 [DANNY WOOL, SV411]
It wasn’t that long ago that the internet served two main functions: email and porn. The times they are a’changing, however, and web surfers today tend to spend more time on Facebook and game sites than email (porn was not included in the survey results, probably because no one will answer honestly).
Of course, email is still a key component of the internet, and one of the three major activities for which it is used. It is in decline though. If at one time it accounted for 28 percent of the time people spent online, this has now dropped
Continue reading The Changing Face of the Internet
 [DANNY WOOL, SV411]
When there’s a will there’s a way, and when there’s a loop there’s a hole, Steve Jobs is quick to learn. For years, Jobs has prevented Apple apps from offering anything even vaguely reminiscent of porn. While this February Apple did offer an “Explicit” tag among its various app categories, that disappeared as quickly as you can say Gizmodo. Since then, Apple has been cleaning up its reputation to surpass even biblical standards: no more was there, “And they bit of the apple, and they saw that they were nekkid.” While Tiger Woods probably sighed in relief, many other
Continue reading No Need for Porn Apps on iPhones
[DANNY WOOL, SV411]
My teacher always said that when you learn a new word, try and use it ten times a day. My word for the day is refudiate(2). That’s what people tried to do with Sarah Palin. They tried to refudiate(3) her message that building a mosque on or near Ground Zero is “a stab in the heart of the families of the innocent victims …” Not only did New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg respond. So did a group of New Yorkers, who wanted Facebook to refudiate(4) Palin’s call to stop the mosque as unwarranted “hate speech.”
At first they thought
Continue reading Facebook Refuses to Refudiate(1) Sarah Palin
 [MASHABLE]
Culture jamming pranksters The Yes Men have released their latest film on BitTorrent, unable to do so via conventional distribution channels because they are being sued by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The Yes Men pose as corporations, governmental organizations or NGOs they believe are hypocritical or enacting harmful policies. They deliver speeches, send out press releases and set up websites to either take the organization’s policies to what The Yes Men believes are their logical conclusions, or to reverse the organization’s official position.
In theory, the latter is useful as a PR stunt because it forces the organization to step forward and
Continue reading ‘Yes Men’ Dodge Legal Challenge
 [DANNY WOOL, SV411]
Paul Ceglia thinks that he should own Facebook. Ceglia, from Alleghany County, NY, claims that back in 2003, he made a deal with Mark Zuckerberg that he would design the social networking site for $1,000 and a 50 percent ownership stake. While it is unknown whether he got the $1,000 dollars, he certainly did not get his 50 percent. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg himself only owns about 24 percent of the company, currently valued at up to $22 billion.
But the case gets weirder. Ceglia also claims that the terms of the agreement stipulate that for every day that
Continue reading Man Sues for a Piece of Facebook
 [TechCrunch]
Tesla Motors founder and CEO Elon Musk isn’t a man that backs down when facing the press. When the New York Times wrote an error-filled article, Musk lashed out at the author, saying “What is he doing picking on an electric car company? Why would he pick on the little guy who is trying to do good when you’ve got egregious waste of money in the tens of billions occurring in Detroit?” He added “He’s a huge douchebag…and an idiot.”
And that was just when a journalist was poking at Tesla. Get into Musk’s personal life and he’ll take off the
Continue reading Elon Musk: Why Owen Thomas is ‘Silicon Valley’s Jayson Blair’
[DANNY WOOL, SV411]
After months of uncertainty, Google has announced that China has renewed its license to operate in China. The statement came after the search engine company stopped redirecting its Google China URL to a Hong Kong-based page. Hong Kong, while officially part of China, is much more lenient about censorship than the People’s Republic.
The news about the license was kept low key, with Google’s Chief Legal Officer David Drummond making the announcement in a [url=http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/update-on-china.html]single sentence blog post[/url]: “We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web
Continue reading Google Goes Back to China
 [GreenBeat]
One of the many unknowns about Toyota’s partnership with Tesla was whether it would result in a jointly produced car.
That won’t be known for many months yet, but Toyota has already taken a first step: It’s building Tesla’s battery into a test car so it can compare the Silicon Valley startup’s technology to its own lithium-ion pack.
Toyota president Akio Toyoda told journalists at a briefing today in Nagoya, Japan, that Toyota is building an electric vehicle with a Tesla battery pack.
The Japanese company’s in-house lithium-ion pack uses fewer, larger-format cells than the 6,831 commodity cells (essentially like mobile-phone batteries) that
Continue reading Toyota: We’re Building a Car to Test Tesla’s Battery
[DANNY WOOL, SV411]
What do former Secretary of State George Schultz, former Golden Girl Betty White, and current Internet bad boy Mark Zuckerberg have in common? They’ve all been inducted into the California Hall of Fame.
Joining Zuckerberg from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins.
Zuckerberg will be the youngest member of the Hall of Fame and also the most recent addition to California. He only moved to the state in 2004.
The induction ceremony for this year’s new Hall of Famers will take place in the California Museum in Sacramento on December 14.
Read More at CBS5.
 [JOHN BATTELLE]
Last weekend the news was conjecture about Facebook doing web search, today, the news is conjecture about Google doing social networks. All of this has been sparked by two well known Valley guys opining on samesaid…Kevin Rose, CEO of Digg, tweeted that Google was working on a “Google Me” social network (he since was “asked to take down his tweet” by someone…) and then a former Facebook employee answered a related question on his own Q&A service, Quora.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, folks. I certainly don’t find it the least bit surprising that Google is continuing its
Continue reading Will Google Compete With Facebook? Er…It Already Is
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