The board meeting was already scheduled when hedge-fund firm Citadel LLC, E*Trade’s biggest shareholder, prodded the company last week to explore selling itself.

The expected talks don’t necessarily mean that TD Ameritrade will make an offer for E*Trade. The New York company had a stock-market value of $4.4 billion on Friday.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

In addition to Kara Swisher’s BoomTown report that Zynga has hired Taylor Barada, Yahoo’s recently appointed head of M&A, for an unspecified role, Zynga has now hired former Cisco exec Debra Chrapaty as CIO.

Chrapaty previously was the SVP of Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group, where she worked on enterprise collaboration software services and cloud infrastructure.

Zynga said her experience working on one of the world’s largest networks will help support Zynga’s infrastructure and internal collaboration as it develops games for millions of players around the world.

Chrapaty will report to Zynga’s CTO, Cadir Lee.

In previous roles, Chrapaty worked at Microsoft and was also president and COO of eTrade. She left Microsoft in late 2009 for Cisco, as BoomTown reported then.

Through Zynga’s network of social games online, it gathers a ton of information and data that is useful to improve games. The better the games, the better they will monetize as players are compelled to play more.

In a statement, Chrapaty said: “Through its focus on leading technology, Zynga is redefining how we look at play. My job will be to make it easier for our employees to design and build for play. I am looking forward to tackling Zynga’s unique technology challenges and helping develop infrastructure systems to ensure that we have the most scalable, secure, and reliable systems in place.”

Zynga has been hiring aggressively, mostly though small studio acquisitions. It has been acquiring one every month for the past 11 months. Last year, it hired more than 800 people and today has more than 1,500 full-time employees in 13 offices, spanning six countries.

On Monday, Zynga beefed up its board of directors by adding Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO and co-founder of DreamWorks Animation.

Super Bowl XLIII is nearly upon us, multimillion dollar ads in tow, and since there’s never been as much video, connectivity or interactivity as there is right now, the whole thing is shaping up to be quite the Web 2.0 extravaganza.

From YouTube to Twitter to Facebook and beyond, here’s your guide to all the digital venues available to view, vote on and even interact with in this year’s lineup of ad campaigns.

There is no shortage of sites on which to watch (and rewatch, again and again) the ads: NBC, the game’s official broadcaster, Spike, YouTube, and Hulu, to name just a few (see below for a list). Many of these sites have already aggregated a number of previews and will allow you to vote for your favorite commercials or rank them.

Speaking of Hulu, the video site has created a customizable Super Bowl ad widget that will allow you to display and vote on the ads and can be embedded into Web sites or blogs. The Hulu folks have also been spreading some talk about how they will “reveal the secret behind Hulu” during Super Bowl Sunday. Really, Hulu? We are sweating in anticipation (not).

Many of the companies whose ads will be featured during the game also have content on their corporate Web sites. Some–like the Orlando Sentinel–are playing coy, releasing only teaser clips about their actual ad–essentially creating a commercial about a commercial. It has something to do with a kid in a cape, accompanied by some very somber background piano music.

Others have already released full versions of their ads online. Internet domain company Go Daddy has put two titillating ads up on its site starring sexy race car driver Danica Patrick, fresh from her big debut last year. The company will also feature Internet-only ads with a more salacious spin on the made-for-TV ones.

Meanwhile, sites like Spotbowl and Superbowl-Ads have aggregated lots of information about the commercials. Spotbowl has collected industry rumors and reports and boasts a fairly detailed list of all of this year’s ad sponsors, noting the type of commercial(s) each will play and behind-the-scenes information on many of them.

Superbowl-Ads presents perhaps the most complete Web 2.0 package, which will not only feature the commercials online, but has established a Facebook and Twitter presence as well. Its Facebook site features much of the same content as the site, but also has a video viewer, news tracker apps and discussion board.

And you can even befriend the famous Etrade Baby, who will make another appearance this year. Find him on Twitter under “etradebaby,” although he hasn’t had much to say so far. At the time of this writing, his most recent, and rather cryptic, message was, “I have very little time or patience for clowns.”

You can also follow Superbowl-Ads on Twitter under “superbowlad,” or search #superads09 and #sb43ads for a constant stream of relevant links, information and chatter leading up to and going into the big game.

Meanwhile, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang will be conducting a “TwitterBowl” experiment during the game whereby you can send in your votes to @superbowlads (with an “s” at the end), commenting on the ads and giving each a rating of up to five stars.

Even iTunes is in on the party this year, as you’ll be able to download original music from Pepsi’s SoBe Lifewater ad. Said commercial is one of the few that will be shown in 3-D, provided that you’ve picked up your new 3-D glasses, since the old red-and-blues won’t do the trick, apparently.

So digitally speaking, you’re all ready for the big game. That is, unless, you were looking for actual information about that big game, in which case you’d probably do better somewhere else.

