SAN FRANCISCO, 1:43 AM, MON MAY 12 | 1 POSTS IN THE LAST 24 HOURS | tips@valleywag.com | SUBMIT A TIP | RSS
Posts Tagged “

Fortune

”
google

Larry Page says be like Thomas Edison, not Nikola Tesla

While taking risks is valuable, it's only those who can successfully commercialize their breakthrough ideas who will succeed, Google cofounder Larry Page told Fortune in a feature interview.
You also need some leadership skills. You don't want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors, but it's a sad, sad story. He couldn't commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research. You'd want to be more like Edison. If you invent something, that doesn't necessarily help anybody. You've got to actually get it into the world; you've got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.
In other words, it's not enough to innovate — you need to make a profit, too. Further nuggets of wisdom from the paper billionaire after the jump. More »

4:20 PM on Thu May 1 2008
By Jackson West
1,147 views, 10 comments

Latest by dula: sounds like a smart guy... more »

exits

Ex-Business 2.0 editor leaves Fortune for Time

Josh Quittner, former editor of the defunct Business 2.0, has extricated himself from his unhappy stay at Fortune by returning to Time, where he previously worked. Tellingly, Time editor Rick Stengel refers to him as a "writer" for Fortune, though he had the ostensible title of executive editor. Stengel's memo is included below. Quittner's new gig is his old gig, covering consumer technology, which takes him back roughly 13 years in the progress of his career. Funny, because we'd heard that Quittner had held serious talks with Michael Arrington about joining TechCrunch, around the same time he wrote a laudatory column about the tech blogger. All that puffery, and no job in exchange? A shame. More »

8:20 AM on Wed Apr 16 2008
By Owen Thomas
523 views, Comment

great moments in journalism

Fortune recycles its Jeff Bezos profile

There is only one story ever written about Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos: That he has defied the skeptics, has had the last laugh, and is now looking to the future. Fortune's latest iteration of the formula is no exception. It begins with an obligatory near-death experience — in this case, a not-quite-fatal helicopter ride near Bezos's West Texas spaceport. And then, Christlike, the escape from death, the resurrection, and the glory. The glory: A stock price driven up not by technical innovations like Amazon's Web services, but by expanding profit margins, the result of tightened R&D spending. Wall Street, not Bezos, has the last laugh, but that conclusion doesn't fit the formula.

12:20 PM on Tue Apr 15 2008
By Owen Thomas
227 views, Comment

conflicts of interest

Fortune columnist fails to disclose Arrington tie

Josh Quittner, the Fortune executive editor who's reportedly plotting his escape from his gilded cage at the magazine, has written a perfunctory profile of TechCrunch blog impresario Michael Arrington. Nothing we haven't read before — including the obligatory paragraph about Arrington's conflicts of interest in writing about startups even as he invests in them. Quittner observes that the practice seems to boost Arrington's reputation in the Valley. One conflict Quittner never mentions: As editor of Business 2.0, where I worked for him, he tried to strike a deal with Arrington to save the magazine by merging it with TechCrunch. The effort failed, landing Quittner at Fortune.

5:00 AM on Thu Mar 27 2008
By Owen Thomas
816 views, 7 comments

Latest by matto: This one time, in 2001, I read an article in B2. Full disclosure. more »

josh quittner

Ex-Business 2.0 editor dumping Fortune for housing blog?

What is Josh Quittner, the former editor of Business 2.0, doing for his next act? Since September, he's had an unhappy career at Fortune, the Time Inc.-owned corporate sibling which took him and a few other refugees from the magazine in. He's been earning what we hear is a mid-six-figures salary playing Scrabulous, and then writing about it. (Actual quote from a recent column: "Clearly, I had too much time on my hands.") The latest I'd heard on Quittner, my former boss, was that he was leaving Fortune to return to Time, where he worked before joining Business 2.0, as its Marin County-based tech correspondent. But he may have another exit strategy in mind. in 2006, Quittner registered roofmagazine.com. More »

3:40 PM on Wed Mar 26 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,065 views, 6 comments

