Back in early 2008 when Scott Thompson got the job as president of eBay’s PayPal, the regulatory filing accurately listed his educational pedigree:

“Mr. Thompson holds a B.S. degree in Accounting from Stonehill College.”

The eBay filings over the next several years — until he left the online commerce giant for a much bigger job as CEO of Yahoo in January of this year — remained consistent.

But, curiously, Thompson’s bio on eBay’s Web site added an additional degree to his curriculum vitae for more than a half-dozen years, different from its Securities and Exchange Commission documents:

“Scott received a bachelor’s in accounting and computer science from Stonehill College.”

As it turned out, according to the Boston-area school, he had not gotten a computer science degree at all and graduated with the Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration (Accounting).

An eBay spokesman I called today had no explanation for the discrepancy, except to note that its legal filings were correct and that it was an error due to the lack of cross-checking the Web bio, which was apparently posted by Thompson’s staff at the time.

Also without explanation — and perhaps more seriously — is that the false computer science degree claim somehow then made it into Yahoo’s SEC filings, as well as his Web site bio, when Thompson took the helm. (The inaccurate line about his schooling is in its latest filing and all others.)

Without providing further explanation of how it got there, Yahoo today called the mistake an “inadvertent error” and said it had no bearing on his ability to lead the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

But the long troubled company might be speaking too soon, given that the revelation was uncovered this morning by activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point. Loeb has called into question the vetting process that Yahoo’s directors did to hire Thompson, as part of a proxy fight he is waging to gain several board seats.

And, while such an allegation is normal for an increasingly nasty battle, Loeb has hit his mark with deadly accuracy this time, putting into question both Thompson’s credibility and Yahoo’s obvious botching in its vetting of him.

“If there is a good explanation for the apparent discrepancies regarding the academic records of Mr. Thompson and Ms. Hart, we are confident that it will be provided promptly,” wrote Loeb in a letter to Yahoo’s board today. “However, in the event that there is no good explanation, we expect the Board to take immediate action.”

The Ms. Hart that Loeb was referring to is Patti Hart, the board member who ran Yahoo’s process for hiring a new CEO after it fired Carol Bartz — who does have a CS degree — last year. (In his letter today, Loeb also correctly called into question how she portrayed her own college degree in a more impressive fashion than was accurate.)

The search for a new Yahoo CEO was conducted by headhunter Heidrick & Struggles, which did not have Thompson on its list of candidates, since it had placed him at eBay many years before.

In fact, according to numerous sources, without involvement by Heidrick, it was Thompson who cold-emailed key Yahoo board members, nominating himself for the CEO job. He was quickly brought in for interviews and, presumably, a thorough vetting.

Despite that and despite the fact that eBay’s SEC filings did not list a computer science degree, Hart or others seem to have totally missed the discrepancies and it was added to Thompson’s official Yahoo bio and legal filings.

It’s not clear what happens next or if there are any legal implications, beyond a needed correction by Yahoo with the SEC — which already took the entire line about Thompson’s education off his Web bio today.

Yahoo’s not talking either, with its spokesperson declining to provide any explanation for its lapse or who had maintained that Thompson had that degree when he did not.

It’s essentially a mistakes-were-made-let’s-move-on defense.

I think not, for my part, and a number of prominent Silicon Valley people I spoke to today agreed that these issues tend to spin out of control.

“This is going to get very messy, very quickly,” said one person in a common sentiment I heard.

Maybe, and it’s not clear if the company has to release any details of how this occurred or if its board needs to investigate the situation.

In addition, Thompson himself is probably not at risk unless it can be definitely proved he was the one who misrepresented having the degree in the first place. He can simply say he had no idea who added it to the eBay Web site and that he did not notice it there on on the Yahoo Web site and SEC filings.

While that makes him look careless, how big a deal it becomes with shareholders, as well as Yahoo employees, is also an unknown. While a computer science degree is not a requirement for a CEO of a tech company — both Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates dropped out of college and did pretty well in computer science anyway — tech resume padding, even inadvertent, is not a characteristic that is going endear Thompson to anyone.

Plus, it just handed Loeb a very potent weapon in his fight against Yahoo, the very day after the company said the hedge fund manager’s expertise was not “relevant” to gaining a board seat.

One thing’s for sure: Loeb is most certainly very good at vetting.

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The engineer, whose name hasn’t been disclosed, explained his plans to other engineers and at least one senior manager involved with the project, known as Street View, in 2008, the FCC report states. Nevertheless, it says, Street View managers told the agency they didn’t learn the Google cars were collecting the personal information until 2010.

Read the rest of this post on its original site »

What is Yahoo?

