One of Yahoo’s biggest problems — brain drain — has turned out to be an asset for private equity firms and other players interested in figuring out their best moves related to the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

A plethora of ex-Yahoos, including many former top execs, are getting buttonholed by those who want to know more about the inner workings of the company that might not be obvious from its copious financial data available publicly.

That includes former Americas head Hilary Schneider, who has a longer-term consulting gig with TPG Capital, one of the several PE firms that has recently signed a non-disclosure agreement with Yahoo; former COO and President Sue Decker, who has had a longtime informal relationship with Blackstone, which has not signed the NDA and has been in talks with Yahoo’s Asian partners, China’s Alibaba Group and Japan’s SoftBank; and even former CEO Carol Bartz, who sources say has also been contacted to get her insights.

She is one of many in that regard, in a large pool of former Yahoos, such as: LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who had run Yahoo’s media efforts; Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, former Yahoo COO; SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg, who ran swathes of Yahoo’s entertainment properties; Criteo CEO Greg Coleman, former Yahoo sales head; former CEO Terry Semel, who is now an investor; former communications exec Brad Garlinghouse, who is now at AOL; and Demand Media Chief Revenue Officer Joanne Bradford, who also was a top Yahoo advertising exec.

Not all are cooperating with the requests for a chitchat about Yahoo, but there is much incoming interest in ex-Yahoos and what they might know.

There’s lots more where that came from, from all parts and all levels of Yahoo, given the breadth of the exes now doing very well — thank you very much — throughout the tech and media industries.

Thus, calls from PE firms, from Silver Lake to Bain Capital to Providence Equity Partners, as well as interest from major and majorly irritated shareholders, such as activist hedge fund investor Dan Loeb.

It’s a smart idea to tap this rich vein of information, as all contemplate possible multi-billion-dollar investments.

While some of these execs have not worked at Yahoo in many years, all have significant knowledge about the challenges and also the culture that cannot be gleaned from spreadsheets.

They also know a lot about the internal politics and personalities of the existing inside players, too. More importantly, several were involved in similar previous major business decisions at Yahoo.

Decker, for example, was a key exec in the Yahoo takeover attempt by Microsoft several years ago; Schneider and Bartz were deeply involved in striking the advertising and search partnership with Microsoft.

“Between everyone, it’s a good way to figure out where all the bodies are buried,” said one person close to the situation. “And there are a lot of bodies.”

“It is critical that we speak with one voice,” wrote Whitman in an internal email I obtained (below).

Thus, she has appointed longtime HP exec Lynn Anderson (pictured here) to “take on the role of acting Chief Communications Officer reporting directly to me,” according to the memo she sent to senior leaders at the company.

Not sure what “acting” means yet, but Anderson has gotten the job that was once that of former SAP exec Bill Wohl. He was put on “special assignment” late this summer, whatever that means, with his duties being taken up by Global Marketing EVP Marty Homlish.

Now Anderson is taking over, having helped during the Wohl transition. She previously headed up influencer relations for HP’s enterprise business.

And before that, she worked on a variety of marketing jobs for HP Canada. Anderson’s background is wonky, according to her company bio: “Before joining HP in 1983 as a systems engineer, Anderson was a programmer, analyst and operations manager for several IT departments.”

During the initial announcement of her new job running HP, Whitman relied on longtime comms adviser Henry Gomez. Gomez, who worked closely with her when Whitman was CEO of eBay and later on her unsuccessful run for California governor, has a consulting business and presumably did not want to work full time for HP.

Here’s the memo:

To: Senior Leaders
Subject: Acting Chief Communications Officer

As we continue to execute our strategy for HP, communications will be an extremely important function and it is critical that we speak with one voice.

I want to thank Marty Homlish, EVP Global Marketing who stepped in and provided leadership during a critical junction. Going forward, I have asked Lynn Anderson to take on the role of acting Chief Communications Officer reporting directly to me.

Please ensure that Lynn is brought into all communications activities.

