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Shanda Interactive Entertainment has made games such as “Home Valley,” “Mir II,” and the “World of Legend” into Internet sensations in the Chinese online games market. Now it’s expanding into publishing reader-generated books.

Shanda Literature sounds a little pretentious. It might be hard to believe that readers can generate “literary works,” as Shanda calls them. But the company has been doing this with separate web sites for a while and it’s already a big business.

Shanda operates Qidian.com, jjwxc.com and hongxiu.com. Its new Shanda Literature division will be headed by Xiaoqiang Hou. Qidian.com is the largest Chinese online literature platform with more than 20 million registered accounts and daily traffic of 220 million page views. You saw that number right. Daily page views. I suppose if readers can create fan fiction for sites such as StarWars.com or original Harry Potter fiction, then it makes sense that similar reader-driven sites can take off in China.

Shanda acquired that site in 2004. In 2007, Shanda bought jjwxc.com, a literature platform that focuses on female readers with 700,000 registered accounts. In March, Shanda bought Hongxiu.com, a literature platform with 1.8 million registered accounts.

Chen Tianqiao, chairman of Shanda, said that the new division moves Shanda closer to its goal of becoming a leader in interactive entertainment media of all kinds. He also said that the user-generated books could lead to new storylines for Shanda’s games. Founded in 1999, Shanda scored a big hit with Home Valley, a virtual community for gamers. It expanded over the years and now has more than 600 million registered users.

The buzz around the mobile web these days is furious, spurred on by the web-friendly Apple iPhone and Google’s forthcoming mobile operating system, Android.

However, the state of mobile web traffic measurement is abysmal.

To dig deeper into the state of web traffic analytics on the mobile web, VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall will be moderating a panel at the next Mobile Monday event, where mobile industry professionals meet up every first Monday of the month.

This event will be this Monday, July 7.

AdMob, one of the leading mobile advertising companies, will give a demo of their new analytics offering, Opera, a leading mobile web browser, will share some about the motivation and learning that’s come from the State of the Mobile Web Report. The goal is to try to pull some overall understanding of how the mobile web is progressing, and what a publisher can do to understand their position and role in the market as a whole. Special thanks to Mike Rowehl, who organizes the informal events. Each month, he looks for a host, and we agreed to offer co-host this time around. He’s also trying to get Nielsen and M:Metrics (acquired by Comscore), two other mobile leading measurement companies, involved.

• What: July 2008 Mobile Monday (Metrics and Analytics)
• When: July 7th, 2008 7:00pm
• Where: Microsoft SF Campus, 835 Market St, 7th floor, San Francisco, CA 94103
• Who: Anyone interested in mobility
• Cost: Nothing!

Here’s the latest action:

More fallout from the YouTube/Viacom lawsuit — After a judge ruled that Google wouldn’t have to reveal YouTube’s source code but would have to open its user data for all to see, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote a post condemning the decision as a violation of privacy. Google lawyers are also on the case, according to The Wall Street Journal. The outcry in the blogosphere has been even bigger.

Chicken Little, the SSD-based MacBook Air prices are falling — Apple has quietly shaved $500 off the price of it’s slim MacBook Air drive with a built-in solid state drive (SSD). These are the drives that use flash memory as require no moving parts, allowing them to be more stable and in some cases much quicker. You can not get one for $2,598, according to AppleInsider.

Economic downturn hits Google? — The search giant is closing two of its offices, one in Denver and one in Dallas. Luckily, no Googlers are being laid off, they were all be relocated, according to Google Blogoscoped

Activision-Vivendi Games merger likely to proceed next week — A judge has denied a request to halt the previously announced $18.9 billion deal. July 9 could be the close date, according to GameSpot.

Report: Baidu enters mobile search deal with Nokia — The largest Chinese search engine has a deal in place to pre-load its product onto Nokia phones, according to Forbes. Nokia recently bought the Symbian OS and announced it would open it in an effort to compete with the likes of Google’s upcoming Android platform. Now it has a mobile search partner besides Google as well.

Segway sales rising as gas prices do the same — Remember the Segway? Of course you do. Know anyone who owns one? Probably not. That may change soon as sales are on the rise with many people looking for alternatives to cars, according to USA Today.

