Mozilla is looking for guinea pigs to try out the new version of its browser, Firefox 3 Beta 1. Mozilla calls itself a “foundation” and its slogan is “Good for the Web. Good for the World.” But you know better than that. Mozilla topper Mitchell Baker makes $500,000-plus a year and Mozilla’s for-profit wing brought in $56 million in revenues last year. In other words, no one should feel obligated by a sense of charity to download the new beta software. Baker & Co. could afford to pay for some actual QA engineers.

Source:Valleywag

LinkedIn will launch a developer program similar to Facebook’s platform on December 10. According to the company’s PR firm, the new program will allow “select” third-party developers to build “business applications for the Web.” We’re just glad that In the details that follow, the words “social graph” are nowhere to be seen.

Several applications will be available the day LinkedIn’s platform launches. The social network also introduce several new apps of its own on that will “enable them to draw on the wisdom, knowledge, experience, resources, and inspiration of their networks.”

It’s not good news for Google’s OpenSocial initiative, in which LinkedIn is a theoretical partner. Why would LinkedIn need its own platform — if, that is, OpenSocial were anything more than a PR scam?

Source:Valleywag

San Franciscans may remember EarthLink CEO Rolla Huff leaving them in the lurch when he abruptly backed out of the city’s municipal Wi-Fi project. Well, it turns out Huff, like any sensible CEO, doesn’t want to lose money on a venture that probably will minimize shareholder value. The Internet service provider is cutting its losses and abandoning all plans to build citywide Wi-Fi networks. A shame. We thought it was just San Francisco’s toxic stew of entitlement, anticapitalism, and government dysfunction that drove EarthLink away.

Before I go any further, a mea culpa: I mocked the service, and […]Source:GigaOM
Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard, released last week, has over 300 new features. Too bad the latest Java SDK isn’t one of them. And the Java developers that use Mac OS are fuming.

They’re feeling slighted: In January, Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs told the New York Times that “Nobody uses Java anymore.” Fast-forward to […]Source:GigaOM
Covad to be acquired by Providence Equity Partners for $1.02 a share in cash, a 59 percent premium to its closing price on Friday. Covad is one of the handful of independent broadband service providers to have survived the telecom bust. Providence, I suspect, will have Covad focusing on wholesale and wireless broadband. Maybe […]

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Could it be that Sky Dayton is feeling a little lonely? EarthLink, the company he founded, refused to participate in the latest round of financing for Helio, the upstart wireless carrier he now heads. In a keynote speech at Technology Review’s EmTech conference, he touted his company’s service not as, say, letting you make calls and surf the Web, but “connecting you to your community of friends.” So it’s a social network! Ah, but a social network that requires buying a phone (as much as $295) and signing up for service ($85 to $90 a month, on average). No wonder Dayton’s ersatz social network, cleverly disguised as a cell-phone company, only counts 140,000 users, and is losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Somehow I don’t think Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sweating over this one.

Sky Dayton’s wireless company, Helio, as rumored, is getting new funding without help from co-owner EarthLink, an Internet service provider facing financial straits. Joint-venture partner SK Telecom is investing $270 million in Helio and renegotiating its agreement with EarthLink. [Reuters]

Stan Oleynick, the smug guy pictured here, wants to sell his name to raise capital for his new startup. The highest bidder will win the chance to rename the 23-year-old and a 10 percent stake of the entrepreneur’s planned “revolutionary” venture. To sweeten the pot, Stan promises to break a world record, thereby getting into the Guinness Book of World Records, where his sponsored name will live on forever — or until someone else beats the former Oleynick’s record by eating more hotdogs in an hour or whatever. Sound suspicious? We thought so, too. And it turns out this is just the latest of Oleynick’s self-promotional stunts.

Two years ago, he created this breathless PR release touting milliondollarstate.com, a Million Dollar Homepage copycat. Oleynick, though, charged $100 per “virtual acre” instead of $1 per pixel, in a precursor to today’s Weblo scheme. Sounds like Oleynick is the type of guy to sell you a bridge, doesn’t it? Fun fact, he’s done that, too! (Musical bridges, but still.) Another venture, eNthem, sold custom-made songs to corporations for $499 per song.