Regards,

Meg

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expect IBM to report sales of $25.35 billion and a per-share profit of $3.03. Analyst Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank Securities says, in a note to clients today, that he expects sales that are slightly above the consensus at $25.9 billion, which would amount to growth of more than nine percent over the year-ago quarter, and earnings of $3.01 or slightly below.

Whitmore says that checks of IBM’s sales and distribution channels indicate that demand remains strong for IBM’s mainframe systems as well as servers running its Power Architecture chip, and he says it’s taking meaningful share away from Oracle’s UltraSparc business, the line of servers Oracle absorbed when it acquired Sun Microsystems last year.

The service business should turn in a beefy quarter on the heels of new contract wins. Expect service revenue to come in line with previous forecasts of $12 to $13 billion, Whitmore says, with help from a favorable environment for foreign currencies.

That’s not to say there aren’t worries: Whitmore points out that IBM announced only five deals during the quarter, which is half as many as in the year-ago quarter. It’s also been disclosing less information about each deal, and only one — with India Infoline — was north of $50 million. “IBM’s services bookings figure is the biggest wild card this quarter due to the limited data,” he writes. Still, he expects it to track in line with prior forecasts, mainly because several five- and 10-year deals have been announced, even though their size hasn’t been disclosed.

We suspect consensus bookings expectation is $12B to $13B for the June Q and believe IBM is tracking in line with this estimate with solid long-term signings, as several multi-year deals (five and 10 years) were announced (although not sized).

Even so, Whitmore expects no change to IBM’s confident prediction that it will deliver $20 per share of earnings in 2015, and that implies annual growth of between 11 and 12 percent, which for now doesn’t seem unreasonable. As usual, all eyes will be looking for any hint that Big Blue is throttling back on its shorter-term guidance.

IBM has been a fairly solid performer this year, having seen its share price increase by more than 19 percent since the start of the year, beating both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Standard & Poor’s 500. Its shares closed Friday at $175.54, up $1.31, but were trading lower in premarket action this morning. We’ll see how it all turns out later in the day. See you then.

How’s this for irony:

It was less than a year and a half ago that Owen Van Natta was ousted from his job as CEO of Myspace.

But last week — just as the failed social networking site sold for a paltry $35 million — Van Natta could have bought it himself for a fraction of his stake in Zynga, the social gaming phenom that just filed for its IPO and where he’s a top exec and shareholder.

As the San Francisco-based Zynga’s chief business officer, he was listed second after CEO and founder Mark Pincus on its S-1 on the list of top management and also serves on its board.

The filing also showed that Van Natta got about $43 million in total compensation in 2010.

That was due to part of his large Zynga holdings, including about three million shares he owns outright via restricted stock units that Zynga calls ZSUs, as well as 6.75 million more in options priced at a low $6.43 each.

All told, he has a 1.6 percent stake in the company. That could be worth upwards of $325 million if Zynga garners an expected $20 billion valuation. And it could be even more if its public offering pops higher as other recent Internet outings have done.

And that’s why when Van Natta arrives at the fancy and exclusive Allen & Company mogul fest in Sun Valley this week, he might want to thank News Corp. digital head Jon Miller — the man who fired him from Myspace.

After the Myspace debacle in February of 2010, according to its filing, it appears that Van Natta bounced back quickly to enter into a consulting agreement with Zynga in mid-April via his Luminor Group.

By August, he was hired on full time by Pincus and also became a director.

One reason for getting that plum post, Zynga said, was Van Natta’s experience as a longtime Internet exec at Amazon and, more importantly, Facebook.

He left the social networking giant in mid-2007 — where he had served as COO and, later, chief revenue officer — after relations with its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg became somewhat tense.

But that’s water under the bridge now; and, in fact, the filing was full of information about the close relationship with Facebook, which is a critical one for Zynga.

And, of course, for Van Natta, who gets my award for best Silicon Valley recovery of 2011.

Had he stepped up and bought Myspace from his large Zynga proceeds, though, he would have gotten my lifetime achievement award for pure moxie.

Mike Murphy–Facebook’s first head of advertising sales, who left the social networking giant in October to take some personal time off–seems done with relaxing.