Aussies living the tech lifestyle in San Francisco — The city’s Hot House provides start-ups from Australia with office space, desks, broadband access and a telephone line on the cheap (around $600 a month), according to The Age. The idea is to help Australian companies better serve their American and Canadian customers which often make up a large percentage of their user base.

Apple developing a whole multi-touch language — A new patent, uncovered by UnwiredView, reveals a wide range of gestures beyond the “pinch” and the “double tap.” The patent is called “gesture learning,” and interestingly it only shows left-handed gestures. A separate report says Apple has filed for 34 different multi-touch patents.

The CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger? is allergic to cats — Yep. Cats are a source of great income, but also a source of great pain, according to Valleywag.

Months after Earthlink gave up on providing municipal wireless service in San Francisco, a company called Meraki is quietly moving forward with its plans to blanket the entire city in free WiFi. In fact, the company just crossed a big threshold — Meraki says more than 100,000 people have used its Free the Net service.

That number is more than double the 40,000 users that Google- and Sequoia-backed Meraki was reporting at the beginning of the year. Meraki’s wireless network currently offers its most comprehensive coverage in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights and Noe Valley neighborhoods; residents of those areas plus the Mission, Alamo Square, Hayes Valley, Russian Hill and the Castro can ask Meraki for free repeaters to spread that network even further. (See the map of Meraki coverage below.) Meraki even provides free wireless to some of the city’s affordable housing developments, and plans to expand in that area, too.

Chief executive Sanjit Biswas says that Earthlink and Meraki have very different business models. Unlike Earthlink, Meraki isn’t seeking the city government’s financial support or approval, and it isn’t looking to make money from the network, either. Instead, Biswas describes Free the Net as a “testbed” and showcase for the company’s wireless technology, which Meraki then sells elsewhere. (The company runs local ads as part of its Free the Net service, but only as an experiment. Meraki isn’t making any money from those ads.)

As for providing wireless in affordable housing projects, Biswas says Meraki stumbled on that idea by accident. Without really planning to do so, Meraki covered some affordable housing units with its network, then noticed that there was substantial usage in those areas. (Biswas says he doesn’t have exact numbers, but estimates there were “dozens” of users in a building with 100 units.) That’s kind of surprising, but Biswas notes that Free the Net is a way to provide fast Internet connections to people who own computers and perhaps dial-up Internet connections, but can’t afford broadband. (Broadband growth is slowing, after all.) Impressively, Meraki isn’t spending any city dollars on this project, either.

Sadly, it’s hard to imagine that every city can get free WiFi as a loss-leader for projects elsewhere. But Biswas says Meraki is seeing healthy growth for its pay product too, particularly in emerging markets like Latin America and Africa. As an example, he says Meraki created a wireless network for a village in Chile in just five days. There’s interest in the United States, too, primarily with an “amenity” model, e.g., a business association pays Meraki so that shoppers can get free WiFi in Harvard Square.

As a Noe Valley resident, I’ve already benefited from Free the Net — I’m not covered at home, but I use the network whenever I’m writing at my neighborhood coffee shop. The company is still a ways off from its goal of covering the entire city, but I’m definitely rooting for its success.

Comcast announced today they had invested an undisclosed sum in seed-round funding to mobile WiMax company Cartiza.

Founded in late 2006, the Boston, Mass. company has previously raised $12.6 million in funding, according to the Boston Business Journal. Cartiza is reportedly in stealth mode, working on infrastructure software for the next generation of mobile broadband. While the company website doesn’t say so, it is working with WiMax: Cartiza is listed in the WiMax Forum membership roster.

In April, Comcast was part of a group of industry giants, including Google, Time Warner, Intel, and Bright House Networks, that invested $3.2 billion in WiMax company Clearwire. Other WiMax start-ups are also getting money in anticipation of spending on WiMax infrastructure. One such start-up is BridgeWave Communications, which last week announced it had raised $10.3 million to create wireless transport infrastructure for WiMax and LTE (long-term evolution) cell phone networks.

Louis Toth, Managing Director at Comcast Interactive Capital, already had ties with Cartiza. According to his CIC profile page, he is “involved as a Director, Board Observer or adviser” for Cartiza and six other companies. However, it’s unclear if he took this role before funding Cartiza.

