Alexander, Oliver, and Marc Samwer, founders of a German eBay knockoff, have invested “$10 million to $15 million” in Facebook, joining Microsoft and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing in a financing round that has valued Facebook at $15 billion. We hear Li Ka-Shing could double his investment in the company, bringing the total raised to almost $400 million. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Source:Valleywag
Today’s most popular stories are

• 
  APPLE
  
  (1,548 views)
• 
  MACWORLD 2008
  
  (1,387 views)
• 
  JAKOB LODWICK
  
  (1,026 views)

Today’s most discussed stories are

Introducing the MacBook Air, or at least its ad campaign (13 comments), Macworld 2008 Steve Jobs keynote (5) and The weapon used to beat the man Google helped arrest (5).

Source:Valleywag

Poor Ars Electronica and Gizmodo. The gadget sites invited San Francisco’s thirsty class over for some pre-Macworld booze at Harlot in SoMa last night, and the assembled crowd drank the hosted bar dry in 35 minutes flat. I ran into a host of familiar faces there, including a certain Farker who goes by the unforgettable login of “catbutt.” So unforgettable that I called him … well, something else instead. And no, I’m not throwing David Ulevitch the shocker — just a gesture that looks a lot like it. Fake Steve Jobs blogger Dan Lyons, making his Macworld debut, drew a tight bubble of fans around him everywhere he went.

Photos by Randal Alan Smith

galleryPost(’arsgizmodomacworld’, 9, ‘Ars Electronica and Gizmodo party’);

Source:Valleywag

Since I first noticed that Fake Bono had taken over Fake Steve Jobs’s blog, I’ve been wondering who Fake Bono really is. We had a number of guesses: Dan Lyons was taking on a second alter ego; Bono himself was writing; Marc Bodnick, cofounder of Elevation Partners, where Bono is a partner, was taking a turn; and Bono-wannabe Valleywag contributor Paul Boutin. After carefully reviewing the Bono posts, we’re ready to reveal the identity of Fake Bono.

As I read through the posts, I noticed a number of themes consistent with another writer I know. References to Natali Del Conte, Nick Denton, and, crucially, Armani sunglasses.

The brats at the Armani store didn’t even know about my Armani Bono Red sunglasses. They’re the same shades I wore on the Elevation tour, priced at a reasonable $145, and 40 percent of the take goes to help your brothers and sisters still suffering. Plus if you’re a blogger and getting kind of wrinkly around the eyes, they’re a lot cheaper than plastic surgery. My good friend Nick Denton in New York bought a pair for one of his gang who’s a bit over the hill. The man looks fantastic now. Fox TV called him on to talk about Google for 15 minutes. God’s truth. It was the shades.

OK, now yes, this definitely suggests Valleywag special correspondent — make that very special correspondent — Paul Boutin. Except, these posts go ON AND ON, rambling and sounding like someone slightly high wrote them. Boutin is the king of the 100-word post and has encouraged me numerous times to JUST GET TO THE POINT.

And yet he even looks like Bono! Here’s a screen cap from a recent Boing Boing TV episode — Boutin is towards the end if you want to see his take on lolcats.

Could he be responsible for these directionless diatribes about Red products and how important Bono is? Well, they’ve both got the self-important part down. I pinged Mr. Boutin to see what was up.

BulldogPup83: Hey Paul, did you read Fake Steve Jobs this weekend?
ArmaniGlasses: Read it? I fucking wrote it.
BulldogPup83: I knew it!
BulldogPup83: Natali Del Conte and your silly sunglasses totally gave you away.
ArmaniGlasses: FOX cancelled on me though.
ArmaniGlasses: I think they found out I’m a libertarian which effectively means a Republican, and their whole idea was to have some whiny liberal blogger from San Francsico on to go WAAAHHHHH GOOGLE IS TOO POWERFUL.
ArmaniGlasses: What was your question again?
BulldogPup83: Oh nothing. Just saying hi.
ArmaniGlasses: Natali gave me away? I’m going to kill her.
ArmaniGlasses: Oh wait, she’ll do that goddam scream if I do, aieee.
BulldogPup83: I know you think she’s awesome and all, but do you really think that Bono would know who she is?
BulldogPup83: He barely knows who the other members of U2 are, never mind Natali Del Conte.
BulldogPup83: total giveaway
ArmaniGlasses: and you giiiiiiive yourself awwaaayyyy, and you giiiiiive yourself awaaaayyyyy, and you give …
BulldogPup83: Thanks for the help, I appreciate your time Mr. Boutin
ArmaniGlasses: Wow, I haven’t been called “Mr Boutin” since the last time the NY Times mentioned me.
BulldogPup83: I suspect you can have me killed. Must be respectful.
ArmaniGlasses: Xeni on line 1 here, gotta hop
ArmaniGlasses: toodles

