment, and those traders may be responsible for the sharp sell-off.

Scott Kessler, an analyst with Standard & Poor’s, said Ms. Bartz might have simply been indicating that selling assets when the company’s value is near a historic low is not a good idea.

The companywide meeting itself was closed to outsiders. But Yahoo posted pictures of the event on Flickr. There are several shots of Ms. Bartz in action, including one in which she walks on stage holding hands with Sue Decker, Yahoo’s departing president and a candidate for the chief executive job. Ms. Decker was quite emotional, according to a person who attended the event. Jerry Yang, back to his role as “Chief Yahoo,” also makes a couple of appearances in the photographs, including a shot with Ms. Bartz and Ms. Decker.

As companies continue to put the brakes on expenditures and reduce staffs, maximizing efficiency becomes even more essential for businesses looking to weather the recession.

InsideView, a start-up based in San Francisco, is hoping to capitalize on that effort by showing businesses how the social Web can make the workplace more efficient. On Thursday, the company announced a $6.5 million round of financing led by Emergence Capital Partners and Rembrandt Venture Partners. The latest round brings InsideView’s total outside investments to $14 million since the company was started in 2005.

The company’s primary product, SalesView, acts as a sort of online divining rod. The service trawls through more than 20,000 public Web sites, social networks and public data sources like LinkedIn, Facebook, Reuters, Securities and Exchange Commission filings and even company blogs. With that information, SalesView can create company snapshots intended to help sales teams identify potential clients. Read more…

We don’t know what’s wrong with Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive. But it’s got to be serious. You don’t take a six-month leave of absence, as he is, just because you’ve got a stomachache.

So that raises the question, for investors and customers, about whether Apple’s amazing record of innovation and financial success are at risk while Mr. Jobs is on leave — and even more so if he never returns.

The answers in each of those two scenarios are very different.

In the short run, Apple is on a roll. It refreshed its notebook line last fall with a new technology. The iPhone has a lot of momentum, and we can assume work is well under way for a third hardware version and a stream of software updates. Read more…

UPDATE 12:20 AM Google Also Shuts Handful of Small Projects

Google has been working hard to rein in expenses, but the cutting, so far, has been mostly around the edges. Now, the company is cutting into its staff.

On Wednesday, Google said it is laying off about 100 people worldwide, all recruiters. That’s about one-quarter of the total number of recruiters at the company — and just half of 1 percent of its work force of 20,000.

Why? Google is hiring fewer people than it used to — a lot fewer — so it needs fewer recruiters to get the job done.

Writing in the company’s official blog, Laszlo Bock, vice president for people operations, said: “Google is still hiring but at a reduced rate. Given the state of the economy, we recognized that we needed fewer people focused on hiring.”

Makes sense. In a November interview, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive, discussed cost-cutting measures and said Google was still hiring a few tens of people a week. “I suspect that will continue,” he said. That represents a drastic drop from the third quarter of 2007, when Google added 2,130 employees, or more than 160 a week. Since several people left during that quarter, the hiring rate was even higher. Read more…

I’ve got two thoughts on the selection of Carol Bartz as chief executive of Yahoo. First, Yahoo’s board appears to have selected her for exactly the same reasons it chose Terry Semel. Second, her first big test will be a decision on whether to outsource Yahoo’s search operation to Microsoft. I’m not as convinced this is a good idea as many analysts and observers are.

Carol Bartz. (Credit: Business Wire/Yahoo, via Reuters)

Regarding Mr. Semel, I think there is an uncanny similarity between the praise his selection received at the time and what is being said about Ms. Bartz today. Both of them worked in jobs that were related to, but hardly the same as, the one Yahoo is in. And both had long runs managing companies that had great financial success (Warner Brothers for Mr. Semel and Autodesk for Ms. Bartz).

Terry Semel. (Credit: Jamie Rector/Bloomberg)

I’ve got to wonder how much running a sales force that peddles expensive software to engineers and designers has to do with running a free Web site that attracts users through branding and products and makes money through advertising.

I’m not saying that the companies need to hire chief executives from their own industries. Before running Google, Eric Schmidt was an engineer and ran Novell, a network software company that has nothing to do with advertising or consumer Internet services. And the man I’d say has been the very best Internet company executive, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, was a 30-year-old midlevel executive at a hedge fund before founding his company. Read more…

If Tesla Motors can’t get its own electric sedan on the road, at least it can join with other carmakers to get their electric vehicles on the road.

Tesla, the Silicon Valley electric car company that has repeatedly delayed production of its Model S sedan, will produce lithium-ion battery packs and chargers for an all-electric version of Daimler AG’s Smart car, the toy-like two-seater that arrived in the United States in January 2008. Daimler started a pilot program to test electric Smart cars in London in 2007 and plans to introduce them here by the end of this year. Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, made the announcement Tuesday at the Detroit auto show. Read more…

A text message that AT&T Wireless sent out advertising Tuesday night’s season premiere of “American Idol” went out to roughly two million of the company’s 75 million subscribers, according to Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman.