He is now taking a part-time, but significant, role at online gaming phenom Zynga to help formulate its advertising strategy.

In addition, Murphy is also close to formalizing a consulting relationship with Facebook.

Given there has been strong interest from more obvious Facebook competitors in retaining Murphy–including Google and Twitter–his move to Zynga is probably the best outcome for it.

Although the relationship has been tense at times, Zynga remains one of Facebook’s major strategic partners.

Facebook has reportedly been close to filling Murphy’s job, talking to several major online ad execs recently, but has not yet replaced him.

While it is not clear what Murphy will be doing for Facebook, where former Google exec David Fischer runs the ad business, Murphy’s role at Zynga will be quite deep and could expand over time even more.

It will include overseeing the development of Zynga’s advertising strategy, team growth and advertising products, and creating new relationships with top brands.

After being contacted by BoomTown about the new job, Murphy confirmed it and said in a statement:

“Social games are becoming a core way for marketers to engage with their customers. Zynga’s network of games have created an incredible opportunity for advertisers to create passionate relationships and emotional connections with their customers.”

Indeed, as it moves toward an inevitable IPO later this year, Zynga is upping its focus on building its advertising business, aiming at selling its fast-growing audience and the frequency and engagement they use its casual gaming products.

At Zynga, Murphy will lead and build the team, scaling its relationships with big-name partners.

The company has already dipped its toe in this arena, integrating some major brands into its games in recent campaigns.

Such online-offline customer efforts, although early, have had strong adoption, such as a recent one to plant branded blueberry crops–organic!–in its flagship FarmVille game for General Mills cereals.

There has also been a McDonald’s-branded farm in FarmVille. (McReally.)

Interestingly, in an inside-Silicon-Valley-baseball way, the move to Zynga will reunite Murphy, the former Yahoo exec who ran global advertising strategy for Facebook for five years, with Owen Van Natta.

Van Natta was once COO of Facebook and hired Murphy there. He is now EVP of Business at Zynga.

Along with Murphy, Van Natta has also brought in Dani Dudeck as communications head from Myspace, where he had a rocky tenure as CEO of the News Corp. unit.

And Katie Geminder, who was a design and user interface exec at both Facebook and Myspace, is also now at Zynga in a similar full-time role.

At the time he announced his departure from Facebook in the fall, Murphy said he had decided to step down in order to take some personal time off, noting that hundreds of nights on the road over the years had been enough.

“For the last five years of hyper-growth here, I have been focused on Facebook,” said Murphy. “Now, I felt it was time to shift that focus to my family.”

And now, apparently, to Zynga.

It’s not all departures!

Yahoo is hiring former News Corp. and Disney online exec Mickie Rosen (pictured here) to run its Audience unit, which includes the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s powerful content sites, sources said.

Starting next week, Rosen will report to Americas head Ross Levinsohn, who has worked with her before, at both News Corp. and Fuse Capital.

Her new title is SVP of the Yahoo Media Network, which is apparently a rebranding of Audience.

Previous to this job, Rosen was CEO of Tecca, a price-checking service Fuse created in partnership with Best Buy.

It’s likely she will remain based in the Los Angeles area, where Yahoo has a large office in Santa Monica, Calif.

The move is Levinsohn’s first management rejiggering since he took over last year, and there is likely to be more to come.

Rosen, who has also worked at the Fandango online movie ticketing site, will replace interim audience head Raymond Stern, who will be–as before–running partnerships and business development, as well as Yahoo’s listings business.

Rosen’s new job had actually been that of former Audience head David Ko, as well as former Media VP Jimmy Pitaro.

Ko left Yahoo and is now heading mobile games at Zynga, while Pitaro is a top digital exec at Disney.

More to come from Levinsohn, but here is Rosen’s bio from the Fuse Web site:

Mickie has over 20 years of operating, strategy and investing experience. For the past dozen years, she has been at the intersection of media and technology, in both large companies such as News Corporation and The Walt Disney Company and in small, early stage start-ups.

