Brad’s Sketchpad

My first day at the New York Times, and my first story. Peer-to-peer file sharing firm BitTorent and retail giant Wal-Mart each announced plans for separate online video stores, to launch early next year.

I grew up at Newsweek- literally. I started in 1990, a sophomore at college, working for the magazine’s syndicated radio show Newsweek on Air. Over the next ten years, I liked to joke, there wasn’t a cubicle in the magazine’s offices at 251 West 57th that didn’t have my initials etched into its wall. Since 1999, I’ve had the luxury of working in the San Francisco bureau, writing about high-tech and the Internet. So this week is bittersweet; I just filed my last story for the magazine.

Next week, I start working for the New York Times. I’ll be spending much of December in New York City, then taking up a station in the San Francisco bureau, covering Internet trends. Please drop me a line at stone [at] nytimes.com. Happy Thanksgiving.

It’s ironic: as the media spins into high-gear to cover the forthcoming launches of the PS3 and Nintendo Wii, the major Internet companies are busy turning the Web into something that closely resembles a game. In this week’s Newsweek, I write about the new Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D, which lets users move in, around and through photo-realistic simulations of 15 American cities. Google has the same idea and is not far behind with Google Earth.

Behind the current flood of Silicon Valley venture capital into renewable energy is a philosophical shift inside high-tech’s most prominent venture capital firm: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Over the last six weeks, I was able to spend significant time with KP partners like Ray Lane, John Doerr and Bill Joy; I tell the story of their committment to greentech, in the special enterprise section in this week’s Newsweek