How to blame VCs for the crash [Meltdowns] (1)
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1 day, 19 hours
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"Venture Capitalists: Don't blame us" is the title of an 800-word essay at The Deal. This kind of headline always has an obvious, hidden meaning: Yes, VCs are to blame. Let's skip to the end and see how they did it: Since Georges Doriot got the ball rolling in 1946, the venture business has remained a straightforward proposition. Invest long-term and earn a return for your limited partners. There have been structural changes, mostly involving ...
Sergey's space obsession [Sergey Brin] (1)
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1 day, 20 hours
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Stop him before — whoops, too late. Over the weekend, Google cofounder Sergey Brin flew to Kazakhstan to meet with fellow space traveler Richard Garriott, better known as Lord British in the online game Ultima. Garriott and two other space tourists — Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov and U.S. astronaut Michael Fincke — flew to the International Space Station in a Russian Soyuz TMA-13 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Sunday. The three are due back ...
Why Seesmic's layoffs don't mean what you think they do [Meltdowns] (1)
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Owen Thomas (398)
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1 day, 21 hours
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Seesmic has laid off 7 employees — a third of its staff. Never heard of Seesmic? You must be doing something right with your life. The startup was ridiculous from its very conception as a tool for embedding videos as comments on blogs. Only to people who spend all day reading and commenting on blogs did that sound like a good idea. But that's exactly the kind of people Loic Le Meur attracted to himself ...
Sarah Lacy not getting a charge out of anyone lately [We Read Twitter So You Don't Have To] (1)
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1 day, 22 hours
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Yahoo Tech Ticker anchor Sarah Lacy's BlackBerry has run out of power. And she wants the entire Internet to know about it! Sadly, no one at Yahoo headquarters has responded to her passive-aggressively Twittered request. See, here's the thing about Twitter. You're not really sending the message to anyone specific, so everyone assumes someone else will respond. Twittering an urgent request in the hopes that someone will just happen to read it is sort of ...
Camp Cyprus's incredible Journey [Meltdowns] (1)
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Owen Thomas (398)
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1 day, 23 hours
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Roundtrip tickets to Larnaca, Cyprus: $1,300. Lodging at your pal's dad's pad on the Mediterranean: Free. Getting your goofy video turned into a symbol of generational excess: Priceless. I'm starting to feel some sympathy for the Camp Cyprus 20, the crazy Internet kids who filmed themselves cavorting poolside at Wall Street big Bob Lessin's gleamingly white vacation home, to the tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." The charge: That they lacked self-awareness. Hence, for example, ...
Robert Scoble, please get back to work Twittering [Blogging For Dollars] (2)
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We remain impressed, if not dumbfounded, that Internet-obsessive videoblogger Robert Scoble talked his way into the absurd title of "managing director, Fastcompany.tv." We'll be even more impressed if he keeps the job, now that the guy who hired him has gotten the boot. But there's evidence that Scoble has buckled down a bit! Or slacked off, depending on how you look at it. Followcost, a website which quantifies just how annoying a particular Twitter user ...
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Kevin Briody said:
The "milliscoble" is a hilarious measurement standard...
The Cyprus 20 and the art of the single-take video [Meltdowns] (1)
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2 days, 1 hour
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The deep mystery of the Camp Cyprus 20: What were they thinking? The most common theory floating around is that the 20 or so Internet-employed twentysomethings who filmed themselves cavorting by the Mediterranean, even as the markets imploded and Silicon Valley shuddered, were simply drunk. Oh no, my friends: This was planned. The beer cans were expertly placed props. Think about it: The Cyprus vacation home of Wall Street power broker Bob Lessin screams "music-video ...
It's the end of Web 2.0 as we know it [Irrational Exuberance] (2)
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Owen Thomas (398)
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2 days, 18 hours
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The infamous Camp Cyprus 20 are trickling back home. And they feel fine. The twentysomethings of Camp Cyprus work at companies like Google, Facebook, and Blip.tv, all of which make a business of moving our lives online. They gathered at the Cyprus vacation home of Wall Street banker Bob Lessin, overlooking the wine-dark Mediterranean, at the invitation of his startup-founder son, Sam, for a vacation. And in this hyperconnected age, they must surely be aware ...
Stupid rock band totally pwns Google [Hackers] (3)
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4 days, 1 hour
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Google's Hot Trends page has been gamed before, but today's #1 spot is the best ever — a dorky-white-guys rock band named Captain Caucasian and the Raging Idiots. No KKK references, just a bunch of guys with guitars and a singer whose baseball cap is two sizes too big. While we wait for Clay Shirky and Cory Doctorow to explain how this is a huge, huge victory for real people over the evil corporate monster ...