So there you have it! Fake Bono is Valleywag very special correspondent Paul Boutin. Namaste to Valleywag commenter Sample032 for figuring it out in about 4 seconds.

We now know the identity of “Ted,” the no-longer mysterious force behind VC ratings site TheFunded.com. He’s Adeo Ressi, who cofounded Total New York, an early Web city guide, back in 1994. But where did his “Ted” nickname come from? Ressi revealed to Valleywag that his early users, a group which may have included FuckedCompany founder Philip Kaplan, dubbed him “Ted” to annoy him, since that was the name of Ressi’s supposed “nemesis.” Now that we know who Ressi is, there’s one obvious candidate: Total New York cofounder Ted Werth.

Source:Valleywag

Why is Adeo Ressi smilling? The serial entrepreneur, now CEO of Game Trust, has pulled one over Sand Hill Road. Through a forwarded Skype phone line, Gmail account, and proxy-registered domain name, he’s hidden his secret identity as “Ted,” the creator of VC-ratings discussion board TheFunded.com. Now, at a time of his own choosing, staged in sync with a Wired profile, Ressi has outed himself. Which tells us one thing: He’s much, much smarter than Fake Steve Jobs blogtard Dan Lyons.

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has more details on the upcoming wedding of Google founder Larry Page and his girlfriend Lucy Southworth. The Chronicle confirms that it will be happening the weekend of December 8, but they can’t seem to find the location. As we told you earlier this month, it’s taking place on Necker Island, the Caribbean hideaway owned by Virgin billionaire Richard Branson. Branson, naturally, is expected to attend the event, along with San Francisco god-mayor Gavin Newsom and “many current and former Google employees” (Perhaps ex-girlfriend Marissa Mayer?). One person, though, is skipping the bash.

That’s former U.S. Vice President and current Google “senior advisor” Al Gore, who has a previous engagement in Oslo, Norway that weekend — he’s receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. (”Larry Page allowed that, on the list of excuses, that was acceptable,” Gore told the Chronicle.) Gore is hoping to attend via videoconferencing, destroying any pretense of this being a high-society soirée –Necker’s going to be Nerd Island for the weekend.

Source:Valleywag

The slight case of sniffles and coughs making the rounds in SF has been dubbed the Woz Cold. Urban legend has it that Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak appeared to introduce Fake Steve blogger Dan Lyons on the Peninsula a week ago despite a nagging head and/or chest cold, depending on who you ask. Woz shook hands and buddied up for photos at the event. Now we’re all snuffling and Apple’s stock is … oh wait, it’s back near 170. Never mind.

Let us bow and say thank you to the gods of Silicon Valley for everything that’s not in this 1994 version of “24.”

Source:Valleywag
Today’s most popular headlines are Facebook’s internal “Wall of Shame” (1,917 views today), 8 steps to getting fans on Facebook (1,404) and How Microsoft knifed its CIO (1,124). Today’s most discussed stories are Never have truer words been spammed (5 comments), Microsoft exec trashes Google’s OpenSocial (4) and Why isn’t the Googlephone guy rich? (4).

Source:Valleywag

The dirty secret behind last night’s book-tour party for Dan Lyons, the man behind the Fake Steve Jobs blog? Rumor is it almost didn’t happen, thanks to a little tiff over who was going to rep him. Flack fight! After the jump, the real battle over Fake Steve.

galleryPost(’fakestevepartyfrisson’, 8, ‘Fake Steve throws a real party’);

Here’s the back story. Marc Bodnick, a cofounder of Elevation Partners, the private-equity firm behind Forbes, where Lyons has a day job, suggested plugged-in matchmaker Brooke Hammerling to make high-level introductions in the Valley. This move, insiders say, confounded Lyons’s publisher, Da Capo Press, which had its own PR operation, and momentarily threw plans for the party out of joint. Hammerling vehemently denies there was any friction. Da Capo ended up handling press for Lyons’s book tour, and Hammerling and the book publisher threw a joint party at Frisson, the restaurant part-owned by Facebook board member Peter Thiel.