Latest by 26footjasontaylor: It's funny b/c Business 2.0 cheerled the housing boom even well after it had burst. In fact, their final issue was about "how to play the housing bounceback." [rangelife.typepad.com] more »

bubble 2.0

Jim Breyer times his bubble-popping just right

Fortune magazine, ever servile, provides a ready platform for the powerful with something to say. The latest on stage: Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners VC with a seat on Facebook's board. Breyer has a fair point: We may be seeing the cyclical bursting of another Silicon Valley bubble. Breyer says this happens once every seven years, roughly. But his timing is suspicious. Last October, Breyer gladly took Microsoft's bubbly $240 million for a microscopic stake in Facebook. Declaring the bursting of a bubble now may help hasten its advent, and in the process, make it harder for Facebook's rivals to raise money. But for Fortune readers' tech-stock portfolios, an early warning might have been more useful. Why didn't the magazine ring him up last fall? Fortune never mentions this. (Illustration by Sean McCabe for Fortune)

10:40 AM on Wed Mar 19 2008
By Owen Thomas
264 views, 1 comment

Latest by Fidel on the Roof: Such a corrupt bastard. more »

apple

Jobs lied about cancer diagnosis at Stanford

A further revelation in Peter Elkind's Fortune profile of Apple CEO Steve Jobs: In a June 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, he told students, "About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer." Jobs first learned he had a form of pancreatic cancer in October 2003. [Fortune]

5:00 PM on Tue Mar 4 2008
By Owen Thomas
2,347 views, 6 comments

apple

Fortune's cover story: Steve Jobs hid cancer for nine months

From October 2003 through July 2004, Steve Jobs hid the fact that he'd been diagnosed with a form of pancreatic cancer, according to a profile of Jobs in an upcoming issue of Fortune, now posted online. A serious charge: Jobs should have promptly disclosed his health scare to Apple shareholders, since he seems practically irreplaceable as Apple's CEO. (Only now is he admitting to thinking about a successor.) But Jobs's cancer scare is old news to most readers. Why is Fortune bringing it up now? More »

3:00 PM on Tue Mar 4 2008
By Owen Thomas
3,779 views, 18 comments

Latest by raincoaster: @Oh No I Di'n't.: I just read the full article: apparently he had a history of intestinal issues, which is often what prompts people to go raw vegan in the first place. But looking at the survivability numbers for people more »

great moments in journalism

Fortune's Facebook infomercial


Before Fortune magazine's little dustup about Facebook's controversial new advertising products, Andy Serwer's court jester, David Kirkpatrick, produced a hardly hard-hitting video on the subject. Just how much of a puff piece was this? Fortune managed to dig up some intercutting shots of a very enthusiastic Facebook user. Recognize her? More »

7:52 AM on Thu Dec 20 2007
By Nicholas Carlson
725 views, Comment

nerdfight

Quittner "silenced," says Fortune colleague

An extraordinary public slap, rarely seen in the genteel world of magazine publisher Time Inc.: Fortune appears to have momentarily taken executive editor Josh Quittner's Techland blog away from him and handed it to rival tech writer David Kirkpatrick. Quittner's recent blog rant about Facebook's Beacon was wrongheaded enough, but entirely undeserving of this humiliation — republishing, duplicatively, a Fortune.com column by Kirkpatrick in Quittner's blog. Kirkpatrick, left, declared that Quittner, right, had been "silenced" on the Facebook issue. He went on to tear apart, at length, Quittner's argument. All the more shaming, because Kirkpatrick is — how to put this gently? — a laughingstock among his colleagues. More »

5:00 PM on Wed Dec 5 2007
By Owen Thomas
1,695 views, 4 comments

Latest by fishneversleep: @Figaro: Silence, bugtard. more »

media

Fortune.com redesign rips off Portfolio.com

Fortune.com — what magazine publisher is calling Fortune's little corner of CNNMoney.com — relaunched today, and the Observer's Media Mob notes the site is "sleeker, whiter, cleaner" but bears a "strikingly" duh-we're-copycats resemblance to Portfolio.com. Whatever, let us know when Forbes.com relaunches with a design inspired by Fake Steve Jobs's Blogger template. In the meantime, here's a Valleywag poll asking you to pick which Web design best helps you forget that no one reads magazines — if you can even tell them apart. More »

10:30 AM on Wed Nov 28 2007
By Nicholas Carlson
1,153 views, 5 comments

Latest by Choochoo: Oh NO! You surely screwed the pooch! Portfolio has a patent on all things Black and orange!! Seriously... nothing alike. If you ask me, Portfolio has ripped Fortune. I mean, come on, Fortune has been around for how long now?? And more »

