geek-love

Tila Tequila switches from Yahoo spawn to Mac guy

Adriana Nunez · 11/05/08 03:00PM

Promiscuous MySpace friender Tila Tequila recently denied reports that her relationship with Courtenay Semel, the publicly drunken daughter of former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, was on the rocks. But The Superficial says the Hollywood Z-lister's shot at girl-on-girl love has ended. Why does she no longer Yahoo?Gossip column Page Six spotted Tequila "hooking up" with Justin Long, best known for his role as a Mac in Apple commercials, at a Vegas nightclub on Halloween. Will the Mac preference stick? Who knows, but according the a New York Post spy, Long reportedly "asked her [Tequila] to straddle him while making out." What would John Hodgman have to say about this? (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images for Cirque du Soleil)

Jim Clark's new wife puts "sex" back in "sexagenarian"

Owen Thomas · 10/23/08 11:40AM

Gazillionaire Netscape founder Jim Clark is getting married for a fourth time — and the bride wore very little. Her name is Kristy Hinze, an Australian swimsuit model who has been dating Clark for some time. Hinze is 28, Clark is 64.Hinze, the host of Project Runway Australia, was first spotted on Clark's $100 million megayacht, the Athena, two years ago, while Clark was wrapping up a $125 million divorce settlement with ex-wife Nancy Rutter, a former Forbes reporter, PEHub notes. Small world: Hinze will be YouTube founder Chad Hurley's stepmother-in-law. He's married to Clark's daughter Kathy.

Bram Cohen's wife comes to his defense

Owen Thomas · 10/22/08 04:20PM

BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen, whose sideline career is in writing horrifyingly violent fiction, approached me at a charity event Tuesday to discuss Valleywag's recent posts about him. I'll give him credit: He's as unapologetic about writing lines like "I don't like fucking bitches like you so don't count on not getting seriously hurt" as I am in criticizing him for them. In Valleywag's comments, Jenna Cohen, Bram's wife, has posted a defense. She says Cohen "has never used" Asperger's syndrome as an excuse. But she does have an interesting explanation for Cohen's stories of torture and rape: They're a turn-on. For her, too. She suggests they were his "porn collection." Here's the full comment:

Valley's dirty old man beats New York's dirty old man

Owen Thomas · 10/21/08 02:40PM

Stewart Alsop, the goofy San Francisco-based venture capitalist, has this in common with Nouriel Roubini, the louche New York University professor known as "Dr. Doom" for his timely predictions of the current market collapse: Both are Facebook stalkers, aggressive in their requesting of friendship from attractive young women. But Alsop has one key difference: He's utterly shameless about it. Roubini was spurred into late-night Hitlerian name-calling by Gawker's reporting on his Facebook habits. We've sometimes felt the urge to hire a bodyguard for CNET video personality Natali Del Conte when she and Alsop attended the same party.But confronted by Mashable about his relationship collection, Alsop freely fessed up: "In his mid-50s, Alsop reaches out to young attractive women and asks if he can be their friend. Many say yes. Alsop says he's an old guy and it makes him feel as if he's got something going on. There's no downside for Alsop. Some may think it's weird, but it doesn't change anything for him." In case you had any doubts on how free-thinking the Bay Area is on such matters, Robin Wolaner, Alsop's "No. 1 girlfriend" and the CEO of social network TeeBeeDee, supports her man's Facebook habit. Even though, in the same Mashable article, she recommends against accepting friend requests from people you don't really know. Like, say, her 50something venture-capitalist boyfriend.

Stewart Alsop's sausagefest

Owen Thomas · 10/15/08 03:40AM

No one quite understood why venture capitalist Stewart Alsop was handing out salamis at Alsop Louie Partners' annual party at Tres Agaves Tuesday night. Power investors in the crowd: Ann Winblad and Ron Conway. The boring business gossip: Sequoia's funereal presentation to entrepreneurs on the coming financial apocalypse. The more interesting personal gossip: Alsop is dating Robin Wolaner, the founder of Parenting magazine — see, everyone's a founder of something in the Valley! — and the author of CEO confessional Naked in the Boardroom. (Since I first wrote this post, Wolaner emailed me to mention that she's also, much more recently, the founder of TeeBeeDee, a social networking website.)Alsop hastened to clarify to partygoers that Wolaner is his "no. 1 girlfriend." Why the enumeration? He still has a habit of picking up other women. I mean that literally. I saw him pick a blonde girl off the floor and give her a full-body hug at the party. That's leverage, of some kind or another. I took one of Stewart's sausages to give to the host at my next party.

