Safa on GOOG: It'll Hit 300: "Last month Safa Rashtchy of Piper predicted GOOG would hit 250, then he revised to 275. Now he's saying 300. I get his reports in email, and he has not uploaded this one to the web yet, but in short, he notes Google's expanded product offerings and upgraded ad networks as signs the company will continue to beat Wall St. estimates." —John Battelle

Running Out of Bubbles: "Remember 'Dow 36,000'? Robert Shiller, who argued against such rationalizations and correctly called the stock bubble in his book 'Irrational Exuberance,' has added an ominous analysis of the housing market to the new edition, and says the housing bubble 'may be the biggest bubble in U.S. history.'" —The New York Times

House of Cards?: "If higher interest rates don't kill the housing boom, what will? Also, finding a bubble-free market and hedging against a bust." —The Wall Street Journal

Bulls, Bears Debate Netflix: "Netflix recently bolstered its position atop the online DVD rental market by striking a deal with Wal-Mart for its subscribers. But chief rival Blockbuster may seek a partnership of its own. Bulls and bears debate how Netflix is faring." —The Wall Street Journal

Good Technology Reaches $200M In Venture Capital: "Wireless e-mail software maker and service provider Good Technology Inc., already one of the best-funded companies in Silicon Valley, has landed another $65 million in venture funding to bring the total amount raised over its five years to more than $200 million." —Blackberry Cool

Is A Consumer VC Bubble Coming?: "There's some emerging data to support the 'consumer bubble' theory.  VentureOne recently reported that in 2003, there were 183 consumer deals and $1.2 billion invested.  In 2004, it jumped to 246 deals and $2.1 billion invested.  I would be surprised if 2005 didn't continue the trend.  Most worrying, this month's featured event at Harvard Business School Club of Boston is, you guessed it, 'Emerging Trends in Consumer Technologies'.  Uh oh.  Anytime HBS jumps on a bandwagon, you know it's the top of the curve." —Jeff Bussang (IDG)

Round Two Nails Round One: "Bart Decrem, a Mozilla alumnus has just nailed funding for his start-up, Round Two. The company got off the ground in April 2005. The funding has come from Bessemer Ventures. It is a small round - said to be in the $0.75-to-$1.5 million range. The company is building a new Firefox browser with special focus on security initially and other add-ons later. More details later. Back in the day, Decrem co-founded Eazel, an open source start-up that was creating a UI for Linux." —Om Malik on Broadband

Hedging against a housing bubble: "The new service from HedgeStreet lets investors bet on the direction of home prices in six U.S. markets—Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego and San Francisco. The idea is to hedge against a housing bubble bursting, which in many of the nation's hottest housing markets would likely lead to a sudden drop in house prices." —CNBC

Swimming a 'froth' of worry in housing, hedge funds: "As a warning, Alan Greenspan's comment about 'froth' in the U.S. housing market last week seemed a lot more serious than his comment about 'irrational exuberance' in the stock market almost a decade ago." —MarketWatch

The Cost of All Those McMansions: "It's too soon to say if there's a bubble, but one thing's for sure: Resources going into housing could fuel sectors that better drive growth." —BusinessWeek

The Long Tail of U.S. Real Estate: "The trouble with thinking in long tail terms is that you can't stop thinking in long tail terms. After a while, pretty much everything you see looks like a long tail, even it's really just commonplace power laws, Zipf distributions, or whatever you want to call it." —Paul Kedrosky (UCSD)

Kedrosky with a stand-up double: real estate and Long Tail! Nice!