At last month’s WWDC event, Apple’s chief executive Steve Jobs did an onstage test of the iPhone 3G download speed versus that of its 2G predecessor. There was really no comparison, the 3G model blew the other one away. But many in the audience, myself included, really didn’t find the 3G speed all that impressive either. That should soon change.

When the iPhone 3G launches next Friday, AT&T’s 3G network will be ready with download speeds of 1.7 megabits per second. That may sound good, but that is also the maximum, it’s probably unreasonable to expect speeds of that nature at all times. This means that those of us used to broadband speeds are still likely to be at least slightly underwhelmed.

However, within a few months of launch, AT&T hopes to increase those speeds four-fold, Bill Hogg, AT&T’s president of wireless network services recently told Forbes. Such speed would then be comparable to broadband and should take web browsing on the device to a level beyond the already high level it is currently at.

All of this of course only matters if you’re living in an area with 3G coverage. If you’re in or around a big city in the United States you’re probably fine, otherwise be sure to check out this map. Right now, AT&T says 3G support is in 280 markets and it hopes to increase that to 350 by the end of the year.

Facebook and erstwhile rival social network ConnectU reached a settlement last month, after a lengthy court battle. ConnectU’s founders were given Facebook stock, in what was a de facto acquisition of the company by Facebook. But ConnectU’s founders have been trying to keep the case open — they’ve claimed to have new evidence that Facebook low-balled the value of the stock they received for the settlement.

This new evidence, according to a court document obtained by the New York Times, is as follows:

The Term Sheet and Settlement Agreement is also unenforceable because it was procured by Facebook’s fraud. Indeed, based on a formal valuation resolution approved by Facebook’s Board of Directors but concealed from ConnectU, the stock portion of the purported agreement is worth only one-quarter of its apparent value based on Facebook’s public press releases.

So, ConnectU has apparently obtained a copy of a tax document showing that Facebook valued itself at $3.75 billion after Microsoft and other investors put millions into the company at a $15 billion valuation, but before the settlement was concluded. If ConnectU’s founders, brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendram, had gotten the stock at the lower price, they would be able to sell the stock for well below the $15 billion valuation and still make a hefty profit. Because they got the stock at the $15 billion valuation, they won’t be able to make a profit until they can sell the stock for above that valuation. In other words, ConnectU is walking away with less than it thinks it deserves.

However, as many of our readers know very well, private company valuations are murky. In this case, Facebook sold Microsoft preferred stock as part of a larger deal, such as an advertising agreement whereby Microsoft would exclusively sell some ads for Facebook. This preferred stock likely has all sorts of rights that the common stock issues as options to employees doesn’t.

Meanwhile, rumors have been popping up recently that Facebook employees are in fact trying to sell some of their own shares, based on a rumored $3-$4 billion valuation. The myriad ways that Facebook could have structured its valuations and equity terms over the years could make any number of things possible. We probably won’t know how much the company is actually worth until the company files for an initial public offering, because we don’t have enough information.

But we do know one way that Facebook employees could be selling stock at valuations less than $15 billion. Facebook’s first investor was Peter Thiel, who also founded venture firm the Founders Fund. This firm allows founders and early employees to sell stock during subsequent funding rounds, a class of stock it calls “Series FF“. So at any point over the last several years, at least a handful of early Facebook employees could quite legitimately have been selling shares at less than the then-current valuation, and making a profit.

The Founders Fund itself has also participated in subsequent funding rounds, and it — and maybe the other investors — could have built Series FF-style stock sale agreements into the employee stock option pool.

In other words, only Facebook — and maybe ConnectU and the courts — have much of an idea of what’s happening with Facebook stock sales.

Note for those who haven’t been following the case: Before founding Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg used to write code for a rival college-focused social network called ConnectU. The latter company, which has never gained significant traction, has been trying to sue Facebook to reclaim what they say is intellectual property stolen by Zuckerberg and used to make Facebook successful.

[Picture of Zuckerberg superimposed over another picture of the brothers Winklevoss, via the Sydney Morning Herald.]