Prior to joining the firm, she was the head of entertainment for Fox Interactive Media where she was responsible for properties such as AmericanIdol.com, Rotten Tomatoes and the entertainment channels of MySpace. Mickie also led content acquisition across the Company, and was a lead in envisioning, structuring and negotiating Hulu, the premier video joint venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal.

Prior to Fox Interactive Media, Mickie was the head of product development, marketing and public relations for Fandango, where she helped lead the company from an early-stage start-up to profitability as it became a leader in its space (acquired by Comcast). Mickie was also a senior executive with an e-learning start-up, an Idealab! consumer robotics company and Disney’s Corporate Alliances group, where she negotiated deals and managed Disney’s top global partners such as Coca-Cola, American Express and AT&T.

Mickie built the foundation of her career with McKinsey & Company, where she spent seven years consulting with senior management on strategy, operational and organizational issues across a number of industries, including media and technology.
Mickie has an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a B.A. in Economics from UC San Diego, and is based in Los Angeles.

SecureWorks, which is privately held, says it has about 2,900 customers in 70 countries, and that its customers include 15 percent of the Fortune 500, as well as 1,500 banks and credit unions, though typical of a security company, it doesn’t name any of them. In 2009 it acquired the managed security business of VeriSign. It has about 700 employees and projected revenue of about $120 million.

It’s also known for its top-flight malware research team. Last year it was involved in the research and response around a banking Trojan called Origami, which originated in Russia and was designed to steal sign-in credentials.

Dell says the deal will expand its IT-as-service offerings. It also looks to be, at least in part, a reaction to Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of security firm ArcSight in October. No financial terms are being disclosed, but Dell had been involved in a reselling partnership with SecureWorks since July of last year. It’s also Dell’s second acquisition in as many months. On Dec. 13 it spent $820 million for the health IT company Compellent.

So why is Garriques, whom Dell recruited from Motorola in 2007 and subsequently tapped to run the company’s communications products division, leaving? Evidently that division’s being shuttered and rolled into other units. Seems new devices like the Streak–Dell’s Android tablet–and smartphones like the Aero and Venue Pro aren’t quite performing the way Dell had hoped. Said Dell spokesman David Frink, “He made a decision to look at other opportunities as we integrate the former communications solutions group into our core operating structure.”

Garriques leaves Dell with a $1.44 million severance payment and a promise of $6.3 million for future consulting services.

After longtime Internet tech exec Owen Van Natta was ousted from his job as CEO of MySpace last February, after clashing with News Corp. (NWS) digital chief Jon Miller and also the other two top execs at the troubled social networking site, he seemed to drop off the map a bit to chillax and regroup.

Not for long, though, as the high-profile Van Natta (pictured here)–he was also a top exec at Facebook in its early days, as well as at Amazon (AMZN) before that–soon began doing mentoring and also unofficial consulting work with various start-ups in which he was an angel investor or had developed an interest.

Most especially, according to numerous sources, that effort has now been largely focused on Zynga, the red-hot social gaming company that has been on a growth and revenue tear of late.

Under CEO and founder Mark Pincus, that has included big new rounds of investment, renewing its partnership with Facebook after some contention, striking another deal to put its popular games such as Farmville throughout Yahoo (YHOO) and, reportedly, working on an even bigger deal with Google (GOOG).

It’s been a very active time for Zynga, which has been contemplating an initial public offering.

All that, sources said, has prompted Pincus to increasingly bring in Van Natta as an adviser to the start-up, focused mostly on strategy and operations.

And, said sources, that could eventually result in a more formal role, such as Van Natta joining Zynga in an official job, like COO. Many say that both have been seriously contemplating such a move in recent weeks.

In fact, at the recent Allen & Co. media confab in Sun Valley, which both attended, Van Natta and Pincus told many of Van Natta’s more substantive advisory role.

A COO job like that would not be a big leap for Van Natta, who was COO and close advisor to Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg at the nascency of the company.

Van Natta was key to some important early deals, such as bringing on Microsoft (MSFT) as an investor and staffing the young service.

In doing so, he formed a close bond with the then less experienced Zuckerberg.

Eventually, though, that relationship cooled, and Van Natta’s job shifted as more execs joined.

