Have you never heard of Starboard Value?

Me, either!

But the New York activist fund is readying to make a splash as soon as today, several sources said, if it follows through on the expected naming of an alternate board to challenge AOL.

Saturday is the official deadline to nominate directors to the board of AOL, also based in New York, which will have all eight up for reelection.

Sources said Starboard has talked to several Internet types, but that it has plans to put up a slate made up more of Wall Streeters to present at the company’s annual meeting later in the year.

In a filing last week, Starboard said it had been in discussions with AOL management about its concerns, so it is certainly possible the investor and the company could come to some agreement over board seats and strategic direction before it gets Yahoo-ugly.

That would make it a kind of an East Coast proxy battle version of what’s been going on over at Yahoo and its tussle with Third Point’s Daniel Loeb. He recently followed through on long-expressed unhappiness with the Silicon Valley Internet giant, and named a slate of directors — including well-known media exec Jeff Zucker — to replace current ones there.

The same kind of thing has been in the works at Starboard, which sent a letter in late December to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, saying his much-touted strategy around content was not a good one for investors.

Like Loeb at Yahoo, Starboard is one of AOL’s largest shareholders, with a stake of just over five percent.

The letter signaled an increasing impatience with the pace of Armstrong’s turnaround efforts, which are still in turnaround. Meanwhile, AOL’s stock has rebounded from last summer’s lows of near $10 a share.

The stock is up more than 22 percent this year, to $18.44. But that’s still down almost 20 percent from when AOL spun off from Time Warner and went public in late 2009.

The grumpy (and opportunistic) Starboard entered the picture late last year.

According to The Wall Street Journal:

“Starboard, which focuses mainly on small-cap companies, was spun off from Cowen Group Inc.’s Ramius Capital LLC in March. In October, the fund successfully waged a proxy fight against hair-salon chain owner Regis Corp. when three of its director nominees were elected to Regis’s board. AOL, which was spun off from Time Warner Inc. in 2009 after a failed merger, is its most high-profile target yet.”

One of the investment fund’s bugaboos is Patch, the local news network that AOL has sunk a lot of dough into. Also under fire is Armstrong’s content efforts and the pace of its display advertising sales, including the high-profile acquisition of the Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

I have emails into all the bigs at AOL and Starboard, so we’ll see who calls back first, if at all.

Through many years of working together, first at eBay and then during the failed California governor’s race, Meg Whitman has relied heavily on Henry Gomez for communications advice.

Their close working relationship even earned them the mash-up nickname among those at eBay and elsewhere: Menry.

So when she got the CEO job at Hewlett-Packard, it was a bit of a surprise that Gomez — who has recently been living on the East Coast (see baseball cap above) — helped out a lot, but was not named to the top PR slot at the tech giant.

No longer, it seems, with Gomez being named EVP and Chief Communications Officer at HP today.

It’s a big job, given the hard work that Whitman faces reviving the iconic tech company, which has been beset by strategic and business challenges of all kinds, shapes and sizes in recent years.

While it might be seen as an adjunct to the business, the forward-facing parts of HP are in need of a powerful public relations initiative, which is presumably why Whitman wanted one of her most trusted and longtime staffers in the post.

According to HP, Gomez will become a member of the company’s executive council and report directly to Whitman.

Said HP in its press release, which you can also read below: “Gomez will be responsible for HP’s media and industry analyst relations, executive communications, employee communications, government affairs and global social innovation.”

As in, the voice of Menry is back!

Here’s the release:

HP Names Henry Gomez Executive Vice President and Chief Communications Officer

PALO ALTO, CA, Jan 10, 2012 – HP today announced that Henry Gomez will join the company as executive vice president and chief communications officer.

Gomez also will become a member of HP’s executive council, reporting to Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer.

In this newly expanded role, Gomez will be responsible for HP’s media and industry analyst relations, executive communications, employee communications, government affairs and global social innovation.

