Watch both the city of light test shoot and the meditation on skateboarding as HD clips from Vimeo and you won't be disappointed.

Pranky crank film professor Arnold Baskin, a teacher at New York University, asked my class last fall why they preferred film over digital. "Because it's more magical," replied a classmate. Not to be too much of a shill for the company started by Oakley shades magnate Jim Jannard, but Red's digital cinematography efforts have created their own, more than estimable, magic — and at a relative bargain price of $1,250 a day and $3,750 a week for a rental in Los Angeles.

Months ago, the company slashed the price on its hardware. More recently, it began offering porn and shortly thereafter introduced a sale on 99 movie titles for only $0.99 each. All of which makes it sound more and more like Akimbo.(Photo by Juha-Matti Herrala)

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.

Acquired in October 2007, Twitter rival Jaiku still doesn't accept new users. Its current ones complain of system slowdowns and malfunctions. On May 30, 2008, founder Jyri Engeström wrote:

Contrary to some voices out there, we DO have plans for future development and we will involve our developer community as much as we can. Just to reiterate, we are working very hard to ensure you have a useful and usable service. We feel the short term pain, too.

Acquired in October 2006, JotSpot is Google Sites now, and according to longtime users, it's not what it used to be.

Purchased in 2005, it took Google six months to assign any new engineers to the project. The founders quit in 2007, and one, Dennis Crowley, will tell any entreprenuer who will listen to reject Google's siren song.

Google acquired GrandCentral, which provides a suite of telephony services, in July 2007, immediately closed it to new users and hasn't opened it since.

Google acquired Measure Map in 2006, hoping to incorporate its features into Google Analytics. "And we did that," reports Google VP David Lawee. Too bad for bloggers who missed Measure Map's blog-specific features and don't use Google's Blogger.

Probably because it's the first animal listed in most dictionaries, implying there will be many more products to similarly anthropomorphize. Assuming the funds from the "mega-Series-A round" the company is looking to close doesn't run out first. According to the prehensile news nose of Kara Swisher, the valuation will be "larger than is typical at this stage in the game." Mahalo and Wikia leave me unconvinced that creating new tools to get help from friends on Web queries will ever make a dent in Google's search market share. If I wanted to ask my friends — even strangers — a question, I've got all sorts of social networks I rarely use like Twitter and Facebook. Email and IM work better, anyway. It's called the Lazyweb for a reason. Why make it harder? (Photo by MontageMan)

Do the math: Ling joined Facebook in October 2007. He's leaving Facebook in a few weeks, months before his one-year anniversary — and it normally takes one year of employment for stock options or restricted stock to vest. However miserable Ling was under Elliot Schrage — Sandberg's personal flack and de facto chief of staff, whom she put in charge of Facebook's development platform, to the utter shock of the entire Valley — can you imagine he walked away from that much money? Far more likely: Sandberg and Schrage asked him to resign in exchange for getting to keep his shares. Ling, who was well-regarded at both Google and Facebook, now gets to walk away from Sandberg's mess.

Cohler, formerly Facebook's product chief, has also made nice noises about Sandberg — and he, too, needed the cash. He's now a general partner at Benchmark Capital, where Sandberg's husband, Dave Goldberg, is employed as an entrepreneur-in-residence. (None of this is coincidence.) General partners at VC firms normally buy into the funds they invest; Benchmark Capital's most recent fund, raised in February, is an eye-popping $500 million.The amount Cohler would have to invest personally comes to roughly $500,000, by my estimates. Selling his Facebook shares seems like the most likely way he'll come up with that money. Isn't it likely that in exchange for making nice noises about Sandberg on the way out, Cohler got an assurance that Facebook won't make trouble about his share sales?

The fundamental problem with Sandberg's take-no-prisoners management style: It's exquisitely tuned for the zero-sum world of Washington, where you're either in power or out. She's treating her appointment as Facebook's COO like a new administration coming into the White House. Her years at Google, which was the only tech-startup game in town for the long years of the bust, reinforced the wrong lesson. Washington's bitter internal rivalries thrive on a scarcity of opportunity. Today's Valley has an abundance. Her employees have options, and not just the kind she can grant.

