“[In Latin America] the smartphone will be your whole connection to the Internet,” said Bloisi, in an onstage interview at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York. “I think Wi-Fi is a big, big trend.”

The fast-growing Movile is trying to find better ways for consumers in its market to be able to connect to take advantage of rich media. “We believe the best of the mobile opportunity will be in the next four years,” said Bloisi, who noted that most users are on pre-paid phones in the important region.

More to the point, “We really need cheaper phones,” said Bloisi, especially since Latin American countries like Brazil are among the most expensive places to buy a device by a factor of 10 times or more.

Why is that so? “Taxes, taxes and the mystery of the Brazilian economy,” he joked, while pointing to efforts to produce phones in the region that would be less expensive.

Bloisi also thought that the focus away from HTML5 — a once-hot area of mobile development that has recently fallen out of favor — was wrong.

“It is not a religious discussion,” he said. “[But] on the long term, I am more HTML5.”

According to sources, Facebook has moved well-regarded exec Emily White to a new job as director of business operations at its Instagram mobile photo-sharing unit.

In this capacity, she will work with Instagram head and co-founder Kevin Systrom to scale nascent efforts to expand partnerships, improve user operations and, presumably, come up with ways to make some money. The fast-growing service, which the social networking site bought a year ago in a billion-dollar mega-deal, has been popular with consumers, but it has not focused as much on its business operations.

(Update: Facebook confirmed the move and also released this statement from Systrom: “I’m excited to bring Emily White onto the Instagram team. As we continue to scale our operation to support over 100 million active users, her experience with partnerships and business operations will play a major role in our future success.”)

In fact, related to business, it has waded more into controversy — such as when changes to its terms of service suggested that Instagram could sell user photos to advertisers, a change that was quickly rescinded by Systrom. That said, it left the door open to selling advertising of some sort on the app.

White has a lot of experience in the online ad space in smoothing out and organizing ops, both at Google — where she previously worked — and at Facebook, where she started in the deal-making arena and later worked on mobile partnerships.

White — who has recently been courted by other Internet startups, reportedly including scrapbooking phenom Pinterest — is also on the board of women’s yoga and running gear retailer Lululemon. That’s good since part of her new job will be to get more big brands integrated into Instagram, which has already begun to do that with some initial level of success.

Systrom will continue to focus more on product development and overall strategy and vision, which he has done since Instagram was purchased last April.

(That photo above is of White, which she just posted on her Instagram account — natch!)

Zynga CIO Debra Chrapaty, who has also done high-ranking stints at other big companies such as Cisco and Microsoft, has been named CEO of enterprise cloud storage company Nirvanix.

She replaces Dru Borden, who will remain at the San Diego-based company as SVP of planning and development and who will also remain a director. Chrapaty will also remain executive chairwoman of the board of Nirvanix, which has investments from Khosla Ventures and Intel Capital.

Chrapaty has most recently been CIO of Zynga, but was also SVP of Cisco’s collaboration software unit and was a corporate VP at Microsoft. She was also president and COO of E*Trade Technologies.

In an email to me, Chrapaty wrote: “I had a great run at Zynga, wish the company and the team the best. But this is a really unique opportunity to leverage a company that is at the center of unstoppable trends (to cloud which hasn’t really affected Fortune 1000 storage yet) and a company that already has some great existing people and customers and investors you have known for decades.”

Zynga has seen a number of high-level departures and top management reorgs in recent months, as it seeks to turn around its recent rocky performance.

Zynga said that Chrapaty, who was hired from Cisco in 2011, will be replaced by Zynga exec Dorion Carroll.

“We thank Debra for her leadership and contributions to Zynga over the past years and wish her luck in her future endeavors,” said Zynga COO David Ko in a statement. “As one of our Zynga Fellows, Dorion has provided direction, leadership and management across numerous technology and products teams at Zynga over the past three years as well as being one of our most senior technology leaders.”

As I noted in a piece last week about the departure of Yahoo Mail head Vivek Sharma for a new job at Disney, the Silicon Valley Internet giant is likely to see a lot more execs unhappy with the new regime of CEO Marissa Mayer take off after annual bonuses start being handed out in March.

Today, it’s James Carroll, SVP of the consumer and global platform group at Yahoo.

In the job, the former Microsoft exec has been in charge of the company’s global R&D centers in China, India and the Middle East and been “responsible for Yahoo’s content, social and membership platforms and the international delivery of all Yahoo! products and services worldwide.” That has included all its efforts at internationalization, international infrastructure development and localization.

Sources said he is leaving to head international at Go Daddy, one of the world’s biggest Web hosting and domain registration companies. Go Daddy is led by former Yahoo product head Blake Irving, who had hired Carroll at Yahoo in 2010.

And, as NBC announced earlier today, editor in chief of Yahoo News, Hillary Frey, has taken a job there as editorial director of news at NBCNews.com, which is undergoing a major refurbishment. She had been at Yahoo since late 2011.

Many more to come, I am told, as execs either decide to depart or Mayer continues to clean house. It’s still unclear who will be taking over these key jobs at Yahoo.

One thing for sure: I don’t expect a comment from Yahoo PR on the changes.

As most of the free world knows by now — from the ubiquitous media coverage that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her new book, “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” has gotten of late — there are some nagging issues of women in the workplace.

That was also underscored by the huge debate that arose over Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new rule for the Silicon Valley Internet giant that eliminated work-from-home employees.

Now, Cisco CEO John Chambers is weighing in, after a meeting with Sandberg last week, ordering each of his top managers to come up with new women-focused initiatives and put them into their development plans.

More interestingly, in an internal email I obtained, he also noted that his own leadership in the area had been lacking.

“While I have always considered myself sensitive to and effective on gender issues in the workplace, my eyes were opened in new ways and I feel a renewed sense of urgency to make the progress we haven’t made in the last decade,” wrote Chambers.

He pointed out that only one-fourth of the networking giant’s employees and top execs are women, and only 20 percent out of one million networking academy students are women. Currently, Cisco’s highest-ranking woman is Padmasree Warrior, its CTO and strategy officer, and it has three women board members.

Still, wrote Chambers:

“After reading Lean In and listening to Sheryl, I realize that, while I believe I am relatively enlightened, I have not consistently walked the talk … What we have been doing hasn’t worked, and it is time to adjust.”

