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Stats Feed: Today's most popular headlines are Dotcom ...
Today's most popular headlines are Dotcom billionaire thinks he can dance (1,440 views today), The stock, at least, is looking up (977) and Former investors avoid new Steve Case venture (688).

Charles Simonyi: Martha Stewart's geek-genius boyfriend has another good thing
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- Here's what you need to know about Charles Simonyi: He made billions by inventing what later became Microsoft Word and Excel, he paid $25 million for a flight into space, and he's dating Martha Stewart. Oh, about that last bit? We wonder if Stewart knows about Simonyi's dinner plans. He's in Cambridge for Technology Review's EmTech conference, where, we hear, he's meeting with Victoria Gray. Gray is an event organizer and rumored to be an old flame of Simonyi's. Of course, perhaps the dinner conversation will be all business: Simonyi is reportedly an investor in a venture run by Gray. After the jump, a paparazzi snap of Gray by Valleywag intern Jordan Golson.(Photo of Simonyi and Stewart by Dan Farber; photo of Gray by Jordan Golson)

Dumb Idea: It's like a ringtone but worse and purposeless!
"You've got a MySpace profile, an Open ID, a Gravatar, tons of indie badges. Anything missing? Yep: Your sound badge." I've got to admit, the pitch appeals to the target market: breathless widget collectors and the sorts of people who glitterfy their MySpace and play the "zombie" app ("You've been bitten by a pyramid game!") on Facebook. Here's the idea behind Soundbadge.1. Answer some quiz questions to make generalizations about your personality.2. Push a button.3. Hear a crappy loop that has nothing to do with your personality."Like you," says the site, the sound badge created for you is "absolutely unique." Unfortunately we're all uniquely like this:Every sound badge is a similar uninspiring MIDI loop. It's the opposite of a custom ringtone or MySpace soundtrack, and it doesn't even serve a social purpose.Odd that such a decent interface should produce such an awful "product."Oh, also, is it "soundbadge" or "sound badge"? It's spelled either way several times on the site....

AOL: Laughing through the layoffs
AOL employees, apparently, have not lost their gallows humor in the face of what most in the industry now believe are impending layoffs. For one thing, some have taken to referring to CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant as "Smithers and Burns," the curiously close assistant-and-boss couple from "The Simpsons." But also, according to one tipster, they're volunteering to tell people, falsely, that they've been laid off -- a prank so successful that it may have generated the rumors of layoffs that reached our ears late last night. How the prank supposedly went down, after the jump.I heard that some people that work there decided to play a joke and see how far it could go. So they told a few people that a few middle managers that would be fairly well known within AOL were let go and those people were also in on it, so when they were asked if it was true yesterday, they said yep. This morning they apologized to at least one person for playing the joke. No one else I know has heard...

Crime: They've caught the infamous tattooed man ...
They've caught the infamous tattooed man -- the dude who allegedly stole some laptops in Vancouver. After having his photo plastered everywhere, thanks to an inadvertent Flickr upload, he turned himself in. He claims he bought the computer off of a friend who bought it from a friend. [Canada.com]

Deathwatch: Yahoo has given podcast haters a Halloween ...
Yahoo has given podcast haters a Halloween treat: On October 31, it will discontinue Yahoo Podcasts. That you likely have never heard of Yahoo Podcasts speaks to the wisdom of the decision, and the new bouts of rationality sweeping the company under Sue Decker. [Read/WriteWeb]

Venture Capital: Draper Fisher Jurvetson continues its venture ...
Draper Fisher Jurvetson continues its venture tourism, opening up an office in Russia. Are there actually interesting startups in Russia, or is this just an excuse to stick DFJ's investors with the bill for Tim Draper's round-the-world plane tickets? [DFJ.com]

Wtf: Armani sets up shop in Second Life
Obviously unaware that fashion trends in Second Life tend to be less "chic" and more "chicken," Giorgio Armani has opened up a store in Second Life. Well thank jeebus. Now avatars can get decked out in Armani duds -- horridly pixelated Second Life versions of them, anyway -- and if they so desire, connect directly with the online store to spend money on actual goods. Mr. Armani, you may have a sense of style, but you don't have any business sense. The people who hang out in virtual worlds aren't the type to wear your clothes -- let alone fit in them. And by buying into the metaverse hype, you're just postponing the day Second Life goes out of style once and for all.

