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geek love
Steve Wozniak and Kathy Griffin all broken up
Speaking to an Us Magazine reporter on Saturday, comedienne Kathy Griffin declared that she and billionaire Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak have moved to Splitsville, population: Them."As a matter of fact," she added, "I got an email last week from him, and he is going to marry someone else... I think he might be married. I don't really know that for sure, though."Wow, with Wozniak's marital status up in the air even while dating, it sure comes as a surprise that the two couldn't see eye-to-eye in the relationship. It couldn't have helped that rumors suggested the notoriously flaky Woz may have held up production of episodes of Griffin's reality show "My LIfe on the D List" slated to air on Bravo. Still, they'll always have Sunnyvale. (Photo AP/Danny Moloshok)
online video
Hollywood talent leery of stock-option deals, but agencies enthusiastic
Cash money, not equity, is what powers the entertainment industry. Especially when it comes to talent. In a possibly apocryphal but illustrative anecdote, legendary bluesman Albert King reportedly refused to leave the stage until he had cash in hand from the concert promoter, presumably because he'd been cheated out of so many deals in the past. Studio accounting has an only slightly better reputation than that of the music industry when it comes to being, ahem, creative. Hence it's no surprise that when negotiating venture funding for Funny Or Die, Will Ferrell reportedly wanted to know what his upfront payout would be, according to Sequoia Capital's Mark Kvamme in comments to the New York Times. Which is one reason why private equity efforts to fund traditional film and television production have yet to pan out. Better to get your money upfront and walk away in case the project is a disaster. So how is Valley money changing Hollywood business models? More »
5:00 PM on Wed Apr 16 2008
By Jackson West
1,957 views,
9 comments
Latest by FiveStarEggRoll: @bbucy: A la Ben Stiller? Well, I guess he still directs (a lot of crap)...Sandler too. Seeing a big SNL trend here. Is Chase directing these days? Harry "wonders what Ackroyd is up to" Wang more »
mythbusting
Why online video hasn't reinvented Hollywood
LOS ANGELES — I'm the first to admit that I wanted to see the Web kill Hollywood. It just ain't happening. It's finally dawned on the studios that you can now pay artists even less to produce content, and pay YouTube absolutely nothing to distribute it. The problem is you have to sell your own ads — but the studios and networks, unlike indie content creators and Valley startups, have armies of ad sales people still at their command. And it's still a hits-based business. So while it's great to have all the creative freedom in the world, you're still going to have to wait tables and get coffee for producers while working, unpaid, on your own projects and pray to the ghost of Mae West that something ends up with mass appeal. What does success look like in the wake of the online video revolution? More »
8:00 AM on Fri Apr 11 2008
By Jackson West
7,131 views,
21 comments
Latest by n/a: you have to dig a little deeper to get a better sense of what's going on. Hollywood's basic business model is to monetize "windows" of opportunity to view its catalog. This only works in a world where distribution can be controlled(think more »
deathwatch
Ashton Kutcher-backed startup Ooma is falling apart
Hold the phone: Voice-over-Internet startup Ooma is flailing, despite — or perhaps because of — a viral-video marketing campaign directed by Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher. Ooma launched its product, a $400 device which offers unlimited phone calls, last year, with a splash of press. Starstruck tech bloggers like TechCrunch's Michael Arrington gave away Ooma gadgets to readers in exchange for some facetime with Kutcher — and asked few questions about its nonsensical business model, which had it charging high upfront prices for hardware and giving away phone service. Now, we're told, its high-school-dropout CEO, Andrew Frame, has seen a host of executives leave. More »
startups
Jessica Alba helps promote Baron Davis's startup iBeatYou
If you're going to waste time at work on a social network, why lavish it on the proles of Facebook? You could instead luxuriate it on the wildly attractive Jessica Alba and NBA All-Star Baron "Bulletproof" Davis of our hometown Golden State Warriors. Davis and old friend Cash Warren, Alba's paramour, cofounded Alba's favored social network, iBeatYou. The basic premise: One interacts through friendly contests like Best Beard. But the "differentiator," in Valleyspeak, is Alba and Davis's celebrity draw. It kind of reminds me of the now-defunct Consumating, except with playful jocks instead of indie rock hipsters. After the jump, NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes captured a moment with the effusive Davis. More »
online video
PageSix.com Spitzer girl video could be its "firecrotch" moment
Ever since TMZ.com ran its infamous "firecrotch" video — the one in which an oil-heir pal of Paris Hilton slagged Lindsay Lohan — the Time Warner-owned Hollywood gossip site has been on a pageviews tear. TMZ.com slaps News Corp.'s PageSix.com around every which way when it comes to visitor traffic. But TMZ doesn't have video of the walking, talking, leaning sensation that is Ashley Alexandra Dupré, now do they?
