I saw Sergey Brin (in all his blaze red-orange Croc glory) eating outside the Marya Cafe in the Melchor pavilion. After he was done eating he ran across the street towards the Orchard pavilion which is the maternity ward for El Camino hospital in Mountain View.

Brin and Wojcicki drew notice for the way they got married in May 2007 in the Bahamas, swimming to the sandbar. But they also got attention for the way they handled a conflict of interest; Brin lent 23andMe his own money to start up, and then Google repaid the loan and became an investor. The company's board approved the deal, but it has never lost the appearance of self-dealing.

In what quirky way will they celebrate the birth not just of their first child, but the first member of the great Google dynasty? In Japan, the successor to the throne was greeted with shouts of "Banzai!"

But we suspect Brin will be more low-key. Perhaps he will order up a new doodle for Google's homepage. We'll let you know as soon as we know more about this momentous occasion — the advent of the generation which will save us from the mistakes of the Google era.

Woj's new disclaimer reads:

I am a long time high school journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School, Palo Alto, CA, but I also have children who are either employed by or otherwise have a financial interest in Google. I am not employed by Google and own no Google stock.

The disclaimer is true in a Clintonian sense. However, Woj does not say she has previously been employed by Google as an "educational consultant" from 2005 to 2006, creating several programs which promoted Google to teachers. Her otherwise lengthy Huffington Post bio does not disclose this fact.

That's not the end of her conflicts of interest. Woj joined the board of Creative Commons, a nonprofit group which promotes alternative means of licensing copyrighted works, in July. Earlier this year, Wojcicki promoted a Creative Commons project without disclosing any ties to the group — such as whether she was, at the time, in discussions to take a seat on its board. At the least, the appointment has the appearance of a reward for her positive coverage.

Which makes me think that disclosure is simply not part of the journalistic curriculum at Paly. Susan Wojcicki rented out her garage as Google's first office; the Wojcicki family has been entwined with Google practically from its inception.

Woj's Google obsession in the Huffington Post would be less disturbing, perhaps, if she stuck to promoting Google's nonprofit efforts. But some plug for Google's products seems to sneak into her writing, too. Whether or not she's got a current, personal financial conflict of interest, she's clearly got an emotional one. Would Bill Gates's mother-in-law bash Microsoft products?

So perhaps Woj is incapable of seeing a tie to Google as something worth disclaiming. Perhaps she has so internalized its don't-be-evil worldview that identifying oneself as connected to Google feels like bragging that she's a good person. Doesn't every good person support Google, the company of good, and all the good it does in the world?

If that's really what Woj believes, she should exercise the critical thinking she ought to be teaching her in the classroom and recognize that her bias runs so deep that she can't even write a truthful disclaimer. And if so, she should stop writing about Google, Creative Commons, her daughter Anne's genomics startup 23andMe, and the various other investments her extended family is entwined in. I can think of no better example Woj can set for her students.

And if she can't, or won't? Perhaps its time for Paly's administration to stop letting her teach her journalism students the wrong lesson.

What to wear: Khaki jacket and black turtleneck
Who you are: Rick Astley
How to play the part: Memorize "Never Gonna Give You Up." You'll be singing it all night.

What to wear: Shower cap, towel, iPhone
Who you are: "Naked Conversations" author Robert Scoble
How to play the part: Engage everyone in conversation. Ask them if they want to get naked. Hope they don't take you up on it.

What to wear: Three-piece suit
Who you are: Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore
How to play the part: Make sure you have a girl on each arm. Tell everyone you're a blogger. Refuse to explain what you actually do.

What to wear: Jumpsuits and aviator glasses for two
Who you are: Larry Page and Sergey Brin
How to play it: Maverick and Goose? So old media. With a fighter jet parked at Moffett Field, Larry and Sergey are the Valley's new Top Guns.

She recently wrote a wide-eyed travelogue for the Huffington Post about the first flight of the Zeppelin NT, a blimp launched by startup Airship Ventures. Airship is backed by Esther Dyson, who is also an investor in her daughter Anne's startup, 23andMe. That, at the least, Woj ought to have disclosed. (I've asked Mario Ruiz, an executive at Huffington Post, if she violated any of the online publication's disclosure rules for writers; he has yet to reply.