Which leaves the question: Why is Sandberg so determined to drive talent out of Facebook? My working theory: She wants to remake the company in her image. Here comes the Sandberg Administration! But to do so, she'll need to find skilled accomplices, not servile yes-men like Schrage (who wouldn't know an API if it extended his subclasses). And she'll need to articulate what, exactly, her new vision is.

For all of Mark Zuckerberg's flaws, he's created a website which will soon have 100 million users, and is worth billions of dollars according to a long line of Silicon Valley moneymen who are slavering to buy his employees' shares. What, exactly, has Sheryl Sandberg done, besides buy a lottery ticket by joining Google when it was still private?

Sometimes you have to tear down before you build. But no one knows what, if anything, Sandberg is building — besides fear and doubt. That's hardly the mark of a Silicon Valley leader. It's a tactic that may have worked in Washington, D.C., where Sandberg worked for the viciously political Clinton administration. But she's killing the company's morale with her Beltway tactics. If she has a bright idea, she'd better start talking about it. It will take far more than three days to rebuild this temple — and it's not clear she has time to spare.

1. Show your product within the first 60 seconds
Don’t spend five or ten minutes "setting the stage" or "giving the background." If you don't have a product to show, don't take the meeting.

2. Take less than five minutes to demo
All the tiny little features, you don't have to show them. Larry and Sergey wouldn't open up the advanced search.

3. Leave people wanting more
It's up to you to make such a compelling core product that they are intrigued enough to explore it.

4. Talk about what you've done, not what you're going to do
Steve Jobs doesn't waste time on what Apple's going to do. Weak startup leaders immediately start talk about "what's next.” What really matters is the core functionality.

5. Understand your competitive landscape—current and historical
I've had three or four companies pitch me on [products that unknowingly re-implemented] Third Voice—the controversial "Web annotation" service from Web 1.0.

6. Short answers are best
Answer questions with the most concise answer. [Then stop talking!]

7. PowerPoint bullet slides are death
Slides that are not boring include charts, product shots, feature set tables and the like.

8. How to use this new device called the phone
When presenting over the phone use a handset and a land-line only! Mobile phones and speakerphones sound horrible, disrespectful.

9. How to handle questions you don't know the answer to
No one has an answer for everything, except b.s. artists. Feel free to say you don't know.

10. Always confirm the time of your meeting/call, and always be 15 minutes early
[Start off on the right foot.] Send a simple email saying "Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow at your offices at 123 Main Street at 3pm. If anything changes you can reach me on my mobile at 310-555-1212." Show respect by being in their lobby or on hold on the conference call five to 15 minutes ahead of time.

Slydial is easy to explain: You sign up, then dial 267-SLYDIAL from any cellphone or land line. Enter the phone number whose voicemail you want — cell phones only — and Slydial lets you record and leave a voicemail message without ringing the other party's phone first. I can finally do my Leonard Cohen impression into my wife's inbox without disrupting her board meetings. Slydial limits you to one phone number per message. That's good — let the telemarketers dial us one at a time.

1. Two things are broken: record labels and movies.
2. Simplified browsing. The space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox.
3. New news. PerezHilton and TechCrunch, Reddit and Digg are just the beginning.
4. Outsourced IT.
5. Enterprise software 2.0 for smaller companies.
6. More variants of CRM: make interactions with customers much higher-res.
7. Something your company needs.
8. Dating.
9. Photo/video sharing services.
10. Auctions. EBay is doing a bad job.
11. Web Office apps.
12. Fix advertising.
13. How can you teach kids through the web?
14. Tell who the most productive people are in large organizations.
15. Off the shelf security. Stitch together alternatives out of cheap, existing hardware and services.
16. A form of search that depends on design. Google has no sense of design.
17. New payment methods.
18. The WebOS.
19. Application and/or data hosting. Start by writing Basic for the Altair.
20. Shopping guides. How do you decide what you want?
21. Finance software for individuals and small businesses.
22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid.
23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia.
24. A buffer against bad customer service: a wrapper around common bad customer service experiences.
25. A Craigslist competitor.
26. Better video chat.
27. Hardware/software hybrids: iPod/iTunes.
28. Fixing email overload.
29. Easy site builders for specific markets. What's the best way to make a web site if you're a lawyer?
30. Startups for startups. We're one; TechCrunch is another.

