Thoughts from a Bafta nominated Podcaster, Blogger, Writer and Commentator.
Michael Arrington on the NSA PRISM story: For my part, I don’t give a damn that Senator Feinstein and others in our government say that this is “called protecting America.” It doesn’t, it’s Orwellian and it kills liberty and freedom on a scale never seen before. It’s not a way to stop terrorism. It IS terrorism. My emphasis, but Arrington nails it.
There’s another truth hiding inside Robin Wauters little part of the TechCrunch story: …[I] finally tease Arrington – who I got to know, ironically, because of the whole Blognation drama – in a Skype chat that he’s getting slow and that there will be a day where he’ll be forced to hire me. One day, not too long after, that’s exactly what he does. He says something like “dude, stop breaking stories on [The Next Web] and come blog for us instead, ok?”. The next day, I received a username and password for WordPress, our CMS, and I remember asking
If (when?) CrunchFund is confirmed, there’s going to be a very obvious elephant in the room marked conflict of interest – how do you write about start-ups and invest in start-ups at the same time? Perhaps Arrington’s plan was to have already been "asked to leave" AOL at this point.
This isn’t “process journalism,” it’s bullying. It’s also unethical. That’s why I tell clients to skip TechCrunch and reach the same influential audience with a story on a site like Business Insider, GigaOm, VentureBeat or AllThingsD. If it’s a big story, you can go to the Wall Street Journal. It’s almost like Techcrunch became the de facto Valleywag, post Valleywag.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a stock option plan like this. I actually worked for a company once that used the same mechanism. I dug up the clause from that agreement, which I kept because it was so audacious. Here’s the relevant clause – it says much the same as the Skype documents but in slightly more understandable language: Michael Arrington shows just how important experience is, and why lawyers are a good idea for any contract. I’m sure that second lesson will kick in soon.
And so the CrunchPad is placed by it’s spiritual father, Michael Arrington, into the Dead Pool. I doubt it’s the last we’ll see of the device, but it’s certainly the last we’ll see of it with the CrunchPad moniker. The legalese may be in motion but some warehouse is going to churn these out within six months. All the real world stuff aside, I’m sad that the CrunchPad isn’t going to be available. Looking at that picture of the circuit board there’s a juicy 1850mah battery, an express PCMCIA 3G card, Intel Atom 1.6 CPU (perhaps a Z or N
