Mr. McClure

#RealTalk Dave McClure, our favorite giver of zero fucks, went on a bit of a Twitter tear the other day. It started with the admission that he'd "just had really hard tough love talk w/ startup founder. fucking sucks, but better harsh truth than bullshit 'you'll make it work' lies." He didn't stop there, adding that "what really sucks is none of other investors (incl big lead VC) have the balls 2 tell them its not going 2 fucking work & shut it down."

He concluded: "the Silicon Valley story is indeed the 1% story of Instagram $1B win, but also 99% broken dreams, shattered hopes & try, try again. sigh."

Okay, 'fess up: Who's the startup? Tips@betabeat.com if you wanna talk.

Not So Super Today, in unlikely historical connections: Wired reports that the decades-long legal battle over the ownership of Superman has been resolved... using the precedent set by the conclusion of Winklevoss vs. Facebook. To simplify a byzantine copyright nightmare: In 1938, the creators of Superman sold the rights for a mere $130. For decades, Jerry Siegel’s heirs have been attempting to rectify the move. In the latest chapter of the saga, they argued that an agreement reached in 2001 wasn’t finalized, meaning that the Siegel heirs could press for more rights and more money. Lots and lots of money. It also presented a potential legal problem for the studio with Man of Steel, which is scheduled to hit screens this summer.

In 2008, the courts sided with the Siegels. That’s been overturned, though, thanks in part to a ruling against the Winklevosses claim that an earlier settlement with Facebook hadn’t actually been binding. Warner Bros. now has the rights to make the movies free and clear--and without having to hand over more moola to Siegel's heirs. Hope the Winklevii and Mark Zuckerberg are proud of themselves for this.

It Ain’t Me, Babe Last year’s coverage of the booth babes of CES took a more circumspect, critical view. “That Mad Men bullshit doesn't represent who we are as an industry anymore, and it certainly doesn't represent what we should aspire to become. Technology is about the future, and this attitude is from the past,” Mat Honan wrote over at Gizmodo.

But Business Insider went back to business as usual this week with its slideshow ogling the antiquated, alienating marketing tactic.

glad we've moved past meta booth babe coverage and circled back to unironic booth babe galleries

— matt buchanan (@mattbuchanan) January 10, 2013

That wasn’t the only sexism on display. Skillcrush, the tech literacy startup, took a stab at “unpacking male tech privilege,” starting with the backlash that followed a petition to get more women on conference panels.

Indeed, blockbuster tech shows tend to surface all manner of moral quandaries, apparently, such as what happened when CNET's corporate owners intercede in news coverage to their own advantage. It was enough make Sam Biddle go straight quid pro quo.

(GIF HAT TIP: @jwherrman)

Viva Las Vegas Maybe the Buzzfeed editorial team skipped CES, but that doesn't mean head honcho Jonah Peretti missed a chance to visit Sin City. Photographic evidence comes from the unlikeliest of sources: Namely News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted that "At CES getting many brilliant presentations. So far most fun Buzzfeed."

We'd almost be afraid to hear what secrets were discussed. Our faces might melt off, like in Raiders of the Last Ark.

WTF Consider the charmed life of Kevin Rose. Sure, Digg crashed and burned (only to be resurrected by Betaworks once it was out of his hands), but Mr. Rose landed on his feet. He's now a venture partner at Google who spends his time Instagramming things like his Hawaii vacation and also this:

The caption: "Hanging with Tim Ferriss, yes this is normal."

Here's what we'd like to know: What was Mr. Rose wearing to the party? Was this, by chance, a furry party?

Open the door and influenza Could someone check on Chris Hughes? You might find him huddled in a corner at the New Republic between two bookshelves overflowing with pamphlets from the 1950s, clutching a giant bottle of hand sanitizer. Earlier this week he tweeted a link to a New York Times piece (with an xpost to Facebook) and commented that "Flu, stomach viruses, and whooping cough are at record levels this season. Reminder: wash hands compulsively."

Okay actually now we're terrified too. If you need us, we'll be looking for Mr. Hughes' Tamiflu stockpile.

