Home / valleywag.com rss archive / October-04-2007


Open Source: Dell's Linux laptop is "free" as in "more expensive"
Dell's Ubuntu notebook, praised as "The Next Leap for Linux" in a freetard New York Times piece today, supposedly beats Microsoft machines on price, because the buyer doesn't pay for a Windows license. But how much is that license? Fifty bucks. If you're truly shopping on price, Dell's entry-level Windows model is a third cheaper than the Penguinmobile -- $499 versus $774. Its Windows Vista Basic is hardly the "stripped-down" operating system Times writer Larry Magid dubs it (see this checklist.) It'll run iTunes and play DVDs without choking, unlike Magid's Ubuntu test unit. Spring for the Windows laptop and your savings will more than cover an upgrade to Vista Home Premium ($30), a legal copy of Office 2007 ($149), and a double cappucino for me as a reward for saving you from this sort of alterna-chic foolishness.

Exits: Sprint Nextel board members are on the hunt ...
Sprint Nextel board members are on the hunt for a new CEO to replace Gary Forsee. Sprint has been losing out to AT&T and Verizon in signing up new customers and recently lost the confidence of investor Ralph Whitworth, who owns almost 2 percent of the company. WSJ]

Clips: Angel investor Ron Conway bores startups silly
Hooman Khalili interviews Google backer Ron Conway at the recent TechCrunch40 conference. He describes the event as showcasing "40 great Silicon Valley companies," which shows he wasn't really paying attention, and doesn't say much else of interest. But his relentless monotone raises a question: How does the Valley's most successful angel investor manage to keep entrepreneurs awake long enough to sign a termsheet?

Competition: Level 3 has cut more than 50 percent off ...
Level 3 has cut more than 50 percent off the prices they charge for "content distribution" -- the premium Internet service charged to online video purveyors and other bandwidth-intensive sites. It's a blow to competitors Limelight Networks and Akamai. Because Level 3 owns its own telecom backbone, they can afford to undercut the competition. We love ourselves a good price war. [GigaOm]

Quotable: "Reid was also subject to derogatory comments ...
"Reid was also subject to derogatory comments from colleagues within the organization, who referred to Reid as an 'old man,' an 'old guy,' an 'old fuddy-duddy.' They told him his knowledge was ancient, and joked that the CD jewel case office placard should be an 'LP' instead of a 'CD.'" -- The California Sixth District Court of Appeal, ruling that an age-discrimination lawsuit against Google was wrongly rejected. [Central Valley Business Times]

Stats Feed: Today's most popular headlines are David ...
Today's most popular headlines are David Pogue writes whatever you tell him to (2,972 views today), Google stinks! (1,568) and Jajah adds to eBay's click-to-call nightmare (631).

Deals: BT and Fon have partnered to create what ...
BT and Fon have partnered to create what they claim is the largest Wi-Fi "community" in the world. "Community," in this case, meaning that participating BT broadband customers will share their home wireless networks with other members and in return will get unlimited access to Fon's almost 200,000 hotspots. Could this be the solution to municipal Wi-Fi? [Connected Internet]

Nerdfight: "Yeah, I suppose you fooled Techmeme about ...
"Yeah, I suppose you fooled Techmeme about your sincerity. Note that you also fooled Fred Wilson and Josh Kopelman in the process. Training your readers to doubt you can be risky. Sometimes you want your posts taken at face value, e.g. those insisting your company is succeeding." Gabe Rivera, founder of blog aggregator Techmeme, takes on blowhard blogger Jason Calacanis. [Calacanis.com]

Mine Is Bigger: "Eat your heart out Larry and Sergey." -- ...
"Eat your heart out Larry and Sergey." -- Reporter Mary Anne Ostrom, describing the Airbus A380 which landed earlier today at San Francisco International Airport. The humongous jet can carry as many as 800 people -- 16 times the passenger capacity of the Google founders' party plane. [San Jose Mercury News]

Earnings: Research In Motion beat Wall Street analysts' ...
Research In Motion beat Wall Street analysts' expectations, reporting a profit of $287.7 million in the second quarter as revenue rose 108 percent. RIM shipped more than 3 million BlackBerry smartphones. Guess the iPhone release didn't slow them down at all. [Canadian Press]

