There’s a popular maxim in Silicon Valley: Find your user base and the revenues will come later.

For a while, it seemed to be the easiest way for a founder to explain his or her way out of a proper business model. But with Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of the entirely revenue-free Instagram, that adage now carries more weight than ever.

Enter: Viddy and Socialcam, two of the hottest start-up apps that both have the buzz of being the “Instagram for video.” The pair have exploded in popularity over the past few months, with each garnering user bases in the tens of millions seemingly overnight.

But the growth of one of these apps is not like the other.

Using a combination of fortunate timing, Facebook’s Open Graph influence and a new way of playing the system, Socialcam has effectively gamed Facebook, YouTube and the App Store to keep a strong grip on that ever-so-valuable user base. In the short term, at least, the three-man Socialcam startup team has discovered a method to beat the 20-plus person outfit that is Viddy.

The method is so effective that Socialcam skyrocketed from around 1.4 million monthly active Facebook users to a whopping 40 million in a span of little more than two weeks. Socialcam surpassed Viddy in the Facebook app rankings last week, and currently sits fat atop Apple’s powerful App Store as one of the most downloaded free applications.

Some have started picking up on Socialcam’s tactics. Threads arose on Quora and Hacker News questioning the validity of the app’s growth, and TheNextWeb picked some of this apart on Thursday.

But there’s far more to it.

History

The concept of social video has been simmering for some time. Viddy was founded in December of 2010, while competitors like Mobli, Klip and Socialcam came along at various points during 2011.

But it was only over the past few months that the mobile social video concept began to boil. Socialcam hit the three million user mark in December. The Instagram acquisition announcement hit the web on April 9th. Two days later, Viddy hit 4 million users.

At some point on April 24th, social video apps exploded, and it suddenly became clearer that Viddy and Socialcam were leaving all of their competitors behind.

Web view traffic to Socialcam through Facebook skyrocketed from around 10 million monthly active users to an astounding 40 million MAUs over a period of two weeks. Viddy jumped from around 8 million MAUs to upwards of 36 million over that same period.

It was as if someone had flipped on the awesome traffic switch.

What Happened That Fateful Day in April?

What isn’t clear is just who or what flipped that switch. But I’m hearing many different theories.

Theory No. 1: Socialcam received its Facebook Open Graph integration around this time, thus increasing the app’s visibility in users’ Timelines. But Viddy’s Open Graph integration had already occurred more than a month previously at South by Southwest, on March 12 and both apps received immense boosts in traffic during that same time period.

It’s possible that Socialcam’s Open Graph jumpstart fueled Viddy’s growth by mere virtue of being another social video app. Or perhaps it was the announcement that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Shakira and Jay-Z would back Viddy financially, the news of which occurred two days before Socialcam’s Open Graph integration.

Theory No. 2: A more conspiracy-like theory in which Facebook itself made changes to its News Feed in favor of the “Watch” action for social videos on the whole.

Consider this: When the once-popular Facebook social reading apps like The Guardian and Washington Post Social Reader recently started tanking in their monthly active user ratings, Ryan Kellett, a Washington Post employee, confirmed to TechCrunch that it was indeed changes in Facebook’s News Feed that led to Social Reader’s decline. It’s feasible, then, to think that Facebook could tweak things in the other direction, in order to favor video apps.

And, indeed, SocialCam, Klip, YouTube, Viddy and DailyMotion all saw spikes in Facebook traffic on April 24 — some more than others — with Mobli’s traffic following suit shortly thereafter.

Facebook declined to comment to AllThingsD on the near instantaneous rise on April 24, although it did shrug off the date in question to The New York Times: “The popularity of videos and other user-generated content on Facebook is not new, so it’s no surprise that social video apps are growing as friends share with each other and as more developers experiment with this type of content on Facebook.”

In a tweet on Saturday, TechCrunch writer Josh Constine noted that the sudden burst of growth on April 24 was due to a reporting error from Facebook to third-party app tracking site AppData. That also seems reasonable, although doesn’t fully explain the sudden traffic explosion that occurred over that two to three week period.

Whatever actually happened, Socialcam saw the chance to seize its moment.

Gaming Facebook

After receiving the boost, Socialcam’s founders discovered the perfect way of keeping that veritable firehose of Facebook Web traffic pouring in.

According to multiple sources, it was around this time Socialcam began scraping video content from Vevo and YouTube to add to its own network of users, which essentially amounts to ripping content directly from other services.

As you might imagine, it’s not a welcome practice.

Then, sources said, Socialcam uploaded that video content to its own servers, where it then began distributing it via different dummy accounts on the Socialcam network. There’s a slew of “YouTube Popular” accounts doing much of the distribution, along with others.

So, in effect, when a Socialcam user on a mobile device clicked on what he thought was a Socialcam video, he was taken into SocialCam’s Custom player, where the ripped YouTube video was played from Socialcam’s servers.

Herein lies the cleverness of the plan: Scraping and ripping stripped each video of its YouTube wrapping, or in the case of Vevo, its pre-roll advertising. So initially, users weren’t even aware they were watching YouTube videos. Socialcam systematically targeted a number of the most viral videos uploaded YouTube in the past four to five years, said sources, aiming to harness that viral success and bolster Socialcam’s network.

Why go to this trouble, especially because it’s against the terms of service to rip off the YouTube APIs? That risks sullying a relationship with a large and powerful online content powerhouses. Embedding the YouTube code within a Socialcam video, instead of ripping YouTube’s content would comply with YouTube’s ToS. It’s also potential fodder to get its app booted from Facebook’s platform.

When asked if Socialcam was ripping YouTube videos, YouTube was cagey, only telling me this:

“While we don’t comment on individual cases, however, we take any violation of our open API’s Terms of Service seriously and take action against known abusers,” a spokesperson for YouTube told me.

A Facebook spokesperson concurred: “If it comes to our attention that an app is violating our policies, we will take action. We have no further details to share at this time.”

Vevo declined my request for comment.

Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel responded: “Socialcam has weekly and often daily interaction with the developer relations teams at both Facebook and Youtube. To the best of our knowledge, we are not violating the terms of service of either company.”

But what apparently happened, said sources, was that Socialcam got caught scraping and was told to knock it off. So to continue with its plan but stay compliant with Facebook and YouTube Terms of Service policies, Socialcam then began embedding the YouTube videos into Socialcam posts, effectively doing the same thing as before, only with the YouTube branding in place.

As of last week, nearly every top trending video on Socialcam’s site was a YouTube video.

Combine the viral nature of those YouTube videos with Facebook’s traffic-driving Open Graph, and you’ve got a recipe for success. If an app is integrated into Open Graph like Socialcam and Viddy are, using those apps publishes activity to three sections of Facebook: Timeline, Ticker and the News Feed. With every click, each user would broadcast the videos they had just watched, and that traffic fed on itself.

Despite the fact that social video on the whole received early initial traffic boosts by some yet-to-be-pinpointed variable, Socialcam was able to retain that traffic through proliferating YouTube videos throughout Facebook.

In a way, the guys behind Socialcam are brilliant, cracking a method of using YouTube and Facebook together to extend the app’s reach in a mere matter of weeks.

And it worked: The app still sits atop the App Store, using its Facebook viral success to boost download numbers immensely. It has soared beyond Viddy and other similar apps, most of which have been around much longer than Socialcam has.

Is All Fair in Apps and War?

And here’s the thing: Aside from the alleged initial screen-scraping, doing what Socialcam is currently doing isn’t breaking any rules.

Sure, its largest competitor, Viddy, is definitely not a fan of the practice. The company spent the past 18 months building its subscriber base out with user-generated content, not to mention raising tens of millions of dollars in venture funding in order to do so.

And Viddy CEO and co-founder Brett O’Brien is making no bones about his discontent.

“Viddy is built on 100% community-generated original content, which we feel is the only way to build a true social community as Facebook, Instagram and others have done,” O’Brien told me in an interview, a thinly veiled slight at Socialcam’s YouTube video poaching. “Our active community of over 27 million Viddyographers is passionate about Viddy and is actively growing the community through sharing. Viddy is clearly filling a consumer need to easily create, beautify and share original video content.”

The problem for Viddy is, others are catching on. Of the top 10 fastest growing Facebook apps from the past week, half of them are social video apps. Most recently, Chill gained more than 8 million users in as little as two weeks. All but Viddy use a mix of content, both user-generated and user-curated — although Socialcam still remains the most adept at working the larger ecosystem.

It seems, however, that in light of the recent negative press Socialcam has received, the company decided to tweak its app on Tuesday afternoon, incorporating a handful of subtle changes. YouTube videos are now labeled much more explicitly. A bug which kept users auto-sharing their videos to their feeds — whether they turned the option on or off — has been fixed. And now Socialcam’s “Trending Bar” — the one replete with YouTube videos — is gone from the site.

Still, as the social apps using these methods proliferate, it’ll only get harder for non-viral videos to rise to the top. According to one source, Facebook’s News Feed only allows for a certain percentage of its inventory devoted to video. The algorithm that determines which videos make it into that inventory is based on click-through rate, as well as the number of comments, likes and shares it received. Still, click-through rate weighs heavy on that scale.

In that case, it’s obvious that when Socialcam — and apps like it — seed Facebook with the most viral YouTube apps of all time, click-through rates and shares will skyrocket, and those apps will take a much larger portion of the video News Feed pie.

The question, then, becomes a philosophical one: Is it fair? Since Socialcam essentially cracked the video sharing code, does it not deserve its seat at the top of the charts?

That point remains contentious. As Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel told me, the company’s “simple goal is to allow users to create amazing videos and watch videos shared by their friends.” And as Seibel explained on Bloomberg West last week, “people want to see the videos that their friends are watching.”

But, if all that is being watched are the most viral videos Socialcam has seeded, are users not just watching what Socialcam directs them to?

The war isn’t over. Perhaps Facebook will tweak its algorithm to compensate for the types of videos. Or perhaps Socialcam and others like it will ride to the top on YouTube videos, then see an influx of user-generated content after reaching a critical mass of subscribers.

And again, like that old Valley adage goes — it’s all about the user base, right?

But there’s one thing that even the most ardent Facebook fan can’t argue with: Facebook advertising is very much a work in progress.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Facebook itself: “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” the company says in its IPO filing.

If you’re a Facebook bull, those words sound reassuring. Facebook sold $3 billion worth of ads last year, and it’s just getting started. Imagine what happens when things really kick in.