Will Slingshot actually produce anything besides cushier jobs for restless talent at MySpace? Yahoo's Brickhouse is a cautionary tale. The San Francisco office was meant to house creative new projects — like Flickr, but built in-house. In practice, however, it's nearly impossible to pay employees as richly as the startup stock-option lottery does. A sinecure at a big company is less risky, and less rewarding. Will the likes of Granado produce a big payoff for MySpace? Unlikely. But it must be worth something to put studs out to pasture, rather than see them running with the herd at Facebook.

It's a long-held truism in the Valley not to risk your own money on a project when there are plenty of people willing to let you risk theirs in the hope of a return. You can now add that you probably shouldn't risk your company's most vital assets in exchange for loans from interested parties. As it stands, all of Flagship and partner Ping0's employees have been laid off, and HanbitSoft along with competitor Perfect World are now sniffing around the remains looking to poach whatever engineering and development talent they can, while Roper and other executives are said to be paying the last of the team's salaries out of their own pockets.

And according to our source, the death of the company couldn't have come at a worse time. The development team were just putting the finishing touches on the code to allow players of Mythos to make "real money transactions" — in other words, pay for in game items and new content as they played. By offering the game for free or nearly so and then charging the players nominal fees afterwards, the game can benefit from wide adoption early on and a revenue stream to pay for the development of more features and content as time went on.

But it meant that Flagship would have to eat the cost of early game development (which can be wildly expensive) and would almost guaranteed not to recoup the full cost on release. While it's an interesting business model that could prove wildly profitable a well-funded company, at one where Roper's old pal from Blizzard, CFO Ken Williams, couldn't keep the burn rate under control and was pawning IP off to licensees in exchange for bridge loans, it might make a little more sense to get some sales in first and nickel-and-dime players later. (Photo by Gamerscore Blog)

As sole founder, she's bootstrapping for now, but upfront about her plans to cash out in three years — how L.A. gauche, yet refreshingly honest! Valley entrepreneurs only blather dishonestly about how they're "building a company for the long term." Meanwhile, she'll be penning a column for TV Week, Digital Dish, about the experience transitioning from Web technology into the entertainment industry, which should make interesting reading for those of you out there looking to go Hollywood.

But as Oprah proves, inspiration sells more ads than sob stories. What is the market for loser-generated content? That's what Wainwright is now testing.

Presenting herself as a heroine to the middle-aged estrogen set strikes me as deeply disingenuous. She may want to present her career as a triumph of girl power, but really, Wainwright's c.v. reads more like an example of the Peter Principle at work. A marketer at Clorox, Wainwright stumbled into the software business in the '90s, and a startup industry desperate for CEOs grabbed onto her. Reel.com, an attempt backed by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen to compete with Amazon.com in the video business utterly flopped; yet she parlayed her tenure there into a gig as CEO of Pets.com.

That's where the overpromoted marketer really failed. By buying television ads at a time when Internet access was not yet universal, she spent millions of dollars in venture capital on wasteful commercials that promoted the Pets.com sock puppet but didn't drive users to the website. The commercials did, however, fill up the telegenic spokes-CEO's clip file. She now takes credit for barely avoiding bankruptcy by shutting down Pets.com, neatly dodging the question of how it got to such financial straits in the first place.

Also lost in Wainwright's narrative: the two or three startups Wainwright has launched between Pets.com and SmartNow, only given the briefest of mentions in her LinkedIn profile.

With the bubble in social networking still frothy, and advertisers eager to reach women online, Wainwright will no doubt be able to flip her new startup to some buyer like Samir Arora's Glam Media, who will then offload it to an even greater fool. She'll no doubt account for it as a win. But even such a sale will not disguise this fact: Throughout her career, the only thing Wainwright has ever successfully marketed is herself.