Rumormonger: Big shakeup at Microsoft?
According to the BusinessofVideo.com blog, Microsoft is shaking up its audio- and video-software business:Today, Microsoft made some major company changes in multiple divisions of their business. Some long time execs including Amir Majidimehr and others are affected and multiple divisions have been reorged. Lots of changes that will affect multiple product lines. I expect we'll see the changes announced shortly, if not tomorrow.Majidimehr, who's been in charge of big parts of Microsoft's multimedia strategy over the years, may be paying the price for letting the software giant get overtaken in online video. The rise of Adobe's Flash as the online-video technology of choice for sites like YouTube has made Microsoft's Windows Media largely irrelevant.

Quotable: "Older people being on Facebook is kind of ...
"Older people being on Facebook is kind of weird." -- Tess Lippincott, 16, reacts to her mother and other adults joining the trendy social network. Imagine what the college kids think of a teenager joining. [USA Today]

To Do: Want to meet a giant of Silicon Valley, but ...
Want to meet a giant of Silicon Valley, but you're stuck in the South? Here's your chance. Former PayPal CEO turned venture capitalist and Facebook board member Peter Thiel will speak at the University of Tennessee at Chatanooga on Monday. [Chattanoogan]

Stats: Who makes more, Yahoo or Google engineers?
It really doesn't matter that Yahoo's "interim" CEO Jerry Yang doesn't have a 100-day plan. Even if he had a plan to executive, he can't attract the engineers to build it. Why? Google simply pays more, and engineers follow the money. According to MyDanwei, a salary-tracking site, the average Google software engineer makes $107,275 a year. Yahoo engineers take in $92,833 -- almost 15 percent less. Wresting market share out from Google's grip faces any number of obstacles, but at some level it comes down to technology and the people that build it. Yahoo simply can't compete. That is, if MyDanwei can be trusted. After all, they still list Terry Semel as Yahoo's CEO. (Average salary calculated using listings under the title "Software Engineer" posted in 2007. An earlier math error in Google's pay has been updated.)

Facebook: Dramatic Whitespace is the best app ever
Shh. Shh. Don't talk. Everything is clear now.

Rumormonger: AOL fires all of its contractors?
A reliable tipster tells us that AOL just terminated all of the contractors in its Dulles, Va. headquarters -- a cheaper cost-saving move, naturally, than actually firing employees, though perhaps a precursor to actual staff layoffs. Anyone know how many people were affected? Let us know.

Great Moments In Journalism: David Pogue writes whatever you tell him to
David Pogue of the New York Times wrote a humiliating column today correcting a huge pricing error in his last piece. He wrote about cellphone startup Cubic Telecom, which carries international phone calls over the Internet to give really cheap rates. Pogue listed off a bunch of rates to places like Greece or Iraq and excitedly wrote that "the appropriate world traveler's response ought to be involuntary drooling." Except the prices he quoted were just plain wrong. That'll stop up your salivary glands.Ordinarily, I conduct my own tests of products and write my own conclusions. But on a product whose primary feature is its price, I have to rely on the company that makes it -- especially when I'm writing the review before the product is available to the public, as often happens in my business.So Pogue wrote what the company told him to. This is the trouble with exclusives. Pogue wrote a glowing review, ahead of the product's launch, and then looked like a fool when the company's...

Blogging For Dollars: The $100 million TechCrunch joke
Henry Blodget is having raucous fun. On his blog, Silicon Alley Insider, the "disgraced stock analyst" -- a seemingly requisite epithet whenever Blodget is mentioned -- is driving people crazy. How? By, say, actually running the numbers on how Google might one day be worth $2,000. Or riffing off a ludicrously sketchy thumbsucker about what blogs are worth, in which he declares that TechCrunch might be worth $100 million. Even the tech blog's editor, Michael Arrington, linked to it, laughing all the while. Unfortunately, no one let Light Reading's Scott Raynovich in on the joke. Raynovich stoutly debunks the notion that TechCrunch might be worth $100 million. An effort, of course, which I'd applaud, if I thought anyone, Blodget included, believed the notion in the first place. (Photo by Getty Images)

