HP said it had named Jim Murrin as its corporate treasurer, effective July 1. He’ll replace John McMullen, who is retiring after 32 years with HP. Murrin is a former senior VP and general manager in the enterprise services business. His current job — which he’ll be keeping — is SVP in charge of corporate development.

Since a lot of HP’s recent success on the quarterly earnings front is due to its careful management of cash flow, paying down debt and setting money aside for investment purposes, the treasurer job is a pretty important one that’s front and center in the turnaround campaign that CEO Meg Whitman has been pushing. Murrin will report up to CFO Cathie Lesjak.

Here’s HP’s original announcement:

HP Names Jim Murrin Treasurer

PALO ALTO, CA–(Marketwired – May 24, 2013) – HP (NYSE: HPQ) today announced that Jim Murrin has been elected to serve as treasurer in addition to his current role as senior vice president of Corporate Development and Corporate Financial Analytics, effective July 1.

In this expanded role, Murrin will manage the company’s worldwide cash, debt, foreign exchange, capital structure, risk management and benefits-plan administration, in addition to performing his current duties, which include assessing ongoing corporate development and company performance, establishing short- and long-term plans and helping to drive decisions on investment choices. He will continue to report to Cathie Lesjak, executive vice president and chief financial officer, HP.

“Jim is a highly adaptable and accomplished veteran HP leader,” said Lesjak. “He has spent the last 23 years in a variety of roles, including several senior leadership positions, giving him a diverse perspective that is especially valuable as we make progress towards the company’s turnaround.”

In January, Murrin rejoined the Finance organization in his current role. Before returning to Finance, he was leading the Select Accounts Group within HP Enterprise Services; he previously served as HP’s corporate controller.

Murrin will succeed John McMullen, senior vice president and treasurer, HP, who is retiring on July 1 after an impressive 32-year career with the company.

“John’s tremendous business acumen and collaborative leadership style all have contributed to his stellar reputation at HP,” said Lesjak. “He is a talented leader and dedicated mentor who will be greatly missed.”
McMullen is looking forward to spending time with his family, exploring new hobbies and traveling during his retirement.

Media giant Hearst has hired two senior execs — Demand Media’s Joanne Bradford and former Los Angeles Times CEO Jeffrey Johnson — in a significant move to digitally turbocharge and jumpstart its flagship but long-suffering newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle and its SFGate.com website.

“They have deep publishing and new media experience and believe in the power of great content with a valued brand,” said Heart CEO Frank Bennack in a statement. “We are excited to work with them to redefine the choices for how and where readers can experience the trusted Chronicle content they depend on.”

In the new leadership, Johnson will be the publisher of the Chronicle, while Bradford will be its president. Both will report to Hearst Newspapers President Mark Aldam. Current publisher Frank Vega — an old-style publisher who has had a controversial tenure at the Chronicle — will retire, though Hearst said he will continue as chairman through the transition.

“The San Francisco Chronicle should be a shining star and use case of how to build a community and cover local news,” said Bradford in a text to me today.

Indeed. While the Chronicle and its website is the largest for local news in the Bay area, it has lagged a lot in aggressively covering key trends — such as tech — and the fast growth of the region. While the area has blossomed, the Chronicle, like many big-city newspapers, has suffered, as digital businesses of all kinds have made incursions on its business.

Its daily print circulation is now 265,000, and combined with its website it reaches close to two million people.

Getting all that a whole lot higher — and, perhaps more importantly, a lot more relevant — will be a tough job and will likely require a major reinvention of the Chronicle brand.

That is especially true since the San Francisco area, including Silicon Valley, is the world’s key digital hub, as well as a leader in a number of areas — from top-notch sports teams to having one of the most innovative food and indie cultures. After a few years of rough economic times, the city is on a bit of a roll, including being the location of some upcoming major events such as the Super Bowl and America’s Cup.

Bradford has a lot of experience in both old and new media and is well known in the online media advertising space, having had top sales and media jobs at BusinessWeek magazine, Microsoft, Yahoo and, now, Demand.

She has been at that content site, where she has been its chief revenue and marketing officer, since 2010. At Yahoo, previous to Demand, she was an SVP in charge of North American revenue and also worked on branded entertainment partnerships. At Microsoft, she was a corporate VP and chief media officer of MSN Media Network.

And, although I have known her well over many years — full disclosure: We are very good friends — I had no idea she had an undergraduate degree in journalism from San Diego State University.

Johnson is also a longtime media exec. He has recently been an operating partner at the Yucaipa Companies — owned by kingpin Ron Burkle — focusing on media investments since 2007. Previous to that, he was president, publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times for just a year, but had been its SVP and GM since 2000. At the Times, he was responsible for the newspaper’s digital and print operations including editorial, advertising, circulation, consumer sales and marketing, finance and technology. Johnson has also worked at the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel and has an undergraduate degree in accounting from the University of Illinois and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

The Chronicle is the largest newspaper in Northern California, founded in 1865 by Charles and Michael de Young. Its owner, the privately-held Hearst, is one of the nation’s largest media companies, with dozens of daily and weekly newspapers; has a huge group of television stations and cable network stakes, such as Lifetime, A&E and ESPN; hundreds of magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Elle; and many other varied holdings.

Bradford will be replaced at Demand Media by Jeff Dossett.

Microsoft said CFO Peter Klein “will leave the company at the end of the current fiscal year, after nearly four years in role and 11 years at the company,” adding that the software giant will be naming a new leader from its internal finance team in the next several weeks.

In addition, reporting its third-quarter results, the software giant said its revenue was just under $20.5 billion on earnings of 72 cents. Wall Street analysts were expecting Microsoft to earn 68 cents on just over $20.5 billion in revenue, compared to 60 cents on $17.4 billion in the same period a year ago.

Strong results in its Business, Entertainment and its Servers & Tools units, and even its Online Services division, were bright spots, even as its flagship Windows business was flat when adjusted for upgrade offers.

But flat is not down. Many investors have been worried about the results, focusing especially on the negative impact of declines in PC sales on its flagship Windows software and the slower uptake of Windows Phone and Surface tablet devices that the company has introduced.

It seems as if Microsoft has calmed those critics, at least for now. Shares were up about two percent in after-hours trading to $29.36.

“The bold bets we made on cloud services are paying off as people increasingly choose Microsoft services including Office 365, Windows Azure, Xbox LIVE, and Skype,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a statement. “While there is still work to do, we are optimistic that the bets we’ve made on Windows devices position us well for the long-term.”

