Techgeist

If you are running Snow Leapord on your Mac right now, back up your data. Do it right now, at least get the backup started before you finish this post. That is of course, if you want to hold onto your data. There are numberous rumors swirling about Mac users running the latest Mac OSX build having a mysterious and horrible experience, involving a mysterious guest account and a empty hard drive. 9to5Mac sums it well:

“There’s been a series of complaints across the last month of incidents in which users start their Macs up as normal only to find they’ve logged in as ‘Guests’ on their machine – with all the files and data held on their Mac in their own user account seemingly deleted.”

My Vista box that I am typing this on is requesting a snickering comment about how Macs “just work.” Sadly, I cannot oblige it, the Mac is still “working,” just not in a very useful fashion. All snark aside, this is a very real issue for Mac users. Get your data saved, and we’ll bring you more as it comes in.

Before we begin this post, I want to make it plain: I love Twitter. But, even with that, the madness has to be slowed. Everyone is having their own cow over Twitter being valued at around a billion dollars in their last round, when they sold around 10% of the company at that valuation. Who am I to stay above the fray? Twitter is here to stay, and will change our lives, but we need to get our hats on straight. Let’s talk math, valuations, revenue, and the future.

I have already tangled with Scoble and Fred Wilson to a lesser extent about all of this once. The Week summarized it well. At the very end of my post on the subject I took the position that Twitter was “worth” probably something around two billion dollars. That number was what someone would have to pay to purchase Twitter outright. Now with Twitter being valued at one billion, they have moved that number up. No VC is going to be happy with Twitter being purchased for my paltry two billion; they need a multiple of return much higher than that to stay in business. …

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FiveRuns, a startup that had raised nine million dollars from Austin Ventures, by WorkThink. FiveRuns was a provider service products around Ruby on Rails. Major products include TuneUp and Dash. WorkThink, according to my looking and TweetCrunch, WorkThink has yet to launch. Their website claims that they are working on getting to launch.

Odd that FiveRuns was acquired by a company that has yet to launch.

We do not have details on the terms of the deal at the moment, but when we do, we will update this post with more. It is always nice to see M/A movement in the market, especially after the announcement of yesterdays NewEgg IPO. Things are moving again folks, get ready.

If you are anything like me, a ringing cell phone is a cringe worthy event. In all honesty, my iPhone exists for email and Twitter. Other people want to use it with me for telephony, but that is not its real purpose. My love for mobile email aside, do I have news and a deal for you. May I re-present the Peek, a diminutive mobile email device that does just that, email. Integrate with Ping.fm, and it does Twitter.

And guess what, no matter how you swing it, the Peek cannot call you at 3 am, asking you to clarify the project objectives. At the same time, you can email from the sack guilt free. This device is brilliant. Best part, according to CrunchGear, you can now get one without a monthly plan. Simply shell out $299 and the device is yours for life. Or, if you feel so inclined you can pick one up for $60 and a 15 dollar monthly plan.

Either way, the next time you drop your iPhone, think about it. No more ringtones, now that is a sweet sound.

BusinessCatalyst, the corporate parent to GoodBarry, is now part of Adobe. BusinessCatalyst will be made part of the Adobe company, the GoodBarry brand will be phased out. Fianancial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The final day for the GoodBarry brand will be October 1, 2009.

GoodBarry was essentially a broad ecommercer/CRM solution that allowed for the creation of online business solutions for the less tech-savvy. That exists in many forms, but GoodBarry was one of the best with a wide toolset, and a terrible name. Larz Shinobi, a GoodBarry denizen and friend of mine put it best on Twitter: “What. A. Day.”

Details on why specifically Adobe has hoovered up the BusinessCatalyst company are not just scarce, for now they are inscrutable. When we have more information, we will bring it to you. Until then, have a second martini with lunch, and toast GoodBarry.