While that has been the perennially unanswered question at the Silicon Valley Internet giant for many years, according to dozens of sources inside and outside the company, Yahoo’s leadership is now deeply embroiled in an intense — and sometimes very tense and fast-changing — debate over a number of critical issues about what is expected to be the most sweeping restructuring in its history.

Top executives at the company are conducting what is likely to be a lively all-day “offsite” meeting today (which is actually taking place on Yahoo’s Sunnyvale campus) to continue to discuss, among other things: How and where the company will make large-scale cuts in staff, which I have previously reported were coming and will perhaps be numbering in the thousands; which businesses to sell off and which to keep, including its ad tech unit; the correct structure for the reconfigured entity; and who will be left to run it all when it is all settled.

Also up for debate is the best course of a two-pronged effort — being led primarily by CFO Tim Morse and members of his corporate strategy team — to renegotiate its search and advertising partnership deal with Microsoft, while also engaging in active discussions with Google about it taking over Yahoo’s search business.

“Everything is on the table,” said one person. “And anything could be blown up by Scott.”

The Scott being referenced is new CEO Scott Thompson, who has become something of a whirling dervish since he arrived at Yahoo only three months ago from the top job at eBay’s PayPal unit.

If shaking up the place — as he has promised in public and internal statements, including a recent memo in which he wrote that “real change is coming” — was his aim, Thompson is certainly doing just that and more.

Along with immediately initiating a massive effort to figure out the best way to restructure the long-troubled and ever-meandering company and all that entails, Thompson has also been meeting players all over Silicon Valley for advice; stopping and then restarting negotiating discussions with Yahoo’s Asian partners, visiting major advertising clients; and engaging in talks with activist shareholder Dan Loeb about settling a looming proxy fight, while also packing the board with allies to help fend off said battle.

And, oh yes, he also took a little time out from his busy schedule to sue Yahoo partner Facebook for patent violations.

But the real action is the remaking of Yahoo in his image. To do so, Thompson has been furiously evaluating the entire company, with the help of Boston Consulting Group and a small group of execs, especially Morse.

While it is all still undecided, he seems to be leaning toward Yahoo as a drastically slimmed-down entity without a central product group and with a simplified structure that includes global units — such as media, commerce and sales organizations — which will again be in charge of the entire development of their offerings.

(I will note, since I have been covering Yahoo since near its founding, this is a structure that has been in place before. In other words, at least for dinosaurs like me, there is nothing new under the sun here.)

The changes being contemplated include, as I have written previously, the possible sale or drastic reconfiguration of its ad technology business, which will effect at least 1,000 employees. Another 1,500 involved in Yahoo’s search business will also be impacted, depending on talks the company has been having with Microsoft, as well as Google, about better monetization.

Such a structure brings up a lot of questions about how, and by whom, it will be run. To figure it out, Thompson has been evaluating — sometimes rather brusquely — his own top managers, as well as looking for new ones outside the company, such as a search for a chief marketing officer and other key positions.

Confused? Perhaps, but not for much longer, said multiple sources, as Thompson moves closer to delivering his answer to the what-Yahoo-is question.

Yahoo PR — by the way, it will not escape Thompson’s change machine, either! — declined comment.

It’s one thing to not be targeted in any regulatory action that strafed your competitors, but SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert used the opportunity to tout just why his company missed the bullets.

In an unusual and interesting post on social answer service Quora, Silbert gave a long answer to the question entrepreneur Jason Calacanis asked there: “Why wasn’t SecondMarket part of the SharesPost/secondary market SEC action today?”

That would be the investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which filed charges, as Arik Hesseldahl wrote earlier this week, “against two managers of private funds that had raised more than $70 million to acquire and trade pre-IPO shares of Facebook and other tech companies with misleading investors and charging undisclosed fees. It also brought charges against SharesPost, saying it had engaged in securities transactions without being registered as a broker-dealer.”

The move was part of a year-long inquiry aimed at secondary markets, where firms trade privately owned shares and options of pre-IPO companies.

Silbert, who runs one of the biggest companies in this sector, apparently decided to make hay while the Feds shone (up). In the Quora post, he noted: “I am proud to say that SecondMarket is not among those investigated or charged, which only reinforces SecondMarket’s ongoing commitment to being the trusted, compliant and fully-regulated marketplace in the startup and private company ecosystem.”

If he does say so himself!

All kidding aside, it is actually a novel way to turn a story that could tarnish everyone nearby into a plus. (Plus, ABC — Always Be Closing!)

