Tag Archives: TechCrunch

News you gotta have to end your week – 1/30/09

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Or your month

  • TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington is ‘taking a break’ from blogging, and running for his life. While the latter part seems pretty serious, the editor of the venerable Silicon Valley news resource is also blaming a Wall Street Journal property and one of Nick Denton’s gossip columns for some of his woes. And if that’s not enough, Ted Dziuba has called Arrington on the carpet regarding the part of the story dealing with a purportedly known felon who also purportedly owns a gun. We haven’t heard the last of this.
  • Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman says it’s a wonderful time for buyouts. Henry Kravis too says private equity isn’t dead. It may not seem all that obvious, but these guys have a point – valuations are dropping right along with forecasts, which will in part make up for the fact that nobody can borrow like they used to. Further, I think this will play well with the middle-market buyout houses too – I’m sure there are a lot of business out there which the owners (often the founders) would trade a pile of liquidity for right about now.
  • Of the top performing branded pages on Facebook, only two are really brands. I take that back – if you are selling Barack Obama or Homer Simpson collectibles, you should be jumping for joy right now. And not to be outdone by the furious ‘business competition’ (read: frivolous attention mongering) which always exists among venture-backed startups, Facebook itself is the 8th ranked branded page on Facebook.
  • Les Jones asks what if we had inflation, and nobody showed up for the party? The hyperinflation question is being bounded about, and at the same time so is the deflation meme. I suspect that when and/or if the dollar takes such a whacking that an iPod costs $1,000, people are just going to quit buying iPods. Same goes for TVs, autos, etc., although they’ve pretty much quit buying most of that stuff already. I think the tougher question regarding which way prices go is whether or not the US can provide its own staples – a gallon of milk at $20 would be a real problem.
  • Talk of Google’s mysterious GDrive offering is bouncing about again – it’s file access anytime, anywhere. Meanwhile, Joel Spolsky says don’t ever rely on Google Apps for anything mission critical, or even keeping your coffee dates straight. I won’t be using either, regardless of the reliability. And while I don’t believe Google is going to disappear anytime soon, Mark Glaser is warning on Facebook/Twitter dependence, using alternate reasoning for those two ‘businesses’.

    • Last but not least:

  • Moldy Chum finds the final connection between golf and fly fishing, which means there is still hope for you fly fishing folks looking for AMEX and Buick endorsements.

    • And finally…

  • A new study finds alcohol makes men better in the bedroom. Last week we had to be rich. Now we just have to be drunk?

    • Adieu.

    Corporation says hackers still matter

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    A Red Hat executive has announced that “hackers still matter.” Hacking software for fun is still okay, I guess. And maybe even a productive endeavor? Techcrunch must be regular tech sector corporate reading material now.

    Boy, if we could just get law enforcement to quit locking up everyone who discloses a security vulnerability for altuistic reasons (like forcing some byzantine software manufacturer to fix it), we’d be in business. Maybe they should start reading blogs too.

    NewsGator talks RSS’s future, and a reaction ensues

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    Newsgator posted a company roadmap a few days back. Techcrunch picked up on it.

    I reviewed both offerings, and concluded the following: first, Bloglines is fine for me, and considering the fact that I have been using it since nearly day one, I’m going to need some hell of a compelling reason to switch readers (which I wish NewsGator would provide, since they are a local outfit – but then again, I suspect they are doing pretty well targeting the commercial enterprise); second, I am now enthralled with FeedBurner.

    Henceforth, tweaked feeds, now playing at Thought Market and Spamroll.

    Ode to RSS (and independent reviews).