“Extraordinary. Incredible. Tremendous. Amazing. Unprecedented. Extraordinary (again). Great. Revolutionary. Great. Extraordinary (yes, again). Unbelievable.” All these words Steve Jobs used to describe the ultra-thin MacBook Air during yesterday’s Macworld keynote. And all without any apparent regard to how that makes laptops which aren’t so thin as the MacBook Air feel. Instead, it takes this brave video from YouTube auteur Kevin Nalts to expose the truth.

Source:Valleywag

Oracle has acquired BEA for $8.5 billion. Sun has acquired MySQL for $1 billion. These events are not coincidence. Oracle, which already makes a database, wants to add BEA’s software on top of that database. Sun, which makes application servers and other software which connects to databases, wants to slip MySQL in underneath that layer. It all adds up to what geeks and software salesmen call a “stack,” or a complete package of interconnecting programs.

The irony is that BEA rose to prominence on the notion that its application server would make things simpler for database buyers. Buy any database you’d like, and BEA’s application server would connect to it. Likewise, MySQL grew as a cheaper, open-source alternative to databases from IBM and Oracle.

A database here, an application server there, a bit of open-source software on top of that all sounds nice in theory. It proved in practice to be a headache for the influential tech buyers at large corporations. One salesperson calling on them, one phone number to dial when things went wrong, it turns out, is what they really wanted.

The consolidation was inevitable, if perhaps a bit sad. The goal of the stack game is to make sure that your software is the layer on top — the one that matters to programmers, the one applications are designed for. BEA and MySQL both had grand ambitions in that regard. Those are now coming to an end. Sun and Oracle will no doubt make grand statements about how compatible their software is, how well their children play with others. Ignore those. The history of IT tells us those promises are false.

Source:Valleywag

Remember the comparisons between Amazon’s Kindle and the iPod? Don’t try them on Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The Kindle was a bad idea, Jobs told the New York Times after yesterday’s Macworld keynote. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” Mmhmm, Mr. Jobs. And whose fault is that?

Today’s Examiner features a front-page story on Moose’s, the recently remodeled North Beach bar-with-a-very-nice-restaurant-attached that Valleywag has taken over as our Friday happy hour spot. Co-owner and bar dominatrix Valen “rhymes with Van Halen” West lets Owen park his PowerBook right where 20th-century gossip legend Herb Caen’s typewriter used to be. I’ll be there, too, with a couple extra pairs of sunglasses in case you forgot yours. 4 p.m. until Owen’s corporate card maxes out. 1652 Stockton Street on Washington Square. Valet parking for Valley people, or the 9X/30/45 lines for Munitards. (Photo by Jason Steinberg/San Francisco Examiner)

Source:Valleywag

A constant thorn in copyright-holders’s sides, The Pirate Bay is finally taking on water. Swedish authorities, aided by evidence gathered during a 2006 raid, are preparing legal battle against captains Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm for “conspiracy to breach copyrights.” Although Pirate Bay doesn’t actively host files, it indexes shared BitTorrent files, which in Hollywood’s eyes makes it equally culpable. The founders are confident they’ll win. The prosecutor, Hakan Roswell, is confident that even if they lose, it “wouldn’t stop the service.” Of course. If Sweden cracks down, the pirates will just seek less-hostile waters.

Source:Valleywag

Valleywag has learned that Amazon.com has invested $4 million in sale-a-day e-commerce site Woot. The deal gives Amazon right of first refusal to buy the company should Woot hit certain unnamed sales targets, want to go public, or sell to another company. For the most part, the companies operate independently. But there’s more to Woot, and its ties to Amazon, than meets the eye.

The company has an extensive back-end sales and distribution network, buying and selling closeout goods to other companies in the industry, including finding items for Amazon to sell on its Gold Box promotion site. It’s expanding into T-shirts and wine, as well. Its fulfillment operations are large and sophisticated enough to qualify for FedEx and USPS’s SmartPost service (though plenty of users have complained about missed SmartPost deliveries, so that’s nothing to brag about). Perhaps the most astounding tidbit of information we got? Woot gets 250,000 views in the first three minutes after midnight from consumers looking to grab the next new item for sale.

Sarah Lacy’s long-awaited book on Web 2.0 is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. The title: Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0. It’s due for release on May 15, which means we’ll probably see copies circulating in late April. Future reviewers, let us save you the work of coming up with a kicker: Yes, the title practically begs for Lacy to announce a followup oeuvre to prove she, too, is more than just lucky.