But if you’re a skeptic, and there are lots of them, that uncertainity is a real problem. When Google went public in 2004, it had already built AdWords, the search ad engine that still generates the majority of its revenue today. Facebook doesn’t have an AdWords, so it doesn’t have a tried-and-true plan it can present to advertisers: Put dollars in here, see results over there.

Instead Facebook marketers try different things over time. A few years back, they were all building Facebook apps. Then they started concentrating on amassing fans/followers. Now digital marketing people tell me with confidence that all of that thinking is outmoded, and that the real Facebook pros are the ones who create “engaging content” on the site, then buy ads to “amplify” that message.

Facebook’s challenge gets even tougher because instead of search ads, whose success and failure are easy for advertisers to evaluate — Did someone click on my search ad? If they did, did they buy something or fill out a form once they got to my site? — Facebook aspires to the big branding dollars that advertisers spend on TV. And those are much harder to score. So convincing GM or anyone else to move big money from traditional ads, which marketers are at least comfortable with, to the wild world of social, requires a lot of work.

The good news for Facebook is that it’s so big that it might succeed even if it never cracks the social ad code. Any Web site with 900 million users and counting, who spend a ton of time there, is going to pull in a lot of ad dollars through sheer force of gravity. If Facebook can keep its users happy, it may get away with muddling through on the ad part.

But being a big, lumbering giant that attracts ad dollars without knowing what it’s doing isn’t the message Facebook wants to sell to advertisers. Or to investors.

OK, on to the “this isn’t that big of a deal” arguments. I’ve heard a bunch, all of which come from (different) people who don’t want to be quoted.

• Obviously there’s a back story here. If GM didn’t want to keep advertising on Facebook, it didn’t have to announce that three days before an IPO.
• Big Fuel, GM’s social media ad agency, didn’t do a good job. That’s why GM fired them in December. For the record, here’s a quote from a Big Fuel rep: “GM never seemed persuaded of the value of social media in general and Facebook likes in particular. In a sales-driven culture, it is very hard to wrap your head around putting money in places where you don’t see immediate results in an uptick in sales.”
• Starcom, GM’s media buying agency, didn’t do a good job. That’s why GM fired them in January.
• How the heck did GM spend $3 on Facebook “content management” for every $1 it spent on Facebook ads, as the WSJ reports? That’s a sure sign that someone was doing something wrong.
• Ford loves Facebook.
• GM is pulling $10 million out of Facebook. Facebook did more than $3 billion in ads last year.

Again, all of those may be valid points.* But if Facebook really wants to allay outsiders’ fears, it needs to be able to prove conclusively that its ads work, in a scalable way, for a wide variety of advertisers. It can’t do that yet.

*I’m totally amazed by the $3-to-$1 ratio, and am wondering if it’s not to late to pivot myself into a “Facebook content creation consultant”. Those numbers also me remind very much of the late 90s, when companies like Organic went public based on the fact that they knew how to build Web sites and their clients didn’t, and they could charge accordingly. That didn’t last long.

The largest U.S. auto maker will continue to expand its use of marketing through Facebook’s pages, in which companies can display content at no cost, these people said.

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That can’t be right, can it?

Not exactly. That scenario is what Gawker’s Scott Kidder encountered when he read a story on Adweek’s site today, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen.

Instead, Kidder should have had a choice of filling out a one- or two-question survey or sharing the story on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Bug, not a feature, says a Google spokesrep, via email:

Generally, Google Consumer Surveys are designed to show a market research question along with an alternate, publisher defined action, such as signing in or sharing a piece of content. Along with the surveys, we also offer a number of controls to prevent abuse of the system. Unfortunately, in rare cases, as a result of these controls, a prompt runs without a survey question included. This is not the intended behavior and we are currently working on a fix.

[UPDATE: This is now fixed, a Google rep says.]

Okay, fair enough. As far as the survey that AdWeek users are supposed to see, which acts as an ersatz pay wall by generating a small fee for AdWeek and Google every time someone fills it out: Annoying and a little clumsy, but not terrible.

I’ve read about the tool, and I’ve used it several times, but each time I encounter it I think something’s broken on the site. Then I remember what’s happening, make a couple of clicks without giving it a lick of thought — today’s survey was about professional medical supplies, I think, but I really have no idea — and move on.

Hard to see how this is useful for the survey sponsor, but I’ve always found online sponsor polls to be baffling. So perhaps it’s a less-bad option.

In any case, it’s a couple of clicks, so I’d prefer that to having Adweek crap up their site with slideshows, or forcing me to make lots of clicks to read a one-page story, which happens all over the Web these days. I also prefer it to Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” via “social readers,” which end up automatically belching up my friends’ reading habits into my feed, whether or not either of us wanted that to happen.

And in the big picture, unless the site you like is using the “borrow money from investors, pay back by selling to Facebook” plan, you’re always going to end up paying something to use it.

Either you pull out your credit card, or you lend them your eyeballs so they can rent them out to advertisers. And if you don’t like those options, you’re going to end up with a much emptier Web.

ESPN has reengineered its streaming radio app to offer improved sound quality, push alerts for when a favorite program is going live and content-caching for listening to podcasts without an Internet connection.

It’s also launching the app for the first time on iPad. The app is already available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry; the updated version will hit Android in June, and a Windows phone app will be available this summer.

If you vaguely recall ESPN having just updated its radio app, you would be correct: The company retooled it less than 18 months ago to include new search and personalization features, as AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka reported here.

Marc Horine, ESPN’s vice president of digital and print media, says that with the newest version, the network is trying to refocus on what’s most important with a radio app — the listening experience. Files have been compressed for faster streaming and downloading, and the sound quality has been enhanced, Horine says. And the app includes DVR — which allows users to skip ads, by the way, though I doubt ESPN would encourage that — and the ability to download full podcasts for listening offline.

Most of the content on the app is commentary, though there are some live play-by-play game options, and there’s a SportsCenter update available every 20 minutes (for the really, really rabid sports fans). To lure listeners to the app, ESPN has mixed up its app offerings to include original, app-only programming with stuff that’s already broadcast on terrestrial radio, like “BS Report with Bill Simmons,” “Pardon the Interruption” and “Fantasy Focus.”

At $4.99, the new ESPN Radio costs two dollars more to download than the old version, and runs in-app ads as well as commercials throughout the podcasts.

Horine says the mobile radio app has been downloaded more than 740,000 times since it first launched two-and-a-half years ago. That’s actually a pretty small percentage of the 24 million weekly radio listeners ESPN claims across all platforms.

And the majority of listeners — 90 percent, Horine says — listen to radio while at work Monday through Friday. But now, with the ability to stop and start radio podcasts on your desktop and pick up right where you left off on the mobile app, ESPN envisions mobile will become a growing fraction of those listeners.

(Full disclosure: I worked as a non-Disney employee for ESPN from 2003 to 2006. I was not involved with network’s radio programming.)

Curalate’s pitch: You need basic information about the way users and potential customers are interacting with your products on Pinterest, but it’s very hard to do it on your own, because users usually don’t identify the products they’re “pinning,” so there’s no effective way to search for your stuff.

The company says it can solve that with image-recognition technology, which it licenses from a  third party, and an analytics engine it created itself.

Curalate’s arrival is inevitable, because every big social platform eventually spawns a set of third-party analytics/brand tracking companies — see Twitter, Facebook. But the company didn’t exist a few months ago.

Up until late last year, Gupta’s company was called Storably, and it was pursuing another hot start-up meme, as an “Air BNB for parking and storage.”

But that one never got traction and, after six months, Gupta — a Philadelphia-based Wharton grad — looked for a pivot. He and his four-man team cast around for a new idea and, after considering some 70 ideas, landed on Curalate. At the end of 2011, the company raised a $750,000 seed round from NEA, First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures.

Now Gupta says he has 150 customers, including Kraft Foods and Time Inc.’s “Real Simple,” and he charges them up to $99 a month for his services.

Ms. Brooks, who served as editor of the News of the World and the Sun tabloids before running all of News Corp.’s newspapers in the U.K., was charged by the Crown Prosecution Service with perverting the course of justice. Prosecutors also charged her husband, Charles Brooks; her former assistant; her chauffeur; and two men who provided security for Ms. Brooks.

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At today’s all-hands meeting for Yahoo employees — in the wake of the dramatic ouster of its former CEO Scott Thompson — what pop culture icon did new interim CEO Ross Levinson use to loosen up the crowd?

Why, a little Al Pacino from the movie classic “The Godfather,” of course — the go-to guy solution menu for all troubles in the world.

Comparing the battered Silicon Valley Internet giant to Don Corleone after a gun ambush, Levinsohn said to the crowd gathered at URL’s Cafe on the Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ campus: “This weekend was like that scene from ‘The Godfather’ — ‘They hit ’im with five shots, and he’s still alive!’”

And also, trying to make Yahoos feel as if there were forward momentum: “There are things being negotiated now that are gonna solve all your problems and answer all your questions.”

Well, let’s hope so, and that it does not end for Yahoo — and Levinsohn — like it did for Luca Brasi (who sleeps with the fishes, in case you didn’t know).

So far, in his first impress-the-employees outing, the reviews for Levinsohn were largely positive on its internal message boards and from numerous sources I talked to.

What they liked: Acknowledgement of the tough past week, but not dwelling on the past, either; a theme of revival and spirit; no PowerPoint slides; and zero direct mention of Thompson.

What they really liked: The whole pile of compliments that Levinsohn doled out to the troops.

No tough-love dude he — unlike Thompson and his predecessor Carol Bartz, who liked to verbally smack around the troops a little more in a mobster kind of way.

Instead, said one person in attendance, “he was appealing to Yahoo pride, which is pretty much in the doldrums.”

Still, one questioner worried about the future and whether the company was going to still be stuck in a leadership vacuum, especially since Levinsohn was not named as the permanent CEO.

Fred Amoroso — who was just named Yahoo’s new chairman and was the only person who appeared with Levinsohn on the stage — tried to assuage that concern by saying he wanted Levinsohn to eventually become the head of the family for good.

While there will likely be a search for other CEO candidates, it is as close to a ring-kiss as Levinsohn is going to get for now.

That is, unless he does not produce some quick results on a variety of Yahoo’s thorniest issues, such as an Asian asset sale and a settlement of the patent lawsuit fight with social networking giant Facebook.

But the over/under on him and Amoroso together was good.

One person said it was important when Amoroso talked about coding and technology and products, which is not advertising- and media-focused Levinsohn’s expertise.

“It was nice to see a board member who cared about products and innovation,” said one person. “Or at least said he did.”