Here are Microsoft’s financial docs on Q3 — Klein will be part of its conference call with analysts on the results at 2:30 pm PT (which I cannot cover today, but I wish the CFO a fond farewell):

PressReleaseFY13Q3

FinancialStatementFY13Q3

In its first C-level hire from outside the company, Eventbrite has brought in experienced finance exec Mark Rubash as CFO. The San Francisco-based self-service ticketing platform has hired the former Shutterfly CFO — who also held top finance jobs at eBay and Yahoo — to focus on scaling and expanding its business model and global growth.

And while CEO and co-founder Kevin Hartz declined to say in an interview whether the move was Eventbrite’s first major step toward a possible IPO, he did underscore the need to gird the company’s management for future expansion.

Recently, the company said it had sold $1.5 billion in gross ticket sales since it was founded five years ago, with total tickets sold topping 100 million. Eventbrite said that it had sold $600 million of that in 2012 alone, hawking 36 million tickets in 179 countries for such events as San Francisco’s iconic Bay to Breakers footrace.

That kind of hypergrowth requires some more experienced management, “independent of any public offering process,” said Hartz.

“We had an opportunity to bring in a great operator to help us become a multi-category e-commerce marketplace,” he said. “Mark has deep experience in building marketplaces of buyers and sellers.”

Indeed. At eBay, Rubash had global purview over eBay finance, investor relations, accounting and more, while he ran Yahoo’s global finance for its paid search, display advertising and e-commerce units. He has also worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and at companies such as HeartFlow, Rearden Commerce and Critical Path.

“It’s a real alignment of what I am passionate about, with a team I really enjoy,” said Rubash. “With the mass of transactions growing on a global basis at Eventbrite, it’s the kind of challenge that is really hard to resist.”

Eventbrite’s investors include Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Tenaya Capital, with about $80 million in funding raised since 2006.

Sandberg and her team have been encouraging women to post their personal stories of when they leaned into their careers and Mayer certainly does that in her post, including discussing taking the job at the top of the troubled Silicon Valley Internet company when she was seven months pregnant.

She wrote:

Looking back to reflect on the question: Could I really take the helm of Yahoo when I was 28 weeks pregnant? Even now, it sounds absolutely crazy. I considered if and how I could make it work: learning more about the role, getting words of encouragement from close friends and family, and developing a plan. I’ve always believed you can never have everything that you want, but with work and dedication, you can have the things that really matter to you. If I took the opportunity, it was clear that I would have to find a way to have time with my baby without a long maternity leave. I also knew going forward that there wouldn’t be much time beyond my job and my family for anything else. Ultimately, I decided I was fine with that, because my family and my job are what really matter to me.

In the piece, Mayer also noted that she jumped at the chance to run Yahoo, which had actually put Google in business in many ways with an early search deal. She started her career at the search giant and was one of its higher-ranking execs.

“The alignment with my experience and career was uncanny: search, email, homepage, news, finance, maps, social, mobile and more,” she wrote, although she also said that after “13 years of really hard work at Google, I had been envisioning a glorious six-month maternity leave.”

Not so. Mayer took off from Yahoo only a few weeks after she had her baby son last fall, and she said it has turned out well for her. “I’ve come to realize that being a mother makes me a better executive, because motherhood forces prioritization,” she wrote. “Being a mom gives you so much more clarity on what is important.”

In a major exec departure, Square COO Keith Rabois will be leaving the San Francisco payments company.

Square gave no other information about the sudden management change, but sources said disagreements between Rabois and CEO and founder Jack Dorsey were part of the reason for his exit.

It’s not clear if there were more serious issues between them, or whether the parting was related to a specific business problem. But the departure of the No. 2 exec is significant, so definitely more to come on what happened.

In a statement about the move, Rabois only said:

It is amazing what Square has accomplished since August of 2010. When I joined, there were 17 engineers all reporting flatly to Jack. The local coffee shop served as our interview room. Leading our amazing crew has been the most rewarding professional journey of my life. I am forever grateful to Jack, for his confidence in me and to each and every member of the team for allowing me to learn from them.

But every day matters. And it is better at this point for me to be doing something different every day.

As a result, I’ve decided to resign from Square. I am very excited about what lies ahead for the company. Square could not be better poised for greatness.

I will have more to share about my next opportunity soon.

Said Square’s Dorsey:

Today I accepted Keith’s resignation from Square. When he joined, we had fewer than 30 employees and under 1000 active merchants. Today, over 3 million individuals and businesses are able to accept credit cards with Square, processing over $10 billion annually. We couldn’t have done it without him and we wish him well in his next opportunity.

Square CFO Sarah Friar will become acting COO, Square said. It’s an unusual move to put an exec without a lot of deep operational experience in the second-most-important slot at Square, though the former Goldman Sachs analyst and Salesforce.com finance exec is clearly familiar with the heart of the company’s business.

The change in top management comes at a time of fast growth for the three-year-old Square, which completed a $200 million funding round in the fall that valued the company at $3.2 billion. At the time, the company said it had more than 400 employees and would grow by 100 more by year’s end.

Square is best known for allowing a range of small businesses, such as taxicab drivers, to accept credit and debit cards using their mobile phones. But it has also branched out into other mobile payments areas.

Besides his stint at Square, Rabois is a well-known angel investor in Silicon Valley, and serves on several boards, including Yelp’s. He has worked at many startups, too, including PayPal (acquired by eBay) and Slide (acquired by Google).

Another big media departure from Yahoo: David Rice, VP of media properties, has left the Silicon Valley Internet giant to take over as SVP and GM of CBS Interactive Games, according to sources close to the situation.

Rice left Yahoo Monday and starts at CBS on Monday, sources said.

Earlier this week, the head of Yahoo’s Omg! and Yahoo TV, Liz Coughlin, left to run business operations at next-gen digital content site Young Hollywood.

The media properties at Yahoo have always been its most successful and powerful units, including powerhouse sites such as Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports.

Which is why Rice is a great get for CBS. Hired in 2010 as part of the crew brought in by former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, the former Microsoft exec was the key media product manager in charge of strategy and execution of Yahoo’s home page, news, sports, finance, entertainment, lifestyle, games and more.

CBS Interactive Games is a big digital division at the company, with more than $50 million in annual revenue, 32 million unique monthly visitors and one billion page views a month, according to comScore. GameSpot is its flagship site, along with GameFAQs, Metacritic, ComicVine and a variety of video streaming and eSports offerings.