Among the reasons that Silbert said SecondMarket was not part of the government probe: “Fully regulated, soup to nuts, from the start” (the company is a registered broker-dealer; “close coordination with private companies on all transactions” (“customized secondary markets,” he noted); “rigid accreditation process” of buyers; and “no disclosure of private company valuation and pricing.”

It should probably come as no surprise to the board and top managers of Yahoo that the just-released annual poll of its workers — called the Yahoo Employee Satisfaction Survey — paints a picture of a deeply demoralized workplace.

Apparently, Yahoos can’t get no satisfaction.

The YESS questions went out to employees the week that the company fired CEO Carol Bartz, with most of the responses gathered in the ensuing weeks.

One major drop — not much of a shockeroo — was the employee assessment of senior leadership, under the question of whether “Yahoo is an effectively managed well-run organization.” That dropped 11 percent from last year.

Also troubling, according to numerous sources who have recounted the results to me, was that 19 percent of employees said they planned to leave the company within less than a year, in case a better opportunity arises.

(I like to call that the anywhere-but-here question.)

This is a large figure for any tech company for such a survey, which is commonly done throughout the industry. Typically, those numbers are around 10 percent, according to several human resources execs I queried, although Yahoo’s chart noted that the industry benchmark was 14 percent.

In any case, this YESS is Yahoo’s highest percentage of negatives for departure intent in several years.

Worse, it is higher in the product unit, where most of Yahoo’s engineers work and which is key to any technology company’s viability. Intent not to stay is 21 percent in the division.

On the plus side, numbers for manager effectiveness, teamwork and accountability did grow year over year in the product unit.

YESS documents sentiments I have been hearing widely and ever louder anecdotally from a plethora of mid-level managers at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Most are worried that they cannot hold onto critical employees as Yahoo is conducting a major strategic review of its businesses, either to sell it or make sweeping changes.

The uncertainty has put its employees on edge and there has been a spike in attrition throughout the company.

And worry. At a recent meeting with its staff, interim CEO Tim Morse was buffeted with questions about the fate of employee stock options and other similar issues.

Despite all the turmoil, Yahoo has surprisingly not yet put an overall new plan into place for retention, although it has given some employees more money and other benefits.

“Can a company collapse from attrition?” one exec joked to me recently.

Yes, it can, which has to be of prime concern to the board of Yahoo, as it seeks to right itself. I cannot stress enough how many talented and committed employees remain at the company, desperately hoping for some effective leadership to finally take hold.

Because for all the swirl of what will happen to the whole company, one truism of technology innovation in Silicon Valley remains, if you want to survive: It’s still all about the talent.

[UPDATE: Here are some more YESS stats, according to sources:

"Yahoo is innovative": 42 percent agree, 27 percent neutral, 31 percent disagree.

"Yahoo anticipates changing customer needs and wants": 33 percent agree, 37 percent disagree, five points worse than the previous year.

But here is the hopeful kicker: 79 percent feel proud to say they work for Yahoo.]

“It is critical that we speak with one voice,” wrote Whitman in an internal email I obtained (below).

Thus, she has appointed longtime HP exec Lynn Anderson (pictured here) to “take on the role of acting Chief Communications Officer reporting directly to me,” according to the memo she sent to senior leaders at the company.

Not sure what “acting” means yet, but Anderson has gotten the job that was once that of former SAP exec Bill Wohl. He was put on “special assignment” late this summer, whatever that means, with his duties being taken up by Global Marketing EVP Marty Homlish.

Now Anderson is taking over, having helped during the Wohl transition. She previously headed up influencer relations for HP’s enterprise business.

And before that, she worked on a variety of marketing jobs for HP Canada. Anderson’s background is wonky, according to her company bio: “Before joining HP in 1983 as a systems engineer, Anderson was a programmer, analyst and operations manager for several IT departments.”

During the initial announcement of her new job running HP, Whitman relied on longtime comms adviser Henry Gomez. Gomez, who worked closely with her when Whitman was CEO of eBay and later on her unsuccessful run for California governor, has a consulting business and presumably did not want to work full time for HP.

Here’s the memo:

To: Senior Leaders
Subject: Acting Chief Communications Officer

As we continue to execute our strategy for HP, communications will be an extremely important function and it is critical that we speak with one voice.

I want to thank Marty Homlish, EVP Global Marketing who stepped in and provided leadership during a critical junction. Going forward, I have asked Lynn Anderson to take on the role of acting Chief Communications Officer reporting directly to me.

Please ensure that Lynn is brought into all communications activities.

Regards,

Meg

According to sources at the company, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz is no longer CEO of Yahoo. CFO Tim Morse has been named interim CEO.

The situation around what is clearly an ouster is uncertain, but Bartz has had a very rocky tenure in her 32 months at the company.

