While Facebook IPOs, moves to a new campus and becomes a house hold name, Hewlett-Packard is planning one of its biggest layoffs, where it expects to cut between 25,000 and 30,000 people on Wednesday. This is in addition to the 120,000 layoffs its has done in the last few years.

HP, is a bloated company with no focus. Its employee head count has grown from 60,000 in 2000 to 360,000 today. Yet the markets it serves have remained the same. Its still a printer company in a age where no-one prints anymore (for sure young folks like me barely print anymore). I see this as the first leg of many more layoffs to come. I believe HP will be back to a 30,000 – 60,000 company in 5-7 years. Hence many more major layoffs are on the way.

HP’s demise also, affects many other valley companies like Intel, Net App, their suppliers and competitors. A smaller HP is bad for Intel, as it will buy less from Intel. There is no way, Intel can make up for the loss of HP’s business for a long time, if ever. This will spawn major layoffs in Intel’s supply channel. Expect Applied Materials, KLA and many others to be hit hard.

All this in turn will accelerate the downward spiral that Silicon Valley is on, one that I believe it won’t recover from. Silicon based technology is no longer a growth industry like its been for the past 50 years. Most of the large computation problems have been solved. The bay area and Silicon Valley, depend heavily on the tech sector, which is expected to take a big hit for years to come. That’s being optimistic.

Facebook and many of the social startups cannot absorb the massive layoffs to come. I see people leaving the valley in droves, home prices heading to the toilet, tax revenues drying up, crime going through the roof. Already, 30% of the many people in silicon valley eat at food banks and these are the good times (see 60 Minutes video). There is no time for foolish optimism. Its time for reality. The valley game is over.

Image source: Michael Totten

WPP’s new deal with Buddy Media—in which the company will become the “preferred social ad management partner” for GroupM, WPP’s media-buying arm—could signal an era of consolidation in the social media ad buying world.

It is the second recent deal in which a large ad agency holding company has locked in a relationship with an agency that specializes in Facebook ad buying.

Further consolidation won’t be cheap: With valuations in the social media/tech sphere currently through the roof, agencies like TBG Digital, AdParlor, and Adaptly, which also manage media buys on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, are likely to price themselves expensively.

WPP’s Buddy media deal could be earth-shaking: WPP spent $200 million on Facebook in 2011, and CEO Martin Sorrell expects that to rise to $400 million this year. With Sorrell wanting to see his $5 million stake in Buddy Media pay off, there will be pressure on GroupM buyers to move their business from rival agencies—TBG, AdParlor, Adaptly, Blinq Media, 22Squared et al.—to Buddy Media and the Brighter Option unit it bought in February. Buddy media CEO Michael Lazerow believes this will eventually make his agency the single largest Facebook media buyer.

But the Buddy Media deal isn’t exclusive—meaning WPP’s various buyers will still be able to place Facebook ads through the rival agencies if they or their clients want to.

Those agencies have their own relationships with clients and, in terms of Facebook ad buying, they have larger staffs and (arguably) greater expertise than Buddy Media does (the Brighter Option buy only gave the company 21 staffers; TBG, for instance, has about 140 employees, of which 90 are analysts).

In other words, there will be fierce resistance in some quarters.

Also:

• The deal comes after Omnicom made a similar non-exclusive pact with Blinq Media.
• And Interpublic Group, famously, owns a stake in Facebook.

Clearly, Madison Avenue isn’t just sitting idly by while all these new startups siphon off Facebook ad-buying cash for themselves. That signals further deals to come.

AnchorFree, a Valley startup that lets its users surf the Web anonymously, just announced a $52 million Series C financing from Goldman Sachs.

AnchorFree came to fame for its Hotspot Shield, an application that let’s users privately surf the Internet, free from prying eyes.

Facebook and Twitter got most of the credit for launching the Arab Spring. But how did users in countries where those services were blocked get online to use them?

Last year, AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky told Fast Company that his users in Egypt suddenly jumped from 100,000 to a million “overnight,” as protesters used it to get to Google and Facebook without the eyes of their oppressive government seeing anything.

AnchorFree now has 60 million users worldwide using it to surf two billion Web pages per month, the company says. That makes it 51st most trafficked site on the Web, according to Quantcast.

But the company has been hot in other areas, too, particularly mobile. iPhone and iPad users like it because it creates a secure connection on a public Wi-Fi network. For instance, if you are the coffee shop and you want to access your bank account, this app lets you do so without the risk of hackers snooping and stealing your password.

Goldman Sachs is joining a roster of famous tech people who have also invested in AnchorFree, including Flickr backer Esther Dyson, former Huffington Post president Greg Coleman, and Bert Roberts, the former CEO of MCI.

Yahoo finally managed to sell off its stake in Alibaba, and after taxes, Yahoo will get to keep around $4 to $5 billion.

