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)

“Google’s Search Party,” Ken Auletta’s 6,264-word opus on the search engine’s grudging embrace of D.C. lobbying, has proved tough to condense. Until I reread it again this weekend, and realized it can be boiled down to the final observation made by CEO Eric Schmidt:

What kills a company is not competition but arrogance. We control our fate.

Control fate, or tempt it? Google, improbably, is managing to do both.

Source:Valleywag

No, I don’t understand Paul Boutin’s fixation with Bono, either. But he brought a fistful of sunglasses to Moose’s on Friday, and before we knew it, everyone was putting them on. The bar’s lighting is already moody, and let me tell you, when you put on a pair of Bulgari, it gets murkier than an open-standards discussion list. Things got even geekier when the boys from Uncov rolled in. And then, out of nowhere — well, out of Las Vegas, really — Julia Allison and Meghan Asha showed up to glam up the evening. Did we say “happy hour“? Our apologies. We practically closed the place. Next Friday: Natali Del Conte’s going-away party.

galleryPost(’valleywag20080111′, 6, ‘Happy hours and hours and oh god will these people ever go home?’);

Along with having excellent food and guests, the All Things Digital party at the Venetian in Las Vegas had very nice throw pillows. Jason Calacanis may have twittered about stealing one, but I actually did it. Score one for the bullycub!

Source:Valleywag

A tipster spotted the female half of Gawker’s favorite ex-couple, Julia Allison, leaving a CES party in Las Vegas with venture capitalist Mark Kvamme of Sequoia Capital. Kvamme, who was a frequent target of Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton, is responsible for Sequoia’s investments in a number of promising companies including LinkedIn and AdBrite.

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.

Valleywag will return on December 26 — barring some hilarious Christmas-Day tech meltdown that calls us to our laptops. Enjoy spending the day debugging your parents’ computers and installing your nephews and nieces’ new peripherals.

Ads by Pheedo

Source:Valleywag

Notorious nerdbody Julia Allison, the Star editor-at-large best known for her geek conquests, has this to share with Valleywag: Digg cofounder Kevin Rose has asked her out on a date. Really, could she have come with a more thoughtful present for a gossip blogger? How sweet. Let me go out on a limb here with my prediction: This is going to end badly. Incredibly, someone has already registered kevinandjulia.com.

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.

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?

Richard Laermer of RLM PR is either into some really depraved adult entertainment. Or he’s very lazy. That’s the conclusion of fellow flack Peter Shankman, an early ri