A number of recipients of the message have criticized AT&T Wireless for sending the message; unsolicited text messages are usually seen as violating cellphone etiquette.

When consumer criticism first emerged on Tuesday, Mr. Siegel said AT&T Wireless had sent the messages to a “significant number” of the company’s customers. He said the targeted customers were those who had used texting to vote for an “American Idol” contestant in the past or who were “heavy texters.” (Some who weren’t in either of those categories also received it.)

Mr. Siegel said Wednesday afternoon that the message reached about 3 percent of AT&T’s customers. He said he wasn’t downplaying the figure, but he hoped that by clarifying the number it would “put to rest” the discussion and criticism being leveled at the advertising. (AT&T sponsors “American Idol” and profits when people use its mobile phone service to vote using text messages). Read more…

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and chief executive, told the company’s employees in a letter on Wednesday that he would take a leave of absence through June in order to focus on his health. Mr. Jobs said last week that he was being treated for a hormone problem. Here is the text of his letter as released by Apple.

Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve

Seagate, a leading hard-drive maker, will conduct a far more drastic round of layoffs than the company had indicated earlier this week.

Close to 3,000 people, or 6 percent of Seagate’s global work force, will lose their jobs in the next couple of months, the company said Wednesday in a regulatory filing. On Monday, Seagate revealed plans to lay off about 10 percent of its United States work force, or close to 800 people. It has now expanded those plans to include the broader layoffs, which affect its workers across the globe.

The layoffs come as Seagate tries to negotiate a management overhaul and deal with falling sales of PCs and servers, which use the company’s hard drives. Seagate lost its two top executives on Monday when it dismissed the chief executive, William D. Watkins, and accepted the resignation of David A. Wickersham, the company’s president and chief operating officer.

Analysts have criticized Seagate for losing ground to major rival Western Digital over the last couple of years, particularly in the markets for laptop and consumer PC hard drives. Read more…

Marketcetera, a Silicon Valley-based start-up, has developed open-source trading software that it says will make the creation of custom financial trading systems easier and cheaper. Rather than creating their own products, financial services firms, hedge funds and others can pick up the Marketcetera Platform software and use it as a basic framework for their operations. The financial companies just plug their algorithms and trading policies into the system and let it handle the demanding processing jobs required to obtain and analyze financial data.

It seems less than ideal — make that crazy — to reveal such a product in the midst of a drastic economic downturn. But Graham Miller, the chief executive at Marketcetera, says that volatility in the financial markets increases interest in products that can help illuminate unique opportunities. In addition, Mr. Miller claims that cash-short companies will find the open-source approach appealing.

Generally, with open source software, the underlying code is publicly released, allowing legions of outside developers to make additions and improvements that all users can benefit from. However, Marketcetera deals with companies that pride themselves on secrecy and proprietary advantages, meaning they’ll be less likely to submit software tweaks back for the greater good.

Still, the company argues that the open-source model allows companies to preserve confidential ideas around trading because they’re free to change the company’s software on their own rather than be forced to reveal parts of their strategy as they ask an outside programmer for special tools. Read more…

As we reported Tuesday night, AT&T sent text messages this week to many of its subscribers advertising the premiere of “American Idol.” While such missives tend to violate cellphone etiquette, AT&T said it was sending the ad only to people who had used text messaging to vote for “Idol” singers in the past or to “heavy texters.”

The company’s definition of “heavy texters” appears to be mystifying and angering some AT&T customers who say they received the message despite only occasionally sending texts. These people seem very ticked off.

“AT&T is, to put it politely, misspeaking when it says it sent its pro-IDOL spam only to those who’d voted for IDOL contestants before or were heavy texters,” Leah Rozen, the film critic for People magazine, wrote in an e-mail response to our article. She said she’s never voted for an Idol contestant, and uses well less than the 200 texts she’s allotted each month under her coverage plan.

“Please keep holding the blowtorch to AT&T’s feet on sending out this kind of stupid excreta,” her e-mail reads. Read more…

While celebrating its role as patent kingpin, I.B.M. has pledged to open up more of its inventions than ever before to the public.

Last year, I.B.M. hauled in 4,186 patents from the United States government, making it the top patent holder for the 16th straight year. I.B.M., in a statement, was quick to note that its patent total outstripped that of Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Oracle, EMC, Apple and Google combined.

In the years to come, I.B.M. expects to maintain a similar patent grant pace. That said, it also now plans to publish details on 50 percent more inventions that I.B.M. does not plan to patent — about 3,000 items a year — via technical papers and the Internet. By making such inventions public, a practice known as defensive publishing, I.B.M. will prevent other companies and individuals from gaining patents on the ideas.

“We concluded that it’s time for us to do something new and different,” said David Kappos, vice president and assistant general counsel for intellectual property law at I.B.M. “We think defensive publication represents a mechanism whose time has come.” Read more…