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google madness
kindergarten Google office: like so.
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In Brief
A billionaire under Silicon Valley's nose
You need to know three things about Joel Stein's feature in Business 2.0 on Andrew Conru of Friend Finder. First, it's fine if you haven't heard of him; nobody has. Second, according to Conru's profile on Adult Friend Finder, the wildly successful sex personals site which is the largest part of the business, "I've had a ménage à trois." And, third, though Stein lets the readers do the sums themselves: Conru's worth 10 figures. He's the billionaire under Silicon Valley's nose. More than $200m in annual revenue; costs which, reading between the lines, can't be more than a third of that; top-line growth of 40% a year; and the Friend Finder founder, who grew the company without taking outside investment, appears to own 90% of the company. Except its almost impossible to find a buyer for the adult business. (By the way, if you're disappointed Business 2.0 didn't work out the valuation, don't bother complaining to Stein; he has no truck with feedback. "Here's what my Internet-fearing editors have failed to understand: I don't want to talk to you; I want to talk at you.")Social networking's dirty side — by Joel Stein for Business 2.0
In Brief
Amsterdam droop
Ah, finally, a real valuation on a Second Life business. Amsterdam, one of the most popular sites in Linden Lab's virtual world, — an online game without any action — has been auctioned off on eBay. You'd expect the virtual city to command a rich price: it hosts sex shops and virtual streetwalkers, who engage in dirty chat, and show clunky 3D animations of themselves in sexual positions. And at least one self-promoting Second Life "mogul" has claimed assets of $1m. So the value of Amsterdam? Brace yourselves: a massive $50,000.
In Brief
Ask self-destructs
We assumed that the billboard on 101, which proclaims The Algorithm Killed Jeeves, was an attack by the machine supremacists of Mountain View against Ask's signature butler. But Valleywag's alert commenters, in an exercise in collaborative journalism, note that IAC's Ask search engine symbolically buried the Jeeves character a year ago in a nasty Manhattan club, and have touted their own algorithm's superiority over Google's. A further clue that this might be some muddled Ask in-joke: a second billboard, spotted by Il Biancone, near Redwood City, explaining the first. The Algorithm is from Jersey; Barry Diller, IAC's boss, has delighted in the idea that a bunch of engineers in despised New Jersey, Ask's home, could take on Google's monopoly, adds commenter tolles. Which begs the question: after a bungled guerrilla campaign against Google's "information monopoly" in London, why another confusing campaign? Ask's merely reminding people of its own earlier failure; dead mascots, rather than be commemorated, are better simply forgotten.
The power of Google
Found on 53 o's, some web art: Lord of the Flies. Click here for the animation. Thanks, Doug.
Found on 53 o's, some web art: Lord of the Flies. Click here for the animation. Thanks, Doug.
In Brief
Fred Vogelstein takes a bit of time to get his point across
FROM MEGAN MCCARTHY TO NICK DENTON — Topic #1 among the many journalists at Business 2.0's drinks party last night: the story of how Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's PR agency, played Wired's Fred Vogelstein. Josh Quittner, quoting Business 2.0 deputy editor Adam Horowitz, said that seeing the memo was "like the first time a man reads Cosmopolitan." It exposed, shockingly, the world on the other side. And Vogelstein himself was there! We talked about this week's news and what it was like to be in the story, instead of the storyteller. "You always want to know what people are saying about you," Fred told me. "And you're always sorry when you find out." Well, to be more exact, he actually said: "You always want to know what people are saying about you... pause... pause... pause... pause... pause... pause..." As we were chatting, I realized what a *fantastic* job Waggener Edstrom did in their dossier, classifying his mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. "It takes him a bit to get his point across so try to be patient." So harsh. But so accurate. In the party pictures, by Lane Hartwell of fetching.net: Josh Quittner and Owen Thomas of Business 2.0; Craig Newmark, recently seen on NBC's Identity game show; and Mark Rolston of Frog Design; and more: GALLERY
vlogs