Gomez, 48, comes to HP with 26 years of communications experience. He spent most of the last decade working at eBay, where he served in a variety of roles including senior vice president for Corporate Communications and president of Skype. Gomez played a crucial role in building eBay’s brand during the critical years following the company’s initial public offering.

Prior to joining eBay, Gomez was vice president of Corporate Affairs at HBO in New York. He started his communications career at Hill and Knowlton and has worked on a wide array of public relations and marketing communications challenges in numerous industries.

Most recently, Gomez ran his own consulting business, providing communications counsel to clients such as H&R Block. He was on the leadership team of Whitman’s 2010 campaign for governor of California and has been involved in government and political affairs throughout his career. In 2011, Gomez was appointed to the board of BJ’s Restaurants, Inc. He is a graduate of Boston College.

“Henry is an excellent manager and communications executive,” said Whitman. “People around the world care deeply about HP, and I believe we have an important obligation to clearly explain where we’re headed and why. Henry will work closely with the entire leadership team to make certain customers, partners, employees, and shareholders fully understand our vision and strategy.”

About HP HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure to solve customer problems. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com .

Revolution Growth, a new investment vehicle led by former AOLers Steve Case, Ted Leonsis and Donn Davis, has raised $450 million in their first investment fund.

Originally, as I reported in March, the growth fund was going to be $400 million, but more was added due to investor interest.

The figure is a large one for a new venture and includes two dozen limited partners.

According to a letter to its partners, which I posted below in its entirety, Revolution said it will make 10 to 12 investments over five years in the consumer space of about $25 million to $50 million and mostly on the East coast, where its principals live and work.

The fund will focus on the “speed-up” stage — which is apparently just past venture stage and not yet in growth.

While both Leonsis and Case have done a lot of investing in the Web 2.0 space both together (Revolution Money) and apart (the Groupon and LivingSocial social buying sites, respectively), this is the first time the pair of well-known Web pioneers are creating a more formal investment partnership.

The pair are also investing $75 million of their own money in total in the Revolution Growth fund.

Revolution’s three partners said they will also be deeply involved with entrepreneurs at its companies.

“We are not just investors, but former CEOs and business builders who have the expertise and passion to be actively involved with the companies we back,” said the letter. “By making only a few investments each year, we will have the time to really help the entrepreneurs with whom we partner.”

Well, you can read about the Revolution Growth fund yourself here:

letter

Yes, New York and much of the Eastern seaboard is preparing for a direct hit from Hurricane Irene, which is being described locally as as a “once-in-a-lifetime” type of hurricane that hits all the populated coastal areas rather than skirting them.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg just announced mandatory evacuations for areas of the city that are most likely to be flooded, which affects more than a quarter-million people. Subway trains, buses, as well as the Long Island Railroad and Metro North rail service are all scheduled to shut down tomorrow at noon.

Many New Yorkers, myself among them, are either getting out of the city or hunkering down. Last night I stocked up on new flashlights and a few of those huge packages of batteries that tend to last for years. As much faith as we have in Con Edison and other regional power companies who keeps the lights on, they’re warning of possible outages.

Phones, wireless, and Internet infrastructure are likely to take a hit too up and down the East Coast. I checked in with several companies to see what they’re saying about their ability to keep services turned on so that people in affected areas can stay informed and communicate with loved ones.

If the power goes out, and if you haven’t done away completely with your old-school telephone line, now would be the time to make sure you have an old-school corded phone around the house. If your home loses power, the phone lines will keep running. The phone networks’ central offices and switching stations have backup power to keep the dial tone on. However, if you have a cordless phone you’re out of luck. Best to spring for an old-style corded phone if you don’t have one lying around.

If you’re wireless-only, you have a pretty good chance of being able to make calls. I checked in with Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile today. As with the central offices on the wireline network, wireless towers have backup power too. All carriers said their teams were fanning out across the region topping off the fuel tanks of backup generators and readying mobile cell sites that can be deployed quickly where needed.

