Gawker
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advertising
Should Police Academy Alumni Direct Microsoft Ads? No.
Microsoft has heard your pleas: it's pulled its "Worst Tech Commercial Ever," which tried to use a puking theme to sell Internet Explorer. And you'll never guess who the director was! You will never guess. More »
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Comment by smokee: He should definitely go back to his day job. You know, directing such atrocious bombs as "Chappelle's Show", "The Man... 3 Responses | Other threads
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bright ideas
Let's Screw Up the Entire Internet to Save Newspapers
The hot new idea among people who think about "journalism," and the sanctity thereof: let's ban linking, on the internet! Let's also ban wheels, in order to save the horse industry. Let's also ban talking about things!
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Comment by contains_hot_liquid: Out of genuine curiosity/ignorance: Why don't the papers just start charging subscriptions for their online content? I'd pay $5 a month,... 66 Responses | Other threads
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bad ideas
Omen That No One Will Pay for Twitter
Ever feel like Twitter is just too, well, free? A new company allows you to pay for select tweets. To prove this is a terrible idea, fallen loudmouth banker Tim Sykes has jumped on board. More »
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By Ryan TateComment by MosseyCade: A much better business model: You pay me to follow you on Twitter. I'll read every Tweet. I promise. 1 Responses | Other threads
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bad ideas
Muammar Qaddafi More or Less Owns Your Links
Cool Web kids are fighting the plague of long Internet addresses "URL shrinkers" — quirky names like TinyURL and Is.gd. One of them, Bit.ly, just raised $2 million. Great news for Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi! More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by MATIC: I just checked the Whois on bitly.com and it's owned by Betaworks. So I'm guessing it won't be a problem... 1 Responses | Other threads
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marketing
Twitter No Longer All About the Art
Marcelo Tas is a Brazilian TV host described as "a tropical version of...Jon Stewart." But you could also describe him as "the first celebrity to trick a company into paying him for bullshit on Twitter." More »
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Comment by BadUncle: My portuguese is rusty, but it looks like he's saying "..can't make it today. Luck and long life to Boo-Box."... 2 Responses | Other threads
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bad ideas
3 reasons why Google's bookstore will be a disaster
The lovingly jumbled piles of books at Shakespeare & Co., the famous Paris bookstore, must madden Googlers. All that information, unorganized! In the wake of its $125 million settlement of a lawsuit filed by book publishers, Google is now thinking about turning its money-burning Book Search product into an online store. This will end badly. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by macbeach: Granted, Google Books won't replace Amazon.com or local bookstore for the things that those stores do: provided a browsing place... 1 Responses | Other threads
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bad ideas
Esther Dyson fails to factcheck her startups
The Valley's pundits believe that partisan bias is damage, and that the Internet can route around it. That's the conclusion I arrived at after hearing about Ameritocracy.com, a new startup aiming to have Internet users factcheck soundbites for free. Esther Dyson, the writer and startup investor, has joined it as an advisor, just in time for the vice-presidential debate Thursday night. "It bothers me to see people's random statements spread around the world with no quality control — and I like Ameritocracy's decentralized approach to providing that quality control," Dyson says in a press release. So that's what's plaguing politics — a lack of quality control! Dyson, who also invested in Flickr, is deluded to think crowdsourcing will work with opinions as well as it does with photographs. Anyone who's spent time on Wikipedia knows that a decentralized approach doesn't lead to the elimination of bias — it just guarantees that whoever has the most time to waste wins.
