I was at the museum on Friday and saw this whole thing go down. Thomas Hawk's account of what happened is unabashedly one-sided. What he neglects to mention is that he was standing on a balcony with his camera pointed down, aiming directly into the shirt/cleavage of one of the female employees working at the museum. Simon Blint asked Thomas Hawk to stop taking photos in order to protect his staff from a creepy perv, not because he was using a dSLR or for whatever BS reason Thomas Hawk claims.

Seriously, that museum is photgraphed by visitors constantly; do you really think that Thomas Hawk was randomly, forcibly ejected for no reason at all?

Update: Hawk's best defense comes from a comment on Flickr: "Blint actually landed that accusation from the foyer, shouting it up to us, accusing us of looking down her shirt. From above, the ticket taker was just hair and neck."

(Photo by Renee Blodgett)

Yahoo's failure-prone four had between 18.2 and 22.1 percent of shareholders withhold their votes for reelection. Board members who met with Valleywag's approval — Eric Hippeau, Vyomesh Joshi, Bobby Kotick, and Maggie Wilderotter — scored between 7.1 and 9.3 percent. Only in corporate America would a passive-aggressive move like declining to vote be deemed "activist." All the same, to those shareholders who sat this one out, we thank you for your fealty.

Why is Roche rocking the boat? Its stake in Genentech already provides a large part of its earnings; owning all of Genentech would maximize Roche's take. But this could be a classic case of killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Genentech's top scientists are already wealthy from stock options; loyalty to Levinson is mostly what's keeping them at the company, writes the In Vivo biotech blog. And Levinson, who has already been at the company for 28 years, is likely to walk if Roche's buyout goes through.

That could be very good for Bay Area biotech startups, and the venture capitalists who fund them. Unlike today's Web startups, which are frustratingly cheap to launch, biotech ventures require real money, which means VCs have something to offer. An exodus of talent from Genentech could turbocharge the sector.

And what of Levinson himself? He could well expand his role at Google. Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin, tellingly, are married to women with biotech backgrounds, and have a fascination with the subject. They see the human genome as just another part of the world's information, which they've made it their mission to organize. Could Levinson become part of Larry and Sergey's intellectual petting zoo — like Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet? It sounds like a better gig than sitting in an office in South San Francisco taking orders from the Swiss.

But throw enough money around and you, too, can pretend to have taste! Worked for the Gap's Donald Fisher, who's opening his own ironically named Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio (or "CAMP") because he didn't want SFMOMA to meddle with his precious collection. No wonder Google chose the Gap building with its godawful Richard Serra sculpture for the company's newly opened San Francisco office. (Original photo by Steve Rhodes)

• Roy Bostock: This guy is chairman of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Can you imagine anyone more out of touch with Yahoo's workforce?
• Art Kern: On the board since January 1996. Used to own some radio stations. Gives a lot of money to good causes. Great — how about you do that full-time, Art?
• Ron Burkle: Politically connected former grocery-store owner.
• Gary Wilson: Used to run Northwest Airlines. Shouldn't that be a disqualifier to do anything?

Memo to the rest of Yahoo's board: Hey, you're okay in our book! Let's do lunch!

A previous return vehicle, Bond Art + Science, promised to be exactly that. But artsy, high-end Web design, while profitable enough as a career, will never scorch the heavens.

So Dachis persuaded Austin Ventures to hitch itself to his star, which is unusual. (If convenient for Dachis personally; he has a child who lives in Texas, and he has been commuting there to visit for some time.) Venture capitalists rarely write a blank check to make things convenient for their entreprenurs. Dachis's company, as yet unformed, promises to be "an industry leading strategic consulting practice and an enterprise class Social Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite." Stripped of the jargon, that means Dachis plans to charge companies for advice and rent software to them over the Web. Specifically, "social software"; the most reasonable guess for that is something like Marc Andreessen's Ning, a service which allows users to create their own miniature social networks.

