What Tongues are Wagging About:

• Owen Van Natta ousted at MySpace. Yikes!
• Google Buzz Backlash (plenty of analysis on this – stirred up privacy concerns, some erroneously reporting that they may remove it – lots of confusion!)
• New report: about $1.4 billion will be spent on social network advertising in 2011
• Zynga acquired Serious Business (Sparkpr client)
• TED conference – the question is whether this was as big a deal as usual. Jamie Oliver talk on what people are feeding their kids generated lots of buzz. What do you guys think?
• Facebook, Twitter Grow More than 100% – MarketingVOX story
• Huge snowstorms on East coast
• Stewart Butterflield, Flickr founder, took the wraps of his new project Glitch. It’s a massively multiplayer online game that hits alpha this week and is set to launch before the end of the year. People are calling it the next Farmville. (Disclaimer: Spark client)
• FourSquare adds Conde Nast and Marc Jacob deals to HBO, Time Warner, HBO etc. Sounds like they’re on a roll!
• Google finally announces it bought Aardvark for $50M (even though everyone knew about it months ago)
• Apple App Store breaks 150k apps

VC and Portfolio:

• Mayfield/First Round Capital Entrepreneurs Helping Entrepreneurs event getting great buzz
• Eight Liverpool entrepreneurs headed to Sand Hill Road to forge stronger relationship between Merseyside and Silicon Valley
• TechCrunch guest post: Where did VCs go wrong in Online Video?

Press Riffs

• Went to the Thrillist party at Bloodhound on Wednesday. They sponsored an open bar and the party was packed, Thrillist is doing really well and expanding to San Diego where they will soon have a newsletter.
• The Economist’s Matthew Bishop launched his book this week titled, “The Road From Ruin: How to Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top”.  Unfortunately, the launch party was cancelled due to the inclement weather here in New York.  Hopefully we’ll have some news whenever it is rescheduled.

Awards

• MultiChannel News 40 under 40 due March 1. http://www.multichannel.com
• Inc. 5000 due in April

Conferences

• February 16, 2010 | SDForum′s: Crafting a Fundable Roadmap
• February 21-28, 2010 | Stanford Entrepreneurship Network: Entrepreneurship Week 2010 at Stanford University

February 24, 2010 | Mobile World Congress 2010 Debrief: All the info, none of the travel

• February 25, 2010 | Telecom Council SPIFFY Awards 2010: Service Provider Forum Recognition Ceremony
• March 25, 2009 | SocialTech: The Social Media in B2B High Tech Conference
• March 24-26, 2010 | Global Technology Symposium
• March 23-24, 2010 The Economist Idea Economy – This will also be an excellent conference to attend if anyone is in town (Disclaimer: Spark client)