So, what will Yahoo do with that money? In a release announcing the deal, ”Yahoo! intends to return substantially all of the after-tax cash proceeds to shareholders following the closing of the transaction.”

In other words, Yahoo intends to buy back shares. This might make Yahoo stock look good in the short term, but that’s not what the troubled Internet brand should do.

Watch our quick video explainer below to find out what Yahoo should do with its Alibaba cash:

Produced By William Wei

There’s lots of collateral damage on the Facebook flop.

Other internet/social media plays like Yelp and Zynga are really taking it in the chin.

But here’s one that’s getting CREAMED.

Snap Interactive is a penny-stock traded app maker that got buzzy a couple of years ago due to a dating app.

Anyway, it’s still a penny stock, and in the last week it’s been crushed, from close to $2 last week, to less than $1 today. KABOOM!

IBM has been awarded a patent for a game that will pay rewards to people who eat right.

IBM researcher Michael Paolini is the inventor of the game and says he lost 18 pounds by playing it, reports the New York Times. Paolini says the idea is to give people immediate rewards for doing the right thing.

So, choose an apple instead of a slice of apple pie, and, ca-ching!, you could get 50 cents awarded to your account.

The game was inspired by a hybrid car, the Honda Insight, that instantly tells drivers how their driving is affecting their gas mileage, Paolini told the Times.

The inventor thinks that companies or insurers may want to use the game to encourage employees to lose weight and reduce their risk for obesity-related disease. That sounds nice but there is a drawback. The game relies on people honestly recording what they’ve eaten.

OK, so anything that makes dieting fun and instantly rewarding is a cool idea. But the idea that USPTO actually granted IBM a patent on this game, that makes us want to choke.

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Yahoo CEO (YHOO), Scott Thompson is out. The official statement simply says, Scott Thompson has left the company. It doesn’t provide a reason.

Thompson lied on this resume, about having an engineering degree. When it was exposed, he lied about lying about no lying about his bogus resume. Its odd that Thompson work as eBay for 10 years and even served as Paypal president with that bogus resume.

Ironically, the Yahoo board did not fire Thompson, they let him resign. That means Thompson will probably walk away with a considerable amount of money, hence richly rewarding Thompson for lying.

——

Yahoo’s Statement:

Now Ross Levinsohn is expected to be named Yahoo’s (YHOO) CEO on an interim basis, with the departure of Scott Thompson.

He’ll be the company’s sixth CEO in five years.

So who’s Levinsohn?

He’s best known for his time running Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. division which formerly owned MySpace and a host of other online properties.

Under his watch, Fox bought Myspace for $580 million—then inked a $900 million search deal with Google. Shortly afterwards, he left News Corp. to become a venture capitalist at Fuse Capital.

So he’s got a good sense of timing.

Before News Corp., he worked in positions at CBS and HBO.

He joined Yahoo in November 2010 and oversees the company’s North American media and advertising businesses.

So his reputation in the Valley is primarily as a media guy. If he’s to be more than just Yahoo’s interim CEO, he’ll need to convince Yahoo’s restive engineers and product managers that he has tech chops, too—and persuade Wall Street that Yahoo deserves the kind of multiple assigned to tech companies, not slow-growth media concerns.

Some in tech are bullish on Levinsohn.

Former Twitter executive Josh Elman, now a principal at Greylock, thinks Levinsohn is the right person for the job.

“Ross could attract strong [product and engineering] talent” as Yahoo CEO, Elman tweeted over the weekend, before Sunday’s news.

“The problem there is overcoming a long time of empty (and changing) promises,” Elman added. “That worries me more.”

Facebook is one of the largest platforms in the world, with more than 900 million members.

The point of Facebook’s new Open Graph, a way to develop apps on Facebook, is giving users more ways to express themselves on Timeline, says Facebook engineer Alex Himel.

But how do you build apps for Facebook’s Timeline?

Himel has a breakdown of what you can do with Timeline and the Open Graph.

He used a bug-catching application he built for personal use as an example on stage at Business Insider’s Startup 2012 Conference.

Let’s get started!

Alex Himel, an engineer at Facebook, is going to walk us through the process.

But first, a quick history of the profiles on Facebook.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Apple is widely expected to launch more stores-within-stores in partnership with both Wal-Mart and Target, but one analyst argues that Wal-Mart will ultimately be the more important partner for Apple’s sales going forward.

In a research note, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster explains that Wal-Mart has 3,800 stores nationwide while Target has just 1,700 stores.

More importantly, Munster says Wal-Mart has more of a presence in rural areas than Target, which would help Apple broaden its reach to U.S. consumers.

“While Target stores will help expand distribution points, we believe from a geographic standpoint that there is significant overlap in markets with both Target, Best Buy, and Apple retail locations,” Munster writes.

At the moment, Apple only has one store-within-a-store in Wal-Mart and two in Target, though Munster notes Apple is expected to add 23 more Target locations this year.