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By Owen ThomasComment by GrosvenorAsterius: I think I missed something here. What is this "fact" she didn't check? more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Twittad lets you sell Twitter pages no one looks at
There is now an online ad network for Twitter backgrounds. Launched last week, ad startup Twittad allows Twitter users to sell their background image as ad space and charge advertisers based on how many followers they have. Back in June, Ian Schafer, the CEO of interactive agency Deep Focus, sold his Twitter background as advertising space for $1,082.01. Ridiculous, we thought — since the background only appears when Twitter users visit the company's website to look at another user's profile, or read a specific message on the website. Twitter's website accounts for about 5 percent of the service's usage, and users mostly read pages with streams of all their friends' messages, on which individual backgrounds don't appear. More »
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Comment by CarlaPidgeot: Making money off of Twitter is the exact business model we launched with Adjix two weeks ago today. Adjix... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
5 social networks Yahoo couldn't befriend
The soon-to-be-shuttered Yahoo Mash is not Yahoo's first failed social network. It's also not its second, third, or fourth. It took one whole hand for us to count Big Purple's failed attempts to get social, either through mergers or in-house development, below. More »
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Comment by Shadowlayer: Considering yahoo's current state of affairs, not buying FB for a billion was an EPIC FAIL. 3 Responses | Other threads
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bad ideas
Google nixes Steve Chen's YouTube live video plan
In a moment of what now seems like irrational exuberance, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen declared that the popular online video site would add live video streaming this year. Not so fast, says Google. YouTube is already struggling with the concept of profitability, and according to an anonymous source cited by Silicon Alley Insider's Michael Learmonth, Chen's idea is a financial black hole: More »
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By Jackson WestComment by dng81: @WagCurious: I can make a few guesses: 1. YouTube videos are delivered off a standard CDN. We've mastered this technology.... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
The bubble in personal-finance websites
AOL has launched Walletpop, a personal-finance site; IAC and Dow Jones have FiLife; and TheStreet.com has MainStreet.com. All hope to attract a younger audience to personal-finance news than the conventional stock talk and online portfolios offered by the staid likes of Yahoo Finance and CNNMoney. The bets are wrong both in their timing and their premise. Stockbrokers and mortgage lenders, reliable advertisers during good times, are both ducking for cover and pulling back their budgets. Froth might have sustained these sites a couple of years ago, but not now. No matter when they launched, though, their proponents should have remembered this maxim: Financial advice, like youth itself, is wasted on the young. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by Ted Dziuba: Who needs financial advice? I just charge everything to visa anyway. Easy. more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Why LinkedIn's getting into the insider-trading business
You'd think LinkedIn management, which has made no secret of its plans to take its automated schmoozefest public, would be trying to avoid trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not so. They're aggressively marketing the company's latest moneymaking scheme, LinkedIn Research, to hedge fund managers. The premise: Traders can use LinkedIn to find "experts" with "unique input" on public companies in their portfolio. What LinkedIn marketers delicately phrase as "input," SEC investigators might well call "inside information." And the only thing actionable about the whole affair might be the insider-trading charges that result. More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by steve94301: I think the author misses a major point. Talking to people at a public company is perfectly okay--as long as... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld to unleash world's worst startup pitches on the rest of us
When we worked together at Business 2.0, I always thought my then-colleague Erick Schonfeld was a bit of an evil genius. Now an editor at TechCrunch, Schonfeld hasn't proven me wrong. He's taking all of the boring startup spiels — "elevator pitches" — he gets from wantrepreneurs trooping through his office and turning them into content. All he has to do is sit back and hit "Record"; he doesn't actually have to do the critical thinking required to evaluate whether the ideas hold any promise, or even make sense. How boring is this idea? Look at David Carr from the New York Times, sitting two seats over from Schonfeld, who's fallen asleep just from listening to the idea. But I have no doubt this is the crowdsourced, video-enabled future of innovation journalism, folks.
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By Owen ThomasComment by MrMedia: was that the guy from Startup Junkies? more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Robotic voices to express HP's disgust with customers
Its pretexting heyday may be over, but HP is apparently still not adverse to a little telephone trickery, as its pending patent for Text-to-Speech Conversion with Associated Mood Tag shows. In it, HP touts the use of VoiceXML to have a fake 18-year-old salesgirl register her disgust with customers who don't respond to offers.
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By theodpComment by AndromedaFoote: fullman, if the repetition in the tags bothers you, just layer a macro processor or teplating interpreter on top of it. ... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Facebook app spreads social disease to your friends
Beware MorphMonkey's invitations to morph you and a friend into love children on Facebook. The American Social Health Association has infected the MorphMonkey app with chlamydia, transmitted each time you make spawn with it. ASHA's video tutorial doesn't explain why Facebook condoms can't protect you from Facebook VD, or how the kids used to deal with virtual infections back in the days of AOL chatrooms and fingering each other's Unix .plan files, but it is sort of sexy in an afterschool special way: More » -
bad ideas
Perez Hilton stars on "viral" hottie rating site to promote HIV awareness
PosOrNot.com, conceived as a public education campaign about HIV/AIDS, apes HotOrNot, asks visitors to the site to guess the HIV status of those pictured, based on photos and social network-style profile excerpts. Look, even professional hater Perez Hilton donated his image to the viral antiviral effort! Then again, encouraging testing using a faux dating site is probably wiser than a campaign to get Web-cruising users to disclose their status on a real hookup site, where everyone is allegedly very good looking. -
entrepreneusialism
Cause of female entrepreneurs set back decades by website with terrible name
When we were notified of the existence of Ladies Who Launch, a website for women with startups, we suppressed the gag reflex triggered by the name. We then consulted one of our favorite entrepreneuses on exactly how horrified we should be. "Yep, we've talked about a profile," she told us. "But bitcheswhobusiness.com, that would be my website." To be clear, we have nothing against anyone offering women like our IM correspondent "resources, opportunity, community," or, for that matter, publicity. We just can't get past the site's unfortunate moniker.