[UPDATE: Yahoo confirmed the departure of Bartz in a press release outlining a reorganization.]

Bartz also sent a stunning email to staff, saying she had been ousted:

To all,

I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.

Carol

Several sources said the board, specifically Chairman Roy Bostock and Co-founder, as well as director Jerry Yang, acted today, informing Bartz by phone of the need to make a change.

What the next steps will be are unclear, but Yahoo needs desperately to explore a range of strategic changes to bring it back to its former glory.

But Wall Street liked the move, with Yahoo stock up more than six percent already in after-hours trading.

Sources said Morse held a call with Yahoo’s senior staff this afternoon, telling them Bartz was out and that a search for a permanent CEO will be commencing.

Why Yahoo’s board did not name a new leader immediately is curious and might indicate a larger deal around Yahoo is in the offing.

As I wrote earlier today, when the Internet giant announced on January 13, 2009, that it had hired longtime Silicon Valley tech veteran — who was well-regarded for her tenure at running Autodesk — to replace outgoing CEO and co-founder Yang and turn around the company, there was much hope.

At the time, she presented a take-no-prisoners image and was touted as someone with a reputation as a professional manager who could clean up the place.

Not so, as it has turned out.

While Bartz has streamlined certain areas and made some strong management hires, her performance has been decidedly bumpy and mostly downhill.

The share price has settled in at about $12.50 (just about where it was when Bartz took over), Yahoo’s recent financial results have been weak, its key advertising business is struggling, its attrition rate among engineers and others is startlingly high and its product innovation cycle seems stopped up.

Add to that: Weak relationships with key Asian partners, a pricey but failed marketing effort and a proclivity for embarrassing verbal gaffes by Bartz.

Still, given that Yahoo’s Internet traffic, top media sites and brand remain huge, the going-sideways situation has again caused some investors — including powerful private equity firms and other monied investors — to pull out their spreadsheets about a variety of scenarios related to Yahoo.

The players who have sniffed around of late are powerful, sources said, including Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin and Providence Equity Partners, among others. Also in the Wall Street rumor mill recently are large companies: AT&T, News Corp. and Verizon.

All the schemes are different — ranging from taking it private to making a large investment to splitting it into parts — although they all seem to require cooperation with Yahoo to get done.

And while there is no serious effort afoot as yet, there have been increasing signs of late that Yahoo’s board is ready to listen to any serious offers, said multiple sources, especially as the company has continued to drift under the leadership of Bartz.

While board chairman Bostock has publicly backed Bartz — after all, he was her biggest champion at the time of her hiring — multiple sources said he had started to become more involved at looking at the management issues at the company and its challenges.

Yang — still a key figure at Yahoo — has also become more active, said sources, and tensions between him and Bartz have increased over the last few months.

The increasing pressure on the directors of the company from its major shareholders to act has gained in recent months, said sources.

Thus, Bartz is gone and the next chapter in Yahoo’s corporate drama begins.

[Photo credit: Asa Mathat for All Things Digital]

Related posts

• As Yahoo Continues to Wobble, Investors (And Board) Eye Options
• Exclusive: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Tim Morse Named Interim CEO
• Carol Bartz’s Last F%*& You — Now Aimed at Yahoo Board
• Yahoo’s Statement on Bartz Ouster
• Wall Street Likes Bartz’s Firing — Yahoo Stock Spikes on News
• My Picks for Yahoo’s Next CEO — Maybe Snoop Dogg, Ya Digg?

When Yahoo announced on January 13, 2009, that it had hired longtime Silicon Valley tech veteran Carol Bartz to replace outgoing CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang and turn around the company, there was a sigh of relief.

At the time, she presented a take-no-prisoners image and was touted as someone with a reputation as a professional manager who could clean up the place.

Not so, as it has turned out.

While Bartz has streamlined certain areas and made some strong management hires, her performance has been decidedly bumpy and mostly downhill. (Update: And this afternoon that ride took her straight out the door.)

Consider: The share price has settled in at about $12.50 (just about where it was when Bartz took over), Yahoo’s recent financial results have been weak, its key advertising business is struggling, its attrition rate among engineers and others is startlingly high and its product innovation cycle seems stopped up. Add to that: Weak relationships with key Asian partners, a pricey but failed marketing effort and a proclivity for verbal gaffes by Bartz.

Still, given that Yahoo’s Internet traffic, top media sites and brand remain huge, the going-sideways situation has again caused some investors — including powerful private equity firms and other monied investors — to pull out their spreadsheets about a variety of scenarios related to Yahoo.