Rice will be in charge of all operations at CBS Interactive Games — at Yahoo, he had only media product duties, although the many properties are all huge.

In a related move this past week, new CEO Marissa Mayer hired former Google sales exec Henrique De Castro to become COO at Yahoo. Mayer also told staff that all media units would report to him.

It’s exactly what it sounds like. Users can choose, mail and pay for real-world, physical gifts — not the lame virtual ones Facebook offered a few years ago — to send to one another, all completely inside of Facebook. They’re tied to the significant event reminders that pop up on occasion — say, a friend’s anniversary, or a birthday. Or even better for Facebook, users can also just buy gifts for others for the heck of it.

It’s a major undertaking for Facebook, tackling an entire new segment of online commerce and adding a brand new revenue stream to its business. And to a degree, we’ve known it was coming for some time — after all, on the same day Facebook went public, it acquired Karma, the social gifting application upon which all of Gifts is based and built.

Perhaps more significant, however, is that users aren’t limited to just the desktop to send and receive gifts; the entire Gifts program is accessible on mobile phones.

“This is truly the heart and soul of Karma, re-imagined inside of Facebook,” Lee Linden, head of Facebook Gifts, told me in an interview. “And it all works perfectly on the phone.”

This is crucial. Since the company first filed for its IPO, we’ve known that Facebook was weak on monetizing mobile. More than half of Facebook’s hundreds of millions of monthly active users access Facebook through a mobile device, signaling a massive shift away from the desktop in just the past few years. But mobile screens aren’t friendly to advertising, which is currently Facebook’s primary revenue driver.

Gifts, however, work just as well on Facebook’s apps and mobile Web site as they do on the desktop. Now, along with notes and photos, users can posts Gifts directly to their friends’ Timelines with the addition of a “Gift” button, squarely placed inside of the text box on each profile.

The selection of gifts is impressive. Facebook is starting strong, joining with over 100 retail partners at launch, from which users can choose gifts to send to others. The selection covers the expected gift-giving bases: Food and drink, fashion, home and kitchen and, yes, kids. So if you want to send, say, a teddy bear to your mom for her birthday, Facebook lets you choose from partner Gund’s selection of stuffed animals. What’s more, if your mom doesn’t like the white teddy bear you chose, she can swap it out for a brown one before it’s delivered.

Starbucks is far and away the biggest launch partner. Starbucks cards are the de facto gift for many on practically every occasion, and can come in relatively low-cost increments. My hunch is that Facebook hopes that users ramp up to gifting larger things by starting small, with users sending five-dollar gift cards all across their friend networks to jumpstart the entire Gifts ecosystem.

From there, users can send gifts to their friends, who will then receive a notification via phone and desktop that there is a present waiting. After the gift is received and accepted, the sender receives a notification in return (again, across both platforms).

The individual retailers handle all the shipping, while Facebook’s payments platform — the same one used for Facebook Games — handles the money-changing part.

Another key component of the process: Just like when you pay for Facebook Games, sending a gift requires that you give Facebook your credit card information. From there on out, Facebook has your credit card on file, streamlining and eliminating friction from the payments process in subsequent transactions. In a nutshell: Buy once, and it’s way easy to buy again.

And voila! In a matter of days, expect a package to show up on your friend’s doorstep (complete with a fancy Facebook card personalized by you, pictured above). Facebook’s online system tracks the process from gift selection to payment to delivery, so both gifter and giftee can keep tabs on the status of the package.

Right now, Facebook is rolling out the launch on a small scale before going wider: It’s live in select U.S. cities as of Thursday, and will roll out to more in the coming months. Additionally, it’ll spread virally as its use widens — once a user sends a gift, the giftee can then start sending gifts to others. (Sort of a Google, Gmail-type roll-out.)

Gifts will first be available on Android devices, the mobile Web and of course desktop, with a wider roll-out to iOS devices in a few weeks.

Facebook obviously has lots of competition in the e-commerce space; Amazon and eBay already dominate, not to mention existing gifting apps like Wrapp and Boomerang. But Facebook’s scale, engagement and the prominent placement of the new Gifting option makes the company a strong contender in the area.

And really, while the e-commerce competition is obviously important to consider, Facebook’s really tough nut to crack is still mobile. The company is slowly rolling out new ad products aimed at mobile devices, but it’s far too early to tell whether or not they’ve proven effective. Gifts is another massive stab at the mobile problem, while also hedging its bets by continuing to invest in revenue streams outside of its core advertising business.

Now it’s up to users to decide whether or not they actually feel comfortable buying and giving gifts inside their Facebook pages.

At the very least, naysayers will no longer be able to say that Facebook is ignoring mobile.

It’s about time. Facebook stock is in free fall — more than halved from its initial listing price at $38 per share — and investors are freaking out. Wall Street responded accordingly with its share of finger-pointing, calling for the heads of executive management.

Questions of blame aside, this is Zuckerberg’s first chance to address some of the biggest questions hanging over his company’s head, with the potential to assuage at least some investor concern.

Here are a few topics I think he should speak to — after that, delivery is on him.

Strategy: Short Term vs. Long Term

Since Facebook first filed its S-1 to go public, Zuckerberg has made no bones about his lack of regard for the Street. “We don’t build services to make money,” Zuckerberg wrote in his founder’s letter last February. “We make money to build better services.” Essentially, it was a message saying that Zuckerberg wouldn’t put short-term fiscal gains ahead of the long-term well-being of the company.

The grim reality of being public, however, has set in. Investors have shown waning confidence in the company’s monetization prospects through the sinking share price. Despite the continued insistent focus on the long-term, Zuckerberg needs to address the here-and-now, what Facebook can do in the short-term.

Why? Because despite whatever grand plan Facebook management has for the company, the reality is that a tanking stock price affects a company in palpable ways, from internal struggle to strain on external partnerships. Shrugging off concerns can only work as a strategy for so long.

How, for instance, can Facebook use its newly gotten IPO gains to get ahead? What sort of immediate acquisitions will the company focus on? Is Facebook in the business of acquiring teams for talent, or for technology?

From there, Zuckerberg could then elaborate further on his vision for Facebook, and how the company’s biggest initiatives — especially Open Graph and working with third-party developers — will benefit Facebook in the long run. While this is obviously more comfortable territory for him, the public needs a better idea of how Facebook plans to get there.

