>> eBay and Craigslist do the lawsuit tango. Google tries to protect your privacy. And Sarah Lacy stops in to dish about her new book on the Silicon Valley. It's Wednesday, May 14, I'm Natali Del Conte and it's time to get Loaded.
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>> Craigslist is suing eBay even though eBay suit over Craigslist is still unsettled. Craigslist is claiming that eBay used its minority stake in the company that steal trade secrets. Craigslist is asking that eBay either restore their Craigslist shares or divest in holdings in Craigslist. Can I say Craigslist one more time? EarthLink has let down the entire city of Philadelphia in the same way that the company let down the entire city of San Francisco. They backed-out of the city-wide Wi-Fi network that they promised to build out. The company just could not afford to build this, so they're canning the project. You know in one hand, it's good not to waste money when WiMax is probably on its way, anyway. On the other hand, it's just lame that EarthLink bid on all these jobs that they didn't have the resources to build. Poor planning, EarthLink, you're supposed to under-promise and over-deliver and not the other way around. Microsoft launched its WorldWide Telescope this week. This is a downloadable program that lets you virtually fly around the universe. It's kind of like Google Earth for outer space. It doesn't work on Macs unless you're running Windows, but other than that it has been really well received. You may recall Kara Tsuboi got a sneak peek of it a few months ago. You can find that at News.com. You can now login to Zoho using your Google or Yahoo ID. The company pulled the new account sign-up requirement this week. Zoho is one of the most comprehensive office suites on the Web, but their biggest challenge has been in creating its own community. Now, they can pull from Yahoo and Google, which is smart and would be even smarter if they use open ID, but they told TechCrunch that they are moving in that direction. Kodak is now selling digital picture frames with your favorite photos preloaded. You can purchase the frames online with up to 100 images of your choice. The images are then saved on to an SD card that ships with the frame. This is a good idea for people who just can't figure out digital frames like my mother. I gave her a digital frame for Christmas and it's still in the box. Sarah Lacy is a technology journalist in the Silicon Valley. She has a new book coming out called, Once You're Lucky, Twice you're Good. The book is about the bubble and boom hysteria as it relates to the Web 2.0 community and I was lucky enough to have her visit me here in New York yesterday to tell me all about it.
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>> It's really written for people outside Silicon Valley and outside the tech scene. And you know, my observation was that everyone heard all about dot coms in the 90s and everyone heard all about the buzz and then recently everyone started hearing about YouTube and MySpace and Facebook, but the whole middle part of that story that's just wasn't covered because everyone just kind of thought it was a dead story and moved on.
>> Lacy told me that even though the dot com buzz scared away a lot of people, there was still a lot of innovation going on in the years between the buzz and what we like to refer to as the Web 2.0 boom.
>> It's sort of a really narrative book following a handful of guys who, I think were the most interesting ones in the scene and how they started believing in the Web again and how they started building these companies and what makes them so different.
>> The book discusses the ways in which the Web 2.0 boom is different than the first time around.
>> More than 500,000 people in the Bay Area lost their jobs, which is like more than the working population of San Francisco today. I mean, it was outrageous. The degree to which it tank the whole US economy, I mean, every single Web 2.0 company could go out of business tomorrow and it wouldn't tank the US economy. I mean it would hurt San Francisco, but not the way it did then.
>> I asked her why people who don't work in technology have such a huge interest in the Web 2.0 community.
>> There's so many human needs that are now being fulfilled via the Internet that it's just something people feel really passionately about and these sites in particular people feel really passionately about. And it's also everyone, because like they get the Internet, so I, you know they can [inaudible] morning quarterback as much as the next guy.
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>> Lacy's book will be available tomorrow on all the normal book retailers' sites and you can find out more about her show Yahoo Tech Ticker at sarahlacy.com. The State of Texas apparently wants to collect taxes from Internet commerce. They got that brilliant idea from the State of New York. The Dallas Morning News reports that the State is looking into whether or not it can instate its own Amazon tax for seen the retailer to pay up to four years of back taxes for sales that made in Texas. Yehey, more taxes. God bless Texas. Creative launched a new video camcorder to compete with the flip cam. It's called the Vado. It has 2 Gigs of built-in memory and 2-hours of battery life and it plugs directly into your computer with a USB connection. It looks pretty cool, but it's $99 plus an extra $30 for the charging station. The flip cam is a $129 total as well, although my sister told me she got one on sale at Target for $80 and it runs on AA batteries. There may be another BlackBerry on its way and this one is iPhone-ish with a big fat touch screen and only 4 buttons. The Boy Genius Report is saying that this is will be called the BlackBerry Thunder and it will launch exclusively on Verizon and Vodafone. This is supposed to be a 4G phone and launching Q3 of this year. This is huge for Verizon customers who covet the iPhone, but just won't leave their V-Cast Live. A lot of New Yorkers are like that. It's Google's Street View catches you doing something you don't wanna be caught doing, you may still be able to pretend it wasn't you. That's because Google is testing a face blurring software that will distort the faces of all people caught on camera in the Street View function of Google Maps. The company has had a lot of privacy violation complaints since Street View launched last year. The Face Distortion is only being tested in Manhattan though, so if you live elsewhere, you're still not safe, so be on your best behavior. We get that Grand Theft Auto was a big seller, but we didn't realize how big. The Guinness Book of World Records says that GTA IV was the biggest launch for any entertainment title ever. GTA IV nearly doubled Halo 3 in first-day sales with $310 million sold in 24-hours compared to Halo's $170 million. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book in the Harry Potter series previously held this record at $220 million in first-day sales. Now keep in mind the Harry Potter books still sold more units. Video games tend to be more lucrative because of their $60 price tag, whereas, the Deathly Hallows only cost 20 bucks. Those are all your headlines for today. Join us tomorrow when we take a behind-the-scenes look at the new Chronicles of Narnia movie. I'm Natali Del Conte with CNET TV and you've just been Loaded.
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