I Hate It Here: When the doorbell rings, pray it's Master Chief
MISSION DISTRICT, SAN FRANCISCO -- Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you know that the world's most anticipated game of all time, Halo 3, launched Monday at midnight. The New York Times wrote about it, ferchrissakes. I was forced to spend an entire evening listening to my roommate disintegrate friends and foes with the Spartan laser through our shared wall. TORTURE! I hate standing in line at launch events, so like an idiot, preordered the game through Amazon.com. It's scheduled to arrive tomorrow. All I can think about is finishing the fight. Honestly, who cares actually about tawdry Valley business matters at a time like this? And then ... then visitors arrived. And my life, unbelievably, got worse.The doorbell rings.Me: Thinks: Sweet! The UPS man brought Halo 3 a day early. Standing at the door is a gaggle of old ladies.Me: Thinks: Fuck.Old Lady: I'm with a group of volunteers in your neighborhood... Me: Thinks: WTF do you want!? You're not the UPS man, nor are you...

Crime: Three men have been charged for the January ...
Three men have been charged for the January murder of PC World editor Rex Farrance. According to the prosecutors, the men were after his son's medicinal marijuana plants, and Farrance was an innocent victim. [AP]

Videogames: Flying in the face of stereotypes, advertising ...
Flying in the face of stereotypes, advertising firm JWT found that more women own videogame consoles than men. Of course this is the same "Denizens of Digitivity" study that concluded that the Internet is better than sex. [MediaPost]

Quotable: "It turns out that there are a lot of people ...
"It turns out that there are a lot of people who lay out in Amsterdam." -- John Hanke, director, Google Earth, at Technology Review's EmTech conference, identifying his service's killer application: Using satellite maps to locate and annotate nude Dutch sunbathers.

Virtual Worlds: Are Second Life's users brain-damaged?
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- John Lester, Boston operations director for Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, is giving the standard sales pitch for the virtual world. His claim: "It's full of people." We wonder if Lester (pictured) would so readily say that to Second Life's corporate-marketer customers, who have found their 3-D Second Life "islands" to be virtual ghost towns. Or to Second Life's disgruntled users, who are stymied by the service's struggle to increase its population capacity. "Our brains crave it," Lester claims. His former job? Creating online communities for patients with neurological disorders. That speaks volumes about Second Life's user base, doesn't it.

Irrational Exuberance: Even in Silicon Valley, you can't expense tuition
It's easy to get a little expense report-happy when faceless shareholders are footing the bill, but $90,000? That's no round of after-work drinks. Bernadette Escue allegedly wracked up these exorbitant fees on her Network Appliance corporate card. A travel manager at the Sunnyvale data center, Escue came under suspicion on allegations of wire fraud after a $12,000 tuition charge for San Francisco's Drew Preparatory School showed up on the corporate tab.

AOL: Ted Leonsis just keeps smiling
Ted Leonsis, the semi-retired AOL executive, is drawing fresh attention for a blog post he wrote last week insisting that all was fine at the Internet giant, citing a raft of lofty numbers. As rumors of new layoffs have bubbled up, commenters on his blog are tearing Leonsis apart for his sunny claims of AOL's health. Leonsis's shiny, happy mantra: AOL has huge traffic. His detractors' retort: Yes, but it's stagnant or declining. Leonsis has yet to respond. Perhaps he's too busy puzzling over buddy Steve Case's perplexing new credit-card startup.

Web2ooh: Overstimulation at the Web 2.0 Summit
As the Web 2.0 phenomenon grows long in the tooth -- some might say this year's TechCrunch40 conference was its official jumping of the shark -- its most venerable proponents are struggling to create a sense of excitement around it. But for this year's Web 2.0 Summit, organizers John Battelle and O'Reilly Media are trying, perhaps, a bit too ... hard. Get an eyeful of the slogan.Where are we most stimulated?At the Web's edge.We can only imagine what Battelle and the rest had in mind when they wrote that. But it puts us in mind, more than anything else, of the AVN Expo, the porn-industry conference held the same week as the CES gadget show in Las Vegas. If the Web 2.0 Summit crowd is so sincere about ensuring attendees' stimulation, perhaps it's time for them to organize a similar companion conference for user-generated adult sites like Zivity. "Web 2.OOH," anyone?