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By Owen ThomasComment by ssparis: I belong to many professional organizations with names that might seem more worthy, such as the National Association of Women... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Page Six's full scoop on Julia Allison's "IT Girls" reality show
Valleywag commenters hate the idea, but the New York Post's Page Six loves IT Girls, the proposed reality TV show with New York umtrepreneurs Julia Allison, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin.These three are more career-driven and have more to say than their L.A. counterparts, which should only lead to more drama. Even when they're not hitting Waverly Inn for dinner or flying cross-country for exclusive Silicon Alley [sic] events, this clique is never boring. They get Restylane injections for fun, own pocket-size dogs, and never go anywhere without blogging about it. What's not to love?
In the full-spread pic below, the Post speculates, and we can confirm, the show will air on Bravo, if the pilot's picked up. (One correction: Meghan Asha, née Parikh, is the heir to her father's Silicon Valley fortune, but it didn't come from Sun Microsystems.) Set your DVR now. More »
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Comment by merdiva: eh these skanks couldn't scratch their way out of a Fedora box, I'd like to see them crawling around under... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Japanese video search engine proves impossible to locate
Dumb money on display: A publicly traded Japanese company, CyberAgent, has put $1 million of its shareholders' money on a video search engine called Fooooo, or as its radio ads will surely call it, "that's 'ef' followed by five 'ohs' — 'ef oh oh oh oh oh dot com'!" Sure enough, when I tried to type it in the first time, I botched it. Foooo? Foooooo? Fooey. Next time, dear friends from across the Pacific, spend six figures on acquiring an easily typed domain name. That seems easier. -
bad ideas
AOL brass frankly embarrassed by Bebo buy
Why were AOL CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant so secretive about buying Bebo? Because they knew much of AOL management hated the deal, Silicon Alley Insider reports. Executives from AOL subsidiaries Advertising.com, Platform A and Userplane would all have worked to kibosh the $850 million deal if they'd known more about it, so Falco and Grant kept them out of the loop. Supposedly, Grant and Falco pushed ahead with the deal because they think Bebo makes AOL a more attractive acquisition target. One source called the buy "Grant's last stand." Below, SAI's account of precisely what's to hate about Bebo, according to AOL execs. More »
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Comment by eze: i think what happens to companies this far behind is that they go out of business. their healthy units go... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Mashable introduces video commenting, terrifying new reality
Embedding videos into Valleywag comments is as easy as dragging and dropping a YouTube URL into the comments field. One advantage this method holds over Mashable's video comments: Embedding a YouTube video of yourself takes at least one extra step. Trust us: No one wants to hear you talk. Especially me. I get paid by the pageview.
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Comment by Whocares: Yeah, because the video responses on youtube proved to be a huge success.. more » | Other threads
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exits
Megan McCarthy unhired by Wired
Former Valleywag party girl Megan McCarthy's all-too-brief career at Wired: admired, hired, inspired, fired. (Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)
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By Owen ThomasComment by awalt80: Fools! I would keep her just for that rack. That is about as good as it gets. Call me;-) more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Time Warner shareholders, blame LonelyGirl15 for the $850 million Bebo buy
If not in traffic or revenues, where has Bebo leapt ahead of MySpace and Facebook? In turning its social network into a TV channel, says NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes. She credits Bebo president Joanna Shields with figuring out the LonelyGirl15 phenomenon in 2007 and hiring the show's creators. Thus was born KateModern, which has been seen some 30 million times, earning exactly $405,000. Expect more of that, the pro-Bebo argument goes, now that the company is tied up with media giant Time Warner. With 2,099 more hits like that, and the deal might pay off.
