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


Clips: HBO buys a Second Life movie
The Internet just imploded: HBO, television's supposed savior, has paid "six figures" for the rights to a Second Life "documentary" titled "My Second Life: The Video Diaries of Molotov Alva." For the uninitiated, machinima, short films recorded entirely within the game world, is a rather popular genre among the videogaming set and usually parodies of the originating property. The most famous machinima series is the five-season long Red Vs Blue, which is based on, and in, Bungie's Halo 2. Apparently HBO hopes to cash in on the virtual world/machinima hype with My Second Life. The short segments star Molotov Alva, a dude who disappears from his first life and winds up recording video diaries in his second one in an attempt to figure out how he wound up there. Sounds like most Second Life users I know. I'm always wondering what happened to their actual first lives, too.

Vint Cerf: Father of the Internet hates streaming video, too
Vint Cerf, founding father of the Internet and Google's underemployed Net evangelist, has a theory: The Internet will kill the television set. The problem is that online-video initiatives are focused on streaming media. Cerf proposes a shift towards downloadable, Internet-delivered content -- called "IPTV," after the Internet Protocol Cef helped invent. IPTV would work more on the TiVo model of record now, watch later. According to him, it would then be possible to serve content faster than real-time -- it would take 16 seconds to download an hour's worth of video on a 1 gigabit-per-second connection -- which would eliminate strain on service providers and placate consumers seeking videos without jagged images and distorted sound. Or we could all just use BitTorrent.

Digital Music: "The iPod will be obsolete," says Rick Rubin, ...
"The iPod will be obsolete," says Rick Rubin, co-head of Columbia Records. In order to combat file sharing, the recording industry needs to operate on a subscription model, he says: "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television," he explains. Oh, you mean already extant services like Napster, Rhapsody, or Yahoo Music? [The New York Times]

Feuds: The Apple-NBC Universal spat continues. Shortly ...
The Apple-NBC Universal spat continues. Shortly after NBC announced it wouldn't renew its iTunes contract, Apple decided to kick the upcoming NBC season off its digital shelves. In a counterstrike, NBC has announced its shows will appear on Amazon Unbox as soon as next week. Burnnnnn. [Ars Technica]

Media: Time Inc. sends secret ninja "kill teams" to shut down Business 2.0
We'd already heard that the October issue of Business 2.0 would be the last one published by Time Inc.; now, the New York Times reports on the Bits blog that it will be the last one, period. Talks with Mansueto Ventures, publisher of Fast Company and Inc., apparently failed; as we predicted, Time Inc. did not want to strengthen a competitor. A few staffers will join Fortune and Fortune Small Business. The rest will fall victim to what Bits colorfully calls "kill teams." This being Time Inc., don't expect black-suited corporate operatives. Or anything the least bit colorful. Instead, the teams will likely kill with kindness -- and boredom. Time Inc.'s HR presentations -- some of which, I should disclose, I sat through as a Business 2.0 employee -- are legendary as cures for insomnia.

Acquisitions: Yahoo is spending $300 million in cold, hard ...
Yahoo is spending $300 million in cold, hard cash to buy BlueLithium, an ad-targeting startup. If the rumors we hear are true, founder Gurbaksh Chahal, who's not sticking around for long after the acquisition, will find ways of spending that. [PaidContent]

Loser-generated Content: Are you a self-righteous, humorless hippie ...
Are you a self-righteous, humorless hippie with no sense of what is socially acceptable? Have design skills? PETA wants you to create its new blog advertising campaign. [BlogAds]

Stats: Almost a quarter of senior executives, including ...
Almost a quarter of senior executives, including CEOs and CFOs, admit to playing casual flash games while at work says videogame publisher PopCap. [Gamasutra]

