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.

Jerry Yang has made Yahoo Go 3.0, Yahoo’s mobile application platform, a key piece of the strategy to keep his business relevant. Rather than trying to run everything, like Google or Apple, Yahoo will focus on being a friend to all. MySpace, eBay, and MTV. But Yang is once again focused on the wrong partners.

Yang’s friends are in low places — positions of weakness relative to the wireless carriers who exercise control over the services used on their phones. While Yahoo has signed up some phone manufacturers to carry Go, the carriers who buy their phones have final say over what runs — and they have deleted Go before it gets into users’ hands. Consigned to obscurity as an add-on download, Yahoo Go is just another example of Yahoo’s strategic blundering.

Source:Valleywag

Electronics retailer TigerDirect plans to raise CompUSA from the grave, using its trademarks and a handful of stores to give its own retail presence fresh life. CompUSA went under last month when it was sold to restructuring specialist Gordon Brothers, which is closing most of its stores, including the helpfully located flagship on Market Street in downtown San Francisco, which catered to hordes of Moscone Center convention-goers. If the deal goes through, TigerDirect would pick up the CompUSA brand and website, as well as 16 stores located in Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico — sorry, San Francisco. (Photo by Mary Jane Irwin)

The professor investigating Sears’s spyware installation has discovered that the department store is also making it easy to spy on others’ home appliance purchases. If you registered at the Sears Manage My Home site, you could view the purchase history of anyone you have a name, phone number, and street address for. No password required. The retailer responded quickly to remove the feature when the news surfaced on the web, but why was such an obvious flaw present in the first place?

The site’s privacy policy says individual information will not be shared with the public, but maybe they just don’t know how this technology thing works. It may not seem like a major concern if someone knows you bought a Maytag washer/dryer combo six years ago, but Sears should be worried that the information is out there. It’s a gold mine for competitors — imagine what Best Buy could do with this information. Or a burglar casing his next heist.

Early Facebook investor and openly Objectivist Peter Thiel tells the Wall Street Journal that Silicon Valley VCs are too quick to fire startup founders. They also meddle too much in their companies. He blames a cultural divide.

Founders have to work hard; venture capitalists do not. VC “have these very cushy jobs; they get paid a lot,” Thiel told the Journal. He thinks VC needs to more accommodating by investing in smaller pieces and allowing founders to cash out some, much sooner.

Source:Valleywag

Online shoppers spent 19 percent more this holiday season than last year, according to ComScore. It’s a big number, but not as big as last year’s 26 percent jump. ComScore chairman and chief wonk Gian Fulgoni says you people did a pretty good job considering the “economic challenges facing consumers this year as a result of higher gas prices, lower home values and a jittery stock market.” I say suck it up and buy some more free stuff off eBay next year.

New Jersey has banned two types of convicted sex offenders from the Internet for life. Those who used the Web to help commit their crimes are the main category. Exceptions are made for those who use computers to work. On a gut level, the new law seems like a no-brainer. Some would say that’s the problem.

“Corrections experts will say that the most important thing to prevent recidivism is stable employment, home, family and social support,” Reverend C. David Hess, New York State representative of SOhopeful International, told InternetNews.com in September. “These laws are destructive to all of those things. Therefore, rather than making communities safer, they put people more at risk.” In an age of social networks, those forced offline are the least connected to society. (Photo by o2ma)

Source:Valleywag

The Spanish-language short “Lo que tú Quieras Oír” — “What You Wanted to Hear” — has snuck into the No. 3 spot on YouTube’s all-time most viewed list, right after “Evolution of Dance” and Avril Lavigne. Unlike most top YouTube clips, its power comes not from visual antics but from spoken words on an answering machine. The few English-language blog posts I could find babbled about the film’s Creative Commons license without explaining the plot. Multilingual space princess Xeni Jardin translated it on the fly for me.

