A big-league reporter emailed us to imply that he (or was that she? I forget) has inside info on today’s Macworld product announcements, and that my hunch that there’s a MacBook with AT&T wireless built in is totally wrong. Of course, the real point of the email was nyah nyah I’m special. But thanks for the tip.

Source:Valleywag

Cabo, it’s supposed to be the West Coast’s Mexico. But here’s photographic evidence that Silicon Alley entrepreneurs (and B.J. Novak from “The Office,” back left) like to play in the Pacific, too.

We know you people prefer schadenfreude to jealousy. So while gazing at this photo of three out of four Connected Ventures founders (Ricky Van Veen, Josh Abramson and Jakob Lodwick plus entourage are present; Zach Klein spent the month in India), recall that despite his success Van Veen rents a tiny Manhattan apartment and that this trip cost the recently fired Lodwick his relationship with Julia Allison. He went with another woman. Follow the thumbnail to see the full image on Flickr. (Photo by mareen)

Working for Barry Diller is a harrowing experience. Just take a look at Jim Lanzone, the former CEO of Amazon.com, before he joined IAC, and after. Even so, we’re reconsidering our sympathetic view of Lanzone. We hear that one big reason he was fired was the slipping schedule on an Ask.com news site. Despite putting 20 people nearly full-time on the project, and getting help from Digg, Lanzone missed a December deadline for the site, now slated for a February launch.

Source:Valleywag

Normatism. No, we don’t know, what the recently fired founder of Vimeo is up to, either. The most entertaining interpretation is that this is the first in a series of softcore geek-porn photo spreads. Unboxing, indeed.

Julia Allison, the ex-girlfriend of Jakob Lodwick, agreed to chat with her sadmirers on sister site Gawker. In the comments, she revealed the real reason why the attention-seeker was fired from his own company Vimeo:

He was fired for “insubordination” — meaning, he didn’t agree with the strategy IAC had for Vimeo, and he just ignored them when they told him to do things. He thinks of himself as Howard Roark and IAC’s middle management as one huge Peter Keating, so getting fired fit into that storyline quite nicely. I think he saw it as almost heroic.

Also, Jakob has strong body order, unmasked by Tom’s of Maine’s natural deodorant — which may have contributed to the firing, not to mention his breakup. I don’t remember Ayn Rand making her Fountainhead protagonist’s hygiene habits explicit, but I’m pretty sure the architect bathed regularly. Maybe Lodwick would be better served emulating his fictional idol’s hygienic standards, rather than “heroically” pissing off the bosses he knowingly sold his company to. (Photo by Noah Kalina)

Amateur attention seeker and entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick may be releasing a new project soon with Scott Karp, the creator of blogging tool Tumblr. Lodwick recently cut ties with both his beau, Julia Allison, and Connected Ventures, the startup he founded, now controlled by IAC and best known for Vimeo and College Humor. Without Barry Diller’s backing or Allison’s cleavage, how will the pasty, shirtless hipster generate the buzz he’s grown to expect but rarely deserves? By mocking the homeless.

CenterNetworks observed that norbum.org, a domain recently purchased by Lodwick, briefly went live with the message:

Norbum.org is an open, crowd-sourced, web 2.0 application powered by Tumblr. Why the name “Norbum”? Simply put, Norbum is like Nordstrom for the homeless. We bring to you the latest in urban street fashion from the people who live it. Rather than relying on an elitist group of professional editors, we invite our readers to submit photos of the most stylish street people from around the world. If you spot one of these edgy trendsetters, just snap a photo and email it to 2tvazf87@tumblr.com. We’ll post the best ones to Norbum.org.

Lodwick’s fashion sense has its own affinity with the homeless. But Norbum is clearly an attempt at attention-grabbing humor. I’ll concede the attention-grabbing part — I’m writing about it, aren’t I? — but the humor, after one weak chuckle, escaped me. Without Allison, without his partners at Connected Ventures, Lodwick’s limits are becoming more easily glimpsed. And less watchable every day.

Another startup boy and his girlfriend have started a Tumblr blog to overchronicle their relationship. Shortly after Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick and TV personality Julia Allison broke up and ended their blog Jakob and Julia, John Shankman (an employee of the Federated Media online ad agency) started the semi-anonymous JohnandJen.net.

The overwrought emotional style parodies Jakob and Julia’s. Early on, Jen wrote:

John apparently doesn’t always understand that his “internet experiments” aren’t priority number one for the rest of the universe. John doesn’t always understand that someone else has finals for the next two weeks, and might have some important life responsibilities aside from responding to nonsensical emails and participating in the public airing of our personal “dirty laundry”, if you will.