Open Source: Dell's Linux laptop, written up in a freetard ...
Dell's Linux laptop, written up in a freetard New York Times piece today, supposedly beats Microsoft machines on price, because the buyer doesn't pay for a Windows license. How much is that license? Fifty bucks. Dell's entry-level Windows laptop is a third cheaper than the Penguinmobile -- $499 versus $774. Windows Vista Basic is hardly the "stripped-down" operating system Times writer Larry Magrid dubs it (see this checklist.) It'll run iTunes and play DVDs without choking, unlike Magrid's test unit. Your cost savings will more than cover an upgrade to Vista Home Premium ($30), a legal copy of Office 2007 ($149), and a double cappucino for me as a reward for saving you from this sort of alterna-chic foolishness.

Deals: MySpace, fearing Facebook, adds PayPal as friend
As rumors grow that social network Facebook will introduce its own payment system, News Corp.-owned MySpace, still the leading social network, is teaming up with PayPal, eBay's online payments division. The partnership amounts to an experiment at this point, focusing on donations to political campaigns and nonprofits -- not exactly a hotbed of MySpace activity. Wake us when you can buy concert tickets on MySpace. But the move does speak to the partners' fears that Facebook will introduce its own payment system. How to respond? Become frenemies, of course. MySpace instantly has a proven payment system without months or years of development, and PayPal gains access to MySpace's millions of users. Nothing builds partnerships faster than fear of the competition.

Microsoft: Open-source trap or sign of weakness?
Open source conspiracy theorists warn that Microsoft's effort to make the code behind .Net, its software-development framework, open to the public to view -- but not modify-- is a trap. The goal? It's aimed, they claim, at tainting Mono, an open-source implementation of .Net, with the software maker's intellectual property. And why does this matter? Mono, you see, allows programmers to easily port software meant to run on Microsoft's Windows to Linux and other competing operating systems. But really, might Microsoft's critics be giving it too much credit for cleverness?While Microsoft has been known to try just about every tactic in the book to undermine the competition, this paranoid theory mischaracterizes the open source community's beloved Mono. True, Mono, in theory, weakens Windows. But only in theory. In practice, Mono is not a threat to Microsoft -- rather, it's spread the popularity of .Net far beyond Microsoft's Windows-developer base, and thereby tied the open-source...

Lifecasters: Do you honestly have nothing better to do than gawk?
If ever you wanted a sign of how neglected Valleywag is at our publisher's New York headquarters, look no further than the new Gawker channel on lifecaster Justin.tv. Clearly, no one at Gawker reads Valleywag. They're set to learn the hard way how pointless lifecasting is. There are, at present, a grand total of 100 people watching what has to be one of the most mundane and boring forms of entertainment ever created -- a live webcam feed from Gawker HQ. Wow. Look at all the dirty, unshaven bloggers. It's like some sort of deranged petting zoo. All this is doing is stroking head honcho Nick Denton's already overblown ego -- with the unfortunate side effect of promoting streaming video as the next big Internet phenom, which it clearly is not. Quit your gawking and move on.

Digital Music: Zuned to failure
Microsoft's bullheaded foray into the music-player market, despite Apple's complete domination, seems as silly a proposition as entering the seemingly impenetrable videogame console business in November 2001. The only problem is that the success of Microsoft's Xbox is a fluke which owes much to Sony's missteps and runaway sales of Halo. The Zune, in all its redesigned glory, has no such killer app -- just the same music, more or less, as Apple's iPod. And the Zune's main selling point?Wireless sharing of music, a feature that was intentionally crippled when Microsoft first introduced it, and now rendered irrelevant by the spread of DRM-free music downloads. A music store redesign and the launch of a social network are hardly compelling reasons to purchase a Zune. And what would be a true marketplace differentiator, a subscription plan the likes of whichthat Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said he has no plans to offer on the iPod, is tied up in legalities. If we were to adopt the Zune...