Here’s the whole memo:

From: John Chambers
Date: March 8, 2013, 6:21:49 PM PST
To: John Chambers
Subject: International Working Women’s Day … Cisco Resolution

To my leaders:

I had the opportunity yesterday to discuss Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In with Sheryl and a group of my CEO peers. While I have always considered myself sensitive to and effective on gender issues in the workplace, my eyes were opened in new ways and I feel a renewed sense of urgency to make the progress we haven’t made in the last decade.

The data is startling. Women hold less than 14% of CEO positions, 17% of board seats globally, and 18% of congressional officials … and these numbers have not changed in a decade. At Cisco, less than 25% of our employees — and our leaders — are women. Only 20% of our current one-million networking academy students are women.

Today is International Working Women’s Day, and I want us, the leaders of Cisco, to see this as a leadership moment. Without realizing it, we operate every day with gender stereotypes and biases, many of which we do not realize. After reading Lean In and listening to Sheryl, I realize that, while I believe I am relatively enlightened, I have not consistently walked the talk. I think each of you, on reflection, will identify opportunities to operate at a new level with your women employees, leaders, customers, partners, and peers. I believe we — together — need to drive a fundamental culture change and it is up to us as leaders to make this change happen. What we have been doing hasn’t worked, and it is time to adjust.

I have two specific asks for each of you: 1) please read the copy of Lean In you will be receiving shortly, before we get to the SVP/VP off-site and 2) determine 3-4 specific things you will do differently and detail those commitments in your development plan and if you need help, please contact Sandy Hoffman, Chief Diversity Officer.

I know each of us will have a different explanation and a different solution, and there is power in the diversity of those ideas in driving change. I am asking two champions — Chuck Robbins and Kelly Kramer — to take a leadership role in moving us forward. I will ask them to report to the Operating Committee every quarter on the progress we have made and the action plans in place.

I think Sheryl says it best: “We can no longer pretend that biases don’t exist, nor can we talk around them … the result of creating a more equal environment will not just be better performance for our organizations, but quite likely greater happiness for all.”

Kath Weslock, Chief Human Resources Officer and I look forward to discussing this topic with many of you. We believe we have an opportunity to make a tremendous difference, and in so doing benefit our people, our culture, our company and, just maybe, the world.

John

Alibaba Group said it had selected Jonathan Lu Zhaoxi to replace its co-founder and CEO Jack Ma, starting on May 10. Ma, who is only 48 years old, will remain executive chairman, and will be involved in the Chinese Internet e-commerce giant’s business strategy and management development. Alibaba has seen tremendous growth in the last year, as it is has increased both its revenue and profit, and many expect it will go public within the next 12 months. The strong performance has, in turn, boosted the stock of Yahoo, which owns a 20 percent stake in the company.

Lu, 43, has been at Alibaba for more than a dozen years, leading major divisions of the company, including its massive and important Taobao unit. He is currently Alibaba’s chief data officer and president of Aliyun Mobile OS.

“Serving as Alibaba Group CEO is an extremely challenging and difficult job, especially succeeding a founder CEO like me. One can only imagine the responsibilities and pressure that Jonathan will shoulder,” said Ma in a letter to employees. “Alibaba has never been only the CEO’s business, it is everybody’s business.”

Here’s Ma’s full letter to employees on the change:
alibaba

And here is some of Lu’s bio, according to Alibaba:

Lu joined Alibaba in 2000, a year after the company was founded as an Internet directory allowing China’s increasingly competitive factories to more easily connect with international buyers. After forming Alibaba.com’s sales team for South China, including manufacturing powerhouse Guangdong Province, Lu in 2004 led the launch of Alipay, the company’s online payments affiliate. He later served as Alipay’s president.

In early 2008 Lu moved to Taobao, China’s dominant online retailing platform. During his tenure Taobao’s GMV (total sales generated by sellers using the platform) soared eightfold, and the online shopping unit began developing and integrating social networking into e-commerce.

Lu, who holds a master’s degree in business administration from China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, was named chief executive officer of Alibaba.com in early 2011, presiding over the privatization of the business-to-business trading website the following year.

Since July 2012, Lu has been an Alibaba executive vice president and the Group’s chief data officer. In this role, he has been responsible for driving the company’s strategically important Big Data initiative, centered on the creation of a data-sharing platform that can be accessed by the millions of small businesses that use Alibaba services. He is also responsible for Alibaba’s Aliyun mobile device operating system.

Former Vice President Al Gore took to the stage at the SXSW interactive festival today to tell a packed auditorium at the Austin Convention Center about the future.

No, really, “The Future,” which is the name of his new book, with the heavy-duty subhead “Six Drivers of Global Change.”

Among these drivers are — no surprise for him — severe environmental damage, as well as overpopulation and changes in biology via technology, and all the problems that come with that. Among the other critical issues, Gore also noted money politics, the ever-more-sophisticated antibiotics for livestock, and the reliance on supercomputers for stock market trading.

Gore told AllThingsD editor Walt Mossberg in an interview that some of these global developments were both a “peril and opportunity.”

But, in all, it’s a pretty depressing picture overall that he is painting, despite pointing out that knowing you have a problem is the first step.

“Our country is in very serious trouble,” he said. “But that does not mean I am not optimistic.”

Which is right before Gore started reeling off the problematic pressure that money has put on politics. “Our democracy has been hacked,” he said.

“American democracy has never been perfect, but more often than not, the will of the people did drive policy,” he added. “Congress today is utterly incapable of passing any reform of any significance unless they get permission from special interests.”

For example: “The NRA is a fraud,” about the National Rifle Association and its links to gun manufacturers.

“I wish I could get you to be more outspoken,” joked Mossberg.

“Timidity has always been an issue with me,” joshed Gore back.

Gore, who often likes to talk in full and very extended paragraphs, slowly worked through the rest of the list, before he got to the issue of spider goats.

Indeed, spider goats, which are created using genetics to mix the genes of spiders and goats.

“You can’t farm spiders for a number of reasons, so people are talking the genes from spiders and splicing them into goats,” explained Gore. “They look like goats, then these spider goats secret silk through their udders. ‘Everyone okay with that?’”

Um, no.

Still, Gore added that there are “blessings” that come with genetic engineering, including the elimination of a range of devastating diseases.

