The Longish Goodbye: Highlights From AllThingsD Staffers Johnson, Del Rey and Cha

I don’t know why you say hello, we say goodbye.

News Byte

Yahoo Loses New Top Data Scientist to eBay

Tim Converse, one of Yahoo’s higher-ranking data scientists, who arrived at the company early this year via an acquisition, has been hired away by eBay. He will lead its search-science engineering team, reporting to search technology VP Dan Fain. Converse is co-founder of Jybe, a mobile app for recommendation and social discovery that the Silicon Valley Internet giant bought in March. His LinkedIn profile notes that, at Yahoo, he “worked on machine learning techniques for the personalization group.”

Betaworks Hires Former HuffPost Publisher Balis as CRO

The New York-based tech studio is trying to monetize across all its online media platforms.

PlayPhone Adds SingTel to Its Roster, Betting on “Not Yet Mature” Emerging Markets

And it’s a safe bet, too. Just don’t expect a whole lot of change overnight.

News Byte

StumbleUpon Acquires Video Discovery Startup 5by

StumbleUpon, the website discovery startup that has been around for more than a decade, announced on Tuesday it has acquired 5by, a Montreal-based video discovery startup. The six-person 5by team will relocate to StumbleUpon’s San Francisco-based offices, and for now will continue supporting the 5by standalone mobile and Web-based apps as it works toward integrating into StumbleUpon’s products. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Foursquare Says It’s Ready to Impress You Now

A new “passive” tip feature starts rolling out, and Dennis Crowley says it’s a huge deal: “This is the version of Foursquare that we’ve been talking about building for a long time.”
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News Byte

PlayPhone Partners With Sprint for Preloaded Social Games Store

PlayPhone has partnered with Sprint to preload its social games store on some of the U.S. carrier’s new devices. Sprint is the fourth such carrier to partner with PlayPhone, after Verizon, AT&T and Claro Brazil. Games in the store, which must integrate PlayPhone’s SDK, let players quickly connect with gamer friends via a built-in menu, and support direct carrier billing if the developer so chooses. The visibility of a preloaded store means better discovery for participating developers, PlayPhone says, and carriers like having alternatives to the two juggernaut mobile app stores, Apple’s and Google’s.

Facebook-Owned Parse to Host First Developer Conference

Attention mobile developers — Facebook really wants to help you build mobile apps.

News Byte

Outbrain Exec Guttman Hired to Oversee SoftBank’s $51 Million NY-Focused Startup Fund

Josh Guttman, who has most recently been an exec at content discovery platform Outbrain, has become a partner at Softbank Capital to manage its New York-focused startup fund. Guttman, who is an active angel investor in the region, will oversee the $51 million fund that the venture firm recently announced that will be aimed at high-growth opportunities in social, e-commerce, digital media and software-as-a-service startups in New York. (You can read a sharp post Guttman recently penned for AllThingsD on native advertising here.)

Time Warner Cable Says It’s Blocking Some Programmers from the Web — But It’s Still Not Holding Up Web TV

The country’s second-biggest cable TV operator is blocking some TV networks from selling to “over the top” Web video guys like Intel. But it can’t stop the biggest networks.