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IPhone: Apple is promoting its Starbucks partnership ...
Apple is promoting its Starbucks partnership by giving away 50 million songs at the chain of coffee shops. The new wireless service "Now Playing" allows iPhone- and iPod Touch-using Starbucks patrons to preview and purchase the music that happens to be playing in their local shop. [AppleInsider]

Stats Feed: Today's most popular headlines are If everything ...
Today's most popular headlines are If everything were sold like iPods (1,620 views today), Pownce engineer picks fight with Kevin Rose (945) and Are Apple's recent ads all brilliant? (783).

Geeks Gone Wild: Inside the Bacchanalia
Valleywag readers deliver. Earlier today, we asked for photos from the hedonistic gathering thrown by Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow on Saturday night. Lo and behold, in popped these cell phone shots, purported to be from the event, sent to us without any explanation or description of the party. Though we think they speak for themselves. We don't recognize any tech luminaries among the garters and facepaint, though commenter Ginamuchava suspects there was at least one in attendance. Anyone have any more info? A copy of the guest list would be much appreciated. After the jump, an additional view of the event.

Your Privacy Is An Illusion: Free calls never cost so much
There's a new Skype competitor, dubbed ThePudding, on the Web. And ThePudding is completely free*. All you have to do is agree to let Pudding Media listen in on your calls. To compensate users for the breach of privacy, the company claims, "ThePudding uses breakthrough technology that makes your conversations fun and interesting." In other words, anyone using ThePudding will be served contextual ads based upon topics overheard in your conversation! It's like Google's Gmail, but for talking. Remember when we were freaked out by the idea of Google scanning our email to pick out relevant ads? And how we all got over it?That's what Pudding Media CEO Ariel Maislos would have you believe, anyway. He explains, "The trade-off of getting personalized content versus privacy is a concept that is accepted in the world." Besides the firm is targeting youths, who judging from their MySpace and Facebook habits, aren't concerned with privacy. In other words, targeting the young and the weak....

Followup: Demo's outcasts revealed
We hear there were actually two companies who chose to forgo this week's Demo conference and present at Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington's TechCrunch40 conference instead. The startups in question? Desktop-wiki maker Wixi has confirmed that they will not be presenting at Demo, and we hear that avatar service mEgo is also off the list. (Two flacks for mEgo didn'tt return our call from this morning and sent us straight to voicemail when we followed up a few minutes ago.) Both companies presented onstage during Tuesday afternoon's "Rich media and mashups" section. If Demo followed its usual cancellation policies, these companies would seem to have lost their $18,000 entrance fees. (Representatives for Wixi had no comment on the fee.) We hope these two companies were able to get a worthwhile experience from TechCrunch40. They may not have won the $50,000 grand prize, but they learned something about the value of a contract.

Blogging For Dollars: What happens when blogs fail? At AOL's Weblogs ...
What happens when blogs fail? At AOL's Weblogs Inc., three cancelled health blogs have disappeared entirely -- not even on Weblogs' list of retired blogs. [TechCrunch]

Niniane Wang: The real Googler behind its virtual world
Who's the mysterious force behind "My World," Google's rumored foray into virtual worlds? Signs point to Google engineering manager Niniane Wang who's currently leading a "confidential project," which was thought to be a virtual world back in January. According to her resume, the project relies on C++ and Java -- both languages are used in serious game development. Prior to her move to California in 2003, she was a lead design engineer at Microsoft Games working on Flight Simulator 2004 and racing games. Sounds like the perfect background for a fly-through metaverse.

Think Of It As Evolution In Action: Thief inadvertently identifies himself
Sometimes you really need to thank the Internet gods. Last week two guys broke into Vancouver's WorkSpace, an office collective, and stole four laptops and two iMacs. The culprits couldn't be identified by security footage. Luckily, as founder Bill McEwan noticed, they did most of the work for him. The new owner of his laptop apparently uploaded a picture of himself to the company's Flickr photostream. Now there's a Web-wide manhunt attempting to identify the tattooed man.