We’ll see how this pair works out together, but always remember this, Yahoos:

Just when you thought you were out, they pull you back in.

Until we know how the movie ends, here is a scary video of me talking about the last week’s events at Yahoo on a local ABC television news station — I look a fright since I’m so tired from covering it all:

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As I reported earlier today, former Yahoo Scott Thompson left the Silicon Valley Internet giant with no severance.

The reason for the agreement was that the company was claiming “cause” for the parting, due to a fake computer science degree on his resume, as well as other issues that were raised from the controversy.

Yahoo said in filing today:

“Yahoo! and Mr. Thompson agreed to terminate all other agreements between them, including Mr. Thompson’s offer letter, all outstanding but not fully vested equity awards and Yahoo!’s other plans and arrangements for the benefit of employees, with no severance compensation.”

The former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit will get “Make-Whole” cash bonus and already vested restricted stock units related to him leaving that job in January to become the CEO of Yahoo.

That totals about $7 million.

Here is the pertinent part of its just-filed document:

Item 5.02. Departure of Directors or Certain Officers; Election of Directors; Appointment of Certain Officers; Compensatory Arrangements of Certain Officers.

(a) Resignation of Chief Executive Officer

Effective May 12, 2012, Scott Thompson resigned as Yahoo!’s Chief Executive Officer and President, as a member of the Board, and from all other positions with Yahoo!. Yahoo! entered into a separation agreement, dated May 12, 2012 (the “Separation Agreement”), with Mr. Thompson to memorialize the parties’ mutual desire to separate employment. The Separation Agreement provides, among other things:

• Mr. Thompson resigned from his position as Yahoo!’s Chief Executive Officer and all other positions he had with Yahoo!’s subsidiaries and affiliates, including as a director of Yahoo!.

• Yahoo! and Mr. Thompson agreed to terminate all other agreements between them, including Mr. Thompson’s offer letter, all outstanding but not fully vested equity awards and Yahoo!’s other plans and arrangements for the benefit of employees, with no severance compensation. However, in accordance with the terms of his offer letter, Mr. Thompson retained the make-whole cash bonus previously paid to him under his offer letter and the make-whole restricted stock units that had been granted to him pursuant to his offer letter and that had already vested.

• The parties reiterated their obligations with regard to disparagement under Mr. Thompson’s offer letter, providing that Mr. Thompson not knowingly disparage Yahoo! or its officers, directors, employees or agents in any manner likely to be harmful to their respective business, business reputation or personal reputation, and that Yahoo! instruct its Chairman, certain employees and executive officers not to knowingly disparage Mr. Thompson in any manner likely to be harmful to his business, business reputation or personal reputation other than in the good-faith performance of their duties to Yahoo! or in connection with their fiduciary duties to Yahoo! and applicable law.

• Yahoo! and Mr. Thompson agreed to a mutual release of claims related to Mr. Thompson’s employment and other relationships with, and the termination of Mr. Thompson’s employment and other relationships with, Yahoo! and Yahoo!’s affiliates, provided, that such release by Yahoo! does not apply to any liability arising out of any intentional and wrongful act by Mr. Thompson.

• Certain of Mr. Thompson’s obligations, such as those in relation to intellectual property and confidentiality, remained in effect.

The foregoing summary of the Separation Agreement does not purport to be complete and is subject to, and qualified in its entirety by, the full text of the Separation Agreement, which is attached as Exhibit 99.02 and incorporated herein by reference.

And here is the full separation agreement:

SEPARATION AGREEMENT

This Separation Agreement (this “Agreement”) memorializes the parties’ mutual desire to separate, leading to the termination of employment with Yahoo! Inc. (“Yahoo!” or the “Company”).

1. Separation. Your last day of work with the Company and your employment termination date was May 12, 2012 (the “Separation Date”). To the extent you have not previously done so as of the Separation Date, you hereby resign from your position as the Chief Executive Officer of the Company and from any and all offices you have with the Company’s subsidiaries and/or affiliates, including the Company’s Board of Directors or any fiduciary or other committee with respect to any benefit plan of the Company or any of the Company’s subsidiaries and/or affiliates. You shall execute such additional documents as requested by the Company to evidence the foregoing. After the Separation Date, you shall not represent yourself as being an officer, director or employee of the Company or a fiduciary of any such benefit plan for any purpose.

2. Accrued Amounts. Yahoo! will pay you all Accrued Amounts (as defined below), subject to payroll deductions and required withholdings. You are entitled to these payments regardless of whether or not you sign this Agreement. Accrued Amounts means any accrued but unpaid base salary through date of termination paid in accordance with normal payroll practices, unreimbursed business expenses incurred prior to the date of termination paid in accordance with Company policies, and accrued but unused vacation time through the date of termination due in accordance with Company plans and policies. With respect to reimbursement for business expenses incurred prior to termination of your employment, you agree that, within thirty (30) days following the Separation Date, you will submit your final expense reimbursement statement and required documentation reflecting all business expenses you incurred through the Separation Date, if any, for which you seek reimbursement. For a copy of the Yahoo! expense form, please email payroll-perations@yahoo-inc.com. You should submit completed expense reports and receipts to the Expense Report Department at Yahoo!, 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, California 94089.

3. Consideration for this Agreement. Except as provided in Section 9 below, you and Yahoo! mutually agree to terminate any and all other contracts or agreements, including but not limited to the Offer Letter, and rights under all pension, welfare, equity and fringe plans, programs, awards, arrangements, and payroll practices; provided, however, that nothing in the Agreement requires you to repay or return to Yahoo! the Make-Whole Cash Bonus previously paid to you and the Make-Whole Restricted Stock Units that already have vested. Therefore, except as provided in this Agreement, this Separation Agreement supersedes and supplants any and all rights, claims, benefits and defenses you or the Company would otherwise enjoy or be entitled to assert pursuant to your Offer Letter or any other document previously executed relating to your employment with the Company.

4. Tax Matters.

a. Withholding. Yahoo! will withhold required federal, state and local taxes from any and all payments of the Accrued Amounts and make all tax reporting it determines it should make based on this Agreement.

b. Responsibility for Taxes. Other than Yahoo!’s obligation and right to withhold federal, state and local taxes and to pay the employer portion of FICA and FUTA, you will be responsible for any and all taxes, interest, and penalties that may be imposed with respect to the payments previously made or contemplated by this Agreement (including, but not limited to, those imposed under Internal Revenue
Code Section 409A).

5. Health Care Coverage. Nothing in this Agreement affects your right to timely elect and purchase at your own expense healthcare coverage under COBRA as provided by law.

6. Invention and Assignment to Yahoo!. You agree to perform promptly, all acts deemed necessary or desirable by Yahoo! to permit and assist it, at its expense, in obtaining and enforcing the full benefits, enjoyment, rights and title throughout the world in all intellectual property assigned to Yahoo! pursuant to your Employee Confidentiality and Assignment of Inventions Agreement(s) or similar agreement(s) including, but not limited to, disclosing information, executing documents and providing reasonable assistance or cooperation in legal proceedings.

7. Return of Company Property. Promptly after the Separation Date, you agree to return to Yahoo! all hard copy and electronic documents (and all copies thereof) and other property belonging to Yahoo!, its subsidiaries and/or affiliates that you have had in your possession at any time, including, but not limited to, files, notes, notebooks, correspondence, memoranda, agreements, drawings, records, business plans, forecasts, financial information, specifications, computer-recorded information, tangible property (including, but not limited to, computers, PDAs, pagers, telephones, credit cards, entry cards, identification badges and keys), and any materials of any kind that contain or embody any proprietary or confidential information of the Company, its subsidiaries or affiliates (and all reproductions thereof in whole or in part). If you discover after the Separation Date that you have retained any proprietary or confidential information (including, but not limited to, proprietary or confidential information contained in any electronic documents or e-mail systems in your possession or control), you agree immediately upon discovery to send an email to IPQuestionsSeparations@yahoo-inc.com and inform Yahoo! of the nature and location of the proprietary or confidential information that you have retained so that Yahoo! may arrange to remove, recover, and/or collect such information.

8. Ongoing Obligations.

a. Intellectual Property and Proprietary Information. You acknowledge your continuing obligations under your Employee Confidentiality and Assignment of Inventions Agreement(s), the Offer Letter or any other agreement(s) signed thereafter containing restrictive covenants (collectively “NDAs”), including your obligation not to use or disclose any confidential or proprietary information of the Company, its subsidiaries or affiliated entities, not to solicit Yahoo! employees and, to the extent permitted by applicable law, not to solicit customers and not to compete with the Company, its subsidiaries or affiliated entities while you are employed, as specified in your NDAs. If you would like a copy of your signed NDAs, please contact David Windley at (408) 349-8449.

b. Nondisparagement. You agree, for five years after your employment with the Company terminates, not to knowingly disparage the Company or its officers, directors, employees or agents in any manner likely to be harmful to it or them or its or their business, business reputation or personal reputation. The foregoing shall not be violated by statements that are truthful, complete and made in good faith in required responses to legal process or governmental inquiry. You agree that any breach of this nondisparagement provision shall be a material breach of this Agreement. The Company will instruct its Chairman, the chief Yahoos, and the named executive officers of the Company, other than in the good-faith performance of their duties to the Company or in connection with their fiduciary duties to the Company and applicable law, for a period of five years following your employment has terminated, not to knowingly disparage you in any manner likely to be harmful to you or your business reputation or personal reputation. The foregoing shall not be violated by statements which are truthful, complete, and made in good faith in required response to legal process or governmental inquiry.