The Facebookification of business may be an inevitable and proftiable trend. Yet it is dangerous for Dachis to launch this so amorphously. He may never live down the time, almost a decade ago, when, faced with a CBS News cameraman, he fumbled at explaining to 60 Minutes II what, precisely, Razorfish did. "We've asked our clients to recontextualize their business," he said. "We've recontextualized what it is to be a services business. We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them." He could say the same thing for his career.

The announcement:

Austin Ventures Announces Partnership with Jeffrey Dachis to Create Social Enterprise Software and Services Company
Digital Services Pioneer Secures $50 Million Commitment
AUSTIN, Texas - April 28, 2008 - Austin Ventures, ("AV"), one of the nation's largest venture capital firms, announced today that it has entered into a partnership with Jeffrey Dachis to form a new company which will focus on creating an industry leading strategic consulting practice and an enterprise class Social Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite. AV has committed up to $50 Million in capital to support management's strategy to build and grow organically and through acquisition. Mr. Dachis will serve as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for the new firm.

Prior to establishing the new firm, Dachis' leadership and vision helped establish the digital services industry when, as co-founder, CEO, President and Chairman of Razorfish, Dachis profitably grew the company revenues to over $250 Million, expanded its talent base from 2 to 2,200 employees with offices in nine countries, completed over 25 M&A transactions, lead its IPO which raised $55 Million, and catapulted Razorfish's public valuation to over $5 Billion. Over the last decade, as the recognized leader in the digital services industry, Razorfish has won numerous performance, design, and professional service awards. Continuing its growth, although Dachis left the company in 2001, Avenue A | Razorfish now part of aQuantive, was recently sold to Microsoft for $6 Billion in May 2007.

Dachis is also a Senior Partner at Manhattan based Bond Art + Science, an Experience Architecture firm specializing in information architecture and user experience design for digital media and information services. He serves as an advisor to companies including: Bazaarvoice, Waterfall Mobile and Swapagift.com. Dachis also serves as the Co-Chairman and national board delegate of the Producer's Guild of America New Media Council East, and is on the Board of Directors of Austin's ArtHouse.

Recognized as a leading expert in digital technology, media, and business, Dachis was awarded Ernst and Young's Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2000, and has frequently appeared as a speaker at industry conferences, and in publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Wired Magazine, and on television shows such as CNBC, CNN, CNNFN, MSNBC, 20/20, and CBS 60 Minutes.

"I believe there is enormous opportunity in helping companies devise and implement a strategy to engage their constituents in a meaningful dialog throughout the enterprise. As companies begin to see the benefits of utilizing "social" technology to engage their customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and communities in an active and transparent dialog, they will need a trusted partner to help them navigate the opportunities, and an integrated set of scalable, robust, and secure enterprise class tools to implement them. We are here to provide both expertise and implementation," said Jeffrey Dachis.

Dachis added "Austin Ventures' considerable resources, experience, commitment, as well as their quality relationships with entrepreneurs, in addition to an unparalleled track record, gave me a high degree of confidence that this was the firm to work with."

"Through his leadership at Razorfish, Mr. Dachis was instrumental in helping enterprises leverage the web during the early phase of the Internet. The proliferation of social networks has created another paradigm shift wherein enterprises need to drive commercial benefit from the evolving social fabric of the Internet. We believe Mr. Dachis' experience and vision are ideal to take advantage of this most recent shift. The relationship with Mr. Dachis is part of AV's ongoing strategy of partnering with talented, proven executives to pursue investment opportunities. We continue to build relationships with executives who share our passion for growth businesses and are energized by the partnership we build with them," said Chris Pacitti, General Partner, Austin Ventures.

The new company will be headquartered in Austin, Texas.

Click to expand all the images, including "MyDoom." If you dare.

18-year-old Sven Jaschan of Germany wrote the Netsky worm, which first appeared in February 2004.

Phishing scams trick users into thinking their giving private information to someone they trust.

A worm called "Russian" from St. Petersburg, Russia, which some call the Storm Worm.