Gore soon moved onto the issue for which he is best known — global warming — after his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” gained worldwide attention.

“It’s not me saying it — I’m delivering the message. Every single national academy of science on the planet agrees with this, he said, before moving onto the recent devastation of Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast. “Mother Nature has the most powerful voice in this debate.”

But Mossberg and Gore soon parried over the sale of Gore’s media company, Current, to Al Jazeera.

You sold your network to Al Jazeera, which is owned by a government that’s a big oil producer,” asked Mossberg. “How could you do that?”

While hemming and hawing about that, Gore then came back with a good one: “I don’t ask you why you continue working for Rupert Murdoch.”

This meant war, since this site is owned by News Corp. “Last I checked, he’s not in the oil business,” countered Mossberg.

“He’s also not strictly in the news business, either,” said Gore.

Oh dear, time to get back to global warming, because it’s getting hot in here.

It was then onto a short Q&A, with one question about the Internet — an issue near and dear to Gore’s heart. In truth, despite all the jokes, he was critical when a senator to turning the Internet over to the people, from its origins as a government project.

And in this Gore finally pointed to a bright glimmer of hope. “The future of democracy,” he said, “may well depend on the continued freedom and independence of the Internet.”

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That’s no mistake (obviously). It’s the company’s mission to spread the “mobile first” mentality throughout the organization (a maxim oft heard and quickly becoming trite in the Valley), which means thinking about designing for mobile in all of the company’s product development.

How to do that, after the organization already has upward of 3,500 employees, with more being added every day? Part of the solution: Send ’em to boot camp.

Facebook has contracted the services of Big Nerd Ranch, an 11-year-old outfit responsible for running a week-long, 40-hour crash course in mobile development that any and all Facebook employees can sign up for.

“Eighty percent of those who took the training were software engineers,” Facebook Director of Mobile Engineering Mike Shaver told reporters at a roundtable Monday. But surprisingly, folks from departments other than engineering were willing to sign up for the course, from marketing to sales to disciplines that wouldn’t require a comprehensive knowledge of mobile coding.

The way Shaver describes it, it’s part of Facebook’s grand, year-long initiative to shift from a Web-centric model of thought to incorporating “native code” — or programming language specific to iOS or Android — into the company’s thinking. In short, it’s crucial in making Facebook’s apps actually perform well. (Remember how crappy the Facebook app was a year ago? I certainly do.)

Which is sort of important, given that Facebook is one of the most popular apps on smartphones across the world.

The program seems to be going well. More than 450 employees have gone through Big Nerd Ranch’s sessions since last July, with nearly two-thirds of those opting to focus on Android rather than iOS. And that’s important to note, too, considering Android’s massive reach in the global mobile device market.

I’d imagine as Facebook continues to hire, the program will continue to expand. Facebook doesn’t require that folks have specific engineering experience in certain areas — “generalists are welcome,” Shaver said — but the ones who are already well versed in either iOS or Android can move through the organization and act as “little seed crystals for different product groups,” Shaver said, which will hopefully beef up the mobile focus overall.

Well-known digital media exec Zander Lurie has been hired by former Yahoo exec Ross Levinsohn to become one of his key lieutenants at Guggenheim Digital Media.

Lurie will be an EVP there, where he will help manage and grow the new heavily funded digital unit of Guggenheim Partners, whose current media assets include Billboard, the Hollywood Reporter, Adweek, the Clio Awards, Film Expo Group and the digital extensions for Dick Clark Productions.

Lurie was most recently an exec at CBS, including as SVP of strategic development, where he worked on a number of key digital initiatives. He was CFO and head of business development for CBS Interactive and also worked on M&A at its CNET tech news unit. Lurie left the media giant in May.

“The opportunity to join Guggenheim Digital Media and work alongside Ross was a no-brainer,” wrote Lurie to me in an email. “We have high-quality, trusted brands in the portfolio and an appetite to grow our position in the premium content/video landscape.”

Expect more acquisitions now that the deal-making Lurie is joining the deal-making Levinsohn and there’s a pile of dough to spend.

Lurie is the first significant hire by Levinsohn, who became CEO of GDM last month. He had been interim CEO of Yahoo, but lost that job when the Silicon Valley Internet giant hired former Google exec Marissa Mayer.

Michel Protti, who worked with Levinsohn at Yahoo as his chief of staff, is also joining GDM as SVP. Before Yahoo, Protti worked at McKinsey & Company.

Pinterest, the popular social scrapbooking site, has completed a massive $200 million funding, which values the company at $2.5 billion, according to sources close to the situation.

There have been reports that the funding was coming, but now it is done, in a round led by Valiant Capital Management. Existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital also participated.

Update: Pinterest confirmed the funding and released this statement from CEO Ben Silbermann: “Our focus is on helping millions of people discover things they love and get inspiration to go do those things in their life. This investment gives us more resources to help realize that vision.”

Pinterest’s last round was in May of 2012, when it raised $100 million from Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten.

It’s likely that the San Francisco-based Pinterest will use the money for further product development, as well as to accelerate international expansion, to further expand the scope of its impact and reach.

While it sounds too simple to be so valuable, consumers have flocked to the free site on which they “pin” photos of their interests and share them widely. Usage has exploded and has also become an increasingly key driver of traffic across the Web.

It now has close to 50 million unique monthly users worldwide and has quintupled its employees to 100 in the last year.

Such growth has become invaluable to many doing business across the Web.

As an article in The Wall Street Journal, which had also flagged funding efforts, recently noted:

Businesses said they also have gravitated to Pinterest because “pinned” content has a different life cycle than what is posted on Facebook and Twitter. Brian Madden. executive director of social media for Hearst Corp.’s Hearst Digital Media, said content that Hearst puts onto Pinterest can resurface months later when people continue to discover it. In contrast, posts on Facebook and Twitter tweets produce “a lot of initial interaction” before fading.

“The longevity of content [on Pinterest] is very valuable to us,” said Mr. Madden. He adds that in December, Hearst got more online traffic through Pinterest than Facebook and Twitter combined. Overall, 3% to 5% of traffic to Hearst’s various brands was through Pinterest that month, with about 1.5% from Facebook and 1.5% from Twitter, Hearst said.

I have a call into Pinterest and await confirmation about the funding.

