In a move to reach profitability, Seattle's CarDomain.com has laid off CEO Rajan Krishnamurty, Vice President of Marketing Sam Bell and a third employee. "It is unfortunate that we had to take this action, but CarDomain is in a position where it makes more sense for the company to focus on further reducing its expenses, while preserving the engineering and products team that has helped us turn around our traffic and grow the community over the past year," said founder Alex Algard. In November, the Web site for car enthusiasts cut half of its staff or 16 employees.

Redmond's Mobui helped develop a new iPhone application in conjunction with Nickelodeon called the SpongeBob Tickler, based on the iconic TV character SpongeBob SquarePants. The $1.99 application, which debuted January 20, allows users to manipulate a virtual SpongeBob. Shake your phone to make SpongeBob jump or tap it to make him talk or blow bubbles. The wacky app was receiving about 3,000 downloads per day after its launch Jan. 20.

Pandora Media, the Oakland, Calif. online music service, has named Brian Mikalis to the position of vice president, performance sales. He most recently served as director of business development at AdReady, the Seattle online display advertising startup.

Now you can watch the StartPad video of the talk last month given by Faves.com founder Mohit Srivastava and ClayValet.com founder Mikhail Seregine about why their startups failed. And here's my summary if you missed it.

Seattle 2.0's Marcelo Calbucci offers his take on the decision of the WTIA and NWEN to combine membership fees. "If you are not member of either organizations, this won't persuade you to join," he writes.

Xconomy has the details on a new University of Washington startup created by professor Alex Jen and dubbed Soluxra that is developing a new solar cell technology derived from a polymer film.