(Photo: Digital Trends)

Rupert Murdoch's less than two-year-old foray into digital-only publishing has officially come to an end with the news that The Daily, News Corp.'s iPad-only magazine, will cease publication on December 15th. Some of The Daily's assets and 120 employees will transition over to other News Corp. entities; Jesse Angelo, its editor-in-chief, will serve as the new publisher of the New York Post.

Mr. Murdoch wrote in a press release:

From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation. Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term. Therefore we will take the very best of what we have learned at The Daily and apply it to all our properties. Under the editorial leadership of Editor-in-Chief Col Allan and the business and digital leadership of Jesse, I know The New York Post will continue to grow and become stronger on the web, on mobile, and not least, the paper itself. I want to thank all of the journalists, digital and business professionals for the hard work they put into The Daily.

The news comes on the heels of downsizing that took place at the iPad mag this past summer, when it went from 170 employees to 120.

News Corp.'s brazen bet on an iPad-only format raised eyebrows when it was announced two years ago, and it may have been the mag's inability to expand its audience within the cluttered app market that led to its demise. Likewise, the company's hacking scandal, which caused it to split News Corp assets like The Daily and The Post away from profit-filled pocketbooks like film and broadcast, may have prevented it from supporting money-losing ventures.

While many seem saddened by the news, new media evangelists on Twitter have already taken to gloating. "How well did that pay wall religion work at The Daily,@rupertmurdoch?" tweeted CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis.

And another bites the dust. And another one bites the dust.

Rupe's first weeks on Twitter were a little awkward, but the training wheels are off: Here he is shilling for wife Wendi Murdoch's high-profile tech investment, Art.Sy, and more recently, pumping up the art market as "ablaze" for her.

Now, he's going after his enemies: specifically, other conglomerates like Google and people like President Barack Obama.

Watch the old battle-axe in action:

Now, why would a guy like Rupe go after Google? So he can wash their mouths with SOPA, which the Obama administration started to lean against over the weekend.

Rupert Murdoch has a ton of intellectual property interests to protect: film, television, movies, awful news networks, Joe Buck, and so forth. SOPA—or the Stop Online Piracy Act—aims to give the government power to shut down anyone accused of aiding and abetting online piracy. Google indexes the results of people who sometimes host pirated content. To hold them responsible for it would be like, for example, holding Big Pharma responsible for making products that people can turn into meth whenever they choose to do so. But the government doesn't do that, so why would they ever do it to The Entire Internet?

[Hint: Has to do with lobbying money. Lots of it.]

What's Murdoch's appeal to the public for his side of the SOPA argument?

Ah, "risky filmmaking." Which FOX is definitely known for. Either way, here's to Rupe's continued adventures on the microblogging platform. This should remain as patently interesting as it's been.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

We can all look back and laugh

Yesterday we had a blast going over Rupert Murdoch's first foray into Twitter, the scolding he got from his wife and his spat with Jack Dorsey. But this morning it turned out Wendi Deng's Twitter account was a fake, even though it had been verified by Twitter for a time yesterday.

"You might ask 'why didn't I tell them?' But surely Twitter should be checking out its Verified status more carefully? No?" the user behind the parody account tweeted this morning. "It might be only a small matter, but you have to worry about the management of News International and Twitter if they can both readily confirm, for a while at least, that this was the account of a very noted personality."

Mr. Murdoch's account has been continues to be confirmed by both Twitter and News Corp., and he never indicated the Wendi Deng account, which was interacting with him heavily, was a fake. That probably lent a lot of credence to the account, although if Mr. Murdoch demonstrated anything in his first few days on the service, it was a blissfull ignorance of how it worked and the line between public and private.

"I was as surprised - and even a little alarmed - when I saw the Verified tick appear on the profile," the faux Wendi Deng wrote this morning. "Above all this was a bit of fun. But I'm definitely not married to Rupert Murdoch. The thought terrifies me. Imagine his sweet whispered nothings."

The deleted tweet

A few minutes later, reports the Sydney Morning Herald Mr. Murdoch's wife came to his aid. "RUPERT!! delete tweet!!" Wendi Deng wrote, "EVERY1 @rupertmurdoch was only having a joke pROMSIE!!!"

