Business

TechCrunch Runs Bogus Last.fm Rumor

Late Friday, TechCrunch ran a single-sourced allegation that the CBS-owned music-recommendation service Last.fm had handed over user data to the RIAA for use in illegal file-sharing lawsuits: ... word is going around that the RIAA asked social music service Last.fm for data about its user's listening habits to find people with unreleased tracks on their computers. And Last.fm, which is owned by CBS, actually handed the data over to the RIAA. According to a tip we received: I heard from an irate ... (read more)

User-Generated Content Event Offers Super Speaker

There's a User-Generated Content Expo being held in San Jose, Calif., next month. Keynote speakers include Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and CafePress founder Fred Durham. While browsing the list of speakers to see if they invited any actual content-generating users, I found one of the greatest speaker bios I've ever read. Meet Dawn Clark, founder of DawnClark.Net: A pioneer in the field of Cyberenergetics, Dawn Clark is a sensitive who stands at the nexus of science and spirituality. Fields ... (read more)

Streamline Your Consolidated Resources

I love the thick coat of BS that Wizards of the Coast President Greg Leeds laid down to justify the layoffs this week of around 20 employees, including longtime Dungeons & Dragons game designers Jonathan Tweet and Dave Noonan: Consolidating internal resources coupled with improved outsourcing allows us to gain efficiencies in executing against our major digital initiatives Magic Online and D&D Insider. Wizards of the Coast is well positioned to maximize future opportunities, including further ... (read more)

Web Hosting Provider Alpha Red Files for Bankruptcy

While looking through some records in a bankruptcy database, I found an item that hasn't hit the news yet: The web hosting provider Alpha Red Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Wednesday in the Southern District of Texas, claiming more than $10 million in liabilities. ... (read more)

Banking CEOs Deserve a Christmas Malus

I was scrounging through old bookmarks recently when I rediscovered World Wide Words, Michael Quinlan's online newsletter of unusual words. His current edition features "malus," a word that ought to be more common in American business given the disastrous mismanagement of many companies: Though malus isn't in any general dictionary that I've consulted, it's also a fairly common term in the world of banking, insurance and contracts. A malus is the opposite of a bonus -- you might call it a ... (read more)

Sanders: Socialism for Rich, Free Enterprise for Poor

Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, makes a point I haven't heard anywhere else in his response to the bailout plan: We must end the danger posed by companies that are "too big too fail," that is, companies whose failure would cause systemic harm to the U.S. economy. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. We need to determine which companies fall in this category and then break them up. Right now, for example, the Bank of America, the nation's largest ... (read more)

No Temporary Checks, No Peace

I had a weird thing happen at my bank this week: I ran out of checks because I didn't reorder them in time, but when I needed temporary checks so I could pay some bills, my request was refused. The bank, which has locations across several Southern states, doesn't give its customers temporary checks. My first impulse is to quit the bank over this hassle. There's a bank on every corner these days, and the services they offer are utterly interchangeable. To get my bills paid, I ended up buying the ... (read more)

The Ghost of Michael Arrington Past

There's some fun stuff in TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington's old personal blog, which he published for eight months in 2005 before becoming the Ron Popeil of Web 2.0. A Nov. 12, 2005, entry in which he raises a little capital: Selling my copy of The Search by John Battelle. $10 obo. An Aug. 1, 2005, post declaring that he has deleted his PayPal account and would no longer be selling items on EBay: I broke up with PayPal today, using their handy 12-step account termination procedure. I ... (read more)

Jerome Armstrong Settles SEC Stock-Tout Suit

I filed a story this morning on Watching the Watchers about blogger Jerome Armstrong settling his stock-tout suit with the SEC: Influential liberal blogger Jerome Armstrong, the founder of MyDD and an originator of the netroots movement, has agreed to pay $29,000 in fines and penalties to settle a 2003 SEC suit accusing him of touting a stock on Internet message boards without disclosing his financial interest in the company. Some of my fellow liberals threw me under the bus for digging into ... (read more)

Google Works in Mysterious Ways

When things are slow on Workbench, activity on this weblog falls to the five subjects of enduring interest to visitors who make comments: Whether lottery winners should be able to hide their identities Whether Best Buy sucks Whether Target sucks Whether Art Bell sucks Whether Orlando Bloom dates outside his race On the first subject, people who support secrecy for lottery winners will enjoy a story from Canada this morning: A guy was caught planning to kidnap, rob and murder a couple who won ... (read more)