The players who have sniffed around of late are powerful, sources said, including Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin and Providence Equity Partners, among others. Also in the Wall Street rumor mill recently are large companies: AT&T, News Corp. and Verizon.

“It’s hard to ignore all that value sitting there and not being managed properly,” said one person who is considering a variety of investing options related to Yahoo. “And it’s not like AOL, whose assets are so weak, so it seems like an opportunity.”

All the schemes are different — ranging from taking it private to making a large investment to splitting it into parts — although they all seem to require cooperation with Yahoo to get done.

And while there is no serious effort afoot as yet, there are increasing signs that Yahoo’s board is ready to listen to any serious offers, said multiple sources, especially as the company has continued to drift under the leadership of Bartz.

While board chairman Roy Bostock has publicly backed Bartz — after all, he was her biggest champion at the time of her hiring — multiple sources said he has started to become more involved at looking at the management issues at the company and its challenges.

Yang — still a key figure at Yahoo — has also become more active, said sources, and tensions between him and Bartz have increased over the last few months.

While this might, as often happens at Yahoo, lead nowhere, what’s clear is the increasing pressure on the directors of the company from its major shareholders to act.

“You watch an asset like that degrade and it makes you furious,” said one investor. “After a while, you hope it makes the board at Yahoo feel the same.”

Yahoo declined to comment (but so would I).

Related posts

• As Yahoo Continues to Wobble, Investors (And Board) Eye Options
• Exclusive: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Tim Morse Named Interim CEO
• Carol Bartz’s Last F%*& You — Now Aimed at Yahoo Board
• Yahoo’s Statement on Bartz Ouster
• Wall Street Likes Bartz’s Firing — Yahoo Stock Spikes on News
• My Picks for Yahoo’s Next CEO — Maybe Snoop Dogg, Ya Digg?

As All Things Digital reported last week, Groupon filed an amended S-1 IPO offering this morning, in which it deemphasized a controversial accounting method.

Instead of a metric called ACSOI, or adjusted consolidated segment operating income, the Chicago-based social buying company noted that gross profit was the “important indicator for our business, because it is a reflection of the value of our services to our merchants.”

But the dreaded ACSOI — which leaves out important costs of marketing — is not completely gone. In its filing, Groupon said it would use it internally, noting:

We exclude those costs because, unlike our other marketing expenses, they are an up-front investment to acquire new subscribers that we expect to end when this period of rapid expansion in our subscriber base concludes. While we track this management metric internally to gauge our performance, we encourage you to base your decision on whatever metrics make you comfortable.

In other words, for the love of Pete, please ignore ACSOI completely.

Groupon also included new financials in its filing for the quarter, with a 36 percent increase in revenue to $878 million from the previous quarter and double a year ago. But its loss was $102.7 million, compared to a loss of $35.9 million a year ago.

The company also reported that its subscribers grew from 10.4 million last year to 115.7 million now.

Costs are also lower by eight percent in the new quarter, with Groupon spending $165.2 on marketing to new subscribers, compared to $179.9 million in the previous one.

The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission is a critical one for Groupon, whose public offering has been mired in questions about how it accounts for its financial performance.

Of particular concern: ACSOI, which is a number that does not include important costs, such as critical online marketing expenses to attract new customers to Groupon.

Such accounting is called non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles).

In 2010, Groupon reported that it lost $413.4 million using standard accounting practices. When it excludes some costs from its calculations using ACSOI — including online marketing expenses to attract new customers — it recorded a profit of $60.6 million in 2010.

The new results were stronger, to be sure. Such growth is important, especially given investor scrutiny of Groupon in the current economic turmoil.

As I wrote last week:

And, indeed, questions from the media, investors and, most importantly, the Securities and Exchange Commission about how Groupon accounts for its revenue and profits using ACSOI were swift and decidedly negative.

Hence, a furious debate — along with much internal tension — within Groupon about what to do. At first, in another S-1 amendment, the company backed away from using ACSOI as a “valuation metric.”

But that was apparently not enough for the SEC or anyone else, so Groupon’s top managers finally thought it best to rid itself of the term entirely.

Presumably, with a cleaner S-1, Groupon can concentrate on a whole new set of issues around its IPO, such as the tumultuous state of the markets.

In a surprise cameo, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has gone Hollywood, appearing in a new trailer for the movie “Moneyball.”

Based on the excellent Michael Lewis book about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its quirky general manager Billy Beane, who is played by Brad Pitt, Kotick is apparently playing its owner.

Kotick seems to do a pretty good job as a sports mogul, which is not much different than his one as a gaming mogul. And, if it works out as it seems it will, a social networking mogul as a possible new owner of Myspace.

