Connie Loizos

Oh, poor AOL. It’s so desperate to appeal to people under the age of 40 that it’s willing to subsidize its own reality show. To wit, it’s currently looking to hire a cool hunter who will live in a “luxury apartment” in San Francisco and a “swank” hotel room in New York, and attend every hot ticket in […]

In a fascinating piece, the New Yorker‘s Raffi Khatchadourian profiles WikiLeaks.org, a three-and-a-half-year-old, donation-supported site that most recently captured the world’s attention when in April it published a 38-minute-long video taken in 2007. The footage, taken from behind the barrel of a machine gun, showed roughly 20 people in Iraq being shot at from an Apache military helicopter; […]

In the Web world, David Ulevitch is a bit like the ubiquitous Waldo of the childrens’ book series. First came the job at a regional ISP at age 12. By his junior year of high school outside San Diego, he was working at the free music-sharing company MP3.com. He was still there when it went public in 1999, and when it imploded under the weight of a lawsuit by Universal Music Group less than a year later. Ulevitch was also a participant in the VA Linux IPO. (He was awarded stock for writing software used by the company; it paid for his college education at Washington University in St. Louis.) And Ulevitch was one of the first employees hired at the ad network AdBrite after entrepreneur Philip Kaplan spun the business out of his popular site, FuckedCompany.com. Ulevitch, now 28, will be on the scene a lot longer, judging by the trajectory of his own four-and-a-half-year-old, San Francisco-based company, OpenDNS. Boring as it may sound, by providing a way for consumers to improve their page loading times, as well as protecting them from phishing scams and empowering them to block sites, OpenDNS has become one of the most promising startups around. Indeed, despite competitors like UltraDNS and, more recently, Google, which launched its own DNS service last December, OpenDNS is uniformly acknowledged as the leader in its field -- and its business is ballooning.

Interesting post just published by Paul Buchheit, best known for creating Gmail as Google employee no. 23, and cofounding the social network aggregator FriendFeed, acquired by Facebook last summer under undisclosed terms. Titled "What To Do With Your Millions," it's Buchheit's response to the post of someone newly rich on Hacker News who is, in Buchheit's view, receiving crummy advice (this comment notwithstanding). Buchheit's first bit of advice, do not hire a financial advisor, no matter how many times friends recommend you to exactly that. "What those people don't understand is that the only skill a financial advisor needs in order to be successful is the ability to sell you things," writes Buchheit. "Their actual financial skills are almost irrelevant."

Earlier this week, I wrote about an entrepreneur with a fairly serious black mark on his record who has nevertheless received seed funding from some top-tier investors, including AOL president Tim Armstrong and Ron Conway. In an email, Conway told me that the entrepreneur, who was indicted for mail fraud in 2002, “has always been aboveboard about his full background” and that he'd “learned from his early mistakes.” The case raises the question -- one that I’m sure that all investors occasionally face -- of when to back someone with a somewhat dubious past, and when to run in the opposite direction.

Municipalities vying to become a test bed for Google’s ultra-high speed broadband network had until late March to provide information about their communities to the search giant. Though the deadline passed two months ago, however, at least one city is continuing its charm offensive: Peoria, Illinois. It hasn’t gone entirely as planned. Earlier this week, the […]

Too bad Jack Bauer had to flee the country with nothing but his blood-soaked T-shirt and jeans in the final episode of “24.” I think he would have really dug these 4GB USB flash drive cufflinks (in either a gold or gunmetal finish). They’re just the sort of thing to come in handy when you’re trying […]

The headline couldn’t have been worse for then-27-year-old Nick Desai, in the June 8, 1998 Los Angeles Times business page: “Buyers Howl as Computer Maker Signs Off, Vanishes." The story proceeded to outline the story of Nimantics, started in 1996 when Desai began selling high-end laptops by mail order. By the time Desai abruptly shut down the company two years later, dozens of tech-savvy customers were claiming that they’d either received nothing from Nimantics, or broken equipment. Now he's back with a new startup, and already has plenty of high-profile backers.

I hate myself for laughing at Second City's take on BP's gruesome gift to the cleantech industry; I also think that if I were a clean tech investor, I'd embed it somewhere on my site. Get it after the jump...

In the late ‘90s, when national healthcare reform was still but a glint in the eye of Illinois state legislator Barack Obama, primary care physician Garrison Bliss was experimenting with his own brand of healthcare reform in Seattle. Earlier in his career, Bliss had co-founded a practice that had sold to an HMO, which expected its doctors to see so many patients that neither Bliss nor his partners were spending enough time with the individuals they treated, or enjoying their work. Two of those partners left the practice to form MD2, a “concierge” medical practice that eschews health insurance and instead treats wealthy individuals who pay roughly $1,200 per month to receive personalized medical attention at their homes and offices (and private jets). Bliss didn’t believe in medicine for the rich versus everyone else, but he recognized the general idea's merit. When the HMO contract expired in 1997, Bliss converted the partners’ old firm, Seattle Medical Associates, into a primary care practice whose patients paid it $65 a month for checkups, vaccinations, as well as care for chronic illnesses and minor fractures and cuts.