Monetization, Mobile and Otherwise

Everyone already knows Facebook’s scale is massive — the company comes closer to the billion-user mark with each passing day. But despite the scale, there’s still that other lingering problem: Revenue.

Right now, Facebook’s ARPU (average revenue per user) isn’t as impressive as some of its peers (like, say, Google), hovering in the dollar to buck-and-a-quarter range. What’s more, user growth is slowing in North America and Europe, where the ARPU is highest, while the fastest-growing areas of user growth — places like Asia and what Facebook calls the “rest of the world” region — typically have some of the lowest ARPU numbers.

Add to that the growing trend of users flocking to mobile devices, a platform that Facebook readily admits it has not effectively monetized. That’s certainly a problem for Facebook when sources of user growth like developing nations rely primarily on low-cost mobile devices to access the company’s services.

And as my colleague Peter Kafka has stated so aptly before, Facebook is still figuring out its whole advertising game. It doesn’t have, for instance, a Google AdWords-like product, essentially a straightforward way of showing advertisers where their ad budgets are going.

But that’s a whole other rabbit hole. Can Zuckerberg plainly and clearly explain what’s in store for Facebook’s advertising strategy for monetizing mobile, or shed light on any potential ad products that we aren’t privy to? That’d be nice.

Supporting the Troops

If you’re an employee inside of Facebook, the last three months have sucked. I’ve heard tales from exasperated Facebook employees who go home from work only to hear from friends and family how awful they’ve heard the company is doing. It’s a wear on internal morale — something that could seriously affect attrition rates.

That’s especially true considering the additional pressure over the next 18 months, as employee shares continue to come out of lockup. Those sitting on millions from when they first signed on could essentially cut and run to a new outfit, either joining a competitor or perhaps taking the money to float a new start-up of their own.

What Facebook needs is a public rallying cry, something beyond the internal all-hands meetings Facebook holds regularly, in which Zuckerberg has reportedly reassured his employees, while acknowledging that the stock slide was “painful” to witness.

A strong declaration of solidarity that, yes, things are tough, but the company has banded together to weather the storm, could help ease the scrutiny his employees face from everyone on the outside.

And it would also be a reminder to prospective Facebookers that the company is still hiring actively, and that it’s still a desirable place to work for a young, upstart engineer.

Admit It: You Blew the IPO

Lastly, there’s the botched IPO that will live in infamy. All we’ve heard is Wall Street and media chatter, with Facebook staying largely mum on the topic. No explanation on why it went down the way it did, no retrospective on what the company would have done differently. (The most we’ve heard was from CFO David Ebersman on Facebook’s first earnings call in July, parroting the “long-term” party line: “We’re disappointed in the way the stock has traded. But we’re focused on long-term.”)

Basically, the public wants to be leveled with. Insight as to why things went south the way they did could ease tensions with retail investors who feel scorned from the offering, particularly when buying into Facebook seemed like a sure bet from the start. It won’t necessarily yield any immediate returns, but it could stanch further bleeding, keeping some from cashing out sooner rather than later.

It’s the elephant that has been in the room for months. Talk about it.

Mark Zuckerberg: CEO

Ultimately, much of Zuckerberg’s appearance will boil down to something intangible: The way he carries himself.

Will his performance onstage carry with it the gravitas of a CEO in control of his company, a commanding presence who knows how to lead? Has the young tech prodigy moved past the days of sweaty public nervousness? It’s unclear what to expect, exactly: I haven’t seen him at an event in the flesh in more than a year.

But one thing’s for sure: He needs to nail it.

Mojgan Khalili

Another prominent venture firm has stepped up in the marketing arena and hired well-regarded former Yahoo communications exec Mojgan Khalili as an operating partner.

In an interview yesterday, Vinod Khosla said that the move was part of the Silicon Valley firm’s motto of “venture assistance.”

Like many top VCs these days, Khosla said that helping build the start-ups it invests in is a key part of its offering. It already has partners specializing in recruiting and finance.

“We are building an operating organization and communications is an important part of that to help the companies we invest in,” said Khosla. “Obviously, other firms are using this function to promote themselves, but as a fund we don’t need more publicity.”

Khosla noted that Khalili’s job would be almost entirely focused on helping start-ups. But the latter part of that quote was referencing the boom in comms hiring by prominent VC firms — such as Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital — some of which are getting a lot of press attention, too.

Khosla acknowledged the importance of good marketing — even some entrepreneurs, such as Square’s Jack Dorsey, are PR naturals.

“He is someone who does press well,” he said. “But 90 percent of start-ups need help to do this function, which is increasingly critical.”

Khalili is a longtime comms exec, who most recently headed product issues at Yahoo, working with top execs there.

“Working with great partners at Khosla Ventures and assisting awesome companies in so many different industries like, tech, big data, health, food and energy makes this opportunity perfect,” she said. “I am really excited to dig in.”

After former interim CEO Ross Levinsohn departed Yahoo earlier this week, I noted that it was only a matter of time before more execs headed out the door with the changeover to new leader and former Googler Marissa Mayer.

So it is written, so it shall be done, it seems, with two significant departures from the company this week — with one tech exec going to Apple and another product exec headed to an interesting new online education initiative.

According to several sources, Adam Bechtel — who has been the VP of infrastructure at Yahoo — will be leaving for an unspecified job at Apple.

At Yahoo, Bechtel was essentially the No. 2 exec under tech, platform and ops head David Dibble, and had purview over its data centers, network, systems, storage and edge technologies. He joined Yahoo almost a decade ago, via its acquisition of Inktomi.

Also out the Yahoo door is Jonathan Katzman, a product ace who was part of the social efforts across Yahoo, led by Mike Kerns. He was on the Kerns team that drove its most notably successful product in a while, Social Bar, which has become one of the most popular apps for sharing on Facebook.

Katzman came to Yahoo after its acquired Xoopit — an email-focused sharing product — in 2009. He’s headed to be chief product officer at the Minerva Project, which is attempting to build the next top-tier university online.

There have been many other departures of less-well-known execs at Yahoo, several sources said, mostly due to fatigue over the number of management changes at the company. Most recently, that includes sales exec Marc Grabowski, who left without other plans.

“It’s not Mayer’s fault, but some of us are just done,” said one person who is leaving. “A lot of us just can’t take another restructuring.”

That said, a large number of others who had been contemplating leaving Yahoo are now in a wait-and-see mode regarding what their new CEO will do and who she will pick to help her turn it around.

