The riots spread from Hamburg to Wuppertal, but the terror reigns over an entire nation. Or a municipality, at least: Lower Saxony could ban Facebook parties following a string of violent incidents involving open party invitations.
They say money can't buy happiness, but Marissa Mayer sure has been trying. And now the Google VP's hedonism/masochism roller coaster has, we hear, earned her a police spanking after a birthday party went too wild.
Google engineer and San Francisco partyboy Orkut Büyükkökten's wild housewarming may have been packed with internet billionaires like Sergey Brin last Saturday, but online pictures were reportedly forbidden. And yet here are snapshots of strippers and nude sculpture.
We couldn't persuade Orkut Büyükkökten to invite us to his opulent birthday-and-housewarmingparty Saturday, but we won't hold it against him. After all, Google's ambassador to the gay party scene had to fit several billionaires between his new dance poles.
If a Googler can pose in Vogue and Glamour, and if Justin Timberlake's playing a Facebook exec, surely London tech geeks can strip off their clothes for a sexy calendar. It'll sell furiously. Or at least, uh, get tweeted furiously.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin is a weird guy. A smart programmer whose ideas lifted humanity, but a weird guy nonetheless. A coder who dislikes coffee. An American who knows virtually nothing about baseball. And then there are his evening jollies.
Yahoo has apologized for providing lap dances on stage at a Tawian programming event. Critics aren't mollified, and that's probably just as well: it's all but certain something like this will happen again soon.
They say the West Coast tech scene is mostly a straight-guy fraternity. For proof, look no further than Jason Goldberg. He played the heteronormative role while running Jobster; it took a relocation to Germany to really loosen him up.
There was supposed to be a Twitter blackout. The Lobby, David Hornik's annual digital "un-conference" in Hawaii, is strictly off the record. But Silicon Valley's self-anointed elite are hardly more deferential to their local overlords than scruffy G20 protesters.
The annual "Google Dance," which drew thousands of search conference attendees to Google's Mountain View headquarters each summer, has been canceled this year, a victim of cost cutting. The outcry only confirms our early judgement of the event: hopelessly lame.
Philippe Dauman Jr. can't stop flouting taboos. Friends remember his Park Avenue orgies. Family members note he joined Google when his father's Viacom sued it for $1 billion. Even San Francisco, we hear, is too tepid for him.
According to the AP, Cisco executives like Joe Burton are brave technology warriors, building the networking giant's post-recession future. According to a guy who runs a Bay Area bike shop, though, Burton's a jackass.
When Steve Jobs is away, his PR mice will play! A tipster sent us this photo of Apple flack Katie Cotton snuggling up to Bruce Springsteen — apparently at a recent concert in San Jose.
How does Eric Schmidt do it? The computer nerd runs Google, has Obama's ear, parks his jet fleet in a NASA hangar, and has a rocking girlfriend. Is she the reason he flies so much?
The founders of Powerset, a search startup sold for more than $100 million to Microsoft, seem to have time on their hands. Barney Pell gropes dolphins and other mammals. What about cofounder Lorenzo Thione?
The Google Jet really is a party plane. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin travel the world on a Boeing 767 they bought and tricked out. But who flies it for them? A wild bunch.
Drugs! Alcohol! Baseball bats! Hey, it's a good story. IT contractor Steven Barnes will serve a year in prison and pay a $54,000 restitution after being convicted of logging into a client's network and deleting the Exchange database, among other things. Barnes claimed he acted after coworkers from Blue Falcon…
Terry Semel, the former Warner Bros. chief who used to run Yahoo, can't catch a break from wild-child daughter Courtenay, who continues to embarrass him. The latest, via celebrity blog TMZ: Testimony from a court case about an incident last August where Courtenay — who's now dating MySpace hottie Tila Tequila — got…
It's the end of an era, they'll all Twitter: Austin's Las Manitas Avenue Cafe has closed. Las Manitas, if you were too passed out to recall, is where the rest of us nursed our South By Southwest hangovers while uploading photos from the events that caused them to Flickr. If you didn't spill salsa verde on yourself…
Yahoo programmer Isaac Schlueter is gunning for a spot in our hearts. His cranky resume demands $400,000 a year up front, non-negotiable. Not that he's going to land that high a salary — Schlueter's real goal is to chase off recruiters who won't leave him alone. Those who bother to read his online CV are greeted…