Marcy Simon: GooglePhone PR in the hands of CEO's girlfriend
Marcy Simon, Valleywag has learned, doesn't just have a coveted desk and a phone line in Google's cramped New York offices. She also has a seemingly hot assignment: PR for the yet-to-be-launched GooglePhone. All this, simply for serving as married Google CEO Eric Schmidt's piece on the side? Yes, that's right: Schmidt's girlfriend, despite having no experience in wireless or telecom, is handling the launch of one of Google's most-whispered-about initiatives. Why the Duchess of West Chelsea, as Valleywag has dubbed Simon, is handling this, and not say, David Krane, Google's telecom-savvy director of corporate communications, is telling about both Schmidt's character and the fate of the phone project.I've written before that Google will not come out with its own phone model, as Apple has done. And indeed, the need for any GooglePhone escapes me; Google should be building services that work on any phone, no matter who makes it or what OS it runs. At best, the GooglePhone project,...

Silicon Valley Tool: Stan Oleynick sets a record for Internet snake-oil sales
Stan Oleynick, the smug guy pictured here, wants to sell his name to raise capital for his new startup. The highest bidder will win the chance to rename the 23-year-old and a 10 percent stake of the entrepreneur's planned "revolutionary" venture. To sweeten the pot, Stan promises to break a world record, thereby getting into the Guinness Book of World Records, where his sponsored name will live on forever -- or until someone else beats the former Oleynick's record by eating more hotdogs in an hour or whatever. Sound suspicious? We thought so, too. And it turns out this is just the latest of Oleynick's self-promotional stunts.Two years ago, he created this breathless PR release touting milliondollarstate.com, a Million Dollar Homepage copycat. Oleynick, though, charged $100 per "virtual acre" instead of $1 per pixel, in a precursor to today's Weblo scheme. Sounds like Oleynick is the type of guy to sell you a bridge, doesn't it? Fun fact, he's done that, too! (Musical bridges,...

San Francisco: Sonic.net tries mob rule for municipal Wi-Fi
With San Francisco's municipal Wi-Fi program stuck in purgatory thanks to EarthLink's budget concerns, Internet service provider Sonic.net aims to be the city's wireless savior. Not that legions of dirty hippy leechers deserve free Wi-Fi. Nonetheless, Sonic says customers can obtain a subsidized wireless mesh router and hook it up to a DSL line. Why? To create a network of wireless access points. Web surfers browsing from the wireless network will be served Google ads to subsidize their surfing. Sonic will implement a profit-sharing plan that will credit their customers' accounts. Sounds like both a cheap attempt to turn EarthLink's woes into free PR, and a blatant ripoff of Fon's business model. More power to Sonic. A plan so crass can't help but work.

Hires: One more down at the Red Herring
Congratulations to Scott Morrison, the former editor of RedHerring.com, on escaping the troubled publication and landing a new job in the San Francisco bureau of Dow Jones. No matter what they say, Rupert Murdoch has to be a better boss than Alex Vieux. We suspected he was on to greener pastures when coworkers told us he started missing work, but an announcement on the website of the The Society of American Business Editors and Writers confirms the new position for us. And for the rest of his colleagues, too. Note to Scott, next time you switch gigs, it might be more polite to send out an internal email before your underlings find out via an industry newsletter. Or some scurrilous gossip rag.

Videogames: Double Fusion means double the ads
Nearly 7 out of 10 Americans play videogames, spending a combined $7.4 billion to feed their habit. But if the attraction of playing games was an escape from nonstop marketing in the real world, they're in for a disappointment. Greedy advertisers want a piece of the action and are expected to drive in-game advertising sales up to $852 million by 2011, according to ABI Research. Startup Double Fusion plans to help spike the numbers by allowing developers to add ads to games without hardcoding spots during development. For instance, ads served in Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas appear on virtual billboard kiosks -- the kind you'd run into in a mall -- that held fake ads themed to the game's environment. Even after Ubisoft launched its in-game advertising service early this year, real ads could only appear in the kiosks. With Double Fusion's software, Ubisoft would be able to create spots on the fly. Billboards could appear on any surface. If it works, Double Fusion has...

