Business Insider

A Letter to the Rolling Stones Regarding Their Absurdly Expensive New Tour

Dear Rolling Stones, As we're sure you're aware, a little ripple of joy went through crowds of music fans the world over recently when you announced you were about to tour again. We were a little perturbed to find out that Mick Jagger has started dancing in front of a mirror in preparation, but tha ... More >>

Bang with Friends Attracts Investors, Yet It's Still Easier to Text Someone for a Booty Call

Bang With Friends, the prurient web application that allows you to click on Facebook friends and invite them for a roll in the hay, has evidently raised $1 million in its first round of venture funding. Yep, you read that right -- $1 million for an app that was created by three (probably) drunk tech ... More >>

SF Weekly Letters

Yes, We Can Blame Facebook and its CFO for Stock Debacle

It's easy, and to a large degree proper, to blame the people who bought into Facebook's dog of an IPO for their own losses. It was no secret that the company's prospects were highly uncertain. But that doesn't mean that others can't be blamed as well, or that investors are the only ones hurt by the ... More >>

Desperate Newspapers Pin Hopes on Annoyed Readers

News publishers have always treated readers like commodities -- because that's what readers are. The real customers for publishers aren't readers, but advertisers. Readers are the product. It's not quite that simple, of course, and more enlightened publishers treat readers with respect and cover the ... More >>

Music Labels Make Life Tough for Spotify

​Patrick Carney of the Black Keys is not a fan of Sean Parker, to say the least. Parker is an "asshole," Carney told NME.com on Monday. It's hard to blame Carney, though his rage might seem a bit misdirected -- or maybe just too concentrated on one person. Parker of course was the guy who brought ... More >>

PandoDaily: Just What We Needed, Another Tech-News Site

​Really? Seriously? Another site devoted to technology news? Yep, 'fraid so. This one, PandoDaily, will be written by, among others, some of the people who had previously made TechCrunch so awful: Sarah Lacy (who runs it), Michael Arrington, MG Siegler, and Paul Carr. These are people who believe ... More >>

Facebook's Cheesy Ads: Do They Make it Worth $100 Billion?

​A couple of weeks ago, Business Insider, the puerile gossip 'n' lies site run by disgraced, bubble-era Internet-stock analyst Henry Blodget, informed us that a "source close to Facebook employees" said in an e-mail to the site that the company would go public within weeks. The article's author, N ... More >>

Facebook Is No. 10 Most "Hated" Company

Facebook's populaity plummets​After Facebook launched the creepy facial recognition feature that had users freaking out, it's no wonder the social networking giant was voted the No. 10 most hated company in America. To put this snub into context, the only companies that are more hated than Faceboo ... More >>

E-mail Spammers Are Migrating to Social Media

Cramming your life​This morning, I had 12 e-mails in my spambox. That includes a few false positives, so really it's only nine. Older spams are deleted automatically -- every night. A few months ago, I was getting anywhere from a few dozen to a couple of hundred new spams a day -- the overwhelming ... More >>

No, Twitter Hasn't Replaced CNN

​It's become perfectly predictable: Every time there's a major news event, people spend several days talking about how Twitter and Facebook are replacing traditional news organizations -- the (sigh) "MSM." Even if the word "replacing" isn't used, that's often the implicationIn the present case -- ... More >>