9. Release of Claims. In consideration for, and as a condition of the payments and benefits provided to you pursuant to this Agreement, you hereby generally and completely release the Company and its directors, officers, employees, shareholders, partners, agents, attorneys, predecessors, successors, parent and subsidiary entities, insurers, affiliates, and assigns (collectively “Released Party”) from any and all claims, liabilities and obligations, both known and unknown, that arise out of or are in any way related to events, acts, conduct, or omissions occurring at any time prior to and including the date you sign this Agreement and which arise out of or are in any way related to your employment or other relationship, or termination of such employment or other relationship, with the Company or any of the Company’s subsidiaries and/or affiliates, including but not limited to: (1) all claims related to your compensation or benefits from the Company, including wages, salary, bonuses, commissions, vacation pay, expense reimbursements (to the extent permitted by applicable law), severance pay, fringe benefits, stock, stock options, or any other ownership interests in the Company; (2) all claims for breach of contract, wrongful termination, and breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing; (3) all tort claims, including without limitation claims for fraud, defamation, emotional distress, and discharge in violation of public policy; and (4) all federal, state, and local statutory claims, including without limitation claims for discrimination, harassment, retaliation, attorneys’ fees, or other claims arising under the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 (as amended), the federal Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (as amended) (“ADEA”), the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (as amended) and similar laws in other jurisdictions, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (as amended), the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act (as amended) and similar laws in other jurisdictions; provided, however, that nothing herein shall (i) release the Company from any claims arising from or by reason of any breach by the Company of this Agreement; or (ii) interfere with your rights, if any, to indemnification or director’s and officer’s liability insurance coverage provided to you by any agreement with the Company or any provision or any By-Law of the Company or application of law. To the maximum extent permitted by law, you also promise never directly or indirectly to bring or participate in an action against any Released Party under California Business & Professions Code Section 17200 or under any other unfair competition law of any jurisdiction. If, notwithstanding the above, you are awarded any money or other relief under such a claim, you hereby assign the money or other relief to the Company. Your waiver and release specified in this paragraph do not apply to any rights or claims that may arise after the date you sign this Agreement.

This Agreement includes a release of claims of discrimination or retaliation on the basis of workers’ compensation status, but does not include workers’ compensation claims. Excluded from this Agreement are any claims which by law cannot be waived in a private agreement between employer and employee. You have the right to file a charge with or participate in an investigation conducted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) or any state or local fair employment practices agency, however, you waive any right to any monetary recovery or other relief should the EEOC or any other agency pursue a claim on your behalf. The Company releases you from all claims to the same extent that you release it, and nothing in this Agreement shall be deemed to apply to any liability arising out of any intentional and wrongful act by you.

10. Representations.

a. You acknowledge and agree that you have not been denied any rights including, but not limited to, rights to a leave or reinstatement from a leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994, or any similar law of any jurisdiction. You represent that your age was not the basis for any Company decision or action affecting you, and acknowledge that the Company relied on that representation in entering into this Agreement.

b. You acknowledge and agree that the benefits provided under this Agreement are in full discharge of any and all liabilities and obligations of the Company and/or any of the Company’s subsidiaries and/or affiliates to you, monetarily or otherwise, including but not limited to any and all obligations arising under the Offer Letter and any other alleged written or oral employment or consulting agreement, policy, plan or procedure of the Company and/or any alleged understanding or arrangement between you and the Company and/or any of the Company’s subsidiaries and/or affiliates.

c. You acknowledge and agree that by virtue of the foregoing Release, you have waived any relief available to you (including without limitation, monetary damages, equitable relief and reinstatement) under any of the claims and/or causes of action waived in this Agreement. Therefore, you agree that you will not accept any award or settlement from any source or proceeding (including but not limited to any proceeding brought by any other person or by any government agency) with respect to any claim or right waived in this Agreement.

11. Release of Unknown Claims. You and the Company acknowledge having read and understanding Section 1542 of the California Civil Code: “A general release does not extend to claims which the creditor does not know or suspect to exist in his or her favor at the time of executing the release, which if known by him or her must have materially affected his or her settlement with the debtor.” You and the Company hereby expressly waive and relinquish all rights and benefits under that section and any law of any jurisdiction of similar effect with respect to the release of any unknown or unsuspected claims.

12. Miscellaneous. This Agreement constitutes the complete, final and exclusive embodiment of the entire agreement between you and the Company with regard to this subject matter. It is entered into without reliance on any promise or representation, written or oral, other than those expressly contained herein, and it supersedes any other such promises, warranties or representations. This Agreement may not be modified or amended except in a writing signed by both you and a duly authorized officer of Yahoo!. This Agreement will bind the heirs, personal representatives, successors and assigns of both you and the Company, and inure to the benefit of both you and the Company, their heirs, successors and assigns. If any provision of this Agreement is determined to be invalid or unenforceable, in whole or in part, this determination will not affect any other provision of this Agreement and the provision in question will be modified by the court so as to be rendered enforceable. This Agreement will be deemed to have been entered into and will be construed and enforced in accordance with the laws of California without regard to the principles of conflicts of law.

13. No Admission; Rules of Construction.

a. This Agreement is not intended, and shall not be construed, as an admission that any Released Party has violated any federal, state or local law (statutory or decisional), ordinance or regulation, breached any contract or committed any wrong whatsoever against you.

b. Should any provision of this Agreement require interpretation or construction, it is agreed by the parties that the entity interpreting or construing this Agreement shall not apply a presumption against one party by reason of the rule of construction that a document is to be construed more strictly against the party who prepared the document.

14. Counterparts: This Agreement may be signed in counterparts, each of which shall be an original with the same effect as if the signatures thereto and hereto were upon the same instrument. Delivery of copies of an executed document shall be deemed a valid delivery of an executed Agreement.

If this Agreement is acceptable to you, please sign below on or after the Separation Date and return the original to David Windley at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, California 94089.

I wish you good luck in your future endeavors.

Sincerely,

YAHOO ! INC .
By: /s/ Michael J. Callahan
Michael J. Callahan
Executive Vice President, General Counsel and
Secretary

AGREED AND VOLUNTARILY EXECUTED:
/s/ Scott Thompson
5/12/2012
Date
cc: Personnel File

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

That will happen in the middle of 2014, says Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar, when circulation growth at the paper will start offsetting the decline in the Times’ ad sales. Here’s what that looks like in chart form:

True, one reason that circ growth will lap ad losses is that the losses will be slowing after much steeper declines. Still, the best-case scenario for most old-line media businesses is that digital sales increase faster than physical sales drop, and that’s essentially what Venkateshwar says is happening here. A year after the Times introduced its pay wall, it now has 450,000 digital subscribers — a number that impresses lots of industry skeptics.

Earlier this spring, when the Times said it was making it harder to read the paper online without paying for it, by dropping its free article limit from 20 per month to 10 per month, I wondered if the Times had made the move out of necessity — because it needed to boost its digital sales — or optimism — because it was confident it could boost its sales with a taller pay wall.

But after some thought, and bouncing the idea off a few industry folks, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s both. The Times would sure like to accelerate Venkateshwar’s timeline, and that’s probably not going to happen by fixing its ad problem. Meanwhile, the paper seems relatively confident that raising the pay wall equals marketing the pay wall. And the nice thing about the system the paper has built is that if it doesn’t work, it can fiddle with the controls some more.

Fortunately, the summer travel season is upon us, and vacation isn’t too far away. So, over the past week, I tested a couple of iPad apps for travel. To be clear, these apps aren’t geared toward finding deals on flights or hotels, but are digital guides that offer written and visual information about various destinations.

The first one I tested is Stuck on Earth, a free, iPad-only app from photo blog Stuck in Customs that takes a different approach to travel planning, with crowdsourced photos and suggestions based on your personality type. I compared this app to one of the new day-by-day apps from the trusted travel authority Frommer’s. The Frommer’s guides, which range in price from $10 to $15, are available for iPad and iPhone. With the HTML version, coming out shortly, users will be able to access travel info from any Web browser or use on an Android device.

There are many more travel apps in the App Store beyond these, including Lonely Planet’s $6 to $10 apps for iPhone and Android, offering seven country guides and 83 city guide apps for iOS. And if you’re taking a more social approach to your travel planning, Gogobot combines trip recommendations from friends with Instagram-like photo filters to create postcards.

Stuck on Earth featured some inspiring, exotic photos, but after testing it, I found it was better for brainstorming trip ideas than it was for firm planning. The Frommer’s guide was more comprehensive, and is the one I’m more likely to use on a trip. However, Frommer’s and Inkling, its publishing partner, have put out only seven digital guides to date, spanning just a few states and a handful of countries.

First I tried Stuck on Earth. That app uses a narrator named “Karen,” whose suggestive tone might raise some eyebrows in a public place. “Well, hello there,” Karen said, her voice dripping like syrup on the iPad. She then asked me which personality type I am: Daydreamer, Explorer or Photographer; or a combination of the three.

From there, the Stuck on Earth app guided me to a main page divided into sections: One featured a world map and a local map; another was dedicated to My Saved Trips and Top Lists of destinations, selected for me by a Stuck on Earth curator.

I created a few folders for My Saved Trips: One was for France, one for Barcelona, and one for India. (A girl can daydream, right?) Then I went to the world map, where “pins” in the form of photo albums appeared in locations around the world. It was easy to get lost in the app’s photo albums. When I saw a photo of a monument, street fair or cafe that looked interesting, I added it to one of my trips; I could also share it via email, Facebook and Twitter.

All of the photos in Stuck on Earth are first posted to Flickr by users who are visiting or have visited that location. You might think this would mean that some photos are shoddy, but I found many of the images to be beautiful and unique. The creator of Stuck on Earth, Trey Ratcliff, says that the photos are chosen from a pool of 25 million photos on Flickr, and the app’s curators pick and choose which ones will be added to the albums. If I wanted to upload my photos to the app, I would have to join the Stuck on Earth community on Flickr and send them there first.

As much as I liked it, it’s not likely that I’d use Stuck on Earth as my main travel app. While the long photo captions are interesting and, in some instances, even include great personal anecdotes from the photographer, they didn’t offer enough information to really plan a trip. Also, the app is iPad-only, and I might not want to carry my iPad everywhere while traveling.

While testing Frommer’s iPad apps, I decided to focus on France. I downloaded the day-by-day guide for iPad for $9.99; Frommer’s also has guides for Alaska, California, Costa Rica, Great Britain, Japan and Spain.

The app has a whopping 18 chapters. Thumbing through the digital pages required a combination of swiping up and down and left to right, but it’s all pretty intuitive. The chapters offer both one-week and two-week tours, and itineraries for day trips, with static maps. There are photo slideshows, too.

A helpful spotlight tool searches for key phrases — like “red wine.” My favorite part of the Frommer’s guide was the ability to highlight content and make notes.

I browsed through a two-day tour of Paris, and explored the best tours for outdoor activity and dining. When I pressed my finger on the text for the Musée du Louvre, I had the option to highlight it, which would add it to my personal notebook, or to leave a public note for other app users to see. After a couple days into my virtual tour, I had left a few public notes (“So romantic!” near the Eiffel Tower), highlighted the Loire as a cycling route, and remarked in my notebook that I loved the Salers beefsteak at Le Baillage. Since the app is so new, I didn’t see any public notes from others yet.

The Frommer’s France app comes with voice dictation for language translation, though this feature is buried within the app. When I touched words or phrases in the glossary, I could hear the proper pronunciation of “Le plein, s’il vous plait?” (this translates to “Fill the gas tank, please?” in English).

