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Confirmed: Sky Dayton's wireless company, Helio, as ...
Sky Dayton's wireless company, Helio, as rumored, is getting new funding without help from co-owner EarthLink, an Internet service provider facing financial straits. Joint-venture partner SK Telecom is investing $270 million in Helio and renegotiating its agreement with EarthLink.[Reuters]

Brad Fitzpatrick: Open feud splits a social network
The notion of social networks like Facebook and Google's Orkut was that they would connect real-world friends, not drive them apart. But a push, driven by technical idealists, to "open" such websites could be driving a wedge between two old friends. David Recordon, right, who recently rejoined blog-software maker Six Apart, has cast aspersions on efforts by Google to make it easier for programmers to hook their software -- like Facebook's popular applications -- into Orkut and other Google products. So far, it may sound like all business. Companies trash rivals' plans all the time. Here, however, is where things get a bit more personal. Leading the charge at the Googleplex, you see, is Recordon's old friend Brad Fitzpatrick, left, who noisily exited Six Apart for Google shortly before Recordon came back to the company. Recordon, in a Twitter, suggests that Google is being less than open by requiring developers to sign nondisclosure agreements before learning about its social-network...

Embargo Breakers: We have Demo's list -- now what's the real surprise?
Well, that was much too easy. The organizers of the Demo conference, it turns out, have gone back on promises made on the website ("the list is not released prior to the conference") and has put the list of startups appearing at next week's event out in a press release. Bastards! The list is technically embargoed until Monday at 7 a.m., but if so, why'd they put it out on the Net? Well, it turns out that the secret secret is what the companies plan to demonstrate. So here's your chance to send in the real dirt: If you have the inside track on any planned demonstrations, send it in by Sunday. After the jump, the full list of companies.DEMOfall 07 Demonstrators 360desktop, Pty Ltd.; Victoria, Australia; www.360desktop.comAdvanta; Spring House, PA; www.ideablob.comAgendiZe; Grapevine, TX; www.agendize.comApprema, Inc.; Sunnyvale, CA;www.apprema.comAttendi, Inc.; New York, NY; www.attendi.comBatchBlue Software, LLC; Barrington, RI; www.batchblue.comCashView, Inc.; Palo Alto, CA;...

Second Life: Newt Gingrich drinks the virtual Kool-Aid
Newt Gingrich, the disgraced former Speaker of the House, had a sit-down with IBM where he learned all about the horrors of the 3-D Internet, including Second Life, the annoying virtual world for undersexed adults, and Webkinz, the online-and-offline toy pet game for children. He calls Second Life a "sophisticated extranet," it represents "the next wave of collaboration using a 3=D Internet virtual world." He finds it compelling that "people actually spend real money to buy real estate in this online reality." So do we, in the sense that a train wreck is "compelling."As an added bonus, Gingrich is gracing Second Life with his presence on September 27. American Solutions, an advocacy group helmed by Gingrich, is renting out the virtual front of a pretend U.S. Capitol for workshops.

Digital Music: Woot has even more Zunes to "give" away ...
Woot has even more Zunes to "give" away at the bargain price of $129. Apparently the fire sale is to clear shelf space for a rumored Zune 2.0 -- though at these prices, who will be left to buy the new version? [Woot]

Sony: Few tears shed for Sony's ImageStation
Sony's photo-sharing site, ImageStation, is quickly following in its sister music site Connect's footsteps, dancing itself out of business, and is closing in February 2008. Meant to boost use of its Cyber-shot digital camera line, ImageStation failed to compete with the likes of Yahoo's Flickr, and its users are having their albums shuffled off to Shutterfly, one of the few remaining independent photo sites. (Kodak bought Ofoto, and HP, another camera maker, owns Snapfish.) ImageStation's failure is not much of a surprise, considering Sony has proven itself, time and again, incapable of coding its way out of a paper bag. Aside from the videogame business, where it has a thriving in-house development studio building games for its PlayStation consoles, Sony has repeatedly bungled all of its efforts to tie together its gadgets with software and websites. A suggestion to CEO Howard Stringer: Stick to to what we know and love your company for -- that is, really swank HDTVs.

Quotable: Anarchic headline-discussion site Fark's ...
Anarchic headline-discussion site Fark's predictably juvenile -- if completely on target -- take on a videoblogger's departure from mainstream TV: "Amanda Congdon and her world-class breasts are gone from ABC.com" [Fark]

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File-sharing: The Pirate Bay takes on corporate raiders
Amidst all the hubbub about MediaDefender -- the file-sharing policing agency whose private email files were recently spewed across the Internet, revealing unsavory antipiracy plans -- one particularly interesting tidbit has bubbled to the surface. The Pirate Bay, a major file-sharing site, says it now has proof from those files that the music and movie industries have been paying hackers to attack the site. It is now taking this information to the police and charging the Swedish arms of Fox, EMI Music, Universal, Paramount, Atari, Activision, Ubisoft and Sony with technical sabotage, denial-of-service attacks, hacking, and spamming.

