SiliconBeat

Last night, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington revealed that he had received hundreds of documents about Twitter sent by someone who had hacked into the company’s system. Arrington said he planned to post some documents related to Twitter’s business. This set off a firestorm of debate about the ethics. With Arrington posting a follow up to his original post here.

I was truly amazed at the overwhelmingly negative feedback from the TechCrunch community about his decision. You can see the harshness continue on Twitter here.

I posted my own thoughts in the comment section, which I’m re-posting here: Read the rest of this entry »

I attended an intriguing dinner in Woodside last night.

The dinner was ostensibly to promote a new wireless router being launched by FON, a Spanish company. The router — dubbed the Fonera 2.0 — is somewhat interesting, adding some neat features that most comparable devices don’t have, such as the ability to upload files to the Internet while your computer is turned off and the ability to offer — and make money off of — a public hot spot without granting the hoi polloi access to files on you home network.

But the dinner was much more interesting for who attended than the product that inspired it. The guest list was a notable cross section of the digerati and tech blogosphere. Among those present: Tech Crunch founder Michael Arrington; Scobleizer’s Robert Scoble; Ryan Block, a former editor at Engadget and more recently the founder of Gdgt, a new tech “community” site; Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a marketing manager at the social networking company; Dave Morin, Facebook’s senior platform manager; and Jeff Clavier, founder and managing partner of SoftTech VC.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tech blog impresario Michael Arrington is very happy with the terms of his new office lease in downtown Palo Alto. A softening in Silicon Valley’s commercial real estate finally enabled the digital media enterpreneur to move his growing TechCrunch empire out of his home in Atheron, where he was being threatened with legal action.

How soft has the market gotten? Arrington describes “the wholesale destruction of the office rental market in Silicon Valley.”

But Phil Mahoney, with the commercial real estate firm Cornish & Carey, says the market may resemble a marshmellow but it is far from melting. Mahoney told the Mercury News there is a 15 percent vacancy rate in Class A commercial real estate versus 30 percent in the post-dot-com economic apocalypse. And, unlike, previous cycles of boom and bust, the industry managed not to overbuild. He says the upshot is that Class A space is still renting at roughly what it did in 2006.