The last chapter also included a ton of information about different types of accommodations, currency exchange, ATM locations, etiquette and customs, pharmacies, hospitals and other fast facts.

With international travel, there’s always the possibility that you might not have cellular service or an Internet connection on your mobile device, depending on your carrier and whether you’ve opted into international service. To test how these apps worked without service, I put my devices into airplane mode.

When I opened Stuck on Earth, Karen immediately told me that I didn’t have an Internet connection, but that I could look at my saved trips. She also thanked me for not turning off her voice. Using Frommer’s on the iPad in airplane mode, I was still able to see the full guide, maps and notes, as well as links to other content within the guide.

Frommer’s also offers the same apps for iPhone — which is great if you don’t want to lug your iPad around — but the apps currently don’t sync between iPad and iPhone. So if you’ve created a day’s itinerary on your iPad app, the iPhone version won’t show all of your notes. Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis says that a solution for this is coming soon.

If you’d rather just carry your smartphone while traveling, you may want to make all of your notes within the Frommer’s iPhone app from the start.

Fortunately, Frommer’s and Inkling are planning on introducing more app titles this summer. If you’re planning on traveling to one of those destinations, I’d recommend checking out the app.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120514/going-on-vacation-ditch-the-paper-guidebook-and-try-these-apps/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20120514/yahoos-parting-with-thompson-will-be-for-cause/ http://allthingsd.com/20120514/yahoos-parting-with-thompson-will-be-for-cause/#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 09:00:21 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=207552

According to numerous sources, Yahoo is claiming “cause” in its parting with former CEO Scott Thompson, related to the fake computer science degree on his resume.

Such a determination will mean the company is not obligated to pay him the large severance that would have been due to him otherwise.

In his offer letter on January 3, Yahoo spelled out the terms of the employment agreement, noting what would happen if he left the company under more positive “without cause” terms.

“If Mr. Thompson’s employment is terminated by the Company without cause or by Mr. Thompson for good reason, the Company will offer him severance benefits similar to the benefits it provides to other senior executives of the Company at the time of his termination,” reads the document, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “In addition, if Mr. Thompson’s employment is terminated by the Company without cause, by Mr. Thompson for good reason, or due to Mr. Thompson’s death or disability, the Make-Whole RSUs that are then outstanding and unvested will fully vest upon his termination.”

The “Make-Whole” RSUs — or restricted stock units, related to his time as president of eBay’s PayPal payments division — were valued at $6.5 million in Yahoo’s SEC filings.

But sources said Yahoo has relied on another clause in Thompson’s offer letter, titled “Code of Ethics and Yahoo! Policies,” to make the case that it would not have to pay out such a large sum to him.

Reads the clause:

“Yahoo! is committed to creating a positive work environment and conducting business ethically. As an employee of Yahoo!, you will be expected to abide by the Company’s policies and procedures including, but not limited to, Yahoo!’s Guide2Working@Y!, Yahoo!’s Code of Ethics and Yahoo!’s Corporate Governance Guidelines,” reads the letter. “Yahoo! requests that you review, sign and bring with you on your Employment Start Date, the enclosed Code of Ethics Acknowledgment Form.”

Under the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s ethical terms, the borked bio and how it got that way — which was still under investigation when Thompson stepped down — was the major issue in his ouster, since he was responsible for making sure it was accurate when submitted for regulatory filings.

In addition, while Thompson publicly blamed a headhunting firm for making the error back in the mid-2000 timeframe, that company — Heidrick & Struggles — hit back, saying his claims were “verifiably not true.” According to sources, Heidrick apparently possesses an inaccurate resume submitted to them by Thompson.

Heidrick, which placed Thompson at eBay many years ago, was not involved in his hiring at Yahoo. It had to recuse itself from his vetting as part of its search for a new Yahoo CEO, because it had placed him previously.

In fact, Thompson had nominated himself for the job via cold emails with Yahoo board members and was examined and hired quickly.

Perhaps too quickly, given the poor background check that was discovered by activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point.

Sources close to the board said that investor pressure relate to these credibility lapses grew too loud, along with employee rancor at Thompson’s actions — forcing the issue this weekend.

What was definitely not a reason for Thompson’s departure from Yahoo — although it was unfortunate timing — was an unspecified “illness” I referenced in my initial story on the subject.

(Note to readers: I found out this weekend that illness was thyroid cancer. But I declined to name it specifically, since I felt it was Thompson’s right to publicly reveal such a personal health issue and not mine. While I recently suffered a stroke and the experience perhaps influenced this editorial decision, the cancer was only a side issue to the resume drama at Yahoo and not naming it specifically seemed, well, more responsible to me. Argue amongst yourselves about it, but that’s my take. And also, I wish Thompson a successful treatment and speedy recovery)

That said, The Wall Street Journal did an entire piece about the cancer today today, noting that “the decision to step down from Yahoo was in part influenced by Mr. Thompson’s cancer diagnosis.”

That might have been true for Thompson — a source close to him characterized the parting as “mutually agreed” — and perhaps his illness accelerated the resume controversy.

But all that aside, he was given no choice in the matter by the Yahoo board, numerous sources said. The parting was almost entirely due to the mess about the botched bio and all its implications.

In fact, in all its public communications about his leaving, Yahoo and its execs offered no token thanks and barely even mentioned Thompson, such as in its official statement yesterday.

It read, referring to newly chosen interim CEO Ross Levinsohn: “Mr. Levinsohn replaces Scott Thompson, former Chief Executive Officer, who has left the Company.”

And left it he has, without a choice and with what will be a much smaller settlement, sources said. It is not clear when Yahoo has to unveil those terms in public documents.

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120514/yahoos-parting-with-thompson-will-be-for-cause/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120513/ross-levinsohns-yahoo-plan-back-to-the-future/ http://allthingsd.com/20120513/ross-levinsohns-yahoo-plan-back-to-the-future/#comments Sun, 13 May 2012 23:08:16 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=207377 Ross Levinsohn wants to be known as more than a deal guy. Now he gets his chance.

Assuming Yahoo gives its interim CEO real power — either by making him its actual CEO, or at least letting him behave as if he has the job — then he’ll finally have full control of a giant media company. That’s something he’s been working toward for a long time, despite his rep as a guy who enjoys buying companies more than running them.

Just like his predecessors, Levinsohn will have to untie Yahoo’s knotty Asian problem. He’ll also have to spend time repairing relationships with Facebook and figuring out what to do with a Microsoft search deal that hasn’t been a huge success.

But if Levinsohn gets to run Yahoo the way he wants to run Yahoo, he’ll focus on getting the most out of its media business, because that’s his strength.

Bear in mind that this is still a huge business — the portal attracts some 700 million visitors a month, which helped it generate nearly $1 billion in ad sales last quarter. But that business is listing and under attack from Google, Facebook, and a swarm of nimble start-ups pulling eyeballs and dollars away.

If you want to get a sense of what Levinsohn may try to do next, it’s good to review what he did last year, when he had control of the company’s U.S. operations — and what he tried to do but couldn’t get done.

• Ads: Yahoo used to have one of the Web’s best sales operations, but those days are long gone. Levisonsohn spent much of 2011 trying to fix that. Part of that involved restaffing his team, and part of it was a strategy that was supposed to cut out some of the ad tech middlemen and allow the company to increase its yield on the ads it sold. Those moves, which included a would-be alliance between Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, all went into a holding pattern when Scott Thompson took over in January. Levinsohn will try restarting that again now.
• M&A: Levinsohn has a reputation as a dealmaker because he’s made some pretty big deals. Most notably, he brought Myspace to News Corp. in 2005, then helped the company secure a $900 million ad deal with Google (News Corp. also owns this Web site). Last year, he tried to land another big fish, when he pushed to pursue Hulu. But Levinsohn couldn’t get buy-in from then-CEO Carol Bartz, and Hulu’s owners decided not to sell after all. I think Levinsohn would still be interested in the site under certain conditions, but he’d need more cash than he has on hand to do it. Selling off his Asian assets might make that possible. If he can’t land Hulu, I don’t see him chasing after Instagram-like companies with big price tags and no near-term revenue plans. I do see him making some plays on cheaper start-ups, as well as some technology plays, to shore up/replace the company’s very old infrastructure/platforms.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120513/ross-levinsohns-yahoo-plan-back-to-the-future/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120513/heres-new-yahoo-ceos-first-note-to-troops-the-leaking-internal-memos-to-atd-policy-remains-in-place/ http://allthingsd.com/20120513/heres-new-yahoo-ceos-first-note-to-troops-the-leaking-internal-memos-to-atd-policy-remains-in-place/#comments Sun, 13 May 2012 21:33:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=207456

Here is the first missive to Yahoo’s troops from new interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, which I obtained from 653 sources at the company. (Joke alert! Sort of!)

“Importantly, today’s announcements lay to rest the unfortunate and serious distractions surrounding our senior leadership and the composition of our Board going forward,” said Levinsohn, who has been head of global media at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, in part. “In spite of the very bumpy road we’ve traveled, we are achieving genuine and meaningful successes in the marketplace every day and heading in the right direction.”

Well, it’s a direction at least, given the recent controversy after it was revealed that former CEO Scott Thompson had a fake computer science degree on his resume.

Levinsohn was named today as the next leader of Yahoo, which has had a revolving door of CEOs in recent years, in a massive shake-up at and which includes many board changes and also the settlement of a potentially nasty proxy fight with activist shareholder Daniel Loeb.

Enjoy:

Yahoos –

We have just announced very significant news regarding the leadership of our Company. The Board of Directors has appointed Fred Amoroso Chairman of the Board and has asked me to take on the role of interim Chief Executive Officer, to replace Scott Thompson, who has left the Company. In addition, the Board also announced that it has reached a settlement with our major shareholder Third Point LLC, enabling us to avoid a proxy contest.

As a part of the Board’s agreement with Third Point, Daniel S. Loeb, Harry J. Wilson and Michael J. Wolf are joining the Yahoo! Board. In connection with their addition, the members of our Board who were not planning to stand for re-election have decided to step down immediately to accelerate the leadership transition for the new Board in advance of the annual meeting. We’ve attached the press release outlining all of these changes for your review.

Importantly, today’s announcements lay to rest the unfortunate and serious distractions surrounding our senior leadership and the composition of our Board going forward. I know that Fred and the new Yahoo! Board are looking forward to working constructively to stabilize the leadership team and to further accelerate the progress we have made in reinvigorating Yahoo!, executing against the Company’s strategic initiatives and enhancing stockholder value.

