PayPerPost: Wasting Investor Money While Offending Native Americans

Ah, PayPerPost. The controversial Florida-based startup that is leading the effort to tarnish the blogosphere makes another PR blunder. And this one’s a whopper.

The company has been chronicling their startup days on a video blog called RockStartup. There have been some embarrassments before with the video blog - such as when a viewer noticed that the company had purchased $700 chairs for employees with investor capital and then yelled at a painter for standing on one (CEO Ted Murphy, pictured above, later said the chairs were purchased used).

But the most recent episode is where the company really takes the cake. All employees of the company were taken on an all-expenses-paid trip to Club Med, where as far as I can tell they spent their time getting drunk and dressing up as Native Americans, complete with lots of red face and body paint (something many Native Americans find both racist and offensive, and which has been equated to Blackface). The company also hired something called a “Creative Thinking Coach” to guide them through the whole experience.

The only question I have is…Did Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the main VC behind PayPerPost, really greenlight this debacle?

Some People Benefited From the Skype Outage

Alexa stats up to August 17 show a massive rise in traffic to Skype competitor Gizmo Project and a more modest rise for Grand Central at the peak of this weeks 36 hour Skype outage.

The SIPphone owned Gizmo Project offers a nearly identical package to Skype, but with added features including built in recording, and cross platform compatibility. Gizmo’s traffic tripled in the space of three days and rose to a rank of 8,561 in Alexa from a 3 month average of 19,102.

The Google owned Grand Central offers a one number everywhere telephone service. Whilst the service doesn’t compete with Skype in the softphone market, the service does provide functionality that competes with Skype services such as Skype In. According to Alexa, Grand Central hit a 4 week high on Friday with a 33% increase in rank over its 3 month average.

Bolt Joins The Deadpool

Video sharing site Bolt has filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations.

The site has been on borrowed time since an acquisition by GoFish failed August 1. Bolt.com was sued by Universal Music in October 2006 and owes Universal $10 million from that suit; the funds from the GoFish acquisition were to have been used to settle the $10 million with Universal.

Bolt joins the TechCrunch Deadpool.

Restrain Discipline on Partnered Lutheran Gay Clergy

Until August 11 of this year, gay clergy ordained within regular ecclesiastical channels of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) were expected to remain celibate, even if they were in long-term, committed relationships with their same-sex ...
Lutherans vote not to punish gay ministers Los Angeles Times
Gay Clergy OK'd By Evangelical Lutheran Church In America WBBM780
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (subscription) - Kansas City Star - WQAD - United Press International
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