About two weeks ago, I heard about a restructuring under HBO SVP of consumer technology Otto Berkes, who also takes over the job of CTO in March from longtime vet Bob Zitter. The former Microsoft exec and Xbox co-founder was named the top tech figure at the premium cable network at the end of last year, after being the primary developer of its popular HBO Go and MAX Go streaming video offerings.

As part of the changes, the memo of the Time Warner unit said, product strategy and development exec Hans Deutmeyer is leaving HBO.

HBO has been very active in the digital space, increasingly offering its shows on a variety of mobile devices. Earlier this week, at our D: Dive Into Media conference, HBO said its subscribers will be able to stream programming from an Apple iPhone or iPad onto their television via AirPlay.

All the various details are below, in a memo HBO sent to its employees at the end of January:

HBO GO has established HBO as a company that understands the value of technology as a tool for delivering great content and experiences to consumers, and HBO.com has become a primary means of driving broad consumer engagement and awareness of our offerings. We are proud of these achievements and also recognize that we have more ahead of us to accomplish. Over the course of the next several years, our mission is to build best-in-class technology execution capabilities. That mission is central to ensuring that HBO has the tools available to support our business through the ongoing technology-based disruption of media and to support new areas of growth. Like other leading Internet-based video service providers, we will design, build, and deploy scalable products with global reach.

Achieving these goals will require focus and a disciplined approach. Roles and responsibilities must be clear and well-defined to ensure efficient distribution of work and smooth collaboration between groups and people. In order to provide the organizational framework needed to achieve our goals, I am restructuring Digital Products around four functional groups (listed alphabetically):

1. Infrastructure Operations & QA,
2. Program Management,
3. Software Engineering,
4. User Experience & Product Design.

Each of these groups will have responsibilities for both HBO GO and HBO.com as appropriate for the functional areas of each group. This will enable more efficient end-to-end integration and coordination of our design, platform architecture, and infrastructure development.

The attached “Digital Products Organizational Pillars” slide illustrates the roles and responsibilities of each of these four functional groups in greater detail. The leaders of these groups will report directly to me and will continue to do so after my transition to the CTO role.

Donna Stalworth will continue to head up the infrastructure operations and QA efforts in Digital Products. She will also add build and release management to her responsibilities.

Rebekah Calabrese will be stepping into the role of VP of Program Management for Digital Products. She and her team will be responsible for cross-group coordination, project management, budget management, technology vendor relationships, and overall status communication for Digital Products. Rebekah will also continue to provide contract support for Digital Products as well as the other technology groups. Her team will consist of the existing Digital Products program and project management staff and her current reports.

Drew Angeloff will lead all of Digital Products’ software engineering activities in New York as well as in Seattle. Centralizing consumer software engineering in one group under one leader will maximize coordination and the flow of information, and will help ensure a consistent and robust software architecture. This is especially important given geographic distance between the New York and Seattle teams. The engineering staff working on device application development and the GO service currently on Rob Caruso’s team will now report to Drew.

Rob Caruso and the workflow team led by Jason Kui will transition to Diane Tryneski’s organization; Rob will report to Diane. Rob’s new charter is to build software engineering capabilities to optimize digital asset creation, management, and security, and to create technologies that unlock the full potential of software in the digital content area. Rob and his team will collaborate closely with Digital Products to ensure that our digital content technologies and our consumer-facing products inform each other to enable unique and innovative content-driven user experiences. This new role and group will be critical to achieving end-to-end software technology excellence.

Dina Juliano will lead the User Experience & Product Design organization. Her team’s responsibilities will include HBO GO, HBO.com, and HBO On Demand. Dina’s team will conceive, design, and realize new digital experiences in partnership with key stakeholders across HBO. She and her team will incorporate consumer and market insights to create a coherent product vision and roadmap that engages our users. Dina’s team will consist of her existing team and the groups formerly in Hans Deutmeyer’s organization.

Hans has decided to leave HBO to pursue opportunities that better align with his future interests. Hans has been a part of the HBO GO story since its genesis and has played a key role in bringing it to the market successfully. Given the new organizational direction, he has decided that this is the right time for him to pursue other opportunities. I want to thank Hans for his contributions and wish him success in his new endeavors.

Please welcome Donna, Rebekah, Drew, Rob, and Dina in their new roles. The changes in their teams and roles are effective immediately.

I am very excited about the new organization and am confident that we have the right the structure, leadership, passion, talent, and creativity needed to deliver best-in-class digital products to our users.

Please let your manager or me know if you have any questions.

Thank you-

— Otto —

Longtime digital exec Jeff Berman is joining Hollywood production company BermanBraun as its first president.

Berman — who is no relation to BermanBraun co-founder Gail Berman — comes to the firm from the National Football League where he has been in charge of its Web, mobile, social and non-console gaming efforts. While there, he worked on several new initiatives, such as its multi-party video chat for Fantasy Football.

Several years before that, he was a top exec at social networking site Myspace, finally ending up as president of sales and marketing, where he was in charge of branded advertising, sales operations, entertainment, content and marketing. Efforts there by Berman included the now defunct Web-only series “Quarterlife,” which also had a very short life on a major network.

The Yale Law School grad was also on the board of Buddy Media, which was sold to Salesforce.com last year.

He’s an interesting person, then, for BermanBraun, which focuses on content across multiple screens, including big branded Web sites such as Wonderwall for Microsoft’s MSN and also more traditional entertainment shows. Its juicy-looking television series “Deception,” for example, is set to appear on NBC this week. It now has about 130 employees, mostly working at its Santa Monica, Calif., HQ.

“We needed an exceptional leader to manage the company,” said BermanBraun co-founder Lloyd Braun, who was once a top media exec at Yahoo. “And Jeff is someone who has skillsets in a whole bunch of areas and an emotional intelligence that is as important to what we do.”

Braun said Berman would initially focus on his area of expertise — digital — but that he would become more involved in the television and movie arenas over time.

BermanBraun — which considered raising funding last year — is at an interesting juncture in its development, trying to form a new kind of independent Hollywood media company that straddles analog and digital.

Berman said he was attracted to the opportunity there.

“I had a great job, since there is nothing bigger than the NFL,” he said in an interview yesterday. “But Lloyd and Gail have an incredible vision across platforms for entertainment.”