Ever since TMZ.com ran its 
deep thoughts
"Grey's Anatomy" illustrates Peter Thiel's Christian philosophy
Facebook investor Peter Thiel plans to pay someone who adheres to a "specific strain of Christian philosophy" $100,000 to $200,000 a year to give away his money. A tipster tell us that the strain is Stanford professor Rene Girard's. Girard's big idea is something he calls mimetic desire, which posits that the only reason I want a Wii so bad is because everybody else wants a Wii so bad. This is called the triangulation of desire. Girard has a 52-minute clip on the Web in which he explains how the theory relates to Christianity. Or, there's this clip from Grey's Anatomy, which YouTube user nefariouscarrot claims illustrates mimetic desire. More »
nerdfight
Cameron Diaz, Arianna Huffington, and the 1,196 other TED attendees Michael Arrington hates
TED, the schmoozeathon taking place in Monterey right now, prides itself on staying exclusive and bringing together only the best of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Manhattan. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is deeply unhappy that he's not invited. So much so that he staged a falling-out with Frenchepreneur Loic Le Meur, a gloating TED attendee. But he's really going to boil when he reads this: The complete list of TED's 1,198 attendees, each of whom he is now personally committed to hate. Arrington's new enemies list includes Al Gore, Amy Tan, Arianna Huffington, Ben Affleck, Cameron Diaz, Forest Whitaker, Isaac Mizrahi, Jeff Bezos, John Cusack, Maria Bartiromo, Marissa Mayer, Max Levchin, Meg Ryan, Peter Thiel, Roger McNamee, Si Newhouse IV, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Steve Case, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Dolby, Tim O'Reilly, and Will Smith. The rest are here.
rock star
Gene Simmons sex tape leaked on Web (NSFW)
"Watch the sex tape Gene doesn't want you to see," GenesSecret.com promises. The website purportedly hosts a NSFW sex tape of Kiss frontman Gene Simmons. Leave aside the question of whether anyone wants to see Simmons in flagrante. Does Simmons himself really object to the site? Nothing revives the Q factor of an aging rocker like a bit of scandal. Since he's no longer recording, just touring, he doesn't have a skittish label to appease. And thanks to the Internet, he doesn't have to rely on the tabloids to get his name out. Welcome to the age of DIY career makeovers. Is it really Simmons? Judge for yourself from these excerpts in which his face is most visible: More »
format wars
Wal-Mart crowns Blu-ray the disc that matters
The high-definition disc battle is over, and Blu-ray has won. We can now move on to more productive matters. Why am I declaring victory? Not because of Warner's switch to the format, and certainly not because of Netflix's. Retailing is not a democracy. There is one vote that matters. No, it's not the consumer's — it's Wal-Mart's. And Wal-Mart, formerly an HD-DVD advocate, is going Blu. Walmart.com currently has its sole HD-DVD player model on clearance, and by June, it will only sell Blu-ray players and discs. Next format war, please.
breakdowns
Service outage strikes BlackBerry users
Poor Research in Motion. First the iPhone shows up and makes its BlackBerry look old and busted. Now, it really is old and busted. RIM is experiencing a "disruption of service" affecting all wireless carriers in North America. BlackBerry users could "experience difficulty" using data capabilities like email and web connectivity on their phones. RIM has called the event a "critical severity outage" which started this afternoon and affects enterprise clients and "users of the Americas network." The company has no estimate for when service will be restored. Quick, call a meeting — people will pay attention for lack of anything else to do. (Photo by decaf)
bubble 2.0
The 10 most memorable tech Super Bowl ads
Behold the best tech ad in Super Bowl history: Apple's "1984" ad, which cost $1.6 million to make and run, and only aired nationally once. The following nine ads, while perhaps not as iconic, are all fascinating in how they seek to make the mysteries of tech compelling to the masses. More »
exits
Terry Semel leaves Yahoo for good, gets street named after him
Terry Semel has stepped down as chairman of Yahoo and will leave the board of directors, more than six months after he left his post as CEO of the company. Board member Roy Bostock will assume his role as non-executive chairman. Don't think they let Terry leave without some lovely parting gifts though: Valleywag has learned that the entrance to Yahoo's Sunnyvale headquarters will be renamed Semel Drive "out of appreciation for everything he's done" for Yahoo. Sweet! That's the kind of golden parachute everyone can enjoy!
A tipster sent us the oddly e.e. cummings-esque internal email from Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang announcing the departure:
More »
hollywood
Man behind Nokia N-Gage debacle now wants your money for Michael Eisner biopic
After the success of former PayPal COO David Sacks's Thank You for Smoking, Hollywood has renewed its efforts to tap the swollen bank accounts of Silicon Valley's newly wealthy entrepreneurs. But the come-on I've just received is more unusual than most such attempts. The movie in question? A film adaptation of James B. Stewart's DisneyWar, a savage portrait of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Eisner drew many enemies in the Valley during his reign at the media company, so there might plausibly be some willing to fund a cinematic poke at him. More »
acquisitions
Amazon.com acquires indie-film site Withoutabox
Los Angeles-based Withoutabox, a membership site which allows independent filmmakers to submit their work to movie festivals, has been acquired by Amazon.com subsidiary IMDB, the company told customers in an email today. David Straus and Joe Neulight founded the company in 2000 and saw it become popular among film-school students and film-festival producers. A niche audience, to be sure: Compete.com puts the site's "people count" in December 2007 at 22,888. But we suspect that Amazon bought the site not for its eyeballs, but for content it can sell directly to its huge audience of shoppers, bypassing Hollywood. Straight from Withoutabox to Amazon Unbox, in other words. Anyone know how much Amazon paid?
valley spawn
Megan Ellison loves the ladies, just like Dad
That New York Post item about an "Internet billionaire" and his "lady-loving," "wild-child" daughter who's been to rehab twice still has us thinking. Former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel's daughter Courtenay is wild enough, but her dad's not rich enough. How about Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the aspiring film producer? Her MySpace profile lists her as "bi". And while we haven't heard anything about stints in rehab, she did write the following in a MySpace blog entry: More »
clips
