BB bb (Photo: Instagram)

Glasshole Missed Connection Betabeat finally had the distinct pleasure of trying the dorky looking face computer we love to mock so much at a party last night at Meetup HQ. We (only slightly drunkenly) approached a tall white dude donning Google Glass and timidly asked if we might be able to try it on. When we slipped on the device (in slate!), the display was incredibly blurry--not due to our eyesight, but because Glass specifically calibrates to the wearer's eye. It was hard as hell to see, but the voice commands worked almost seamlessly, impressive since we were at a loud party.

The device's functionality is fairly limited: you can take a picture, record video and get directions to and from places. It also has the added benefit of making you look like a complete dork while somehow also attracting swaths of attractive ladies to get up real close to your face.

As it turns out, the Glasshole bro developed a crush on a Betabeat acquaintance, but even his face computer couldn't help him remember her name or even what she looked like. Instead, knowing only where she worked, he sent a LinkedIn message to a coworker he thought was her, but nope. (They do have the same hair color.) The coworker then forwarded his picture around the office asking if anyone had met him the night prior and wanted to date him. In the picture, he was wearing Glass.

A source also tells Betabeat that the Glass-wearing dude is working on a facial recognition app for the device that would take a person's picture and tell the wearer what their name is. You do you, Mr. Glasshole, but you might want to get on that one sooner rather than later.

Royal Joyriding  Important update in the Yellow Cab Wars: Here is a photo of Prince Harry (you know, the hot one) getting a personal demo from Hailo's cofounder:

Hailo co-founder Russ showed Prince Harry how to use Hailo to get home after a big night at the @uktiusa Tech event: hailo.to/l4naQ

— HailoNYC (@HailoNYC) May 15, 2013

Breakfast Breakup If you make a breakfast date with Ben Lerer, don't you dare stand him up. Mr. Lerer tweeted that he had early morning breakfast plans with Gawker publisher Nick Denton (at Balthazar, we assume?), but that the media mogul failed to show. Perhaps Mr. Denton was getting a head start on wedding planning.

https://twitter.com/BenjLerer/status/333934325286436866

What Is... Eyeroll Jeopardy does its best to related to the youngs during its college editions. As such, Wednesday's episode featured a category called "Yo-lo," as well as an entire column devoted to "Techie Dropouts." Tech familiars name-checked in that round included Kevin Rose, David Karp and Mark Zuckerberg. Aaron Swartz was the $2,000 answer.

https://twitter.com/1uigi/status/335006407361433600

(Photo: Tumblr)

A Meetup for Meetups Last night, we climbed an interminable number of stairs to reach the rooftop where Meetup was holding a celebration for its 100 millionth RSVP. We arrived to find hotdogs, plentiful kegs and even a tiny lawn made of AstroTurf. Musical accompaniment was provided by (what else?) a local bluegrass Meetup.

Among the crowd we spotted Laughing Squid’s Scott Beale in conversation with man-about-town Rex Sorgatz, Branch’s Josh Miller chowing down on a hot dog, and Small Girl Mallory Blair working the crowd. Lindsay Kaplan and Richard Blakely, Baratunde Thurston, Chris Kennedy and Kickstarter’s Fred Benenson also turned out.

“Meetup got started when there were two towers over there. Now there’s one tower going 1776 feet in the air. And Meetup wouldn’t be here if that tragedy didn’t happen,” said founder Scott Heiferman, standing up to extemporize a few remarks. “The worst things happen when people meet up. But thankfully, more often, the best things happen in life when people meet up.”

As we rode the Gilded Age elevator back downstairs later that evening, several people pulled out their phones to check their Hailo reservations. “I Hailo’d three times today,” one said proudly.

Wedding Bells Last weekend, at a ranch in Glen Ellen, California, New York Times columnist David Pogue married his longtime girlfriend, PR pro Nicole Vosshall Dugan. No word whether the vows included a brief but tasteful disclosure.

Mistaken identity Recently, one Betabeat reporter found herself in her umpteenth conversation about Lean In. A male developer frowned and announced, befuddled: "Oh, I thought that was a lean startup book." So, there’s that.