Your Privacy Is Your Illusion: Free calls never cost so much
There's a new Skype competitor, dubbed ThePudding, on the Web. And ThePudding is completely free*. All you have to do is agree to let Pudding Media listen in on your calls. To compensate users for the breach of privacy, the company claims, "ThePudding uses breakthrough technology that makes your conversations fun and interesting." In other words, anyone using ThePudding will be served contextual ads based upon topics overheard in your conversation! It's like Google's Gmail, but for talking. Remember when we were freaked out by the idea of Google scanning our email to pick out relevant ads? And how we all got over it?That's what Pudding Media CEO Ariel Maislos would have you believe, anyway. He explains, "The trade-off of getting personalized content versus privacy is a concept that is accepted in the world." Besides the firm is targeting youths, who judging from their MySpace and Facebook habits, aren't concerned with privacy. In other words, targeting the young and the weak....

Virtual Worlds: Google Earth to take on Second Life
Here we go again. Google is, apparently, terraforming Google Earth, its 3-D flythrough of the planet, into a virtual world. Rumored for more than a year, particularly since the acquisition of 3-D modeler Sketchup, confirmation of Google's new "My World" comes in the form of a beta-testing questionnaire circulated among Arizona State University students asking, on behalf of a major Internet company, whether they were into games and social networking, and already had an avatar and a Gmail account. If anyone can pull off a virtual world that's actually interesting, it's Google. But this is like prospecting in the old West. Everyone from Sony to Linden Lab on down is attempting to cash in on the hot new "virtual world" frontier. Eventually, they'll figure out that it's dry, dusty, and mined out. It's just a question of how long that will take.

Deals: Facebook now worth $15 billion?
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook is negotiating with Microsoft to sell a stake in the hot social network at a valuation between $10 billion and $15 billion. That would net Mark Zuckerberg's company between $300 million and $500 million in cash, without Zuckerberg having to surrender any meaningful control over the company; the stake would represent 5 percent or less of Facebook. What's not clear is why a deal's happening now, save to lock in a stratospheric valuation. Some time ago, a Facebook insider called Zuckerberg "a crazy kid" for not selling. And we've said Facebook's valuation claims seemed a bit puffed-up. But given that suitors' offering prices have rocketed tenfold since then, Zuckerberg doesn't seem that crazy anymore. Instead, it's Microsoft executives, driven mad by Google and MySpace envy and determined not to miss out on the social-networking trend, who seem, well, a bit off.

Apple: If everything were sold like iPods
Kitchen appliances:"This microwave looks great. Does it have a popcorn setting?""A popcorn subscription, yes.""Sorry?""There is a popcorn setting, but it's only good with this list of popcorn manufacturers. We were at least able to get Pop Secret and Orville Redenbacher to agree on a 99-cent price point for each use.""Erm. How about this model? Is popcorn free on this?""Yes, but you can only use it three times.""Oh.""There is, however, a bonus: You can play five pre-loaded microwave games.""On this little screen?""One of the games is 'Guess what I'm cooking.'"McDonald's:"Hi, can I have a Big Mac?""Great, that'll be $2.99.""Can I get bacon on that?""You can have our bacon cheeseburger with no lettuce.""But...but I want both.""I'm sorry, we don't have that model; it's too much clutter. What color would you like your Big Mac?""Wha...what color? Look, I'll just get the bacon cheeseburger.""Ohhhh, I'm sorry, we just discontinued it and replaced it with a tofu burger. And the Junior...

Think Of It As Evolution In Action: Bomb or not?
So the picture on the left is MIT student Star Simpson's attempt to win a Darwin Award. Obviously, a piece of socket board, a LED star, and a 9-volt battery aren't exactly threatening, though we can see how loose wires on a jacket could jar security guards with loose wires upstairs. A DIYer, Simpson fabricated the sweatshirt ornament in honor of an MIT electrical engineering course, inscribing on the back "Socket To Me / Course VI." One might conclude that security personnel at Boston's Logan International Airport may have overreacted -- a bit. But even if she wore it out of habit, let us not forget that we can barely smuggle liquids onto planes these days.In fact, if you're toting electronic gadgets of any sort, even commonplace ones like Sony's PlayStation Portable, you up the odds that you'll be targeted by the TSA. And, let's not forget, Boston was the city shut down by a bunch of blinking LEDs. Honestly, you sometimes need to be aware of your surroundings. (Photos by Associated...