He added that content was just at the beginning of development online, but was finally poised to explode with the popularity of tablets, smartphones, interactive TV and other such devices, as well as social and e-commerce tools.

“The mind reels, there is so much that has happened and can happen,” said Berman. “I don’t know if there is a better time to be at such a place to create these new franchises — [BermanBraun] is a laboratory, where stuff is actually working.”

The culture-celebrating hijinks continue at Yahoo, it seems.

After free food and smartphones and even dressing up as a Yahoo purple banger, CEO Marissa Mayer now has a high-ranking exec dancing for employee enjoyment.

As part of an effort to improve participation in the annual Yahoo Employee Satisfaction Survey (YESS), Mayer instituted a punishment for the lowest participation rate of any division on her executive staff.

The culprit turned out to be Jackie Reses, EVP of people and development for Yahoo, which includes the unlikely combo of human resources and business development.

Thus, Reses apparently had to dance to the hit K-pop song “Gangnam Style” with her staff at the weekly FYI employee meeting at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ on Friday.

Despite having a rep as an intense New Yorker, said one employee, Reses has some “decent moves.” Others agreed.

Also decent was one of the top results of YESS, which showed that employee belief in the future vision of the company was up 32 points year over year.

That’s not a big surprise, given the upward trajectory of Yahoo’s shares of late. But, more to the point, it has a weak comparable in last year’s survey, which painted a picture of a deeply demoralized workplace. That’s because the 2011 YESS questions went out to employees the week that the company fired CEO Carol Bartz, with most of the responses gathered in the ensuing weeks.

Despite the improvement, this year’s YESS also still showed a lot of worry about whether Yahoo leadership can execute, and whether the company can achieve strong results over the long term.

[UPDATE: One reader said the Yahoo survey is now called YEES, the Yahoo Employee Engagement Survey. I could not determine if that name change had been made.]

That’s the question that at least one Wall Street firm was asking, in a downgrade of Yahoo stock today. In dropping Yahoo’s rank to “market-perform,” Sanford C. Bernstein analysts noted worries about its turnaround efficacy, a possibly jarring reorg of its advertising unit, and also whether the future sale of its assets in China’s Alibaba Group can save the day again, as it did for last quarter’s results.

“We think there may be upside from an eventual Alibaba IPO at a valuation much higher than $50B or a Yahoo! core turn-around, but it is hard to have high conviction in either given the facts we currently have,” said the report, in part. “In addition, there is manageable but real downside risk: reorganization (e.g., of the sales force) could be negative for revenues, management could decide to invest in growth now and cut excess later, and MSFT RPS guarantee could expire without a renewal.”

Those are all good questions for investors to ask, of course, although more have been caught up in the hype/hope ahead of actual performance gains.

Still, it’s no sweat to get caught up in digital execs being made to trip the light fantastic for their weak results. So, since I was not there to enjoy Reses’ performance, click here for an also fun-tastic JibJab Gangnam video I made of her.

Adam Cahan

A very important management shift at Yahoo got a bit lost in last week’s news of CEO Marissa Mayer’s first acquisition, a small mobile start-up called Stamped.

That would be the appointment of former IntoNow founder and CEO Adam Cahan to oversee all of Yahoo’s mobile efforts, as well as its Flickr photo sharing service.

According to an internal memo that Mayer sent out last week to employees, Cahan has been given the title of SVP of Emerging Products and Technology, with a spot on the exec staff, reporting directly to her.

Said the memo (in its entirety below):

“[Cahan] will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.”

Mayer’s promotion of the slick exec, who has been described by almost everyone I spoke to at Yahoo as smoothly political, is an interesting internal choice by Mayer. He only got to Yahoo recently, after IntoNow was bought by Yahoo for more than $20 million in the spring of last year.

IntoNow was a spinoff from the video advertising company Auditude, which was sold to Adobe for a reported $100 million.

The television indexing start-up had launched in early 2011 as an Apple iPhone app that recognized what was playing on the screen by analyzing the audio from satellite feeds and matching it to listings. The start-up had hoped to eventually license its technology as offer-measurement services for TV advertising and viewership.

As Liz Gannes noted in a post on AllThingsD:

“It’s similar to the Shazam mobile app that many people know and love, which IDs an ambient song by recording it and quickly matching it to an archive. IntoNow users can “check in” to a particular episode once it’s been recognized, like one would check into a restaurant on Foursquare. The goal is to enable conversations around the watercooler and on social networks by helping users connect around what they’re watching and discover new things to watch.”

Cool, although IntoNow’s technology was far more compelling than its consumer promise.

Now, Cahan will be charged with doing both of Yahoo in mobile — which is most likely to be accomplished via a series of small mobile acquisitions, presumably to be stitched together into a cohesive and successful whole.

At least that’s the idea.

Cahan is an experienced exec, having worked at a number of places before founding IntoNow, including MTV Networks, NBC, McKinsey, National Geographic Television and — wait for it — Google, in business operations.

(Being an ex-Googler, which Mayer is, seems to have its advantages at Yahoo these days, with Cahan as the latest example.)

He is most definitely a key hire, because Mayer spent a lot of time stressing how mobile was Yahoo’s No. 1 priority on its recent earnings call with investors.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said, noting a “focused, coherent” mobile strategy was the top initiative.

Mayer had to say that, of course, even if being a mobile giant is now mostly just wishful thinking at Yahoo, since most of the many efforts the company has made in the arena have been duds. Yahoo has also lost a lot of mobile engineering talent over the years, remaining largely a desktop offering, even as the area has increasingly become where consumers are getting their information.

A blog post by Cahan at Yahoo was widely quoted when the tiny Stamped — which is an online recommendations app — was bought for under $10 million last week by Yahoo.

In it, he noted:

“Most people are always within arm’s reach of their mobile phones. For many of us, it’s the first thing we look at in the morning and the last thing we check at night. Mobile is at the center of how we connect with people, consume information, and pass the time, and we’re focused on making Yahoo! the most inspiring and entertaining way to do just that.”

We’ll see if Yahoo can be a significant mobile player, as Mayer has promised Wall Street. But Cahan has certainly been busy since he got the job, sources said, beginning with the rejiggering of Yahoo’s mobile teams, as well as visiting the Flickr office this week.