We’re Puking. Here’s a cool glimpse of what they’re serving up in Hell, er Silicon Valley: Angry Bird-themed sushi rolls! Much to Selina Meyer’s relief, it isn’t a fine Finnish import and it’s not made of real birds-- just fake fish. We don’t know what tastes more depressing: the Angry Birds II roll (filled with mango, torched salmon, and “special sauces”) or the OMG roll that contains a spring mix salad and torched white tuna. What’s worse is that the ginger is probably served room temperature.

https://twitter.com/jowyang/status/333750310633873408

Better than a “I’m With Stupid” mug. Oh, ha ha. Look at Jack “the Jokester” Dorsey everyone! The personified short-circuiting Twitter feed joked that he was giving arch nemesis Mark Zuckerberg one of his snazzy new Square stands for his “hoodie business.” It’s a joke because the Facebook CEO wears a lot of hoodies! The animated interaction happened on Twitter, a website that Mr. Zuckerberg (née @finkd) hasn’t used since 2012. We really need to figuring out a neutral platform for these two nerds to troll each other on. Reddit?

https://twitter.com/jack/status/334339997626949634

Gizmodo's Sam Biddle sluttin' it up at CES. (Photo: Gizmodo)

News of the first annual Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day swept across the web this morning following an article penned by one of the event's founders, gaming and social media reporter Leigh Alexander. "From booth babes to harassment, snide comments to double standards, women have often had a hard time feeling comfortable around the tech industry," she wrote. In order to demonstrate "the absurdity of objectifying people you claim to agree with or support intellectually," she's encouraging female tech writers to give gendered compliments or make sexist proclamations to men about their work.

Though the actual Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day isn't until February 1st, Betabeat--comprised primarily of female writers--could hardly contain ourselves. Here are 25 gendered comments for 25 of our favorite male tech writers.

Walt Mossberg: What's a pretty face like yours doing buried in those product specs?

Mike Isaac: Shut up, honey, the women (Kara and Liz) are talking.

Ryan Tate: Started a flame war with Steve Jobs just to get some attention.

Sam Biddle: Hey baby, want a massage?

Mat Honan: It's cute how you just discovered two-step authentication last year.

David Pogue: All your scoops come from your PR girlfriend.

Michael Arrington: Swaggy? More like bitchy. Men should keep their opinions to themselves.

Steven Levy: Only wears glasses to look more authentically geeky.

John Herrman: 17 Ways John Herrman Uses His Looks to Get Ahead

Peter Kafka: You smell amazing.

Farhad Manjoo: Maybe I'd take you more seriously if your Twitter avatar wasn't so suggestive.

Anil Dash: Nag!

Peter Ha: Only a celebrated reporter because he can fill out a hoodie.

Carl Franzen: Just because it's an all-night hackathon doesn't mean you shouldn't put in a little effort.

Om Malik: He just googled some companies to look cool, he doesn’t really get tech.

Eric Eldon: We know Alexia does all the work and you were just hired as window dressing.

Ben Popper: Why are you being MEAN to STARTUPS?

Josh Topolsky: Why don't you go back to makeup reviews?

Steve Kovach: Your obsession with Snapchat proves you're a sexting slut.

Jason Del Rey: Your Twitter presence is adorable.

Nick Bilton: Maybe try an industry where you'd fit in better, like construction.

Ashlee Vance: Who'd you sleep with to get on the Techmeme leaderboard?

Bryan Goldberg: We never see you around at tech parties. You should come outttttt more.

Christopher Mims: FAKE GEEK GUY ALERT

Adrian Chen: Pretending to like Reddit so he can be the only boy in a girls' club.

Brian X. Chen: What's a nice boy like you doing at a gadget convention?

Mr. Pogue posted some photos to his public Facebook page of the makeup artists at NOVA turning him into a neanderthal, GEICO commercial-style. They are indeed as terrifying as you imagined. Take a look.

And with that, we'd like to formally apologize for pre-emptively ruining your weekend.

The man and his muse

So what does the Apple fan's Apple fan—the New York Times's own David Pogue, the (somewhat controversial) most widely-read technology columnist in the country—have to say about Apple's relationship to Foxconn? Especially given the front page of today's Times, do these sorts of revelations about their manufacturing processes change the way he feels and/or writes about Apple?