For my part, I want you to know that I am honored to lead this great company as interim Chief Executive Officer, and I accept that responsibility with enthusiasm and confidence for three reasons above all others: As I have said since I joined Yahoo in 2010, I believe in the tremendous strength and value of our brand, and in our relationship with our users and partners; I believe in the substantial organizational, operational and strategic progress we have made in recent months in spite of the internal and external challenges we have faced; and most of all, I believe with all my heart in all of you and your dedication to continuing to make this company great. What we achieve in this company is substantial on each and every day, on a scale rarely matched across the globe. I’m incredibly proud to be a part of this team.

This may seem like a great deal of news to digest, but as you are all keenly aware, Yahoo! is a dynamic, global company in a dynamic, global industry, so change — sometimes unexpected and sometimes at lightning speed — is something we will continue to live with and something we should embrace. However, today’s announcements really boil down to this: following these changes, a transformation and renewal at the Board level that began in August of last year is now complete.

Of course, these changes will also raise new questions along with those it answers. I invite you to bring those questions to me, or any member of the executive leadership team, and we will answer them as forthrightly and promptly as we can. Please also look for an invite and plan to attend an all-hands meeting we are organizing for Monday afternoon — we look forward to speaking with you further at that time.

In the meantime, I know there is one thing we should definitely all be doing in light of this news, and that is to focus on the momentum we’ve created over the last few months. Many of you have heard me talk about the possibilities we have, and about the opportunities in front of us. In spite of the very bumpy road we’ve traveled, we are achieving genuine and meaningful successes in the marketplace every day and heading in the right direction.

You deserve at least as much from your leadership as you give. I take that responsibility very seriously and promise to give you my all while I’m serving as interim CEO.

I want to close by thanking you for your commitment to Yahoo! and your continued hard work. To be a Yahoo is to be resilient, and you are very much appreciated. Let’s go on the offensive starting today!

Ross Levinsohn
Interim Chief Executive Officer

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120513/heres-new-yahoo-ceos-first-note-to-troops-the-leaking-internal-memos-to-atd-policy-remains-in-place/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120513/yahoo-officially-confirms-atd-report-on-ceo-changes-and-proxy-settlement/ http://allthingsd.com/20120513/yahoo-officially-confirms-atd-report-on-ceo-changes-and-proxy-settlement/#comments Sun, 13 May 2012 19:35:17 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=207405

Here you go, on what I reported earlier today on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson stepping down, being replaced by current global media head Ross Levinsohn on an interim basis, the naming of board member Fred Amoroso as chairman and director changes related to the settling of its proxy fight with Third Point’s Daniel Loeb. The company is confirming the whole thing in an official press release.

The news brings to a close Yahoo’s latest controversy, involving a fake computer science degree that somehow was on Thompson’s bio and also in official filings of the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

As you can see, the statements have almost zero to say about Thompson. Sources said that the board reached a settlement with him — I am trying to find out more, natch — after more and more problematic issues cropped up in recent days.

But for now, I am going to buy myself some Mother’s Day chocolates and find my kids:

YAHOO! NAMES FRED AMOROSO CHAIRMAN AND APPOINTS ROSS LEVINSOHN INTERIM CEO

BOARD ANNOUNCES SETTLEMENT WITH THIRD POINT LLC

Sunnyvale, Calif. — May 13, 2011 – Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) today announced that the Board of Directors has named Fred Amoroso as Chairman of the Board of Directors and Ross Levinsohn as interim Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. The Company also announced that its Board has reached an agreement with Third Point LLC (“Third Point”) to settle its pending proxy contest related to the Company’s 2012 annual meeting of shareholders.

Mr. Amoroso replaces Roy Bostock, who has stepped down from his role as Non-Executive Chairman in order to accelerate the leadership transition for the new Board. Mr. Levinsohn replaces Scott Thompson, former Chief Executive Officer, who has left the Company.

Under the Board’s settlement agreement with Third Point, three Third Point nominees — Daniel S. Loeb, Harry J. Wilson, and Michael J. Wolf — will join the Yahoo! Board, effective May 16, 2012. Mr. Bostock, along with Patti Hart, VJ Joshi, Arthur Kern and Gary Wilson, all of whom previously disclosed their intentions not to stand for re-election, as well as Mr. Thompson, have decided to step down from the Board immediately.

As a part of the settlement agreement, Third Point, which owns an aggregate of 70,545,400 shares, or 5.8% of Yahoo! common stock, has agreed to withdraw its previous Board nominations for consideration at the annual meeting and vote its shares in support of Yahoo!’s nominees. Yahoo!’s slate of director nominees for election or re-election at the 2012 annual meeting of stockholders will now include Fred Amoroso, John Hayes, Peter Liguori, Thomas McInerney, Maynard Webb, Sue James, David Kenny, Brad Smith, Daniel S. Loeb, Harry J. Wilson and Michael J. Wolf.

As interim CEO, Mr. Levinsohn will manage the Company’s day-to-day operations with assistance from Yahoo!’s existing senior leadership team.

“The Board is pleased to announce these changes and the settlement with Third Point, and is confident that they will serve the best interests of our shareholders and further accelerate the substantial advances the Company has made operationally and organizationally since last August. The Board believes in the strength of the Company’s business and assets, and in the opportunities before us, and I am honored to work closely with my fellow directors and Ross to continue to drive Yahoo! forward,” said Fred Amoroso, Chairman of the Yahoo! Board of Directors.

Mr. Amoroso continued, “On behalf of the entire Board, I would also like to thank Patti, VJ, Arthur, Gary and, in particular, Roy, for their dedicated long-term service and contributions to the Board and Yahoo!.”

Third Point Chief Executive Officer Daniel S. Loeb stated: “Harry, Michael and I are delighted to join the Yahoo! Board and work collaboratively with our fellow directors to foster a culture of leadership dedicated to innovation, excellence in corporate governance, and responsiveness to users, advertisers and partners. We are confident this Board will benefit from shareholder representation, and we are committed to working with new leadership to unlock Yahoo!’s significant potential and value.”

Third Point Director Nominee Jeff Zucker stated: “I have been supportive of Third Point’s efforts since Daniel asked me to join the slate. When I became aware of Yahoo!’s offer of three board seats to Third Point, I approached Daniel and let him know that I would be happy to step aside to quickly facilitate a settlement. I believe that it is in Yahoo!’s best interests to avoid a prolonged proxy fight and have new board members immediately to help move the company forward. While there is clearly much work to be done, this is the right combination of talented executives to do just that.”

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120513/yahoo-officially-confirms-atd-report-on-ceo-changes-and-proxy-settlement/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120513/meet-the-man-i-call-the-hair-the-video-stylings-of-yahoos-newest-ceo-ross-levinsohn/ http://allthingsd.com/20120513/meet-the-man-i-call-the-hair-the-video-stylings-of-yahoos-newest-ceo-ross-levinsohn/#comments Sun, 13 May 2012 19:03:01 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=207366

Over the many years I have covered Yahoo’s expected new interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, I have done several video interviews with him.

And, for my own amusement, I also have nicknamed him “The Hair,” due to his very impressive mane.

We’ll see how impressive the longtime digital media exec will be now that Levinsohn has become the latest head of the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

His job is only interim for now, but in selecting him, the Yahoo board is opting for a more media-centric approach.

Among his claims to fame: He was president of News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media, where he bought the then-soaring Myspace social networking site. Levinsohn managed to get Google to fork over more than double its price in advertising guarantees and luckily left the company before it went off the rails.

He was also an exec at AltaVista, an early search pioneer, and was head of content and development at CBS Sportsline. Levinsohn also dabbled in investing at Fuse Capital, with current News Corp. digital head Jon Miller focused on digital media and communications companies.

When he was at Fuse, ironically, Levinsohn and Miller were also raised as possible board members by Carl Icahn, who has conducting a different proxy fight against Yahoo.

In the latest fighting, at least, Levinsohn appears the victor.

To assess him, here are two videos I did with him — one in 2007 when he was at Fuse and one from last year at our D: All Things Digital conference (I ask about his hair-care product at the very end).

I also added a recent mockumentary video that Levinsohn for Yahoo’s recent Newfront media presentations in New York, which is pretty funny (and, in Carol Bartz channeling, Levinson curses at the end!):

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120513/meet-the-man-i-call-the-hair-the-video-stylings-of-yahoos-newest-ceo-ross-levinsohn/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120513/will-thompsons-ouster-mean-a-yahoofacebook-patent-settlement/ http://allthingsd.com/20120513/will-thompsons-ouster-mean-a-yahoofacebook-patent-settlement/#comments Sun, 13 May 2012 18:00:31 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=207343

In January, as the freshly crowned CEO of Yahoo, Scott Thompson initiated a series of dramatic acts to get the company back on track. The most notable was to make the boldest — or most boneheaded — move the head of Yahoo could make: Filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook.

The controversial move was wildly unpopular in Silicon Valley, and even among many Yahoo employees.

But after a drawn-out weeklong controversy over a fake computer science degree on Thompson’s resume, he is reportedly headed out, and global media head Ross Levinsohn is in the driver’s seat as interim CEO.

Now one of the big questions is: Will Levinsohn take steps to repair Yahoo’s relationship with Facebook, especially since it has proved to be one of the most fruitful the ailing Silicon Valley Internet giant has seen in years?

Sources say that some members of Yahoo’s board, as well as the top exec, would welcome a settlement with Facebook on the litigation. Thompson was the main advocate of the in-your-face strategy against the social networking giant, levying a barrage of legal claims at a critical time — the quiet period before Facebook’s public offering this month.

So, if Yahoo wanted to turn back the tide of rancor toward Facebook, now is the time it could happen.

The lawsuit essentially deemed Facebook a thief of Yahoo’s social innovation, claiming that were it not for Yahoo’s many years of research and development, products such as Facebook’s News Feed, privacy settings, advertising models and more would never have come into existence.

“Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology,” one line from Yahoo’s lawsuit reads.

It’s unclear how much Levinsohn, acting as temporary CEO, will be able to change, in terms of the progress of the lawsuit. But if he’s looking to dial things back, his first call could be to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who would be instrumental in reaching some sort of detente in the case.

The initial act of aggression from Yahoo caught many in technology — including Yahoo’s employees — by surprise.

That’s because the various partnerships that the pair have struck in recent years have been hugely successful.

Yahoo’s Facebook-integrated Social Bar application, for example, has essentially been a traffic funnel from Facebook to Yahoo, with nearly 40 million monthly active users accessing the application, according to AppData statistics, and it is now one of the top Facebook apps.