Blogging For Dollars: Huffington Post raises more cash
At PaidContent, Rafat Ali picked up this interesting fact from a perfunctory USA Today profile of Arianna Huffington: Her company, The Huffington Post, has raised another $5 million in financing. With blogging companies in vogue with big media, though, that strikes me as small change. Huffington doesn't even pay most of her celebrity bloggers, so it's not clear what she would need the money for. But one wonders why she didn't take more money off the table. Could it be that, despite all the buzz, the Post's blog-for-free business model isn't all that hot?

Social Networks: Can a Facebook app possibly be useful?
The way people talk publicly about Facebook's application platform, you'd think Jesus used it to invite his apostles to the Last Supper. But some industry insiders quietly say they're not at all impressed with the applications people have developed. "None of the most popular apps actually do anything," a high-ranking Yahoo developer recently told Valleywag. It's hard to disagree: "Top Friends"? "Food Fight"? But Facebook's cornucopia of uselessness may gain some measure of utility on Friday. Friendvox, a new Facebook instant-messaging tool, is going into beta then, according to Blognation UK. It turns your roster of friends, instantly, into a buddy list, and lets you exchange messages without the tedious back-and-forth of Facebook's built-in email system. It's a great idea -- so great that we're sure that Facebook will, in short order, steal this idea for itself and build IM functions into the site.

Mark Cuban: Dotcom billionaire thinks he can dance
newVideoPlayer("Dancing_With_the_Stars.flv", 475, 376);The brash Mark Cuban, who sold his Internet-video company Broadcast.com to Yahoo at the peak of the '90s bubble, has found old-media fame on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars." His star turn -- which, of course, he promoted on his blog was both charming and cheesy. Okay, he hardly pushed himself on the dance floor, but he looked suave in brown coattails, grinned the whole time, and exhibited a cunning use of jazz hands. Despite our misgivings, Cuban won our vote.

Revolution Money: Former investors avoid new Steve Case venture
You may remember Steve Case from your spam-filled AOL inbox and your junk-CD-filled postal mailbox. The former CEO of AOL and now the head of the Revolution Health, a flailing healthcare startup, is giving it another go. His latest venture? launched Revolution Money, a nontraditional credit card combined with a PayPal clone. The former would be interesting if we didn't already have Visa and MasterCard, and the latter if we didn't have, well, PayPal. The basic sales pitch for the card is, alas, utterly flawed. Sure, it's cheaper for merchants, which may win it some acceptance among businesses. But since Visa and MasterCard make money by charging fees to sellers, not buyers, that price cut won't make any difference to consumers when they hit the mall. This obvious point is perhaps not lost on the star-studded investors Case attracted to his earlier venture.Revolution Health investors and board members included a series of boldface names: Colin Powell, Carly Fiorina, Jim Barksdale,...

Yahoo: The stock, at least, is looking up
Over at Forbes.com they're pointing out that since September 10, Yahoo's stock price is up 15 percent, while Google's has only risen about half that much over the same period. Of course, the difference here is that Yahoo still hasn't returned to its 52-week high of $33.61, and Google hit an all-time high of $571.46 only two days ago. And yes, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, Google still has twice as much search market share as Yahoo. But still, something must be right in The House of Jerry Yang to get investors buying. Forbes points to new partnership deals, a bargain-priced stock, and rumors that somebody -- Microsoft? -- will buy the company soon enough. That would explain it. But perhaps there's more to the stock rise than that.Another thought: Yahoo's advertising platform, code-named Panama, which advertisers have raved about since launch, is finally kicking in on the bottom line, boosting search-ad revenues, making up a bit for Yahoo's flagging display business. Unfortunately,...

