The celebration for Google's tenth anniversary party was held in Rhodes, Greece, of all places. It doesn't get much more lavish than flying employees from offices around the world to a popular tourist destination, near the peak of the travel season. One self-proclaimed shareholder employee complained that "spending…
Let's face it, the world of Web development and production is a glamorous sham. The real science is in semiconductors. That cute Ajax script kiddie with the asymmetrical haircut? Ask him to design a microprocessor cache bus. Learn a little ActionScript? Go ahead and try to get a job pinning Intel chips to nuclear…
COO Freddy Mini will be taking over Krim's job, with Krim staying on the board, as the Paris-based personalized homepage company changes focus to widgets. "No concrete reason for his departure was provided," writes Caroline McCarthy. Surely our tipsters can alleviate the circumspection and tell us why. [CNET] (Photo…
Google cofounder Sergey Brin is, two days away from his company's first-quarter earnings call, sunning himself in Tahiti. As is Greco-American blog tycoon Arianna Huffington and Wendi Deng, wife of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch. Huffington is reportedly there on vacation, but it's a stretch to think Brin and Deng…
Google PR's party line: Even though Verizon Wireless and AT&T mostly won the FCC"s 700-Mhz spectrum auction, Google got what it wanted out of the bid by forcing the carriers to agree to "open" their new airwaves to any wireless device, including the still-mythical Googlephone. Google's latest actions speak…
We hear that all MySpace talks at next last week's Mix Conference were unexpectedly cancelled. Anyone know anything about it? email us.
The hot Santa at Marissa Mayer's Christmas party inspired us. Readers, we've heard all about your tragic holiday parties — like Facebook's prissy shot luge, where health inspectors forced partygoers to use a glass rather than press their lips against the ice to get a drink. Pictures are worth a 1,000 words. Send in…
Persistent rumors are burning my ears about last week's Thrillist SF launch party. The events newsletter reportedly attracted a very special guest — one who probably should have been burning the midnight oil in Palo Alto dealing with a company crisis. We hear he stayed up late drinking, ending up passed out on a…
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg kept an online journal during college. Part of it has become publicly available thanks to 02138's recent reporting on the ConnectU case. In this portion of the diary we witness the moment of Zuckerberg's inspiration for Facebook, the social network with 57 million active…
We now hear that Jakob Lodwick, the fame-seeking oddball who started Vimeo, didn't quit the IAC-controlled video site — he was fired. And probably not for his views on Web development, either. Anyone know more?
Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, Forbes editor Dan Lyons's Fake Steve Jobs blog was taken over by Fake Bono. As the story goes, Bono was spending Thanksgiving at Jobs's house and found El Jobso had left himself logged into Blogger. He got drunk with Googlers, flew on Marissa Mayer's jet to meet the Pope in Uganda…
Now that we've heard that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has his own bodyguards, just like his pal Steve Ballmer, we're dying for some photos. If you've seen any bulky, black-suited guys with earpieces hanging out on University Avenue in Palo Alto, kindly snap a picture and send it in. But be warned: If they're not at…
Heard of Stuart Scott? No, not the lazy-eyed Stuart Scott of ESPN fame, but the wandering-eyed CIO of Microsoft fame. He's been sacked from his chief information officer job at Microsoft after joining the company in 2005. Microsoft will only say:
Last night, when Brad Stone and Miguel Helft got the scoop about Google's OpenSocial program, they included a quote from Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. You can still find the quote using Google's search engine, but it's gone from the text of the story, and we can't find any cached version. Why? Perhaps it…
We hear that Brad Fitzpatrick, the LiveJournal creator recently hired by Google, has an "epic" costume. Well, we heard that from Fitzpatrick, actually. "Yo, rumor is you need to go down to Google and get a pic of Brad Fitz's costume," a mutual friend IMs. A drive down to Mountain View isn't really in the cards. But…
A friend writes us, "Hey so word on the street is Yahoo is holding some mandatory 'leadership session' this morning in a hotel somewhere — hear about this?" True! Until noon, there are Yahoos meeting at the Hyatt Santa Clara's Grand Ballroom, which seats up to 2,500 people. What's the purpose of the meeting? We're…
Could soon-to-be departed Yahoo chief marketer Cammie Dunaway be on her way to Nintendo of America? That's what one tipster suggests. And it makes sense. Cammie describes her new home as "a natural fit for someone who loves driving profitable revenue for big, well-loved consumer brands and can't pass up the…
WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — At a panel discussion about making money in online video, Federated Media VP of sales Chas Edwards said he'd pulled checks "from a million dollars down to $10,000" for video ads on Federated's network, which includes the popular shows Diggnation and Ask a Ninja. The burning question: Who paid a…
Embargoes, in the age of instant journalism, are the silliest of PR conventions. In fact, they're counterproductive — especially for publicity-seeking startup conferences like this week's TechCrunch40 and next week's Demo, organized by Chris Shipley (left). And yet not everyone gets this. Blogger Paul Boutin sent…
