It's been a very, very bad year for Anne Wojcicki. The wife of Google founder Sergey Brin just went through a blockbuster cheating scandal and the implosion of her marriage, and now the federal government is trying to shutter her shady, Google-funded genome analysis firm.

TechCrunch alum Paul Carr's e-zine NSFW Corp has gone under, The Guardian reports. Carr says he will join longtime friend Sarah Lacy at her site, PandoDaily, which will also hire some of his staff.

Entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis offered an exquisite example of the dangers created by loosening the rules around crowd-funding. During a PandoMonthly fireside chat last night, Calacanis not only argued that any consumer knows how to pick a winning startups, but that the populist thing to do is to let the masses bet on them.

[At least one Kickstarter project has reached fruition. It looks like the company's $7.5 million new headquarters, a former pencil factory on Kent St. in Greenpoint with a "rooftop garden penthouse," is open for business. Photo by Fred Benenson via Instagram]

First it was going, now it's gone: the social music website we all messed around with a couple years ago (I think that's when—right?) is now going off to the great website in the sky.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is an egomaniacal buffoon who laughs at the plight of underpaid Walmart workers and flies the prime minister of Haiti up to San Francisco so he can thank Benioff in person, in front of 15,000 people, for being such an amazing human being. And like all buffoons, Benioff has no idea how much of a buffoon he truly is.

It's important to never take anything called a "hackathon" too seriously, but when a million bucks is on the line—the self-hyped "single biggest prize in history"—allegations of foul play really sting. Participants in this year's Salesforce.com sponsored coding competition are furious, because the winner is a total sham.

Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference—"the biggest cloud computing event of the year"—already mocked Wal-Mart workers protesting Marissa Mayer's board seat and broke a local hospitality union's boycott by hosting it at the Moscone Center. So why not add regressive gender norms to the list?

Lulu, an app that lets women anonymously torment their dude Facebook friends with sexual feedback, is one of those you play with briefly and then forget. It's a gimmick—half malice, half prank, and all dumb, which is why it was plummeting in the app store. Until the Times stirred up the toilet bowl today.

It starts with a Martin Luther King Jr. quote, and ends as a total mystery: an internal video memo from Apple's chief is very strange, and the company is trying to scrub it off the internet.

It's perfectly fine to be a predatory sleaze after you invest in a company—but expecting a struggling startup founder to hand over cash just for ten minutes of your time is generally frowned upon. That's not stopping these VCs.

Another reason to escape San Francisco: this advertisement, spotted in the back of a cab during Dreamforce 2013.

And more importantly, he probably deserves some money. In deposition video obtained by Business Insider, Snapchat's co-creator and CEO Evan Spiegel discusses Reggie Brown, who helped create the app back in their Stanford days and was abruptly kicked out and left with nothing. But in Spiegel's own words, Brown was part of the multi-billion dollar sensation—and still won't get a cut.

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg and his friends made a baby, and sent it on a cross-country bus trip to DC? FWD.us was supposed to be a new force in Washington, using new tech smarts to solve old policy impasses. Of course, that was bullshit, but here's a semi-exploitative hackathon, just for fun.

Of all the "Uber for __" propositions, the splashiest by far was Blackjet, the app that purports to help wealthy users book seats on private jets (for a $2,500 annual membership fee). When it launched last October, the company touted A-list Hollywood investors like Ashton Kutcher, Jay Z, and Will Smith, not to mention connections to successful—or successful-seeming—companies like Uber. But sources tell Valleywag that Blackjet is in a tailspin—out of cash, unable to raise funds, and "basically over." Another source said: "They are fucked."

Goldman Sachs annual conference wooing tech startups is currently underway in Las Vegas and TechCrunch got its hands on the agenda for what it calls "one of the most high-end and hush-hush events in the tech world."

After inviting so many of them to his modest marriage proposal, Kanye West might be rethinking his nerd-chic allegiance to tech: in a recent sit-down with Bret Easton Ellis, West, strangely, slams internet shoe warehouse Zappos and its Vegas-dwelling chief Tony Hsieh.

Away from the beanbag-seated crowds and cloud software kiosks at Dreamforce 2013, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer and Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff sat down on a stage to praise on another. But the panegyric swap was rudely interrupted by labor protestors, calling out Mayer for her board position at Walmart. They responded in the most Silicon Valley way possible.

It's unclear if this forthcoming title will be made out of repurposed yoga mats and glitter, but Brit Morin, Silicon Valley's most accomplished daycare instructor and DIY auteur, will be a published author. Watch out, Randi: there's a new literary star in town.

Contrary to what people who call themselves that would love us all to believe, an "EIR" is a silly sinecure—not even the people who want the job know what the hell it is.