Politics: GOP candidates spurn YouTube debate
Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson haven't yet agreed to participate in the CNN/YouTube debate planned for November 28, the Trail reports. It's a surprising reticence, the TechPresident blog notes, because both campaigns have embraced Web video and YouTube in the past. Romney's YouTube profile hosts 357 videos, including this recent one, a response to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia University. Perhaps the candidates are not avoiding YouTube as much as they're avoiding CNN. After all, Romney and Thompson are also not going to tomorrow's PBS debate in Baltimore, Md. We're thinking about sending an intern to interview the handful of second-tier candidates who do show up.

China: "Great Firewall" blocks websites, not hackers
Apparently, the Great Firewall of China -- the Chinese government's elaborate system for blocking websites deemed politically incorrect -- is only good for censorship, not for boosting the country's network security. Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that the Pentagon traced a June attack on U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's computer back to China's People's Liberation Army Chinese officials denied the report -- and they want you to know that they're victims, too."China is facing a more severe information-security situation than any Western country," the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Wang Xinjun, a researcher at the People's Liberation Army's Academy of Military Sciences, as telling China's official Xinhua news agency. Xinjun goes on to say that China is "calling for international cooperation to crack down on Internet-wrecking crime." Oh, we're all for international cooperation -- let's hold hands and sing, everyone -- but isn't it time for China to admit...

Media: Kevin Rose says Digg to launch headline suggestions
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- Coming to a browser near you: "People who liked this article also liked these articles." That's right -- according to founder Kevin Rose, Digg is getting ready to do to news what Amazon.com did to shopping. At a panel at Technology Review's EmTech conference, Rose said that Digg would be launching a "suggestion service" in a few months. It's a natural move, after Digg introduced social-networking features that let you better track the headlines your friends find interesting; mining that data to find patterns and present users with similar articles just makes sense. Still, it could spell a radical shift in news consumption -- a move that brings us closer to the vision of the "Daily Me," a techie vision of a completely personalized news outlet.

Quotable: "We think technology is a high adventure." ...
"We think technology is a high adventure." -- Technology Review editor-in-chief Jason Pontin, shortly before welcoming Kevin Rose to the stage at his magazine's annual EmTech conference. You don't say, Jason, you don't say.

Your Privacy Is An Illusion: Google Street View to blur Canadians
Oh, Canada. With the loonie matching the value of the dollar, a bunch of our northern neighbors are crowing. Yes, yes. Wake us when the Canadian football field shrinks to a normal size, too. Anyway, the Sydney Morning Herald says that Google is considering meeting Canadian legal concerns over its Street View map feature by blurring people's faces and vehicle license plates. In the U.S., Google will only blur your face if you ask. Canadian strip-club owner Robert Katzman ">complained to the Wall Street Journal that the stronger loonie has his clientele heading over the border to Detroit's bars. Maybe Google's cross-border Street View policies offer new incentive to stay home, you hosers.

Rumormonger: Who's not coming to Demo? The startup that got kicked out
We hear that Chris Shipley and the rest of the Demo conference team are coming down hard on companies who violate their exclusive contract. A tipster "has it on on good authority" that one presenting company has been "yanked off the stage" at tomorrow's fall Demo conference in San Diego, because it demo'd its wares at Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis's competing TechCrunch40 conference last week. No surprise there: The whole point of these startup-demonstration conferences is to show something new, and an already-launched product won't make the cut. But Shipley's crew is being especially tough: We hear that the company isn't gettting its $18,000 entrance fee back either. So who is the culprit? And did they make the main stage, or did they lose out on Demo just for debuting in TechCrunch40's also-ran DemoPit? If you know anything more, fill us in.

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.

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 a Jeff Goldblum look-alike, um, moonwalking. The clip, after the jump. Any other nominations? Leave a comment.

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...

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?

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...

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...

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....

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.

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? Media-sharing service 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]

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.

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).

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]

Analysis: EchoStar buys Sling Media -- and a shot at the future
What does EchoStar's $380 million deal to buy Sling Media mean? In some ways, Sling's decision to sell out seems odd. Satellite TV is on the downswing, most people believe. Rupert Murdoch, after all, sold News Corp.'s stake in DirecTV, in part to raise cash to buy Dow Jones -- favoring content, in other words, over distribution. But Charlie Ergen, the obstreperous entrepreneur behind EchoStar, may have a larger plan for Sling's Net-connected set-top boxes. "This is just the beginning," says Sling founder Blake Krikorian in an interview with PaidContent. He's not kidding. The rich EchoStar buy, I believe, is a move by Ergen to prepare his company for life after satellite TV.Sling Media's main product, the Slingbox, differs in a key way from popular digital video recorders like TiVo. Instead of recording programs for later display in the living room, the Slingbox rebroadcasts what's on your TV, live, to your laptop, cell phone, or other Net-connected screens. While TiVo lets you...

