We actually stopped the video halfway through to make sure it wasn't a conscious parody, maybe a viral ad for some new Office-like television show. Nope: Addante is very real, and he and his videos have already earned more than his share of notoriety.

Here's quick tour of Addante's tour:

Above the reception desk are the first of many pointless flat-screen monitors.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The office is built on the set of 24, which is a great idea if you value panic, screaming and torture in your place of work.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.These 11 cultural values shall "govern the behavior" of all who enter. Consider yourself warned.

The main penoffice. Rubicon has a "No Office Policy," because it is so egalitarian and communicative. This explains why Addante introduces the cofounder he sits next to, but not the random woman he also sits next to.

Addante is trying to ring the "Victory Bell" more frequently, probably because its clang is so delightful for employees trying to get work done at the surrounding desks.

This "countdown clock" is like the one in 24, except instead of nuclear apocalypse it counts down to something you don't care about.

Yes, you really work for a company whose slogan is "Make Mad Cash From Ads On Your Website." If you ever doubt this fact, just look up at the wall.

Yammer is like Twitter, except you read it by standing in the middle of the office and craning your neck to read another pointless, wall-mounted flat screen television.

Remember the room in 24 where they always torture terrorists? Addante thought it would be cool to hold company meetings there, and call them "boiler room" gatherings to boot.

It seems the employees gulped down the on-site alcohol much more quickly than anticipated. Go figure.

In 2009, being told your company "is managed like a financial institution" is not so comforting. Thank God there's another pointless, flat-screen television to soothe your pain.

[FounderBlog]

Can one blame Calacanis? After a blog named him as a candidate for the job, based on speculation over his friendship with new News Corp. digital executive Jon Miller, he grabbed the opportunity to treat it seriously with nonstop "no comments." Even after former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta was revealed as the real candidate News Corp. was considering to run its social network, Calacanis has maintained the serious pose. (Everyone knows his current gig is going nowhere. We'd love to read the memo on what to do with his overgrown Web directory, Mahalo.)

Now he's penned a memo on what the next CEO of MySpace should do.

His memo is a grab gag of the trendy (virtual currencies!) and the obvious (fix the website!). It's standard fare for Calacanis, a Brooklyn-raised hustler who has made an art of talking more loudly than anyone surrounding him, in the hopes that people incapable of grasping the obvious will follow him.

Wait a second: "People incapable of grasping the obvious." We take it back. He's exactly the man MySpace needs.

Jack Dorsey, the nominal (read: unemployed) chairman of Twitter, posted about meeting with Iraqi president Jalal Talabani in his palace — which would give anyone opposed to changing the world 140 characters at a time a good bead on his location. Dorsey posted a photograph of Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman, who in turn lensed Wired scribe Steven Levy in protective gear. Meanwhile, Howcast CEO Jason Liebman boosted international relations by misspelling Talabani's name.

Perhaps to stay in the good graces of their State Department protectors, they've also started to assiduously suck up to their official hosts. Anyone who wants to monitor their Twitter transmissions can do so by using their official "iraqtech" tag. Way to make it convenient for the bad guys to keep tabs on you, Web 2.0 dudes!

Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman:

Wired writer Steven Levy:

(Photos by rbc, jack, and heif )

The State Department has released the list of minor players traveling to the country to share their thoughts on "how new technologies can be used to build local capacity, foster greater transparency and accountability, build upon anti-corruption efforts, promote critical thinking in the classroom, scale-up civil society, and further empower local entities and individuals by providing the tools for network building":

• Jason Liebman, CEO-Founder, Howcast
• David Nassar, VP, Blue State Digital
• Scott Heiferman, CEO, MeetUp
• Raanan Bar-Cohen, VP, Automattic/WordPress
• Richard Robbins, Director of Social Innovation, AT&T
• Jack Dorsey, Chairman-Founder, Twitter
• Kannan Pashupathy, Director of International Engineering Operations, Google
• Ahmad Hamzawi, Head of Engineering, Middle East/North Africa, Google
• Hunter Walk, Head of Product Development, YouTube
• Steven Levy, Senior Writer, Wired Magazine

Is this a joke? It sounds like the State Department rounded up all the people who couldn't even qualify to go to Social Web Foo Camp in the woods of Sebastopol, Calif. last weekend. (For example: Jack Dorsey, Twitter's "chairman," has time on his hands after being fired as the comapny's CEO.) In other words, we're hardly sending our best and brightest. Save for the misplaced Levy, a talented writer whose job we do not envy. How will he turn this gang of second stringers into the heroes of a Wired feature?

