Gawker: valleywag, deja vu

Why more porn stores don't have Internet cafes in them

Melissa Gira Grant — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:00:00 EDT

When the sex shop Love Boutique placed Internet kiosks in its California storefront, for customers' "private use," the local zoning board decided Love Boutique was giving the clientele a way to find people to play with their new toys with, too, and threatened to pull its business license. The owners, sex biz conglomerate Deja Vu, are crying First Amendment violations and have brought a lawsuit against the City of Industry. Forget the legal details — what's the crime in being servicey?

For the few folks who don't buy their smut and butt plugs from Amazon.com or Good Vibrations, having a nice little private corner to do naughty things on the Internet sounds like a great value-add. Where are customers supposed to surf — at home, with their spouse lurking, or at the office, with net-nanny software monitoring every click? It just doesn't seem fair. If high schoolers can take over the Apple Store to flirt on their MySpace pages, why can't real grownups have a clean, well-lit place to cruise for sex?

At iVillage, NBC makes all the same mistakes

Mary Jane Irwin — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 12:40:36 EDT

NBC has relearned, at great cost, a valuable lesson. The Web is more than the Wild West. One doesn't profit by simply squatting on land; it actually has to be developed. Beth Comstock, NBC's president of integrated media, dazzled the Net with NBC's acquisition of women's health site iVillage. She boasted how the purchase gave NBC "scale and a profitable, established platform to expand [its] digital efforts." It would allow the company to connect "more deeply online, on mobile and on demand with key consumers throughout their various life stages." Now, Comstock admits she bet wrong, to the tune of $600 million.

It's a masterful mea culpa, the best way to spin bad news. "Few people at NBC Universal are boasting about iVillage now," says The New York Times, which slams the whole iVillage deal as a rather embarrassing affair. The Times chronicles NBC's attempts to latch iVillage onto its existing properties through promotion on the Today Show and the creation of companion TV show "iVillage Live." These failed.

"You assume in the beginning that a mention on the 'Today' show will drive tremendous traffic, but it's not that easy," said Comstock.

You'd think that some folks at NBC would remember NBCi, the company's failed 1990s-era broadband portal. Like iVillage, NBCi found that on-air promotion didn't count for much on the Web. But that lesson clearly didn't stick. And, as with NBCi, which it cobbled together from several Web startups, NBC found that iVillage's technology, far from cutting edge, would need to be expensively updated. So much for providing a platform.

Comstock, of course, maintains that all is now well and NBC has righted its worst mistakes. And iVillage has longstanding relationships with advertisers that NBC has managed not to burn. So the deal can clearly be salvaged. But it's an expensive way to learn things that NBC should already have known.

Well this sounds familiar. One blog's erroneous...

Megan McCarthy — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:14:07 EDT

Well this sounds familiar. One blog's erroneous report caused Apple shares to fall today. The stock was down 7% after TheStreet.com published a story about cutbacks in iPhone production. [CNBC]

Google's freebie problem: "They don't know where to draw the line."

wagger1 — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 12:54:53 EDT

You've seen one Google office, you've seen them all. But Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times had a column to write, so he ate some free food and turned in yet another dutiful profile of the lavish cafeterias in Google's Kirkland office. The outpost of Google is mostly notable for being a stone's throw from Microsoft and Amazon.com's headquarters, whence it's poached countless engineers with free food and other soft benefits.Perhaps the infusion of competitors' DNA has some value. Unlike the hordes of programmers at Google's Mountain View headquarters, who have gone straight from the cocoon of college dorms to the comforting swaddle of the mothership, Google Kirkland's engineers are a bit more skeptical, having seen office perks come and go as their former employers' fortunes wax and wane. Says Googler Steve Yegge:

"We've got perks for perks. You go on a company ski trip, and there's this bag for going on the ski trip — it's like the trip was a reward unto itself, right? You know, I got a perk for moving offices — I showed up and there was this box and it had this big red stapler from 'Office Space' in it. It was like, 'Oh, my office moved twice in a quarter.' They don't know where to draw the line."