We've reached out to David Pogue for comment with those questions. He did not respond, though he did forward our request to New York Times technology editor Damon Darlin, who responded by assuring us over email that "you’ll never get anyone to talk to you if you approach it like that." On Mr. Darlin's insistence, we rephrased the question, and have yet to hear back.

For the moment, it doesn't look likely.

A search for "Foxconn" turns up nothing on his blog. Searches for David Pogue and mentions of the Chinese manufacturer turn up nothing, either.

Mike Daisey—the critically-lauded monologist whose one-man show about these very problems with Apple, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which played at New York's Public Theater to critical acclaim last year—actually singled out David Pogue for failing to investigate Apple's practices.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Mr. Daisey, whose show ran for a number of weeks, and who actually ran an Op-Ed in the Times, was shocked at Mr. Pogue's silence on his show, let alone Foxconn, who he covers for the Times and writes users manuals for.

"David Pogue—I'll call him out—hasn't actually been in to see the show. What I know of David Pogue, David Pogue would travel on his hands and knees, over broken glass, to see anything about the Mac or Steve Jobs, but...he hasn't been here."

Full-Disclosure: I own an iPhone. Reading the Times' piece today—like every other piece about Foxconn out there—gave me further pause about what owning an Apple product (or anything containing any of the products Foxconn manufactures) actually means, and whether or not it's time to start looking into alternatives. Especially as their stock price and revenues continue to soar.

But I don't own one of the largest audiences for personal technology writing out there, and I've been openly critical of Apple's practices and culture in the past. Mr. Pogue's reputation as a nearly unwavering fan of the company's is well-established. The question of whether or not it gives him pause presents itself pretty clearly; what his silence says about the state of how we as a culture talk about technology is a far murkier picture.

On the bright side, at least there's a Google result for it, now.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

His attentive Twttr following started responding immediately. "You should influence people to stop wearing socks with sandals," "is there a way for you to influence my salary? Positively?" and Mr. Pogue, whose recent domestic abuse arrest rekindled old accusations that the man is an "insidious shill" for Apple and new accusations that his tech publicist girlfriend represents a conflict of interest, is retweeting it all.

Stop wearing socks with sandals? That's like wasting your genie's wish on a glass of lemonade! We don't know what you entreprenuers are waiting for. What would PRSourceCode do? Tell Mr. Pogue to influence people to download your fucking iPhone app, S.T.A.T.

Alternatively, you could tell him to influence people not to throw things at their spouses.

The man and his muse

David Pogue was voted the most influential tech writer of our times today, as well as the most influential tweeter, even beating out Mashable's social media maven Pete Cashmore. It's a reminder how powerful a personal brand he has built, and why the NY Times hasn't given him the boot after numerous conflicts of interest.

“We’re talking about a guy who was trained as a pianist and a magician,” said Jeff Yablon, a tech writer who met Mr. Pogue in the early 90’s, when Mr. Yablon was the president of the Computer Press Association and Mr. Pogue’s writing career was still in its earliest stages.

Mr. Pogue’s entertaining tech coverage has conjured a massive and devoted following, but his greatest trick might be convincing the stately Times not to make him disappear—despite raising some of the more thorny conflict-of-interest questions the paper has confronted in recent years.

Mr. Pogue has been accused of being an insidious shill for one of the most powerful technology companies on the planet, Apple, and was reported to be dating a publicist who represents many of the same companies he covers for the Times.

Seven days prior to the video’s release, Mr. Pogue and his estranged wife were each charged with disorderly conduct by police in Westport, Conn., after he allegedly hit her with—what else?—an iPhone.

In the video, the bite mark he reportedly received on his arm during the incident had apparently healed, or was well-concealed. It wasn’t noticeable. Not a single scratch.

If anything, it was classic David Pogue.

An Ohio native, Mr. Pogue graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1985 with a distinction in music. According to the biography on his website, Mr. Pogue moved to New York City after college, and worked a series of jobs in Broadway theater, with an ambition to compose for musicals. He eventually took up teaching at the New School and the Learning Annex, and went on to program and write manuals for various music software programs.