I remember my BlackBerry kept running during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. I was able to contact friends outside the blackout zone to get news stories about what was going on. That is, until my BlackBerry’s battery ran out. Have extra batteries and even an extra phone charged up and ready, and make sure your phone stays dry. All the carriers are advising that you save your power for emergency calls and use text messaging to minimize network congestion. Remember that it was network congestion that ground the wireless networks to a halt after the earthquake on Tuesday. (It felt so strange to type that. Suddenly I feel like I’m a character in a Left Behind novel.)

So what about the Internet? Customers of Verizon FIOS know that even if the power goes out, their modems have an eight-hour backup to keep the bits flowing and the dial-tone on for phone service, but not the Internet. Time Warner Cable, which serves about 6 million people from the Carolinas to New England, has deployed Business Recovery Unit trailers up and down the coast to quickly restore service to affected areas.

All that is great news for connections at home. What about critical services for businesses? As we saw in April when it crashed for a few days, Amazon Web Services is pretty critical for several companies. The company has data centers in Northern Virginia that are close enough to Irene’s path to make customers nervous. Geekwire noticed a message on a support forum advising customers to make sure they’re running applications in more than one data center. “We are monitoring Hurricane Irene and making all possible preparations, e.g. generator fuel, food/water, flashlights, radios, extra staff,” the message said.

And what about Monday morning? In New York, the big question is whether the markets will open on time. After 9/11, the New York Stock Exchange closed from the time of the attacks (Sept. 11, 2001, was a Tuesday) through the end of the week. Trading reopened the following Monday, Sept. 17. If the market did fail to open Monday, it would be the first time such a closure was forced on the exchange by external forces since then. The last time a hurricane shut down financial markets was in September of 1985, during Hurricane Gloria.

Reuters is reporting that staffers at the big board were laying in a supply of fuel for backup power generators located above the trading floor, as well as a supply of food. A final decision about whether or not to open as usual will be made Saturday or Sunday as circumstances warrant.

The hurricane’s name, of course, can’t help but conjure up thoughts of “Goodnight, Irene,” the early 20th century folk standard that seems to close every third or fourth installment of Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” radio show, the lyrics of which have been running through my head all day. The folks at The Awl have collected 23 different versions of the song performed by artists as varied as Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton and The Meat Puppets. If you’d care to have the same lyrics in your own head while you rush your own hurricane preparations to completion, you can enjoy the Lead Belly version I’ve embedded below. Everyone stay safe.

Enjoy:

In fact, the 10-year-old venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners is moving out two of its partners from Cambridge, Mass., to Palo Alto, Calif.–just in time to avoid the Boston winter.

On Tuesday, I met up with Neil Sequeira, a managing partner at the firm, who arrived in town a few months ago and is focused on the social Web and new media.

Sequeira said his fellow managing partner Hemant Taneja, who invests in cleantech companies, will be joining him out here soon.

Sequeira’s kids are too young to be in school, he’s from the Bay Area and none of his portfolio companies are based in Boston, so for him it was a relatively easy move.

General Catalyst’s Palo Alto office will soon have 11 people, up from no presence whatsoever a year ago. Sequeira and Taneja account for about a third of the core partnership of the small VC firm.

Sequeira, whose investments include the Internet television delivery company Boxee and the social media marketing company Vitrue, recently had two of his companies sold–Hot Potato to Facebook and ScanScout to Tremor Media– so he’s looking to find a few more board seats to occupy.

He said General Catalyst was happy with its two-x return on selling Hot Potato to the social networking giant shortly after it invested. But to find the really big opportunities on the consumer Internet, the place to be is in Silicon Valley, he said.

I recorded a very quick interview with Sequeira in which he revealed he’s getting the hang of this Palo Alto VC thing pretty well: He’s already done a seed investment deal at the bustling Coupa Café, where we met up.

Here it is:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101124/general-catalyst-heads-west-to-find-some-young-men-and-women-to-fund/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100510/video-boomtown-meets-five-non-sv-techie-dudes-in-10-minutes-in-boston/ http://allthingsd.com/20100510/video-boomtown-meets-five-non-sv-techie-dudes-in-10-minutes-in-boston/#comments Mon, 10 May 2010 12:15:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=28194 BoomTown made a trip recently to Boston, where Walt Mossberg and I talked in front of hundreds of East Coast entrepreneurs and investors at an event put on by General Catalyst Partners.