It’s what Director of Product Development Jonathan Katzman called, in an interview last year, “the future of social for Yahoo.”

Finding a middle ground in some sort of settlement with Facebook could win back Yahoo detractors, a culture that praises innovation and largely rebuffs the practice of patent litigation as an act of trolling.

Facebook declined to comment, as did Yahoo, but several sources said to expect some movement sooner than later.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120513/will-thompsons-ouster-mean-a-yahoofacebook-patent-settlement/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20120513/exclusive-yahoos-thompson-out-levinsohn-in-board-settlement-with-loeb-nears-completion/ http://allthingsd.com/20120513/exclusive-yahoos-thompson-out-levinsohn-in-board-settlement-with-loeb-nears-completion/#comments Sun, 13 May 2012 15:59:24 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=207290

Yahoo’s embattled CEO Scott Thompson (pictured here) is set to step down from his job at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, in what will be dramatic end to a controversy over a fake computer science degree that he had on his bio, according to multiple sources close to the situation.

The pair will apparently say he is departing for “personal reasons.” Sources said that Thompson will be claiming to be leaving due to a serious illness that he recently discovered he had.

But the evolving crisis — which is just over a week old — centered on his botched resume and how he handled the thorny issue is the key reason for the abrupt end to his tenure as a CEO.

Thompson’s likely replacement on an interim basis will be Yahoo’s global media head Ross Levinsohn, who most recently also ran its Americas unit, including its advertising sales.

In addition to the management upheaval, Yahoo’s board is closing in on a settlement with the man who discovered Thompson’s misstep, activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point, said sources.

The situation could change, since Yahoo’s full board still has to meet this morning to officially approve the sweeping changes at the long-troubled company.

But, if it is, this development goes a long way toward fixing some of what has been ailing Yahoo recently.

And it’ll also be a stunning victory for Loeb (pictured here), since the pugnacious hedge fund investor is set to get three board seats from a slate proposed by him as part of a proxy fight aimed at Yahoo. The new Yahoo directors will be media exec Michael Wolf and turnaround specialist Harry Wilson. Loeb’s fourth selection — former NBC head Jeff Zucker — will withdraw.

The five current Yahoo directors — who were to step down at the company’s annual meeting this summer — will leave the board effective immediately, sources said, to make way for the Third Point selections.

Finally, Yahoo’s recently added director Fred Amoroso will be named chairman of the board.

Amoroso is the director who has been conducting the investigation into the issues raised by Loeb about how the fake academic credentials got in Thompson’s public bios, as well as in Yahoo’s regulatory filings, and also the hurried circumstances around his hiring in January.

Those mysteries — read, screw-ups — might never be solved now, although Thompson made a convoluted attempt to explain it all in two awkward employee meetings at the end of last week. In those gatherings, according to numerous sources, he blamed a headhunting firm for introducing the mistake when he was being hired for a job at eBay in the mid-2000 timeframe.

That company, Heidrick and Struggles, slapped back last week with an internal memo, noting that Thompson’s claim was “verifiably not true.” Sources said that Heidrick told Yahoo’s board that it was in possession of a resume that Thompson had apparently submitted showing the inaccurate CS degree on it.

That memo, impugning Thompson’s credibility, was one of many that piled on to create an impossible situation for the Yahoo board, related to his leadership ability going forward.

Thompson had also previously issued a Yahoo statement, in which he apologized for the “distraction” caused by the problematic resume, but not for the mistake itself.

And, initially, Yahoo — under his direction — had called the borked resume an “inadvertent error.”

Such fumbling to fix the situation was among the many other issues that the board has been considering relating the ability of Thompson to remain in his job. Also of importance was the sinking morale of Yahoo employees, who had largely rejected Thompson’s excuses in the ResuMess scandal.

Internal message boards at Yahoo lit up all last week, with staffers largely rejecting his explanations. In addition, a number of top execs and engineers approached the board calling for Thompson’s firing.

While that’s not precisely what happened here, it’s close enough to describe Thompson’s departure as inevitable.

All this change comes in the wake of a massive restructuring he was in the midst of at Yahoo, after 2,000 employee layoffs.

Thompson was pushing forward a vision of adding a much more significant data and commerce element to Yahoo’s largely ad-based business.

That is likely to be less stressed under media-focused Levinsohn, who will be essentially trying out to be the permanent CEO.

Well known in the media and advertising communities, he has worked at a number of big online efforts over many years.

According to his bio at Yahoo, where he arrived in 2010:

He previously served as the President of News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media, where he was responsible for the day-to-day operations, strategy and acquisitions that helped transformed the company into a leader in digital media. He also held senior management positions with AltaVista, an early pioneer and leader in search, CBS Sportsline where he oversaw all content and development for the top rated sports site, and HBO where he launched and oversaw a unit developing new programming and revenue streams. Levinsohn also was the co-founder and managing director of Fuse Capital, an investment and strategic equity management firm focused on investing in and building digital media and communications companies.

Levinsohn sits on the board of Freedom Communications and the Bogart Pediatric Cancer Research Program. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from The American University.

So far in my checking, Levinsohn’s resume is accurate.

More to come, obviously.

I have emails and texts and calls into everyone for comment, but apparently they are all out at a Mother’s Day brunch (except me).

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120513/exclusive-yahoos-thompson-out-levinsohn-in-board-settlement-with-loeb-nears-completion/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120511/heidrick-struggles-slaps-back-at-thompsons-yahoo-in-blame-game/ http://allthingsd.com/20120511/heidrick-struggles-slaps-back-at-thompsons-yahoo-in-blame-game/#comments Sat, 12 May 2012 01:39:30 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=207190

And it just gets worse in the controversy over Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson and the circumstances around how a fake computer science degree could get onto his bio.

Heidrick & Struggles is smacking back at him for insinuating that the well-known headhunting firm had messed up his resume.

In meetings with employees to attempt to explain the situation yesterday, multiple sources said that Thompson claimed that a mistake made by a headhunting firm in mid-2000, when he was moving to a job at eBay, was the way the inaccuracy got into his bio.

Thompson did not name the firm, but he was clearly referring to Heidrick & Struggles, which handled that placement. It was also working on the Yahoo CEO search, after the Silicon Valley Internet giant fired its former CEO Carol Bartz last fall.

But, because it had originally placed Thompson at eBay, the firm did not work on his hiring at Yahoo.

So, Heidrick was not going to take Thompson’s blame for the botched bio.

“While we were not involved in this placement, there have been both direct and indirect mentions of this relationship in several news articles. Furthermore, if recent media reports are accurate, the CEO of Yahoo! has made potentially damaging allegations about our firm that are simply not true and cannot be allowed to stand in the public record,” wrote CEO Kevin Kelly to staff. “The media articles in question have indicated that the Yahoo! CEO told members of his senior staff that, many years ago, a junior member of our firm invented an academic credential for him in the course of preparing standard profile materials. Based on information in our possession, this allegation is verifiably not true and we have notified Yahoo! to that effect.”

This letter is just another brick in what is looking like an insurmountable wall for Thompson to keep his job at Yahoo. Sources said that the board of Yahoo had been sent a letter from Heidrick on the matter earlier today.

And, let me just say, this latest eruption is simply not good for Thompson’s chances to remain CEO for much longer.

Yahoo declined to comment, but here is the full letter from Kelly to its staff:

Colleagues,

Heidrick & Struggles’ clients across the globe place their trust in our professionalism and discretion, as we assist them in their most significant leadership decisions. We regard that trust as one of our most valuable corporate assets. As such, we do not often comment on internal matters involving our clients. However, recent press accounts have reported statements that contain misstatements of fact and criticisms of our professional services that require a response from us.

As many of you have seen, there has been recent focus on the CEO appointment at one of our long-term clients, Yahoo!. While we were not involved in this placement, there have been both direct and indirect mentions of this relationship in several news articles. Furthermore, if recent media reports are accurate, the CEO of Yahoo! has made potentially damaging allegations about our firm that are simply not true and cannot be allowed to stand in the public record. The media articles in question have indicated that the Yahoo! CEO told members of his senior staff that, many years ago, a junior member of our firm invented an academic credential for him in the course of preparing standard profile materials. Based on information in our possession, this allegation is verifiably not true and we have notified Yahoo! to that effect.

This is why I am writing to you today. All of us at Heidrick & Struggles take our responsibility to our clients very seriously, and it is important for us to set the record straight when our good work and reputation are called into question.

The issue surrounding Yahoo! underscores the importance and impact of the work we do for all of our clients — helping them build the best leadership teams possible. Our clients place their trust in us each day, and we have developed strong policies and procedures over our nearly 60-year history to serve them.

On behalf of the management team and Board of Directors, thank you for your continued support and dedication to Heidrick & Struggles.

Best,
Kevin
L. Kevin Kelly
Chief Executive Officer
Heidrick & Struggles

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120511/heidrick-struggles-slaps-back-at-thompsons-yahoo-in-blame-game/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120511/is-he-in-or-is-he-out-crunchtime-for-scott-thompson-at-yahoo/ http://allthingsd.com/20120511/is-he-in-or-is-he-out-crunchtime-for-scott-thompson-at-yahoo/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 15:15:28 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=206889

While he has only been CEO of Yahoo for less than five months, in the next several days Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is facing perhaps the most critical moment of his short tenure.

According to sources with knowledge of the situation, the board of Yahoo is not likely to take long in assessing whether he will stay or if he will be let go, due to a controversy around how a non-existent computer science degree got on his bio and also in Yahoo regulatory filings.

A special committee of independent directors is now investigating the matter, including trying to assess the damage has had on Thompson’s ability to lead the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

How quickly the board moves is likely to be a sign of their intent. If within the next days, it is likely to let the former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit go and replace him with a current company exec; if it waits longer and shows some public support of him — which the board has not done since the scandal erupted — Thompson’s chances are better that he will only be given some sort of censure.

One important task is also closely considering the impact of possible legal problems related to Thompson and others signing documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission that were not accurate.

One thing is clear from interviews with multiple sources, many members of the board have not been happy with how Thompson has handled the matter since activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point uncovered the problem a week ago.

While first tossing the borked bio as an “inadvertent error,” Thompson was then largely silent about the issue with staff, despite being in close meetings with them, which caused stress among key execs.

Then, he made a public announcement in which he apologized for only the “distraction” caused by the incident and not the error itself as some had hoped he would.