Vinod Dham has lived the quintessential Silicon Valley rags to riches immigrant story. Born in Pune, India, he came to the U.S. in 1975 as an engineering student with just $8 in his pocket. He became a chip engineer and helped invent Intel’s first flash memory chip.  He went on to manage Intel’s microprocessor projects, including the breakaway Pentium chip that debuted in 1993 and cemented the company’s position as the world’s biggest chip maker. He handled the bad press on the Pentium’s bug and later joined Intel rivals NexGen and Advanced Micro Devices. He became the CEO of Silicon Spice, which he sold to Broadcom for $1.2 billion in 2000. Then he became a venture capitalist, first at NewPath Ventures and now at NEA-IndoUS Ventures, where his aim is to give something back to his native India.

VB: What inspired you get into electronics when you were growing up in India?
VD: When I graduated in 1971, at 21, I ended up at the only semiconductor company that existed in India. It was a start-up that spun out of Teradyne Semiconductor and it happened to be in New Delhi. My home was seven kilometers away. It was perfect for me to live at home with my parents and work. It wasn’t until I worked at this company that my love for semiconductors bloomed. I found it to be a very exciting field because it brought in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and mechanical drawing. I moved to the U.S. and studied for a master’s degree in solid-state sciences at the University of Cincinnati, where I studied silicon germanium and compound transistors. I was doing that back in 1975.

VB: You came with very little money?
VD: I came with $8. In the 1970s, the government of India had little money to spare for foreign travel. They gave $8 to foreign tourists. As a student, I could get an additional $20. You had to go to the reserve bank of India. You had to apply. But it was such a corrupt country at the time; you had to bribe somebody to get the $20. I refused to do that. I said I’ll just go with $8.

VB: How did you get off the ground in the U.S. with just $8?
VD: That was the most amazing part. I kept it with me. There were many distractions. Even on the plane, they would sell cartons of cigarettes. People used to smoke. I used to smoke. The carton cost about as much as I had. The hostess offered me just one. I said I could live without smoking for a day. I went to the foreign student office. There was a lady named Mary Campbell. She had been corresponding with me for a year. She asked what she could do for me. I asked about my research assistant job. That was supposed to pay $325. She said I don’t get that money until I did a month of work. I told her I needed $75 to get into an efficiency and $15 for health insurance. I needed $90 to survive, and I needed more for food. She went to a room and came back with $125 in cash. She said it was a distress fund. I paid it back at zero percent interest at about $25 a month. She saved my butt. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Morin, Facebook’s senior platform manager, posted an interesting message on Twitter today:

“The government should create open APIs for accessing all publically (sic) available government data. Then, let all of us create great UIs for it.”

The comment, while no doubt partially made in jest, was quickly picked up on the social information conversation site FriendFeed. Venture investor and former head of special initiatives at Google, Chris Sacca, was the first to comment:

“Why don’t you guys show them how it’s done by opening up Facebook mail? ;)”

And a few comments later, FriendFeed cofounder and another former Googler, Paul Buchheit left the following comment:

“Photos are the biggest thing. Facebook is to a large extent a photo sharing site, but their TOS prohibit you from doing anything interesting with the photos — they’re trapped inside FB.”

The comments kept rolling in, mostly noting the irony that Facebook would be telling anyone to open up its data when most feel the data inside Facebook is anything but open.

This openness debate is being played out on many fronts, but perhaps none more high-profile than Facebook versus Google. It’s pretty clear that Google feels its Open Social platform is much more open than Facebook’s, and the two sides recently came to blows when Facebook cut off Google’s Friend Connect from accessing its data.

Facebook claimed that Google’s method was violating user privacy, and now the matter is in the hands of lawyers. The issue provided a rather tense moment on stage between Morin and Google’s Kevin Marks at the Supernova conference a few weeks ago.

To be fair, while Facebook gets criticized for not being more open, plenty of companies aren’t open — they just don’t have data that’s as valuable as Facebook’s, so people care less in the first place.

And, as VentureBeat’s own Eric Eldon points out in the FriendFeed discussion:

First, government data is created through taxpayer dollars and since we all kinda have an ownership stake in the gov, we should have access to its data. FB data is FB’s, per their TOS. Second, FB has data that is more valuable than other services — it’s a big business decision for them to be more open or not, and imho it’s not clear if being more open is worth it to them at this point.

That makes sense, but I disagree on the spirit of that.

User data on Facebook is Facebook’s, but seeing that at least some in the company are pushing for more openness of other data, shouldn’t it be okay with opening its data if its users tell it to?