Among current top execs, that has prompted who-will-stay-and-who-will-go guessing games internally, with Mayer grilling staff up and down the organization to get a better lay of the rocky land.

Perhaps the most insecure in their status are the top employees on the media and sales side of Yahoo, who were aligned with Levinsohn and his vision of the company as a content-centric business. Those to watch include strategy exec Jim Heckman, sales head Michael Barrett, and media head Mickie Rosen, among others.

Also, intriguingly still in the mix: Former Americas ad sales head Rich Riley, who is apparently still with the company, despite a June declaration to move on after some months. (Things change fast at Yahoo!)

On the tech and product side, it will be interesting to see if Mayer will promote from within its ranks — such as elevating Shashi Seth, SVP of Yahoo’s connections business. Other execs who could move in this arena are Dibble, and also Mark Morrissey, who now works for Dibble as head of engineering operations.

Of course, there are the other parts of Yahoo that Mayer also now has responsibility for, such as legal, marketing, finance and HR. The execs to monitor there include CFO Tim Morse, HR head David Windley, and marketing chief Mollie Spilman.

Longtime Yahoo legal head Mike Callahan left the company before Mayer’s arrival, so that job has been given to Ron Bell — Hi there, Ron, be nice! — on an interim basis. But look for movement there too.

Much speculation is also centering on what tech stars Mayer might bring in from Google or from elsewhere, including via acquisition.

She’ll need a lot of firepower, of course, to turn the company around, and has told various execs that she expects to make a lot of talent hires to get Yahoo back to producing at more innovative levels.

As I reported earlier today, she has got one already — former Google PR exec Anne Espiritu is now moving over to corporate communications at Yahoo. At the same time, Mayer abruptly let Yahoo’s most recent PR spokeswoman, Dana Lengeek, go.

Expect Mayer to continue to pull from Google, which is chock-full of talent and where she had a coterie of favorites, some of whom are there and some of whom have moved on. Those mentioned as possible hires still at Google include shopping exec Samir Samat and social-networking-famous (and fantastic) Orkut Büyükkökten.

But many of Mayer’s close colleagues have left Google already and are ensconced in important jobs, including: Dylan Casey, who is now director of product management at Path; PR exec Gabe Stricker, who runs communications for Twitter; Craig Silverstein, now at the Khan Academy; and Ben Ling, who is currently COO of the Badoo “meeting network.”

Mayer also reportedly holds former Googler, FriendFeeder and Facebooker Bret Taylor in very high regard. But the entrepreneur — exactly the kind of tech powerhouse she needs to bring into Yahoo and soon — is now in the midst of creating a new start-up.

When I pinged Taylor today about whether he’d consider taking up a challenge such as Yahoo, he texted back:

“No, definitely still starting my own company, despite the fact that I am a big fan of Marissa.”

It’s a nice compliment, and Mayer’s got a lot of people rooting for her, of course — the real trick will be to turn some of the strongest ones into Yahoos.

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.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images News

According to sources close to the situation, Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz and Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy will be stepping down from the board of Groupon.

Schultz’s departure will be effective today, but Efrusy — who was critical to the initial funding around the Chicago-based daily deals site — will not be standing for re-election at the company’s annual meeting in June.

The departures are voluntary, but sources said the pair will be replaced by two new directors with significantly more fiscal oversight experience, whom one source characterized as “accounting types.”

(Update: Groupon just posted a press release noting the board departures, with the names of the new board pencil pushers: Daniel Henry, CFO of American Express, and Deloitte Vice Chairman Robert Bass. Henry joins immediately in Schultz’s place. Full press release below.)

It is a move that is critical, given Groupon’s recent series of missteps around its financial reporting that have hurt both its reputation and, more importantly, its stock.

Interestingly, several sources noted that Schultz almost left the board right before Groupon’s public offering last fall, after several ongoing disputes with its management, but stayed on so as not to scuttle its IPO.

The board of the company has not involved itself as prominently in the accounting messes at the company, but it appears as if they will begin to now.

It must, given Groupon shares have been trading at a low of $11. Its stock has dipped to $10.98 today.

As Tricia Duryee wrote recently about the fall:

At that price, it is now worth just over $7 billion, down 57 percent since the company went public last November and well off the more than $10 billion it was valued at as tech’s hottest start-up of 2011.

Ironically, Groupon’s current market valuation is actually not much more than the $6 billion offered for it by search giant Google in late 2010.

The fall of Groupon has been swift, from the honorific of being the fastest-growing company ever to one that cannot keep control of that runaway growth.

That’s perhaps no surprise.

Perhaps most significantly, Groupon went public in just four years, delivering the biggest tech IPO since Google.

The quicksilver move was typical for it. In just two years’ time, the company ballooned from 37 employees to 9,625 and from serving five markets in the U.S. to 175 in North America alone. And that’s leaving out massive expansion abroad. In the past year, Groupon has acquired roughly 17 companies, including many international copycats.

The company also has entered many new segments, expanding from selling lower-priced and simpler deals on restaurants and spas to more complex and pricey arenas, including travel, physical goods and luxury items.

But Groupon is now learning that its original business does not work across just any segment, especially to more discerning customers of its higher-level and more expensive offerings.

In fact, it was those newer and potentially more lucrative markets that forced the company recently to revise the company’s fourth-quarter report after returns skyrocketed on luxury items, such as Lasik eye surgery.

The problems forced Groupon to lower revenue in the period by $14.3 million and net income by $22.6 million. It is now reporting a wider net loss of $64.9 million on revenue of $492 million, pushing it further away from its goal of profitability.

The company also disclosed at the time that independent auditors had noted “material weakness” in its financial controls. In addition, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission was examining Groupon’s revision. 

With many companies, investors might have shrugged off such accounting issues, but the impact on the stock has been greater since they are only the latest in a string of similar mistakes at Groupon.

In its pre-IPO period, for example, Groupon was forced to restate revenues after counting both its portion of the revenue and the revenue that goes to the merchant together. It also had to dump a controversial accounting metric that made the company look more profitable than it was, because it did not include important costs, such as critical online marketing expenses to attract new customers.

Those came after the company retracted a statement by Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon’s co-founder and executive chairman, who told Bloomberg in an interview that Groupon would be “wildly profitable.”

At least the wild part was accurate.

Much of the blame for these missteps by Wall Street is being aimed at CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason, the iconoclastic 31-year-old entrepreneur who is largely responsible for defining the company’s culture, as well as Jason Child and Joe Del Preto, the chief financial and accounting officers, respectively.