Thiel, alas, didn’t show, but San Francisco’s tech press corps turned out in droves, and in the case of videoblogger Natali Del Conte, kickass boots. Also crowding the joint: a bevy of Lyons’s Forbes colleagues, past and present, and backers from Elevation Partners. Digg board member Brett Bullington no-commented his way through the evening. An unusually buttoned-up Hammerling, when she wasn’t schmoozing, was ringing up copies of Options for Lyons to sign.

Source:Valleywag

“Once every hundred years media changes.” With those words, at 2:37 PM Eastern time yesterday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg officially flipped Silicon Valley’s bozo bit. East Coast cynic Nick Carr has the best response:

It’s true. Look back over the last millennium or two, and you’ll see that every century, like clockwork, there’s been a big change in media. Cave painting lasted a hundred years, and then there was smoke signaling, which also lasted a hundred years, and of course there was the hundred years of yodeling, and then there was the printing press, which was invented almost precisely 100 years ago, and so forth and so on up to the present day — the day that Facebook picked up the 100-year torch and ran with it.

Source:Valleywag

The Q&A session at the Computer History Museum last night was billed as a talk between former Apple evangelist turned venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki and former anonymous blogger turned book shill Dan Lyons, better known as Fake Steve Jobs. But it quickly turned into a sordid three-way. Brad Stone, the New York Times scribe who outed Lyons as Fake Steve joined the two on stage, and what was billed as the “Confessions of Fake Steve Jobs” turned into a celebration of Apple, blogging, and Dan Lyons’s massive mancrush on the real Steve Jobs.

Fireworks, we thought, were inevitable when Lyons got on stage with Kawasaki, whom he’s savaged on his blog. Turns out the worst thing Fake Steve said about Kawasaki was that he was a motorcycle designer, something Kawasaki found amusing. Our promised fireworks turned into kiddy-safe Independence Day sparklers.

Something to know about Dan Lyons: The man is as hilarious in person as in his best blog posts. He’s quick, succinct, and dead-on with his observations. He is, as they say in Detroit, “wicked smaht.” Also, he has a huge hard-on for Steve Jobs. Like, major mancrush. Lyons describes Jobs as a “son of Zeus born to a mere mortal” and other outrageous claims, which makes it seem like he’s taking the piss out of Jobsian worshipers. Not true. Lyons really is an Apple fanboy who believes in the infallibility of His Steveness. Jobs is, to Lyons, “the most interesting person alive.”

Which seems like the most boring thing he could say. But here’s a secret for you: That awe is what makes the blog work. Lyons clearly venerates Jobs, without which his Fake Steve blog might come across as mean-spirited, not a satirical celebration.

One question kept coming up: How was Lyons treated by people who he slammed in the blog? He admitted to being worried about their reactions, but said that there have been few negative repercussions. He brought up Bike Helmet Girl, an early target for Fake Steve due to her appearance in a photo taken at a Yelp party last year. He initially ran the photo with a derisive caption. “Bikey” wrote in, a correspondence was born, and her character became a recurring figure in the blog. Lyons finally got a chance to meet her at a book signing last week, and spent a good minute in the Fake Steve character, dreamily recounting their meeting. (Lyons never revealed the lingering question about Bike Helmet Girl: Why was she wearing a bike helmet in the first place?)

I asked him about an article he wrote for Forbes, “Attack of the Blogs,” a cover story which he railed against anonymous blogging as an abhorrent practice. Has being an anonymous blogger changed his mind about such practices? He admitted that he would like to “get a do-over” and rewrite the story. He likened his attack to writing a story focusing on spam as an example that all email was bad. “Tomorrow, Valleywag will call you a hypocrite,” Kawasaki warned him.