Super Bowl ad watch sites:

NBC
Hulu
Spike
Superbowl-ads
Spotbowl
NFL
Fanhouse
Myspace
Youtube
Adweek

It’s no surprise, obviously, that financial advertising has slowed down in the first three quarters of 2008. The surprise is that it’s only been a 10 percent reduction (so far), according to Nielsen.

There are also some interesting breakdowns: Mortgage and loan companies spent 62 percent less (of course). But credit service companies increased their spend by 22 percent, and investment service companies boosted their spend by six percent.

Here’s Nielsen’s list of top 10 financial advertisers (click chart to enlarge): Note that Bank Of America (BAC), one of the comparative winners during the meltdown, has cut its spend by 30 percent so far this year–slightly more than teetering Citigroup’s (C) 26.5 percent cut. Previously left-for-dead ETrade (ETFC), meanwhile, bumped up its spend by 24.5 percent.

Want more unpleasantness? OK. Comes now yet another ad executive to tell you that next year will be very unpleasant for anyone looking to make a living off of advertising revenue.

U.S. advertising spending will drop 5-8 percent next year, says Steve Lanzano, chief operating officer of MPG North America, a unit of French advertising conglomerate Havas SA. Lanzano predicts that sports advertising, long considered one of the most impervious to downturns, will get roughed up as well:

Even television sports, which have become more popular with advertisers since audiences tend to watch the events live rather than recording them, will suffer from the broad pullback in marketing spending, said Lanzano.

Lanzano estimated 9 to 10 percent of spending on broadcast sports comes from financial services and automotive, both industries that have been in turmoil. ‘That’s a lot of money moving out,’ said Lanzano.

‘Because of the hits in the categories that support sports–whether it’s financial or automotive or retail–I think they might take a little more of a hit than they would in other recessionary periods,’ he said.”

OK. Let’s break the glumness up a bit, shall we? If you’re looking for a cheap laugh, head to the Hollywood Reporter’s take on the Nielsen numbers. Then feast your eyes on the unintentional, yet very successful contextual advertising placed to the right of the story (which is where I borrowed the image currently at the top of this story).

To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. We’re calling it the Tech 10 and it appears below.

1. As inevitable as death and taxes: YouTube, the world’s No. 1 video site, will begin placing ads in its videos, All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher reports. The animated advertising will appear no earlier than 15 seconds into a video, overlaid on the bottom fifth of the screen. Citing viewer revulsion, a YouTube product manager told NewTeeVee the site will not use the dreaded preroll or postroll.
2. Apple, leveraging its deal-brokering with AT&T stateside, has signed up European partners for iPhone sales and service. A report in the Financial Times notes that three telecoms–T-Mobile in Germany, Orange in France and O2 in the United Kingdom–will fork over 10% of the revenues made from iPhone calls and data transfers.



3. Stargazing earthlings will get a new perspective today, as Google unveils Sky, its view of the heavens from Earth. The New York Times reports that users will be able to zoom around to view millions of stars and galaxies, much as they do on a smaller scale with Google Earth.
4. Henri Richard, the very visible top sales officer of Advanced Micro Devices, is leaving the troubled chip maker. Confirming an earlier report on Hexus.net, Tom Krazit of CNET describes the executive vice president’s departure as a “significant development in what has been a disastrous year for AMD,” precipitated by its postponement of Barcelona, its quad-core server chip.
5. Regrouping years after the dot-com implosion, the online-trading business is in for some consolidation now that TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. and E*Trade Financial Corp. are holding merger talks. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the potential union could create a single dominant force in what has been seen as a highly fragmented industry, with many small companies in the competitive fray.
6. Spotting potential in the social-networking trend, U.S. spy agencies plan to develop an information-sharing portal based on MySpace and Facebook. According to the Register, taxpayers, rather than advertisers, will foot the bill for the spook Web site.
7. Darkening the cloud of suspicion hanging over electronic-voting machines, California’s secretary of state has accused Election Systems & Software of selling about 1,000 uncertified electronic-voting machines to five California counties in 2006, according to IDG News Service. The state has instituted new security standards for all electronic-voting machines after a review sharply criticized the technology.
8. Reconsidering the upswing in PC gaming, Microsoft is bringing back its SideWinder line of peripheral equipment, starting in October with a new mouse, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The device will cost $79.95 and includes a wider scroll wheel, special buttons and other doodads for gameheads.
9. Joining the competition for the thinnest TV screen, Sharp is unveiling a 2-centimeter thick LCD screen. PC World reports that the prototype TV will get its signals via a high-speed wireless link, eliminating the need for a cable.



10. Talk about a cybervirus. Epidemiologists have found that studying an imaginary epidemic in an online game world could provide valuable clues to coping with the real thing. Writing about research published in the September issue of Lancet Infectious Diseases, ABC News reported that researchers from Tufts and the University of North Carolina are serious in applying the lessons of online epidemics (in particular, the “corrupted blood” that spread on World of Warcraft in 2005) to disease-control efforts worldwide.

–posted by Associate Editor John Sullivan