Two consumer advocacy groups say FTC chairman Deborah Platt Majoras has no place judging the merit of their privacy complaints stemming from the proposed merger of Google and DoubleClick. Majoras’s husband, John M. Majoras, works as an antitrust lawyer at Jones Day. DoubleClick is a firm client. That’s a conflict of interest, say the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy.

The FTC said its ethics division will review the situation, but noted that Jones Day has so far only represented DoubleClick before the European Commission. John Majoras claims not to be involved in this case. But as a partner in the firm, won’t he profit from the case regardless of whether he works on it?

Source:Valleywag

What’s the matter, Jason? No bulldogs with you in France? Yes, our pal Jason Calacanis really called for all non-Internet people to die at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris, TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher confirms. When we called Calacanis for factchecking, the moonfaced rhymes-with-entrepreneur said, “You guys are idiots. I don’t even want to talk to you. Never call me again.” Then he hung up. Jason, baby, is it something we said? Nah: It’s something you said.

Source:Valleywag

In a long-overdue move, Chris Sacca, Google’s “director of special initiatives,” has left the company. Cleverly, though, he’s moving into a new career where he can continue to talk a lot and let others do the work: He’s becoming an angel investor, working with Evan Williams’s Obvious, the company which spun off Twitter, and Paul Graham, whose Y Combinator specializes in funding companies with utterly adorkable names. We figured Sacca’s career at Google might be foreshortened when Google listed an opening for a “director of other,” since that pretty much sounded like Sacca’s job. Doing anything other than work. Congratulations, Chris: In a Valley that unfairly discounts laziness, you’re now the ultimate value stock.

Evan Williams, the astute creator of Blogger and Twitter, is acting mesmerized by the unflappable showmanship of AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson. He Twitters: ” I like this Randall chap that runs AT&T, surprisingly. Straight shooter, he seems.” Clever. Yes, Ev, I’m sure Stephenson will agree to that text-message revenue-share scheme you have in mind. [Twitter]

Every year, we at Beloit College publish a “mindset list” to identify the worldviews of the year’s entering college freshmen. The “class of 2029″ refers to students entering college this fall, in 2025. Most of these students are 18, which means they were born in 2007. For them, Anna Nicole Smith, Steve Irwin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Saddam Hussein, and Robin Williams’s career have always been dead.

1. No one’s ever worn a digital watch.
2. “I’m Rick James, bitch” is just something old people say.
3. To relax, they’ve always turned on the nightly news. The news has always been delivered by comedians.
4. They don’t know what a LOLCat is or why it talks that way.
5. They’ve always been able to use a cell phone on a plane.
6. Tattoos have always been normal.
7. Mr. Rogers has never taken them to the Land of Make-Believe.
8. Good sitcoms have never had laugh tracks.
9. Apple has always been a big deal, as have Google and Facebook.
10. They’ve never paid for a classified ad.
11. They’ve never danced to “Numa Numa.”
12. Who’s Mario?
13. Katie Couric has still never been a respected news anchor.
14. Kids have always had their own phones.
15. They’ve never “missed” a TV show that they couldn’t watch an hour later.
16. Movies have always come in the mail.
17. They’ve never licked a stamp.
18. Americans have always worried about Muslims.
19. They don’t care if Tony Soprano died, if Ross and Rachel ever got together, who got to be a millionaire, or who was a Cylon.
20. Lindsay Lohan was never innocent.
21. They’ve never read “People” Magazine.
22. They don’t remember Castro or why he was ever a big deal.
23. What’s a mousepad?
24. “Lord of the Rings” looks fake and the effects are laughable.
25. Andy Samberg has always been a movie star.
26. The Olsen Twins have always been legal, but it’s still creepy to want Mary-Kate.
27. There’s never been smoking in restaurants.
28. Saturday Night Live’s good stuff has always been made for the Internet.
29. Pop stars have always worked with rappers.
30. Perez Hilton has always been on TV.
31. Computers have never been beige.
32. Role-playing games have always been played on the Internet. What’s a 20-sided die?
33. All TVs are “high definition.”
34. They’ve never had to pull over for directions.
35. Cafes have always been a place to work on a laptop.
36. The “dot-com bust” means as much to them as the Great Depression.
37. Ipods have always come with a phone.
38. Global warming has always been a major voter issue, and Republicans have always acknowledged it.
39. Vice presidents have never been useless.
40. Quarters have never all looked the same.
41. Abe Vigoda is still alive.

