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Web 2.0
Web 2.0
YouTube
What do we lose when YouTube sells out?
It's the place you go for Family Guy clips and last night's Jon Stewart interview. For now, media companies keep their hands off YouTube and cut deals with the site instead. But some day, if it doesn't die first, YouTube will have to sell out, and the buyer will become a juicy legal target for every other media company whose stuff is pirated on the popular video site. What clips are in danger if one of these top potential buyers bites? More »
Advertisers
Advertisers are pretty, oh so pretty, oh so pretty and witty and bright
And they pityanyone whose ads aren't here tonight! More »
To-Do
To-Do this weekend: Que honda, guero?
- Tonight through tomorrow, go to Yahoo's campus for Yahoo Hack Day to hang with coders. Oh, and Beck. [Upcoming]
- Beck and people who sound like Beck play at the Download Music Festival tomorrow in San Fran. [Download Festival]
- Our Silicon Alley brothers can hit up the Wired NextFest in New York City. Picture the Chicago World's Fair plus Bruce Sterling. [NextFest]
Slate
Google only half as stingy as we thought
Did anyone else catch this correction in Slate last week, appending writer Daniel Gross's excoriation of Google's philanthropic efforts as stingy and overhyped? More »
YouTube
YouTube: The Movie (we found it on YouTube)
It was inevitable after MySpace: The Movie, wasn't it? YouTube: The Movie isn't half as tightly scripted — okay, it's pretty much junk — but suck it up and watch, because this is the next YouTube-driven viral that everyone* is watching. More »
Henry Blodget
Could Henry Blodget be a $15 billion liability? Easy
Amazon's stock will hit $400, predicted analyst Henry Blodget in 1998. It didn't. The stock now trades at $32.14, but Blodget got attention and a job at Merrill Lynch. Never mind that he was a journalist by trade, with no analyst training. One dot-com bomb later, Merrill let him go, Eliot Spitzer charged him with securities fraud (he settled), and the "analyst" was banned from the securities industry for life. More »
Hewlett-Packard
SV Confidential: Pat Dunn thought she could pull up anyone's phone records
The highlight of yesterday's Congressional hearing over a sketchy Hewlett-Packard investigation came when Congressman Greg Walden asked HP ex-chair Patricia Dunn, if she didn't know investigators were lying to phone companies to get targets' phone records, how she thought they got them. More »
Yahoo
Guest post: Yahoo Finance employees flee for their lives
Written by a reader. Fact-checked by your mom. More »
Hewlett-Packard
New York Times nearly name-drops Nancy Drew
Quick, which detective case does the scandalous Hewlett-Packard leaker investigation resemble? The New York Times can't decide. Their latest piece on the scandal includes: More »
Hewlett-Packard
HP's board-slimming camera
I asked, reader Jon Grubb had the idea, and tech-industry joker Theo DP executed this clever comment on the execs from Hewlett-Packard, makers of the HP digital camera with slimming features. More »
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 exit-strategy badges
Blogger Marco Rosella helps dot-coms prep for the next O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference with a set of badges — a "buy me" set, some "me-too" badges ("Better than YouTube"), and some more desperate messages ("Tag please, I have three children"). Honest poll: Would you buy these if they were real buttons? More »
Microsoft
Loose Wires: Peter Jackson to make next Halo title, released as five-disc six-commentary special edition
- Why is Yahoo's stock stuck in the mud while Google's soars? Because Yahoo is slow, the CEO is "non-confrontational," and they don't "throw things against the wall and see what sticks." In other words, it's a good old media company. Hey, at least it takes those things decades to die, not the months of a real dot-com. [Economist]
- Bored by three-hour Peter Jackson movies? So is he, so his next project is Microsoft's newest Halo game title. [Kotaku]
- I tried really hard to think of a joke about HP involving corporate scandal and this camera with a "slimming" feature, but it's just not working. Can anyone bring the wit? [HP.com]
- Geek calculates the Web 2.0 hype percentage for the TechCrunch blog at 66% — two thirds of all TC posts include the loaded phrase. [Shmula]
- The FBI calls Silicon Valley a "hotbed" of economic espionage. [Mercury News]
Hewlett-Packard
SV Confidential: Day 1 wrap-up for the HP Congressional hearings
Hero of the day's Hewlett-Packard Congressional hearings: Representative Greg Walden, who tried hard to wave a smoking gun in HP Chairwoman Pat Dunn's face. Dunn spent the whole day expressing surprise at every piece of information — leading one Congressman to remind himself out loud, "You were the chair of HP." More »
YouTube
The billion-dollar backlash: Even Mark Cuban thinks it'd take a moron to buy YouTube
The first naysayers to come out swinging against the crazy valuations of sites like YouTube ($1.5 billion), Facebook ($2 billion), and MySpace (a ricockulous $15 billion) are reporters and bloggers, and a few analysts known for a healthy cynicism. Slate writer Daniel Gross, for example, today praised the role of skeptics in the social-network-valuation boom. But who'd expect Mark Cuban to join them? More »
Hewlett-Packard
SV Confidential: How clueless is ex-chairwoman Dunn?
