CARLSBAD, CA — Who are those cool cats in sunglasses at D6? Why, it's Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, a board member at Facebook, lunching with Wendi Murdoch, wife of the News Corp. CEO and chairwoman of MySpace China. Also at the table: Martha Stewart, seen here to the left; Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures; and Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe.
CARLSBAD, CA — I'll be unabashed about it: Part of the fun of a conference like D6 are the casual mogul sightings. Look! Barry Diller in a schlumpy brown sweater! Say, isn't that Jeff Bezos chatting up a Googler? But my favorite happenstances are the reunions of frenemies. Take, for example, this chance encounter between Marcy Simon, the former girlfriend of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Elliot Schrage, the head of Facebook PR. (Sandwiched awkwardly in the middle is Google VP Susan Wojcicki.) Simon and Schrage's back story, and more pictures from the hotel lobby at D6, after the jump.
Mark Zuckerberg must be glad he's at the D6 conference in Carlsbad, where he has nothing to fear besides running into my boss. We've heard one of the reasons Zuckerberg left town in the first place was that he didn't want to be around when the company eased out CTO Adam D'Angelo, a high school friend of Zuckerberg's. Another the sensitive CEO skipped town? He may not have wanted to see the disappointment when his employees learned that the company would revoke a cherished $600 housing subsidy for those living near Facebook's downtown Palo Alto headquarters. Since reporting the news yesterday, more tipsters tell us the subsidy slash is real. According to one, new employees will get no housing subsidy and as soon as current employees sign new leases with their landlords or decide to move, they lose theirs too. "Something is going on at Facebook and it isn't good," observed commenter sggrf afer yesterday's news.
To come up with the estimated pay for tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs we spoke to former and current employees, HR reps and friends of friends working these jobs. But still, some of our commenters expressed disbelief over the salary estimates. "80 grand for an entry level job? Time to apply and kick those whiney losers out! Let's see how they feel about their new job bagging groceries at the Safeway," wrote mwbeeler. Loakim said:
Valleywag commenter Fidel on the Roof likes to call Facebook "Fadbook." Harvard graduates Greg Atwan and Evan Lushing, authors of the Facebook Book: a Satirical Companion beg to agree. But Atwan and Lushing might disagree with Fidel on the scale of said fad. "Facebook is huge," they write.
CARLSBAD, CA — D, the Wall Street Journal schmoozefest which opened today with a round of golf at the Four Seasons Aviara Resort, is not the conference for the rest of us. It attracts a host of tech and media CEOs who agree to be harangued onstage by Walt Mossberg, the sexagenarian of sexy gadgets, and Kara Swisher, the diminutive media commentaterrorist of AllThingsD.com. In exchange, they get to seem classy and witty, if only by comparison. It is the sort of elite event to which Valleywag is not invited. We showed up anyway.
File this under "Confirmation of scary news that you already suspected was true": a new survey says that corporations have become so paranoid about leaks (justifiably) that many are now engaged in "systematic snooping" in employees' electronic communications. More than 40% of large companies read employee emails, but that's not all; they're also looking at your instant messages and Facebook pages. Delete! Delete!
Google may have its free food and massage parlors, but Facebook pays its employees a $600 per month housing subsidy as long as they live near the company's headquarters in Palo Alto. At least, for now it does. "Yeah, they're talking about getting rid of the subsidy," a disgruntled Facebook employee told a local gossip who passed word onto us. Our source blames new Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — the ex-Googler picture on the right, who when hired "came and kicked everybody in the ass and said this is going to be hard," according to Facebook HR chief Christopher Cox.
Oh noes! Publicist/stylist/funboy-about-town Kristian Laliberte's Facebook page was hacked and someone's been sending his friends the most horrible messages! "Dear All," he writes. "This is Kristian and this message is real. Sometime between midnight and nine am, my facebook account was hacked into. A similar experience happened with my gmail two weeks ago-where fake emails were forwarded to an unknown address. The perpetrator sent slews of disgusting fake messages to many of my contacts, but I do not know who all received these. I am categorically letting everyone know that this happened and I'm so sorry if you were upset for one moment and caught up in this mess." Clues as to the perp's ID and a sample of the offending emails below.
Most of Facebook's adult supervision gave the Facebook Prom a skip, we hear. But not recently hired Google execs Elliot Schrage, now Facebook's top flack, and Sheryl Sandberg, the formidable new COO who's revising Facebook's internal social graph day by day. We heard Schrage and Sandberg were tight at Google, but close enough for this "me-and-my-bitches" pose captured at the Facebook Prom event held two weeks ago? (Camille Hart, Sandberg's assistant, is on the left; she also followed Sandberg to Facebook.) Suggest a caption in the comments, and the best will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner: abmw, for "They never have enough restrooms in these Apple Stores."
Do you remember Corey Johnson? He was the kid who was the co-captain of his high school football team, and maybe "the first high school athlete in the nation to declare his homosexuality so publicly while still enjoying the support of his teammates, parents and coaches," back in 2000. It's his birthday! He invited all his Facebook friends! One person, though, can't make it. Former New Jersey Governor and Gay American Jim McGreevey. He has a totally valid excuse!
In the latest installment of "Where in the World is Mark Zuckerberg," one stop on his tour to the subcontinent was to the favored ashram of Larry Brilliant, director of Google's entrepreneurial philanthropy project, Google.org. This would presumably be the one run by Neem Karoli Baba which Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs has also visited. Brilliant has said he also brought Google cofounder Larry Page and eBay cofounder Jeff Skoll there.
The best chance you have at getting a date with an escort off Facebook? Win a night with Lisa Lewis, the host of the Web show Naked Newsflash. In addition to doing news in the nude, Lewis is a proud escort: "I am not ashamed of what I am doing, I see it as an honest job," she told the Waikato Times. She charges $7,000 an evening for completely legal sexual companionship — legal, not as a wink, but legal, as in, New Zealand has decriminalized prostitution.
Twitter is about to close another round of funding, perhaps setting its value at $80 million, and hype for the service is running at all time high. So we'll forgive the two tech-savvy San Francisco bloggers who both saw this advertisement for a longstanding Facebook Mobile feature which allows users to update their statuses via SMS and called it Facebook's response to Twitter. Not correct. Facebook has allowed users to do so since April 2007. Still, I understand why Facebook is exhibiting a bit of Twitter jealousy and advertising the feature heavily now. Last weekend, my little brother graduated from Davidson College outside of Charlotte. At a coffee shop in town, Twitter came up in conversation with another patron. That's mainstream — while Facebook's mobile features still aren't popular on the social network's home turf.
The author of Bringing Down The House has signed a million-dollar-plus book deal for his memoir about Mark Zuckerberg and the other Facebook founders, according to a tip to Gawker. In the proposal, author Ben Mezrich claims that Zuckerberg and his friend Eduardo Saverin started Facebook to get into a secret society and, of course, to get laid. The book may not be the most rigorously factual account, as Mezrich's Bringing Down The House (the basis for the Kevin Spacey film 21) was debunked by the Boston Globe as "not a work of 'nonfiction' in any meaningful sense of the word." Also, our tipster claims Mezrich's only source was Saverin, whom Zuckerberg is now suing. Here are the juiciest (and previously unreported) details from the proposal.
