Michael Arrington "classless" says Stewart Alsop
Reporter Brad Stone jumps into the fracas between the Demo and TechCrunch 50 conference organizers, with venture capitalist and Demo founder Stewart Alsop saying of Arrington's public baiting:
Blather, rinse, repeat
"I know how these stories develop, having written more than a few of them myself over the last 20 years. You start with one fact, get the usual suspects to speculate on what that fact could mean, throw those speculations into print, then look for an official denial of the parts that are wrong. Once that denial comes…
"I think that Yahoo management was pathetic"
Oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens told the San Francisco Chronicle that he's given up on a Yahoo/Microsoft deal, and has sold his shares at an undisclosed loss. But let's be clear: Pickens is not a technology investor. He invested in Yahoo because he believed Carl Icahn had a workable plan, and that chief Yahoo Jerry…
Bostock: Why can't Microsoft be more like InBev?
Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock says that if Microsoft had handled itself the way InBev did, buying Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion even after A-B rejected an initial offer, Yahoo and Microsoft would probably be one company by now. "InBev was a classic, perfectly managed takeover," said Bostock.
Jason Calacanis takes first step — admitting he has a problem
The road to recovery from gambling addiction is a long one, but the first priority is admitting to yourself that you have a problem, which Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis did in his first email missive since quitting the blogosphere:
Verizon CEO thinks iPhone hype is a "conspiracy"
Obviously tired of being pestered with questions about iPhone this and Steve Jobs that, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg put on a tinfoil hat and sat down for an interview with the Financial Times:
Yahoo plagued by "systematic rot" says Om Malik
Almost every technology and business publication, including Valleywag, has been all Yahoo, all the time. Between the Microsoft merger talks, proxy board battle with Carl Icahn and employees leaving nearly every day, there's been lots of deliciously bad news to report. However, my old boss Om Malik over at GigaOm has…
Bill Gates privately declared Windows usability "an absolute mess" in 2003
Five years ago, which is probably about when Microsoft started announcing shipping dates for Vista, Bill Gates wanted to play with Windows Movie Maker. Thanks to the power of Windows XP and Microsoft's online support, it took him over an hour in frustration downloading software, installing it and rebooting and, in…
Bill Gates looks back at the competition Microsoft annihilated
Putting media naysayers in their place, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates continued his farewell tour by pointing to old press accounts of companies like Ashton Tate and Lotus as worthy competitors into the perspective only the ultimate winner can enjoy. When asked by CNET's Ina Fried about the early presumptions that…
Britney Spears, Perez Hilton and Vinod Khosla walk into a courtroom
Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins was sued by prison inmate Jonathan Lee Riches, who wanted $43 million from Khosla because "Khosla’s fund invests in prison buildings," among other concerns. Riches has also sued former Giants slugger Barry Bonds and hundreds of other celebrities, inspiring Khosla…
Kongregate's Jim Greer, on how to get a girl-crazy VC to commit
In this morning's otherwise sleepy session the "brave new world" of entrepreneurship at Supernova, Vipin Jain of Retrevo offered the analogy first — that for startups, attracting venture capital is like dating. "When you first start there’s some excitement. Then, the unknown!" Jim Greer, CEO of the epic timewasting…
The Internet's role in contemporary philosophy
Yesterday Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures quoted extensively from "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond," a 2006 article in Philosophy Now by Alan Kirby. Kirby's piece does much to sum up the relationship of communications technology and cultural theory without the shrill demagoguery of anticrowdsourcing…
Esther Dyson: Online advertising will "turn good people into prostitutes"
Esther Dyson, one of the 28 women counted at today's Supernova conference, responding to Bob Iannucci of Nokia in a conversation on the challenges of making money off of emerging networks of users, urged businesses to "appeal to people's pride rather than their avarice" or else they risk "turning good people into…
10 things Hugh MacLeod hates about Web 2.0
Web cartoonist and blog punditarian Hugh MacLeod dislikes many aspects of Web 2.0. We share his pain, but not his taste in metaphors. No. 2 on his list:
ConnectU lawyer on the IM transcripts that will totally milk more millions from Facebook
Mark Hornick, the lawyer representing ConnectU's Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, on the "smoking gun" chat transcripts that data forensics expert Jeff Parmet may or may not have discovered on hard drives subpoenaed from Facebook implicating Mark Zuckerberg in grand theft source code: "We don't have them. The courts…
Jeff Bezos just wants his shareholders to know he's still having sex
Attention, Amazon.com shareholders! Your money is not, repeat not in the hands of a sexless technomonk. Jeff Bezos took a moment to share some evidence of this at his annual shareholders meeting in Seattle. He reprised an anecdote about The Joy of Sex and its pivotal role in the early days of Amazon, lifted from his…
And by "compete," we mean "grind the bones of our enemies into dust" — did I say that out loud?
"Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete." — Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, whose company remains under antitrust supervision, at the All Things Digital conference Tuesday.
Arianna Huffington wants you to have a menage a trois
"The online vs. print debate is totally obsolete. It's as musty as the old barroom argument about Ginger vs. Mary Ann. It's 2008, why not have a three-way?" — Blog mogul Arianna Huffington, putting the sin in "synergy" for BusinessWeek, 22 May 2008
Jeff Bezos to remind John Doerr he's not a virgin
Speaking to young graduates, including eight new Amazon.com hires, at Carnegie Mellon University's commencement ceremonies on Sunday, Jeff Bezos admitted that he's a nerd who does "a mean interpretation of Captain Picard," but is not a sexless monk. That classification was suggested by Amazon board member John Doerr…
Meet the man Carl Icahn praised for fixing Yahoo: Terry Semel
How good is corporate raider Carl Icahn's grip on what's wrong with Yahoo? Two years ago, when Icahn complained to the Financial Times about inept executives at Time Warner, he asked why couldn't they be more like then-Yahoo CEO Terry Semel?