Is the bubble back?: "Median pre-money valuations of U.S. venture-backed companies in the first quarter reached $15 million - the highest since 2001 - driven by an increase in first-round valuations." —Marc Goldberg (Occam)

Google insiders sell over a billion dollars of stock in one day: "Shattering all previous dot.com records, on May 4th Google registered its largest single instance of insider liquidation to date.  Over 1 billion dollars worth sold in under 24 hours." —F---edGoogle

The Good News and the Bad News About Interest Rates: "This is the throw-in-the-towel time when all the naysayers decide that the optimists must have been right and the housing market really will keep booming into the foreseeable future. For Internet stocks, it would be circa November 2000." —BusinessWeek

Greenspan Is Concerned About 'Froth' in Housing: "'Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable underlying pattern,' Mr. Greenspan told the Economic Club of New York at the Hilton New York hotel in Midtown." —The New York Times

Oh go ahead, Alan, call it a bubble.

KPCB's Hiring Spurt: "Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers--the VC firm that funded Google, Sun Microsystems, Genentech, and many others--has added four staff members in the past five months." —Deal Flow

Next tech deals will be mid-sized ones: "The market action for mergers and acquisitions in the technology industry is about to move to the middle, according to someone who knows the M&A landscape." — MarketWatch

JPMorgan Chase: Tech scene is getting brighter: "Investment bank says the mood was upbeat at its annual get-together of leading and up-and-coming technology companies." —News.com

Austin economy gaining strength: "The Austin area has turned the corner and is resuming its claim to having one of the fastest-growing economies in the state, according to a new index." —Austin Business Journal

Netflix Takes Over Wal-Mart DVD Rentals (AP): "AP - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is turning over its online DVD rental business to Netflix Inc., signaling that the world's largest retailer couldn't beat the Internet upstart at its own game." —Yahoo! News: Business

Chalk one up for the little guy. Go, NFLX! Now if they would just open a little store in the shopping center in my neighborhood and hire a 16-year-old kid on a moped to deliver movies to my house... Oh, wait.

Valet Parking, Comfy Seats, Nice Meal (This Is Flying?): "Companies in the United States own or operate more than 5,000 private jets. Also, manufacturing is rebounding sharply after a post-9/11 slump, with shipments up 21.1 percent in the first quarter of 2005." —The New York Times

Howard Anderson's "Good-Bye to Venture Capital": "Yeah – the markets are rational again – but isn’t that just a cycle (I smiled as a wrote that – at least they aren’t irrationally horrifying anymore like they were in 2002.)" —Brad Feld (Mobius)

A Better Bubble?: "Vonage has just raised an awesome $200 million in additional venture capital. Skype has built a huge networks of users, most of whom contribute nothing to the company’s coffers; but Skype is rumored to have turned down nine digit buyout offers." —AlwaysOn Network

Scary, Scary? Quite Contrary: "The economy is slowing, real wage growth is nowhere to be seen, the consumer is finally rolling over and the Fed needs to raise rates to fight inflation. Yep, it's time to buy stocks." —The Wall Street Journal

Our Schizophrenic Housing Market (at Forbes.com): "When it comes to homes in the U.S., you can forget everything you know about supply and demand." —Yahoo! Finance: CFC

Sleazy Salesman Finds Dot-Com Stock Dupes ... After The Bubble: "The attorney general of Missouri is going after scammers who sold worthless dot-com stock. That's a blast from the past, not only to those of us in the here and now, but apparently also to those who fell for the scam: it happened in 2002." —Techdirt

Bay Area employment rebound predicted: "Thirty-nine percent of Bay Area CEOs and top business executives say they will increase their Bay Area workforce in the next six months, according to a survey for the Bay Area Council. Another 51 percent will keep their current regional workforce stable and only 7 percent plan layoffs, the council says." —Silicon Valley Business Journal

Travelzoo Stock Up on Takeover Speculation (AP): "Investors moved into shares of Travelzoo Inc. as speculation heated up Thursday it might be the next Web site to be snapped up in the ongoing consolidation of online travel agencies." —Yahoo! Finance: TZOO

Monster Boosted By Tightening Jobs Market: "Piper Jaffray rates the company at 'outperform' with a $41 price target." —Forbes

Profit leaps at Nvidia: "Graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp. late Thursday said net income more than tripled in the first quarter, sprinting past Wall Street's expectations." —MarketWatch