Van Natta left the social networking giant in early 2008.

He did a short stint as CEO of music discovery site Playlist later in 2008, but was put in charge at MySpace as part of an awkward troika of leadership by the following April.

Although he moved to reinvigorate the tarnished service, Van Natta’s job there was short-lived, After much internal wrangling with COO Michael Jones and product head Jason Hirschhorn, Miller suddenly fired him in a tense meeting earlier this year.

To be sure, to grab a big job at Zynga would be a splashy move for both the company and Van Natta, who has clearly seen quite a few of them in his Internet career.

When I contacted them to ask about Van Natta’s role, Pincus declined comment and Van Natta has yet to respond.

The top priority this time for Big Blue–which famously dumped its personal computer business in 2004 to focus on consulting and services—is software. Mr. Palmisano wants that high-margin business to account for about half of the company’s pretax profit by 2015, up from just over a third in 2003.

In particular, Mr. Palmisano wants to sell programs that help clients sort through the mountains of data being generated by the growing number of transactions and record keeping that have moved to electronic form.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Andrus (pictured here) joins a pair of directors from each of Rhapsody’s large shareholders: Bob Kimball and Mike Lunsford from RealNetworks (RNWK) and Wade Davis and Van Toffler from Viacom (VIA).

Andrus–who mostly worked at MySpace under the tenure of co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe and President and co-founder Tom Anderson–left the troubled social networking site last year.

He had been doing some consulting for Rhapsody and had considered working there too. After deciding against it, since he lives in the Los Angeles area, he said he was asked to join the board.

“I liked what I saw,” said Andrus in an interview with BoomTown. “Rhapsody is really ready to blossom and poised for some real growth.”

The Seattle-based Rhapsody spun off from RealNetworks earlier this month and has plunged into efforts to expand its offerings and become profitable.

These include a price cut for its subscription to $9.99 from $15 and aggressive mobile efforts, such as a Wi-Fi app for Google (GOOG) Android smartphones.

RealNetworks owned 51 percent of the Rhapsody, and Viacom’s MTV Networks the remainder. Restructuring gave both companies a 47.5 percent share. The rest is
allocated to the employee pool and outside investors, including Universal Music Group.

Jon Irwin is president.

For a new company, Rhapsody is one of the oldest in the music space, founded in 2001 by Listen.com.

Listen.com was bought by RealNetworks in 2003, and Rhapsody became its flagship brand as a music service offering.

But Rhapsody quickly lost ground to savvier competitors like Apple (AAPL) and its innovative iTunes service.

Rhapsody, along with Best Buy’s (BBY) Napster, has sold music via monthly subscription, as opposed to Apple’s (AAPL) a la carte download offering.

But Rhapsody has not been able to gain much traction, despite years of effort.

RealNetworks and Viacom’s MTV created a joint venture in 2007 to try to goose it, which did not work either, before the recent formation of the privately held independent company.

Currently, hotter services, such as Spotify, are getting more attention, but Andrus said Rhapsody can compete.

“The company has been through the storm and is ready to win,” he said.

Here’s an interesting piece you might want to take a gander at, from McKinsey & Company and titled “The Internet of Things.”

While embedded sensors in physical objects is not exactly a new topic, this is a nice synopsis from the consulting giant on what will be the next great pile of data after people everywhere are done updating Foursquare to identify the bar where they’re “The Mayor” (why, oh, why, dear Lord?).

McKinsey, which likes to organize stuff, identified six different categories about the Internet of Things:

Tracking behavior: Monitoring the behavior of persons, things, or data through space and time, enabling such applications as presence-based advertising, and improved supply chain management

Enhanced situational awareness: Achieving real-time awareness of the physical environment, enabling applications such as logistics fleet optimization through better weather awareness or improved physical security through fusing data from many sensors

Sensor-driven decision analytics: Assisting human decision-making through deep analysis and data visualization, enabling better decisions to be made in medical diagnoses from continuous patient monitoring, or improved oil-and-gas exploration

Process optimization: Automated control of self-contained systems such as manufacturing lines

Optimized resource consumption: Control of consumption of scarce resources such as energy or water, e.g., through the application of smart grids and smart meters

Complex autonomous systems: Automated control in open environments with great uncertainty, such as collision avoidance systems in automobiles or autonomous robots being used to clean up hazardous waste sites

But you can read the fine print too, as I have embedded the whole report below:

mckinsey_internet of things

First, CBS (CBS) digital dealmaker Quincy Smith and crew formally unveiled Code Advisors, the M&A shop they’ve been assembling for nearly a year. Now comes Michael Wolf, last seen in the halls of MTV Networks, where he was COO for a bit more than a year.