During today's Congressional hearings on Hewlett-Packard's possibly illegal pretexting investigation, a panelist cites an e-mail from investigator Vince Nye to HP. According to the New York Times, Nye's e-mail said that the pretexting his investigation used was "very unethical at the least, and quite likely illegal" and "could damage our reputation or worse." More »
larry sonsini
Larry Sonsini: "I never took the position that pretexting is legal."
"The press is entirely wrong," Hewlett-Packard counsel Larry Sonsini just told a Congressional hearing panelist. "I never took the position that pretexting is legal." He's speaking now at the hearing about HP's pretexting case. More »
Hewlett-Packard
SV Confidential: Who's pleading the fifth
On the day of the Congressional hearing for Hewlett-Packard, the first federal investigation into corporate espionage practices that could be industry-wide, we're following who says what, but more importantly, who refuses to speak at all. Here's who took the Fifth so far: More »
Hewlett-Packard
SV Confidential, Volume 1: Dunn's a patsy!
Welcome to SV Confidential, the Valleywag court watch that starts with Day 1 of the Congressional hearings for Hewlett-Packard. Today, Congress starts figuring out who to blame for an espionage case that may be just one of scads of corporate investigation scandals. More »
Linux
Moments in Um...: BBC News snaps an Ubuntu thong
The BBC needed an illustration for its story about Ubuntu, the sub-Saharan African philosophy meaning "I am because we are," which Bill Clinton this week exhorted the British Labor Party to embrace. More »
Hewlett-Packard
HP's lawyer resigns, and other spying scandal news
- Hewlett-Packard's chief in-house lawyer, Ann Baskins, resigned and won't appear in today's Congressional hearing. Her lawyer says Baskins always thought the investigation of HP board members and outside reporters was legal. [NY Times]
- Chairwoman Patricia Dunn yesterday repeated her claim that no one told her these investigations could be illegal. She also says she didn't hire the investigators who impersonated people to get their private phone records; they already worked for HP when she ordered the investigation. Because that...makes...such...a...difference. [NY Times]
- HP stock is up as investors admire how CEO and now-chairman Mark Hurd is handling the situation, as well as the actual company, which is making major bank since he took the helm in 2005. [Wall Street Journal]
- Business blog DealBreaker, which is holding a Pat Dunn Sympathy Watch, promises to cover today's Congressional hearings, which should include testimony from Dunn and from the investigators. Sez DealBreaker, "Expect some tough questions...like: so you thought stealing the phone records of your board members was legal?" [DealBreaker]
Myspace
Oh yeah? MySpace is worth twentyeleven gajillions!
Oh great. A Wall Street analyst wrote to his clients that MySpace could be worth $15 billion in the next three years, after meeting with suits with its corporate owner, Fox Interactive. Now he's quoted in Reuters and all over the press. More »
Craig Newmark
Craig Newmark plays it safe
Someday a lot of dot-commers will wish they were Craig Newmark. Why? Reuters says: More »
Digg
Geek out: Revision3 Launch Party
Last night, Digg founder Kevin Rose and pals celebrated the relaunch of his Revision 3 online TV network with a party at Mighty, a San Fran venue currently sporting sculptures of flying underwear (really. Don't know why). Scott Beale provides the photos below. More »
Intel
ConFonz at the Intel Developer Forum
This week, the Conference Fonzie reports from the Intel Developer Forum at SF's Moscone Center. Dig in! More »
Jonathan Schwartz
