It's complicated. God, is it ever. The same October Details story that follows around New York's "Internet playboys" and their bicoastal hangers-on runs with this chart of who dated, funded, or hated in this overdocumented side of the Web scene. So sweet to know we're not the only ones keeping a scorecard, but one of its subjects, Caroline McCarthy, claims there's inaccuracies! Let's do Details and the kids recently fanning their fameballs from the coverage a favor and fix it up then. Ready? Let loose in the comments with your errata.
MySpace Music, a joint venture between the News Corp. social network and music labels Universal, Sony and Warner,finally launches next week, says Fortune, though it still won't have a CEO. MySpace users will be able to listen to and organize playlists full of songs from all three music labels for free. (EMI is the lone holdout, which means no coldplay.) Playlists will include affiliate links to Amazon.com's MP3 store. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe says ad revenues and song kickbacks are going to save the music industry, replacing lost CD sales.
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Muxtape founder Justin Ouellette says he's shut down the mixtape-hosting website because of a problem with the Recording Industry Association of America. A statement from the RIAA itself seems to confirm the story. Bu we hear another reason Muxtape is shutting down is that it got too expensive for Ouellette to keep up.
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Even when Manhattan's favorite Internet hipster Jakob Lodwick isn't high, he's not that hard-working. Connected Ventures cofounder Zach Klein reminisces about the early days of Connected Ventures, the IAC-backed testosteronefest behind CollegeHumor and Vimeo. Lodwick leads the startup's crew in singing "Semi-Charmed Kind of Life," and trashes cofounder Ricky Van Veen's cardboard cutout of Shaquille O'Neal. Any questions on why Vimeo's performance soared after IAC fired Lodwick? shaq attack from Amir Cohen on Vimeo.
In the second quarter, IAC swung from a $94.6 million profit last year to a $421.6 million loss this year. Don't blame Jakob Lodwick! His former company, Vimeo, is nowhere near the top of IAC/InterActiveCorp's expense report for the past quarter. The real problem at Barry Diller's Internet empire is Cornerstone Brands, a rollup of catalog companies undermined by weak consumer spending in home and apparel retail. Cornerstone's losses led to a $300 million writedown in goodwill in IAC's second quarter. In addition, the soft real estate market cut revenue for home financing site LendingTree nearly in half.
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Victim of their own success: Vimeo, the online video-sharing venture owned by Barry Diller's IAC. The site has been been doing well since IAC fired Vimeo's founder, wacky Web 2.0 poster boy Jakob Lodwick. But Vimeo's ample capacity is now bogged down by a glut of videogame screen-capture movies, sometimes called fraps. Why is that a problem?
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It's been just a little over a year since Julia Allison touched down in Silicon Valley, strutting past the hand-stampers at an arts fundraiser and informing anyone who would listen that she was looking for a boyfriend to help her with her website. It hasn't exactly paid off. The so-soft-it-hurts launch of her new startup, Nonsociety.com, is a technical tour de farce. The rumored-to-death project wraps glamour shots of Allison and friends like comrade Meghan Asha Parikh, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's ex-girlfriend, around sideways-scrolling feeds ("lifestreams"!) of their Tumblr blogs. Meghan, a former hedge-fund analyst, shows off her tech creds here. She's the only one who seems to have a functioning "lifestream," even on launch day. Allison's and a handbag-designing ladyfriend's came up 404. We salvaged the launch video, in case the whole thing collapses:
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On Monday, we posted Muxtape founder Justin Ouellette's accidentally-emailed-to-the-Internet photo of a napkin on which he'd scribbled details of his investment deal with Jakob Lodwick. Lodwick, best known for getting fired from Vimeo, an online video-sharing site he founded, now owned by IAC. He now spends his days playing the solipsistic teenager in a man's Crocs-shod body. Now Lodwick's replacement at Vimeo, director of development Andrew Pile, joins the fun.
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Is IAC's Vimeo, the video-sharing site founded by bizarrely charismatic (and just plain bizarre) New York entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick, missing its founder? In a word, no. Lodwick lost his job due to insubordination last November; his dare-you-to-sue-me funding of an IAC employee's music startup, in an apparent violation of his noncompete agreement, is right in line with the nose-thumbing he did while on the job. We heard IAC finally fired Lodwick because he would blow off meetings with upper management when it wanted to talk to him about things like marketing and growth. So who got it right — IAC chairman Barry Diller's suits, or the wannabe iconoclast?
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Once an oversharer, always an oversharer — no matter what it costs, personally or financially. When IAC fired Jakob Lodwick — the Internet's own Howard Roark — from Web video site Vimeo, IAC agreed to pay Lodwick $100,000 a year until 2011, just so long as he stayed away from IAC employees in any new ventures. Lodwick, reportedly bipolar and never much one for consistency, has proven unable to resist the temptation. An image posted to former IAC employee Justin Ouellette's personal blog seems to confirm what's already been rumored: Lodwick funded Ouellette's side project, an online-music site called Muxtape, with enough cash — $95,000 in exchange for 1 percent of Muxtape's equity, going by the scribbled napkin — so that Oullette could quit IAC to run Muxtape full time.
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