But if she really wanted to impress her students with her journalism chops, Woj might have asked questions about Amphitheatre LLC, the shadowy entity which has also invested in Airship Ventures. Amphitheatre shares a name with the street address of Google's headquarters — and possibly more. I would love to have known what Woj would have discovered, had she been less interested in promoting her daughter's investor's new startup.

Right: Because it's an awesome branding opportunity. The draft is a self-parody of corner office drama, full of Honorary Co-Chairs, Leaders, and Former CEOs. But the real story is: Who's missing? Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are here, but not Larry Page. Twitter's Ev Williams is here, but not Digg's Kevin Rose. Federated Media: Present. TechCrunch: Absent. Mark Zuckerberg is not here, but Sheryl Sandberg pulled a John Hancock: She's right up top, where Owen can't miss her. Oh, look, she's trying to make nice! She's going to be sorry.

Why, with the Google founders' fleet of party planes, which are also parked at Moffett Field, with the excuse that they sometimes fly scientific missions. (In fact, the Google founders' jets proved impractical for Nasa's science needs; Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt bought a fighter jet to fly those missions instead.)

One of Airship Ventures' backers is an entity called Amphitheatre Holdings. Amphitheatre is incorporated in Delaware under the address of INV Tax Group, which Google may have purchased in a real-estate transaction two years ago. Google's headquarters is at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Calif.

This hardly seems like coincidence. Dyson is an investor in 23andMe, the Google-backed startup of Anne Wojcicki, wife of founder Sergey Brin. Has Dyson taken Google's shareholders for a ride, by having them take a hidden stake in a blimp startup?

Why, Google did, according to Davos party correspondent Meghan Asha, the sometimes girlfriend of TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who got her in. Google's affair included Norman Jay, a British house-music DJ. There you have it: Larry and Sergey are at fault for distracting the world's best and brightest from preventing the meltdown we now face. If Schwab is serious about keeping thing's serious at the next WEF, we recommend disinviting Page and Brin. And Arrington and Asha.

Last year, Google struck a $144 million deal to lease land from Nasa's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, for future office space. Separately, but not coincidentally, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, through a company called H211 LLC, struck a deal with Nasa to lease a hangar at Moffett Field for their growing fleet of private jets.

Why on earth, or in space, did the Googlers get parking privileges at Moffett? Nasa and Google came up with a great spin: The jets would be available to fly scientific missions. Larry and Sergey got to geek out, thinking their party plans served a higher purpose — while saving hours commuting to and from SJC or SFO.

One small hitch, Miguel Helft reports in Bits: Using the party planes for scientific missions required tinkering with their electronics. And changing anything about the planes required new FAA certifications.

This may explain why Larry and Sergey pulled their party plane from a recent Nasa mission. We know it wasn't out for repairs — around the same time, they used it to ferry guests to and from Gavin Newsom's wedding.

Hence the Dornier fighter jet, which is deemed an "experimental" plane, and which will now satisfy H211's space-mission duties. But that leaves the Googlers and Nasa in a rather unsatisfying position. When the Googlejets were flying for Nasa, they had a reasonable excuse for parking them at Moffett Field. But the purchase of a special plane to run space missions leaves Larry and Sergey's party-plane fleet used solely for civilian purposes. What are they doing at the field? Why, satisfying a quid pro quo, like they always were. This latest twist on Larry and Sergey's lease just makes it more obvious.

We hear that CEO Jerry Yang wrote a long, rambling, presumably uncapitalized email to the troops explaining why the company, which is otherwise outspoken on gay rights, is not taking sides on the issue. Gay employees at Yahoo are purple with rage. Will someone forward us the memo? We'd love to read Yang's explanation of why, once again, he can't make a decision one way or another. (Disclosure: I got married to my husband last month, and recently held a fundraiser in opposition to Proposition 8.)

If you've ever wondered why Google's founders would bring on "adult supervision" in the form of CEO Eric Schmidt, here's the photo proof: Larry and Sergey are moving on to the final frontier. Squirrel Boy gets to stay behind and talk up Google's brand savvy to a roomful of advertisers. Whose job do you want? (Photo by Reuters/Shamil Zhumatov)

Larry and Sergey yanked a promised Boeing 757 from their private fleet, operated by a company called "H211 LLC," just weeks before the originally scheduled reentry date of the Jules Verne ATV-1 space freighter, forcing Nasa and the European Space Agency to scramble to find an old DC-8 to be able to observe the freighter's burn up in the Earth's atmosphere as planned.