State of the Vlogosphere: Sunny, chance of suck
NICK DOUGLAS — In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 frames per second. Just check these stats from Mefeedia. In its report on "the state of the vlogosphere," the video aggregator reports that the number of vlogs has risen from 617 to over 20 thousand in the last two years. Let's project that growth rate to next year. More »
In Brief
Sean Parker and Malcolm McLaren
Sean Parker's look changes with his hair length, and the brutality of his hangover. In a certain light, however, the 28-year-old entrepreneur (a founder of Napster, Facebook and now the Agape Project) is the spitting image of another impresario: Malcolm McLaren, the music promoter who managed the Sex Pistols. Compare. The tight curls; the coloring; the post-party weariness; the naked 14-year-olds; not to mention an uncanny ability to spot trends and teen talent. (We made up the shared interest in 14-year-olds.) ENLARGE
In Brief
Aging newspaper forgets its readers
Has the San Francisco Chronicle gone entirely internet mad? For the second day in a row, the limping newspaper has splashed a marginal story about blogging above the fold on its front page, this time a day in the life of Justin Kan, the 24-hour video blogger. The headline blares: It's Justin, Live! All Day, All Night! Appropriate: the newspaper's coverage of internet culture is just as incessant. Yesterday, you'll remember, the anonymous death threats against a little-known online marketing speaker prompted the Chronicle to worry, prominently, that a mob of bloggers was taking the web conversation down into the sewer. Fascinating stuff — unless you're an average reader of the Chronicle, a 55-year-old Daly City insurance salesman approaching retirement, say, in which case you probably want to know more about annuity plans. The Chronicle, fearful of the future of newspapers, may be seeking a younger audience; it had better just hold on to the readers it has. ENLARGE
In Brief
Sean Parker's guilt trip
Here's what I like about Sean Parker's approach to business in general, and social networks, in particular: he's wise to the ways of human nature. The serial entrepreneur, who helped launch both Napster and Facebook, is trying to work guilt and pride into his latest project, Agape. I'm guessing the idea is this: You're raising money to combat cocaine addiction, for example. An email goes out to your friends. They can forward the appeal. The amount each person contributes, and the money raised from those on their distribution list, is charted, publicly. The big donors get kudos, the penny-pinching are embarrassed; just like the real world. The irony: that Sean Parker — an iconoclastic thinker, and one of the few entrepreneurs who defies Silicon Valley convention by, um, having fun — should rely on peer pressure to build his next business.
In Brief
Ask's rivals respond
A prize — a $50 Amazon gift certificate — to the person who supplies us with the first published photograph of the new billboard on Highway 101. You'll see it heading south from San Francisco to go down to the Valley. White letters. Blue background. No obvious sponsor. A simple slogan: The algorithm killed Jeeves. Excellent: a slanging match! We're hoping this is Google's response to the stillborn guerrilla ad campaign that the Ask search engine — formerly Ask Jeeves — has been waging against the monolith of Mountain View. Ask, owned by Barry Diller's IAC conglomerate, papered central London with its tongue-in-cheek campaign against the "information monopoly" — pretty obviously Google's information monopoly. It would be typical of Google to reply with technological arrogance.
In Brief
A bear-market bet
Here's a little hedge if you're long the internet: Fucked Company, the website which chronicled the tech sector bloodbath seven years ago, is up for sale. It's a perfect contracyclical play: the site — which published memos and tidbits, about layoffs or financial difficulties, came alive only in 2000 when the Nasdaq stock market crashed and internet companies began to run out of cash. During this internet upswing, the site's had no particular function; in fact, it's so passe that the site's shameless founder, a Manhattan roue nicknamed Pud, has moved on. Philip Kaplan, as he's now known, got with the Silicon Valley program. Busy with Adbrite, his Sequoia-backed ad network, he's selling the Fucked Company site. It would be a perfect acquisition for, say, Michael Arrington. When his startup-hyping news site, Techcrunch, goes under; he'll have Fucked Company to pick up newly cynical readers.