Apple is accustomed to scrutiny for its business practices, it seems to be the brunt of a monthly lawsuit. But now things are different, just past the options pricing scandal, Apple is under the eye of the SEC for possible insider trading. The HuffingtonPost, well connected as they are, have received documents that outline four specific times where “uncanny trading” took place.

Uncanny being poor code for trading with inside information. Of course, Apple stock has been doing quite well lately, doubling in recent months. This of course means that there are few investors scared or annoyed about Apple. The SEC disagrees. Especially with a company like Apple that values secrecy over transparency, insider trading allegations could put a dark cloud over the Snow Leopard dawn.

The actual areas of suspicion, mostly regarding Job’s health and iPod sales information have a full insider flavor attached. Who else knows anything about what is going on in Cupertino? If these trades can be proven as irregular, and they can track down the source, we may have not just a inquiry, but a major lawsuit in the works.

As a final note, there are 16 million shares short against …

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Robert Scoble, a great technologist, recently kicked up controversy by posting an interesting piece on the value of Twitter. He points out that it is becoming cemented into the way businesses work, and is so useful that its value is now around $5,000,000,000. That is a lot of zeros for a company with no revenue.

I fully agree with Robert that Twitter will not have trouble monetizing. I also agree that Twitter is kicking Facebook’s ass in the business domain. To think otherwise is foolish. Twitter is getting bigger, and it is not going away. Robert is right, correct, and dead on until we reach his financial numbers.

He postulates that Twitter is worth “five to 10 billion dollars.” He qualifies this to a solid $5 billion at the end of his piece, so we’ll use that number. Robert points out that many businesses will in fact be willing to pay $100 a month for Twitter, or perhaps more. We will use $125 monthly, to give the rate and his thoughts a little breathing room.

Given that Twitter is an internet company with a total of three servers that are powered by goats running in large …

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In case you missed it, TechCrunch went down, due to some fun fun MediaTemple failing. Big Boy Arrington took it very well, chiming in:

I do love when the excrement hits the cooling implements. Recently, Allen Stern of Centernetworks was complaining about Rackspace/Mosso on Twitter. He raised enough ruckus that the damn CEO emailed him. The times, they are a changing. No formal work if TechCrunch is actually going to leave MT, but perhaps if they do, our reliability will go up.

If you are described by your lawyers as “UFO eccentric,” you might be a bit off kilter. Although odd that the belief in a second form of life in universe of an odd quadrillion stars or so is somehow insane, and forcing people to swear to a sky daddy not to lie is not, this hacker from the UK is in some trouble. Crazy, or not, he hacked into NASA and the Pentagon. And you thought that when you cracked your friends Gmail password was slick, this man is your boss.

However, he just lost a major lawsuit disallowing his trial in Britain, making it nigh certain that he will be tried in the United States. Dear me, this man is in it deep. Especially in the current political and military climate of the United States, he is going to have some explaining ahead of him. More as it comes.

Who would have thought that the curmudgeons at the business bastions of the United States would lower themselves to the point of “tweeting.” I can imagine the board room now: tense, wavering eyes, empty donut boxes, and a CEO as bass akward as a Luddite in a Best Buy:

“You want us to do what, ‘tweet,’?”

“Yes sir,” the terrified intern pipes up, quivering in the corner, his nerves a wreck, and his brain overclocked on meth or coffee. “Competitor X is doing it, and has 1,000 followers!”

The CEO scoffs: “We did 17 billion in revenue last year. Know how many shits I give out 1,000 anything?”

“But sir,” the intern continues, “we can brand you ‘visionary’ and a ‘future bringing genius,’ if we start using Twitter.”

“Do it. I now declare you Senior Vice President of something, now get the hell out of my office.”

Something like that, I am sure. However if happened, 54 of the Fortune 100 are sending out updates through Twitter, or as least Reuters claims so. What does this mean? Dollar signs in the eyes of Twitter. There is one thing that the Fortune 100 have in common, large mountains of cash. …

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