Bronte Media

Rupert Murdoch used to tell his editors that the best publicity a newspaper could ever receive was to be sued.

Which brings us to Hercules Technology Growth Capital, which received a negative review on TheFunded.com, a review site for entrepreneurs about VC funds.

The review said that the firm was “shady, if not outright dishonest” and to “avoid them like the plague”.

So what did Hercules do? They threatened to sue TheFunded for defamatory comments.

Adeo Ressi, the founder of TheFunded, then forwards it on to VentureBeat, causing a spotlight to shine even brighter on the original review. Ressi refuses to take the remark down and stands by the comment.

He effectively is building his brand in the court of public opinion. Hercules just looks like a clueless firm. But apparently not clueless enough for Hercules’ chief executive Manuel Henriquez who ensures that the saga takes on a third chapter of hilarity when he butchers the english language in a response:

“Unfortunately we do not comment on pending legal action or on anonymous disparaging or slanderous posting which chose to hide behind anonymous attribution. We find such actions to be careless and site (sic) should fact check the facts to confirm if there is any evidence to support such claims or at a minimum provide attribution for comment postings.”

The story, via a post on alarm:clock, is now in the top few results for a Google search on “Hercules capital”.

Hollinger does it again! Titanic versus Hindenburg:

“Even with the win, the Bulls have the worst record in the East, and perhaps more importantly its worst point differential at a whopping -8.3 per game. They even lost the much-anticipated Titanic versus Hindenburg matchup against the Knicks last Friday, scoring just 78 points against one of the league’s worst defensive teams.”

.. go and read Spencer Rascoff’s. Spencer is the CFO/VP Marketing (a curious title into itself) of Zillow, a real estate site.

Zillow already has a corporate blog. But the company blog gets a fraction of the comments per post that Spencer’s does.

There are a few reasons why:

- He goes to his key stakeholders, not the other way around. The blog is part of ActiveRain, which is a kind of industry blog network, where, on the whole, agents talk about real estate with other agents.

- He doesn’t bullshit. On the front page of Zillow’s blog right is a history of thanksgiving and a post about riding your bike to work. Spencer is writing candidly why Zillow is not the enemy of real estate and asking for feedback as to why some agents think they are.

- He posts regularly and strips company news to their basics and makes the conversation accessible. That is, he doesn’t waft on like most corporate communications do.

Caveats:

- It should be noted that agents do get ‘points’ for commenting, which gives the Active Rain blog a greater chance of garnering more comments per post. But read the quality of them and real debate is taking place.

- Hopefully Spencer can keep up the pace. He’s only being going for a month or so. If he can keep it up, I’m switching out my Zillow blog feed subscription and just getting his take on the company via his Active Rain blog.

There mightn’t be an Active Rain for every professional industry, but I am sure there are analogs: whether it is contributing regularly in a particular forum, commenting thoughtfully and at length on other blogs etc.

It’s a real shame but I won’t be able to attend NextNY’s Matchup Camp this Wednesday night. But if you are in New York, live and breath startups or want to live an breath startups, I’d highly recommend you attend.

Instead, I’m off to the Kelsey Conference in LA LA land. Peter and co have put together a great show and I’m looking forward to it.

The Journal takes a swipe at the One Laptop per Child project in a look through what’s happened so far: That Negroponte promised to sell 100-150 million laptops by the end of next year and the price will be $100. He has a snowflake’s chance in hell of achieving that.

I hate the way Negroponte blames Intel and Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers for ‘competing’ with his project. He comes off naive and searching for excuses for his own failings.

But I love both the mission and the actual laptop. I love the fact the computer is designed for rural areas and rugged use (sealed laptop, solar power, manual power, screen that works in daylight etc.). And is it just me or does the thing just look cool?

I am not surprised that third world governments have not embraced the concept. In fact, and this is rather naive and rude of me, it shouldn’t be surprising when you look at the governments in question. So much aid is wasted and filtered through corrupt governments. The United Nations is a bloated mess. etc.

I still think that efforts like this have a chance through grassroots adoption. You can give one and get one at laptopgiving.org. Apparently they have been getting around 5,000 orders per day in recent days (5,000 to the kids, 5,000 to the people in the US and Canada ordering them for a total of 10,000 per day).

If they keep it up, that’ll be 250,000 given by the end of the year.

Stupidly they are ending the program on December 31. Stupidly they are only allowing Americans and Canadians to order. Maybe that is because they aren’t ready yet to actually make but it just reeks of bad execution.

And then also this:

“Mr. Negroponte said some initial tech support would be provided by Brightstar Corp., a Miami-based wireless equipment distributor. Just who would provide support a few years from now, he said, was “a frightening question.” The students, he said, will need “to do as much maintenance as possible.”

Industries will sprout up. Entrepreneurs in these companies will start tech support companies. I’d love to lend/fund the entrepreneurs through Kiva.org or other sites like it.

It seems to me that the OLPC project just needs to let Negroponte slip into a figurehead role and let some smart technology entrepreneurs who want to do more with their lives than buy Boeing aircraft take center stage and actually execute upon this monumentally powerful idea.

Remember when comScore said that more than half of MySpace’s users were over 35 years old? Well, not surprisingly it turns out that the same is true for Facebook.

Rob Leathern and co at CPM Advisors does a great job of comparing the data. Specifically: “The largest difference then between the way comScore sees the Facebook audience and the reality thereof, is that instead of 13.6 million US people age 35 or older using Facebook, that number seems to be just 1.26 million — or less than 1/10th the size.”

It’s an absolute joke that they can publish the data and not correct their panel weighting. It’s even more confounding that they actually chose to publicize the data in the case of the MySpace debacle last year.

I did a bit of Friday reading, including NameMedia’s S-1 and various investor presentations from DarkBlueSea, an Australian based domain portfolio holder, looking to answer a simple question: How much does an average domain earn per year?

NameMedia owns 750,000 domain names and earnt $40.56 per domain name in revenue in the first 9 months of the year. That ends up at around $54.08 per domain name per year.

DarkBlueSea has 150,000 domain names and earns about $12.82 per quarter or $51.28 per year per domain.

“BURGER KING TO TRY $1 RIVAL TO MCDONALD’S

DES MOINES, Iowa - Burger King Corp., in a move that could ignite a fast-food discounting war, plans to test a $1 double cheeseburger that would challenge one of McDonald’s Corp.’s best-selling items.”

Warren Buffett on career advice:

“A few months ago I was talking to another MBA student, a very talented man, about 30 years old from a great school with a great resume. I asked him what he wanted to do for his career, and he replied that he wanted to go into a particular field, but thought he should work for McKinsey for a few years first to add to his resume. To me that’s like saving sex for your old age. It makes no sense.”

The NY Times has a love letter to Goldman Sachs, who have prospered through the mortgage/credit ‘crisis’ while other banks have lost billions and are set to lose billions more.

I think if I wasn’t in this Internet thing, I would try to work for them.