rumormonger

Fortune editor censors Larry and Lucy's wedding date

Which is mightier, the pen or the search engine? On October 19, Fortune editor Andy Serwer blogged a short-lived rumor that Google cofounder Larry Page will marry girlfriend Lucy Southworth on December 7. Short-lived, because the passage about the smooch-prone couple's happy news quickly disappeared from the page:
Wedding Pages: Okay, you may have heard that Larry Page of Google is getting married. A friend of a friend of mine got this information via e-mail. The information did not include the bride's name (Lucy?) nor the location of the wedding. The wedding will be held on the weekend of December 7th. Some guests, depending on their location, will be leaving the evening of December 6th and others will be leaving the morning of December 7th. Guests will have the choice of leaving either the 10th or the 12th. A valid passport will be necessary for the event and it should be valid for more than 6 months after the event. (That last bit is a baffling.) You may remember that Sergey Brin married Anne Wojcicki earlier this year.
None of that shows up on the current version of the post. And the Google cache returns the edited post. Yahoo, however, obliges. (Go figure.) A screenshot of the original post after the jump. More »

Feature

1:20 AM on Wed Oct 31 2007
By Megan McCarthy
7,971 views, 9 comments

Latest by Megan McCarthy: @VenusCloacina: The first headline did reference the infamous date. However, this postis really about Fortune caving, so the headline was edited appropriately. We'll have more info on the wedding as we find more out about it. more »

media

Fortune editor in town to boss ex-B2 staff around

Remember former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, whose tech magazine got shut down by parent company Time Inc.? Now an executive editor at Fortune, he outranks, on paper, assistant managing editor Jim Aley — the man he replaced as Business 2.0's editor five years ago. Which makes the following curious: The New York-based Aley, pictured above, is in town this week. Valleywag hears he started off his visit with a breakfast with Quittner. And then Aley met with the remnants of Business 2.0's staff, who now make up Fortune's San Francisco bureau — without Quittner. Remind us again who's in charge here? And if you want your startup written up in Fortune, who's the right guy to schmooze?

1:48 PM on Thu Oct 25 2007
By Owen Thomas
328 views, Comment

media

A turnabout for Business 2.0's former boss

Time Inc. has officially announced Business 2.0's closure in an internal memo obtained by Jossip. In it, Time Inc. executive John Squires explains that folding in some of Business 2.0's staff into Fortune will give it "the largest San Francisco bureau of any major business publication." The Wall Street Journal bureau will still be twice its size, but never mind — we assume Squires meant "magazine." No, what's interesting in the memo is what's not said. More »

2:11 PM on Wed Sep 5 2007
By Owen Thomas
1,433 views, 5 comments

Latest by Owen Thomas: @arepb: You mean, a blog like this one? The one Sloan has had for almost a year now? more »

media

Business 2.0 staff faces Fortune-ate fate

There's no official word on the fate of Business 2.0, the Time Inc.-owned magazine where I used to work. The publication, once fated to shut down after its September issue, is still alive, thanks to a hastily granted extension of life support. The staff is working on the October issue, while higher-ups consider offers to buy the magazine that streamed in after word of its impending demise leaked. But they seem to have resigned themselves to the fate of being absorbed into larger sister publication Fortune, based on this sign: A magazine logo near the entrance has been altered to read "Fortune 2.0."

5:12 PM on Wed Aug 22 2007
By Owen Thomas
596 views, 3 comments

Latest by Owen Thomas: @fangsta: Thank you, I am enjoying reading the copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that was, as I've noted here, delivered to the B2 office by mistake, and late at that. I can't believe what happens to Hermi... more »

deathwatch

Fortune parties while Business 2.0 burns

Fortune's summer party, scheduled for today, has been postponed, ostensibly for weather reasons, as New York is under siege from a nor'easter. With sister publication Business 2.0 on the rocks, it might have been seemly to cancel it altogether. We've learned, however, that the all-day shindig has been rescheduled for tomorrow. So, as Fortune staffers party, Business 2.0 employees will continue huddling under a storm of their own. Rumors, true and false, are flying. (I should note that I'm covering this as a former Business 2.0 editor who worked at the magazine for seven years — but events are moving so fast that all of this comes from new reporting since I left, not any knowledge I acquired on the job.) Here's what I know, and what I don't know, so far: More »

Feature

1:58 PM on Mon Jul 23 2007
By Owen Thomas
1,656 views, 3 comments

Latest by Figaro: @raincoaster: There is no justice (or sense) left in the world. more »

Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick catches a clue, says he won't use the silly iMeme name for next year's conference. [The Sam Whitmore Sampler]

Comment

Everything you need to know about the VC panel at today's Fortune iMeme conference, including the sartorial choices of prominent moneymen. (Accel's Jim Breyer wore a CBGB shirt!) [Barrons]

Comment