Our soul is the same.

– Larry Page to Businessweek’s Brad Stone, on his belief that Google hasn’t really changed since it made its motto “Don’t be evil”

Now it is trying the same gambit, but with Mark Zuckerberg instead of Steve Jobs. If you want to read “Inside Facebook,” Miguel Helft and Jessi Hempel’s pre-IPO profile, you’ll need to pay up.

I just plunked down $1.99 for the Amazon edition, and zipped through it this morning. Like the Apple story, this one is focused on the company’s structure and management philosophy more than anything, which is quite useful for outsiders. Alas, no org chart.

And if you’re into profiles of big Silicon Valley companies in big business magazines, this is your lucky week: Businessweek’s Brad Stone profiles Twitter in a story out now.

The cover art is very promising:

The profile is good but the cover art is just freaky.

Amidst the heaping serving of anecdotes of Sandberg’s prolific abilities to charm and impress people (she cried at work in front of Mark Zuckerberg! She helped her new head of sales decide what to wear!), there’s also some good stuff on Facebook’s current operations:

• Facebook, led by Sandberg, is dedicated to keeping its employee count as low as it can, in order to avoid the “innovation-killing bureaucracy” that has plagued other tech companies (a.k.a. her former employer Google). Sandberg is overjoyed by examples of smaller teams doing more work.
• The FTC will “within weeks decide that Facebook’s privacy policies were unfair and deceptive, and Facebook will agree to undergo ‘periodic privacy audits.’”
• Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow said Facebook’s largest advertisers will this year spend more than $100 million each.

Since Facebook in China is one of the topics I’m more interested these days, I’ll excerpt the meat of that portion:

And then there’s China. Facebook has explored creating a joint venture with Chinese Internet companies such as search engine Baidu (BIDU) to operate a division of the social network in China that complies with local censorship and filtering requirements. The company maintains that no decision has been made. Sandberg says the subject, like countless interpersonal relationships on Facebook, is complicated. “There are compromises on not being in China, and there are compromises on being in China. It’s not clear to me which one is bigger,” she says.

Three people familiar with these internal deliberations say that Sandberg and Zuckerberg fundamentally disagree on the issue. Zuckerberg believes that Facebook can be an agent of change in China, as it has been in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia. Sandberg, a veteran of Google’s expensive misadventures in the world’s most populous country, is wary about the compromises Facebook would have to make to do business there.

Sandberg won’t address whether there’s friction over the topic, but she says disagreements in her partnership with Zuckerberg are common and healthy, and that the CEO gets to make the final call. For his part, Zuckerberg insists that he is taking the long view and that nothing is settled. “We have a pretty long-term perspective on this,” he says. “Given our track record so far, I have confidence that we have a good shot at winning whenever it makes sense for us to enter. But we need to figure out what that is going to look like.”

Next up: A New Yorker story by Ken Auletta about women in technology is set to prominently feature Sandberg.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Yesterday morning, the pair of Stanford University graduate students who made the hot news-reading iPad app, Pulse News Reader, were ecstatic to be mentioned first–for being among the most promising developers for the new tablet device–by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in his keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

But by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple (AAPL) informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company (NYT) declaring that “The New York Times Company believes your application named ‘Pulse News Reader’ infringes The New York Times Company’s rights.”

In an unusual coincidence, the Times Web site was on prominent display on a huge screenshot of the iPad during Jobs’s speech.

Ironically, the Times wrote a big wet kiss about Pulse last week in a blog post titled “The iPad Pulse Reader Scales the Charts,” by tech writer Brad Stone.

“Pulse is a stylish and easy-to-use news aggregator,” wrote Stone. “News organizations still puzzling over their iPad strategies can perhaps derive some hope from Pulse’s success–or at least its price tag.”

No longer. Pulse was down completely by 6:30 pm PT last night.

Reads a notice on iTunes now: “Your request could not be completed. The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the U.S. store.”

“I don’t blame Apple, because they have to respond when contacted by lawyers from the Times,” said Akshay Kothari, a 23-year-old student of well-known Silicon Valley investor Michael Dearing’s Launch Pad class at Stanford, of the letter the media giant sent to Apple (which is below, along with the take-down notice).

“But it was definitely a roller coaster of a day.”

In fact, it has been all up for the past four weeks, since Kothari and 22-year-old Ankit Gupta released the Pulse iPad app, creating it for the class, which requires students to develop and put out a product.

Both are at Stanford’s Institute of Design and created a company called Alphonso Labs.

The app was quickly approved after about four weeks of development. Since then, it has taken off strongly, downloaded 35,000 times at a $4 price tag, even rising to No. 1 in paid apps several times, as noted prominently in the lead of the Times story.

Kothari said that the pair plan to contact Apple in the morning and take steps to remove Times material from the feeds.

It is not immediately clear why they need to, since Pulse draws from publicly available Times RSS feeds, as do many other apps, and does no scraping.