Valley's cutest couple ever creates cutest video ever

Owen Thomas · 10/08/08 09:00PM

Click to viewHoly frack. Is there any couple more adorable than Facebook platform director Dave Morin and his lady love, evangelicious Google Maps marketer Brittany Bohnet? Their employers may be rivals for developers' affections, but this lip-sync video of "All My Life," created on a road-trip through Cyprus, has no competition for the remaining drips of sentiment in my sappy little heart. Will you two crazy kids quit your dead-end jobs and start a company devoted to, I don't know, being the winsomest thing in the world? I'd invest in preferred shares of teary-cheeked admiration, at a valuation of 15 billion awwwws.

Michael Arrington wants you to read about MySpace Music, not his love life

Owen Thomas · 10/06/08 10:18AM

If you didn't believe our report that TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is in bed with MySpace's top flack, Dani Dudeck, read the obsessive startup blogger's latest story on MySpace Music, which claims that MySpace has "streamed" 1 billion songs. Considering that most MySpace profiles are set to start playing a song, whether you like it or not, as soon as you visit them, that's not that impressive. Arrington leads his story by comparing MySpace streams to iTunes sales, and then acknowledges it's not a "fair comparison." His readers, in the comments, went much further, citing our report and questioning whether the affair with Dudeck clouded Arrington's judgment. Those comments have been — what's the word? — unpublished.

Jimmy Wales gets a German prize

Owen Thomas · 10/04/08 12:00PM

On Friday, the cofounder of the world's most comprehensive directory of socialites, Jimmy Wales, was one of the recipients of the $138,000 Quadriga prize for philanthropy in Berlin. Wales is a committed follower of Ayn Rand, the founder of Objectivism and noted loather of altruism — but he got handsomely paid for his do-gooding, so it must be okay! And that's not the only way Wales was rewarded in Berlin.The previous evening, the Berliner Kurier reports, Wales dined with Celia von Bismarck, shown here, a dilettante magazine editor and think-tanker. (She hates "boring society ladies," according to Vanity Fair, so she and Wales must have self-loathing in common.) No mention of Wales's current fling, Andrea Weckerle, who's said to be on the outs with him after rumors circulated that he sent around racy photos of Weckerle without her knowledge.

HotOrNot founder James Hong engaged

Owen Thomas · 10/02/08 07:00AM

James Hong, who recently sold rating-and-dating site HotOrNot, has announced his engagement to girlfriend Julia Zhang. I wondered if he'd dropped down on one knee at Max Levchin's wedding over the weekend, where he served as best man, but Hong tells me he popped the question a few weeks ago. Hong also celebrated his 35th birthday earlier this week. I guess this settles the question, James: Definitely hot.

Martha Stewart's Microsoft-billionaire ex-boyfriend to go back into space

Nicholas Carlson · 10/01/08 12:00PM

Charles Simonyi, the Microsoft billionaire who paid $25 million for a 13-day stay on the International Space Station in April 2007, plans to return on another Russian rocket in 2009, says Virginia-based Space Adventures, which didn't say how much he was spending this time. Simonyi, who made his money helping Microsoft develop Excel as well as word, had been dating Martha Stewart for 15 years before they broke up in February; he's now engaged to Lisa Persdotter, a 28-year-old Swede, according to reports. Is she more tolerant of his rocketing career?

Michael Arrington's MySpace Music review, the 100-word version

Nicholas Carlson · 09/30/08 09:00AM

We know what TechCrunch's Michael Arrington got out of sleeping with MySpace PR executive Dani Dudeck: Screenshots of MySpace Music before the service launched. But what was Dudeck's quid to Arrington's quo? To find that, it's worth examining all the nice things Arrington has posted about her employer over the past couple of months.On MySpace's Data Availability, a feature which lets MySpace users link their profiles to other services like Twitter, versus Google's similar Friend Connect, he wrote:

The bromance of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett

Nicholas Carlson · 09/29/08 05:40PM

Like any good ro-man-on-man-tic comedy, before Bill Gates and Warren Buffett had their first encounter at Gates's parents' home in 1991, they didn't want to meet each other. Says Buffett: "While we're driving down there, I said, 'What the hell are we going to spend all day doing with these people? How long do we have to stay to be polite?" Says Gates: "I told my mom, 'I don't know about a guy who just invests money and picks stocks. I don't have many good questions for him; that's not my thing, Mom." Both showed up at the appointed time anyway — Buffett in a economy-sized car, Gates in a helicopter. It was love at first bluster, according to the Financial Times."We talked and talked and talked and talked and paid no attention to anybody else. I started asking him a whole bunch of questions about his business, not expecting to understand any of it. He's a great teacher, and we couldn't stop talking," Buffett told the newspaper. "We were sort of ignoring all these important people, and Bill's father finally said, gently, that he'd prefer that we join in a little more." Then the conversation turned to sex and computers. As the night wore on — Gates's helicopter had to fly before it got dark, and he let it go — Gates and Buffett grew more and more fascinated with each other. Buffett asked Gates about IBM and Gates told him to buy stock in Microsoft and Intel. Then, per the rules of the buddy-comedy genre, Gates objectified a woman. (The idea being, of course, to share a sexual course of thought without crossing any societal norms.) Says Buffett: "Bill started trying to convince me to get a computer."