Here’s the video of the trailer for the film, which comes out in September, with Kotick:

Of all the many job openings in tech, perhaps the most interesting to watch will be who Groupon selects as its next COO.

The search has been on for a while for the critical hire for the Chicago-based social buying company, well before the recent announcement that it was parting ways with President and COO Rob Solomon.

Among those approached, said sources close to Groupon: Former Doubleclick and Google exec David Rosenblatt.

He’s not taking the job for a variety of reasons, sources said, but
finding someone to step up for the job will be tough, since it is likely to be one that will require a wide range of talents.

That includes: epic cat-wrangling of thousands of employees in far-flung locations; deep marketing and advertising prowess; high-level technology, product, mobile and e-commerce chops; and international experience.

The last is perhaps the most critical of all, since global growth–especially in Europe and Asia–is increasingly becoming Groupon’s main revenue driver, and the COO will have to pull together a crack team across the world.

That will become even more important after Groupon’s top international managers–Germany’s entrepreneurial Samwer brothers–move out of active management by the end of this year.

While company sources said this has been long planned, the Samwers (pictured here) have been fully involved in Groupon’s fast trajectory in Europe and elsewhere, since it bought their Citydeal discounting clone last May.

Thus, sources said, Groupon is looking at a range of candidates with experience abroad, as well as talent in scaling businesses quickly and to huge size.

And that means looking to companies such as Google and Amazon for an exec, where there are quite a few choices.

While BoomTown could not confirm whether Groupon has spoken to any of them, possible COO types are obvious.

At Amazon, some qualified execs include: Sebastian J. Gunningham, SVP of Seller Services; Diego Piacentini, SVP of International Retail; H. Brian Valentine, SVP of Ecommerce Platform; and Jeffrey A. Wilke, SVP of North America Retail.

At Google, there are tons of good candidates that Facebook has not yet raided, including: Stephanie Tilenius, VP of eCommerce; Henrique de Castro, VP of Media and Global Platforms; Dennis Woodside, VP of Americas Operations; and Margo Georgiadis, VP of Global Sales Operations (plus a Chicagoan!).

Other names being raised include Hulu’s Jason Kilar (unlikely, but I’d like it), various Microsoft execs and a spate of others.

(I say, let’s bring in Zynga’s Owen Van Natta, who was once COO of Facebook, since he’s missing a big pile of Groupon stock to add to his enviable collection of hot Web 2.0 company shares.)

While there are probably qualified execs outside the tech industry at retail and media outfits, sources said it is likely Groupon will select within the digital ranks.

Lastly, and perhaps most important, the Groupon COO candidate is going to have to accept that the role will not be a CEO-in-waiting, either before or after its inevitable IPO in the next year.

While I have received several tips that Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason (pictured here) might not stay its principal exec, extensive checking with sources inside and outside the company indicate that such a move is highly unlikely.

“Andrew is beloved to the board, by investors and, most of all, by employees,” said one source. “He’s not going anywhere.”

Indeed, Mason has a close working relationship with Co-founder Brad Keywell, as well as Groupon Co-founder and Chairman Eric Lefkofsky.

In fact, despite other business interests, Lefkofsky has been very involved in all key decisions with Mason.

That job, presumably, would fall to the new COO, which Groupon should be hiring sooner rather than later.

“Groupon needs a world-class COO, who can manage hyper-growth, but also who knows that a No. 2 stays in the background while doing it,” said another source. “That’s a tall order.”

As we await the decision of which uneasy head gets the COO crown at Groupon, here is the opening from the Swisher boys fave Animal Planet cable television show, “Must Love Cats,” to get you in the mood:

Memo to tech CEOs everywhere: Now that’s how to write an internal memo.

That would be the 1,300-word one that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop (pictured here) apparently penned for employees at the Finnish telecom giant, which inevitably leaked to the media (in this case, kudos to Engadget for getting the whole thing, which is below).

Elop uses the harsh but cogent metaphor of a burning oil platform to take a bracing opening shot at turning around Nokia, which has lost market share–and, more importantly, mindshare–to both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating system.

This is not breaking news to anyone in the wider tech world, of course. But for the CEO to say it so flatly and brutally to the insular troops at Nokia makes it remarkable.

As you can read, it’s dramatic all right, and just the kind of thing a lot of leaders at troubled companies–Hello, Yahoo!–could learn a thing or two from.

That’s because it’s honest and also genuine, and with enough of a direction and glimpses into pending action–to be revealed later this week at an event to unveil a new strategy–that it’s not just a diatribe by a new manager about how bad the previous managers were.