Most might kill for an iPhone, but not director David Lynch. Appalled by the notion of viewing his movie on a cell phone, Lynch rants about the technology in one of the featurettes accompanying the special edition of Inland Empire. Of course, YouTube louts have crowdsourced this into an anti-iPhone spot.

Source:Valleywag

I’m as ready as anyone to declare Sony the victor in the epic high-definition disc battle. Its Blu-ray, now supported by Warner Bros., looks set to best Toshiba’s HD-DVD. In Hollywood, where they still care about the industrial process of shipping plastic discs by the millions to retail stores, this matters. In the Valley, we’ve long since moved on. Sony executives still dream of formats, hardware, and an empire of lock-in. To them, “software” means the creative content screened in theaters, dropped into CD players, or played on a videogame console. That’s why they’re doomed to lose the real war.

Here we know better. Software is the ingredient that turns content into quicksilver, shifting in time and place to the device we desire, at the moment we choose. Apple has mastered this alchemy, and others like Microsoft and Amazon.com are studying the fast; but to Sony it remains a dark art.

Online video remains immensely fragmented. Should you download a video on Xbox Live? Buy it on Amazon.com’s Unbox via your TiVo set-top? Rent it on iTunes, and broadcast it to your flat-screen display with an Apple TV? The choices seem endless, and endlessly confusing. But none of them, I’d note, market themselves based on a format. The format, if any, is broadband, and a set of standardized audio/video connectors. The rest is fungible.

There will no doubt be a shakeout among online-video stores. If nothing else kills off the weaker players, consumers will rapidly tire of purchasing the same movies again and again. A rack of DVDs on the shelf provides a reassuring sense of permanence. Perhaps physical media will make a comeback. Warren Lieberfarb, who helped invent the DVD at Warner Bros. and now consults for Toshiba on HD-DVD, predicts that flash-memory devices might be sold in stores preloaded with video.

Sony actually had that idea, I believe, with its MagicGate memory sticks. Another nonstandard format, tied to hardware, with buggy software. The same complaints are being made about Blu-ray, with its ever-shifting specification requiring firmware updates. Sony, drenched in blood, stands victorious in the optical-disc format battle. Too bad the war is now being waged in another theater.

Amateur attention seeker and entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick may be releasing a new project soon with Scott Karp, the creator of blogging tool Tumblr. Lodwick recently cut ties with both his beau, Julia Allison, and Connected Ventures, the startup he founded, now controlled by IAC and best known for Vimeo and College Humor. Without Barry Diller’s backing or Allison’s cleavage, how will the pasty, shirtless hipster generate the buzz he’s grown to expect but rarely deserves? By mocking the homeless.

CenterNetworks observed that norbum.org, a domain recently purchased by Lodwick, briefly went live with the message:

Norbum.org is an open, crowd-sourced, web 2.0 application powered by Tumblr. Why the name “Norbum”? Simply put, Norbum is like Nordstrom for the homeless. We bring to you the latest in urban street fashion from the people who live it. Rather than relying on an elitist group of professional editors, we invite our readers to submit photos of the most stylish street people from around the world. If you spot one of these edgy trendsetters, just snap a photo and email it to 2tvazf87@tumblr.com. We’ll post the best ones to Norbum.org.

Lodwick’s fashion sense has its own affinity with the homeless. But Norbum is clearly an attempt at attention-grabbing humor. I’ll concede the attention-grabbing part — I’m writing about it, aren’t I? — but the humor, after one weak chuckle, escaped me. Without Allison, without his partners at Connected Ventures, Lodwick’s limits are becoming more easily glimpsed. And less watchable every day.

Source:Valleywag

The herd of day traders is debating whether to buy Apple before Steve Jobs’s keynote at Macworld Expo. But following the herd is a strategy that generally leads to getting trampled. Eric Savitz of Barron’s spots a smarter strategy: Buy Amazon.com, and sell — or at least avoid — Barry Diller’s IAC. Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney says IAC has “few countercyclical hedges to protect against a potentially material economic slowdown in the U.S.” What does that mean?

It means that Diller, who prides himself on spreading his bets, has done a bad job. The company’s diversification into all fields of Internet business has proven a weakness rather than a strength — a fact even Diller now recognizes. That’s why he’s breaking the company up into bits, leaving an IAC that’s focused on online content and advertising. The remainder, however, will still be too vulnerable to the U.S. economy.

Bezos, meanwhile, has proved the opposite of Diller. He’s made one bet and stuck to it. And while e-commerce is no longer sexy on Sand Hill Road or on Wall Street, it continues to be a growth industry. The longer users have been on the Web, the more they tend to shop online.