Hype: Hefty investment in virtual worlds based on virtual math
Media company Virtual Worlds Management, which is hosting the Virtual World Conference next week in San Jose, boasts that $1 billion was invested in virtual worlds over the past year. Well, as Leigh Alexander of Worlds in Motion points out, this figure results from skilled sleight of hand. Here's how the market really breaks down.Disney acquires Club Penguin for $700 million.Actually, it was half that. The other $350 million is dependent on meeting earnings goals by 2009.Intel acquires Havok for $110 million. Second Life may use the Havok physics engine, but its engines are most commonly used in videogames, not virtual worlds.Double Fusion raises $26 million; Double Fusion Japan secures undisclosed capital inves Double Fusion is an in-game advertising firm. It no doubt is inherently interested in product placement and ad sales in virtual worlds, but its in-game ad engine is widely marketed to console and PC videogame publishers. Again, counted properly, this is a videogame investmen...

Blogging For Dollars: To the frustration of his less-savvy and ...
To the frustration of his less-savvy and overserious critics, Internet entrepreneur and professional gadfly Jason Calacanis has mastered the API for online tech-news tracker Techmeme. [Calacanis.com]

Videogames: Microsoft's golden child, Halo 3, continues ...
Microsoft's golden child, Halo 3, continues to break videogame sales records by netting more than $300 million during its first week on store shelves. [Shacknews]

Deathwatch: Red Herring defaults, again
When Red Herring, the troubled tech publisher, got an eviction notice, editor-in-chief Joel Dreyfuss tried to pass it off as a quirk of publisher Alex Vieux's financial-management strategy. "That's just how Alex pays his bills," said Dreyfuss. Or rather, doesn't pay his bills. Already, Vieux's Herring has been ordered to pay Comerica Bank $180,457 plus interest for an unpaid loan. But now, it looks like he don't even have the time, money, or inclination to dispute his debts. A look at San Mateo County Court records reveals that two recent cases brought against Red Herring, Inc, have been awarded to the plaintiffs in default judgments. In other words, Vieux's legal repreesentatives didn't even bother to show up in court.The first case, brought by online distribution service Zinio, explains why Red Herring disappeared from both physical stores and Zinio's virtual newsstand this summer. In June, Zinio sued for breach of contract. Red Herring apparently never responded to the...

Blogging For Dollars: Why jock blogs are attracting advertisers
Advertisers are realizing that the blogs written by pro athletes are an attractive advertising platform -- at any rate, as far as blogs go. They have a built-in audience of rabid and loyal fans. Many of the most popular athletes tend to be outspoken and controversial, drawing in a wider audience. Mere talk of on-field or locker-room disputes can generate buzz. Likewise, non-sports talk builds interest. The downside: Advertisers are leery of controversial athletes being associated with their brands. But everyone knows the mainstream media ignores blogs, so they're safe, right? Best of all, while bloggers in the self-righteous tech world are vilified for pitching products, fans expect pro athletes to be walking billboards. The occasional awkwardly inserted product pitch may rub a few readers the wrong way, but it doesn't lead to an angry horde with pitchforks and torches.

Reality Check: Jajah adds to eBay's click-to-call nightmare
We'd hardly blame Meg Whitman if, after this week, she decided to hang up on the phone business altogether. On Monday eBay said they were taking a $1.4 billion charge related to their acquisition of VOIP startup Skype. On Tuesday, we noted that one of Whitman's major goals in buying Skype, bolstering its auction business in China, where rivals were using click-to-call features on their auctions to close sales, has turned into a complete failure. And then, yesterday, things somehow managed to get worse.Skype competitor Jajah launched click-to-call buttons that connect potential buyers and eBay sellers, accomplishing an integration into the auction site that Skype hasn't. In response to this affront, eBay last night deleted all auctions with Jajah buttons on them. Reportedly, eBay and Jajah had reached some sort of tentative agreement giving Jajah users the go-ahead to put Jajah buttons on their auctions -- but that deal is now clearly dead.So where does that leave things? eBay...

