fake

The problem with insidery satire is that you're leaving a good portion of your audience in the dark. Almost anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley over the past 15 years, however, will find something to laugh at in Options, the debut novel from Fake Steve Jobs due out November 1.

It's not The Bonfire of the Vanities or anything, but Daniel Lyons--the Forbes reporter behind the Fake Steve Jobs blog--has produced a delightful send-up of Valley culture, celebrity CEOs and the inscrutable mix of enlightenment and paranoia that's thought to inhabit the brain of the real … Read more

"See, Fake Steve Jobs was like the Banksy of blogging."

I was trying to explain to the guy standing next to me why I'd just flipped out. We were at McCarren Park Pool, a massive abandoned-natatorium-turned-concert-venue in the Brooklyn hipster hub of Williamsburg (a neighborhood which any New Yorker either loves or loathes). All summer, McCarren has hosted a series of "Pool Parties" concerts, sponsored by youth-oriented "social tech" brands like Helio and Going.com, and this past Sunday was no exception. Hordes of sunburned music fans in imitation Ray-Bans and shrunken plaid shirts had crowded into the drained swimming pool for performances by I'm From Barcelona and Blonde Redhead, and while they were batting around beach balls in the mosh pit, New York Times writer Brad Stone outed Fake Steve Jobs as Forbes editor Daniel Lyons.

Upon seeing the headline on my mobile Google Reader, I may have overreacted just a bit.… Read more

Brad Stone of The New York Times just outed the Fake Steve Jobs and it's none other than open-source software lover (Not!) Daniel Lyons of Forbes. The Great Faker Himself has admitted it..

And now there's nothing left to read with childlike wonder. Especially the wonder of how anyone could write with such acerbic bite about people that Lyons will interact with each day.

20/20 hindsight points to Lyons, who has never had much in the way of praise for open source.… Read more

Like many of you, I have my own theory as to Fake Steve Jobs' real-life identity. But I'm not going to discuss it here. At this point, bloggers' rabid attempts to lay bare the face behind the anonymous writer have grown a bit tiresome, and for all we know, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs will turn out to be a corporate travail staffed by a team of six writers nabbed from The Office. But that's not to say that Fake Steve isn't newsworthy. The blog, I'm willing to argue, has more to say about the state of the media today than a thousand "purple cows," noisy disruptors, viral-buzz ecosystems, and whatever other business clich?s you'd like me to throw in your face.

More than a few people would agree that the blogger behind Fake Steve, underneath his exaggerated Jobsian obnoxiousness, ranks right up there with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as one of the most spot-on social critics we have. But because nobody knows who he is, he can get away with more: Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman is a " sociopathic nouveau riche lady-killer," Gawker Media founder Nick Denton is almost never mentioned without the epithet "macrocephalic," and his Valleywag successor Owen Thomas is constantly referred to as "Mr. Bigglesworth." Former vice president and current global warming figurehead Al Gore is depicted as emotionally fragile and tormented by marriage problems that lead him to frequently call up the faux Jobs and ask for a couch to crash on (which tends to infuriate Mrs. Jobs). Rockers turned social crusaders Bono and The Edge, according to Fake Steve, are prone to bar fights. ("Bono says it's an Irish thing," the satirist asserts flippantly.)… Read more

Fake Gene Munster.

Fake Steve Ballmer.

Fake John Dvorak.

Fake Paul Thurrott.

Fake Rob Enderle.

Fake Peter Oppenheimer.

Fake Phil Schiller.

And, of course, Fake Steve Jobs.

Who's the Macalope missing?

He's thinking there has to be a Fake Walt Mossberg but he couldn't find one.

Got more? Post 'em in the comments.

The writer of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs appeared to break character Wednesday in decrying "invasions of privacy" that have the anonymous author rattled.

Fake Steve Jobs, as he or she has come to be known, posted a two-paragraph rant saying he has been consulting with lawyers and computer security experts after discovering activity "that may or may not have crossed over the line of legality but definitely fall outside the boundaries of what most decent civilized human beings consider to be appropriate behavior."

Valleywag, the self-described "tech gossip rag" of Silicon Valley, … Read more

I'm in the Connected Innovators session of the SuperNova conference. This is where thirteen start-ups are going to pitch to the audience. I hear that one of these companies is a fake, and that conference organizer Kevin Werbach is going to announce that fact after the last presentation. I'm going to liveblog the presentations as they happen. Let's see if we can spot the faux one.

These are the 13 companies. More as they come on stage.

Adap.tv. I just covered these guys yesterday. It's a video-advertising company. Not fake.

AdaptiveBlue is a semantic Web … Read more

...really, really funny.

A high-profile search for the identity of the blogger behind The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is under way, with Valleywag and Business Week leading the charge. The site is full of satirical posts from Steve's point of view--or, at least, one who would be Steve--on just about anything. Fake Steve, a "benevolent dictator" according to his Blogger profile, plays "Dear Diary" with such topics as the iPhone development process, U2 lead singer "Bono's driving skills", or deeper thoughts like "Jesus didn't go to college either" (… Read more

We felt that something had been amiss lately, and it finally dawned on us: It's been days since we've blogged about a pink gadget. But this one more than makes up for our dereliction of duty, if we do say so ourselves: the multimedia "Girls" keyboard.

All of the keyboards made by Greybusters are colorful, to say the least, but this one seems over the top even by the company's own garish standards. And not just because it's shocking pink from A to Z--as Chip Chick points out, it's also got a vanity mirror … Read more