There is clearly plenty of that, of course, which is no surprise. But with rumors of an imminent significant management overhaul–which few execs ever do enough of at the start of their tenure, when it is easiest–there seems to be teeth to the memo too.

And although the burning platform part will get all the attention, perhaps the most important observation was in one particular passage that outlines exactly the giant challenge Nokia faces to catch up:

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

Because, as it has turned out, it is all about ecosystems and using them to provide consumers with the best and most seamless experience possible.

Walt Mossberg and I will be interviewing Elop–the former Microsoft exec, who is neither a Nokia insider nor Finnish–about all this and more at the ninth D: All Thing Digital conference in late May.

Obviously, there will be a lot to talk about.

But, until then, here’s Elop’s memo below in its entirety.

I also reposted a video interview I did with Elop in April of 2009 in which he talked about making Microsoft a more open and innovative place, the changing business model of software and more.

Also below is a video Elop ordered up while running Microsoft’s Business Division as part of an “Envisioning” series.

These see-into-the-future videos were done by Microsoft Office Labs as part of a “Productivity Future Vision” series that sketched out a landscape of smartphones, touchscreens everywhere and a whole lot of cool interacting.

It would be nice if he can drag Nokia back into that world–although Elop’s memo is a good start.

Hello there,

There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform’s edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.

As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a “burning platform,” and he needed to make a choice.

He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times–his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a “burning platform” caused a radical change in his behaviour.

We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.

Over the past few months, I’ve shared with you what I’ve heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I’m going to share what I’ve learned and what I have come to believe.

I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.

And, we have more than one explosion–we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us.

For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.

In 2008, Apple’s market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.

And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under €100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry’s innovation to its core.

Let’s not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally–taking share from us in emerging markets.

While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.

The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.

We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.

At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.

At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, “the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.” They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us.

And the truly perplexing aspect is that we’re not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

This is one of the decisions we need to make. In the meantime, we’ve lost market share, we’ve lost mind share and we’ve lost time.

On Tuesday, Standard & Poor’s informed that they will put our A long term and A-1 short term ratings on negative credit watch. This is a similar rating action to the one that Moody’s took last week. Basically it means that during the next few weeks they will make an analysis of Nokia, and decide on a possible credit rating downgrade. Why are these credit agencies contemplating these changes? Because they are concerned about our competitiveness.

Consumer preference for Nokia declined worldwide. In the UK, our brand preference has slipped to 20 percent, which is 8 percent lower than last year. That means only 1 out of 5 people in the UK prefer Nokia to other brands. It’s also down in the other markets, which are traditionally our strongholds: Russia, Germany, Indonesia, UAE, and on and on and on.

How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved?

This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally.

Nokia, our platform is burning.

We are working on a path forward–a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on February 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company. But, I believe that together, we can face the challenges ahead of us. Together, we can choose to define our future.

The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behaviour, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future. He was able to tell his story. Now, we have a great opportunity to do the same.

Stephen.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110209/nokias-stephen-elop-didnt-start-the-fire-but-his-burning-platform-certainly-lights-one/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110204/msfts-2-3b-bond-sale-year-of-the-shareholder-says-bloomberg/ http://allthingsd.com/20110204/msfts-2-3b-bond-sale-year-of-the-shareholder-says-bloomberg/#comments Fri, 04 Feb 2011 11:58:29 +0000 Tiernan Ray http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=35914 In response to Microsoft’s plan to sell $2.25 billion of bonds in maturities of 2015, 2020, and 2040, Bloomberg’s Sapna Maheshwari and John Detrixhe this afternoon write that the offering signals 2011 is, “more the year of the shareholder than the year of the bondholder,” citing money manager Tom Murphy with Columbia Management, based in Minneapolis.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110204/msfts-2-3b-bond-sale-year-of-the-shareholder-says-bloomberg/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110201/seesmic-raises-from-4-million-in-funding-salesforce/ http://allthingsd.com/20110201/seesmic-raises-from-4-million-in-funding-salesforce/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:39:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40053

In an interesting social enterprise move, popular social networking collaboration tool Seesmic is taking a $4 million investment from Salesforce.com, as well as from Softbank.

The San Francisco-based Seesmic has one of the top desktop and also mobile applications for monitoring a consumer’s various feeds from Twitter, Facebook and more.

So far, Seesmic has received $16 million in total funding. Other investors include Atomico, Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners.

Moving beyond a consumer app, where it has one million registered users, Seesmic has also worked closely with Salesforce.com on integrating its Chatter social enterprise network offering.

Deeper integration with Chatter and bridging more social communications with its customers is coming, said Seemsic founder and CEO Loïc Le Meur.