Accoona: Paid blog posts may put Accoona's IPO at risk
Saul Hansell of the New York Times was surprised when numerous blogs chastised him for his coverage of search engine/electronic retailer Accoona and the questionable history of its founder, a felon sometimes known as Armand Rousso, as a stamp dealer and stock promoter. Why would anyone bother to defend such a questionable man and such a negligible company? Because they're apparently getting paid to do so. Most of the blog entries openly label themselves as paid posts -- a practice that is itself highly controversial. What's even more controversial is who is footing the bill for these sponsored testimonials. Regardless, Accoona is likely to pay for them in the end.Hansell reports:Valentine Zammit, Accoona's chief executive, said that company had nothing to do with the posts. He added that Accoona's employees, directors and consultants aren't supposed to be touting its stock while the company is trying to sell shares to the public.Nevertheless, someone is, in fact, touting the...

Think Of It As Evolution In Action: MIT student almost killed for wearing a fake bomb
MIT student Star Simpson narrowly escaped death by submachine gun earlier this morning at Boston's Logan International Airport. What for? Why, sauntering about one of the terminals with a fake bomb strapped to her chest -- a circuit board rigged up to a battery pack, allowing it to light up, with a ball of Play-doh in her hand -- while, allegedly, awaiting an incoming passenger. She was apprehended, at gunpoint, on a traffic island outside the terminal. Her excuse? It was "art." Uh huh. At an airport? She's lucky she wasn't attacked by an angry mob of Bostonians on the spot. This is, after all, the same city ravaged by the Aqua Teen Hunger Force bomb scare/advertising campaign earlier this year. The main takeaway: They're letting anyone into MIT these days, aren't they?

Politics: Norman Hsu's venture-capital connection
The case of Norman Hsu, the avid political donor now facing allegations of defrauding investors and breaking federal campaign-finance laws, has ties to the Silicon Valley tech scene. Like many venture capitalists and entrepreneurs here, Hsu craved influence and power that's hard to get this far from the office towers of Manhattan and the halls of the Capitol. In fact, Hsu introduced Hummer Winblad VC Mark Gorenberg to Barack Obama, the presidential candidate on whose finance committee Gorenberg now sits. (Luckily for Obama, Hsu later switched his allegiances to Hillary Clinton when she announce her presidential campaign.)Venture capitalists love to tell you that one of their skills is evaluating and assembling teams, for which being a good judge of character is essential. So consider this quote from Gorenberg, after Hsu was taken into custody:"Despite it all, I still love the guy. Despite everything you read, every experience I ever had with him was nothing but delightful, and...

Digital Music: Too lazy to do research, Canada looks up piracy stats on Wikipedia
Apparently digital-music piracy isn't as prevalent as we thought. Canada's Royal Mounted Police simply made up the fact that the country loses $30 billion to software piracy. We thought only gossip blogs did that kind of thing. The figure, a jumble of Internet research and corporate propaganda from the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (members include the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Software & Information Industry Association), has helped shore up Canada's anti-piracy laws. Let this be a lesson to you kids: Don't always believe what you read on the Internet. Even if the Mounties wrote it.

Surly Adopter: AmEx only issues partial iPhone refund
Sorry to get your hopes up, folks. After early reports that American Express was giving cardholders $200 refunds on their iPhones -- after Apple slashed the price earlier this month -- it now seems the company has reconsidered its generosity. Early adopter Muhammad Saleem blogs that he only got a $100 refund, not the $200 he requested. An AmEx rep told him that he had to apply to Apple, which now offers a $100 credit to premature iPhone buyers, to get the other half. Saleem and other cardholders should consider themselves lucky to get anything at all, though. American Express discontinued its price-protection benefit last fall, and the company is only offering iPhone refunds at its discretion -- likely because it's a high-profile case of a price drop, and it hopes to win positive publicity and customer goodwill.

Videobloggers: Amanda Congdon's ABC rocket goes boom!
ABC has finally realized that popular, busty, vacuous Internet anchorwomen do not translate into popular, busty, vacuous television anchors. The network is severing its one-year relationship with Amanda Congdon, who shot to Internet fame hosting the videoblog Rocketboom. So what now?ABC can dismiss the failure as an experiment:It's been a great year with Amanda -- a great experiment for both of us. We thank her for her many contributions and know that she's about to embark on new endeavors and expect there will be times in the future that we can again work together.The TV network learned a simple lesson: Quirky Internet success does not equal mainstream-media succcess. And frankly, ABC is likely as much to blame as Congdon; it failed to pick up some of Rocketboom's key interactive elements, while Congdon failed to make more of her sporadic appearances on ABC shows like Good Morning America.One thing we can count on: Congdon will bounce back, perky as ever. She has a show in...

