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food fight
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 »
i hate it here
The east coast's love affair with Gavin Newsom
Time magazine gives renewable energy credit to hunky God-mayor Gavin Newsom. None was due. The august journal hails our fair mayor for a nonexistent wind-energy installation:San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom may be known nationally as the patron saint of gay marriage, but back home, Newsom has built his career on things like buying fleets of hybrid vehicles and installing windmills near the Golden Gate Bridge.More »
party report
PALO ALTO — How was Facebook's toga party, held to celebrate the company's 100 millionth user? We couldn't sit back and just read the status updates. So we sent a Valleywag spy deep inside the social network's headquarters. At last, the answer to the question, "What do you get when you mix 5 kegs of beer and a case of champagne with hundreds of geeks?" Alas, we just missed Zuckerberg — he's not known as a big drinker. But even COO Sheryl Sandberg, known for quashing every sign of fun at the company, showed, and grudgingly allowed herself to be wrapped up in a toga. The photos:
More »
Spy photos from the Facebook toga party
PALO ALTO — How was Facebook's toga party, held to celebrate the company's 100 millionth user? We couldn't sit back and just read the status updates. So we sent a Valleywag spy deep inside the social network's headquarters. At last, the answer to the question, "What do you get when you mix 5 kegs of beer and a case of champagne with hundreds of geeks?" Alas, we just missed Zuckerberg — he's not known as a big drinker. But even COO Sheryl Sandberg, known for quashing every sign of fun at the company, showed, and grudgingly allowed herself to be wrapped up in a toga. The photos:
More »
andrew baron
Rocketboom son and dad profess ignorance about Edwards affair
John Edwards has admitted to his affair with "filmmaker" Rielle Hunter, even if he hasn't come totally clean about the shenanigans he and his inner circle of advisors went through to keep it a secret. Elizabeth Edwards has also admitted that she knew about the affair before her husband formally announced his candidacy. But the Baron family — deep-pocketed trial lawyer Fred Baron and son Andrew Baron, who funded his startup Rocketboom from the family coffers — continue to hand-wave about what, exactly, they knew. More »
pay by touch
Washed-up NFL players want money back from SF startup
Seven former NFL football players — including Drew Bledsoe — are suing UBS, a Swiss bank, for investing their money in collapsed electronic-payments firm Pay By Touch. They claim the bank neglected to mention that Pay By Touch's founder, alleged cocaine addict John Rogers, was once charged with a felony. We'd love to know how an investment bank's lawyers would have framed this disclaimer in legalese. More »
food fight
Googleplex cafes staffed by illegal workers
One of our sources with Google's ready-to-boil kitchens, whom we've nicknamed "Deep Fried," tells us that the employee-coddling search giant has a much bigger food problem than cutbacks on dinner — and a much bigger labor problem than a lack of work visas for its programmers. More than half of the contract workers who prepare and serve Googler's vast quantities of free food, our source claims, lack documentation that proves they have a legal right to live and work in the United States. Are they illegal aliens? The point is that Bon Appétit, the management company which runs Google's cafes, has turned a blind eye — as has Google, until recently. A former chef tells us Google would frequently let workers who didn't have proper credentials return to work with fresh documents, under new names. More »
food fight
How Google's cafes turned into hell's kitchens
Live by the fork, die by the fork. Now that Google is cutting back on its free food, where will its flacks woo journalists? Morale in Google's kitchens is rock-bottom, as leaderless workers try to keep understaffed cafes running, even as Google management insists they open new eateries. The last place Google's PR staff should want to entertain a reporter is in their cafes. The tragedy of it all: As we learn more about how the Googleplex's food operations fell apart, it sounds like Google executives' ego got in the way of thinking about the needs of employees — or the workers who keep them fed. More »
politics
Barack Obama, meet your new Social Media Czar
Self-appointed "geeks" are nominating their blogosphere heroes to become America's CTO under presumptive President Barack Obama. The roster reads like the speaker list at any old emerging-technology conference: Larry Lessig. Tim O'Reilly. Dave Winer. Would any of these guys know a data governance strategy if it bit them on the face? Obviously, what their fans really want isn't a chief technology officer, it's someone to be Obama's Web 2.0 point man — a Social Media Czar. Guess who that should be? More »
the sum of all human knowledge
Wikipedia boss hits Jimmy Wales where it hurts
Sue Gardner, the Canadian ex-journalist hired to run Wikipedia last year, has treated Jimmy Wales, the site's cofounder, with kid gloves. Until now. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Gardner vehemently defends the nonprofit status of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's owner:It's a charity. Nobody is making any money from the organization. Nobody has made any money, and nobody will ever get rich from it because we're never going to sell it. We're not open for business; we're not looking for investment.More »
googleplex
There's no such thing as a free dinner. A worker at Google tells us the company is taking evening meals off the menu: "Google has drastically cut back their budget on the culinary program. How is it affecting campus? No more dinner. No more tea trolley. No more snack attack in the afternoon." The changes will be announced to Googlers on Monday. Workers at the Googleplex will remain amply fed, with free breakfast and lunch — dinner will be reserved for geeks only — but it's still a shocking cutback.