(Photo by AP)

Geraci has a neato-keen idea to have New York's huddled masses monitor bus delays with their cell phones. The Observer gushes:

His DIYcity initiative challenges tech whizzes, futurists and even regular Facebookers to take transportation, and other antiquated city services, into their own hands by using modern technology-from geospatial tracking devices to social media platforms like Twitter to government data and stats.

Note whom DIYcity does not challenge: John Geraci. Geraci has a history of dabbling in changing the world through technology, but never quite seeing a project through to transformative fruition:

DIYcity IS THE culmination of six years of Mr. Geraci's work to improve cities with the Web. A Bay Area native, Mr. Geraci graduated from N.Y.U.'s Interactive Telecommunications Program, an incubator for some of the city's brightest tech brains, in 2005. In May 2004, he launched Neighbornode, a project that took the local community corkboard online-encouraging neighbors to set up their own wireless hot spots and create connections through electronic bulletin boards. The next year he created Grafedia, which connected graffiti in the streets to the online world. His thesis project, Foundcity, took inspiration from bookmarking site del.icio.us and photo-sharing site Flickr, and asked users to "bookmark" real-world locations and sites by text or picture message and "tag" them with descriptive words.

In February 2007, Mr. Geraci co-founded (with Everything Bad Is Good for You author Steven Johnson) Outside.in, a site that scrapes information from local blogs, event listings and other online media so people can see what's happening locally. Mr. Geraci recently reduced his responsibilities as head product developer for Outside.in and is only working part time to devote himself to fund-raising and advocacy efforts for DIYcity.

Somehow, we're supposed to see this flitting from project to project as the ever-building narrative of a genius at work. What it actually looks like: A 38-year-old guy who still hasn't learned to finish what he starts.

(Photo by Sean Ellingson/New York Observer)

The group is ringled by ragingly egocentric former Google peon Chris Sacca. It also includes Twitter CEO Ev Williams; Josh Spear, the "youngest marketing strategist in the world"; and Jake Nickell, the "chief strategy officer" of online T-shirt vendor Threadless. (In Silicon Valley, when board members are not prepared to fire a founder outright, they often give him a meaningless title involving "strategy.")

It's one thing for the Valley's moneymen to maintain the polite pretense that the twentysomething entrepreneurs they fund are brilliant creators whose searing intelligence makes up for their inexperience, naïveté, and general ineptness. After all, if they pretend long enough, they can peddle whatever shlocky website their protégés have cooked up to an even more gullible private-equity investor or mutual-fund manager. 'Twas ever thus. We call this scam "venture capital," and in good years, it is mildly profitable.

Let's review: Williams's company isn't even trying to make money. Spear is a social media marketer — in other word, someone who gets paid to chat with his friends online all day. Nickell clothes the indolent hipsters of Brooklyn.

And Sacca? He's the worst of all. In five years at Google, he never rose higher than the level of manager, despite an assiduous track record of sucking up to CEO Eric Schmidt. People assume that he's rich from having joined Google before its IPO — yet as he once defensively whined to me in an email, he actually isn't. So this is someone who managed to be present at the greatest wealth-creating event of our decade and yet failed to actually make money. He is now advising startups.

For Barack Obama to take these lackbrains' advice when the world needs saving? This is an outrage on the scale of the bank bailout. Perhaps he thinks there's some photo-op value in being pictured with so many young, hip types — proof that as old American industries die, new, Twittery ones are being born. But these companies won't create meaningful numbers of jobs. At best, they'll make some VCs rich by flipping them to some unlucky buyer. At worst, they'll go spectacularly bankrupt. Inevitably, that photo of Obama and the twits will surface as news of their failure breaks. Stop this meeting, someone, before they taint our most perfect president forever!

