Online furniture store Living.com has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy after failing to raise its next round of financing.

In February the venture signed a deal to pay Amazon.com $145 million over the next five years. The agreement was to make Living.com a featured partner on Amazon's site, while Amazon got an 18 per cent stake in the company. Living.com has not yet made any cash payments to Amazon.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Living.com has laid off 275 staff, and a recorded message on the company's phone said it had been "forced to discontinue our operations".

Online retailer Kozmo.com has laid off 10 per cent of its workforce (around 275 people). Those concerned worked in its warehouse operations and the company said new software and multi-skilled staff had made them redundant.

Kozmo claimed that its expansion plans are continuing unabated. We reported back in June that Kozmo had delayed itsIPO because of market conditions.

VC-backed Wine.com and Amazon-supported WineShopper.com are to merge to create a single operation, wine.com. Details of the deal were not released.

Hemscott.net Group has got the WAP bug. It is to pump its unique brand of financial information onto phones, PDAs and all manner of techy gadgets as part of its info-on-the-move strategy.

Michaels Williams of Freecom.net has resigned his post as chief executive to take effect immediately. The finance director Paul Coleman is waiting in the wings to take his place. Bodo Heiss has also resigned from the board. Bob Morton, company chairman, said that both men had made significant contributions to the company and wished them luck in the future.

Nick Temple, former CE and chairman of IBM UK, was yesterday appointed a non-executive director of AIM listed e-commerce outfit, auxinet.

Lycos has beaten expectations with its Q4 results with revenue shooting up 89 per cent as online traffic and advertising grows. While revenue is up to $87.9 million from $46.4 million, losses are also up to $39.5 million compared with $21.4 million in the same period last year. Advertising revenues, seen as a key indicator of dotcom health, gained 72 per cent to

$56.9 million.

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