More »
Google's food perks on the chopping block
There's no such thing as a free dinner. A worker at Google tells us the company is taking evening meals off the menu: "Google has drastically cut back their budget on the culinary program. How is it affecting campus? No more dinner. No more tea trolley. No more snack attack in the afternoon." The changes will be announced to Googlers on Monday. Workers at the Googleplex will remain amply fed, with free breakfast and lunch — dinner will be reserved for geeks only — but it's still a shocking cutback.
More »
politics
Obama picks Biden, lets CNN tell supporters
So much for being the first to know, as Barack Obama's campaign promised Internet users who handed over their email addresses and cell-phone numbers in exchange for early notice of Obama's VP pick. "Multiple Democratic sources confirm to CNN that Sen. Barack Obama has selected Sen. Joseph Biden as his vice presidential nominee," CNN.com reports. A text message with the announcement will be sent to Obama's supporters sometime Saturday morning." BarackObama.com is still soliciting users' emails and phone numbers. Oh, and Twitter? More »
mythbusting
Why sponsoring bloggers is a waste of money
Even Scoble couldn't save Seagate. Almost a year after the hard-drive maker renewed a sponsorship deal with the prolific blogger, its stock is down 35 percent. Archrival Western Digital, meanwhile, is up 40 percent. So much for the profession of "influencer marketing," a field which has exploded since the 2000 publication of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and the subsequent work The Influentials. These books, translated into action by marketers, have prompted companies from AT&T to Yahoo to hire executives expressly to suck up to bloggers. Seagate's Scoble sponsorship is the purest expression of this trend. And the best illustration of why it doesn't work. More »
5:00 PM on Fri Aug 22 2008
By Owen Thomas
3,031 views,
16 comments
Latest by n/a: @TRTeller: Best comment ever! So true, so true. more »
the sum of all human knowledge
Is Jimmy Wales stalking his ex-wife in Alabama?
From Jimmy Wales's Wikipedia entry, one learns that the online encyclopedia's founder grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, and that his father, Jimmy, worked as a grocery-store manager, and his mother, Doris, ran a private school. From sources less public but more reliably accurate, I've heard that he's visiting his parents this weekend, with daughter Kira in tow. Ah, a touching family get-together. But a person familiar with Wales's plans believes that he is actually heading back to Alabama to bully his ex-wife Pam over statements she made to W magazine, which appeared in a profile that he found frustratingly unflattering. More »
Tim the IT Guy
Home tech support from AT&T? Please hold
AT&T has launched a "Geek Squad meets Fire Dog" IT service called AT&T ConnecTech. The company told USA Today that ConnecTech will provide home technical services in all 50 states: Home networking. Household tech support. Home theater installation. Having dealt with AT&T's "We don't have to — we're the phone company" attitude for years, I predict ConnecTech will be more like "Geek Squad meets the DMV." More »5 ways the newspapers botched the Web
Here's our theory: Daily deadlines did in the newspaper industry. The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look farther into the future than the next edition. Speaking of doom and gloom: Online ad revenues at several major newspaper chains actually dropped last quarter. The surprise there is that they ever managed to rise. The newspaper industry has a devastating history of letting the future of media slip from its grasp. Where to start? Perhaps 1995, when several newspaper chains put $9 million into a consortium called New Century Network. "The granddaddy of fuckups," as one suitably crotchety industry veteran tells us, folded in 1998. Or you can go further back, to '80s adventures in videotext. But each tale ends the same way: A promising start, shuttered amid fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
More »
5:00 PM on Thu Aug 21 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
59,493 views,
44 comments
Latest by n/a: Three things about smaller newspapers and the web. 1. ABC accepts (or used to accept) PDF downloads as paid circulation for more »
State of the Valley
Bracing for the big one
The Valley's latest extreme sport is feigning nonchalance about the economy. Living in an earthquake zone requires developing a habit of stoic flinchiness. The economy's seismic shifts are slower, but just as unpredictable; all one can do it shrug one's shoulders, stock the emergency kit, and keep on living. "We're watching the economy crater all around us, but ... well, we're not really seeing any direct impact," writes Tech Ticker anchor Sarah Lacy. "Making things more uneasy for those here in 2000: We didn't cause this one." Lacy's right to reach back in history for examples, but her timing is off. This is 1998 all over again. More »
5:00 PM on Wed Aug 20 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,790 views,
16 comments
Latest by Shadowlayer: The problem with VCs is that when they talk about "profitability" "untapped potential" and the like, they aren't serious about more »
Tim the IT Guy