So, how are his businesses doing now? Can’t quite tell. eNthem is “under construction” and Million Dollar State is suspended. Is there a Guinness record for failed startups? We think Stan’s on his way.

Source:Valleywag

Marcy Simon, Valleywag has learned, doesn’t just have a coveted desk and a phone line in Google’s cramped New York offices. She also has a seemingly hot assignment: PR for the yet-to-be-launched GooglePhone. All this, simply for serving as married Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s piece on the side? Yes, that’s right: Schmidt’s girlfriend, despite having no experience in wireless or telecom, is handling the launch of one of Google’s most-whispered-about initiatives. Why the Duchess of West Chelsea, as Valleywag has dubbed Simon, is handling this, and not say, David Krane, Google’s telecom-savvy director of corporate communications, is telling about both Schmidt’s character and the fate of the phone project.

I’ve written before that Google will not come out with its own phone model, as Apple has done. And indeed, the need for any GooglePhone escapes me; Google should be building services that work on any phone, no matter who makes it or what OS it runs. At best, the GooglePhone project, I believe, is a big stick Google will use to threaten phonemakers and wireless carriers into carrying its search engine and applications.

Which, of course, makes hiring a fancy New York PR person like Simon thoroughly pointless. If there’s no GooglePhone for Simon to launch, why waste office space on her? Because it’s a plausible job that Schmidt can assign to his girlfriend with a minimum of fuss. Simon, ignorant of the wireless industry, won’t know it’s a waste of time; Schmidt may actually have duped her into thinking it’s a plum job, almost as sparkly a bauble as the canary-yellow diamond ring Schmidt also gave her. Meanwhile, Schmidt can appease his internal critics by pointing out that he’s only given Simon a space-filling job that no savvy staff member would ever want.

Source:Valleywag

With San Francisco’s municipal Wi-Fi program stuck in purgatory thanks to EarthLink’s budget concerns, Internet service provider Sonic.net aims to be the city’s wireless savior. Not that legions of dirty hippy leechers deserve free Wi-Fi. Nonetheless, Sonic says customers can obtain a subsidized wireless mesh router and hook it up to a DSL line. Why? To create a network of wireless access points. Web surfers browsing from the wireless network will be served Google ads to subsidize their surfing. Sonic will implement a profit-sharing plan that will credit their customers’ accounts. Sounds like both a cheap attempt to turn EarthLink’s woes into free PR, and a blatant ripoff of Fon’s business model. More power to Sonic. A plan so crass can’t help but work.

BLACK ROCK CITY — Despite the best efforts of many sleep-deprived hippies with the Department of Public Works, The Man itself, the centerpiece of the Burning Man arts and counterculture festival in Nevada, is still not back up. Crews have been working around the clock to restore the festival’s iconic sculpture after it was prematurely burned by local antihero Paul Addis early Tuesday morning. The area has been strictly cordoned off by some very pissed-off volunteer Black Rock Rangers, with no one except for officials allowed entry. The featureless desert, normally dominated by the giant wooden statue, is sad and eery, especially in the frequent dust storms.

In other news, a two-story tall pink birthday cake with flaming-candle sails just drove past, its full complement of fur- and leather-clad passengers lustily singing choruses of “What Do You Do With A Drunken Raver?” So it’s not all bad.

Source:Valleywag

Following yesterday’s daily dose of EarthLink doom — the Internet service providerlaid off 900 employees, including municipal Wi-Fi networks president Don Berryman — the copmany has decided San Franciscans aren’t worthy of free Internet after all. CEO Rolla Huff called up god-mayor Gavin Newsom to say, as a Newsom spokesman put it, “they were not going to be able to fulfill their end of the bargain.” The mayor’s office says it’s still committed to blanketing San Francisco with Wi-Fi, and is counting on Google to remain an “anchor” while the city shops for more vendors. Newsom is also placing a measure on November’s ballot asking to use public and private funds to get the network of the ground. Good luck with getting free Wi-Fi, you dirty hippies. As we’ve said, you don’t deserve it.