Blue Bottle, the artisanal coffee retailer popular with hipsters from coast to coast, just informed employees that part-time workers will not receive health benefits, effective January 2015. A tipster reached out to Valleywag with the news and the company confirmed the change.

What happened to just letting a shitty idea die? For Kevin Rose, giving up the dream of owning a thriving app incubator is something he can't let go of. The former television personality's last company, Milk, released one app before the entire company shut down. Now after two years of investing, Rose is rehashing his old doomed business plan with a new company.

Earlier this afternoon, Bloomberg reported that Google Ventures managing partner Bill Maris (the Glass man in the middle, above) thinks that Uber could one day be worth "$200 billion or more." Why would a sensible outlet like Bloomberg give an Uber investor the platform to pump up his investment?

The only way Google could be in worse trouble with European regulators right now is if Larry Page signed the order to wiretap Angela Merkel's phone himself. NSA revelations have hurt Google's European contracts and antitrust investigations are multiplying like Gremlins.

Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose is quickly racking up enemies in Portland. After infuriating thousands of residents over his planned demolition of a historic home, the Digg founder offered to sell the property back to the original owners for $1.375 million in cash. A group of neighbors scrounged together the funds and accepted Rose's offer, but he's leveling the landmark house anyway.

If Kevin Rose's apparent move to Portland was in any way motivated by getting away from the anti-tech activists that protest on his San Francisco doorstep, he blew it. The Oregonian reports hundreds of the Google executive's future neighbors are fighting plans to demolish his new home.

Carmelo Anthony is a warrior for wearables.

If you float the theory that "younger users don't like the feeling of being alone. They want to be tethered to their friends constantly," important venture capitalists will invest in your app. It doesn't even need to solve that problem.

YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are parting ways. The duo worked together for 15 years, starting at PayPal, then got $1.65 billion from Google. But faced a series of missteps at their incubator Avos Systems. Now Hurley is cutting his losses and focusing on just one Avos product, MixBit, and Chen is joining Google Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

So much has changed since the Arab Spring. Wael Ghonim, the Google marketing executive credited with igniting a revolution in Egypt, just joined Google's venture capital firm as an entrepreneur-in-residence because "He's really trying to move his life forward."

Uber is first third-party app to ever to be integrated into Google Maps. Last summer Google Ventures, the corporation's "entirely" separate venture firm, was part of a $258 million investment round in the e-hailing company. Synergy had me like . . .

The anti-capitalist activists behind the Counterforce finally released footage of the protest they staged outside the San Francisco home of Google Ventures investor Kevin Rose. The video confirms that the anonymous people I interviewed were part of the protest, but it's hard to muster much empathy for either side.

Good citizens of "Palo Alto, Mountain View or Menlo Park," you still have a few hours to hail an Uber for the chance to pitch Google Ventures in the back of a moving vehicle. If paper money is meaningless, you might as well play Cash Cab.

After slogging through their 2,000-word anti-Google ransom note, I did not expect to engage in a remotely reasonable discussion with the Counterforce. Not when the anti-capitalist protestors distributed fliers to Kevin Rose's neighbors in San Francisco demanding that Google pay them $3 billion—and especially not when the group "stalked" Google X engineer Anthony Levandowski.

Yesterday was not an insanely awesome #sundayfunday for Google Ventures general partner Kevin Rose. Protestors gathered outside the Digg founder's San Francisco home in Potrero Hill with banners calling him "a parasite," threatening to "snip snip" his "ballz" (a reference to a joke Rose made in 2008 about cutting a woman's breasts with a pair of scissors), and demanding a $3 billion ransom.

All does not necessarily end well just because your startup scored $6.5 million and a profile in The New Yorker. TechCrunch reports that Google Ventures pulled its $100,000 investment in Bustle "divesting after deeming the startup out of touch with its values."

Uber, the rebellious car hailing smartphone app, is a big fan of bribery as a sales tactic. To break into New York City's taxi market, they offered users free rides. At South by Southwest, they rode the digerati around Austin. For a couple years now, they've doubled as an ice cream truck for a day. But now the company is offering the closest thing to being a pampered, infantilized startup employee: on-demand kitten delivery, plus cupcakes.

Uber is done with vociferous denials. Sort of. Raging Randian disruptor Travis Kalanick confirmed that Uber raised a $258 M. round, led by Google Ventures and TPG Capital in order to expand and "fight off protectionist, anti-competitive efforts," but the post was quickly taken down.

Something beautiful happened yesterday: an otherwise fractious internet was drawn together in harmony, united in mutual contempt for a new website called Bustle. Bustle is the spawn of asinine media mastermind Bryan Goldberg—creator of the dudebro sports-spam boiler room Bleacher Report—who reached new depths explaining his amazing, unprecedented brainstorm: a website... for girls!

This is why stuff like this matters: less than a month after investor MG Siegler announced his move to Google, he's written a TechCrunch column pillorying Apple for looking dull. There's no mention—by Siegler or TechCrunch—of the fact that he works for Apple's rival.