Layoffs: AOL considers mass firings to amass profits
Time Warner's troubled Internet unit, having resorted to me-too strategies in search, copying Google, and in portals, copying Yahoo, is now copying itself, going back to its old ways of mass layoffs. At Silicon Alley Insider, Henry Blodget crunches the numbers on various layoff scenarios. And here's the thing: It's not like AOL is losing money. Far from it. It's simply not as obscenely profitable, as, say, Google, which is adding employees as fast as AOL seems to be shedding them. A layoff of a quarter of its staff would lift AOL's profit margins from 39 percent to 52 percent, Blodget estimates. Given the constant dwindling of its Internet-access business, and the uncertain growth of its online advertising sales, cutbacks, while regrettable, seem logical. Let's just not pretend Time Warner's doing this to keep AOL alive; they're doing this to keep AOL gushing cash.

Microsoft: On the Xbox, Linux is a dirty word
Microsoft, apparently sick of taking guff from Windows haters, has banned users of Xbox Live, the Xbox 360 videogame console's online service, from setting their motto to "Linux." Apparently the company views competing operating systems -- especially dreaded open-source ones -- as "inappropriate" words. Unix is also considered too naughty for public display. Mentions of Apple, iPod, or variations of Mac OS X are, however, permissible. (Photo by zarcx)

Apple: The best PR gig in the Valley
An article in Ad Age purports to expose something that every Valley reporter has long known, but never come out and said: Apple's PR department is the biggest group of slackers to grace the tech world. What, exactly, do they do all day long? It's a mystery. For the uninitiated reporter looking to get a quote, the list of Apple PR contacts, complete with direct-dial numbers, seems heaven-sent. But don't get too excited. Every call goes straight to voicemail, like the entire PR department paid its credit card bill late and is now ducking the collection agency. If you leave a voicemail, reporters say, it more often than not disappears into the ether, never to be returned. As Ad Age points out: "if you Google 'Apple did not return calls,' you'll come up with 2.35 million hits." That claim is more than a bit sloppy. The exact phrase "Apple did not return calls" returns 3,100 hits. But still, Apple makes the rest of the Valley look like pikers when it comes to withering silence. "Google...

Online Video: World shocked, shocked by Sony's download move
OMG! Sony is challenging Apple to a video-download service duel! Howard Stringer, Sony's CEO, has a novel plan to use the PlayStation 3 as a trojan horse into the living rooms of America -- supplanting the struggling Apple TV. Please. The only thing shocking about Sony's service is that it took the company this long to sort things out. And that's not particularly shocking, since this is Sony we're talking about -- the conglomerate that couldn't coordinate its way out of a paper bag. The surprise is not that Sony has a video-download service in the works -- it's that Sony management feels confident enough about the effort to spoon-feed a story to the Wall Street Journal about it. Here's the back story that the Journal didn't bother to provide.When Microsoft announced its Xbox Live Marketplace for the Xbox 360, which offers television and movie downloads, last November, it was only a matter of time until Sony felt compelled to offer a similar service for its PlayStation3. As a...

Google: Marissa Mayer takes credit for not killing AdSense
Success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan -- unless you can somehow spin an adoption tale into the mix. That seems to be what Marissa Mayer is trying to do. In a recent interview, Marissa Mayer tries to take credit for both Google's Gmail email service, as well as AdSense, the immensely profitable system which places Google-sold ads on blogs and other independent websites based on their content. Her claim over AdSense? She didn't kill the product outright, despite her fears that it would be "creepy." But she also reveals that Paul Buchheit, the Googler who burdened the company with "don't be evil" as an unsheddable corporate motto, is the true inventer of a system that matched ads to a Web page's content -- whether that content is a blog post, an email message, or anything else.Mayer's admission also destroys another myth spun by Google PR: That Susan Wojcicki deserves credit for AdSense, the current name for Google's content-matching system. In July, I exposed...

