Roundup: Twitter attack mania, Apple tablet rumor update, down rounds beat up rounds in Q2

Nortel’s CEO will leave — Mike Zafirovski has been criticized for not doing enough and not doing it fast enough, to save the maker of aging CDMA mobile network technology from bankruptcy and to strip it down to a lean, mean machine with a future. The Wall Street Journal has the best summary.

Down rounds officially outnumber up rounds — Down rounds, in which a company gets money by agreeing to be valued lower by new investors than it had by previous funders, beat up rounds, the kind everyone wants, 46 to 32 percent in the second quarter, according to a new report on 89 deals by Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West.

Apple tablet will cost $600 and sell 2 million units — That’s this weekend’s cocktail-party story, thanks to a report by market researchers Piper Jaffray. No fake spy shots, sorry.

Denial-of-service attack knocked out parts of Google — I somehow can’t believe the conventional wisdom that the Russian government ordered Thursday’s massive denial of service attack that knocked down Twitter, Facebook and many other sites, all in order to silence one blogger who doesn’t seem to have written anything important. I certainly don’t believe an attack that large was accomplished by putting links to the guy’s online accounts in spam emails. I think a different story will emerge in the next few days.

More interesting today is that the IT geeks at Google were caught off guard, blocking some users from their Blogger and Google Sites accounts for an hour on Thursday morning. Sources at Google say the big news was that Google’s search engine stayed up despite being included in the attack. No, the story is that Google hasn’t built out its auxiliary services to the same robustness as its always-works search engine. Probably because that’s not where the money comes from.

[Image: OakLeaf Systems]

“Evan Williams is the perfect embodiment of the Silicon Valley ethos that business plans are oppressive things, to be deferred as long as possible.” — In response to a Cassandra post about Twitter’s future circulating among New York’s Internet literati, Valleywag editor Ryan Tate retorts that Twitter founder Evan Williams has, unlike his critics, succeeded again and again — not despite, but because of his ability to build a company on a hunch and change horses midstream, rather than starting with a full go-to-market-and-then-exit plan. I’m sure he’s written up several such plans, but @ev’s talent is packed into the seat of his pants.

[Photo: Joi Ito]

VentureBeat’s green reporter to speak at Journalism 2.0 roundtable August 12th — Camille Ricketts is part of a panel discussion to be held Wednesday, August 12 at 6:30 pm, at MySpace’s San Francisco office at 625 2nd St, near South Park. Only $10 to get in at the door, and lots of the VentureBeat crowd will be there.