Production is set to begin next month for the screens, which measure at least 4 inches diagonally compared with 3.5 inches on the iPhone 4S, the latest phone from Apple, the people said.

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Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs will be the best or worst movie I’ve ever seen.

– Dan Frommer, via Twitter

Google’s strategy is a shift from its previous practice, when it partnered with only one hardware maker at a time to produce seven “lead devices” that showed off the newest Android software features, before releasing the software to other device makers. The change is a bid to exert more control over the apps that run on smartphones and tablets powered by Android, thus reducing the influence of wireless carriers over such devices, these people said.

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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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The discussions center on a possible partnership for production or developing manufacturing technology for organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, television sets, the people said.

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Getty Images News | Justin Sullivan

Here we go again. After just four months, Yahoo has taken the CEO reins from Scott Thompson and passed them to interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, marking the fifth change in the company’s top job in the past four years. During this time, the company’s market cap has deteriorated from $28.53 billion at the end of June 2008 to $19.04 billion today, clearly indicating what the revolving CEO suite and associated roller coaster has done to shareholder confidence. But what about the impact on the 13,300 people employed by Yahoo?¹ Clearly, this is something the Yahoo board of directors and Levinsohn — however interim he is — must address, if they hope to achieve a turnaround.

Think about it: Yahoo employees who have weathered multiple rounds of layoffs have also had to adapt to the frequently changing leadership tides created by the revolving door at the top of the company: Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz, Timothy Morse, Scott Thompson, and now Ross Levinsohn. Not surprisingly, this has impacted Yahoo employees’ faith in senior leadership over time.

According to social jobs and career site Glassdoor, morale at Yahoo has softly teetered from quarter to quarter. On a five-point scale, employees have given the company a high rating of 4.3 (satisfied) in the first quarter of 2008 to a low of 3.0 in the second quarter of 2009; however, the rating has settled around 3.4 (okay), for the most part.

However, the employee sentiment surrounding how well each Yahoo CEO has led the company has had a much more turbulent path. When Carol Bartz started off, she had a 91 percent approval rating in her first quarter, but by her last quarter on the job, it sank to just 33 percent. For Thompson, it was too short to tell if his 48 percent approval was a starting-off point based on employee satisfaction, or if it was his personal high note.

Evidence of this employee turmoil, along with a desire for more direction and stability, can be found in many of the anonymous reviews left by Yahoo employees on Glassdoor in recent months:

As one Yahoo senior financial analyst comments, “Develop a clear strategy, and stick to it! Way too much disparity in communicating what it is the company stands for.”

A Yahoo principal engineer adds, “The lack of vision is really astounding … Executive management should try better communicating with senior management and solicit their input when making such major personnel changes. There should be clear strategic goals conveying what is trying to be accomplished.”

Another Yahoo employee notes that Yahoo “lacks a clear vision of what the company is all about. The sooner they figure this out, the sooner they can focus their resources in the right direction.”

Employees know the company best. As a leader, you may think you know, hear and understand your company’s challenges, but if you fail to listen to your employees and therefore fail to address those challenges, you will likely find the road to growth and change within the company tougher than expected.

Now, perhaps more than ever, Yahoo’s executives and board should listen to and focus on what’s at the heart of the company: Its employees. Some proven strategies that can support stabilization and rebuilding the business include:

Leadership must extend beyond one title or one person. There are a lot of executives on the Yahoo management team beyond interim head Levinsohn, some of whom have extensive tenure with the company, including co-founder David Filo. This team needs to quickly build consensus on strategic priorities and collectively own responsibility to make sure this is communicated and understood by the entire Yahoo employee population. The new permanent CEO should build on this foundational direction, not deviate from it or completely change it.

Define your vision, stick with it and repeat. Where the company is headed should be articulated in one clear, crisp statement, and as CEO or as a senior leader, it should be used and touched on routinely in all communications, both internally and externally. There is a lot to get done as a leader; there is a lot to convey. But without purpose and vision, efforts to move a business forward will fall flat.

Don’t mistake perks for culture. In the Valley, where talent wars are fierce, we often regard perks as synonymous with culture. While a hefty paycheck, bonuses and other perks like free food, on-site dry cleaning or on-campus childcare may help recruit top talent, they don’t do much to retain talent the way a solid and positive culture does. A good culture takes time, and emanates from a work environment that provides room for — and rewards — creative thinking, and allows opinions to be heard and to be challenged.