From there, he began teaching composers and Broadway stars how to use their computers, which evolved into—as he put it on his website—“Hollywood and literary celebrities, from Mia Farrow to Harry Connick Jr.”

“The first time I came across David Pogue he was working as Liza Minnelli’s geek-for-hire,” said Mr. Yablon. “He was doing social media marketing before that term existed. The routine was, ‘You know me, I work with these big names, you can trust me, I’ll set you straight on technology.’”

Mr. Pogue has often outlined his entertainment background as a foundation for his current work, once telling a music website that, as the youngest of three children, he is “a natural-born entertainer.” And, after a rare interview with Steve Jobs was criticized for a lack of skepticism, Mr. Pogue defended himself by saying, “I am not a reporter. I’ve been an opinion columnist my entire career … I try to entertain and inform.”

In 1988, Mr. Pogue began a regular column for the Apple fan magazine Macworld. In 1992, he wrote the second book in the “For Dummies” series, Macs for Dummies. He has written more than 50 books, making him, in the words of his own biography, a “ridiculously prolific author.” Only two of the books are fiction: a 1993 “techno-thriller” entitled Hard Drive and a 2010 young-adult book, Abby Carnelia’s One and Only Magical Power. (The Times’s own review noted that “Pogue, the personal-technology columnist for The New York Times and a former magic nerd himself, clearly has a lot of affection for kids.” In the second sentence of the review, the review’s author admits to crying at the end of the book.)

In 2000, Mr. Pogue brought his entertaining brand of explanation to the Times, where he was hired as the Personal Technology Columnist, and, since then, his State of the Art column has appeared regularly on the front page of the Thursday Business section.

He arrived at a crucial moment. Around the time of his hiring, the objects of Mr. Pogue’s affection and study—personal technology—started to transcend their roles as utilitarian aides and objects of geek affection and become fashionable accessories increasingly central to the lives of those who adopted them. When Apple released the iPod in 2001, Mr. Pogue became the go-to layman for the company’s new gadgets, and when the iPhone arrived, he filled his prose with apostlelike praise. (His Times video on the first iPhone is the second-most watched video ever uploaded by the newspaper, with nearly one and half million views.)

Mr. Pogue’s influence metastasized along with Apple’s market share, and his 1.3 million Twitter followers now dwarfs the digital presence of other marquee Times writers such as Thomas L. Friedman and Maureen Dowd. It’s more than four times the number of followers that Jenna Wortham, the Times’s decidedly hip, young tech reporter, has; Mr. Pogue, in fact, has more followers than the entire tech reporting staff of the Times combined.

“He’s like the Oprah of gadget writers,” said Michael Sebastian, the managing editor at PR Daily. “A single tweet from him can put you on the best-seller list.” Earlier this week, the appropriately named Cult of Mac tweeted out: “@Pogue...our servers just melted melted from your sorcery.”

“A review from David Pogue is the holy grail,” said a spokesperson from Open DNS. “After he wrote us up, we experienced the single biggest day of growth in the company’s entire history.” In the 24 hours after Pogue’s review appeared in the Times, Open DNS saw account creation jump 370 percent.

Mr. Pogue’s success has created some ethical entanglements. He has been attacked for taking paid speaking engagements, such as one for the Consumer Electronics Association’s “CEO Summit” near Los Angeles in June 2009. That fall—one month after then-public editor Clark Hoyt used an entire column (entitled “He Works for the Times, Too”) to admonish Mr. Pogue—he spoke at Disney World, in an event hosted by the defense contractor Raytheon Company.

In his column, Mr. Hoyt had challenged three media ethicists with Mr. Pogue’s case; all three agreed that Mr. Pogue’s interests were conflicted. His employment status remained unchanged. That same year, the Times fired a writer named Mike Albo, for taking a paid trip to write about junket travel culture for a separate publication—his first, and last, infraction. “Comparing this situation with one particular instance is not fair,” said Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy when asked to compare Mr. Pogue’s case with that of Mr. Albo. “There are different sets of circumstances involved. They’re handled on a case-by-case basis. We handle these situations in accordance with our policy. We are confident that our standards editor has made the appropriate judgment in each case.”

