Mazen Araabi, a venture capitalist at First Round Capital, has just put up a new blog. Until recently, Mazen was an MBA student at UCLA Anderson. He was also part of the founding team at MySpace, at ResponseBase, and was an early employee at Xdrive.com. He’s now up in the Bay Area (we’ll forgive him) [...]
Rafat Ali has an interesting post (and photo) of George Lucas and Chad Hurley at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad this morning. Apparently George Lucas was telling Chad and Steve of YouTube to donate money to film schools like USC. (George Lucas went to USC, and last year he donated $175M to [...]
Wired’s Epicenter blog picks up on an LA entrepreneur looking for their CTO on YouTube. An interesting article and interview with Ken McBride at Stamps.com by the New York Times on adoption of custom stamps; Ticketmaster buys a stake in a Chinese ticketing firm.
I posted a few days ago about the heavy trading of rumors on blog sites lately. The latest is an unsubstantiated rumor that Peter Adderton is out at Los Angeles MVNO Amp’d Mobile. For background, ValleyWag, the Silicon Valley “gossip” rag ran a piece yesterday claiming that Adderton is out as CEO at the firm; then, [...]
BoingBoing today highlights an interesting program that looks to train computer programmers to become journalists, in a grant program which gives computer programmers a master degree in Journalism. Given the hand wringing over widespread cost cutting and layoffs in the newspaper industry (the latest being the San Francisco Chronicle), and with offshore outsourcing both reducing [...]
Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington, in a post from very early this morning, says “Silicon Valley sucks“. Arrington says, in the post, titled “Silicon Valley Could Use A Downturn Right About Now” that: It’s no longer about beautiful products and genius developers. It’s about the money and the status, and hot PR chicks and marketing departments. Maybe [...]
In the ongoing debate over blog credibility, it seems like the past week or so has been heavy on the rumors, and pretty light on details. False rumors published on Engadget of a delay to Apple’s iPhone took a chunk out of Apple’s market cap last week, and although there were very few announcements, there [...]
The online advertising M&A frenzy is continuing unabated this morning, as Microsoft announced it is acquiring online ad firm aQuantive in a $6B deal. The deal comes one day after advertising firm WPP said it would acquire 24/7 Media for $649M in cash, and shortly after Google purchased Doubleclick in a $3.1B deal, and Yahoo [...]
Some interesting items for today: Google just added a Flash slideshow feature for the firm’s Picasa online web picture albums, and to show it off they’re posted a slideshow of their new Santa Monica offices. Plus, Luis Villalobos of the Tech Coast Angels gets his picture in the New York Times, along with an extensive [...]
The entire Silicon Valley press core is at Google today for the Google Searchology event, where they announced a number of new tools. Google has several of their tools live online now at Google Experimental, including a new timeline tool which shows your query on a timeline; keyboard shortcuts (for the geeks out there missing [...]
Thoughts and commentary from Benjamin F. Kuo, publisher of socalTECH.com.