Yesterday, apparently feeling it was time to try to explain things face-to-face, Thompson made another attempt to explain what happened in two separate meetings with his direct reports and then his senior staff, apparently trying to get through to employees that he did not fake his resume nor did he give an inaccurate bio to Yahoo when he was being hired for the job earlier this year.

Thompson thought it was time — now that the board investigation was underway — to answer questions directly, said a source.

Among other things, Thompson gave a somewhat convoluted explanation that it appeared in his bio due to a misunderstanding during an interview with a headhunting firm. And that he never noticed it once it proliferated And that when an NPR interviewer asked him directly about his CS degree, he did not want to correct her in mid-discussion — although others report he said he did not hear the question fully.

Sources said Thompson — who is on the midst of initiating changes across a large and troubled organization, after laying off 2,000 employees — thought the sessions went well, that he clearly communicated that he was taking blame for the problem and its repercussions. Those sources also noted that he received support for doing so after the talks.

But, more than a dozen others I interviewed who were listening remotely — some of whom I sought out and some who contacted me directly — thought Thompson’s complex explanation was deeply problematic and that he tried to foist the blame on others rather than on himself.

Every one of these people expressed the need for him to step down to allow Yahoo to move forward.

What the board thought about the performance is still not clear, said sources, but things are coming down to two distinct scenarios.

The first is a quick parting of the ways with Thompson, within days, either for cause or via a negotiated settlement. Others at Yahoo involved with perpetuating the mistake in the bio are also at risk.

This option is perhaps the more likely at this moment, unless the scandal dissipates and employees continued rancor over the situation can be assuaged soon.

In this case, sources said, Thompson will be replaced by a current board member or a member of the top staff. When directors fired Carol Bartz last fall, CFO Tim Morse became interim CEO and he is one of the likely candidates for the job again.

The second scenario centers on needing Thompson to complete a number of complex transactions related to the sale of Yahoo’s Chinese assets and its re-negotiations with Microsoft over its troubled search partnership, among other things.

In that case, Thompson will be censured in some manner by the board and will also probably have to endure some punishment for allowing false regulatory documents to be filed by Yahoo. Others at Yahoo will also be subject to the same treatment in such an outcome.

How will it turn out?

Only board member Patti Hart has so far paid for her faulty vetting of Thompson, stepping down from the board earlier this week.

But whether she will be the only shoe to drop in what has turned out to be a bizarre wildfire that as raged across Yahoo’s troubled landscape remains to be seen.

Thus, most definitely watch this space this weekend.

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120511/is-he-in-or-is-he-out-crunchtime-for-scott-thompson-at-yahoo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120511/is-youtubes-ad-pitch-working/ http://allthingsd.com/20120511/is-youtubes-ad-pitch-working/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 14:19:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=206926 Last week, YouTube threw a glitzy party designed to get advertisers to move their money from TV to the giant video site. Is it working?

Capstone analyst Rory Maher thinks so. He’s been polling ad buyers and thinks they may collectively be spending 40 percent more on YouTube than they did a year ago.

He also thinks YouTube’s strategy of grouping its new channels into “genres” — like “women,” “pop culture,” etc. — and selling those as megapackages is attractive to advertisers, and that they’ve at least placed tentative commitments on all 18 packages YouTube is selling.

But those dollars aren’t going to come from TV, Maher thinks. Instead, advertisers will take money they would have spent on other Web ads and move them over to YouTube. That’s still a win for Google, but it’s not the win it really wants.

Last week’s event didn’t win everyone over. Several folks I’ve talked to — including people who are making stuff for YouTube’s channels — say they’re underwhelmed with the actual content they saw onstage at the Beacon Theater.

“It looked like Web video,” one Web video maker told me. That is, it didn’t look like the stuff the TV guys show off at their advertiser events.

Some of the stuff may get close to TV.

YouTube is brimming with pride over WIGS, a series of soapy dramas featuring actresses you’ve heard of, like Jennifer Beals and Julia Stiles (News Corp., which owns this site, had a hand in putting the series together). The teaser trailer they’ve put out looks like a reasonable facsimile of Lifetime, at least to my eyes. And Machinima is planning a series based on Halo, the hit Xbox game, and the few seconds of that they showed looked pretty slick.

It’s more likely that most of the Web video YouTube produces with its channels this year really will end up looking like Web video. But if that doesn’t bother the people who watch it — and there are some 800 million people watching this stuff every month — then it shouldn’t be a problem for the ad guys, either.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120511/is-youtubes-ad-pitch-working/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120511/video-the-secret-life-of-nprs-terry-gross/ http://allthingsd.com/20120511/video-the-secret-life-of-nprs-terry-gross/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 11:30:18 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=206862 Ever wonder what Terry Gross does after she wraps up her “Fresh Air” show on NPR and ever-so-sincerely thanks one of her guests?

The bust-a-gut-funny storyteller Mike Birbiglia let his imagination run wild, and got Gross to play along. He made the short film below for the 2012 “This American Life” live show, which was broadcast to some 500 movie theaters full of public radio fans on Thursday night (including the one I visited in lovely and foggy San Bruno, Calif.).

Another segment of the live show — which was themed around performances that wouldn’t work on the radio — was a special audience smartphone participation number by OK Go.

The band, which is famous for its creative music video concepts, created an app that split the audience into different tones of chimes. Then we provided accompaniment by pressing buttons within the app while OK Go played a couple of songs and projected a scrolling color-coded score, like in Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution.

Getting permission to allow people to use their cellphones in theaters was no easy task, and required multiple personal pleas to CEOs, said “This American Life” host Ira Glass, when he introduced the band.

While I had my phone turned on, I snapped the picture below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120511/video-the-secret-life-of-nprs-terry-gross/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120511/bing-and-youre-modeling-every-object-on-the-planet/ http://allthingsd.com/20120511/bing-and-youre-modeling-every-object-on-the-planet/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 07:17:43 +0000 Voices http://allthingsd.com/?p=206863

We’re literally no longer indexing text. We’re trying to associate data that exists on the web in all forms with the physical object that spawned it in the first place.

– Bing director Stefan Weitz, in an interview with Fast Company’s E.B. Boyd

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120511/bing-and-youre-modeling-every-object-on-the-planet/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120510/not-so-scott-free-yahoos-other-big-shareholder-cap-re-leaning-toward-supporting-loeb-over-thompson-resumess/ http://allthingsd.com/20120510/not-so-scott-free-yahoos-other-big-shareholder-cap-re-leaning-toward-supporting-loeb-over-thompson-resumess/#comments Thu, 10 May 2012 22:56:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=206788

One of Yahoo’s biggest long-term investors, Capital Research and Management, which owns more than 10 percent of the company in two different funds, is leaning toward voting for the slate proposed by activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point, in the wake of the controversy around the botched bio of its new CEO Scott Thompson.

“Having a CEO with that hanging over his head is really a problem going forward,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “It’s hard to pretend this is not a problem.”

While sources said Yahoo’s longtime institutional investor — which currently holds large stakes via its Capital Research Global Investors and Capital World Investors funds — is not likely to go public with their voting choice until close to the annual meeting, which will take place sometime this summer.

But its fund managers have told key Yahoo board members of their grave concerns over the situation.

Ironically, in the last proxy fight showdown with Carl Icahn, Capital removed its support of Yahoo’s slate too and was an important influence to many major changes at the company.

Such a move is problematic for Thompson, since the rejection of another big shareholder at its upcoming annual meeting will keep the unusual issue and right in the middle of a noisy proxy fight.

A special committee of the Yahoo board is investigating the situation — in which a fake computer science degree somehow got on the resume of the former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit and later into official Yahoo regulatory filings.

The problem was uncovered last week — unfortunately for the Silicon Valley Internet giant — by Loeb, who has been banging away on Yahoo since.

A trio of independent Yahoo directors is looking into the mess, with a focus on how that happened, whether anyone at Yahoo knew of the inaccurate bio and how it got there in the first place.

Also of great concern, is how Thompson could have not seen the error in the many years it was on the Web site of eBay and also how he approved a bio that had the inaccuracy in it when he was hired by Yahoo in January.

Worse still, in a 2009 interview, he clearly did not say he did not have such a degree in with a radio show host when directly asked about it.

“It’s a little hard believe an executive of this level would have missed such a thing, when he had so many opportunities to fix it,” said one source. “And, if he did overlook it that many times, that’s a problem too.”

In fact, according to a report earlier today by Business Insider that I also confirmed, Thompson told employees today in two separate meetings that he did miss the error since it was placed there — inexplicably — in 2004. In the meeting, he blamed a low-level headhunting staffer who added it incorrectly, an error that then proliferated.

Thompson also said he did not provide a resume to the company in his hiring process — say whaaaat, but true — although this still does not absolve him from the original error.

As to the interview: Thompson said he did not want to be rude and correct the host of TechNation, Moira Gunn, after she clearly asserted to him he had a computer science degree as part of a question on his qualifications. Others present at the meetings said he said he did not hear the question.

But, in an video interview with me yesterday, though, Gunn said she and Thompson discussed a computer science education in a way that left the clear impression that he had obtained one.

While Thompson’s excuse may beggar the imagination of some, it’s his story and he’s sticking to it. In all seriousness, his complete lack of willingness to take responsibility for the error — even if it was not his fault — itself is a little startling.

Because what’s not clear is how the bio was miraculously correct in eBay’s official filings and also if it is plausible that he never saw the mistake.

Numerous communications execs at Internet companies told me that it was unusual for a high-level exec not to pay close attention to information that went out about them, especially in legal filings. In addition, just as many execs are made to check and swear on their bios that go into such documents.

In fact, it was Thompson’s job to make sure the things written about him were correct at all times. As CEO, as a major Silicon Valley player pointed out, he is required by federal law to personally certify Yahoo’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Violations of these rules carry financial and also potential criminal penalties.

Sources said the board is worried about that credibility issue too and it puts Thompson in an ever-dicier position. Noticeably, the board has yet to make a public statement of support for him on the issue.

Also a major worry for the directors is the mostly negative response to the situation from Yahoo employees, who are deeply upset that Thompson’s error was not caught and that he might not be treated in the same way as anyone else who turned in a false resume, whether it was by accident or not.

A Yahoo spokeswoman told me last week that there was also support internally for Thompson, but in many dozens of interviews I have done with Yahoo employees and a continued monitoring of internal bulletin board, the tone is not in his favor by any means.

Like I said, it’s a dicey time to be Scott Thompson right now.

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120510/not-so-scott-free-yahoos-other-big-shareholder-cap-re-leaning-toward-supporting-loeb-over-thompson-resumess/feed/ 0