Comments: Brad Fitzpatrick coming unplugged at Google?
From the comments, a fresh rumor about Brad Fitzpatrick, the LiveJournal founder widely believed to be working on social networks at Google. The commenter, who claims to work at Google, says Fitzpatrick is actually working on free, ad-supported Wi-Fi. Curious, since Google's Wi-Fi projects have faced trouble recently. A deal with San Francisco for free Wi-Fi fell apart thanks to Google partner EarthLink's straitened finances. Why would a tech star like Fitzpatrick work on such a seemingly doomed project? With that caveat, the report on Fitzpatrick's new project, from googleyes, after the jump.Brad is not working on social graph problems at Google. He came here to work on technology to insert ads into web pages being viewed via Google's municipal Wi-Fi hotspots. Very hush-hush; the only thing publicly available on this is the patent applications. We've been working on it for a while and Brad is working on making it more palatable to the privacy crowd (mostly marketing, actually).The...

Stats: Welcome to the Massachusetts Institute of Technicalities
Got a smug MIT grad in your engineering department? Here's a chance to gloat. MIT dropped from fourth to seventh place this year in US News & World Report's college ranking guide. Why? Not because the class of 2010 is dragging the rest of the school down, though class of '10 member Star Simpson's recent Logan airport bomb hoax might imply that. Turns out that MIT has been fudging their numbers for the last few years, by neglecting to include SAT scores from non-English speaking students and kids who scored higher on the ACT test, in violation of USN&WR rules. Oops. Of course, all of this happened during the reign of Marilee Jones, the admission head who doctored her own resume. That MIT degree gets more and more valuable everyday, doesn't it?

Hardware: EMC gets cozy with Mozy, but will consumers bite?
The problem with selling your wares to Fortune 500 companies? There are only 500 of them. And the high-priced, hard-charging sales force required to woo them is prone to scandal, as a recent sex-bias lawsuit against EMC alleges. That, I believes, explains why the storage-hardware maker is getting into the consumer business with its $76 million purchase of Mozy, an online data-backup service. With only 180,000 customers, the purchase price seems high, as GigaOm and others have noted. But small businesses are often better courted with consumer-friendly offerings than with hard-sell pitchmen. Mozy, with online-backup plans starting at $4.95 a month, opens up EMC to businesses that would never bother to buy their own servers. And Mozy itself, as it adds hardware to cope with growing demand, makes a fine in-house buyer of EMC hardware. That's the business logic, anyway. In practice, there's a flood of online-storage startups on the market, and EMC may find the consumer business tough...

Valleyspeak: "Curation"
In Silicon Valley, one no longer picks, chooses, selects, or even edits. One "curates." Take, for example, Jason Calacanis's self-congratulatory wrap-up of TechCrunch40, a blog post titled "Conference Curation." What does that mean, exactly?Calacanis and fellow organizers Michael Arrington and Heather Harde, he claims, didn't just randomly assemble a bunch of startups willing to kowtow to their terms. Nor did they sift through the applications in some open, meritocratic process. Instead, they "curated" the list of presenters, as a university librarian might pick out volumes for a collection. Bloggers, too, try to dignify their work by claiming that they "curate" links, instead of admitting that they just post things they find interesting. By claiming to "curate," not "choose," people like Calacanis try to lend an academic dignity to their work -- at the same time that they brush away charges of self-serving subjectivity. Of course the selection is biased and untransparent. But...

Advertising: Are Apple's recent ads all brilliant?
MacLife has put together a list of the 10 worst Apple commercials of all time -- but with the exception of the infamous Ellen Feis, who became an Internet celebrity with her bleary-eyed exhortation to switch to a Mac, none of the ads seem to date from the current Steve Jobs era. Could this really be the case? Are all of Apple's recent ads uniformly brilliant? Take, for example, the first-ever ad for the iPod, which features actor Jeff Goldblum, um, moonwalking. The clip, after the jump. Any other nominations? Leave a comment.

Leah Culver: Pownce engineer picks fight with Kevin Rose
Ah, we remember a day when relations between the creators of Pownce, the online message board backed by Digg founder Kevin Rose, were, well, kinder. But now Pownce coder Leah Culver, pictured here, has started a spat with Rose, using his own Digg site to accuse Digg of copying Pownce. Digg has added more social features, it's true -- and considering that Digg and Pownce share employees, is it really surprising that they'd look similar? Perhaps Culver has reconsidered the charge, having deleted the Flickr screenshot she used to illustrate it. Considering that one of the double-time workers, Daniel Burka, is Culver's ex, we suspect that there may be more to this drama than mere user-interface issues.