Online Advertising: At Mixx, Seth Godin pimps Squidoo
NEW YORK CITY -- I'm at the Mixx 2007 online-advertising conference here, marveling at the brazenness of author and entrepreneur Seth Godin. "How do we use this medium in the way it wants to be used?" he asks, as he's interviewed by Charlie Rose. He's speaking, of course, about the Web, but he might as well be talking about the medium of the conference stage. And he's using it to promote his new website, Squidoo. Squidoo, as best as I can tell, is sort of a blog-hosting service like Google's blogger, sort of a social-bookmarking service like Yahoo's Del.icio.us, and sort of a hand-compiled search-results aggregator like Mahalo. Godin, of course, doesn't miss the opportunity to brag to Rose and the audience that Squidoo's Web traffic is larger than the Wall Street Journal's, without the benefit of any advertising. Except, of course, the kind of free advertising you get by being a best-selling author and getting invited to speak at conferences.

File Sharing: Porn industry insiders disagree on how they ...
Porn industry insiders disagree on how they feel about The Pirate Bay. Some would like American authorities to go after the file-sharing site to protect their copyrights. Others are uneasy about the idea of one country's laws reaching across borders, since many countries aren't as permissive about adult entertainment as the U.S. [TorrentFreak]

Exits: What's up at Yahoo Brickhouse?
Remember Yahoo Pipes, the "interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" -- in other words, a website meant to help people build simple Web applications? It launched to some fanfare last February, with many taking it as a sign of Yahoo getting its mojo back. We hear that the project is starting to "implode," as our tipsters says, with most of its upper-level people looking to get out. Already gone, Wired's Epicenter notes, are the two cofounders of the project, Pasha Sadri, who left to pursue a "personal project," and Edward Ho, who just joined rival Google. Pipes was the first major release out of Yahoo's Brickhouse, the company's San Francisco-based startup-idea incubator. That Brickhouse's door is revolving so swiftly after six short months isn't a good omen to us. So, how are the rest of Brickhouse's projects faring? If you've heard anything, please fill us in.

Amazon.com: The Internet retailer has finally launched ...
The Internet retailer has finally launched its long-awaited digital music store as a public beta, with prices that undercut Apple's iTunes by a dime. The music also comes free of digital-rights-management software, which raises the question: What will Boing Boing editor and anti-DRM crusader Cory Doctorow do with all his free time? [Amazon]

Deals: What if Facebook merged with Amazon.com?
FANTASY M&A --The buzz is all about Microsoft, or possibly Google, taking a stake in Facebook, the popular social network, at a lofty valuation as high as $15 billion. But the logic of those deals is driven by advertising -- the more targeted, the better. But what, exactly, are advertisers hoping to target, and why? Besides crude demographics and geographies, the most logical hooks for ads are Facebook users' expressed preferences -- the books, music, and movies they're increasingly listing on their profiles. And who has the best data on what consumers will buy? Why, Amazon.com, of course. The logic of a combination -- a merger of the two giant databases of consumer preferences is, at least on the surface, compelling.The companies, in fact, are such natural partners that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg invited Amazon.com to be one of the first to develop an application for Facebook -- for book reviews, naturally, complete with one-click buying. With Amazon's existing video...

Crime: New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo has ...
New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo has written an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, calling on him to increase policing of sexual predators on the site. From all appearances, though, the police who performed an undercover sting operation on Facebook need a refresher course on the site's privacy tools, which allow users to refuse messages from strangers and report abusive users. [Internetnews.com]

Social Networks: MySpace millionaire says "whatever" to high school
Many parents are worried about their teenage children obsessively spending all their time on MySpace and other social networks. Not Ashley Qualls's mother -- even though her 17-year-old daughter has gotten so involved with MySpace she dropped out of high school. Qualls has parlayed her MySpace designs into an ad-supported business worth millions of dollars. Her website, Whateverlife.com, has seven million unique visitors a month. The teenager has bought her family a new home and hired her mom.