John replied:

Well, I have to admit, that is not what I was expecting for a first post from Jen. It was very angry and, also, alluded to some things that were very unnecessary. Why do you have to bring things like that up in your first post?

John and Jen make constant references to Jakob and Julia (such as the above comparison of Jen’s stubbly “pit” to Julia’s lasered “underarm”), which are hilarious to the dozen of us who actually followed that relationship.

Sorry people, show’s over. Connected Ventures cofounder Jakob Lodwick has pulled the plug on JakobandJulia.com, his joint venture with his girlfriend, Star editor-at-large, and geekboy aficionado Julia Allison. “My interest in creating fuel for the gossip sites has dried up,” Lodwick writes on the blog. “I don’t enjoy the attention anymore.” We’ll hold you to that, Mr. Lodwick. Allison, however, doesn’t seem like she’s going to hold you much at all anymore, judging by the following response.

“It’s not a new thing. Two months ago, we had a party, and I beat up five cops and threw their bodies out the window.” So said freshly fired Vimeo cofounder Jakob Lodwick when police officers broke up the Connected Ventures holiday party. Unknown at this time is the aftermath of the officers’ visit or the reason why the cops were called. (Noise? One hopes there’s more to it than that.) Also unknown: the level of awkwardness created by the Lodwick’s abrupt exit from Connected Ventures, the IAC-controlled startup which runs Vimeo and CollegeHumor. Facebook sales director Kevin Colleran captured the video of Lodwick’s comments as the party got shut down.

Jakob Lodwick, the Vimeo founder allegedly fired today from the IAC-controlled online-video site loves to post racy photos of himself and his love, notorious New York nobody and Star editor-at-large Julia Allison. That fact can’t have been lost on his corporate overseers, which makes commenter brigamortis’s theory — that he’d been fired for posting a mildly salacious photo of Allison to his personal blog — seem ridiculous on its face. Still, Lodwick took the photo in question off his blog, a move which raises suspicions. We obtained the photo, above. Could Allison’s knockers really have gotten Lodwick canned?

Tumblr, the cute blogging tool that recently received $750,000 in funding, has been touted as enabling unique habits not possible with other blogs. Habits that include boring one’s readers more frequently throughout the day. Now Ricky Van Veen, editor of CollegeHumor, is blaming Tumblr for the same thing. Van Veen thinks Tumblr causes bloggers to post too often. He is frustrated that his friends are posting inanities not worth reading. And yet he finds himself obsessively following these trite microposts. According to Van Veen, Tumblr is the problem.

But we’d say Van Veen’s problem has more to do with his choice in friends: Jakob Lodwick, Julia Allison, and Reggie Watts. Please. Does Van Veen really think these egobloggers need any inducement to post half-naked photographs and pictures of Lodwick’s “retard shoes”? If only Tumblr were to blame. It’s safer to want a company to shrivel up and die than to puncture your friends’ egos.

EAST VILLAGE, NEW YORK — Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, who sold social-news website Reddit a year ago to the publisher of Wired, brought Reddit’s beer-laden world tour to New York last night. And, on the promise of an open bar from 7 till last call, the people showed. Among the crowd a pair of Condé Nast Newhouses and a whole mess of Silicon Alley’s scruffiest. What’d I learn? Some tidbits such as that Huffman doesn’t always flush and that at Reddit, Ohanian just draws the aliens. But mainly we learned that the people wanted to know: Would Jakulia show?

You’ll recall Jakob Lodwick, the always-naked Vimeo founder and geek-lusting girlfriend Julia Allison, Star’s professional pretender. Dubbed Jakulia by a notorious Manhattan gossip — Allison herself — the pair were set to make or break Reddit’s party with a rumored late-night appearance.

But in the meantime, the booze flowed freely at Hanger bar between Avenues B and C. Here are two of the founders, Huffman and, in the background, Ohanian. Next to Huffman is his fiancé, Katie Babiarz.

While you’re admiring the obnoxiously handsome couple, here’s a tidbit to bring them back to earth. I learned from Huffman, that, among his college friends, other than a penchant for right-wing conspiracy theories, he’s most known for habitually forgetting to flush. Alas, poor Huffman: successful, handsome and engaged to a beautiful woman, but with a circle of friends who can only remember that his shit still stinks.

Here’s a better shot of Ohanian. No word on his bathroom habits.

Things got rowdier as the night went on. Well into the sloshing, Ohanian got the bright idea to turn off the music and host an imprompt Q&A session. He got exactly two questions from the packed crowd. One from a woman I’d seen dancing feet away from the founder most of the night.

“How does one start a — when are we going to have intercourse?” she shouted.

“When is Julia Allison getting here?” shouted another. The music returned.

Still, despite the hooch-induced frivolity, you people are still … you people, even in Silicon Alley. Solo cups and blackberries? Sick.