From: Xeni Jardin

A woman walks in to her apartment, chatting on her cellphone to a friend about a bunch of little mundane things, she’s getting ready to prepare dinner for herself and her boyfriend. A child’s drawing sits on the table, bearing the title “Sofia,” a lady in a red dress. The woman, whose name, we learn, is Sofia, puts her things down, sees something that jars her — she presses “play” on her answering machine, still chatting with her friend on the cellphone. She realizes the message is from the man she loves, Miguel — her voice changes, she tells her friend she has to go, will talk later. Sofia replays Miguel’s voice message in entirety. It’s a breakup voicemail. “Are you there? Please pick up if you are, it’s urgent… I don’t know how to tell you this. I’m not coming back to the house, not tonight, not any other night… I need some time to think… I’ve been thinking about us… I have to get out of the house… I don’t want to stay anymore… I don’t love you…” Sad music floods in. Sofia is heartbroken. We observe time passing, she’s more and more depressed, her friend calls again and again but she won’t answer the phone, that dinner is now a dinner for one, and it appears to be a particularly sad dead fish. But then — Sofia takes action. She pops the tape (hahah how old-school) out of the machine (hahahaha ancient) and snips it up and remixes the breakup call. “I need to return…” Miguel now says. “I love you…. I have to return, I love you, I love you…”

(Pause)

“No,” says Sofia, shaking her head and wearing the red dress..

Source:Valleywag

Hitwise reports that December 26, also known as Boxing Day, was online shopping’s busiest day in the U.K. so far this season. In the U.S., MasterCard says its numbers show post-Christmas shopping accounts for 16 percent of all holiday sales, online and off. One likely reason why, besides post-holiday sales? Gift cards.

In a $3 million lawsuit against eBay, Tiffany has called the online auction house a “rat’s nest” of counterfeit goods. Maybe the blue-boxed retailer is grumpy because Tiffany had to send eBay 135,000 takedown notices in 2006. As Eric Goldman points out on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog, that’s 370 notices per day, 15 an hour, or 1 every 4 minutes. The suit itself, by the way, basically comes down to who should pay for investigating counterfeiting claims; eBay says Tiffany could fix the problem by hiring one more paralegal.

FedEx was hit with a $319 million tax bill over the job classification of FedEx ground employees. A number of lawsuits have been filed by FedEx ground drivers who believed the company was responsible for their taxes; FedEx maintained that they were independent contractors. That’s not the interesting part, though. FedEx, in a tried and true public relations move, “took out the trash” and released the bad news late Friday on a holiday weekend. The earliest story we could find on the IRS charge was released at 6:34 pm Eastern, well beyond when most people were reading news stories. Very clever, FedEx. (Photo by Brosner)

Source:Valleywag

In 2007, online holiday shopping as rose 20 percent over last year. And “Green Monday” — the day on which e-commerce sales peaked at $881 million, beat out “Cyber Monday” and “Black Friday” for most ridiculous made-up holiday shopping day. Cyber Monday spending came in at $734 million and Black Friday didn’t even make comScore’s top ten list. Neither day was available for comment.

Facebook is looking for platform developers to test a payments system, an administrator announced on the Facebook Developers forum. Details are scant, but it’s more likely than not built on the micropayments software Facebook developed for its virtual gifts. (Which, by the way, is a brilliant Trojan horse strategy: Charge people a token amount for something that costs you nothing, and get their credit-card numbers while you’re at it.) The good news for the rest of us is that the new payment system might mean we’ll see some Facebook apps that are meant to do something besides show us ads while we goof off.

But don’t get too excited. After all, even the Facebook-app advertising economy is scarcely developed. Most of the apps making money are … advertising other apps. It’s as if this were California in 1849 and you had people setting up picks-and-shovels advertising agencies before the picks-and-shovel merchants opened their doors. Online advertising works, obviously, but because no one’s hit on the right formula for Facebook apps yet.

Turning Facebook into a marketplace is another potential revenue stream for the site. As eBay learned with PayPal, it’s not enough just to list goods; you have to provide the means to move cash and close the deal, too. Expect to see a ton of e-commerce apps — and a rash of alarmist articles predicting Amazon and eBay’s doom. There’s always a market for those.

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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.