[photo: flickr/Robert Scoble]

Below you’ll find this week’s PartnerUp Opportunities of the week.

PartnerUp is an online community for entrepreneurs and startups that helps them find people for their businesses, such as co-founders, business partners, advisors, board members, and skilled technical people. In addition, PartnerUp helps entrepreneurs ask for and offer up advice, find commercial real estate, and find resources for their businesses.

The PartnerUp team blogs on the StartUp Blog, an up-and-coming blog about entrepreneurship, small business, and startups. If you get a chance, check it out at startup.partnerup.com.

You can find thousands of additional opportunities by signing up for PartnerUp or browsing PartnerUp’s Business Opportunities Directory.

Co-Founder/Business Partner/CEO
Partner, Green Innovation Technologies LLC
Co-Founder, Itrans
Partner, Mobile Marketing Startup
Co-Founder, College experience web 2.0 site
Co-Founder/Partner, Project LAN

Board Members/Advisors/Mentors
Board/Advisory Board Member, PharmRX Solutions
Advisor, Revolution Energy
Advisor, SASH & Associates Inc.
Members - Board of Advisors, Atalasoft Inc.
Board of Directors, Essential Development

IT/Software/Web
Software Engineers, SEOs, and Programmers, Internet Search Startup
Web Developers, Blueprint Technology Inc.
Website/Network Developer, Next Up Networks
Website Developer/Designer/Webmaster, Innoengineer
Smartphone Developer, fotogo

Sales/Marketing/Business Development
VP Marketing, SecureDreams
Sr. Marketing Manager, New Plant Growth Technology Startup
Business Development, XMG Web Designs
Business Development, Total Spectrum Support
Systems Consultant, Expense Reduction Associate Inc.

Browse thousands of additional opportunities on PartnerUp.

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German skill-games site GameDuell has raised $17 million in a second round of funding from Wellington Partners.

The Berlin-based company has more than 10 million registered members and claims to be the No. 1 game community in Germany. It plans to use the money for an international expansion, including a move into the U.S. which is already under way.

Kai Bolik, chief executive, said in a statement that results in France and Spain show that the company’s marketing strategy is working.

GameDuell creates skill-based online games, which include solitaire, Mahjong, Sudoku, pool and darts. Players can log into the site and play against real players for prizes. But since the games involve skill and not luck, they aren’t considered gambling. Thus, they aren’t restricted in many territories. The site says more than 200,000 games are played each day.

But the market is competitive, since the games are simple and they’re not so hard to clone. Of GameDuell’s competitors, the toughest is WorldWinner, which has the backing of Liberty Media’s TV properties to push users to its site. In the U.S., WorldWinner has been around since 2000. In 2006, it was acquired by FUN Technologies, the owner of SkillJam, for $23 million, and media giant LibertyMedia bought WorldWinner in December.

WorldWinner says it has tens of millions of registered players. It has 100 employees, mostly in Newton, Mass. Peter Blacklow, president of WorldWinner, said on a panel in May that gamers typically spend $400 a month playing the company’s contests. WorldWinner’s commission is 15 percent to 20 percent of that.

GameDuell said it has more than 200 media partners and is Germany’s third-largest online advertiser. It has 80 employees and plans to double its workforce in the coming months. Founded in 2003, the company is run by Bolik and fellow internet entrepreneurs Michael Kalkowski and Boris Wasmuth.

GameDuell received a first round of funding from Holtzbrinck Ventures and Burda Digital Ventures in 2004. Wellington just added LinkedIn cofounder Eric Ly as a partner.

Miasole, the thin-film solar cell maker that is the third member of a triumvirate of heavily-funded CIGS startups including Heliovolt and Nanosolar, has been pretty quiet since losing its CEO and laying off 40 workers late last year. In the interim, there has been plenty of speculation that it was faltering, and might even close its doors.

Not even close, according to a report this morning. Instead, Miasole is about to close a round of between $200 and $220 million, a source has told VentureWire — and, even better, the company will have a sky-high valuation of $1.2 billion. If true, the investment would be the largest single venture funding any solar company has received to date, although the reported valuation would be lower than Nanosolar’s.