People Search: A host of entrepreneurs are trying to sell ...
A host of entrepreneurs are trying to sell the Internet on their new snake oil: "people search," or specialized search engines designed to pull up personal profiles. Too bad Spock, SquidWho, WhoZat and Wink are all trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. [Web Worker Daily]

Facebook: We reserve the right to rip off your idea
Pity the poor Facebook-app developer. The hot social network won frothing fanboys up and down the Valley when it opened up its site to any programmer who wanted to create amusing add-ons. With MySpace actively blocking some third-party applications, Facebook looked like a hero. Now, however, the bloom is off the rose. In an attempt to spur more applications, Facebook has started issuing grants from its fBFund to developers. A newly issued caveat: Facebook says that it reserves the right to fund competitors with similar applications, or develop lookalike applications in-house. It's a real problem; one unhappy developer says his "Shortcut" app for quickly finding friends has become, without so much as a "by your leave," a feature of Facebook's search. No surprise, really. In backing startups, Facebook is treating them much like a venture capitalist would -- and VCs are infamous for refusing to sign nondisclosure agreements, or otherwise promise confidentiality. Here's the full...

Telecom: Google's fiber-optic plans spur new phone talk
According to Australian tech trade Communications Day, Google may be planning to fund a new trans-Pacific fiber-optic cable, part of its growing in-house telecom network. (A Google rep neither confirmed nor denied the plans.) Why would Google want to lay cable on the ocean floor? Google already owns a considerable fiber network, used for in-house needs at present. But its telecom activities, which now include bidding on wireless spectrum in the United States, arouse suspicions that it might be getting into the phone business. Nonsense.Google would like people to think it's getting in the phone business. The mere prospect of Google as a competitor causes panic among entrenched phone and broadband providers like AT&T and Verizon, and accomplishes two important goals: One, it helps persuade those companies to bend to Google's public-policy whims, like "network neutrality." And two, it lets Google's sharky telecom purchasers negotiate better terms when they do buy fiber-optic...

Stats: ComScore numbers released today show that ...
ComScore numbers released today show that Google now controls 56.5 percent of the U.S. search market, up 1.3 points from last month. Second-place Yahoo shows a decline, losing 0.2 points and conducting less than a quarter of all searches in the country. [PR Newswire]

Embargo Breakers: Send me Demo's secret startup list
Embargoes, in the age of instant journalism, are the silliest of PR conventions. In fact, they're counterproductive -- especially for publicity-seeking startup conferences like this week's TechCrunch40 and next week's Demo, organized by Chris Shipley (left). And yet not everyone gets this. Blogger Paul Boutin sent TechCrunch40 organizer Jason Calacanis into a rage by committing an act of journalism: Going to the open site of the startup conference last Sunday and copying down, by hand, the names of the 40 startups due to present. What prompted Boutin to do this? Why, the organizers' ham-handed, ridiculous embargo demands.The most ludicrous, self-defeating requirement -- the one that prompted Boutin to detach himself from his keyboard and head downtown -- was that journalists not publish the list until 9 a.m. Monday morning -- a full two hours after TechCrunch itself said it would publish the list. Boutin, of course, did Calacanis a huge favor by doing so.In reporting the publicly...

Bubble: GOOG shares hit their highest price ever ...
GOOG shares hit their highest price ever today, reaching $560.70 at one point this afternoon, bringing Google's market cap up to $175 billion. [San Jose Mercury News]

Stats: Videogames rot your time-management skills
Researchers have concluded what your parents always feared: videogames rot your brain. Well, kinda. A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that male game players, on average, wound up with grades almost a quarter-point lower; girls saw a 0.13-point decrease. But for all the anti-videogame advocates out there, know this. It's not the games' fault, it's these lousy students' inability to manage their time. (Photo by wahba)

Your Privacy Is An Illusion: Big Brother is watching -- but doing nothing
The streets of London are monitored by 10,524 CCTV cameras. One camera for every 714 people may sound like a lot, and the city has spent over $400 million in an effort to cut down on crime. Only it hasn't exactly worked. Despite Big Brother watching, essentially, every street corner, the London police are still letting four out of five crimes go unsolved. And worse yet, there seems to be no correlation between the density of cameras and the crime-solving rate.

Blogging For Dollars: No, make that just plain writing for dollars. ...
No, make that just plain writing for dollars. Fake Steve Jobs has a day job? Why, yes. Dan Lyons, the Forbes editor who pens the faux-Apple CEO blog, has chucked his pajamas, donned a suit and tie, and filed a story for the magazine's website. How does he find the time, with all that blogging? The subject: SCO, the software company which filed for bankruptcy as a series of its anti-Linux lawsuits fell apart. [Forbes]

Loser-generated Content: Get ready for Marthapedia
Apparently Martha Stewart thinks wikis are a good thing. Which strikes me as odd, since the no-longer-jailed domestic doyenne built her multimedia empire pretty much by sitting you down and telling you how things are done, her way or the highway. She's a tastemaker, not some kind of San Francisco-Web-startup "community manager." Asking for readers to email in scrapbooking tips is one thing. But user-generated recipes? Communally edited herb-planting instructions? Heresy. The plans for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia to embrace wikis and other community features on a new website, announced by company president Susan Lyne, suggest to me more an attempt to embrace the bubbly valuations assigned to Web properties like MySpace and YouTube, rather than the egalitarian ideals of Web 2.0 proponents.