The Gizmodo crew are with me at the CES 2008 Unveiled press event reporting on widgets and gizmos, but what really has the attention of the geeks at CES? Women, food and robotic beer coolers.

• Veronica Belmont of Mahalo Daily is here with a crew of three or four people — and that’s before her Engadget support team shows up. Jason, I thought the point of podcasting was you didn’t need a big support staff.

• There are the usual event staples of fish and pasta, but then there is a lone waitress walking around with delicious lamb chops. Every time she walks by I hear a quiet chorus from the surrounding press flacks: “ooh, are those lamb chops?”
  
• A remote-controlled rolling robotic beer cooler. True, this is a gadget but it combines laziness, beer, and completely uselessness; three tried and true geek pastimes.

Source:Valleywag

A tipster tells us that he was approached by Red Herring magazine to work as a reporter from his “home office,” probably something similar to this job for a Wireless Reporter which is currently on the Red Herring jobs page. He turned the job down very quickly, but says that he later talked to the fellow who ended up taking the job who was having “difficulty” getting paid. No surprise there, given the “difficulties” the magazine has had recently. “What pissed me off most was that they were approaching people when they had to know they were in such financial straits.”

Google is cracking down on copyright-infringing videos uploaded to its site. Sort of. Click through to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire ” on YouTube and you’ll see a yellow box which reads, “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.” This is bad news for Songza, the Web jukebox which rips the audio track from YouTube videos.

If there’s no audio track to rip, Songza will go silent. But after so many obnoxious parodies using BIlly Joel’s song in the past few weeks, we’re not so sure that, in this particular instance, Google’s ban isn’t actually good news for the rest of us.

In a shareholders’ conference call yesterday, Pay By Touch CFO Robert Sigler told investors the company plans to raise $150 million in 2008. This after Pay By Touch management has already burned through over $300 million since its founding and cost some 250 jobs just this fall. Tell you what, I hope Sigler and returning COO Eula Adams find their investors. Beause whoever they are, maybe I can find something to sell them, too. (Photo of the Brooklyn Bridge by absolutwade)

Those sneaky dastards! The reality behind Google’s mysterious free 411 service is far more insidious than we could have imagined. The conspiracy theories ran rampant: We even wondered if it was a way to test the effectiveness of Google-brokered billboard ads! But no. According to Google VP Marissa Mayer, it’s actually a way to record our voices and get inside our heads. The horror!

Says Mayer:

The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model.

That’s right. GOOG-411 is free — as in free labor for Google. If you want to dial alocal pizzeria that badly, you’re going to have to volunteer to train Google’s speech recognition software. Mayer suggests that all this talk will be put towards projects like video search. Great. All this so we can find Robert Scoble whiteboard videos on YouTube. (Photo by Gaetan Lee)

Source:Valleywag

Famous YouTuber Noah Kalina writes on his blog that a Simpsons writer called to say using the soundtrack from Kalina’s YouTube video without paying a royalty was a mistake. Whatever. Here’s what we should have said the first time, instead of rambling on about fair use and copyright: Watch this awesome video of Homer Simpson paroding a famous YouTube video. [Noah Kalina. Blog.]

Source:Valleywag

Eula Adams, who’s returned to trouble payments company Pay By Touch as its COO, said during a conference call for investors today that at least two independent investigations into alleged illegal acts by officers of the company came up empty:

When issues were raised, we spent $50,000 hiring a firm to interview people and try to determine whether allegations were valid or invalid. And we were prepared to take action.

Nothing turned up, claimed Adams. A surprising outcome, considering what we’ve heard about the company and the man who ran it.

We’ve chronicled allegations of sexual harrassment, wrongful termination, drug use in the office, property destruction, more wrongful termination and threatening emails. Makes us wonder who, exactly, did these investigators speak to, and did they hear the truth? Let us know.

Failing biometrics company Pay By Touch has shed 250 employees in the last “couple months,” COO Eula Adams said on a call for shareholders today. Of that 250, Adams said new management “took out” 90 employees in the last couple of weeks. The cuts came to “non-core” Pay By Touch initiatives in “healthcare, online, government,” Adams said.

All of it confirms a rumor posted by a commenter a few weeks back. “Rumor has it that TODAY IS LAYOFF DAY! Again!”

Thanks for weathering the storm where we did not pay you for six weeks! Sorry for that month we still OWE you! uhm, yeah and we won’t be paying you out when you go, and we’ll probably just keep your vacation. So hoist a few and call a lawyer! It’ll be fun!