Jeff Jarvis, a best-selling author and journalism professor known for his strong, loudly broadcast opinions on media and tech, compared Mr. Pogue’s self-styled status an “entertainer” to that of Michael Arrington, owner of the blog TechCrunch, which was recently purchased by AOL. “When Mike Arrington says he’s not a journalist, he is really dismissing the label, because he began as an investor,” Mr. Jarvis explained. “I think Pogue is more specious, more for convenience. He expects us to trust him, but at the same time, he asks not to be held to the same standards.” Mr. Jarvis concluded: “I don’t buy his shtick about being an entertainer, not a journalist.”

Mr. Pogue’s harshest critics have focused on his undying praise of Apple products in the Times, and the potential conflict with his best-selling books on the company. Mr. Pogue has gone to bat for Apple’s products quite often, in his signature over-the-top style. An April post mocked the outrage over revelations that Apple was storing location data in its phones. “Ooh! Apple is spying! Ooh! The government is tracking! Ooh! Big Brother is watching!” he wrote. It also ominously noted: “The one legitimate concern [of Apple’s location tracking] is that someone else with access to your computer could retrieve the information about your travels and see where you’ve been. Your spouse, for example.”

A week after Mr. Pogue’s domestic dispute, Dan Lyons, a longtime press foe of Mr. Pogue’s, claimed an even more personal conflict. Mr. Lyons wrote for The Daily Beast that Mr. Pogue had been dating Nicki Dugan, a public relations executive who works out of San Francisco. A journalist dating a public relations executive is hardly novel, but Ms. Dugan is a vice president at OutCast, which represents some of Silicon Alley’s most prominent tech companies.

The Times responded by saying that Mr. Pogue had approached technology editor Damon Darlin in December with the news of his relationship, and that Ms. Dugan didn’t pitch Mr. Pogue stories. The Daily Beast produced several instances where Mr. Pogue seemed to write glowingly of OutCast clients and disparagingly of OutCast competitors. When speaking with The Observer, Mr. Darlin questioned that reporting, noting that OutCast doesn’t represent Amazon, but an Amazon business-to-business product. Mr. Lyons also cited a review by Mr. Pogue of a competitor to Netflix, which is an OutCast client. “No intelligent person would construe that as a positive review for Netflix,” Mr. Darlin noted. Finally, refuting Mr. Lyons’s argument that Mr. Pogue’s writing about Groupon and Skype was conflicted by another OutCast client, a venture capital firm with investments in both, Mr. Darlin argued that this is “a pretty thin string.”

“I can understand why there’s skepticism,” Mr. Darlin admitted, “and that’s always healthy under an intelligent readership. Because of these other questions that have been raised in the past, it’s very easy for someone to make that charge. In this case, that charge doesn’t stick.” Yet when asked if Mr. Pogue had been given preferential treatment by Times editors during past transgressions, Mr. Darlin noted that he wasn’t familiar with Mr. Albo’s situation, and that the Times has “addressed all of this. We’ve been satisfied that under the rules we’ve set up for [Mr. Pogue], and that there is no conflict.”

Responding to an emailed request to speak, Times executive editor Bill Keller referred The Observer to a spokesperson, noting simply: “We have rules. David followed them.”

An assistant in the office of the Times’s current public editor, Arthur Brisbane, responded: “We dealt with this issue last week after the Daily Beast story” and included Mr. Brisbane’s response to a reader about the issue. In it, Mr. Brisbane noted that he had “spoken with [David Pogue] and Times editors and satisfied myself that Pogue has made the appropriate disclosures about his relationship with Nicki Dugan of OutCast Agency. Any time there is a conflict, it does create complications but I think in this case Pogue and his editor have taken the appropriate steps to comply with the newspaper’s ethics policy.”

Groupon’s latest IPO talks are said to put the company at $25 billion value. [Bloomberg]

That Times Square hack video? Not only fake, it's also an ad. [NYT]

Paramount plans a BitTorrent movie release. [Slashdot]

David Pogue reviews Zediva, a streaming service that works via DVD. [NYT]

Newark’s Patch.com, presumably a news organization, will launch "in partnership with Newark Mayor Cory Booker." [LA Times]

Facebook closes in on $60-$75 billion valuation. [WSJ]