Until it all sorts itself out, please enjoy this Oct. 25 internal memo on Cahan and the Stamped acquisition:

YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD

Hi All –

As we discussed in our strategy all-hands earlier this month, innovation and talent are essential to delivering against our vision to inspire and delight our users as a part of their daily lives. Many of the areas that require special attention are emerging technologies and Yahoo! products where we’ve not yet reinvented, re-imagined and rebuilt in order to keep pace with changes in user behaviors and platform shifts.

To aid our efforts, I’m promoting Adam Cahan to lead this effort as Senior Vice President of Emerging Products and Technology. Adam will be a member of e-staff and report directly to me. He will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.

And he’s already making great progress! Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve acquired a very talented mobile team, based in New York City.

Robby, Kevin, Bart, Paul and the entire team at Stamped are a natural fit for Yahoo!. Their experience building fun, useful, personalized mobile products aligns well with our vision to create the best everyday mobile experience for our users. The team will be a great asset for us as we expand Yahoo!’s mobile efforts and create another key center for mobile innovation in New York.

I’m excited that we’ve been able to move quickly and execute well in order to bring on such a talented team. Please join me in congratulating Adam in his promotion and welcoming Anthony, Bart, Geoff, Kevin, Landon, Michael, Paul, Robby and Travis to Yahoo!

Thanks,

Marissa

Big management shifts at Apple are now taking place.

Scott Forstall, the man in charge of its iOS mobile software efforts and a major and longtime executive at the tech giant, is leaving next year and will remain an adviser to CEO Tim Cook until then.

In addition, new retail head John Browett is headed out the door.

As part of the move, Apple noted that four key execs — Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi — would “add responsibilities to their roles.”

Ive gets “Human Interface”; Cue will take over Maps and Siri voice recognition responsibilities; Mansfield will run a new unit called Technologies, “which combines all of Apple’s wireless teams across the company in one organization”; and Federighi gets the big job of iOS and OS X.

More to come on what happened, but Forstall’s departure is very big news and a drastic move for such an important player in the tech space.

He had big fans and also many detractors for his sharp-edged personality, as well as what some described as exhibiting “growing open challenges” to Cook himself. Forstall had previously been called “CEO-in-waiting” in one media account in Fortune.

In addition, numerous sources noted persistent tension between Forstall and several other key execs, especially the powerful design chief Ive.

Veiled internal politics at Apple aside, Forstall has been a key part of Apple’s success over the last decade, especially in the development iPad and the iPhone.

Recently, there has been some level of ire at Apple over the troubled rollout of its own mapping software and the replacement of Google’s popular service, which was Forstall’s responsibility. (No, this move does not mean everyone gets Google mapping back, as one person asked me.)

Browett’s leaving is a little less of a surprise. Since he got the job, he has alienated many within the highly successful retail organization at Apple, many sources said.

His departure comes less than one year after the former Dixons CEO was hired by Apple to succeed Ron Johnson, who left for J.C. Penney in November 2011. Recently he’s been criticized by some Apple Store employees for unfriendly policy changes aimed at increasing Apple’s retail profit margins.

More to come, obvi, but here is the official press release from Apple, which it put out with the most understated title of all time:

Apple Announces Changes to Increase Collaboration Across Hardware, Software & Services

Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi Add Responsibilities to Their Roles

CUPERTINO, California — October 29, 2012 — Apple® today announced executive management changes that will encourage even more collaboration between the Company’s world-class hardware, software and services teams. As part of these changes, Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi will add more responsibilities to their roles. Apple also announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim.

“We are in one of the most prolific periods of innovation and new products in Apple’s history,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The amazing products that we’ve introduced in September and October, iPhone 5, iOS 6, iPad mini, iPad, iMac, MacBook Pro, iPod touch, iPod nano and many of our applications, could only have been created at Apple and are the direct result of our relentless focus on tightly integrating world-class hardware, software and services.”

Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company in addition to his role as the leader of Industrial Design. His incredible design aesthetic has been the driving force behind the look and feel of Apple’s products for more than a decade.

Eddy Cue will take on the additional responsibility of Siri® and Maps, placing all of our online services in one group. This organization has overseen major successes such as the iTunes Store®, the App Store℠, the iBookstore℠ and iCloud®. This group has an excellent track record of building and strengthening Apple’s online services to meet and exceed the high expectations of our customers.

Craig Federighi will lead both iOS and OS X®. Apple has the most advanced mobile and desktop operating systems, and this move brings together the OS teams to make it even easier to deliver the best technology and user experience innovations to both platforms.

Bob Mansfield will lead a new group, Technologies, which combines all of Apple’s wireless teams across the company in one organization, fostering innovation in this area at an even higher level. This organization will also include the semiconductor teams, who have ambitious plans for the future.

Additionally, John Browett is leaving Apple. A search for a new head of Retail is underway and in the interim, the Retail team will report directly to Tim Cook. Apple’s Retail organization has an incredibly strong network of leaders at the store and regional level who will continue the excellent work that has been done over the past decade to revolutionize retailing with unique, innovative services for customers.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

DreamWorks Animation, the Hollywood studio that has made such movies as “Shrek,” has promoted Lincoln Wallen to be its new CTO.

“Lincoln is an exceptional executive and brilliant technologist whose contributions to DreamWorks Animation have already been monumental,” said DreamWorks Animation’s CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg in a statement.

Wallen had been DreamWorks’ head of animation technology, having joined the company in 2008 as head of research and development. Previously, he was CTO at Electronic Arts.

Wallen replaces former CTO Ed Leonard, who is now running a mobile app effort called Ptch, incubated at DreamWorks.

When the stock market opens later today, one interesting indication of the impact of the Apple victory over Samsung in its patent infringement battle will be investor reaction.

A jury in California rendered the verdict in the contentious case — in which more than $1 billion was awarded Apple — after the markets had closed on Friday.

In after-hours trading starting later that day, Apple’s shares rose smartly. The stock is now up almost 2.4 percent, or $15.67, to $678.89. Apple closed Friday afternoon at $663.22, already an all-time high.

On the flip side, today in Asian markets, Samsung’s stock plunged 7 percent.

And even though the South Korean consumer electronics giant has vowed to appeal the decision, this morning will bring the clearest indication of what the financial markets think of the development.

Will Apple soar — especially given that the Silicon Valley icon is expected in the weeks ahead to also be releasing new versions of its hugely popular iPhone and iPad devices?

