A year and some after the Facebook platform's launch, few of its widgetmakers have made any real money — unless you count the venture capital they've raised. Just a month after the iPhone 3G launch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs says that $30 million has already changed hands through the iTunes App Store. Even the guy behind…
"We think it's a good thing that users can lie," said Tom Coates, of Fire Eagle, the location-tagging app Yahoo just opened up to all comers-and-goers. It's a topical spin on a problem as old as Dodgeball, the first widely adopted friend-finding cell-phone app. Dodgeball and its kin are ostensibly used for telling…
It seemed like such a simple proposition. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wanted Ben Ling to lie for her, and get rich doing it. Ling is — was — the director of Facebook's applications platform, which had garnered the social network much of its buzz over the past year. But he'd been supplanted by Elliot Schrage,…
Facebook's COO is tearing down the temple. That's the only conclusion I can reach after witnessing the Sheryl Sandberg's management of the Palo Alto-based social network. What I hear from inside Facebook: She demands total loyalty, and brooks no dissent — even the healthy, boisterous debate that's common to…
Here's to the screaming ones. The chair-throwers. The death-threat makers. The imperious gazers. The ones who see things differently — and will stare you down until you do, too. They're not fond of rules, especially those outlined by the human-resources department on "treating your employees with respect." And they…
PayPal's CEO is talking up the company's business handling payments on websites other than eBay. Where have I heard this before? Oh yes: In April 2002, when I had coffee with Peter Thiel, then the CEO of PayPal as an independent concern. He talked up the prospects of growing PayPal's business on other websites. He…
BitTorrent has denied our report that the company laid off 12 out of 55 employees. That may be true: While our source told us 12 employees were on the layoff list, we've learned that, at the last minute, the jobs of two sales engineers, an HR manager, and an office manager were spared. Another tipster — "you can…
Why did investor-news aggregator Monitor110 go under, taking $20 million in funding with it? Read early investor Roger Ehrenberg's surprisingly humble and informative blog post about the ordeal, titled "Monitor110: A Post Mortem," and it sounds like the startup fell prey to the usual pratfalls — too much PR, weak…
"A nondescript man with thinning brown hair and a slight paunch" is how W nondescribes Jimmy Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia, the site where anybody can write history, and nobodies do. Wales, once known for sporting kimonos and Mao jackets, has reverted to wearing all black, which gives the fashion magazine rather…
Peyton Manning, Derek Jeter and LeBron James today announced they've joined an $8.6 million funding round for social network Weplay. Weplay isn't going to work out — vertical social networks are so 2007 — but at least the sports-star troika can take heart in knowing they're following the same path as other fading…
The Wall Street Journal's Pepper ... & Salt has never been particularly cutting-edge. But a recent cartoon reads like a time capsule: An entrepreneur at startup WotsHot.com says, "Here's our timetable: launch, grow rapidly, be bought by Google." How quaint! During the lean years earlier in the decade, when Google…
Technology beat reporters have a problem: They're required to quote experts, rather than making their own assessments of who's what is why. Armchair advice on business intelligence software flows like water out here, but readers want someone with implied credibility. Enter the analyst. Companies like Forrester or…
Silicon Valley's press corps is wringing its collective hands over the botched launch of Cuil, a Web search engine. Instead of complaining about Cuil's piss-poor search results, why is no one asking who paid for this debacle? The surprising answer: Wal-Mart.More precisely, Wal-Mart family money. Madrone Capital…
It's as if Orson Scott Card hasn't gotten the message of his own greatest work, Ender's Game, where the main character learns to tolerate people different from himself. The sci-fi writer's best-known work is widely read in Silicon Valley, a region full of people who pride themselves on their distinct talents and…
On Monday, spokespeople for software megalith SAP announced that SAP would shut down its software support subsidiary, TommorrowNow, which PC World called "a rising star in third-party maintenance and support for Oracle enterprise applications such as Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards." The fatal bullet: A lawsuit…
At a party thrown by Wired in June, I teased Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen for eschewing the online publication's mid-1990s bravado in favor of his just-a-journalist aw-shucks routine. I fear the man has taken my jibes seriously, to his employer's peril. He is talking up Wired as a software developer,…
Former AOL CEO Jon Miller, reportedly Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's favorite to lead the company's new online division, withdrew his name from consideration yesterday because he'll soon be joining Yahoo's board. So if not Miller, who's going to take on the task of saving Microsoft by building its presence on the…
In what seems like another age, my predecessor once wrote about companies' "blogger appeasement groups" — units dedicated to generating buzz, not bucks. With Chad Dickerson leaving Yahoo Brickhouse, the troubled company's troubled incubator for new ideas, I think we can declare the delusion of blogger appeasement…
Click to viewConventional wisdom has it that males on the Internet gravitate toward pictures of pretty women like hungry honeybees to a sugary tulip, and click, click, click. It's why Tila Tequila has 3,345,634 MySpace friends and Tania Derveaux has 108,907 YouTube subscribers. It's why, on social news site Digg, so…
Developers have been raging about Mark Zuckerberg's redesign of Facebook's user profile pages, at last unveiled today. But advertisers might soon find reason to fuss, too. The new design has no conventional ads — not the banners sold by Microsoft; not the smaller, demographically targeted ads sold by Facebook in its…