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Comment by longtimereader: Has no one has figured out that LonelyGirl15 was lifted from the Sony Pictures online serial Rachel's Room that ran... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Sequoia clones unsuccessful search engine — maybe Google will buy it anyway
Sequoia partner Mark Kvamme just plunked down $31 million on a company he also chairs, called Searchme. It's an image-based search engine. Search is a crowded field but Searchme CEO Randy Adams thinks there's room for innovation. "Search," he told BoomTown, "is still largely a text and list experience." True, but Snap CEO Tom McGovern told me almost the exact same thing in May 2006. Didn't work out for him. Now Snap is a site for bloggers. Below, a video demonstration of Searchme's "innovation" and another video showing two-year-old Snap doing pretty much the same things. More » -
bad ideas
Yahoo gives up on improving search results
When all else fails, declare yourself "open." Netscape first pulled this maneuver in the late 1990s; the Netscape browser is now extinct. Yahoo has declared its search results open to improvement. Website publishers are encouraged to submit ideas for prettying up Yahoo search — presumably to include prominent links to their sites. How this is supposed to make Yahoo search results better, it's not clear; won't it just fill them with promotional spam? We'll leave you with this wisdom from a guy with a blog:When I hear a big company use the term "open," I almost immediately assume they mean "to fucking me."
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By Owen ThomasComment by search.scientist: Open is the way to go. The real question is will Yahoo be able to adapt from closed community thinking... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
JuicyCampus founder wants to take it all back
JuicyCampus founder Matt Ivester created a site that allows college students to anonymously post gossip and rumors about each other. With threads like "Who is the sluttiest girl??????," it's been popular with the kids. The lawyers, too. Now Ivester wants users to know "hate isn't juicy": More » -
bad ideas
Spielberg's next opus: a social network for tinfoil-wearing nutjobs?
Steven Spielberg, who allegedly believes in ghosts, is launching a social network for other tinfoil-wearing crazies. Thank god they'll all be corralled in one place; fear that they might find a leader and organize.
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Comment by mindscienceofthemind: Someone ought to teach Michael Arrington about the concept of viral marketing. This is not a genuine Web 2.0 effort. more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Eric Schmidt impersonates Mike Long at healthcare conference
Google's onto its new thing, Google Health, and CEO Eric Schmidt is off on the road to promote the product. Stiffly. Too bad he's above taking lessons from the recent past. Back in the 1990s, Silicon Graphics and Netscape founder Jim Clark planned to put his third company, Healtheon, at the center of the health care industry. Didn't happen. But if investors ever believed it would, it's because Healtheon CEO Mike Long sold them during talks across the globe. In the book The New New Thing, author Michael Lewis called it Long's "road show." If anything will doom Google Health, it's that Schmidt lacks Long's flare for salesmanship. Here's a clip from his stop at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Annual Conference in Orlando. -
bad ideas
Microsoft makes Vista cheaper — as if that's why people weren't buying
Microsoft has cut the price of the U.S. consumer versions of Windows Vista. The Ultimate Edition fell from $399 to $319 and the Home Premium Edition went from $159 to $129. The Register nails it: "It's hard to believe that millions of Windows XP users were just waiting for Vista to get a little cheaper before committing themselves." Why don't they just put XP back on the shelves? That seems easier. (Photo by mkeefe)
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Comment by isights: If they really want to sell Vista, go the Apple route and sell the premium version for $129. Heck, quite... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
"Free!" issue of Wired not actually free
We heard through the grapevine that copies of this month's Wired were being taken off newsstands without payment — because unsuspecting readers thought the giant "Free!" on the cover meant the magazine was available no charge. Wired editor-in-chief Greg Anderson tells Valleywag:The mag was indeed free (but not at newsstands). There have been some scattered reports of people walking out with them without paying. After the alarms went off, we hope they were advised about the web offer ;-)
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Comment by old-and-in-the-way: My advanced vintage means that I was a teenager when Abbie Hoffman released "Steal This Book." Of course I shoplifted... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
We were kidding about the Julia Allison cover, Wired
We weren't actually serious about Julia Allison following up her Time Out New York cover with an appearance on the front of Wired. And yet, here's a photo from Julia Allison and Meghan Asha's brunch meeting with an unnamed Wired "marketing manager." Our hope is expired.
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Comment by Mike D.: @Dweezil: You're missing the point. HTML as a euphemism does not equal HTML as a solitary skill. Think... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Like this T-shirt? Then you might also want:- Just 1% of the Market? ORLY?
