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copyfight
Valley denizens descend on Black Rock City
It's time for the annual bacchanal of burning fossil fuel and using drugs known as Burning Man. According to a tipster, "Google has a total of five big-rig hospitality trucks camped out at Burning Man for the Google elite and some other Valley bigwigs." Hope they stocked up on water, condoms and 2C-B! For those of you who would prefer to stay home and relish the widespread availability of parking, Scott Beale has assembled a handy guide to experiencing the scene on the playa without getting any sand somewhere uncomfortable. [Laughing Squid] (Photo by Dana Robinson)
copyfight
In Brief
Bloomberg Runs Steve Jobs's Obituary
FROM GAWKER.COM: For whatever reason, the Bloomberg financial newswire decided to update its 17-page Steve Jobs obituary today. More »
Poll
"West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin is still in the research phase of his Facebook: The Movie project, but we thought Valleywag's readers could help cast the lead role. Take your pick from our list, below.
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Who should play Zuckerberg in a Facebook movie?
"West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin is still in the research phase of his Facebook: The Movie project, but we thought Valleywag's readers could help cast the lead role. Take your pick from our list, below.
More »
internet trends
FriendFeed declares instant gratification not fast enough
Faster! In the '90s, people used to reload websites to see if they'd updated. Too slow! Hence the invention of RSS, a protocol for distributing headlines and stories over the Web. Faster! RSS takes too long to update, and requires too much bandwidth to check more frequently. Faster! Visiting multiple social networks takes too long. Paul Buchheit, an ex-Google engineer, cofounded FriendFeed, a site which uses RSS heavily to monitor your friends' activities across multiple websites. Faster! Now Buchheit is working on a replacement for RSS called SUP, or "Simple Update Protocol." More »
Most Popular Stories
- The east coast's love affair with Gavin Newsom (3,765 views, 35 comments)
- Spy photos from the Facebook toga party (3,124 views, 17 comments)
- Google food manager charged with double-dealing (2,330 views, 7 comments)
- Microsoft's current pay rates for H-1B workers (16 comments, 1,987 views)
Commenter Of The Day
Spy from the Land of Rainpeople
Those Europeans like to make money just like Americans do but this year they've been holding off on making as much investments. What's going on? Today's featured commenter, Spy from the Land of Rainpeople, pithily explains: More »
Tim the IT Guy
Stupid Google calculator tricks
Google's named after "googol," an incredibly large number — misspelled. Does it surprise you that the search engine makes mistakes with math, too? Just for fun, watch what happens when you use the Google calculator to solve equations involving a Googol (10^100). More »
Caption Contest
Google's hired hands at the DNC
For those stressed out at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colo. this week, the Google "Retreat" offered a refreshing smoothie and a free, ten-minute massage. Because nothing says "Stick it to the man!" like a rubdown from your friendly search-engine overlords. Think you're funny? Best caption submitted in the comments will get ranked first as the headline. Yesterday's winner was auntanna for "Mark is all smiles until Dave explains the 'vomitorium.'" (Photo by Steve Rhodes)
exits
Report: Yahoo mobile exec Steve Boom hangs up on the company
"Sure, I know some people at Yahoo," says an industry executive. "They're scared. The company's in Titanic mode." The latest exec to scurry off the ship: Ten-year veteran Steve Boom, the No. 2 at Yahoo Mobile, says TechCrunch, which broke the story. What prompted his departure? Not sure yet, but we've heard Boom's division talked about as the target of layoffs.
We Read Twitter So You Don't Have To
Oh good God, she's tweeting her childbirth
Ginny-Marie Case wins the prize. While others thumb-type the same old same from the DNC in Denver, she's Twittering her way through labor. "At 4 cm. Epidural is in. Doing well." Tweeting your ob/gyn exam during an earthquake is now officially lame. Ginny, when they hand you your lovely newborn? Put down the phone.
blogging for dollars
TechCrunch drops blog format for newspapery look
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has said that he wants to displace CNET as the tech industry's top news site. His redesigned home page suggests that TechCrunch won't so much defeat CNET as become CNET. Arrington has replaced the Boing Boingy full-posts-in-reverse-order blog format on TC's home page with much more of a news-site layout. There's a top story with a custom-written "deck," to use newsroom jargon, meant to get you to click through to the whole article. It's similar to the format used by most newspaper sites. Here's a demo of the click-through trick: More »
The Facebook Movie
Aaron Sorkin's rep fails to deny Facebook movie
Is "West Wing" writer Aaron Sorkin making "The Facebook Movie," as someone going by his name on Facebook claims? I called Aaron Sorkin's agent, Ari Emanuel — yes, the inspiration for Jeremy Piven's character in "Entourage" — and got his assistant. She said: "I'm not denying anything. I just can't comment for the company." Meanwhile, New York got a an emailed confirmation from producer Scott Rudin. Email? People, Facebook messages are totally the way to go here.