What prompted the Google execs to pull the 757, and jeopardize a mission of the American and European space agencies?

Days before the announcement that the 757 was no longer available for the mission, the promised jet was instead used as a limo for San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom's wedding. But it should have been ready for action after the unremarkable flights to and from Montana.

In the end, the Googlers did deliver one Gulfstream V party plane to watch the Verne burn. But one hopes it was a spare, not the same one used to chauffeur Larry, Sergey and their wives to the Google Maps satellite launch in September, right around the time of the originally scheduled reentry date. Was that the event which forced the rescheduling of the Verne mission? And if so, should Nasa be relying on billionaires' personal jets, and their whims, to complete complex, dangerous and time-critical missions?

• Steve Ballmer
• Mitchell Baker
• Jeff Bezos
• Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt
• Jeff Clavier
• Paul Graham
• Arianna Huffington
• Joi Ito
• Steve Jobs
• Jonathan Kaplan
• Loic Le Meur
• Jack Ma
• Matt Mullenweg
• Rupert Murdoch
• Craig Newmark
• Gabe Rivera
• Kevin Rose
• Sheryl Sandberg
• Jon Stewart
• Peter Thiel
• Maria Thomas
• Anssi Vanjoki
• Jimmy Wales
• Evan Williams
• Jerry Yang

On Larry's page, dug up through the Internet Archive, he declared "I attribute a great deal of my understanding and ability with mechanical devices to Legos and similar construction toys." Brin's page has a laughable GIF animation, but the real humor is that he apparently worked on an early copyright-infringement detection system called COPS with Stanford professor Hector Garcia-Molina. Brin even posted his resume from 1994, and a quick peek into the source code reveals a telling tidbit — hidden in a HTML comment, Brin states as his employment objective: "A large office, good pay, and very little work. Frequent expense-account trips to exotic lands would be a plus." Looks like his dream came true.

Brin told the crowd how tinkering with the G1 gives him pleasure: "It's just very exciting for me as a computer geek to have a phone I can play with and modify." Page mostly stood there with a silly grin on his face.

Contrast the willy-nilly performance with Apple CEO Steve Jobs's meticulously planned iPhone announcements. It serves as a convenient illustration of the differences between the Apple's mobile strategy and Google's. Apple's iPhone offers millions of consumers a simple, structured experience — just as Jobs's bullet-point keynotes focus on marketable sound bites. The G1 is an open, developer-friendly phone that — like Brin and Page's slapdash appearance — thousands of geeks will appreciate and few consumers will bother to decipher.

During their conversation, Mr. Brin said it could be useful to have one’s DNA code open to the public, where it could follow a sort of open-source model. If his data was public, he said, doctors — or anyone who was interested — could look at his results and make suggestions about how he should handle them, offering treatment suggestions if it showed he might be susceptible to a disease. “I figure if I put it out there, people would look at it and I’d learn something I need to know sooner than if I hadn’t put it out there,” Mr. Brin told Allen.

Brin should do what many in the health-obsessed Valley unilaterally shun: Take up smoking, as nicotine has been shown to have a prophylactic effect on the degeneration of dopamine-producing brain cells in mice.

[Brady] underwrote subsequent stock offerings, is a bidder in Google's transferable stock option program, covers its conference calls, and tries to cheerlead its price up to $900.

Our tipster asks how something that could appear as a conflict of interest got past Google's Code of Conduct Police, but he answered his own question: After funding his wife Wojcicki's biotech startup, it's clear that Brin, his fellow cofounder Larry Page, CEO Eric Schmidt, and other executives hold themselves well above any ethical guidelines they may have put into place for the underlings at the Googleplex.

That’s a long way down the sea. There are a lot of benefits for us, aside from potential financial success. The experience, for example. If we want to start another company at some point, that would be fairly easy because we have all the contacts in the industry. Also, it’s been very exciting. I really enjoyed being a Ph.D. at Stanford, but at Google, we do lots of really different things involved in setting up a company. We take care of very many things you don’t get to see if you’re just purely focused on creating technology. There’s one more important thing, and that’s to bring what we’ve done to the world. That’s very exciting, too, of course. And we think this does have a potential to really change things forever.