Geek Pride: Loudmouth Internet billionaire Mark Cuban ...
Loudmouth Internet billionaire Mark Cuban thanks the "Nerd Hard" [sic] for keeping him on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" for one more week. You're welcome, Mark. And, um, thanks for noticing, I think. [Blog Maverick]

Superficial: Google VP needs a new shirt
Spotted at last night's party at the Googleplex New York: Douglas Merrill, a Google engineering VP who's kind of a geek hottie. Actually, majorly nerd smoking. No, scratch that: The Brad Pitt of brainiacs. Except for his fashion sense. A Valleywag fashion correspondent, working incognito, reports that Merrill was wearing the same exact red paisley shirt he was photographed in for his publicity shot, above. What? With his Google stock options, the man can't afford more than one party shirt? Dougie, give desperate geek-seeking missile Julia Allison a call. The Star magazine editor would be glad to dress you. Or undress you.

Acquisitions: Facebook applications chase Mark Zuckerberg's shadow
Mark Zuckerberg's strategy of holding out for a Facebook valuation as high as $15 billion is contagious. Developers of the most popular Facebook applications have become mini-Zucks, unwilling to part with their astronomically self-valued creations. If Lance Tokuda, the chief executive of RockYou, sees any difference, it's only one of scale. Speaking about his companies popular Super Wall application, Tokuda, says "If you told me you were going to write me a check for $10 million, I'd say, 'Forget it.'" Why?What Tokuda didn't mention to the New York Times is that Sequoia Capital, RockYou's venture-capital backer, is rumored to be shopping his entire company for a price between $200 million and $500 million. It's hard to say which is more inflated: Tokuda's price for Super Wall, a minor improvement on Facebook's built-in Wall message board, or Sequoia's price for RockYou's entire collection of "barnacles," as the Times describes its applications.Tokuda and Sequoia, of course,...

Stocks: Chipmakers' stocks fell yesterday after a ...
Chipmakers' stocks fell yesterday after a Morgan Stanley report advised investors to sell Intel and AMD because of a possible price war between the two. Of course, what's bad for chipmakers is good news for PC makers, and computer buyers. Baby needs a new Mac. Bring on the price war, we say! [The Register]

Clips: Google stinks!
newVideoPlayer("Julia_Google_Party.flv", 475, 376);Julia Allison, the notorious nobody who clings to Gawker like a barnacle ... I mean, a Facebook application developer to the red-hot social network, has discovered that Google is not all it's cracked up to be. First of all, the hygiene in the Google New York cafeteria? Not so good. And Google Husband Finder? Not even in beta yet.

Spam: UK sting arrests 80 Nigerian spammers
The Serious Organized Crime Agency (it's for real) led a multi-national operation -- 60 arrests in the Netherlands, 16 in Nigeria, a few in the UK and one in Canada. Times Online reports that many 419 scammers aren't loners, but rather organized crime "gangs," often run by West African ex-pats in the Netherlands. Mock their bad English if you must, but it's a living. One government estimate says email scammers con seven billion dollars' worth of cash out of the Brits alone, every year. That's 23 times more than USA for Africa collected.

Great Moments In Public Relations: Fake Steve impersonated by One-Laptop PR shill
A few weeks ago, Forbes editor Dan Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, wrote a devastating analysis of the One Laptop Per Child project. On Tuesday, Wayan Vota, a blogger who follows the OLPC project, responded in essence, that while he agreed with Fake Steve, he still agreed with the project's aims. That would have been the end of it, except for a comment left on his post by "Fake Steve Jobs." The problem? Lyons didn't leave that comment. Vota compared the IP address that left the comment to others that he'd received and tracked it back to the Racepoint Group, the PR firm that reps OLPC. The commenter has since apologized, but the damage is done. To Kyle Austin, soon-to-be-fired flunky at Racepoint Group we say: great spin control. Proof after the jump.(Screenshot from DCMetblogger)

Facebook: Man gets jailtime for Facebook friend request
When you have a restraining order out against you, you need to be careful when playing around on social networks. A 37-year-old British man had been given a no-contact order after harassing his wife with text messages and phone calls. When he joined Facebook, he checked the box that would invite his entire address book to join as well. In Silicon Valley, that's just an annoying social faux pas. But for him, it was a violation of his no-contact rule. He received ten days in jail, but served only seven after his lawyer petitioned the court that he had been "confused" by Facebook's sign-in procedures. Good thing he didn't poke her.