Child joined the company in December 2010, coming from Amazon, where he held several roles over a 10-year period — including VP of finance, international, and director of investors relations. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked at Arthur Andersen as a certified public accountant.

Del Preto has been Groupon’s chief accounting officer for the past year and, before that, he was the company’s global controller for three months. Before Groupon, he was controller and VP of finance at Echo Global Logistics and also served as controller at InnerWorkings, the same company where Mason was a computer programmer in his early career.

Mason, of course, is the best known and the person most responsible for establishing the company’s whimsical culture and managing — or mismanaging, depending on how you look at it — Groupon’s hard-charging growth.

It will also be up to him to turn it all around, as the company sinks in both value and investor regard. Since the restatement, Mason has said little about how he intends to do that. In February, when Mason concluded Groupon’s first-ever earnings call, he said: “Thanks, guys, this was a lot of fun, and I look forward to many more of these.”

It’s not clear fun will be on the agenda at his next outing on Groupon’s first-quarter call in mid-May.

Here is the official press release from Groupon on the board changes:

Groupon Appoints Two Directors to Board Daniel Henry, CFO of American Express, and Robert Bass, Vice Chair of Deloitte

CHICAGO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Groupon, Inc (http://www.groupon.com) (NASDAQ:GRPN) today announced that Daniel Henry, the chief financial officer of American Express Company and Robert Bass, a vice chairman of Deloitte LLP will join its Board of Directors. Both will serve on the Audit Committee with Audit Chair, Ted Leonsis. Daniel Henry was appointed to the Board on April 26, replacing Howard Schultz, who has stepped down from the Board. Robert Bass will stand for election at the annual stockholder meeting to be held on June 19 following his retirement from Deloitte, replacing Kevin Efrusy, who will not stand for reelection at that time. “With their deep financial, accounting and operational experience, Dan and Bob will provide invaluable expertise to the Board going forward,” said Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon Chairman.

Daniel Henry, 62, has been the Chief Financial Officer of American Express Company since October 2007. Henry is responsible for leading American Express Company’s finance organization and representing American Express to investors, lenders and rating agencies. He has also served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of U.S. Consumer, Small Business and Merchant Services and joined American Express as Comptroller in 1990. Prior to joining American Express, Henry was a partner with Ernst & Young.

Robert Bass, 62, has been a vice chairman of Deloitte LLP since 2006, and a partner in Deloitte since 1982. He will retire from Deloitte on June 2, 2012. Bass has specialized in e-commerce, mergers and acquisitions and SEC filings. At Deloitte, Bass is responsible for all services provided to Forstmann Little and its portfolio companies and is the advisory partner for Blackstone, DIRECTV, McKesson, IMG and CSC. He has also previously been the advisory partner for priceline.com, RR Donnelley, Automatic Data Processing, Community Health Systems and Avis Budget. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the New York and Connecticut State Societies of Certified Public Accountants.

“I’m thrilled to have been a part of Groupon’s development,” said Kevin Efrusy. “The Company is well on its way to becoming the operating system for all local commerce.”

“Howard and Kevin helped guide us on our journey to becoming a public company and I want to thank them and acknowledge their contributions,” said Groupon CEO Andrew Mason.

“During my tenure on the Board, I was impressed by the game-changing opportunities that Groupon has delivered for both merchants and customers on a global scale,” said Howard Schultz. “Groupon has a strong sense of mission and purpose, and as I move on to focus on my other time commitments, I wish them the very best.”

Update: Apple didn’t wait for the conference call to release its news. It has just announced plans to pay a quarterly dividend of $2.65 a share and buy back $10 billion worth of shares.

The question has lingered for a long time. At last count, when Apple last reported quarterly earnings, the figure was a staggering $97.6 billion. At the close of that period, which happened to coincide with Apple’s all-important holiday season, the company reported that its cash pile grew by $16 billion, in a single quarter.

That is more cash than the $12 billion it had on hand in 2007, which is roughly when the persistent questions about paying a dividend, buying back shares, making large acquisitions, or doing something else with the cash started knocking around in the minds of investors and analysts. At that time, Apple had reached a point where it was growing its cash hoard by a healthy $1 billion per quarter, an amount that seems quaint now.

Apple’s cash-generating power is scarcely imaginable. In the company’s most recent four quarters, analyst Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee estimates that Apple’s free cash flow was $45.3 billion. But as iPhone, iPad and Mac sales grow, it is on track to nearly double that figure in the next four quarters, to somewhere between $75 billion and $80 billion.

The cash — technically the figure most widely used is the sum of Apple’s cash on hand, its short-term investments that can be quickly converted into cash, and its long-term investments — has a lot to do with the reason that Apple’s share price has risen so high so fast. If, hypothetically, Apple were to shut down and liquidate tomorrow, everyone who owns shares would be entitled to about $104 for every share they own, and that would be before accounting for the sale of any assets.

It has always been used as a strategic hedge. Apple has the strongest supply-chain planning in the computer and electronics industry because it can show up, cash in hand, and buy up a fixed percentage of a supplier’s capacity. In 2005, this proved strategically invaluable when it launched the iPod nano. By buying up a large percentage of manufacturing capacity of flash-chip manufacturers, it guaranteed its supply of a critical component known for regular shortages, and forced its competitors to wait in line when the shortages inevitably arrived. Soon, Apple was the only music-player maker worth talking about, as most others faded into market obscurity or ceased to exist. Yet, as of Dec. 31, only $2.7 billion was committed to these “long-term supply agreements” that Apple concludes with companies that supply it with certain strategically important parts.

The consensus appears to be that Apple will pay some sort of dividend. Analysts seem to want a dividend of about 2.5 percent. At that rate, says ISI analyst Brian Marshall in a note to clients issued Sunday, Apple would pay a higher dividend yield than Hewlett-Packard, at 2 percent; Cisco Systems, at 1.6 percent; and even IBM, at 1.5 percent.

At current prices, a 2.5 percent annual dividend would put $14.65 per share in the pockets of Apple shareholders. It would also cost Apple between $12 billion and $14 billion a year, but given its expected free cash flow for the coming year, it can easily afford it.

A dividend would also spur a new round of buying of the stock, and probably have the effect of driving the share price higher, as mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) pile in to add to their Apple positions, thus spurring other investors to keep buying as well. One wonders where — if it happens — this all leads. Apple is the largest company in the world, and every day brings some new, uncharted territory.