One has to wonder if Ferrell isn't trying to undermine the competition, however, considering how not-funny the clip is. Neither Ferrell nor Reilly can seem to decide who's the straight man and who's the goofball. IBeatYou should probably stick to promoting itself with Jessica Alba — 758 users participated in her staring contest, compared to twelve so far for Ferrell and Reilly.

• 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)

Palo Alto is home to about 60 startups, including Facebook but more importantly, MC Hammer's DanceJam.

Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures funded at least two of these 76 startups, Zynga and Disqus.

World-changing startups such as FriendFeed and TechCrunch favorite Mint sprout in Google's Mountain View shadow.

Our favorite startup in midtown Manhattan is obviously Ladies Who Launch.

Joost, the online video site started by the Skype founders inhabits an office in downtown Manhattan. For now.

There isn't actually a zoning law against useful vowels and consonants in Seattle, yet still among the startups between Cherry Street and Jefferson Street: Askablogr.

Rafat Ali of PaidContent parent company ContentNext Media legitimizes Santa Monica's startup scene. Then there's Jason Calacanis's year-old "Google-killer" Mahalo — which will pay you $10 per hour to write Wikipedia entries from your dorm room or trailer.

As goes Yahoo, so go the startups in its Sunnyvale. Jiffle?

You've heard of Austin's Famecast, no? Oh. It's serving up the world's best new artists apparently.

Vancouver's startup scene is a pretty cool scene and doesn't afraid of anything.

It was only a few years ago that Decrem was threw an open bar party on Nob Hill for Flock, and now he's rumored to have tapped Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff for a first round at an $8 million valuation. Pinch Media, for its part, is being backed by Union Square Ventures. And that doesn't even count the $100 million Kleiner Perkins has set aside for an "iFund." What's the prize? $1.2 billion in business that a Piper Jaffrey analyst is estimating the Apple iPhone application store will generate. And that doesn't include the money 111 Minna will make hosting parties for wantrepreneurs to celebrating their good fortune on Sand Hill Road hustling the latest flavor of the month business model. (Photo by Ian McKellar)

Hornbaker attributed his actions to desperation over his infant daughter's hospital bills. The Valley is a very forgiving place, when there's money to be made. Conway likely bought Hornbaker's story, and saw promise in his new idea; why would he have invested otherwise? But if Foomojo — or Youvebeenboned.com, which may well prove a better name — doesn't take off, the meaning of the phrase "Ron bomb" may change for good.

Because Levchin believes that right now, companies that get it right — get funding, revenues or both — will be able to vacuum up developer talent and smaller, failing companies with useful assets. For example, Slide, which recently raised $50 million, and whose most successful application, SuperPoke, was an acquisition from three Seattle based kids, not an internal development. How convenient if Levchin's theory made it even easier to perform more such maneuvers. And does anyone wonder why he wasn't predicting an impending apocalypse before his company's latest round? All of this seems like it would have been useful information for his new investors. (Photo by flawedartist)

[It's a] community service site with videos of athletic women like Jackie Joyner-Kersee or Florence Griffith Joyner. But it is also a technology site. It was one of the very first sites with high-definition video being distributed on the Internet. As people used that site, we saw how well it ran on different machines. We looked at the algorithms. WOA TV was a complete test bed for us and a cool site for something that wasn't covered enough, like women in sports.

Most heterosexual men would just troll YouTube for clips of sporty women. Perlman? He started an entire company around the concept of female bodies in motion, and developed an elaborate creation myth for it. If he can persuade the likes of Takahashi that his collection of videos of women running in spandex is a massive technological step forward as well as a politically correct celebration of female athleticism, he can sell anything to anyone.

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures once described Hype Machine as "the best thing to happen to music since the Rolling Stones!" But for a founder like Volodkin, taking nearly all of a $10 million offer must surely seem more attractive than rolling the dice by taking venture capital and trying to get a smaller slice of a larger jackpot. Some VCs have resorted to bribing founders — buying shares outright, rather than just increasing their paper wealth — to dissuade them from selling, as Automattic's investors did with Matt Mullenweg. VCs like to talk about making entrepreneurs wealthy. But they like to arrange things so they hitch a ride to the payday.