Last weekend the New York Times Magazine published a beautiful set of photos of abandoned buildings and such, as a chronicle of the end of the gilded age. Now they've pulled them for probably being Photoshopped. Fakery!
Comcast's announcement of a bandwidth cap for home users beginning in October has raised a recurring fear: Is the Internet being overloaded? It's not a new worry. Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe forecasted a meltdown in 1995. But our growing adoption of BitTorrent downloads and YouTube-like streaming clips must be…
Even Scoble couldn't save Seagate. Almost a year after the hard-drive maker renewed a sponsorship deal with the prolific blogger, its stock is down 35 percent. Archrival Western Digital, meanwhile, is up 40 percent. So much for the profession of "influencer marketing," a field which has exploded since the 2000…
Technologists are instinctively averse to debt. The cycles are too swift and mistakes too punishing, the conventional wisdom says, to subject a startup to the burden of debt; cash is better spent on growth opportunities than interest. But Facebook has never followed the usual script for a startup, and its CFO,…
LOS ANGELES — I'm the first to admit that I wanted to see the Web kill Hollywood. It just ain't happening. It's finally dawned on the studios that you can now pay artists even less to produce content, and pay YouTube absolutely nothing to distribute it. The problem is you have to sell your own ads — but the studios…
"For months, dozens of sites have been on an auto-bury list, often with no explanation whatsoever. These sites often get submitted to Digg and then are invariably buried after a certain amount of time." So claims an open letter posted to Valleywag yesterday. The mythical Digg auto-bury list is one of those Internet…
YouTube founder Steve Chen, on the Oprah show, recites the same old tale he and Chad Hurley have been trained to give about how YouTube got his start: Chen threw a dinner party, friends filmed each other with videocameras, and then realized the videos were hard to share. What the two didn't tell Oprah: YouTube's…
Success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan — unless you can somehow spin an adoption tale into the mix. That seems to be what Marissa Mayer is trying to do. In a recent interview, Marissa Mayer tries to take credit for both Google's Gmail email service, as well as AdSense, the immensely profitable…
Microsoft and Google are getting into the healthcare business, according to Steve Lohr, the New York Times' most reliable transcriptionist of big tech companies' plans. Both tech giants want to put patients' health records online and help them search for medical information on the Web. But Lohr entirely misses the…
Everything you know about Craig Newmark is wrong. The tale that Craigslist's founder and CEO Jim Buckmaster like to tell about how eBay got a stake in their company goes like this: Newmark, the clueless business naif, issued shares to an employee, never thinking they'd be cashed in. That employee turned around and…
Apple shares are down more than 4 percent to $139.53 right now. And why? Because AT&T has revealed that it only activated 146,000 iPhones in the last two days of the second quarter. Analysts, ludicrously, had expected 500,000, a number seemingly plucked out of thin air. Consider that Apple only has 160 U.S. stores,…
Everyone's still talking about Henry Blodget's facile guess on his Internet Outsider blog that Microsoft might offer $6 billion for Facebook, the social network of the moment. And Facebook investor Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners venture capitalist who's on Facebook's board, tried to stoke hopes for such an outsized…
(Valleywag Emeritus Nick Denton took a break from playing with his iPhone to pen this screed. Enjoy! - Ed.)
