Silicon Valley round-up: Google's Schmidt 'screwed up'; plus iCloud, Twitter, Zynga

Two major tech conferences, one going on this week and another starting on Monday, have fed the Silicon Valley chatter mill with plenty of fodder.

Plenty of tech news has already emerged from the D9 conference, hosted by AllThingsD.com. Held in Southern California, D9 continues through Thursday.

Perhaps most notably, Google chairman Eric Schmidt generated a fair share of chatter by admitting ( during a D9 Q&A )that he “screwed up” when it came to the company’s social media efforts.

He should have been more aggressive about working with Facebook when he was CEO of Google, he said: “Three years ago I wrote memos talking about this general problem. I knew that I had to do something and I failed to do it. A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.”

More from World

Israel informed US ahead of strikes on Hamas leaders in Doha, says White House Nepal: Oli to continue until new PM is sworn in, nation on edge as all branches of govt torched

(It seems like Google is trying to take the social media bull by the horns with its launch of +1 for web sites, which some have likened to Facebook’s “like” button for search results.)

[caption id=“attachment_18984” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The Google Wallet application will help users find local discounts. Shannon Stapleton/Reuters “]  [/caption]

At D9, Google reps also demonstrated its new commerce app-Google Wallet-which enables people to find local discounts and make purchases with their smartphones. The service is currently available in New York and San Francisco.

Impact Shorts

More Shorts

Nepal: Oli to continue until new PM is sworn in, nation on edge as all branches of govt torched

Oli resigns: Who Nepal Gen Z protesters will accept as next PM, Deuba, Prachanda or Koirala?

It also launched on Wednesday a Groupon-esque product called Google Offers in Portland, Oregon. The service will spread to New York and San Francisco this summer.

More on Twitter

The D9 conference also gave Twitter CEO Dick Costolo a chance to offer more detail on Twitter’s new photo-sharing feature.

At the conference, Costolo called the feature a “Twitter native photo-sharing experience” that will be rolled out over next couple weeks as a way to “remove friction” from the photo-sharing experience related to issues like copyright.

As Twitter explained on its blog:

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be releasing a feature to upload a photo and attach it to your Tweet right from Twitter.com. And of course, you’ll soon be able to easily do this from all of our official mobile apps. … For users without smartphones, we’re working with mobile carriers around the world so you can also send photos via text message (MMS).

Steve Jobs on iCloud

As we’ve previously reported , yet another tech conference, Apple’s Annual Worldwide Developers Conference, hits San Francisco next week. On Wednesday, Apple announced in a press release that Steve Jobs’ Monday keynote speech will “unveil its next generation software,” including, Lion, it’s latest operating system; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s mobile operating system which powers iPads and iPhones; and iCloud, Apple’s “upcoming cloud services offering.”

What’s that mean exactly? iCloud remains a bit of a mystery, but various sources have reported that it’ll likely replace theMobileMe service, which hosts a user’s files in the cloud for a monthly fee. Most of the buzz has been over whether iCloud will allow for increased portability of media via iTunes.

In non-conference news…

Zynga, the company behind Mafia Wars and Farmville, launched another social game in 12 languages on Wednesday named Empires & Allies, which the company is calling “Farmville Meets Risk.”

AllThingsD reported that Zynga could announce an IPO this week.Zynga’s recent rounds of financing have valued the company at about $10 billion.

And in his first column on innovation for the Washington Post, scholar and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa writes about how the secondary markets-the private exchanges where shares in Facebook, Twitter and other not-yet-public social media companies are bought and sold-are “the next big fraud.” Wadhwa calls the secondary marketa bubble that has the “potential to generate fraud on an Enron-like scale.”

Specifically, the researcher and scholar for Harvard, Duke, and UC Berkeleyworries that there are simply too few rules and not enough regulation of the secondary market, which is only open to supposedly experienced investors. “So there are basically no rules, no real disclosure and minimal registration of issues. Welcome to the Wild, Wild West,” Wadhwa wrote.

In a group email he sent out on Wednesday, Wadhwa added that he is “really worried about the damage that Enron-like fraud can and will do to the Silicon Valley ecosystem. At first it was Russian money that was distorting things, now money is flowing in from everywhere. I expect to take intense fire from the Silicon Valley elite for this piece. After all, they are the ones who are benefitting from this bubble.”