Already, shareholders are anticipating good news. Apple shares are up by nearly $22 to $606.87 a share in premarket trading this morning, in anticipation of a dividend. The $600 threshold, barely cracked last week with a few trades at $600.01, will in all likelihood be smashed to bits today, once the markets open for regular trading.

A return to paying a dividend would also close the loop on an important thread in the now decades-long epic that has made the Apple story one of the greatest narratives in the history of business. In November of 1995, during its crisis years, when cash was so short that Apple struggled to keep its doors open, it payed its last dividend of 3 cents a share at a time when on a split-adjusted basis, the shares were trading at less than $10.

The story of what has happened since then is well-known. And it’s not over yet.

Seattle-based Bobber Interactive believes it has come up with a solution: A Facebook application that allows prepaid users to track their spending, make savings goals and ultimately earn cash rewards.

While a number of Facebook applications exist to collect debts from friends, pool money for shared bills or track household expenses, this may be the first application that allows people to actually manage real money, like a bank.

The application, called Goal Card, is being unveiled this week at the Finovate event in New York, where the company is providing a demonstration and announcing that it has raised $1.4 million in a round of capital.

As you might expect, the Goal Card application is nothing like your mother’s bank. Instead of black-and-white spreadsheets, the GoalCard apps uses animated pictures, videogames to increase loyalty, and even viral mechanisms, like posting to a friend’s Facebook page.

The concept for the company, led by CEO Eric Eastman and COO Scott Dodson, started to gel last year, and won the “Best in Show” award at the Finovate event in the spring.

Today, the five-person team works out of luxurious headquarters in downtown Seattle. The space is hundreds of thousands of square feet too big, but it’s a bargain, and there’s always parking available in the garage. It’s also appropriate because it’s on Wall Street. Eastman jokes that while a lot of people have lost their trust for financial institutions on Wall Street, “hopefully they’ll trust this one.”

The company’s investors include Peak6 Investments and Dove Capital.

The application allows prepaid cardholders to do a number of regular banking activities such as check balances and track recent purchases. But it also allows users to set goals, like saving up for a new mountain bike or designer purse. Every day, users will see a progress bar detailing how close they are to making that purchase.

Users will also be able to play games, like a version of Bejeweled in which users line up credits and debits or answer questions such as “Who would you rather loan $50 to?” using their Facebook friends.

The games encourage engagement and enable users to earn cash rewards, Dodson explains. Users will also be able to receive up to five percent cash back once they meet their goal and purchase the item they’ve been saving up for.

Bobber makes money by sending referrals to e-commerce sites, which can pay up to 15 percent, depending on the item. But the majority of its revenues are expected to be made from interchange rates, which merchants pay the card’s processors each time a purchase is made. Those rates have remained high for prepaid cards — around 1.25 percent — despite recent legislation that lowered rates for other transactions.

So far, Bobber has only integrated with Amazon, but it expects to add more retailers soon.

Additionally, it expects to lower the cost of acquiring customers compared to other banks and card issuers, which spend big dollars on circulars and flashy ads. Instead, it believes current customers will spread the word about the site through Facebook’s viral channels.

I have just been notified that Quicken 2007 for the Mac won’t run on Apple’s new Lion operating system. I don’t wish to use the new Quicken Essentials for Mac program, which has fewer features. What are the alternatives?

A:

There are other full-featured finance programs for the Mac, whose makers say they will work with Lion and can import your data from Quicken. Two better-known ones are iBank and Moneydance. I haven’t reviewed either yet, so I can’t say how they measure up. Another option is to install Windows on your Mac, or buy a cheap Windows PC, and run Quicken for Windows. Intuit, the maker of Quicken, says on its support site that, while the Windows version can import most data from the Mac versions, it cannot import investment history. Intuit says: “You will need to either re-download your investment transactions or manually enter them.”

Q:

How do I put my computer to sleep?

A:

If it’s a Windows 7 PC, click on the “Start” button at the far left of the task bar. In the menu that pops up, click on the arrow icon to the right of the search box (it may be next to a button labeled “Shut Down.”) Select “Sleep” from the list that pops up.

If it’s a Mac, click on the Apple icon at the far left of the top menu bar and select “Sleep.”

Q:

How can I utilize my Slingbox for watching TV on an iPad?

A:

There’s an app for that, but it costs $30 and only works with two Slingbox models, the Slingbox SOLO and Slingbox PRO-HD. The company has a discounted upgrade program for people with older models. Information is at slingbox.com/go/iPad.

Email mossberg@wsj.com.

Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments in Chicago, spoke with The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Blumenstein. Julie Louise Gerberding, president of Merck & Co.’s Merck Vaccines unit, sat down with the Journal’s Laura Landro. Marissa Mayer, Google Inc.’s vice president, consumer products, talked with the Journal’s Julia Angwin. And Debra L. Lee, chairman and chief executive of BET Networks, a unit of Viacom Inc., spoke with the Journal’s Alessandra Galloni.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Designed to offer consumers content based on their interests, Livestand is a sort of personalized digital newsstand for tablets. It will feature content from Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! News, Flickr and celebrity gossip site OMG, and it will customize that content according to user preference as well as time of day. “Tablets are great for a laid-back experience, but most magazine content remains trapped online,” Irving said this morning . “But consumers don’t want a digitized magazine. They want rich media, they want connections beyond just commenting.”

Which is what Yahoo is trying to give them in Livestand. The platform will be integrated with Yahoo! Finance as well as Yahoo! Mail, and it will support content sharing and commenting. “We see this as the next generation of Yahoo and we’re putting the full force of Yahoo behind it,” Irving said.

The hope here, of course, is that this will play well with advertisers dissapointed by shallow digital experiences. “You don’t exactly curl up with your PC, the way you do with a magazine,” said Irving. “With Livestand, brands can finally match the intimacy that magazines once brought to their audiences.” That means offering them ads that adapt and respond to user interaction and the tools to create “a TV-like ad experience.”

Yahoo Livestand will debut on iOS and Android in the first half of 2011. No word yet on subscription pricing.

