Blippy hit the jackpot enabling internet oversharing. Now comes the punishment: Just three days after a front-page New York Times profile, the Web startup is under media attack for exposing credit card numbers on Google.
Nicole suggested sexing up Sesame Street; Debbie Gibson LOLed at a Krispy Kreme employee; and Susan Orlean's mind was controlled through the mail. The Twitterati got their kicks, one way or another.
FuckedCompany creator Philip "Pud" Kaplan will soon be a married man. So why did he just unveil Flirt140, the world's most awesome online flirting site?
Since the Panic of '08 started nailing Silicon Valley startups, people have been begging Philip Kaplan to restart his FuckedCompany website. But Kaplan doesn't want a second dose of dotcom doom.
Sequoia Capital, the backer of Apple, Yahoo, and Google, ordered its startups to slash their payrolls this fall. We hear one CEO fired people so enthusiastically he had to retract some of his pink slips.
In the self-involved world of Silicon Valley, finding a suitable mate outside the industry is inconceivable. Dating at work is par for the course. So congratulations are due to Philip Kaplan and his new fiancée for defying local convention.
Eight years ago Philip Kaplan, aka Pud, turned his anonymous rumor site FuckedCompany into a modest advertising business. Today, Kaplan is chief something-or-other at AdBrite, a Sequoia-backed startup whose CEO has dutifully slashed its payroll down to profitability. By contrast, sloppy typist "FS Crew" at…
Cue the schadenfreude brigade: AdBrite, the online-advertising network funded by Sequoia Capital, has laid off 40 of 100 employees. Why will some view this with glee? Because, a decade ago, AdBrite founder Philip Kaplan ran a site called FuckedCompany, which chronicled layoffs and cutbacks in the bursting of the…
FuckedCompany creator Philip "Pud" Kaplan's ad network, AdBrite, just fired its VP of Sales Jim Benton. In mid-August, a tipster told us it would happen. Now the same source tells us "free lunches are next on the chop." Engineering VP Mike Reaves and HR chief Melissa Vernon left the company earlier this year. Why's…
AdBrite, the online-ad network best known for its quirky founder, FuckedCompany creator Philip "Pud" Kaplan, is hiring an in-house lawyer. This is odd only in that last we heard, the online ad network already had one. Current general counsel Rebecca Eisenberg is just one of several vice presidents leaving the…
Vancouver-based NowPublic is ostensibly all about citizen journalism. But since Guy Kawasaki sold Truemors to it and signed up as an advisor, it's becoming better known for publishing flattering lists of "influencers," supposedly ranking them according to various social media metrics. The first "Most Public" list…
From the beginning, Philip Kaplan has touted AdBrite's ad stats on the ad network's homepage. Today, it proclaims "470 million impressions a day on 54,328 sites." Which sounds impressive enough. Until one consults the Internet Archive and sees that more than two years ago, AdBrite was "serving 321,628,843 daily…
Why did FuckedCompany creator Philip "Pud" Kaplan record a profane song, "Fuck," in August under the name "Farty McPoopants"? The pseudonym is easy enough to explain: His current venture is AdBrite, an online-advertising network. And selling ads is a business that's all about keeping up appearances. Given his past,…
How eager is AdBrite founder Philip Kaplan to get into the porn-ads business? So eager that he's counting the seconds. On AVNAds.com, the relaunch site for AdBrite's partnership with porn-trade publisher AVN, there's a splash page announcing the move to Black Label Ads, a new website wholly owned and operated by…
The so-far anonymous creator of TheFunded.com, a message board which lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists, is going to unveil himself tonight at an event. New rumors continue to bubble up about who "Ted" might be, as the site's founder is known. One tipster suggested Philip "Pud" Kaplan, the founder of…
Philip Kaplan once ran the website InternalMemos.com, a compendium of leaked company missives. Now Valleywag has obtained one from AdBrite, the online-ad network Kaplan founded. AdBrite is now run by CEO Iggy Fanlo, who earns our Silicon Valley Tool award for railing at his employees about their work hours: "I…
Philip Kaplan seems to have patched things up with AVN, the porn-industry trade publisher with which his company, AdBrite, runs an online ad network for adult websites. Earlier this month, AVN had abruptly yanked the AdBrite-run version of AVNAds.com offline and replaced it with its own hastily-built site for selling…
AdBrite is rebounding fast from the loss of its porn-ads partnership with AVN, the prominent publisher of news and information about the adult-film industry. While AVN appears to have taken back control of AVNAds.com, a website previously operated by AdBrite to market a network of independent porn sites to…
When you talk about "the Valley" in tech, it's taken for granted that you mean Silicon Valley. But in the world of porn, "the Valley" is the San Fernando Valley, where the adult-film industry has established itself. Now, as porn goes online, there's a long, drawn-out war for dominance fought by the two valleys. And…
Why are green-eyeshades types calling AdBrite's customers and asking probing questions about the online-advertising network? The company founded by Philip Kaplan of FuckedCompany fame — pictured here with some friends — might be giving accountants an eyeful for a host of reasons. Let's rule out an IPO: The Sequoia…