Other Fake Steve revelations:

• Someone named “Katie Cotton” — the same name as the head of Apple PR — ordered a number of Fake Steve T-shirts from CafePress. (Brad Stone asked the real Cotton about the purchase. She declined to discuss any clothing purchases.)
• The front row was filled with a line of Apple employees, one of whom brought an OS X programming book as light reading during downtime.
• Kawasaki asked Lyons and Stone if they thought they would always be known as “Fake Steve” and “the guy who busted Fake Steve,” much like Eddie Murphy will always be known as Donkey from Shrek. Lyons and Stone’s reactions suggested they thought Kawasaki was nuts — and then started talking about how Donkey wasn’t really representative of Eddie Murphy’s career.
• Brad Stone broke the news that Lyons was Fake Steve while Lyons was on his way to a Maine vacation with his wife, a vacation he had promised would be work- and blog-free. Stone’s call to Lyons while he was en route changed all that. During their conversation, it was revealed that Lyons is the father of two-year-old twins. Stone and his wife are expecting twins soon. As their call was ending, Lyons promised Stone that he would buy two voodoo dolls of the twins and poke them at 2 a.m. random nights, to make up for Stone ruining Lyons’s vacation.

newVideoPlayer(”fakestevewoz.flv”, 475, 376);
Dan Lyons, the faux Apple CEO blogger, is introduced by the real Steve Wozniak. Check Woz’s manic but funny patter about Kathy Griffin, Fake Steve, and Apple.

Oprah Winfrey is launching her own YouTube channel. It will have clips and behind-the-scenes footage from her show. The unveiling will occur November 6 on the Oprah show along with YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, Tyson the skateboarding dog and Judson Laipply, the “Evolution of Dance” guy. That’ll be a fun show to watch. Hope someone posts it on YouTube.

Seriously, if anyone can make a YouTube channel work, it’s Winfrey. Her show grabs 5 million viewers a day, and presumably some of them have computers. On the other hand, her past Web performance does not bode well for the venture. The last Oprah foray onto the web was the Oxygen cable-net/website which imploded and was sold off to NBC Universal, long after Winfrey had backed out of the venture.

Source:Valleywag

This weekend, check out manmade ski jumps, old computers, and — in case you’re not completely over Fake Steve Jobs — more, more, more Dan Lyons! All in this weekend’s Valleywag Calendar.

• Plaxo, one of the OpenSocial members, shows off “the opening of the social Web” today from 4-6 p.m. at their offices in Mountain View. [Upcoming]
• The Vintage Computer Festival is this weekend at the Computer History Museum. If you’re a supernerdy way-old-school videogamer, you can play Space War on an original PDP-1. That’s the first videogame ever, on the first machine it was programmed for. [Vintage.org]
• More Dan Lyons! Tonight, he’s reading Options at Books Inc in the Castro at 7:30 p.m. And by “reading Options,” we actually mean “cracking jokes about Nick Denton and Robert Scoble.” Lyons never actually reads from his book at these things. [Upcoming]
• Icerair, the build-a-ski-jump party in San Francisco, takes place at AT&T Park this weekend. [Icerair]

So I’m here at Keplers, the bookstore in Menlo Park, with a bunch of Stevetards waiting for Dan Lyons, the faux Apple CEO who pens The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs and the new book Options, a parody memoir of Steve Jobs. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak has taken the podium, and is speaking a mile a minute, referencing his on-again, off-again romance with comedienne Kathy Griffin. And then he spins into a weird numerological digression. I’m starting to think this guy is actually kind of nuts. And then Wozniak presents him with a genuine Apple turtleneck. It’s only getting weirder from here, I fear.

“This is the highlight of my life — the birth of my children, and meeting Woz,” says Lyons, like some pathetic starstruck fanboy. This is the man who called me “Bigglesworth“? I’m wondering who the real pussycat is.

Lyons starts by explaining how he got the “Secret Diary” moniker from the British magazine Private Eye. The whole idea, he explains, was just to learn more about blogging and figure out how tools like Blogger works. The blog spiraled from there.

“I don’t know anything about Steve Jobs,” Lyons says. “This is as close as I’ve ever gotten,” he adds, pointing to Wozniak. He recounts how he closed down the blog, and a reader actually reposted his archive, which prompted Lyons to continue.

Lyons then makes a gaffe: “I’ve written a lot of books, which are still available on Amazon.com.” The owner of Keplers coughs and glares at him. “Sorry. In a brick-and-mortar store, you never say the ‘A’ word.”