The appeal for me: Checking back in with former Excite CEO George Bell, whom I used to cover in Web 1.0–an exec who never failed to correct my grammar, even though I was chronicling the quick rise and slo-mo fall of the doomed portal.

Bell is now a venture capitalist at GCP.

Here’s the video of my interview with him, as well as reps from four start-ups I met with before the event, all of which are not based in Silicon Valley, a relief in and of itself.

The interviews, in order:

* Justin Shaffer, founder and CEO of Hot Potato, a “presence data” service, based in Brooklyn, NY.

* Paul English, co-founder and CTO of Kayak, the travel aggregator, based in Norwalk, Conn.

* Stephen Chao, co-founder and CEO of WonderHowTo, a how-to video content destination, based in Santa Monica, Calif.

* Dan Olschwang, president and CEO of Jumptap, a mobile advertising company, based in Cambridge, Mass.

Check it out:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100510/video-boomtown-meets-five-non-sv-techie-dudes-in-10-minutes-in-boston/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090817/top-ad-sales-exec-on-west-coast-departs-yahoo/ http://allthingsd.com/20090817/top-ad-sales-exec-on-west-coast-departs-yahoo/#comments Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:37:26 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=17697

One of Yahoo’s highest-ranking premium advertising sales execs–David Dickman, VP of West Coast sales–is leaving the company, people familiar with the situation said.

Sources said Dickman, who will leave Yahoo at the end of the month after three years at the company, is reportedly going to Time Warner (TWX) unit Warner Bros. to work in digital sales.

Well liked at Yahoo (YHOO), Dickman was impacted in a sales reorganization done in the spring.

At the time, Atlanta-based regional sales VP Mitch Spolan was named to lead Yahoo’s North American field sales, consolidating its display ad sales groups, which had previously been split between the East and West Coasts.

Before that, Dickman ran the Western sales and another exec the Eastern sales, serving big display advertisers. The latter exec took over agency sales, while Dickman remained running sales on the West Coast, reporting to Spolan.

Dickman’s departure comes after another top Yahoo display ad exec, Todd Taplin (pictured here), left last week. He was regional VP of sales in New England and Canada, responsible for big Yahoo display advertising accounts like Fidelity Investments in Boston.

Taplin–who was also well regarded at Yahoo–took a job at Collective Media in New York, as its new Chief Revenue Officer.

Flux at the Yahoo ad sales group in the U.S.–which accounts for most of the Internet giant’s revenues–will be closely watched by Wall Street right now since it is also charged with selling premium search ads for both Yahoo and Microsoft (MSFT) under the recent deal they struck. Yahoo is also aiming to turbocharge its premium graphical ad sales business.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090817/top-ad-sales-exec-on-west-coast-departs-yahoo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081027/peter-kafka-takes-on-the-mediamorphosis-in-new-atd-mediamemo-blog/ http://allthingsd.com/20081027/peter-kafka-takes-on-the-mediamorphosis-in-new-atd-mediamemo-blog/#comments Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:10:27 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=5610

BoomTown just could not resist making the obvious literary pun on the debut of Peter Kafka’s new daily blog, MediaMemo, on AllThingsD.com.

(He is pictured here.)

For those who were not dragooned into reading existentialist writers in college, I am referencing “Metamorphosis,” about a man who turns into a bug–except that the process is fraught with so much more meaning.

And thus it will be in Peter’s column, as the most excellent writer and reporter plunges into the topic–as he writes in his first explanatory post–of “the ongoing battle between the established media business and the technology that is reshaping it day by day.”

It is transformative, to say the least, from someone who will lead you through it with the kinds of standards, accuracy, great writing and insight that I hope you have come to expect from this site.

While Peter’s impending arrival to ATD was announced in mid-September, he actually debuts today and will be posting many times daily.

