Toluu

Valleywag

Gawker posts tagged 'Valleywag'

Google Boss to Newspapers: No BailoutToday

Everyone wants a sugar daddy to save them. Wall Street has found one in Washington. But the newspaper industry has been batting its eyes in the direction of Mountain View, Calif., home of Google. Ha!

Smart, since the government and Google are the only people who have money anymore. But no such luck, says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Google will take over a newspaper's Web search and broker ads for it (taking a hefty cut of revenues, of course) — but it's not going to shower the dead-tree industry with cash, he tells Fortune:

How about just buying them?

I don't think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question we're in this uncomfortable conversation.... The fundamental question you're asking is, Why does Google not write large checks to newspapers? We're careful at Google with our money. We write large checks when we have a great strategy. And we don't yet have that strategy.

So much for the world's most innovative company! Google is getting into the energy business. One of its top executives, Vint Cerf, spends much of his time th

Google Billionaire Ex-Wife's Revenge WeddingToday

What did the ex-wife of Google executive Omid Kordestani (net worth: $2.2 billion) do after getting dumped for a younger woman? She hooked up with a doctor and hired Julio Iglesias as her wedding singer.

Iglesias — whose private-performance fee is estimated at $1 million — was only the start of the bills for the wedding, held last weekend at the Marquis Cabo San Lucas hotel.

Kordestani's ex, Bita Daryabari, and her groom, varicose-vein specialist Reza Malek (pictured above, at a charity event in San Francisco), stayed in a $4,000/night presidential suite. Colin Cowie, the celebrity wedding planner who's seen Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Jennifer Lopez, and others to the altar, organized the nupt

Forbes.com, Magazine United at Last by LayoffsYesterday

We hear Forbes, the fussily conservative business magazine, is laying off Web and print staff today, and merging the surviving editors and writers into a single newsroom. It only took them a decade.

Peter Kafka, a former Forbes.com editor, reports that 19 have been laid off from both the print and online sides. Other sources give a breakdown: 17 from print, chiefly those with the longest tenure and hence the highest salaries; and 2 from the Web, both recent hires.

Forbes and Forbes.com have been run separately since the late '90s, when the Forbes family hoped to make some quick cash by spinning out the dotcom in an IPO. The public offering never happened, but Forbes Media's split has persisted, exacerbated by turf wars and infighting. (Forbes.com did not want Dan Lyons, the magazine writer who turned into a superstar blogger as Fake Steve Jobs, to write for the website; he left for Newsweek last year.)

Plans to merge the two feuding operations first leaked in October. In November, the company, which is

The Sick Internet Joke About 9/11: ✈ ▌▌Yesterday

An airplane flies into two vertical objects: For many ordinary New Yorkers, it's a horrible, still-living memory. For Internet commenters, it's absolutely hilarious.

A user on eBaum's World, a site which posts pictures and invites often profane discussion, suggested his peers search on a string of icons — "✈ ▌▌" — and thereby launch it onto Google Trends, the search engine's tracker for swiftly rising Internet phenomena.

The trick worked; Google's algorithm declared the glyph's rise "volcanic." And despite a surge of protests about its tastelessness, the Googlers have yet to censor the term, as they've been known to do with other offensive searches which show up on Google Trends, like a swastika symbol which showed up last summer.

Officially, Google says it has robots which take

The Russian Bear Slashes a Social NetworkYesterday

The bubble in social networking has burst, decisively. LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut about 20 of 28 employees — and offered them no severance, we're told.

The quirky site, part blog and part social network, is best known for its users' weird obsessions — like the troublesome clique of Harry Potter erotica writers, whose outré tastes ran afoul of LiveJournal's efforts to comply with U.S. child-pornography laws. (Oddly, the site also gained a following in Russia, which led to its acquisition by Sup.) All that adds up to an environment even more distasteful to advertisers than the typical social site.

The company's product managers and engineers were laid off, leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers — which speaks to a website to be left on life support. Matt Berardo, a Yahoo executive hired on last summer, is also believed to be gone.

The company's Moscow-based management has told employees it blames the "global economic downturn" — the kind of pat excuse every boss is giving for layoffs, even w