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lawsuits
Facebook still facing existential legal threat
New Facebook lawyer Ted Ullyot will have his hands full. Before Mark Zuckerberg came along, every college had a facebook — a collection of pictures of the incoming freshman class, distributed in print. But now, there's only one Facebook. Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard student who came up with an online facebook called HouseSystem prior to the creation of Facebook, has long disputed Zuckerberg's claim to the idea — and he's been disputing the company's name, too. Records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office now show that Greenspan's suit to cancel Facebook's trademark has resumed, having survived two motions to dismiss. The most probable outcome here: Like Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins who claim they hired Zuckerberg to work on their college social network, ConnectU, Greenspan will get paid off with a piece of Facebook, too.
larry and sergey
Google party plane watches spaceship go down in flames
It's good to be the Googlers. Part of Larry Page and Sergey Brin's sweetheart deal to park their fleet of private jets at Nasa's Ames Research Center involves letting the space agency use their Gulfstream V for so-called "scientific experiments." What that really means: Getting a front-row seat for some really bitchin' real-time space porn. A European space freighter, full of trash from the International Space Station, was sent down from orbit to burn up in the atmosphere early this morning over the Pacific Ocean. A Gulfstream owned by H211 LLC, the flight-operating company through which Larry and Sergey own their party planes, participated in observing the event. "It was decided to postpone the reentry by three weeks so that the reentry would happen at nighttime for best viewing conditions," two researchers wrote in an article on Space.com. That raises one key question. More »
exits
FriendFinder employees tiring of abusive relationship
More bad news from the slave galley otherwise known as FriendFinder Networks, the renamed Penthouse publisher whose Adult FriendFinder site's ads grace numerous porn sites. The company lost its top sales performer, Greg Chan, to World NetMedia, proprietor of surging competitor Fling.com. He probably wasn't very happy working with marketing VP Charlyn McNamara. To get a sense of McNamara's management style, consider the case of senior sales veteran Sondra Moore: Moore walked into McNarama's office to ask for more challenging work. Most bosses reward employees who show initiative and a willingness to take on more responsibility. McNamara's response? She fired Moore. And it gets worse from there. More »
max levchin
Please don't post photos of my wedding to Slide
Slide founder Max Levchin made longtime lover Nellie Minkova an honest woman on Saturday. The ceremony was held at San Francisco's St. Regis Hotel, and featured HotOrNot cofounder James Hong as best man, with fellow PayPal mafioso Peter Thiel another groomsman. Gracious enough for the couple to refuse gifts besides books and wine, considering how many zeros Levchin can count toward his (and now their) wealth. However, rather ironic that the bride and groom asked guests not to upload any pictures from the ceremonies online for "privacy" reasons. More »
geek love
Michael Arrington pounding his MySpace source
When TechCrunch, the blog for startup fetishists, published leaked screengrabs of MySpace's just-launched music service, Michael Arrington wrote: "We’ve been pounding our sources for screenshots of the new service for weeks without any luck." Now we know what he meant. A tipster tells us, and another source confirms, that Arrington's been dating Dani Dudeck, MySpace's VP of global communications, for months. More »
meltdowns
The fake crisis that's killing startups
Ever heard of Uber.com? Join the club. But the Los Angeles-based social networking startup now says it's a victim of "the crisis in the economy." Investors like Discovery Communications and Universal Music Group, which sunk up to $7.6 million in the social network-turned-publishing platform, want what's left of their money back. Discovery's investment came just last May, with the company looking to use the site for its Miami Ink and LA Ink shows on TLC. But was it really the economic meltdown, or just investors coming to their senses? More »
Culture of Complaint
The "I Hate The New Facebook" group is up to 1.4 million members. Facebook plans to make its redesign permanent next week anyway. That rebuff won't hamper Facebook's popularity, or discourage the creation of new groups motivated by the urge to whine. Starting a group on Facebook is the millennial generation's preferred act of protest, but not because the students who create them hope to change anything. They are popular because, since preschool, my fellow millennials and I — very special snowflakes, all of us — have been told that it's not if you win or lose, or even how you play the game. It's that you participate.
More »
The Facebook generation's pointless protests
The "I Hate The New Facebook" group is up to 1.4 million members. Facebook plans to make its redesign permanent next week anyway. That rebuff won't hamper Facebook's popularity, or discourage the creation of new groups motivated by the urge to whine. Starting a group on Facebook is the millennial generation's preferred act of protest, but not because the students who create them hope to change anything. They are popular because, since preschool, my fellow millennials and I — very special snowflakes, all of us — have been told that it's not if you win or lose, or even how you play the game. It's that you participate.
More »
rumormonger
Layoffs at ad network Glam Media
A tipster says Glam Media, the women-focused online-ad network, is going through "material layoffs" — 14 out of 200 employees, mostly in sales, Silicon Alley Insider now confirms. The cutbacks, coming just seven months after Glam raised $85 million, mark the popping of the ad-network bubble. The move is consistent with what I've heard from inside the company: Tales of wild spending, chaotic decisions, and mismanagement. Glam, cofounded by slick serial entrepreneur Samir Arora, has embraced a risky business. Arora pitched the company as the future of online advertising, a "distributed media" network, targeting the lucrative female market, overtaking established players like Time Inc., Hearst, and NBC and transforming the economics of the industry. In reality? More »
jackpot
Did Kevin Rose cash out?
The whispers have started: How much money did Kevin Rose make personally by selling shares in Digg's latest round of VC funding? The talk that Rose has sold shares is driven by equal parts envy and admiration. To understand the reaction, it helps to realize that the notion of an entrepreneur selling his own shares directly to investors before a public offering — getting out of the company just as other investors were getting in — used to be taboo in Silicon Valley. But that was before Wall Street's IPO machine broke down, and before merger activity dried up. Rose is at the vanguard of a seismic shift in how the Valley pays off its entrepreneurs. More »
8:00 AM on Thu Sep 25 2008
By Owen Thomas
9,046 views,
18 comments
Latest by DarthMac: He created the site, so why would it be a big deal for him to get some money out of more »