As I have previously written, Walt Mossberg and I have long wanted to bring in someone located on the East Coast and away from the echo chamber that Silicon Valley can be, because we both feel the ongoing digital revolution is taking place over a number of key industries all over this country and the world.

With extensive connections across the media, advertising, entertainment and tech sectors, Peter will be doing original reporting, getting scoops, doing interviews, making videos and providing much needed and clear-headed analysis that he is so well-known for.

Peter has been working at Silicon Alley Insider, most recently as its managing editor, since mid-2007. The first hire at the start-up tech business analysis site, he has focused on enterprise and beat reporting, as well as breaking news.

Previously, he spent 10 years as a reporter and editor at Forbes and Forbes.com covering media and technology. (You can read more of his bio here, along with his ethics statement.)

Walt and I are thrilled that Peter is coming onboard to join the rest of the strong ATD team, which includes: John Paczkowski, author of the rocking Digital Daily column, who formerly wrote the award-winning blog, “Good Morning Silicon Valley” at the San Jose Mercury News; and Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Boehret, who writes the most excellent weekly Mossberg Solution column.

And we hope you will soon find–via following Peter regularly–why we are so very excited to welcome MediaMemo to the site.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081027/peter-kafka-takes-on-the-mediamorphosis-in-new-atd-mediamemo-blog/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080918/atd-hires-peter-kafka-to-pen-a-new-media-and-advertising-blog-from-new-york/ http://allthingsd.com/20080918/atd-hires-peter-kafka-to-pen-a-new-media-and-advertising-blog-from-new-york/#comments Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:11:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=3966

Although we did not raid the offices of Silicon Alley Insider and “steal” Peter Kafka, as the fanciful SAI kingpin Henry Blodget alleges–had it been a raid, BoomTown would have properly hog-tied Blodget so he could not make such spurious allegations!–it is true that SAI’s current managing editor (pictured here) will be coming to work for us at AllThingD.com soon.

Indeed, Walt Mossberg and I, as well as the rest of the ATD team, are thrilled that Peter is coming onboard at the end of October. He will write a daily still-unnamed new media blog from New York City.

Walt and I have long wanted to bring in someone located on the East Coast and away from the echo chamber that Silicon Valley can be, because we both feel the ongoing digital revolution is taking place over a number of key industries all over this country and the world.

Peter was our first choice and has been on my must-read list since I began this blog. He is sharp, witty, confident and has the kind of reporting and writing chops that we think are key to giving readers high-quality, standards-based content they can trust.

With extensive connections across the media, advertising, entertainment and tech sectors, Peter will be doing original reporting, getting scoops, doing interviews, making videos and providing much needed and clear-headed analysis that he is so well known for.

Peter has worked at SAI since mid-2007. The first hire at the start-up tech business analysis site, he has focused on enterprise and beat reporting, as well as breaking news.

Previously, he spent 10 years as a reporter and editor at Forbes and Forbes.com covering media and technology. There he launched two tech columns, coordinated the video staff and represented Forbes on industry panels and in TV appearances for CNN, BBC and CNBC.

Peter was also a staff reporter with City Business in Minneapolis and a staff writer for the Minnesota Real Estate Journal in Bloomington from 1993 to 1997. Earlier, he was a stringer with the Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel in Madison, Wis.

He holds a bachelor of arts from the University of Wisconsin and resides in Brooklyn, NY.

More importantly, Peter is a newly-minted father, which should give him more practice in prolonged sleep deprivation needed for his blogging.

He will begin at ATD on Oct. 27.

Along with Walt and me, Peter joins senior news editor John Paczkowski, author of the rocking Digital Daily column, who formerly wrote the award-winning blog, “Good Morning Silicon Valley” at the San Jose Mercury News, and Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Boehret, who writes the most excellent weekly Mossberg Solution column.

We hope you are as thrilled as we are that Peter is coming soon to the ATD site.

(And if you want a little taste of Peter’s work, here’s a post he did yesterday on an appearance by Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes at the Goldman Sachs media conference and another on Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. [News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and of this Web site].)

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