His lone divagation from e-commerce — Amazon’s panoply of Web services, popular with gullible startups — is an exercise in renting out a computing infrastructure he’s built at great expense. It’s unlikely to be a better business than e-commerce, but it scores Bezos valuable press at little cost.

Mahaney’s stock analysis is not a shocker: The stock market undervalues persistence and overvalues change for change’s sake. What’s surprising is that so few people have taken this insight to the bank.

Amazon.com is moving its headquarters out of an aging hospital and into a shiny new corporate campus north of downtown developed by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. One of the main draws? “Great access to public transportation,” company spokeswoman Patty Smith tells the Seattle Times. Ah yes, that would be the South Lake Union trolley — known locally by the acronym “SLUT.” Just think: 6,000-some Amazon workers riding the Slut. All in a day’s work. (Photo by Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

If you’re worth $20 billion, I guess you can’t just go on a vacation. Even if you just got married. Larry Page and new bride Lucy Southworth headed down to Argentina after their Necker Island wedding last weekend — and Larry promptly met with Argentina’s recently elected president Cristina Kirchner. Kirchner bragged about her country’s software industry and Larry thumped his chest about alternative energy. Muy romantico. At least Larry continued to rock the urban mullet. Now go on your frigging honeymoon, okay? (Photo by Infobae.com)

Source:Valleywag

Why the frenzy of end-of-year redesigns at Google? Last week we noticed that Google was launching a new sidebar with Video and Products results. This evening, Google changed the “Products” button on its home page and search result pages to “Shopping.”

Originally called Froogle, a pun on “frugal,” Google Product Search has never really gotten the attention it deserved. It could have posed a threat to eBay or Amazon.com, especially when combined with Google Checkout, but it never really caught on. Additionally, for anyone who has ever used it, it’s certainly not the best product finder out there. I much prefer Amazon, with its huge collection of third-party merchants, for my shopping needs.

Regardless, we’re in the thick of the holiday shopping season and many, many buyers are turning to the Internet to find gifts without braving the mall. I’m buying all my gifts on Amazon. I have spent two to three times more at Amazon.com this year because of free two-day shipping from Amazon Prime. Larry and Sergey, when you give me something as awesome as that in Google Shopping, you’ll have a convert. Until then, Jeff Bezos gets my hard-earned bucks.

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Congratulations, Eidos: You’re officially off the hook. Responding to rumors that CNET fired GameSpot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann for slamming a game heavily advertised on the site (check out the highlights in the above clip), spokesperson Sarah Cain told Joystiq, “We do not terminate employees based on external pressure from advertisers.” We doubted that CNET would toss away its credibility so readily.

Kotaku got a longer if less poignant spiel from CNET’s improbably named director of public relations, Leslie Dotson Van Every:

“GameSpot takes its editorial integrity extremely seriously. For over a decade, GameSpot and the many members of its editorial team have produced thousands of unbiased reviews that have been a valuable resource for the gaming community. At CNET Networks, we stand behind the editorial content that our teams produce on a daily basis.”

Stand behind? If CNET stands behind its editorial content, why did it take down Gerstmann’s video review in the first place?

Source:Valleywag

Ahh, that feels good right there. I don’t think we’ll be talking about this week next week. The Facebook pile-on continued. Amazon’s Kindle reader suffered a surprise media backlash. I’d hoped for another bank-employee-in-tutu photo to liven things up. Instead we got Gerstmanngate. At least we still have jobs — oh wait, Valleywag party girl Megan “Leggy” McCarthy is heading to Wired. I think I’ll go curl up in the tub with my INVISIBLE PUPPY. (Photo by Jason Calacanis)

Walt Mossberg, surprisingly slow out of the gate, has finally deigned to review Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader. He was not kind, calling it “mediocre” and “marred by annoying flaws.” He also says that Amazon “nailed the electronic-book shopping experience,” which is no surprise given the success of Amazon.com, “but it has a lot to learn about designing electronic devices.” Harsh words from a top reviewer who can make or break a device. Here’s our question: what took him so long?

Newsweek had an glowing exclusive review from Steven Levy and New York Times tech reviewer David Pogue wrote up the Kindle soon after it was made public, but it took Mossberg more than a week to review the device. What happened? Another tech columnist told us that Mossberg “was only interested in reviewing it if he could be first. When Steven Levy got it first Walt threw a tantrum.” Classy. We also hear Mossberg tried to edge out other reviewers to be first on the iPhone — but got turned down. Incidentally, I still haven’t gotten any response from Amazon PR about a review unit. What’s up with that? I’ll be nicer than Mossberg — maybe.