Please don't post photos of my wedding to Slide

Jackson West · 09/29/08 01:00AM

Slide founder Max Levchin made longtime lover Nellie Minkova an honest woman on Saturday. The ceremony was held at San Francisco's St. Regis Hotel, and featured HotOrNot cofounder James Hong as best man, with fellow PayPal mafioso Peter Thiel another groomsman. Gracious enough for the couple to refuse gifts besides books and wine, considering how many zeros Levchin can count toward his (and now their) wealth. However, rather ironic that the bride and groom asked guests not to upload any pictures from the ceremonies online for "privacy" reasons.Levchin's Slide promotes the practice of sharing every precious and not-so-precious moment with the world at large, and that his company has massive amounts of Facebook user data at its disposal thanks to the popularity of the company's Facebook applications. Yes, the rich are different than you and I: They don't buy into the crap they sell us.

Michael Arrington pounding his MySpace source

Nicholas Carlson · 09/26/08 02:00PM

When TechCrunch, the blog for startup fetishists, published leaked screengrabs of MySpace's just-launched music service, Michael Arrington wrote: "We’ve been pounding our sources for screenshots of the new service for weeks without any luck." Now we know what he meant. A tipster tells us, and another source confirms, that Arrington's been dating Dani Dudeck, MySpace's VP of global communications, for months.We're told Dudeck leaked Arrington not only the MySpace Music screenshots, but also tipped him to a story about MySpace friend-in-chief Tom Anderson's brush with the FBI as a hacker in the 1980s. The article served to burnish Anderson's rather questionable geek credentials. MySpace has helped Arrington's business in other ways besides feeding him stories. The News Corp.-owned social network was a major sponsor of the recent TechCrunch50 conference. Arrington has no issue bragging privately about his relationship with Dudeck. And Dudeck, our source says, has "no issues to sleeping with key influencers." Before Arrington, we hear, the rumor was Dudeck dated MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe. But don't believe us — let's go to the tape. Check out this clip of DeWolfe and Dudeck together at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, caught by Kara Swisher for AllThingsD. The way Dudeck leans in to DeWolfe to stay warm tells you more than any of our anonymous sources. Kara's quippy response — "You don't have to love me" — reminds me of an anecdote my boss once related about Dudeck. The flirtatious MySpace flack accosted him at a conference last year and said, "We really need to work on our relationship." Sorry, Dani — Owen doesn't swing that way.

Marissa Mayer dateless at society gala?

Jackson West · 09/23/08 01:00AM

Wearing a green ballgown and patent leather belt from designer Catherine Martin and plenty of diamonds, Google cupcake princess Marissa Mayer mingled with the local society set at the San Francisco Symphony opening night gala. But the big news isn't that Martin clearly chose the green print from the upholstery section at the fabric store, but that Mayer's venture capitalist boytoy Zack Bogue was nowhere to be seen in any pictures. Could the pair be on the outs? Of course, where Mayer goes, A-list Google gay Orkut Büyükkökten and his partner Derek Holbrook are sure to follow. The pair wore white and silver tuxes, respectively — however, with no right hands visible in their photo, we can't tell if the betrothed couple have officially tied the knot yet. Update: Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Don Draper, the Chronicle has pics of Bogue and Mayer arm-in-arm. Looks like Bogue took our advice and dressed it up with a pocket square.(Photo by Drew Altizer via SFLuxe)

Shawn Fanning and Jennifer "Jennicide" Leigh an item?

Jackson West · 09/18/08 04:40PM

Serial entrepreneur Shawn Fanning, probably best known as the founder of early file sharing site Napster, recently changed his relationship status on Facebook from "single" to "in a relationship with Jennifer Leigh." Whom I'm pretty sure is Jennifer "Jennicide" Leigh, a televised poker personality who's posed in FHM and Playboy. (Preemptive apologies to Fanning's other friend Jennie Leigh if Fanning mistyped.) Fanning and Leigh share interests in both World of Warcraft and programming, and Valleywag would like to wish them nothing but happiness and plentiful lewtz while raiding Northrend. (Photos from Jennifer Leigh, Joi Ito)

Sex advice from MIT

Melissa Gira Grant · 09/16/08 09:00PM

Trust a campus reporter to get to the heart of the underloved MIT student body. The Tech's Christine Yu explains sex in a language those who need it most can relate to in a moment of crisis: introductory math and physics. You don't need to have gotten off or awkward in Cambridge's most notorious sub-basements to find a grain of truth in her advice.