This doesn’t answer the question of how Pay By Touch got into “healthcare, online, government” in the first place. Shouldn’t it have, say, figured out how to make money off fingerprint-approved payments first?

Web software provider NetSuite’s IPO, set for this Friday, should be one of the last of 2007. Despite losing $20.6 million on $76.8 million in revenues — wait, isn’t Web software supposed to be more profitable than desktop software? — expectations are running high. Get-rich-quick artists may be disappointed.

NetSuite says it doesn’t expect subsequent market demand to immediately match share prices set by its auction-model IPO, according to the Wall Street Journal. Translation: The price will drop. Somebody ought to warn Craig Ramsey, the Salesforce.com board member who invested in the company. Unless this is exactly what he wanted to happen. Crafty!

Source:Valleywag

Failed biometrics payments firm Pay By Touch has filed voluntarily for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and will sell subsidiaries ATM Direct and CardSystems, employees learned during an all-hands on Friday. During the meeting, Pay By Touch COO Eula Adams asked employees to remain positive. Then he virtually assured that wouldn’t happen by explaining the company’s payroll situation.

Adams said the company still owes $3 million in back pay, and, according to our source, new investors in the company have demanded that money not be paid. Which of course leads to a pressing question: Pay By Touch has new investors? For their sake, let’s hope company founder John Rogers didn’t set their price.

You too can own a piece of the dystopian future! Bill Joy, the grimfaced Sun Microsystems cofounder who likes to muse on humanity’s demise, is putting his $40 million triplex in Manhattan’s West Village up for sale. He never even moved in. The future does not need humanity. Nor does a 11,000-sq. ft. condo, apparently.

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Source:Valleywag

Employees smart enough to flee the sinking ship known as Pay By Touch are getting their comeuppance. While the new custodial rule of Tom Lumsden has managed to raise $9 million, part of which is earmarked for six weeks of missed paychecks during founder John Rogers’ last hurrah, he’s not wasting pennies on deserters. A tipster forwarded us an email exchange between a “screwed employee,” who was originally told ex-employees would be paid back wages alongside the suckers, and Pay By Touch HR executive Judy Nelson. Here’s the key piece of the email:

The policy of paying terminated employees has changed since you had your exit interview now that we have a custodian in place. Our plan when you terminated your employment is different than what is happening now.

Now there’s a suspicion among Pay By Touch refugees that they’ll be treated like creditors — winding up on the bottom of the accounts payable list. At least those with new jobs can console themselves with the fact that they’ll be receiving regularly scheduled checks for the foreseeable future.

“The problem with most conferences is we don’t have enough to do,” laments seminar veteran Dave Winer, who admits to Web surfing, emailing and instant-messaging during presentations. In Las Vegas today, speaker Mike Arrington forgot to show up. Why bother? Instead of onstage pony shows and awkward demo booths, conference sponsors should just set up an open bar and invite potential clients to come schmooze with a few paid celebs and Marc Canter (zzz at left). Think David Hornik’s The Lobby for the rest of us. But first, make sure the Wi-Fi’s rock solid.

Source:Valleywag

John Rogers, the founder of biometrics startup Pay By Touch, has filed for personal bankruptcy, the San Francisco Business Times reports. On top of that, four employees are seeking $60,000 or more in back pay from the company, and are trying to force Pay By Touch into bankruptcy to get what they’re owed. Pay By Touch is not actually in bankruptcy yet, and the company could try to oppose the move in court or come to a settlement. Rogers, who has a controversial past, holds two-thirds of the company. But investors who have arranged a $163 million loan for the company are suing in a dispute over the makeup of the board. Add that credit line to the $190 million in venture capital the company has raised. With $350 million in stake, you’d think investors would be fighting over how to salvage something from this troubled company.

Mobile Rules, a business-plan competition for wireless startups, is promising winners the ultimate booby prize: Their photo on the cover of Red Herring magazine next March. One small problem: With printing and distribution bills reportedly unpaid, the Herring has given up on the paper-magazine business. An online-only magazine cover somehow seems unsatisfying. But give Herring publisher Alex Vieux this much credit: It’s a very economical prize.

Apple’s third quarter was a blowout all around, but the real question is how the iPhone is faring. Now that we’ve got a quarter’s worth of data, we can compare it to the competition, and gauge the effect of blogosphere scandals like the recent episode of iPhones “bricking” after a software update — sure, tech pundits got worked up, but did people stop buying iPhones? The bottom line: Steve Jobs & Co. entered a daunting market and performed quite well.

For comparison’s sake, I measured the iPhone primarily against offerings from Palm, BlackBerry-maker Research In Motio