Satire: Oh pfeez! A new "game" is the perfect deconstruction of Web 2.0
"Pfeez : a worldwide game where people from all horizons enjoy taking photos of other people who are wearing the logo of the Pfeez community (photos taken without their knowledge)." When my editor sent me this pitch for Pfeez, his only comment was "Buh?" He must not have realized that this is the perfect crime: A reductio ad absurdum of contemporary social sites, and a profitable one at that.The deconstructionThose participating in Pfeez must wear its logo or take pictures of those wearing the logo. But what does the logo represent but the act of interacting with the logo? It is thus a self-referential symbol. And thus Pfeez points a mocking finger at Facebook, MySpace, and other networks that no longer represent real-world relationships but merely point at themselves. Even "useful" sites like Flickr, filled with photos of Flickr users taking photos of the cameras of other Flickr users, cannot escape the stinging satire of Pfeez.Phase 3: Profit!Someone's going to buy Pfeez's...

Digital Music: Everybody hates iTunes
Well, maybe not everyone. But the tide is certainly turning against Apple's music and video store, which has held a near-monopoly on digital media distribution. Vivendi says the contract between its Universal Music Group and Apple is "indecent." We like the sound of that, but somehow it doesn't sound like Vivendi meant it as a compliment. Like NBC Universal, in which it holds a minority stake, Vivendi wants more control over pricing -- the option to charge more for new, in-demand content than old library tracks. While Apple has a few stalwart supporters, like Fox, at the moment, it's likely that many content providers are waiting for enough key players to take the plunge before determining whether to abandon ship or demand more flexibility. Particularly if they're getting a better deal from Apple's new competitor, AmazonMP3.

Nicholas Negroponte: Oh, no laptops per child?
Nicholas Negroponte of the One Laptop Per Child initiative is waking up to the business realities of equipping millions with low cost hardware: "I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written." No kidding. Some degree? A commitment for three million down to no orders for the production of 120,000 cheap laptops is some degree. To spur sales, the low-cost laptop will be offered to North American consumers for $399. The price includes an additional laptop donation for charity. But come on: Wal-Mart sells computers for less.Even while embracing reality, Negroponte clings to idealistic expectations: "Negroponte explained that if donations reached, say, $40 million, that would mean 100,000 laptops could be distributed free in the developing world. The idea, he said, would be to give perhaps 5,000 machines to 20 countries to try out and get started." These, of course, would be the same countries that have so...

Videogames: Microsoft's gaming division has struggled ...
Microsoft's gaming division has struggled to pull itself out of the red since its inception back in 2001. Its current console, the Xbox 360, has been plagued with manufacturing defects that could cost the company up to $1 billion to fix. But Microsoft expects its blockbuster Halo 3 to end its financial woes by tallying an estimated $140 million upon its release today -- a blockbuster some will no doubt tiresomely liken to first-day box-office figures. [BBC News]

Yahoo: Escape from the Brickhouse
Earlier today, we asked about Yahoo's Brickhouse -- the ostensible incubator of innovation in San Francisco's South Park charged with reviving Yahoo's reputation for Web cool. Departures from the Pipes project, the only notable product release from Brickhouse, raised questions about the operation. Brickhouse head Bradley Horowitz thinks his group is "thriving," but a recent ex-Brickhouse employee reports otherwise. His complaints range from the petty (the office "smelled like dirty socks") to the more troubling (Horowitz, he claims, "suffers from god syndrome and needs to get over himself"). The full email, after the jump.I worked at Brickhouse and quit. The place smelled like dirty socks and had no ventilation. In general the building feels cursed, probably from the old Organic days. [Organic, an online ad agency, used to occupy the same building, which Yahoo now shares with Wired. -- Ed.]I even question the seismic soundness of that building. Don't take your kids there either,...