In fact, Pulse is little more than a really well-designed RSS reader, which is what the Times said it was in its write-up. You add feeds to it and it visualizes them in a way that’s easy to get through.

The Times story did have one ominous-in-retrospect note about Pulse: “It also lets people easily share articles through Twitter and Facebook–bypassing the individual sharing tools presented by each news site.”

But Pulse is pretty basic and is similar to many others readers.

In the New York Times case, as with others, one view is plain text and only shows whatever the Times puts in its RSS feed, which isn’t much. And its Web view seems to be just an in-app browser that takes you straight to the page that is in the link with the RSS feed.

You can see both here below:

The Times lawyer, Richard Samson, sees it differently, apparently, since it is a paid app rather than a free one, noting in the Times June 3 notice to Apple, which came two days after the newspaper’s article about Pulse:

“The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.”

Samson also complained about how Pulse was marketed in the App Store, a screenshot of which you can see below:

BoomTown sent an email to Samson, as well as to Apple, for comment.

Until I hear back, here is the email from the App store to Pulse, including the letter from the Times lawyer–I removed personal email addresses and phone numbers, along with the number of the Pulse case Apple gave it–as well as a lovely video of Pulse in action:

From: App Store Notices
Date: Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 3:09 PM
Subject: Apple Inc. (our ref# APPXXXX)
To: Akshay Kothari

Dear Sir or Madam,

**Please include APPXXXX in the subject line of any future correspondence on this matter.**

We received a written notice from The New York Times Company that The New York Times Company believes your application named “Pulse News Reader” infringes The New York Times Company’s rights. A copy of the notice is attached.

Accordingly, we have pulled your application from the App Store. Please contact The New York Times Company directly regarding any questions or concerns you may have.

For any technical questions, please contact iTunes Connect: www.apple.com/itunes/go/itunesconnect/contactus.

Thank you for your immediate attention.

Sincerely,

? iTunes Music Marketing & IP Legal | Apple | 1 Infinite Loop | Cupertino | CA | 95014 | AppStoreNotices@apple.com

Begin forwarded message:

From: “Samson, Richard S”
Date: June 3, 2010 10:51:23 AM PDT
To:”‘appstorenotices@apple.com’”
Cc: “Samuels, Robert”, “Manning, Michael”
Subject: infringing “Pulse News Reader” iPad app

Hello-

I am writing again, on behalf of The Boston Globe, Boston.com and The New York Times Company, about the infringing iPad app, “Pulse News Reader” produced by Alphonso Labs Inc. (please see pertinent details, link and screenshots below).

The infringing app is available on the iTunes store here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pulse-news-reader/id371088673?mt=8

The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.

I note that the app is delivered with the NYTimes.com RSS feed preloaded, which is prominently featured in the screen shots used to sell the app on iTunes.

I hereby declare, under penalty of perjury, that the information contained in this notification is accurate to the best of our knowledge and that I am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyrights and trademarks of The Boston Globe, Boston.com and The New York Times Company. We hereby demand that you immediately and permanently remove this app from the iTunes site.

Please let me know if you need any further information or have any questions. I can be reached directly at this Email or at the phone number below.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Richard Samson

Richard Samson
Senior Counsel
The New York Times Company
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York 10018

* NYTimes.com Terms of Service, paragraph 2.2: “The Service and its Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S. and international copyright laws. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce (except as provided in Section 2.3 of these Terms of Service), create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Service (including software) in whole or in part.”

* Boston.com Terms of Service, paragraph 2.2: “The Service and its Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S.and international copyright laws. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce (except as provided in Section 2.3 of this Agreement), create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Service (including software) in whole or in part.”

[All Things Digital intern Drake Martinet contributed to this report.]

BoomTown captured some bits and pieces of tasty video as I attended the Apple rollout of its newest device, the iPad, yesterday.

There are shots of the action in San Francisco outside and inside the launch hall and demo area (with key clips of CEO Steve Jobs during the event) showing off the hardware and software.

And, in a series of interviews, I mocked New York Times (NYT) tech legend John Markoff, got mocked by Apple (AAPL) PR gurus Katie Cotton and Steve Dowling, got gallant treatment from Gizmodo’s Brian Lam, got shut down by New York Times tech dude Brad Stone and got CNBC’s Jim Goldman–whom I did not ask for a date–to call the iPad “an XL version of the iPod touch.”

Or is it a Thneed–the innovative thing that everybody needs–from Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax”?

Time will tell, but here’s the video to enjoy, plus one of the terrific “Everybody Needs a Thneed” song:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100128/scenes-from-the-apple-ipad-day-is-it-a-thneed-or-an-ipod-xl/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091103/volpi-and-index-ventures-out-of-skype-deal-the-lawsuit-happy-founder-twins-in/ http://allthingsd.com/20091103/volpi-and-index-ventures-out-of-skype-deal-the-lawsuit-happy-founder-twins-in/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:58:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=20231

According to sources close to the situation, Index Ventures and Michelangelo Volpi are out of the deal to buy Skype–and their lawsuit-loving nemeses, the founders of the Internet telephony service, are in.

Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis had sued Index and partner Michelangelo Volpi via tech companies they control, Joltid and Joost.

The pair had already been in a legal battle over software licensing issues with eBay (EBAY), the company that had sold Skype to in 2005.

They then accused Index and Volpi, employing a reputation-bashing style, of using confidential information as part of a consortium bid to acquire a large chunk of Skype.

Volpi had been Joost’s CEO.

Volpi and Index fired back in court filings and both sides armed themselves with powerful PR guns.

Ironically, Index was only a small part of the group that won the deal to acquire Skype from eBay recently.

News of the serious settlement talks was reported earlier this week by GigaOm’s Om Malik.

The New York Times’s Brad Stone also added significantly to the story about the settlement today, noting the Skype founders would be getting a stake and that Index “is most likely withdrawing from the deal.”

Well, most likely now means certainly for Index, sources told me, and the London-based venture firm that bid for Skype has to bid that deal goodbye.

More details to come, but it’s sure proof that the legal system, such as it was used, works.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091103/volpi-and-index-ventures-out-of-skype-deal-the-lawsuit-happy-founder-twins-in/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20070806/monday-morning-quarterback-the-poor-little-rich-and-in-mitt-romneys-case-humorless-boy-edition/ http://allthingsd.com/20070806/monday-morning-quarterback-the-poor-little-rich-and-in-mitt-romneys-case-humorless-boy-edition/#comments Mon, 06 Aug 2007 07:07:28 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070806/monday-morning-quarterback-the-poor-little-rich-and-in-mitt-romneys-case-humorless-boy-edition/ IF I WERE A RICH GEEK…

In a front page article Sunday, New York Times writer Gary Rivlin drags out that old Silicon Valley chestnut about how hard it to is be just a plain old millionaire when everyone else around you has all those hundreds of millions and–worse!–billions.

I always enjoy Rivlin’s work and even spent a lovely few weeks with him and also Po Bronson on a lecture/debate scheme hatched by our Random House editor called the “Bleeding Edge” book tour in the summer 1999. (Here’s a quick recap: I thought the Internet was underhyped at the time and Rivlin did not, while Bronson dreamily sold more books than both of us combined.)

But it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine anyone–even in the gold rush days of the Web–not being happy with several million in the bank.

Notes Rivlin: “…Those with a few million dollars often see their accumulated wealth as puny, a reflection of their modest status in the new Gilded Age, when hundreds of thousands of people have accumulated much vaster fortunes…”

Oh, good heavens.

But Rivlin did manage to get his interview subjects to say appalling things, such as calling tech work the “Silicon Valley salt mines” (um, the food is a bit better and there are no whips and chains I have ever seen except by personal preference).

My personal favorite was a quote from Match.com founder Gary Kremen, who apparently without irony declared, “You’re nobody here at $10 million.”

At this, I can only quote the poet Emily Dickinson:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us–don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog.
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”

SPOILER ALERT! HARRY POTTER IS FAKE STEVE JOBS!

Speaking of nobody we knew until just now–the Times’ Brad Stone also managed to finally out the creator of the popular Fake Steve Jobs blog. As it turns out, it is not our own John Paczkowski, but Daniel Lyons (pictured here), a senior editor at Forbes magazine.

While some will care more than others about Stone’s identifying the snarkaholic FSJ (Owen, stop crying now), it’s, of course, about the need to sell a book. In this case, Lyons’s “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody,” coming out in the fall.

In a post Sunday, Lyons asked for suggestions for a new verb for Stone’s first name, and then suggested himself: “To bust a fellow filthy hack without mercy and spoil the fun for everyone, in a quest for personal aggrandizement.”

Yes, just like Harry Potter spoilers on the Web! In fact, the Harry-Potter-as-middle-aged-man-looking Lyons would know all about that kind of thing.

MEMO TO MITT: THE KIDS LOVE BOTH SNOWMEN AND THE WEB

And Mitt Romney needs to get over himself, after he viciously attacked the snowman named Billiam. The frozen questioner was posing a pretty good question about global warming in the YouTube/CNN presidential debates recently completed with Democratic presidential candidates.

The GOP wannabes were supposed to do the digital debate in September. But that has been stymied so far when the former Massachusetts governor said a video question from a snowman was undignified, noting, “I don’t know that it makes sense to have people running for president answering questions posed by snowmen.”

Given snowmen have the most to suffer from the climate heating up, I say: Who better!?!

In all seriousness, the Jon-Stewart-tone of the Web is something all the candidates had better get used to. In fact, years hence, queries from snowmen are going to look tame by comparison.

Here’s a Dow Jones Online video on the topic with the chilly question from Billiam:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20070806/monday-morning-quarterback-the-poor-little-rich-and-in-mitt-romneys-case-humorless-boy-edition/feed/ 0