Ever read: "GROUPSeX SeXDATiNg NiKkErThuMPER CUTIEZ" ? Bad news. That was this SexDating virus.

Some times you think software will perform one function, and then it takes over your computer. That would a Trojan attack, here pictured.


(Images by MessageLabs)

Thankfully Flickr user paulthewineguy has annotated nearly 50 masterpieces, translating them into geekspeak for the less artistically inclined. For instance, the angel in Caravaggio's Inspiration of St. Matthew has been lovingly reworked as Clippy the Office assistant, Jasper Johns' Map has a Google Maps overlay, and Leonardo DaVinci's helicopter sketch is still in beta. (Illustration by paulthewineguy)

Chris Coy, an art and design student from BYU, calls his work vintage web. Circa 1996.

Coy will be part of an exhibit opening at the New Museum in New York tonight. But be warned, you may experience flashbacks.

Commenter rheiser says:

Google occupies buildings that Adobe once occupied when they were in Mt. View across from the Amphitheater parking lot. I haven't looked to see if the statue we used to call "Gumby" is there anymore in front of the green buildings.

Those certainly look like the acrobat sculptures that used to be outside the Adobe buildings — I used to pass by them every day when i worked at Sun in the early 90's. I had always assumed that Acrobat was named after the sculptures ....

A potentially interesting factoid: The statues referred to in #10 are holdovers from when Adobe occupied these buildings, and are why it's called 'Acrobat'.

Total coincidence. No relation to Acrobat the product. However, like most big tech companies Adobe has an agreement with it's local government (now city of San Jose) to provide some level of public art in its environs. Adobe now has a couple of rusty sculptures in front of its San Jose HQ. And that funny light thing on top of its building. Funnily enough Apple has a similar agreement with Cupertino. But Steve Jobs took down the art (it was a collection of big software icons in front of Infinite Loop) because he didn't like it.

I don't know whether or not that building was ever Adobe, but I do remember when Bldg 45 was owned and occupied by Sun, back when the Google Campus was SGI. I used to work for SETI (yes, *that* SETI), which was in the building just on the other side of Landings from the one marked marked "1965 Charleston" on your map at that time, and drove by those statues every day. I always thought they were a bit odd, since Sun isn't in the habit of littering their campus with giant kids. Except for the executives, of course.

You forgot to mention Scott Drave's Electric Sheep installation in the main Google lobby. Also, where can one find Larry & Sergey's gallery of Burning Man photos? I know they exist somewhere in the halls of the 'plex.

I remember those sculptures of acrobats outside of an Adobe building. Perhaps building 45 used to be used by Adobe, and the artworks remain? I had wondered at the time if there was a correlation between the name Adobe Acrobat and the sculptures.

Human Browser gallery [Christophe Bruno]

The Portable Cell Phone Booth (embedded vid), pictured above, ups the chance of yelling "Buy! Sell! Buy! Sell!" by 90%.

CellBooth is a toteable fabric curtain with a weirdly serious writeup: "Ultimately, I desired to recreate the illusion of privacy and stillness afforded by oldschool, 4-walled phone booths, but also to update the booth as a portable object that would fit into a modern life."

But the most telling: Not only is a company selling cell booths for restaurants, but last fall it earned a Wired News story. Shoving public cell talkers into a little wooden box is no longer just a dream.

The Portable Cellphone Booth [cowboygirlproductions]
CellBooth [Jenny Chowdhury]
C.P. Booth LLC [Official site]
Booths Silence Cell-Phone Boors [Wired News]

Google this afternoon:

Google buckled under pressure from the firm representing Joan Miró's family, who threatened a copyright suit over the holiday logo. Google just wanted to celebrate the surrealist artist's birthday with a tribute — and one would guess they have enough lawyers to defend an obviously non-infringing work. But hey, no problem — someone else can go defend creative rights.

Artist's family asks Google to take down Thursday's `painted' logo [Mercury News]
Earlier: Google Miro: Brilliant or toddler? [Valleywag]

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

Google [20 April 2006]