Social Networks
Science says poking won't make you more slutty
Using social networks to find sex only make kids these days look sluttier. The reality? A new study of 2,000 MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo users aged 16 to 24 finds they're not happy about the reputation. A full 69 percent believe the media portray them unfairly as "sex maniacs." Those surveyed will be happy with the study's results: More »
food fight
Google food manager charged with double-dealing
The brouhaha over Google's once-legendary, now troubled free-meals perk has bubbled up more charges of wrongdoing in the search engine's kitchens. An anonymous poster has taken to Craigslist to air charges against Google's former global food manager, John Dickman. (The post refers to him as "Dick," but it's obviously Dickman being discussed.) The Craigslist poster claims Dickman, left, who is married to Lisa McEuen, right, an executive at the parent company of food-service operator Bon Appétit, with leaking inside information which helped Bon Appétit win a contract to run Google's in-house meal service. More »
cleantech
Silicon Valley thieves sawing catalytic converters off cars
The antipollution device bolted onto your car's exhaust pipes contains platinum, an expensive metal. Some recycling shops will pay $200 for a used converter — whether it comes from a junked vehicle or was freshly sawed from beneath a Toyota Land Cruiser at the Stanford Shopping Center. I typed up the best parts of a not-online report by the San Francisco Daily Post: More »
Design
Yahoo changes its logo to purple
At last, Yahoo's not just bleeding purple on the inside. Yahoo's Argentinean and Brazilian portals have switched from the company's longstanding red logo to a purple one, tipster Mauro Borione tells us . Can the main Yahoo site be far behind? The site's red logo has long been a branding mystery. More »
Hackers
Any guy in a suit can crack the iPhone's password
A forum post on MacRumors explains how to end-run the password on a locked iPhone. It's so easy it hurts: More »
100-word version
Mossberg's stunt double solves Windows Mobile's media problems
"A single tap on its surface instantly zooms in on images; a flicking gesture moves one photo off the screen and pulls another one on. Menus appear with clever animation, and actions like downloading and emailing photos and videos are intuitively incorporated." No, not the iPhone. It's the Kinoma player for Windows phones. WSJ contributor Katie Boehret solves all of Walt Mossberg's problems with this tidy report on using Kinoma to serve Flickr, YouTube, SHOUTcast and other services on a Windows phone. There's good news for Linux and Symbian fans too: More »
Great Moments In Pr
Chinese iPhone worker gets to keep her job
A Chinese worker at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China is "definitely not fired," a factory spokesperson told the newspaper Xiandai Kuaibao. The smiling young lady's photos were found on a newly unboxed iPhone by a British buyer who posted them to MacRumors.
Clips
Bill O'Reilly dance mix rocks the house
Look, I used to be a professional musician. And basically, most mashups, remixes, and other forms of Music 2.0 just don't work. All brain, no booty. But this remix of Bill O'Reilly's most awesomely human moment — "Fuck it! We'll do it live! Fucking thing sucks!" — blows Girl Talk off the turntable. Throw away your thinking caps and crank it to 11. Valleywag's contribution to the fad: We've successfully tainted Natali Del Conte with the line. it's so much cuter when she says it.
Nancy Floyd
Green VC's speech outperforms her investments
Nth Power founder Nancy Floyd, whose firm invests in clean-energy solutions, spoke at the Democratic convention last night. I tracked down her full speech. Nth Power's investments haven't exactly threatened Kleiner Perkins on ROI. But Floyd has a plan to fix that. Wanna guess? Don't miss the part where she panders to the DNC's Mac fans. More »
e-commerce
Botched software upgrade costs J. Crew $3 million
Luxer-than-thou retailer J. Crew has mostly avoided the economic pinch, since its customers barely notice that they're paying $4 a gallon for gas. Instead, the retailer has been laid low by buggy software, reports the Business Technology blog. One outraged customer, shown here, was billed $9,208.50 and shipped baby-size shirts, not the mediums he'd ordered. J. Crew's net income in its most recent quarter fell 12 percent from the same period last year to $18.1 million, and the company said it spent $3 million to fix the problem. Do the math: Had J. Crew not had the software problem, its income would have been up 2.5 percent. It's a shameful comeuppance for J. Crew CEO Mickey Drexler. More »
valleywag calendar
Not all search engines rhyme with "oogle"
Thanks to Google's unquestioned domination, the not-so-wide world of search makes for uninteresting competition. But while Yahoo, Ask, and now Cuil duke it out for whatever scraps of market share they can get, specialized search engines are aggressively trying to outwit the master. Join John D. Mitchell, also known as the Mad Scientist of MarkMail, for "A Tale of Two Search Engines" at the Cubberly Community Center in Palo Alto at 6:30 p.m. Also on the Peninsula, Bay.Net is bringing DotNetNuke's cofounder Shaun Walker to Foothill College at 6:00 p.m to talk about the open-source application that could. But if you're more inclined to do a little story telling of your own, head to Techsoup at 7:00 p.m. The SF Online Community Report MeetUp wants to know, "What are you doing?" So go on. Don't be shy. Tell them.(Photo by Danard Vincente) More »
Virtual Worlds
The reinvention of Second Life
Virtual worlds are endlessly mutable. As are the wildly implausible schemes their boosters concoct for making money off them. The latest idea Linden Lab has for Second Life: Profit, in some vague, unspecified way, from the world's free 3D design tools. The perpetually gullible BusinessWeek bought this story, pointing to examples of toy designers and architects building digital models and showing them off to customers in Second Life. There's a certain beauty to it: An entrepreneur's fantasy, used to peddle other entrepreneurs' fantasies. Not that there's much of a business here, since Linden Lab gives away its design software. More »
European VCs even more skittish than ours
Investments in startups by European firms last quarter hit their lowest level since at least 2000. Dow Jones VentureSource counts only 167 companies funded, compared to nearly 300 a year ago. Total funding dropped from $2 billion to $1.3 billion. More tellingly, investment in technology startups dropped by half. For comparison, American investments are off 19 percent. [WSJ]
Apple Users Held Hostage
iPhone day 49: AT&T overseas plans "only" $200 per month
The New York Times pored over the details of AT&T's new overseas data plans for the iPhone. Not only is it pricey, but absent-minded travelers (that's "I believe I'm slightly autistic" in the Valley, or in New York, "Anyone seen my Adderall?") will find themselves paying a lot more than they planned: More »
In Brief