ON THE CREEPY LINE
“There is what I call the creepy line.The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”
–October 2010

ON BRAIN IMPLANTS, WHICH WOULD CROSS THE CREEPY LINE
“I would argue that implanting something in your brain is beyond the creepy line–at least for the moment, until the technology gets better. As far as I know, we do not have a medical lab working on implants … As far as I know.”
–October 2010

ON PRIVACY:
“Streetview, we drive exactly once. So you can just move, right?”
–October 2010

ON CARS:
“It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.”
–September 2010

ON THE BORG:
“What we’re really doing is building an augmented version of humanity, building computers to help humans do the things they don’t do well better.”
–September 2010

ON EXTENDING GOOGLE’S MISSION TO YOUR BRAIN:
“With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
–September 2010

ON YOUR FACEBOOK PHOTOS
“Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos!”
–August 2010

ON FINANCE:
“One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”
–March 2010

ON YOUR NEEDS:
“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
–August 2010

ON PRIVACY:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
–December 2009

ON M&A AND “ADULT SUPERVISION”:
“One day Larry and Sergey bought Android, and I didn’t even notice. Think about the strategic opportunities that has created. Sergey found Google Earth one day while he was surfing on the Web. And then he walked into my office and told me he bought them. “And I said, ‘for how much, Sergey?’ And it turned out to be a few million.”
–October 2009

ON ‘DON’T BE EVIL’
“‘Don’t be evil’ is misunderstood. We don’t have an ‘Evilmeter’ we can sort of apply–you know–what is good and what is evil….The rule allows for conversation. I thought when I joined the company this was crap…it must be a joke. I was sitting in a room in [the] first six months…talking about some advertising…and someone said that it is evil. It stopped the product. It’s a cultural rule, a way of forcing the conversation especially in areas that are ambiguous.”
–June 2008

ON THE ‘EVILMETER’:
“We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve [China] at all was worse evil.”
– Jan. 2006

ON EVIL:
“Evil is what Sergey says is evil.”
–-December 2002

ON IDIOTS:
“People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they’re idiots.”
–Date Unknown

ON RUNNING GOOGLE:
“Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!”
–-January 2011

Now, users will be able to share articles, leave comments and play fantasy sports on Yahoo by signing in to accounts they’ve created on Facebook and Google. They won’t have to create a Yahoo profile or associate their Facebook or Google ID with an existing Yahoo one (though a Yahoo account is being created in the background that’s associated with the other site’s credentials).

Other properties included in the new login regime (or lack of a regime) are Yahoo! Finance, as well as pages for users to rate movies, music and restaurants. (Obviously for some properties, like Yahoo! Mail, users will still need to plug in Yahoo-specific credentials to create a full-fledged Yahoo ID.)

The beleaguered company is playing this as a move toward openness. And there is some precedent for the move. Yahoo had previously allowed users to log in to Flickr using OpenID logins from Google, and had partnered with Facebook to give users an option, through Facebook Connect, to integrate their accounts on the two sites and send information back and forth between them.

But this latest announcement is different from Facebook Connect; what Yahoo is now offering is a wholesale substitution of another site’s account system. Yahoo for a long time had the coveted advantage as a Web portal of having a large percentage of its visitors logged in at all times to a consistent account across all its properties; that doesn’t seem to be a top priority for the company anymore.

It started with some simple graffiti that Ben Berkowitz wanted to get removed from a wall near his office in New Haven, Conn. 

“And not the nice kind of graffiti,” he added. 

Instead of knocking on the door of City Hall to get the unsightly spray paint dealt with, Berkowitz and his fellow co-founders developed SeeClickFix.

The Web and mobile app, from the company of the same name, has been aiming to help users document and report civic annoyances since its alpha launch in 2008.

Now SeeClickFix has just completed a $1.5 million Series A round of funding led by Bryce Roberts at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. EBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network also invested.  

The round closed very shortly after a major upgrade of its Apple iPhone app and formalization of partnerships with San Francisco’s 311 issue reporting system, as well as Washington, D.C.’s similar service.

So issues submitted in those cities via the SeeCickFix apps will actually create a work order in the cities’ official system, rather than just being directed to the appropriate agency’s email “tip line.”

Berkowitz said the infusion of cash will allow the addition of a sales and business development staff, as well as the hiring of two developers to focus on its apps and Web presence.

The concept behind SeeClickFix is simple, if not entirely original. In fact, Berkowitz admitted, it began as an outright copy of FixMyStreet, a pothole-reporting Web app from the U.K. 

“We looked at the FixMyStreet code when building SeeClickFix, and quickly realized that it was built specifically not to scale outside of the U.K.,” Berkowitz said. ”We had to rebuild the concept from scratch so it would be useful here in the U.S. and so it could scale.”

SeeClickFix took the pothole concept and added the ability to report graffiti, speeding school buses, broken infrastructure and just about any kind of civic breakdown one might imagine. 

People have even used it to request beautification, other than blight removal, such as asking for a tree in their neighborhood. 

Berkowitz claimed the resolution rate for issues filed with SeeClickFix is approximately 45 percent nationally, although he wouldn’t elaborate on given municipalities. 

He did say that he hoped the new formal partnerships would close the loop and allow SeeClickFix to more accurately list the issues that had been fixed through municipal reporting, rather than waiting for citizens to document the fixes. 

I asked about the somewhat unusual funding situation SeeClickFix is now in, having a venture investor best known for supporting micro-finance and political engagement campaigns in the developing world. 

But to Berkowitz, it seemed like a pretty natural partnership. 

“Citizens are our users. That’s who we serve,” he said. “Governments just benefit from it.” 

Berkowitz actually had quite a bit to say about the larger motivations behind SeeClickFix, and you can watch the video interview below to hear it all from him:

(Early Adopter is a new column on early-stage start-ups and ideas that will be written weekly by Drake Martinet.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110114/early-adopter-pothole-reporting-app-seeclickfix-raises-1-5-million-to-help-you-be-a-squeakier-wheel/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101117/former-northrop-grumman-ceo-joins-apple-board/ http://allthingsd.com/20101117/former-northrop-grumman-ceo-joins-apple-board/#comments Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:10:11 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=52771 Here’s a worthy addition to Apple’s board of directors: Ronald Sugar, former chairman and CEO of Northrop Grumman. “Ron is an engineer at heart, who then became a very successful business leader,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said of Sugar, who will also serve as chairman of the company’s audit and finance committee. “In addition to having been the CEO of a high-tech Fortune 100 company, Ron has a Ph.D. in engineering and has been involved in the development of some very sophisticated technology.”

Sugar’s appointment grows Apple’s board back to seven members, following the death of Jerome York earlier this year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101117/former-northrop-grumman-ceo-joins-apple-board/feed/ 0