That was all the way back in 2007, but Wolf’s contract with Viacom (VIA) kept him more or less tied up until 2010. Now he’s opening up his own shop: Activate, a boutique media and tech consulting firm.

That’s a return to form for Wolf, who made his reputation as a tech-savvy media consultant at both Booz Allen and McKinsey (for a time capsule that’s also 100 percent up to date, see Kurt Andersen’s 1997 New Yorker profile of Wolf). He says he’s self-funding the operation, and won’t need to take on investors, as he already has paying clients (whom he won’t name).

He also has a co-worker: Anil Dash, the longtime veteran of blogging software pioneer Six Apart, who is now a director at Expert Labs. Dash says he’ll keep his job at the nonprofit, which is a sort of tech/good government mashup, and split his time between that and Wolf’s shop.

And yes, just because people still mix them up–Wolf is not Michael Wolff, the bomb-throwing media agitator/aggregator. That’s this guy.

Georgens says that one of the things he will focus on is strengthening NetApp’s relationships with systems integrators, the consulting companies that recommend and install technology for customers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Hey, politicians aren’t the only ones who get to do fancy polls!

Walt and I had a bunch of them about a variety of tech topics that we pulled out to ambush, ooops, pose to speakers at our seventh D: All Things Digital conference last week.

For the D7, we commissioned a study of digital trends from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB), a global market research and consulting company and a conference production partner.

PSB conducted 1,005 interviews within the general U.S. population–you know, real people who are not geeked out.

One showed–despite Silicon Valley hype–how Twitter was still in its infancy, in awareness, engagement and size, which we got Co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams to react to onstage. (They could care less.)

Another showed that the biggest problem that users of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone cited was the poor AT&T (T) network. (Sorry, Randall Stephenson!)

Another looked at the declines in usage of the MySpace social networking site, which we know its new CEO Owen Van Natta enjoyed reacting to in front of the crowd. (Okay, he did not enjoy it.)

Also, no one is paying for subscriptions to blogs, which the Huffington Post impresario Arianna Huffington said was okay, since consumers will only fork over money for “very weird porn.” (Yes, she said that!)

In any case, here is a selection of slides that were shown and discussed during various speaker sessions.

Click on any slide below to enlarge, then hit “next” or “previous” on either side of the slides to page through.

Hey, politicians aren’t the only ones who get to do fancy polls!

Walt and I had a bunch of them about a variety of tech topics that we pulled out to ambush, ooops, pose to speakers at our seventh D: All Things Digital conference last week.

For the D7, we commissioned a study of digital trends from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB), a global market research and consulting company and a conference production partner.

PSB conducted 1,005 interviews within the general U.S. population–you know, real people who are not geeked out.

One showed–despite Silicon Valley hype–how Twitter was still in its infancy, in awareness, engagement and size, which we got Co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams to react to onstage. (They could care less.)

Another showed that the biggest problem that users of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone cited was the poor AT&T (T) network. (Sorry, Randall Stephenson!)

Another looked at the declines in usage of the MySpace social networking site, which we know its new CEO Owen Van Natta enjoyed reacting to in front of the crowd. (Okay, he did not enjoy it.)

Also, no one is paying for subscriptions to blogs, which the Huffington Post impresario Arianna Huffington said was okay, since consumers will only fork over money for “very weird porn.” (Yes, she said that!)

In any case, here is a selection of slides that were shown and discussed during various speaker sessions.

Click on any slide below to enlarge, then hit “next” or “previous” on either side of the slides to page through.