In Brief
Too much revenue can be bad for you
Time, and the fumbling of a $400m payday, can do funny things to the memory. John Battelle, former founder of the Industry Standard, is at odds with the defunct magazine's backer, who claims the permatanned entrepreneur, dreaming of "world domination", thwarted a fabulous exit to Time Warner or Hearst. Pat McGovern of IDG, which owned the majority of the Industry's Standard during the magazine's meteoric rise, portrays Battelle confident to the point of hubris: extrapolating the magazine's annual revenues to $1bn in 2006, and planning a hostile bid for Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal. "Revisionist history," responds Battelle. The squabble is amusing, if only to see Federated Media boss Battelle — who usually affects a pot-smoking it's-all-good west-coast zen-buddhism — show a little edge. But there's one more significant lesson for current-day entrepreneurs. More »
In Brief
The Valley's chess club
Among Silicon Valley's many mafias, here's one you might not be aware of. Harvard Business School graduates may be more numerous; but the Valley's informal chess club has the quality. The nexus is Peter Thiel, the former Paypal founder who now runs a hot hedge fund, Clarium Capital — who's astonishingly well-connected for someone so socially uncomfortable. More »
In Brief
Adbrite's new image standard
Now this is very clever. While every superannuated TV exec and trend-following marketing guru witters on about web video, a Sequoia-backed startup has zagged in the other direction. Adbrite, a venture founded by Philip Kaplan of Fucked Company fame, has come up with a simple way to embed advertising in images. It's part of the web's unfinished business. A publisher doesn't have to do anything to the images themselves: the wizardry is in some javascript code which lays interactive functions over the image, such as a watermark and an ad strip at the top of the picture which expands when a user's cursor passes over. It's extremely simple — a web producer can tune the image "player" simply by editing the javascript code — which means that publishers might actually use it. But why is Valleywag, usually so cynical, excited about Adbrite's new offering? More »
In Brief
Naturally high
Steve Jurvetson's enthusiasms, since he discovered Hotmail in the 1990s, have grown ever more baroque: nanotechnology; rockets; and now "synthetic life forms." (He should know.) The wide-eyed DFJ partner believes, with gene-splicing, they're only a couple of years away. But his prediction, made to a panel this Tuesday, was so bewildering that one of his fellow panelists quipped: "This is particularly interesting given that you've never even experimented with hallucinogenics."
In Brief
Red Herring magazine goes missing
When Alex Vieux, embattled publisher of Red Herring, gets back from his jaunt to Cannes, he might want to do a bit of advertiser maintenance. The exotic miniature mogul's been busy this week, at the legendary tech magazine's conference at the resort on the French Riviera. Or maybe at the casino, which was so busy on the first night that most attendees failed to make the next morning's keynote on time. At any rate, he's still not delivered the latest issue to one of the troubled magazine's few remaining advertisers. Mail Foundry, we're told, booked a full-page ad in the magazine's recent security special. The anti-spam venture's execs couldn't find a copy of the magazine, which has a notoriously erratic publication schedule, on newsstands; and they're still waiting for Vieux to send them, as he promised, a copy. If indeed it ever did go to print.
In Brief
The marketing of Photobucket
Surprise, surprise. Just as Photobucket talks to potential acquirers, there's a burst of press about the photo hosting service. The biggest web site you've never heard of, says Fortune's David Kirkpatrick. Worth $300m-$400m, Lehman Brothers, bankers hired to pitch the company, tells Michael Arrington. 17m unique visitors a month, according to Comscore. It's a veritable coming-out party for a previously obscure widget company. No doubt Photobucket will be acquired, probably for something like the price that the site has signalled through Arrington's Techcrunch. (By the way, when did bankers start sending messages through blogs?) But the venture is not, as Arrington says, cheap at the price. For three reasons. More »
In Brief
Chronicle v. the blog mob
For the second time this week, the usually limp-wristed San Francisco Chronicle has splashed its front page with a story about the evils of the blogosphere. On Sunday, the newspaper — the Chronic-al, as it's sometimes known — slammed the nasty citizen reviewers of Yelp for daring to enter the temple of authoritative restaurant criticism. Today's paper, only three days after the story broke, considers the death threats against Kathy Sierra, the marketing guru. "Blogs and online communities were supposed to herald an era in which "the wisdom of crowds" guided online behavior to a higher plane. Instead, instances of mob rule appear to be leading the discussion into the sewer." Harsh! This tirade couldn't have had anything to do with the leak to the blogs of the Chronicle's despairing emergency staff meeting, could it? The Chronicle's been struggling with questions about its future since Phil Bronstein, the newspaper's star-fucking editor, warned journalists that the news business was "broken" — and a mob of badly-behaved sewer-loving bloggers grabbed onto the story.
