rumors

NEW YORK--"They have that saying, 'don't shoot the messenger,' but the reason they say that is because the messenger gets shot," Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me over coffee on Tuesday morning. "So I have to take my shots."

He was talking, of course, about the PR fiasco that ensued when the Emeryville, Calif.-based East Bay Express newspaper published a lengthy expose on the business reviews site, alleging that it strong-armed businesses into paying to remove negative reviews. As a fairly regular Yelp user, I was repulsed by the possibility that its corporate … Read more

Correction 11:56 a.m. PST: We messed up. The 9 to 5 Mac blog we cited below is in fact from September 2008, so it turns out this is an old rumor. Because it showed up in our RSS feed Saturday, we, like a number of other publications, took it as a recent post and went from there. Apologies for the confusion.

There have been rumors buzzing around the Internet for some time Apple is secretly preparing a CDMA version of the iPhone, probably headed to Verizon Wireless, and probably by the end of this year. It's no … Read more

iPodObserver has published a photo what appears to be a new revision of the Apple iPhone 3G.

The photo shows the bottom portion of the iPhone as pictured here. You can also see a new model number: "A1303" and that model number has not appeared on any released iPhone to date

According to the post, "The new iPhone case back appears to shed its glossy appearance for a matte black look, and also sports what may be etched markings which indicates the plastic used in the current iPhone 3G model may be dumped in favor of a … Read more

Talk about spilling the beans: A marketing brochure for law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, which represented would-be social network ConnectU in its much-publicized suit against Facebook, claimed that the final settlement netted the site's founders a handsome $65 million in Facebook stock and cash.

Oops.

A Law.com article dug up the brochure and its claim, and has posted a .pdf file on the Web. According to the same article, principals at the law firm now regret posting the results. Meanwhile, ConnectU remains in a fee dispute with Quinn Emanuel, a fact which came to light … Read more

OK, so Dell and Apple have been locked in a marketing war for years. Dell has long been considered the default PC for enterprise, while Apple has positioned itself as the most influential consumer computer brand in the world. But Apple has branched out from computing with the iPod and, of course, the iPhone.

Now it's looking more and more likely that Dell might be going the way of the smartphone, as well, but don't look for an iPhone competitor, at least not at first. Dell tried something similar to take on the iPod, but the effort felt … Read more

When Palm's new smartphone, the Pre, debuted at CES, many GSM users (this reporter included) were chagrined to note that the maiden device was branded for Sprint, a CDMA carrier.

Almost all of Palm's past smartphones have had both CDMA and GSM flavors, and there's no reason to expect anything different from the Pre. And, according to rumors swirling around the Internet, we'll see the first GSM Pre at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, this February.

The first GSM device will likely be an unsubsidized and unlocked version. Internet clairvoyants are guessing the … Read more

Clarification at 7:02 a.m. PST: This article originally noted Silicon Alley Insider's report that Dan Lyons has been banned from CNBC. A CNBC representative disputes that assertion.

Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons, whose anonymous "Fake Steve Jobs" satire blog took the tech world by storm in 2007 went on a blunt rant on cable network CNBC that questioned its journalistic tactics--but contrary to a blog report, CNBC says he has not been banned from appearing on the network.

Lyons was facing off against CNBC's Silicon Valley bureau chief, Jim Goldman, in a segment about the … Read more

This post initially misstated Digg's 2007 loss as reported by 'BusinessWeek.' The company reported lost $2.8 million in 2007.

There are some stunning numbers in BusinessWeek about social news site Digg: In 2007, the company reportedly pulled in only $4.8 million in revenue and lost $2.8 million. In the first three quarters of 2008, it lost $4 million on $6.4 million in revenue.

Digg declined to comment on the numbers.

This is a little bit disconcerting, if true. Digg has been one of the hottest start-ups in Silicon Valley's hype machine for the past … Read more

While we just met with Sony Hardware Marketing Director John Koller, he had nothing to say about the possibility of a PSP-4000, let alone a successor to the PSP itself. According to Eurogamer, it's possible he was holding something back.

It seems that a PSP-4000 is very much in the works for 2009. We'd imagine the updated PSP would address the screen interlacing issues that the PSP-3000 suffers from, but we're just speculating. We're still going to chalk these details up as rumors, but it does make sense for a new iteration of the PSP to … Read more