But by figuring out the single-nucleotide polymorphisms which lead to chiseled features and a high-powered metabolism, Wojcicki might figure out how to make sure her next child with Google cofounder Sergey Brin is healthy, smart and ravishingly beautiful according to media norms. My suggestion? New York's models should be making 23andMe pay them for saliva samples. It's not like Wojcicki, whose startup is already backed by her husband's employer, can't dial for more dollars from Google's new venture investment arm whenever she feels like it.

Mainframe terminals, or keyboards and monitors attached to a big piece of iron in a subbasement somewhere, probably built by IBM or DEC. While proponents of what until recently was called server-side computing have now opted for the friendly-sounding "cloud computing" moniker, let's not forget that Google has built some of the biggest iron around, fulfilling an even more ancient prophesy from the days of punch cards and vacuum tubes: that someday, computers would grow so large they would require their own warehouses, and require so much power, you'd have to build them next to dams.

It makes sense from a business model angle. Google can give away open-source browser code all it wants — while keeping its search algorithm and Web index behind doors firmly locked with key cards and biometric scans. When you're not passively paying Google by paging through independent tabs looking at ads, you'll be actively paying Google by using its suite of office productivity applications. The browser is just another loss leader, as evidenced by Google's history of paying everyone from Mozilla to MySpace for traffic acquisition.

Microsoft's model predicated on proprietary code distributed in paper boxes and intellectual property restrictions writ in byzantine end user license agreements has been dated for some time now. By tethering hardware to software and upstaging everyone with design and branding, Apple has done well by maintaining manicured gardens for the wealthy. But it has clearly ceded the business market by shifting focus to consumer devices, and derives much of its hipster cache from vapid anti-establishment rhetoric. IBM, the company that Apple wanted to smash? Doing quite well selling big iron and giving away open-source code, thank you very much.

That's because the cloud computing worldview is one that has much to recommend it to large institutions, and IT guys at large corporations, research universities and in the government all understand it implicitly. Access to the highest level, or root, of a really big system is an awesome power. You can mete out shares of computing resources, invade people's privacy in all sorts of heinous ways and otherwise torment the poor plebes typing away at the terminals like a true autocrat. All those computer science Ph.D.s and technology researchers Google has hired have mainframes in their blood and ambitions far beyond two measly processor cores.

Google is familiarly setting the stage for later dominance: From earning money from Web applications built for Chrome that lease computing power from Google App Engine to providing the very electricity to juice up these massive mainframes. Meanwhile, the faster you flip from tab to tab, the more advertising inventory you create for Google through their sites and through third parties. Hundreds of clicks and impressions in a day from every Internet user worldwide, from when they wake up to check email through their day at the office to when they come home and look up American Idol highlights, whether they use Chrome or not.

So while much innovation has clearly gone into the design and architecture of the new browser, Brin's ideas are nothing new. The practice of running applications and storing data on a centralized server is actually older than operating systems for personal computers. And the dream of vertically integrating all levels of a trade network — of creating a monopoly? Even older than that.

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma and Alex Handy)

Yes, Jennifer is one of those Siebels — her dad, Ken Siebel, is a cousin of Tom Siebel, the founder of Siebel Systems. The father of the bride is also chairman of Private Wealth Partners, which manages a $444 million fund. But Newsom might find it difficult to pry any campaign contributions from his new father-in-law, since the elder Siebel has donated only to Republicans in national elections since 2000, including George W. Bush, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani.

Newsom did at least convince the bride's family to host the wedding in Stevensville, Montana, where the groom wore a casual linen suit and the bride wore Vera Wang and rode down the aisle bareback on a white black stallion. By far the best blow-by-blow of the nuptials was from Newsom's predecessor at City Hall, Willie Brown. Siebel and Newsom plan to tour Africa on their honeymoon — no word if they intend to indulge in the hot celebrity trend of adopting a child as a souvenir.

Being in the family way might help burnish Newsom's image after an adultery scandal in 2007 and a public admission of the entrepreneurial wine salesman's drinking problem. The timing of this marriage eerily reflects that of Newsom's first in 2001, when the then-Supervisor wed Kimberly Guilfoyle months before he announced his candidacy for mayor of San Francisco.