The horror is, of course, unfolding in real time on Twitter. Avert your eyes.

Dear Owen,

How are you? Hope things are going on well.

This is Darren here and I am the co-founder of AdExcel. Do you remember me? I have sent you an email a few weeks ago.

I need your help.

AdExcel is moving quickly to commercialize its platform and needs funding. For you to help, I would like to invite you to a special event to preview the next generation of Internet advertising and present an opportunity for you to take part in this branded venture.

IMPORTANT: I understand that you are from the Media, but I am presenting this to you because you are selected by our team as a highly respected personality. Therefore, we wish to extend this very limited edition and special invitation for your kind consideration - Hoping you could join us!

To keep it brief and in context, here are the details in milestones:

As you might already know, AdExcel is working on an extraordinary advertising platform that allows anybody to comment and rate online advertising – with that and bundled with other full blown features such as a Publishers Social Network and White Label Advertising Network Solutions – will make this something very different from the industry standards.

To learn more about AdExcel quickly – please click here, here and here. We are also recently featured on the Inquisitr by Duncan Riley over here. Duncan Riley is a brilliant journalist and also a former TechCrunch writer. The article is titled "AdExcel: Ning for Advertising". To see and test out AdExcel for yourself, please click here for instructions.

The truth about this venture is that before I started AdExcel, I was a Social Entrepreneur and I traveled a bit to share and exchange ideas about social entrepreneurship from places like Geneva to Philippines. Essentially, being a social entrepreneur often means to affect change in the world through mechanics of a social enterprise. In reality, it’s a long and hard mission for the whole of humanity. We just need to be reminded that each of us is as important to make this world a better place. No matter how small our contribution is but it will make a big difference as a whole. I believe AdExcel can be a benevolent idea. If it becomes successful, it will succeed in eradicating poverty and extreme hunger from the world including poorer nations. The bigger concept of AdExcel is to allow absolutely anybody to create and run their own advertising network.

In the virtual Internet, anybody from all parts of the world can profit from the Internet marketplace. AdExcel allows people to leverage that and gives them the tools to scale quickly. So, we really hope that AdExcel could be given a chance to prove itself and maybe someday by allowing more people to own their small “Google Ad Network”, we could really help more people to make ends meet. Also, given the methods used in AdExcel's technology and strategies, this is a great business model that scales exponentially with growth patterns such as Social Networks (e.g. Facebook ) and White Label Networks (e.g. Ning ).

I personally invite you to join us. In this tough economic times, we are prepared to be prudent with investor's money and fight the good fight. AdExcel is building the future of Internet Advertising and having you as an investor will definitely accelerate its growth and success. To show you that we are sincere, we are also prepared to negotiate at any price/deal that you feel is right. Any size in allocation is possible. We really hope you and/or ValleyWag could join us.
Thanks again Owen and hope to get a reply from you soon.

Warm regards,

Darren
Founder, AdExcel
www.adexcel.com

NOTES: You can download the AdExcel Business Presentation (lots of visuals) here.

If you have a moment, I'd appreciate your help. Please take a look and forward this job on to anyone you think would be interested in the position, or anyone else who could help me find a great candidate.

Thanks for your help!
-Frank

Company: the Rubicon Project

Job Title: Executive Assistant

Job Description: The Rubicon Project is looking for ambitious mavericks, entrepreneurial winners and A++ people. We are an online advertising technology company. In 2007, we pioneered the ad network optimization category with the goal of helping website publishers make more money from their unsold ad space.

In nine short months of offering our service we're now optimizing more than 11 billion ads each month for 1300+ customers (including some of the world's largest publishers) across 240 of the top ad networks, reaching more than 240+ million unique Internet users. We've been featured as an expert in our field by publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Fortune. And we've already been recognized with a number of awards, including: start-up winners of PricewaterhouseCoopers EntreTech, AlwaysOn OnMedia's Top 100 and Global 250, and as Favorite Show-off at LA's TwiistUp 3.

Our goal is to build a truly unique company. From the people we hire, our company culture, products we build, to how we reward our employees, we aim to make the Rubicon Project a place people are excited to come to everyday.

