And what a week it was.  Let's sift through the chaos and see what patterns we can find . . . most of them will involve layoffs unfortunately.

In Anime and Manga, Tokyopop wanted interns, while Bandai entertainment restructured.  Neither of which is particularly promising for job seekers.  Harlequin launched its own manga imprint in Japan, and I expect it to come over here eventually.  However thats just more competition in the market.

In comics, Diamond's changing order standards may push people to more digital comics – if IVerse has anything to say about it.  I consider Harlequin's entry into the manga market, and IVerse to be very interesting – one big company moves to the "phonebook" and one looks for ways to newly distribute content.  Comics has a lot of distribution options – and with people wanting to A) expand markets, and B) deal with distribution issues, I can see many possible permutations: indies teaming up to do "phone books", more digital distribution, big companies consolidating small projects in "phone books," etc.  Watch this space.

YouTubes Click-To-Buy technology resulted in an incredible increase in sales of Monty Python DVDs.  Now THAT is synergy.  I think after this little announcement more and more people will be trying to jump on the bandwagon.  I also admit its a good idea – its convinent and relatively non-invasive.  Makes me wonder what you could do to combine that with, say cell phone text message advertising.

Unfortunately a lot of tech news was semi-dismal.    Sun Microsystems began its layoffs,  Ericson had cuts, Logitech had cuts, and O'Reily made cuts and Digg made cuts and Google had a painful writedown – plus we've all heard stories of Microsoft and IBM  Things are crazy at Sony still, quite likely due to a leadership conflict,  At least wages seem good and growing in tech – if only we can be sure of WHERE the jobs will be.

My guess is we've got another month of bad announcements in technology, with things stable in March.  I expect a wild ride however – and things stangant at least until later 2009 or early 2010 on the hiring front.  Companies will play it close to the chest.

Videogames had their own cuts as well.  Microsofts flight sim studio Internal Aces is closed, Eidos closed its Rockpool Mobile Gaming Studio (I still am betting on Time Warner getting Eidos), EA cut 200 people at Black Box and more jobs at Tiburon while restructuring at Mythic, Trion sees some layoffs and restructuring,  Sega had layoffs, and Jaleco just plain left gaming.  Sony ironically doesn't see any big layoffs in gaming (and is apparently still hiring), which fits my continually touted 'power through the downturn' theory – if anything else who knows who they can outlast.

There was good news in gaming, such as good sales and a few companies raising venture capital (which is still down), but it reflected not so much a bad market, but a case of some players in the market having trouble (read, many people who aren't Nintendo).    I am wondering if, when the market improves, there will be more space for independent players.

In short, not a pleasant week, but admittedly not unexpected.  Hang in there people . . .