But the couple divorced a year after he was elected amidst talk of a new "Camelot" couple rising in the Democratic Party ranks. You can expect the eternal flame of the media's love for Newsom to be rekindled along those lines, though I doubt the newlyweds will be posing in any oil-money mansions this time around.

With Newsom now fielding an exploratory committee to run for statewide office, longtime superfan and San Francisco Chronicle blogger Beth Spotswood was generous: "I give them two years, that's my wedding gift to Gavin." Which is just long enough to last until June 8, 2010, when the votes for Governor will be tallied.

Hopefully Siebel can continue to steer clear of commenting on blogs in the meantime. Siebel's first publicity challenge will be to show up California attorney general Jerry Brown's longtime partner and current wife Anne Gust in the primary, followed by Maria Shriver, wife of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Photo by Getty Images/Meg Smith)

He is an advisor to 23andMe, a Google-backed genetic-testing startup. Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe's cofounder, is married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Google has backed Church's Personal Genome Project, an effort to tie the human genome with personal health information, with an unrestricted grant. Church is an entrant in the Archon X Prize for Genomics, a $10 million genetics-research competition. Anne Wojcicki has donated money to the Archon X Prize at a Google-hosted gala. She and husband Brin, along with other Google executives, are also members of the X Prize's Vision Circle, a group of high-powered fundraising supporters. Oh, and just to complete things, 23andMe board member Esther Dyson is one of Church's test subjects.

Nothing really amiss here, but it all seems quite cozy. If Church's team wins the X Prize, Brin and Wojcicki can be quite content that their donations didn't end up too far from home. (Photo by Lloyd Ziff/Wired)

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.

Brin has a personal foundation, funded with some of his Google fortune. One of the largest recipients of his largesse is the Michael J. Fox Foundation, an organization founded by the Canadian actor and dedicated to researching Parkinson's disease, from which Fox suffers.

In May, 23andMe announced that it was signing up Parkinson's patients for its genetic-testing services. The tests would be paid for by a $600,000 grant from the Fox foundation.

Wojcicki described the approach in a Huffington Post op-ed as "Research 2.0." To our ears, this sounds more like a good old-fashioned back-scratching arrangement.

Here are the questions people ought to be asking: Was Brin's donation really a donation, since some of it ended up going into his wife's pockets? And should the Fox grant count as revenues for 23andMe, since the money can be traced back to Brin, the cofounder of Google, an important investor in the startup? If IRS and SEC officials don't start looking into the deals, then they're not doing their jobs.

How can Brin make this right, if he really believes in his company's code of conduct and the "don't be evil" culture he helped foster at Google? Google should immediately sell its shares in 23andMe, at cost. 23andMe should return the Fox grant. And the Michael J. Fox foundation should return Brin's donation.

Brin, whose net worth was recently estimated at $18.5 billion, can easily afford to invest personally in his wife's startup. And there's no conflict in doing so; he'd merely be seen as a supportive, if indulgent, spouse. The problem comes when he starts using other people's money to fund Wojcicki's ventures. Google shareholders shouldn't be funding her experiments; neither should the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Nor should U.S. taxpayers be footing the bill. Especially considering that 23andMe's tests may not even be legal, according to the state of California.

Google's success has persuaded Brin that he doesn't need to listen to other people's advice, or follow their petty little rules; his gut instincts have made him fabulously wealthy, so why should he? He may not have crossed any legal lines in this latest episode of self-dealing — but it shows that he's on a path to do so. Sergey, stop now, before you really embarrass yourself.

"Another important factor that nobody talks about is teachers' salaries," Brin said. "Teachers are among the lowest-paid professionals. At Google, we've been paying our teachers 25 per cent more, but even with that, they're among the lowest-paid employees. I think it's really important to have a living wage for teachers."

Schools, of course, cost money. Google doesn't actually run a school, so Brin must be talking about the workers at his company's wildly overpriced childcare centers. On the Google model, even with teachers at the bottom rung on the payroll ladder, Brin's answer was to demand more money from parents.

Yet I haven't exactly seen Brin standing in solidarity with the teacher unions in California when they've lobbied for salary increases and smaller class sizes. Nor has Brin come out against Prop 13, the bill which froze property taxes in California, permanently hobbling education spending. But then it's been typical of Google to think they can have their gourmet, organic, locally-sourced cake and eat it, too.(Photo by AP/Douglas C. Pizac)