Because we work hard and always strive for perfection as a team, we also play hard as a team. Our environment is passionate, fast-paced, team oriented, creative and interactive. We go above and beyond to create a strong culture. In addition to standard benefits like health, dental, vision insurance, and 401K plans we also throw in perks like generous stock option packages, free gym memberships, catered lunch and dinner, a stocked kitchen with healthy snacks, dry cleaning, car washes, and even company happy hours, to name a few.

In addition to giving back to employees, we also feel it's crucial to give back to the community. Every quarter we have "community service day" and a portion of our profits are ear-marked to be donated to charities selected by the company.

We are in search of a sharp, self-motivated, detail oriented, organized and creative individual to assist our CEO. This is not your average executive assistant job. In addition to standard scheduling and coordinating, you will also be called on to work on special projects to propel the company forward. Every day will be a different day and you will be pushed to your maximum potential, guaranteed.

Responsibilities and Requirements:

• Great attitude!
• Extremely responsible, trustworthy, caring and fun!
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Strong organizational skills are a must
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint
• Ability to take initiative and work quickly and independently
• Ability to manage multiple tasks
• Flexibility and willingness to adapt to changing priorities and accomplish projects in efficient and timely manner
• Must have reliable transportation to run errands
• Precise calendar coordination (Outlook)
• Presentation preparation
• Generating accurate expense reports
• Travel coordination
• Meeting arrangements and coordination - planning, set up, presentation preparation and minute taking, distribution and follow up
• Conference call arrangements
• Wide range of administrative duties as needed

We are looking for an extraordinary executive assistant who thinks on their feet and can work with minimal supervision, this is a one of a kind opportunity.

To get to know the guy you'd be working with a little better check out this video that our CEO, Frank Addante did: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ola3ribSKKM

From: Calley Nye
Date: Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 8:35 PM
Subject: I could really use your help :)

Sorry for the mass email, but I wanted to keep you all informed about something I'm working on, and to ask for your support.

Today, I launched a social media fundraising experiment that I'm calling Start Me Up. Most of it is explained here http://calleynye.com/post/52663867/start-me-up

The accompanying post is pretty self-explanatory, just an explanation of my startup and why I'm raising money. But I wanted to share with you my real intentions.

In Jason Calacanis' email the other day, he talked about the startup depression. Several other people have been talking about it as well, and I think it could be a real problem. In a failing economy, it's not hard to lose faith in business and in part, yourself.

I hope that this can be a demonstration that there is always another way. The message is that it's not the end of the world if you can't get institutional capital, and that you hold some control in these troubled times. Entrepreneurial spirit is why we all wake up in the morning, and I don't want to see that die or suffer in anyway.

I would really appreciate your support in this, anything would help. Donations, tweets, blog posts, Facebook bulletins or forwarding this email.

Thank you, and if you have any questions you know how to find me :)

Calley Nye
Entrepreneur/Blogger/Marketing Consultant

(Photo by Andrew Mager)

Look, I get it, working on a dissertation can make you go crazy. That said, armed with his advanced degree, Chang should at least be able to get a job at Google answering customer-support calls or keeping an eye on toddlers at the Kinderplex.

Played: A twin eunich [sic] with his brother in his high school play, "ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM."

Maybe the Waspy wantrepreneurs can use some of that money from the Facebook settlement to get started as producers in Hollywood. Tip next time they get pitched by a buddy from Harvard to fund his vanity short: It will be about as likely to make any money as it will be for Zuckerberg to publicly admit that he totally ripped you two off.

Sure, it's just a bunch of disgruntled kids at legendary San Francisco after-work bar House of Shields slinging tech slang and calling into question the reductionism ideal for deal making in the Valley. But few of the ideas presented at interface designer Eris Stassi and author Paul Carr's hastily assembled "Smack My Pitch Up" were so farfetched as to be unbelievable. In the poorly-shot video above, the three finalists join Calacanis Cup winner and founding Valleywag editor Nick Douglas in presenting business ideas to change the world, from prostitute-tracking plans (thankfully preempted by prior art) to a community-oriented embrace of institutional buggery. It wasn't pretty, but then paying for an emo kid's suicide in order to offset your carbon footprint, as winner GreenSuicides.com suggests, never is.