Blue Angels save San Francisco from sucky workday [Distractions] (3)
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4 days, 20 hours
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Stock market be damned, it's Fleet Week. While Owen grumbles about the racket overhead that drowns out his phone calls, I'm up on the roof screaming Yeeeeeeeeeha baby YES WE CAN!! The Angels are doing practice runs for this weekend's performances, Saturday and Sunday from 3-4 pm. I feel kind of sorry for the guy flying the little red Oracle biplane. Larry Ellison clearly needs an F-18. Four of them.
Laid off before sunrise [Layoff Memos] (1)
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4 days, 23 hours
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We've got our first layoff-memo story — and it's actually about a layoff conducted without a memo. Read on, and don't forget to send in your own: I was in the parking lot of the small consulting firm I worked for meeting my boss to fly to Seattle for business. It was 4am on a Monday morning, I was about to pull my luggage out of my trunk, and he laid me off right there. ...
Scoble kills newspapers [Death Of Print] (2)
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5 days
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"What's killing the newspaper business — with thousands of jobs lost and even the Washington Post Co.'s reporting its first loss in 37 years — is its inability to reach people like me." — Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble, in a column some Fast Company editor wrote for him, in which Scoble goes on to relate all of the ways he obsessively consumes newspaper articles online.
Portfolio editor goes startup [Blaise Zerega] (1)
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5 days, 2 hours
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The only thing more foolish than joining a startup right now is staying at a print magazine. Portfolio's San Francisco-based deputy editor, Blaise Zerega, has left the Condé Nast business magazine. He's now the president and COO of Fora.tv, an online-video startup which collects clips of those boring public-affairs speeches we all dread attending, but go for the mingling and cocktails that follow. Not clear how Fora.tv will reproduce mingling and cocktails online. One other ...
RIM the next takeover target? [Acquisitions] (1)
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5 days, 2 hours
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Shares of Research In Motion have declined from $148 to $60 in four months, falling along with most tech stocks. The difference between RIM and, say, Yahoo? Microsoft still wants to buy RIM, say some analysts cited by Reuters. Forget Google's still-not-on-the-market Android phones; RIM's BlackBerry is the only real competition for Apple's iPhone. Like Apple, RIM offers not just the hardware but the software and services that run on top of it; RIM does ...
"It's always darkest before it's pitch black" [Meltdowns] (3)
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5 days, 19 hours
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Bad times have hit sunnily optimistic northern California. Does it matter if the mayhem on Wall Street had any real connection with the tech-powered Silicon Valley economy? Some of the region's most influential power brokers believe it will — and by pushing others around, they can make perception reality. A helpful insider has provided notes from a recent meeting of Sequoia Capital, a backer of Apple, Cisco, and Google which has risen to become the ...
WSJ reporter parties in Cyprus with people she covers [Jessica Vascellaro] (1)
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5 days, 21 hours
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You can never escape the media! Valleywag's favorite hot-tech-company couple, Facebooker Dave Morin and Googler Brittany Bohnet, weren't vacationing in Cyprus alone. A whole group, "Campcyprus," attended the get-together in the Mediterranean island's Turkish-controlled sector. And who was in the in crowd? Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Vascellaro, who covers Facebook and Google, and her startup-founder boyfriend, Drop.io CEO Sam Lessin, the son of ultrawealthy investment banker Bob Lessin. Sam, who's normally obsessed with privacy, ...
National Debt Clock runs out of digits [Meltdowns] (2)
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5 days, 23 hours
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In 1989, real estate developer Seymour Durst installed an electronic billboard near Times Square that tracks both America's national debt and your family's share, back before San Francisco destroyed the family. The clock has been modified by replacing the "$" with a "1" to display the current $10 trillion-plus debt level. The Durst Organization reportedly plans to replace the clock with a 15-digit version. Why not a giant TV screen with an animation of my ...
Software startup's ex-execs charged with defrauding VCs [Entellium] (1)
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6 days, 13 hours
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Here's an inventive business model: When you're not actually making money, try making it up. The former CEO and CFO of Entellium, a software startup in Seattle, have been charged with wire fraud after an employee found the company keeping a cooked set of books for its investors. Paul Johnston, the CEO, and Parrish Jones, the CFO, resigned abruptly last month. 40 of the company's 60 employees in Seattle were laid off, having been told ...