She quickly followed up with: "explaining to @rupertmurdoch about being careful with humor on line. sometimes it comes out as rude!"

While some doubted that this was an official account, it has been verified by Twitter and its CEO Jack Dorsey, who chatted with Mr. Murdoch via tweets.

"With his own voice in his own way, @RupertMurdoch is now on Twitter," Mr. Dorsey wrote. In his next tweet, he said his resolution for the past few years has been to simplify.

Mr. Murdoch couldn't resist the opportunity for a little put-down. "Right on simplify but easier in startups. My resolutions, try to maintain humility and always curiosity. And of course diet!"

Mr. Dorsey wasn't going to take any guff on his own service, "@RupertMurdoch you can definitely simplify big companies too. They need it the most. Try it this year."

Killing two birds with one stone, Mr. Murdoch pwned Mr. Dorsey and gave himself a pass on recent scandals, "@jack you are right and we try all the time. But wait till you have 53000 people across sixty countries with different laws,etc," Mr. Murdoch fired back.

It certainly seems like Mr. Murdoch will be an exciting addition to Twitter; that is, until his lawyers get wind of this.

And another bites the dust. And another one bites the dust.

Betabeat was sceptical when we first heard about Beyond Oblivian, a New York based music startup that got $87 million in backing from big names like Allen & Co., Sony and News. Corp. The startup aimed to take on Spotify by offering an unlimited music streaming service with no monthly fee. Instead the service came baked into smartphones, adding around $60 to the cost of each device,

Seems like our doubts were well founded. The Financial Times is reporting that  has shut down before it even launched. It's another costly and very public black eye for Rupert Murdoch's digital explorations, which so far have included Myspace and iPad-only newspaper The Daily.

The service apparently struggled to convince the four major labels that consumers would buy into its pricing plan. It wasn't clear how a user who paid $60 extra for a device would react when it came time to buy a new phone. Would the service transfer over, or would they be charged a flat fee a second time?

Beyond Oblivian executive Adam Kidron told The FT “Beyond was always a tremendously grand ambition as the advances required by the record labels and music publishers were substantial, reflecting the breadth of the rights required to create a true digital music one-stop."

Anyone who has followed the history of Spotify should have seen that coming. The record labels love to pile on the onerous demands and fees, trying to squeeze as much revenue as possible from assets that no longer sell well in physical form. In fact, Nokia had tried to do something just like Beyond Oblivian, a service called Comes With Music, but was forced to scrap the project after it also failed to take off.

Obviously we would love to read this as another case of corporate hubris gone horribly wrong. Startups, we prefer to think, work best when the idea and the technology are innovative, not dreamed up by bankers, media titans and record execs. But it might also just be an abject lesson in how difficult a space the streaming music market is. Spotify, Pandora, Rhapsody, all are mature companies, some public, none of which have yet turned a profit.

If anyone who worked with Beyond Oblivion is reading this, give us your thoughts on what went wrong in the comments.

He whips his hair back and forth, he whips his hair back and forth.

Despite an already crowded marketplace for cloud jukebox services like Spotify and Rhapsody, not to mention streaming radio services (Pandora and the upcoming iTunes Match), the Financial Times reports that a New York start-up called Beyond Oblivion plans to launch an unlimited music service later this year, under the unfortunately-named brand Boinc (Beyond Oblivion's initials + Inc.). How does one pronounce that exactly? Boink? Beau-ink?

Beyond Oblivion will be selling its cloud-based library of millions of songs by bundling it with the cost of a smartphone or PC. Users get free streaming music for the life of their device, with an extra $50 to $70 per device naked into the purchase price. The idea is to mitigate revenues lost to illegal downloads. However, and this is a very big but, when Nokia tried to do pretty much the same thing with its Comes with Music service, the company was forced to scrap the effort after two years due to limited success.

The start-up picked up $77 million from an investment round back in March that included Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate and Wellcome Trust. That's on top of a $10 million round for Allen & Company and Intertrust Technologies, a joint venture between Sony and Philips.

According to the Financial Times, Beyond Oblivion has been in negotiations with the four largest record labels for the past year and a half and is now seeking additional funds to put towards upfront payments needed to get access to the labels' catalogs.