Burning Man: The burners return, en masse and without class
The good news: Burning Man is over. The bad news: The burners are back in town. Once a year, the Bay Area's most troublesome pyromaniacs head out of town, leaving Silicon Valley cubicles deserted and Mission barstools empty, as they fill up Black Rock City, the temporary site in the Nevada desert for the now-ended arts and counterculture festival. Despite Caltrans's best efforts to block their return by closing the Bay Bridge, they've come back -- except for one sad suicide. It's never the ones you wish would off themselves who do, of course. Take Paul Addis -- please. The man accused of prematurely setting fire to Burning Man's giant wooden statue was one of the first to return, beating a hasty retreat after spending time in a Pershing County jail. At a Labor Day barbecue, blogger Scott Beale taped Addis in a pseudoconfessional rant.(Photo and video by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

Exits: Miles Flint, president of mobile phone maker ...
Miles Flint, president of mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson, is being replaced by Dick Komiyama, a Sony Electronics executive. Flint's claim to fame: Using Sony brand names like Cyber-shot and Walkman to sell music-playing and photo-taking cell phones. [The Register]

While You Were Out: What you missed on your August vacation
Welcome back! It's September, if you haven't noticed, and our instant-messenger software is beeping every three seconds as our faithful correspondents inform us of the breaking news that they're back from the beach -- or Burning Man's playa. If you didn't bring your EVDO-card-equipped laptop on vacation, here's a quick catch-up guide to the biggest news in an August that proved surprisingly hot for news.At Burning Man, the giant wooden statue of The Man burned. Twice. The first time was, allegedly, arson; the second, intentional. See our complete Burning Man coverage from Black Rock City, including an exclusive interview with accused arsonist Paul Addis.Google CEO Eric Schmidt's girlfriend has a desk at the company's New York office now.NBC and Apple broke up, citing irreconcilable difference about how much to charge on iTunes for the network's TV shows.Videoblogger Robert Scoble went completely bonkers.AdBrite, the online-advertising network run by FuckedCompany founder Philip...

Conflicts Of Interest: Eric Schmidt's girlfriend gets the Googler crown
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Eric Schmidt as Google's CEO because, among other reasons, he'd been to Burning Man, they must have known they were getting a boss with alternative values. But did they know that their newly hired grownup would prove to be Google's adulterer supervision? Schmidt is famous for having a series of girlfriends, despite being married, to whom he's reportedly promised marriage. Ones known to Valleywag include Rita Koselka and Marcy Simon. But it's Simon, his current fling, who might concern Page and Brin. Why? Because Simon has apparently wangled a desk and a phone line in Google's cramped New York offices.Packed to the gills in its West Chelsea offices, Google is on the hunt for more office space in the neighborhood. And Schmidt himself has noted how a rampant hiring binge led to a squeeze on profits in the second quarter. Schmidt defended the overhiring, saying the people Google brought on were of such high quality that, in retrospect, company...

Burning Man: Techno playa bling
BLACK ROCK CITY -- In between weathering dust storms, drinking heavily and stalking Internet tycoons, we have come in contact with an amusing assortment of tech people who have come to Burning Man to shrug off their work cares and forget about the Web for a few precious, hot, dusty hippie-filled days. We managed to tackle Stef Magdalinski, illustrous CTO of Moo.com, as he was puttering about his camp.(Moo, if you're not familiar with its work already, prints those pint-sized business cards emblazoned with Flickr photos on the back. If someone hasn't handed you one yet, you need to attend more Lunch 2.0 events.) We were going to hogtie Magdalinski and take staged photos of him naked and covered in engine grease to sate our readership's need for news, but he distracted us with a handful of shiny stickers. We're still trying though, sit tight.