And whither the shares of Google — a major Samsung mobile partner, whose Android operating system software is at the heart of many of the contested smartphones and tablets?

The big question, of course, is whether Google is seen by Wall Street as a Samsung proxy, with the potential of being a future target of Apple’s lawyers or, perhaps more simply, collateral damage in the fight.

Not surprisingly, the search giant sought to distance itself from the legal melee by finally releasing an ain’t-nobody-here-but-us-chickens statement on the situation last night.

In case you’re keeping track anyway, Google shares closed Friday at $678.63 — ironically, at almost the exact same price as Apple’s.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Apple versus Samsung Full Coverage

Actually, if truth be told, Buffalo, N.Y., is one of the loveliest places to visit in the summer, especially if you’re lucky enough to be right next to majestic Lake Erie.

And that is where the Z80 Labs will have its grand opening today in the Queen City, home of chicken wings and lots and lots of snow, by launching its first start-up, called AppVue.

While visiting the Western New York city this past weekend, I paid a visit to the new facility, which is in a large airy room on the first floor of the Buffalo News.

What’s most heartening to see, of course, is the definitely more earnest and rawer kind of entrepreneurism on display, of a kind that is often lost in the slick, well-oiled machine of Silicon Valley.

That was the point by well-known venture capitalist Jordan Levy of SoftBank Capital, who has long split his time between New York City and his home in Buffalo. He founded the incubator with SoftBank’s Ron Schreiber.

“It’s easy for entrepreneurs in places like Palo Alto to get going,” the voluble Levy said to me on my visit. “We wanted to find a way to keep really great techies here to create an ecosystem that would be able to jump-start even more and help this city keep jobs.”

The longtime investor (pictured here) had already made scores of wins from fundings of companies such as OMGPOP (sold to Zynga) and Buddy Media (sold to Salesforce.com). But Levy appears particularly proud of Buffalo-based Synacor, where he serves as chairman. It’s a successful cloud platform service for companies that want to put video online.

As the big tech dog in Buffalo, Synacor is playing a big role in Z80 Labs, which will focus primarily on making investments in digital media and mobile Internet companies.

The tech incubator — which will provide office space, support and mentorship to its start-ups — is also getting an assist from a $4 million Innovate NY grant provided by the state.

Such a solid base is just what the founders of AppVue — which “specializes in mobile apps that make trusted recommendations among social media friends and networks” — told me they needed.

Essentially, it’s another new take on app discovery, which is a vexing issue for both app creators and users.

After AppVue won the University at Buffalo’s Henry A. Panasci Jr. Technology Entrepreneurship Competition, besting 19 other companies, its trio of founders — Matthew Epstein, CEO; Andrew Cassetti, EVP of product development; and Chief Architect Nathan Schiffer — told me that, until now, there have been no other options but to leave the area to make it in tech.

“We wanted to stay here, and now we can,” said Epstein. “And we are getting the kind of attention we need to try to make this a real company.”

Let’s hope so. It’s already looking impressive at its start — both Forbes CEO Mike Perlis and New York power VC Fred Wilson will make appearances today for Z80’s debut.

I’d suggest Frank & Teressa’s Anchor Bar on Main Street — where chicken wings were apparently invented, and an arena in which Silicon Valley will never have an upper hand.

In a critical hire to solidify its top corporate ranks, Airbnb has hired Intuit finance exec Andrew Swain as CFO.

At Intuit, he was VP of finance for the financial software company’s $1.5 billion consumer group, which includes its well-known TurboTax, Quicken and Mint products. Previous to that, Swain was VP of corporate strategy and development.

Swain also worked at the Boston Consulting Group. He got an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS from the University of Manchester.

The San Francisco-based Airbnb said that Swain would “provide strategic leadership and build the company’s financial infrastructure as it continues its rapid global growth.”

AirBnb also hired a head of talent — former Apple HR exec Joni Reicher. She was most recently senior director of HR, focused on Apple’s sales org and also on its international recruiting.

Last week, Ford Motor Company officially opened a new “lab” in Silicon Valley, a move to get it immersed into the tech scene here and also burnish its innovation cred.

The reasons for the move — which some other car companies have also made — are myriad, including focusing on leveraging big data from its four million cars that have a variety of sensing and other synching technology embedded in them.

It’s all been part of an aggressive effort by Chairman Bill Ford Jr. and CEO Alan Mulally to double down on tech as a key differentiator of its automobiles.

That includes Ford’s nifty hands-free SYNC offering, which lets consumers control a variety of devices without interfering with driving. Detroit-based Ford has opened up the technology to allow third-party development using SYNC.

Now comes the inevitable Palo Alto, Calif., office in the heart of the digital industry, to push Ford further and to move the company from the car business to the “mobility” one.

That’s according to Paul Mascarenas, the charming CTO of Ford Research and Innovation, who leads the global development and implementation of the company’s technology strategy.

He talked about a wide range of issues for automakers going forward — from air bags in seatbelts to cars that sense your every move.

Mascarenas was even brave enough to let me drive him around in Ford’s latest all-electric vehicle — the 2012 Ford Focus Electric, with a range of 90 miles — which I thankfully did not crash into some geek on University Avenue.

Here’s the video of the interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120624/fords-cto-drives-new-silicon-valley-office-opening-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120623/happy-100th-birthday-alan-turing-love-silicon-valley/ http://allthingsd.com/20120623/happy-100th-birthday-alan-turing-love-silicon-valley/#comments Sat, 23 Jun 2012 22:32:56 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=223620

Although the circumstances of his death — considered a suicide, due to persecution over his being gay, although that conclusion has recently been disputed — were tragic, there is no question that computing owes a great deal to Alan Turing.

Britain’s math whiz and famed codebreaker would have celebrated his 100 birthday today. His theories that helped crack Nazi Germany’s Enigma code in World War II might be enough, but Turing pushed the boundaries on machine intelligence and algorithms to levels that changed technology.

The development of the modern computer — including work on the stored program concept — was born from many of his key insights.

No surprise, the doodle today on Google — a company that knows a thing or two about algorithms — today is in tribute to him, a version of Turing’s hypothetical computing machine.