Get personal. I suspect that the trust level of senior management has been seriously compromised, and this last blow regarding Thompson’s degree has hurt whatever trust was left. It’s going to be a tough road ahead for Levinsohn and his succession when it comes to winning the hearts of employees. But Yahoo’s senior leadership can make it right, if they make it personal and swing for the fences in communication by hosting small group meetings and by truly showing that management is listening to the wishes, desires and dreams that employees have for the company and for themselves.

This is another critical juncture for Yahoo. With the board and management team in transition, it is especially important that time and resources be dedicated to rebuilding a new social contract with Yahoo employees around the world. Employees come to work every day and vote with their feet for the company to succeed, and it’s the responsibility of senior leadership to work on bringing together the troops to get the company back on track.

Rusty Rueff is a corporate and philanthropic board director, career and workplace expert consultant and writer, as well as start-up company adviser and investor. He currently serves on the corporate boards of Glassdoor, the leading social jobs and career community, and HireVue.com, a video interviewing platform designed to improve the recruiting process. Rusty is also the co-author of “Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business” (Prentice Hall, 2006).

Companies crossing DNA-mapping technology with social networking are developing a brave new world in which samples of customers’ genes can be used to map family trees, find relationships people never knew they had, and identify adopted children’s biological parents.

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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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They are going to have to think about whether they can continue with the motto “Done is better than perfect.”

– Altimeter Group’s Susan Etlinger, talking about Facebook in the New York Times

Quora Inc., a question-and-answer site started by two of Facebook’s earliest employees, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, has raised $50 million in a new financing that values it at $400 million, up from a valuation of around $86 million two years ago, said people familiar with the matter.

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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled a California trial judge was too quick to deny Apple’s request to temporarily block the sales of Samsung tablets while Apple’s patent-infringement claims against its rival proceed in court.

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LightSquared reported assets and debts each exceeding $1 billion, according to the petition it filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.

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The new features, expected to be announced at Apple’s world-wide developer conference beginning June 11, will allow iCloud users to share sets of photos with other iCloud users and to comment on them, these people said. Currently, users can only store one set of photos in iCloud through a feature called Photo Stream, which is designed to sync those photos to other Apple devices, not share them.

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The struggling electronics retailer disclosed that its board-supervised investigation into Mr. Dunn concluded he engaged in an “extremely close personal relationship” with a 29-year-old subordinate that “negatively impacted the work environment,” though it found no evidence that he misused company assets.

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The two sides still have until 5 p.m. Monday to reach a deal that would keep LightSquared out of bankruptcy court, and there were some indications over the weekend that a final decision hadn’t yet been reached on the company’s fate. Still, the two sides remained far apart and people involved in the negotiations expected LightSquared to begin making bankruptcy preparations in earnest.

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The amount of spam sent by text messages has more than tripled from last year’s level to 45 million messages sent each day. About 92 percent of those are messages are trying to trick people into giving up money.

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Google’s U.S. market share rose 0.1 percentage point to 66.5 percent in April from the prior month. Microsoft’s share also edged up 0.1 percentage point to 15.4 percent last month. Yahoo Inc.’s sites remained in the No. 3 spot, slipping 0.2 percentage points to 13.5 percent. IAC/InterActiveCorp.’s Ask.com’s share and AOL Inc.’s shares were unchanged at 3 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively.

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Ordinary investors, however, would be better off waiting until some of the buzz dies down, experts say.

The initial public offering, expected on May 18, could value the company at anywhere from $77 billion to $96 billion based on its $28- to $35-a-share price range — making Facebook the biggest company to go public in U.S. history, according to Dealogic. Some analysts already have issued one-year price targets as high as $46 a share.

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Panasonic recorded a net loss of ¥438.4 billion ($5.49 billion) in the three months ended March 31 compared with a loss of ¥40.7 billion in the same period a year earlier. Sales fell 8 percent to ¥1.880 trillion in the quarter, hurt by soft demand for flat-panel televisions and mobile phones.

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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

The 15th straight quarter of contract customer losses puts the carrier further behind AT&T and Verizon Wireless in the race to lock users into two-year commitments.

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The feature, dubbed “Auto Hop,” is an advance on existing ad-skipping features on digital video recorders, which have been widely available for several years from cable and satellite operators. For existing DVRs, consumers have to manually press a fast forward button to speed through the commercial breaks. Timing the fast forward can be difficult and viewers can still see scenes from ads.

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