- My Ham Sandwich Has A Better Shot at Marketshare
- You Had Me at NanoTech
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Comment by zabovo: Or since I don't see any copyrights we could just reproduce the t-shirts for 5 dollars each. Why... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Cordawrongs: How not to viral-market a product
When a presidential candidate puts her daughter on the hustings, they call it "pimping." But when a company sends a girl out looking for dates, we're supposed to call it a community service? That makes Cordarounds the pimp this Valentine's Day. In a viral marketing project titled "Karen the 13th," the horizontal-corduroy pantsmaker subjected winsomely hapless Karen Palmer — and us — to a drawn-out search for the man of her dreams. More »
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Comment by dfo: @FlakJack: You really have a handle on what is truly funny. And to think that comes with a brilliant marketing... more » | Other threads
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wireless
Voce, a wireless service for hipsters with scraggly beards and ducktails who could nonetheless afford to buy Prada handsets and spend $118/mo. on service fees, has gone under. The company's COO learned of the shutdown when his Voce phone stopped working. [RCR Wireless News]
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By Owen ThomasComment by lottalance: Helio is next. All about perceived value for the money. more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
$1.1 million paid for world's stupidest domain name
As the real world's real-estate bubble pops, a virtual one continues to inflate. Cruise.co.uk, a British travel agent, has paid $1.1 million for the domain name cruises.co.uk. An exorbitant sum to let pasty Englishmen know they are able to purchase more than one cruise at a time. The second domain is to be used for a "social network," Cruise.co.uk's PR agency claims.
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By Owen ThomasComment by Steffi_B: Funny post. Here's the story from the horse's mouth: [www.cruises.co.uk] more » | Other threads
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chirp
The search for an intelligent business model
Chirp, a so-called "social screensaver," has launched to the usual barrage of press. How could a company stocked with such brilliant founders — CEO Eve Phillips has a masters degree from MIT and an MBA from Stanford — have come up with such a brain-dead business model? Screensavers have been technologically outmoded for a decade or more, and they waste electricity. As more computer users switch to laptops, and close up the lid when the computer's not in use, do they have much of a future? More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by BobDope: the concept of 'smart' has been outmoded for a decade now, too... more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Xerox finds a new logo on the playground
Xerox is synonymous with copiers. But it urgently wants you to forget all that — and, as well, its brief, pointless stint as a "document management company." It has now joined hundreds of young, hip Internet companies with 3D glassy ball logos. Xerox hired Interbrand to spend 18 months conducting 5,000 interviews to rationalize the new logo: "friendlier" lowercase letters, a slick new typeface, and the obligatory ball, which is supposed to "suggest forward movement and 'a holistic company.'" I just think: kid's toy. More »
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By Tim FaulknerComment by Dror Poleg: How exactly are they planning to use this logo on their equipment? Will not look good on a copy machine. more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Why Robert Scoble got banned from Facebook
Illustrious egoblogger Robert Scoble, the Paris Hilton of Silicon Valley, has committed the geek equivalent of a DUI. He has, by his own admission, violated Facebook's terms of service, and had his account suspended — 5,000 friends and all. Scoble's sin? He used a script to export his Facebook address-book information to Plaxo, which runs a competing social network. Running such scripts has long been forbidden, though Scoble argues Facebook should open up its information. Unlikely, given Facebook's history. More » -
bad ideas
Is Calacanis underpaying Mahalo workers — or overpaying them?
Jason Calacanis's Mahalo has a problem: its business model is a Catch-22. Mahalo differentiates itself from Web search engines by using the paid services of humans, which Calacanis argues is a cheaper strategy than buying servers. And yet Mahalo seems to have trouble paying the rates it set for its human laborers. A blogger who works for Mahalo as a "mentor" — a fancy title for someone who basically works as a QA tester, reviewing pages of search results created by others, is complaining that Mahalo is refusing to pay the full amount he is owed. More »
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By Tim FaulknerComment by Carlos: wow, nothing from the blowhard himself? telling! more » | Other threads
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bad ideas
Netscape cofounder fails at real estate
Jim Clark is finding real estate a tougher game than the new new things he started at Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon. The New York Times reports that five years into a Miami real estate venture, Clark and partner Tom Jermoluk might not be able to repay a $110 million construction loan. More »
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Comment by StartupBitch: Rule #1 - Make sure the exits are clear Rule #2 - Never use your own money Rule #3 - Make sure... more » | Other threads
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Fri Jul 10
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