In Brief
The end of the beginning
Steve Rubel, a marketing guru who's rarely met a new paradigm he didn't immediately pitch to clients, is tempering his support for Linden Lab's virtual world. The Benchmark-backed venture has depended on the evangelism of wide-eyed enthusiasts such as Rubel — who have in turn befuddled clueless suits at companies such as IBM and HR Block. Hence the absurdity of enterprise software marketed to the adolescent pranksters and Nazi fetishists who roam the 3D environment. Now one of Second Life's most gushing proponents concedes that access to the online world requires too much computing power for the general public. In the words of Winston Churchill, this is not the end of Second Life, nor even the beginning of the end; but it is the end of the beginning. The key passage, from Rubel's post, on the folly of crowds, after the jump. More »
In Brief
A bogus league table
How tiresome: yet another survey saying the US has lost its high-tech lead. The World Economic Forum, the group of middle-aged German factory bosses who play global elite for the week in Davos, says the US has fallen to seventh place in technological readiness. The WEF — which went internet crazy a few months before the last crash and gaga for Second Life this winter — says that the country with the best regulations and integration of technology in business is, um, Denmark. Yes, the same tiny country which just launched an institute for "user-generated" innovation, because of the poor record of its corporate sector. Let's get something clear: often the countries with the best government policies, and the most fabulously of-the-moment state-supported institutes, are the ones that need them the most.
In Brief
How Viacom's video pirates cover their tracks
It gets better. Valleywag reported yesterday how Sumner Redstone's Viacom, while suing Google for allowing pirated clips to be shared on Youtube, was quietly using the video sharing service on the media giant's own blogs. Now it turns out that some of the 83-year-old billionaire's properties have been even sneakier. Comedy Central Insider — a website which promotes Viacom shows such the Daily Show and the Colbert Report— has been grabbing funny clips from Google's phenomenally popular video site, probably in breach of its terms of service. More »
Microsoft
Windows Mobile, sold by that annoying cell phone guy
NICK DOUGLAS — Remember how the Daily Show's John Hodgman did such an adorable performance in Apple's "Get a Mac" ads that it made the PC seem cuddlier than the smug Mac? Then remember how Microsoft hired the equally charming Daily Show correspondent Demetri Martin to pimp Windows Vista on the delightful site, Clearification? Now imagine how Microsoft might handle such blessing. Yes, by screwing them up. Know the annoying prick in every coffeeshop line and office hallway, bragging about his $500 phone that runs his "work stuff"? He's the new spokesperson for Windows Mobile. Sure, some of his lines in the videos are charming, but on this promo page, he comes off a little too much like the suits I avoid at tech conferences.
silicon valley users guide
How to look good when your recruiter googles you
NICK DOUGLAS — You were qualified, they could afford you, and they needed you. So why didn't they hire you? They didn't want to tell you, but your boss-to-be rejected you because of the best kegger of your senior year. She saw the photo with the sorority girl with — is that a tattoo or a third nipple? — straddling you as you spray Heineken all over her. A new study summarized by CNET says that one in five employers look up job candidates online. In your industry, you'd best bet everyone at the company is not only googling you, but digging up your MySpace and your blog as well. That doesn't mean you have to stop having fun; it just means you have to take the following steps to keep what's none of their business out of their business. More »
In Brief
Earth minus 15 countries
Google Earth has been blocked by countries such as Bahrain, where it's been used by critics of illegally-built palaces; and it's come under criticism in India, which feared enemy Pakistan would use the satellite maps to gather intelligence. We're hearing a rumor that the service, which overlays satellite imagery over a map grid, is actually forbidden in no fewer than 15 countries. Anyone have the list?
In Brief
Valleywag calendar
Research assistant Megan McCarthy has updated the Valleywag calendar with the birthdays of Silicon Valley's rich and famous. If you haven't been checking, you're too late to send Larry Page a birthday greeting. He turned 34 on Monday. To make sure you don't miss key suck-up dates, conferences and the Bay Area's best parties: subscribe here to the Valleywag iCal feed. We're trying to stay pretty selective in the events we display. So nothing about how next Monday you're releasing version 2.1 of your collaboration system for corporate librarians, please. But do send Megan notice of the better parties and events, and any other dates you think we should share.
In Brief