But in the section, "How to bond with a journalist," he suggests that "you can cut to the front of the line by spending just 30 minutes researching the journalist you're pitching." We're not sure what's creepier: (A) that Calacanis emailed the piece directly to me and very special contributor Paul Boutin, nagging us to post it, or (B) that his suggestions describe the duties of the minion he employs to monitor us.

I've gotten so obsessive about this that my liaison Tyler, whom anyone who's met with me in the last year knows, keeps tabs on our journalist and blogger contacts. He not only reads their work, he always stays in contact with them. This means we are in constant research and dialogue with the folks who are covering us. This means when we meet about a story we know as much about the journalist as they know about us—sometimes more! Tyler will hand me a stack of stories and background information on the people we're meeting with on the flight to another country so I can play catch up.

I have officially been scared into never oversharing again, lest some flack or wantrepreneur watch and wait until I'm in a vulnerable emotional state to better prey on me.

Allison's quest for a geek boyfriend paid off in two regards. Nonsociety's design is strongly reminiscent of Iminlikewithyou, the casual-games site run by her current beau, Charles Forman, and the teaser video is hosted at Vimeo, the online-video site founded by Jakob Lodwick, Allison's ex. Too bad she didn't hook up with a boy more experienced at handling back ends.

1. Find software that sells for $20,000 a copy. Don't try to come up with something new. If there isn't a product already, it's because there isn't a need. With something "new" you have to convince businesses or organizations they need it. An example: automated parking garage software.

2. Pick products supporting million-dollar companies. Those companies spend lots of money convincing customers they need their products. Then the customer will get quotes from everyone and might end up buying yours instead.

3. Build the product but only with the core features. Make a "lite" version initially. Use that money to continue to make it less "lite" and higher in price.

4. Get your name out in the industry. $20K software is certainly going to be "niche" software, with not a whole lot of customers out there who buy it. Get your company name out there so everyone knows you sell your systems and could be an alternative to what they already have.

5. Present yourself as consultingware. Be there on call and devoted to them and how they're using the product.

(Photo by Manuel Faisco)

• Solve a problem, not a class of problems. It's okay to not have your product do everything, as long as it does something well. Many platforms started that way. Linux, The web, Rails Django, PHP.
• Set things up so you get that rush of accomplishment as you finish things. Pick a problem that's worth addressing and doesn't require a lot of support code to address it.
• I'd read the initial idea wasn't important. Thing is, the initial idea determines how the initial idea will change. An example is the choice to go into gaming at all. Out of college, that was what we were familiar with and passionate about. But gaming is overcrowded.
• Developing in a vacuum never works. Prove yourself wrong as soon as possible.
• Have a product that is useful on its own. Del.icio.us, for example - it's just a bookmark manager that happens to be more useful as more people use it.
• Prototype any 3rd-party libraries.
• If you're doing anything other than building your project and getting users, it's premature.
• The product will take longer than you expect.
• People have an incentive not to crush your dreams. Take everything they say with a grain of salt.
• Know your limitations. Apple, or Sun, or Google — founders of those companies concentrated on the areas that they were experts in.

(Photo by dierken)

• Failing to spend enough time researching the business idea to see if it's viable.
• Miscalculating market size. Entrepreneurs say, 'The market size is 50 million people. If I only sell to 2 percent, I'd be selling a million.' But most products sell less than 1 percent.
• Making a commitment on sales projections that were wrong. Created costs that require those projections to be met. Run out of money.
• Overprojecting sales prospects.
• Making cost projections that are too low.
• Hiring too many people and spending too much.
• Lacking a contingency plans.
• Bringing in unnecessary partners.
• Hiring for convenience rather than skill requirements.
• Spending half their time doing something that represents 5 percent of their business.
• Accepting that it's "not possible" too easily.
• Focusing too much on volume and company size rather than profit.
• Looking for somebody to tell you you're right.
• Lacking simplicity.
• Lacking clarity of your long-term aim and business purpose.
• Going after too many targets at once.
• Lacking an exit strategy.

(Photo by juhansonin)