Here it is:

And, if you want to learn more about this tech legend, visit the Web site of Bletchley Park, the location of the secret British codebreaking activities during WWII. Turing worked there, along with 10,000 others — including 5,000 women.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120623/happy-100th-birthday-alan-turing-love-silicon-valley/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120614/its-time-for-an-internal-memo-dibble-takes-over-all-tech-at-yahoo/ http://allthingsd.com/20120614/its-time-for-an-internal-memo-dibble-takes-over-all-tech-at-yahoo/#comments Fri, 15 Jun 2012 05:06:21 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=220638

Even though he is interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn just made a significant change in Yahoo’s tech organization, putting David Dibble in charge of both central technology and core platforms.

Previously, Dibble had been running technology and operations.

The move puts everything from Yahoo’s vast databases to its infrastructure that serves consumers to its advertising products under Dibble.

He is not, as some at Yahoo have perceived the new role, in charge of consumer product development itself. That role still remains with several execs, including Shashi Seth and Mickie Rosen. Yahoo is reportedly looking for a more senior product exec, as well as a new ad head.

But — since it’s Yahoo — the shift is not sitting well with some at the company, since it gives the man in charge of IT a much more expanded role in areas beyond his usual purview. One person likened it to “having an architectural firm run by a plumber.”

Ouch! Still, Dibble is well-regarded as an operator and a technologist and considered one of the more no-nonsense execs at the company.

As part of the move, another longtime Yahoo exec, Mark Morrissey, moves under Dibble as chief of operations for engineering. He used to report directly to the CEO and has held a number of jobs at Yahoo, including working on its search alliance with Microsoft.

Here’s the internal memo about the changes:

Yahoos:

Nothing will enable us to win as much as our ability to execute at the highest levels. We have incredible talent here. We have one of the largest audiences in the world, and we have a myriad of experiences that engage and delight users globally. It’s imperative that Yahoo! execute and operate in a world-class manner. When combined with a true focus on our priorities, growth and prosperity will be the natural outcome. Alignment of our organization and talent against a clear set of actions and goals is essential. To further enable our efforts, I’m pleased to announce the following organization alignment, effectively immediately.

We are bringing together our Central Technology and Core Platforms into one team that will be led by David Dibble. This provides the consumer business units with a single technology team responsible for platforms, technology infrastructure, engineering, science, and operations. It also unifies our key talent behind major projects including Rewire, Alpha, Agile, video technology, mobile technology, personalization and ad targeting, security, and sales tools.

Great technology relies fully on great execution. Great content cannot flourish without great technology. World-class experiences are fully wedded to flawless execution. David has proven to be a world-class operator with a team that operates at remarkable levels at massive scale. Thus, I’ve asked that David also take on broader operating responsibilities for Yahoo!

As executive vice president of technology and operations, David will lead diverse, dynamic, cross-functional program management initiatives and hold teams accountable for key deliverables, including uniting stakeholders in a cohesive product development lifecycle process. This ensures we have the right business case and strategic underpinnings to make our next generation products successful, and that teams are aligned on strategy, objectives, and goals from product conception through launch and subsequent iterations. Product-specific engineering teams for Connections and Media will continue to report into those business units and work closely with the combined group.

Additionally, I am thrilled to announce that Mark Morrissey becomes chief of operations for engineering, reporting into David. In this expanded and pivotal role for our company, Mark leads teams focused on product operations and lifecycle, service engineering, and priority program transitions. He is point for continuing the engineering Alpha initiative and Rewire, our effort to increase datacenter efficiencies. Critical to our future will be Mark’s role in driving our product operations and lifecycle. We must dramatically accelerate how we conceptualize, develop, and go to market with our products. We also must ensure that the company as a whole is fully aware and does their part to capture the potential opportunity. We need to assure the highest quality performance, maximize our marketing efforts and drive both user engagement and monetization. Mark will ensure that we have an agile, yet complete process.

John Kremer continues to lead business operations and the execution of the Alpha initiative, reporting into Mark. John is the executive lead for change management and ensuring the Alpha initiative is executed across the organization with quality and cohesion.

Please join me in congratulating David, Mark, and John. The leadership team and I are committed to making things easier, removing obstacles to our success and enabling Yahoo! to accelerate. I appreciate everything you contribute to the company daily; your passion, drive, and determination are inspiring. Together we are creating the future and defining what it means to be the world’s leading technology powered media company. Much like you, I’m playing to win. We’re in the midst of a revival!

Ross

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120614/its-time-for-an-internal-memo-dibble-takes-over-all-tech-at-yahoo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120514/twilio-taps-say-media-vet-kirkpatrick-as-cfo/ http://allthingsd.com/20120514/twilio-taps-say-media-vet-kirkpatrick-as-cfo/#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 12:00:37 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=207472 Something is going on at the telephony software start-up Twilio, and I guess the word to use is “growth.”

Barely two weeks after hiring former Jive exec Lynda Smith as its chief marketing officer, today it will announce that it has a new CFO. It’s Lee Kirkpatrick, and he’s leaving Say Media, where he had the same title. He started his new job on May 7.

Twilio is growing so fast that it’s a little hard to keep track of all the news coming out of it. In his new role, Kirkpatrick will be responsible for Twilio’s finances and worldwide strategy. The company recently added Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden to the steadily growing stable of countries where it is operating. It also recently struck a deal with Microsoft to add telephony features to its Azure cloud computing platform, so, yeah, maybe now might be the time to add a CFO.

What’s Job One? Well, here’s a funny tradition at Twilio: Every employee, no matter their level or level of technical ability, is required to build a Twilio application in order to become familiar with how the service works. So, part of this week will be devoted to that. Companies like eBay unit StubHub, Salesforce.com and Airbnb have used it to create some custom apps that include the use of a phone.

It’s a very Twilio sort of thing to do. When the company was in the process of raising its most recent funding round — a $17 million series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures — Bessemer partner Byron Deeter created a Twilio-connected number and asked CEO Jeff Lawson to call it. As VentureBeat reported at the time, when Lawson called, he heard an automated voice message asking him to press 1 for $5 million, press 2 for $10 million and press 3 for $15 million.

It turned out that C round topped out at $17 million late last year, bringing its total capital raised to about $34 million, so there’s a decent-sized pile of money to look after. Before Say Media, Kirkpatrick held executive jobs at Ofoto, the Kodak Gallery and Reuters.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120514/twilio-taps-say-media-vet-kirkpatrick-as-cfo/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!):

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