As The Register reports, Beyond Oblivion doesn't seem to be worried about Spotify's popularity with consumers--or the competition:

"Like Comes With Music, the licence grants access to a large music library for the "lifetime" of a device. And like the doomed Nokia service, it relies on DRM. But unlike Comes With Music, Beyond Oblivion will bundle the offering with any kind of participating device, as long as someone in the retail chain is willing to sign up, and also offer it as a standalone subscription service via an iOS Android or Windows Phone app, or a client for Mac or Windows. It is also happy to leave branding to retailers or device manufacturers.

The FT has some interesting figures. As is the customary practice, large record labels have demanded (and received) large up-front payments: 40 per cent, apparently. The labels have also secured a minimum 70 per cent of total annual revenue in royalties. Boinc has secured a royalty ceiling of 92 per cent. That doesn't leave a lot to market and operate the service. Or, more importantly, much of an incentive for other investors to think, "What a brilliant idea, maybe we could do this even better."

We guess the Daily hasn't exhausted Uncle Rupert's patience, because apparently he isn't worried about having another MySpace on his hands.

Will Murdoch join Myspace?

The full News. Corp board will meet this week to discuss the fallout from the News of the World "Phone Hacking" scandal and then, on Wednesday, deliver its end of year financial report which it hopes will shift attention and allow the company to move on.

The big news on the tech side is that News Corp. finally sold off the long suffering Myspace, which had been a perpetual eye sore on its quarterly results. The purchase price wasn't enough to move the needle, but it will stem the losses in the interactive division. The cable division and Fox in particular, are expected to deliver their typically stellar results.

News Corp is sitting on $12 billion in cash, much of which it had hoped to spend on the now defunct BSkyB deal. The company will probably heed its large investors wishes to buy back a large chunk of stock, but savvy start-ups could also grab a piece of the pie through a tactical M&A deal. Start pitching those biz dev types today!

The big question is whether Murdoch will remain his position as chairman of the company. Institutional investors in News Corp. are game to strip him of his title, hoping that his removal will allow the company's stock to bounce back from the losses it sustained during the scandal.

Mr. Yang.

Not everyone was pessimistic about Myspace, writes Dan Primack over at Term Sheet. At least one VC tried hard to wrest control of the company back from News Corp before the media dinosaur could drive it into the ground: Redpoint Ventures partner Geoff Yang, who tripled his money by investing in Myspace months before the acquisition. 

Mr. Yang, who previously invested in Excite, Ask.com and TiVo, currently has investments in Formspring, Scribd, and the gaming site Machinima.com. Mr. Yang wanted to spin Myspace out of News Corp, allowing the parent company to retain some stake, and turn it into a $1 billion company--sort of like the Prehype model.  For whatever reasons, News Corp said no, opting instead to slash costs and chase after the music market in an attempt to make the social network profitable.

The tale of woe reminds us of News Corp's current experiment with new technology it doesn't fully understand at the height of said technology's hype: The Daily--the world's first iPad-only newspaper!--which has not been considered a success and is currently bleeding talent. Any interest in tablet publishing, Mr. Yang?

The once proud papa

Despite handing out pink slips to almost 40 percent of its employees and putting another 40 percent on a transition plan that will keep them on staff as they look for new gigs, Myspace seems likely to sell for a fraction of the $580 million News Corp paid for it back in the summer of 2005.

The remaining suitors, according to Kara Swisher, are not exactly big names. Specific Media is a five-year-old ad network who would most likely be buying Myspace for its vast collection of user data in order to improve ad targeting.

Golden Gate Capital is the other bidder, a private equity firm that has made its name turning around real stinkers, but has never worked with a social media firm like Myspace before.

Apparently the original founders, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, are both involved in separate investor groups that threw their hat into the ring. A big piece from Bloomberg Businessweek recently got Mr. DeWolfe on record for the first time about the sale to News Corp. and the sale of the site. He still has a profile, but says he cringes ever time he sees it.

News Corp is desperate to get Myspace unloaded before the end of the month, in order to avoid the companies red ink appearing on its financials for 2012, so expect more news on this sale within the next few days.