Source:Valleywag

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In this clip from CNBC, a Playboy executive describes his company’s new social network, PlayboyU, as a place where college students can “commune” with each other. Right. If that’s what you want to call it. My take? “The bunny’s not going to get much of a bang,” I told CNBC.

Source:Valleywag

Inc. magazine is digging into the mystery of who’s running TheFunded.com, a website which lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists. Writer Max Chafkin makes four guesses: Gawker Media publisher and Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton; Digg founder Kevin Rose; Blogger and Twitter founder Evan Williams; and blog blowhard Jason Calacanis. Asked by Chafkin, Calacanis denied being “Ted,” the mysterious man behind the site. A curious stance, since until recently, Calacanis was eagerly attempting to take credit for TheFunded.com. Never one for subtlety, he told friends of his plan to leak a rumor to Valleywag that he was behind the site. Alas, no, Jason: You only wish you were clever enough to come up with an idea like TheFunded.com.

The happiest day of your life ought to be free from workaday entanglements. But no one, apparently, has informed attendees at today’s wedding of Sara Morishige, a designer and former recruiter at Google, and Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter. Two guests, at least, have already sent Twitter “tweets” from the event. (The couple is seen here in a pre-Twitter photo from 2004 taken by Williams.)

I’ve been thinking, obsessively, about the revelation Google CEO Eric Schmidt made in last week’s earnings call that his company had overhired. Even more curiously, Schmidt defended the hiring binge, expressing his delight in the quality of the people Google’s overeager recruiters had brought on board.

If the new guys are so great, though, why stop hiring? Here’s a radical idea: Keep on adding new employees, but start ripping out some of the dead wood that’s accumulated at the world’s most adjective-ridden company.

And with that, I present “Toogle Many Googlers!”, a series in which I nominate Googlers who need to be given a gentle push out of the Googleplex. Read on for the first batch of names. Got a nomination? Send it in, preferably with a pic of the victim.

Chris Sacca Google’s “head of special initiatives,” with an inflated title and an inflated ego, specializes in hot-air projects guaranteed never to go anywhere, and hence, never require any real work on his part. If it weren’t for the special halo of protection draped on his shoulders by CEO Eric Schmidt, or so we hear, Sacca would have been given the sack long ago. No time like the present! Congratulations, Chris Sacca: You’re the first person Valleywag nominates as one Googler toogle many!

He’s already said he’s got the world’s easiest job. So why not just ease David Lawee right on out of it? With no real background in marketing, Lawee just parrots the same palaver as the rest of the Google gang about how its products market themselves. If they market themselves, bud, why do you have a job? And when he’s not reciting those tiresome lines, he brags about how Google’s so humble — so humble, he needs to tell you how humble it is five times in a single conversation! David Lawee, if you can take a break from eating humble pie in the Google cafeteria, accept our heartfelt congratulations — you’re not just a Silicon Valley Tool, you’re also one of Toogle Many Googlers!

It’s time for Eric Schmidt to declare victory and move on. Google cofounder Larry Page still talks like a giant dork. But we hear that Page hasn’t just upgraded his fashion sense — he’s also grooming himself to take back his original role as Google’s CEO. As Google’s founders grow up, Schmidt’s role as Google’s so-called “adult supervision” grows increasingly pointless — witness last quarter’s unsupervised hiring binge. Declaring himself a surplus Googler will let Schmidt cash out in peace and pursue his real passion: spending time with women who aren’t his wife.

Source:Valleywag
“He was talking for 45 minutes about ‘design’ and ‘emotion’… All we wanted to know was, how much is that light gonna cost?” — the always refreshing Bill Watkins, CEO of disk drive manufacturer Seagate, points out the differences between the designers and engineers.

Source:Valleywag

I hate you, Paul Kedrosky. Why? Because you’ve said, more perfectly than I ever could, why venture capitalists love profitless companies like Twitter, which has just raised a financing round from Union Square Ventures, the New York-based venture capital firm run by Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham. Companies with real business plans, making real money? It’s cheap enough to start a company these days that savvy entrepreneurs don’t need venture capital, funding themselves from a few angel investors and reinvested profits. It’s only the clueless, the hapless, and the willfully profligate types like Evan Williams of Twitter, who want to fumble around with a fun toy for as long as they can get away with it, on whom VCs can make the tall dollars.