Burning Man: The Orb Swarm rules the night
BLACK ROCK CITY -- One of the neatest things I have seen in the self-expressive miasma that is Burning Man, the countercultural arts festival here in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, has been The Orb Swarm, a group of spherical robots designed to roll around the playa and interact with participants with lights, motion and sound. Imagine this: You're deeply intoxicated on a substance of your choosing, wandering around in the dark, when suddenly you're nudged by a two-and-a-half-foot high aluminum balls twittering at you and changing color. Yeah. You're tripping over balls, and the balls are tripping you.The Orb Swarm's builders are a group of San Franciscan mad scientists who sprang up as a sort of offshoot of The Flaming Lotus Girls, a fire arts group best known for their gigantic interactive fire sculptures of snakes, constellations and phoenixes. Do not let the hippie name fool you: These people are not only hardcore, they know what they are doing. The Lotus group's name comes...

Black Rock CIty: Sergey and Larry's desert hideaway
BLACK ROCK CITY -- The story so far: In between desert heat, bronchus-choking dust storms, too many Tecates, and a lingering desire to throw rebar tent stakes at the ravers across the street, we here have been continuing in our mission to spot Google bigwigs Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who are rumored to be raging around the playa in comfort as participants in this year's Burning Man festival. On a tip from an informant close to the pair, we did some reconnaissance work out at the 2 o'clock end of the city, which is home to the high-decibel sound installations and rave camps. (Black Rock City is laid out like a clock, with loud stuff at ten and two, and quieter, more civil installations in between). While comatose ravers and stoned hippies lay on fluffy pillows in the shade, Camp I Am, the rumored home of the Google deuce, was quietly buzzing with activity, three RVs surrounding a shaded area set up with long folding tables and chairs. There was no glitter in sight, nor was...

Burning Man: Satan's Calliope rocks the desert
BLACK ROCK CITY -- One of the main advantages to being the middle of the fucking Nevada desert for Burning Man, the arts and counterculture festival held here this week, is that it's a lot easier to burn a whole lot of accelerant without incurring too much wrath from the local authorities. Of course, every single thing that is soaked with gasoline and set on fire out here has gone through a rigorous process to make sure that carbon-offset trees get planted up in Canada somewhere. This is a kind, gentle, carbon-negative hippiefest, after all. However, some attendees transcend the incineration of mere wood and plastic and build art pieces that really say something while they're warming up the planet. In the case of Lucy Hosking's Satan's Calliope, that thing is "Earplugs Schmearplugs". The Calliope is an art car with a reclining fire organ mounted on the back. Each pipe is an individual pulse jet engine, each one shoots fire, and some of them are preloaded with titanium dioxide...

Burning Man: The Man burns tonight
BLACK ROCK CITY -- Actual conversation, overheard at the Porta-Potties:"So what'd you do last night?""I took some unknown hallucinogen from a guy I didn't know." (shakes head sadly, as if in shame)"How was it?""Fucking awesome."The Man burns tonight. Like it was supposed to, before those gol-dinged ne'er-do-wells came in with all their smart-aleck "Burn the man early" talk. Right! Like this is supposed to be a festival of anarchistic self-expression or something!

Burning Man: The Man is dead, long live the Man
BLACK ROCK CITY -- It is quiet in Black Rock City this morning. The rave camps have quieted down, fire-spewing trinkets have ceased exploding, and the only citizens of Black Rock City out at this hour, just after 8 a.m., are dazed as they wander through the detritus of dead glow sticks, dusty embers, and unconscious hippies.The Burning Man, wooden centerpiece of the Burning Man arts and countercultural festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, burned just around 10 p.m. last night, amid cries of "Last time was better!" (it was, the Man didnt catch on fire so well). Such fond memories of Burning Man arsonist Paul Addis's handiwork were, shortly thereafter, completely obliterated by the detonation of San Francisco artist Dan Das Mann's wooden sculpture, "Crude Awakening."The ;piece began with the wail of an air-raid siren that announced the 1,000-foot safety perimeter was in full effect. The impromptu carnival of art cars, roaming robots, fire twirlers, and drunken frat boys came...