Mark Penn, the Burson-Marsteller PR guy known for giving terribly inept advice to everyone from Hillary Clinton to Bill Gates, is opening his home to help the poor. Everyone's welcome!
Imagine an online encyclopedia anyone can edit — and no one can run. With the calendar running out on 2008, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's sleaze-drenched cofounder, nearly lost his seat on the board. Who's in charge here?
The children of the world will be deprived of knowledge unless you shell out money soon, says Jimmy Wales, the sleaze-drenched cofounder of Wikipedia. Is this what Wikipedia has come to — an online telethon?
There is no form of activism lazier than Internet activism. A new startup promises not to harness that laziness as much as to embody it, aiming to convert clicks into do-gooding, through some online alchemy of advertising.
A team of sponsors lead by developer Barry Swenson are offering a penthouse in Swenson's City Heights high-rise housing development in San Jose as a prize in a raffle. A $150 ticket could win you the $1.2 million flat or $1 million in cash — if 15,000 tickets are sold. Otherwise, you'll have to settle for half the…
Now we know why BlueLithium founder and short-time Yahoo employee Gurbaksh "G" Chahal decorated his $6.9 million penthouse with tacky animal skins and a cheap-looking chandelier. To look rich for middle America. Chalal is starring in a Fox "reality" show this fall called The Secret Millionaire. In it, G will live…
Google's do-gooder arm, Google.org, is off in Washington holding a conference to lobby Beltway insiders on commercializing plug-in hybrid vehicles. Which makes sense from a self-interest standpoint, since Google is actively investing in companies and technologies that could benefit from subsidies and regulatory…
It looked like an unassuming boast-post on the official Craigslist blog touting the site's fast page load times as computed by Alexa. But it's the post's category tags that caught my eye — Harassment and Philanthropy. Could be nothing, could be a subtle backhand to critics. You decide.
The legendary site in England where the Nazis' communication code was finally broken, Bletchley Park, has hit hard times. The land is being eyed by developers eager to build on the spot situated perfectly between Oxford and Cambridge. Among possible funders who turned the opportunity down was the Bill and Melinda…
The Castilleja School, a posh private prep school for girls in Palo Alto with an annual tuition of $29,305, received a $1 million from the Benificus foundation, which lists John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins as president and his wife, Ann Howland Doerr, as vice president and secretary. The gift was part of the school's…
After years of going to tech networking events and trade shows, you end up with logo shirts and crappy hats. Unless you have the fashion sense of Robert Scoble, you wouldn't actually want to be seen wearing them in public. Which inspired consultants Michael Liskin and David Preciado to come up with The Schwaggin' Wagon
Rolling Stone's profile of Google.org director Larry Brilliant presents a man with an unimpeachable reputation in public health and a decidedly impeachable one in private business. Since Google.org is run more like a venture fund than a traditional philanthropic foundation, the company's supposedly humanitarian work…
Ordinarily, this would be good news: Vinod Khosla, the former Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist, and his wife Neeru Khosla, have donated $500,000 to Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation. But founder Jimmy Wales's dalliances with other VCs — chiefly Roger McNamee and Marc Bodnick of Elevation…
Perhaps inspired by Jason Calcanis's successful Twitter for help when stranded sans passport in Paris, the do-gooding Google.org has launched the Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster project — essentially a Web 2.0-fueled emergency broadcast system that will spread disaster-related tidings. With so…
Google.org, Google's for-profit charity, announced all kinds of new initiatives today. The short version: health, climate change, good government. The basic idea, as MarketWatch notes in a video report about the project, is to approach "giving" like a venture capitalist. Thing is, Google's only "investing" about 3…
Mary Lou Jespen, founding CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project, recently walked off her job at Nicholas Negroponte's charity case. And now she wants to build a $75 version of the laptop that OLPC has struggled to build for $200. But Jespen may be crazy like a fox. She's actually building a business — the insanity!…
John Lilly, the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation, doesn't want you to pay attention to his new charge. The for-profit arm of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation produces the Firefox browser and makes money largely by partnering with search engines — that's why the Firefox browser comes with a Google or Yahoo search box…
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's efforts to fight AIDS, malaria and measles in Africa is working. Millions of vaccinated children are now safe from malaria and measles. In many parts of the continent, AIDS deaths are no longer on the rise. But now Africa has other problems, thanks to the charity's focused…
