[Xerox hardware designer Chuck] Thacker revealed the real origins of the term [WYSIWYG]. He said it was coined by his wife, Karen, who upon seeing an Alto running Bravo, turned to him and said, "You mean, what I see is what I get?" Mrs. Thacker is a true technophobe, he said in a phone interview Thursday, one who believes the best computers are the ones we don't see, like the ones in ATMs and in cars. NY Times: Bits
An informant reports that high-energy Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's early morning razzle-dazzle outpaced one reporter:
Reporting is hard work. So why bother? That seems to be the rationale behind a new Q&A session scheduled for tomorrow afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit. Program chair John Battelle will answer questions for journalists who can't be bothered to actually, y'know, attend the conference. Another option for even lazier hacks: Just read Valleywag's minute-to-minute coverage. Special correspondent Paul Boutin and I, we've got your back. Hit the bar instead. Your editors need never know.
Apparently startups are getting bought for more and more money? And some people think it's a bubble? And some think it's not? That's what the International Herald Tribune tells me. If you need to explain to Mom why you're worth $10 million on paper and ten bucks in the eyes of jealous TechCrunch readers, show her the Herald Tribune's tidy summary.
Science fiction writer and Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow has made a career out of finely parsing copyright issues. He's lectured on the topic as a visiting professor at the University of Southern California. So it seems kind of weird that Doctorow would cut and paste a 600-word satire by A Wizard of Earthsea author Ursula K. Le Guin onto Boing Boing and leave off the last line: "copyright © Ursula K. Le Guin, 2007." The result: An outstandingly huffy email from a spokesman for Le Guin. But there's more to the story.
Has there ever been an investment mania built on sketchier numbers than the fad for virtual worlds? Ever since Second
David Pogue of the New York Times wrote a humiliating column today correcting a huge pricing error in his last piece. He wrote about cellphone startup Cubic Telecom, which carries international phone calls over the Internet to give really cheap rates. Pogue listed off a bunch of rates to places like Greece or Iraq and excitedly wrote that "the appropriate world traveler's response ought to be involuntary drooling." Except the prices he quoted were just plain wrong. That'll stop up your salivary glands.
Time's Josh Tyrangiel on Radiohead's plan to let fans choose what they'll pay for their first new album since leaving EMI: "In an industry stuck in the financial equivalent of Hurricane Alley, In Rainbows is more than just a storm. 'This could be the mother of them all,' e-mailed an A.-and-R. executive at a major European label. EMI pulled in $3.6 billion last year. It is a couple of Radioheads away from a musical New Orleans." [Time not online.]
And a child will lead them — down the garden path. PlaySpan is garnering buzz because its cofounder, 12-year-old Arjun Mehta, hauled in $6.5 million in venture capital (although it's suspected that his father and CEO Karl Mehta is using Arjun as a mere promotional tool). Talk about a startup in need of adult supervision. Arjun makes teenage entrepreneurs like Jessica Mah and Comcate founder Ben Casnocha look like pikers. The founder's age, however, is distracting reporters from the real question: Why did this company snag so much cash?
Newspaper editors have long fretted about the keyword-linked ads provided by Google and others. "What if airline ads appear next to a story about a plane crash?" they ask. But they appear to be so busy worrying about the ads that they're not minding unfortunate collisions of stories. This morning, the website of The Chattanoogan displayed a photo of a plane crash next to a news story about a startup airline, Skybus, expanding to the paper's Tennessee hometown.
Congratulations to entrepreneur Aaron Patzer, pictured above with an oversized novelty check. His financial-services startup Mint was the big winner in this week's TechCrunch40 conference, bringing home the $50,000 prize for being the "best in show." So, what was the overall view of TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis's big event? This take, sent to us late last night from an out-of-town journalist, explains it better than we could.
With the publication date of Rosie O'Donnell's memoir Celebrity Detox fast approaching, the Post spins into action, taking their hard-hitting approach to news to its logical extreme. They had a couple of psychiatrists read an advance copy and perform a diagnosis of the former "View" host. What did the good doctors learn? "Rosie O'Donnell is full of rage, has a profound distrust of men, craves public adoration, shows signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and dishes out her anger mostly to women because of deep-seated abandonment issues over her mother's death."
Huffington Post's Esther Wojcicki gushes over Google's Lunar X Prize. It's not the $30 million those nice Google boys, Larry and Sergey, are offering whomever can successfully land a rover on the moon. This Palo Alto schoolmarm is keen on all the teaching tools the Lunar X Prize is providing educators. She writes, "The team at the Lunar Xprize has prepared free learning guides, videos and other resources to help stimulate student interest not only in space but in math, science and technology as well." She sees this as an effort to rectify the "anti-science trend in schools." Google's efforts are all well and good, but there's another reason why this journalism teacher is so sweet on Larry Page and Sergey Brin — she's Brin's mother-in-law. Her daughter Anne married him in May. But the Google ties go even deeper. Her daughter Susan Wojcicki is Google's VP of product managementand Susan's garage in Menlo Park served as the search engine's first headquarters. Even daughter Janet is married to a former Googler.
"No two ways about it—not with Labor Day prowling around, ready to pounce on the end of summer, skin it, pound it, and throw it on the grill so it goes up in flames like a chicken breast marinated in motor oil." Uh, we think this means Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy is depressed that summer's over? [NYS]