Virtual Worlds: Now Second Life avatars warrant trademarks?
Alyssa LaRoche has successfully obtained a trademark for her Second Life avatar Aimee Weber. Wait, what? Billed as one of the most recognizable figures in Second Life, LaRoche says she had to take steps to protect her virtual image because it's directly tied into her virtual design shop, Aimee Weber Studio. Her firm has produced everything from Second Life's virtual American Apparel outlet to a Peugeot concept car. Linden Lab actually permits Second Life users to keep some intellectual property rights in their unreal creations. But the account itself remains the property of Linden Lab, revocable at any time, without recourse. LaRoche is wise to seek protection for her creations. But she's ultimately foolish to think she really owns anything. She is seeking, in essence, a trademark on a figment of her imagination, in the service of a business of selling figments.

Quotable: "lame you took my song dedication off ;" ...
"lame you took my song dedication off ;" -- the urgent message Facebook spokesprofile Brandee Barker left for CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook profile, at 1:16 in the morning Monday, shortly before kicking off a week filled with Facebook news and rumors. [Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook profile]

Venture Capital: Investors in Parakey, a hot startup founded ...
Investors in Parakey, a hot startup founded by Firefox creators Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, were paid in cash, not shares, when Facebook bought the company. While they doubled their money in the $4 million sale, the cash payout means they were shut out of Facebook's future growth, which has left some of them quietly grumbling. [TechCrunch]

Online Advertising: YouTube not, repeat, not adding 30-second ads
Internet users are up in arms on Digg over a months-old report, mistakenly rehashed as news by Gizmodo, that Google's YouTube site was considering adding 30-second ads to run at the beginning of its online videos. The problem? The report, from April, has been overtaken by events. YouTube's current plans, unveiled last month, are to add "overlay" ads, like the teasers you see on TV for upcoming programming, to the bottom of some videos. In a statement, YouTube group product manager Shashi Seth says that testing found that users didn't like the ads. Consider the outrage, however mistakenly founded, as further confirmation of Google's testing.

Rumormonger: RockYou wanted to pay $2M to draw on your wall
Facebook's platform has captured the hearts of Valley developers and the wallets of Sand Hill moneymen, but still has yet to prove it can make a buck. The question, five months after the Facebook frenzy began, is how much is a Facebook application worth? For an answer, let's turn to widget powerhouse RockYou, the startup known to users for its horoscope application and to backers for an intellectual property scandal which almost cost backer Sequoia Capital its investment. Here's what they thought one high-profile app was worth.We hear RockYou made a quiet pitch to the developers of Facebook application Graffiti soon after the Facebook platform launched. The offer? $2 million for the viral success story, mere weeks after it was introduced. The most bizarre part of this tale is the reaction from the developers Mark Kantor, and Tim and Ted Suzman: They turned down the offer, presumably because they were looking for a higher payout for their numerous sleepless hours spent coding...

Clips: Josh Kopelman's bad break
If you were wondering why First Round Capital VC Josh Kopelman has been walking around in a sling, here's your explanation. Embedded, above, is the video Kopelman posted of him breaking his shoulder trying to indoor skydive in Las Vegas. Beware: The mishap occurs around :90 seconds in, and it's totally not for the squeamish. But if you can stand it, it's as good a demonstration of the downside of the Valley's macho, testosterone-driven, thrill-seeking culture as you'll ever need.

Stats: Facebook has overtaken MySpace in the United ...
Facebook has overtaken MySpace in the United Kingdom, a media stronghold for the latter's parent company, News Corp. As one might write on Rupert Murdoch's Facebook wall, OMG embarrassing!!! [Mashable]

Deathwatch: Vonage, the Internet phone service, has found ...
Vonage, the Internet phone service, has found itself besieged by more legal woes. A court has found it infringed on six Sprint Nextel patents, and ordered Vonage to cough up $69.5 million and a 5 percent royalty on future sales. Last March, Vonage suffered similar penalties after it was found guilty of infringing on Verizon patents. A royalty here, a royalty there, and soon you're talking serious money. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Self-referential: Gawker book can't shake Jason Calacanis from its coattails
Even on YouTube, Internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis dogs the every step of Nick Denton, the owner of this blog. A promotional video for a new book from Gawker, a sister site to Valleywag, lists an interview with Calacanis as one of its related links.