MySpace inches toward Madison Avenue credibility

Nicholas Carlson

10/07/08 11:00am

News Corp.'s hire of a Yahoo veteran, Valeh Vakili, reported yesterday, as MySpace's senior vice president of sales strategy and operations could prove to be a coup. Madison Avenue only buys ads on News Corp's social network MySpace inventory for their clients "if they have to," one agency exec told me in August.…

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eBay layoffs coming Monday?

Nicholas Carlson

10/04/08 2:28pm

I've long wondered why a largely-automated site like eBay needs to employ 15,000 people. Soon it might not. In September, research firm Wedge Partners said eBay needed to cut 10 percent of its workforce. Now an employee tipster tells us such "big deep cuts" may come as early as Monday. Our unverified source reports…

Friendster founder still pretty bitter

Nicholas Carlson

10/03/08 1:40pm

I like how New York Times reporter Brad Stone ends his in today's paper — with a quote from a man who has more reason to be paranoid and jaded than most, failed Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams. Abrams, who now runs a six-person startup called Socializr, says he's prepared to “hunker down if things go bad," a…

Senator wants to babysit Yahoo-Google after deal

Nicholas Carlson

10/03/08 1:20pm

If the Justice Department does allow Google to serve ads on some of Yahoo's websites, Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl believes it should then monitor "the amount of advertising outsourced by Yahoo to Google" to make sure it doesn't increase over time. His math: "Should the amount significantly increase, we believe the…

Sandberg critic escapes from Sandberg oversight at Facebook

Nicholas Carlson

10/03/08 12:00pm

Another Facebook employee has managed to figure out how to get out from under Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's thumb — and he didn't even have to leave Facebook to do it! Christopher Cox, Facebook's director of human resources, has gotten a new job as the company's director of product. In April, told about Sandberg's…

Superinvestor Ron Conway suffers confidence crisis

Nicholas Carlson

10/03/08 11:40am

Venture capitalists' "confidence" is at its lowest level since the University of San Francisco began a survey of startup investors in 2004. Sharing the pessimism, angel investor Ron Conway told Silicon Alley Insider that, given current economic conditions, wantrepreneurs should "keep their day job." If they can't find…

AMD can't find cash for company-saving spin-off

Nicholas Carlson

10/03/08 11:20am

Advanced Micro Devices hasn't been able to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars it needs to spin off its chip-manufacturing business and focus on processor design. This news comes after AMD sold its digital-TV arm to Broadcom for $193 million in August. The spinoff was supposed to help AMD cut billions of dollars…

Jimmy Wales hangs out with China's top censor

Nicholas Carlson

10/02/08 2:20pm

Jimmy Wales, cofounder of the world's most comprehensive history of C-Pop, recently sat for with China's top censor Cai Mingzhao. The pair also spoke a little bit, but not about "the fact that a few politically sensitive pages are blocked," according to an interview Wales gave to Rebecca MacKinnon, an advisory board…

Apple's five worst quality control failures

Nicholas Carlson

10/02/08 1:00pm

In the past year, Apple earned top scores in both customer satisfaction and . It's a tribute to the power of marketing. And for Apple customers' collective delusion, we credit Greg Joswiak, a top marketing executive who handled Mac hardware before he moved on to pushing iPods and iPhones.While Apple products may be…

Sarah Lacy: No one cares about tech now

Nicholas Carlson

10/02/08 12:20pm

Some of Yahoo Tech Ticker's recent headlines have little to do with tech: "Senate Passes Bailout Bill: 74 to 25"; "Buffett Buys $3B of GE Preferred, Company Selling $12B of Common"; and "It's 'Absolute Nirvana' for Value Investors, Whitney Tilson Says." Tech Ticker talking head Sarah Lacy has posted an existential…

Facebook idealist crushed by Sandberg's realpolitik hire

Nicholas Carlson

10/02/08 11:20am

Ted Ullyot, the neoconservative lawyer who served as Alberto Gonzales's former chief of staff, is not Facebook's first general counsel, as had been reported. Facebook cleared the way for Ullyot by sending former top lawyer Rudy Gadre packing in July. Gadre left "to spend more time with his family." Gadre is spending…

Don't worry Yahoos, 80 percent of you are definitely safe

Nicholas Carlson

10/02/08 11:00am

Here's a splash of ice water for your morning cup of coffe, Yahoos: Silicon Alley Insider hears 3,500 people will lose their jobs in Yahoo's next round of layoffs. "People familiar with the company's thinking" — read: flacks who want to be able to deny the comments later — call that number too high. Cold comfort,…

YouTube PR's own financial crises

Nicholas Carlson

10/02/08 10:40am

YouTube announced a new channel called "Your Money" yesterday, describing it as place to "learn more about borrowing, investing, and saving, along with Financial News and Analysis." YouTube said the channel would feature content from Bloomberg, Reuters, Wall Street Journal. But now YouTube Your Money is gone. So is…

LinkedIn: "Where the PR is hot but the business is not"

Nicholas Carlson

10/01/08 4:00pm

A LinkedIn tipster tells us that even as the all-business social network raised $53 million from Bain Capital and other investors in June, at a $1 billion valuation, it sought to pull in another $25 million from Goldman Sachs and failed. More damningly, he claims that CEO Dan Nye lied on-air when he told Fox Business…

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Martha Stewart's Microsoft-billionaire ex-boyfriend to go back into space

Nicholas Carlson

10/01/08 1:00pm

Charles Simonyi, the Microsoft billionaire who paid $25 million for a 13-day stay on the International Space Station in April 2007, plans to return on another Russian rocket in 2009, says Virginia-based Space Adventures, which didn't say how much he was spending this time. Simonyi, who made his money helping Microsoft…

French newspaper says Macs cause cancer

Nicholas Carlson

10/01/08 12:40pm

The Liberation of France an oft-noticed smell emitted by Apple's Mac Pro desktop computers is caused by a combination of toxins, including benzene, which is known to cause leukemia. The questions now have to be: What did Apple know and when did Apple know it? , full of Mac Pro owners complaining of the smell,…

Apple drops hated iPhone app NDA, obliquely blames Microsoft

Nicholas Carlson

10/01/08 11:40am

Apple made developers who wanted to write applications for the iPhone sign a non-disclosure agreement that was rigorous it even forbade them from publishing Apple's letters rejecting their app from its iTunes store. More seriously, the NDA also prevented developers from learning from each others mistakes and…

Bezos and Benioff buy into ZocDoc

Nicholas Carlson

10/01/08 11:20am

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff invested around $3 million in ZocDoc, a service for making medical appointments on the Web. Their money joins Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla's, who led ZocDoc's $3 million first round. "We're looking for wealthy individuals to invest and…

Microsoft now resorting to free ringtones to add searchers

Nicholas Carlson

10/01/08 11:00am

Microsoft's Live Search Cashback program isn't winning Microsoft search market share, so the company today launched SearchPerks, a program to give users prizes for using Microsoft search. Use Microsoft search for 4 days and get a ringtone. Use it for 10 days and get 100 frequent flyer miles. Use it for 7 months and…

Apple's latest iTunes temper tantrum

Nicholas Carlson

10/01/08 10:40am

The National Music Publishers Association wants to raise the rate it charges Apple for each song shoppers purchase via iTunes from 9 cents to 15 cents. Apple wants to lower the rate to 4.6 cents and says that if it doesn't get its way, it might just shutter iTunes altogether. In a letter to the Copyright Royalty…