This raises some questions about what’s going on inside Miasole. Why would investors pour money into a company that, as recently as April, lost a high-profile contract to a rival? Miasole was supposed to be in full production mode by early last year, but slipped on the dates. It was also reportedly planning an IPO, but no more mention of that was made after early 2007.

For the last few months, the company had declined to talk with the media.

A giant round of funding may indicate that the company has spent the extra time honing its technology, perhaps even entirely changing its manufacturing process, which some have suggested is inferior to its competitors’ processes.

That would explain a comment an investor, Bill Reichert of Garage Technology Ventures, made to me a couple months back. Although he would say nothing specific about the state of Miasole’s technology, and admitted that the company had taken “longer than we wanted” to mature, Reichert said that it was still making progress. “We’re extremely optimistic that these guys will change the world,” he told me.

Unmentioned by VentureWire is whether the money will come entirely from venture sources, as it has in the past. Another possible scenario is that Miasole is getting ready to build a large production facility. For that, it would likely raise debt from sources like banks, rather than selling shares. But with sizable new late-stage cleantech investment funds around like the one Kleiner Perkins (another Miasole investor) just announced, a $200 million venture round is plausible.

No matter what Miasole is doing, it will face some stiff competition. Heliovolt recently hit a record cell efficiency, and Nanosolar followed up by announcing a next-generation production tool that would put it in First Solar’s league. And since Miasole first started getting press, a hoard of other companies emerged from hiding or started up in thin-film production, from ultra-stealthy Optisolar to IBM’s new CIGS research division.

Eric Ly, a co-founder of professional networking site LinkedIn, has signed on to be a venture partner at Wellington Partners. Ly says he’ll be helping the London- and Munich-based firm with its plans to expand into the United States, and into Silicon Valley in particular.

That’s a natural expansion for Wellington, given its interest in technology and the current Euro-dollar exchange rate. But it’s a surprising move for Ly — after all, you’d think he’d have his hands full with his scheduling startup, Presdo, where he is the founder and chief executive. (I’ll be writing more about Presdo soon.) And indeed, Ly says that Presdo is “my life”; his deal with Wellington only commits him to working two days per month.

“The first time they approached me, I said no,” Ly says. “But [General Partner Eric Archambeau] was just very persistent, you know, and I started to see some benefit in doing this part-time, for myself.”

Although Ly says his heart is still in startups and entrepreneurship, the deal gives him a chance to dip his toes into the venture world. Archambeau’s credentials as an investor were a big draw too — before joining Wellington, Archambeau worked at Benchmark Capital and Atlas Venture, and previous investments include eGroups, which became part of Yahoo Groups, and Trading Dynamics, which was acquired by Ariba.

At Wellington, Ly will focus on social media and social networking. With a limited time commitment, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll have a huge effect on the firm’s direction, but his name is an impressive addition to Wellington’s stable of venture partners, which also includes Loic Le Meur, chief executive of Seesmic (a Wellington investment), and former Fireclick chief executive Ram Sranivasan.

Yesterday came word that Microsoft was talking to Time Warner and News Corp. about potential deals to help it acquire Yahoo. So naturally today comes word that Yahoo is talking to those very same companies about doing similar deals — just without Microsoft, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The whole thing is just ridiculous. We’re back to where we were in February — everyone is talking merger with everyone else.

Time Warner is talking with Yahoo about combining its AOL property with the Internet company. This is the scenario most often brought up and makes at least some semblance of sense. The problem is that Time Warner may now be concerned about Yahoo’s value, which has diminished since the two last talked about this scenario.

Meanwhile, News Corp. is said to be trying to get some sense of what is going on in the Yahoo camp as it mulls over an idea by Microsoft that it join in any takeover and merge MySpace with Yahoo. Microsoft would then take Yahoo’s search business. Tax hits that Yahoo would face over selling off its search business may halt that one.

Microsoft also may just take AOL off of Time Warner’s hands itself.

I wonder if and when any of these deals actually take place, if any of the companies involved are actually going to remember who is getting what.

The Yahoo annual shareholder meeting is set for August 1st. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn will launch his hostile takeover bid at that time. That should at least be good theater.

Already, Yahoo’s leadership is said to be willing to hand over two seats on its board to Icahn — but he wants four, according to BoomTown’s Kara Swisher. If that isn’t emblematic of this whole situation, I’m not sure what is.