“It becomes an amazing internal dashboard if you are a manager,” said Le Meur in an interview with BoomTown this morning. “It has everything we have built for consumers, but internally.”

There are many such apps and software-based services being developed to inject social into the enterprise, including Yammer, Socialcast and Jive.

It will also be interesting to see if the investment is a prelude to an acquisition by Salesforce.com, to further bolster its own efforts in socializing the workplace.

Here is the official press release:

Seesmic Receives $4 Million Investment

SAN FRANCISCO–Feb 1, 2011–Seesmic, the leading maker of applications that monitor social networks across mobile devices, today announced a $4 million investment from salesforce.com, inc. and a Softbank Group company managed by Softbank Holdings Inc.

Seesmic helps companies monitor, engage and build their brands across social networks and mobile devices. The Seesmic Desktop provides a single console that lets companies view and respond, in real time, to comments being made about their brands in Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Seesmic Desktop works with Apple’s iPhone and Macintosh computers, smartphones running Google’s Android or [Microsoft] Windows Phone 7 mobile operating systems, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and on personal computers.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, and Softbank group join previous investors Atomico, Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners. Seesmic has received a total of $16 million, including the most-recent investment round.

Seesmic and Salesforce.com have worked closely for more than six months to create a seamless integration between Seesmic Desktop and Salesforce Chatter, the industry’s first enterprise social collaboration app and platform. Leveraging the social features popularized by Facebook and Twitter–such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds–Chatter lets employees “follow” documents, people, business processes and application data. The result is a new level of productivity that crosses departments and organizational barriers. By integrating with Chatter, Seesmic Desktop will enable salesforce.com users to immediately see comments that customers have posted on Facebook and Twitter.

“Salesforce.com has become a valued partner as we work together to bridge external and enterprise social communication with Chatter. These investments will enable us to reach more enterprise customers” said Loïc Le Meur, CEO, Seesmic.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/seesmic-raises-from-4-million-in-funding-salesforce/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101202/password-manager-lastpass-acquires-xmarks/ http://allthingsd.com/20101202/password-manager-lastpass-acquires-xmarks/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:10:01 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37969

LastPass, a cross-platform password manager, has acquired the social bookmarking and browser synchronization service Xmarks.

The San Francisco-based Xmarks has been in the midst of some tumult of late, as it closed down in September and then quickly opened back up again in an effort to keep its service running for a large group of active users.

That happened after user outcry, spurring the company to try to stay afloat.

SInce then, Xmarks has been trying to land itself safely.

The start-up had multiple offers to keep the operation running, as well as pledges from almost 30,000 fans willing to pay $10 to $20 a year for a new “freemium” business model.

Enter LastPass, based in Vienna, Va., whose CEO Joe Siegrist said in an interview that he wanted to help keep the service operating.

“They had a large dedicated audience, but their free offering and advertising model was not working,” he said. “We really want to figure something out that could keep it going.”

Siegrist said LastPass offered a robust free service, but relied on a small group of users who pay to upgrade to a premium offering.

The browser add-on for cross-platform synchronization operates in the cloud.

And that is going to be the fate of Xmarks–which had been called Foxmarks initially.

It had been seed-funded in 2006 by well-known entrepreneur Mitch Kapor and also got an additional investment from First Round Capital.

Xmarks garnered another $5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures in 2008,

That year, it also hired Silicon Valley entrepreneur James Joaquin as CEO, whose job it was to carve out a business with Xmarks’ assets, including using its mass of data.

Xmarks had certainly been growing its user base and bookmarked Web addresses strongly, via a browser widget that recorded bookmarking information.

Earlier this year, it tried out an advertising product called SearchBoost, which gave advertisers additional analytics about their ads, as well as organic search results.

But all that ultimately did not translate into a viable business for Xmarks.

“We think this will make a great ending and beginning for Xmarks,” said Joaquin.

Both Xmarks and LastPass declined to provide financial details of the transaction.

Here is the blog post by LastPass and Xmarks about the integration:

Today we’re excited to announce that Xmarks has been acquired by LastPass, makers of a leading cross-platform password manager. It’s a great opportunity that ensures the survival of Xmarks as the same service that you know and love.

In the last few years, we’ve attracted over 4.5 million users syncing more than 1 billion bookmarks across 5 million computers. Most importantly, we’ve provided a simple solution to help people easily access their bookmarks, wherever and whenever they needed to. We’ve had thousands of users tell us that Xmarks has become an integral part of their browsing experience. You can rest assured that LastPass will continue to build upon the service in the coming months.

We’re also committed to keeping Xmarks free while implementing a viable long-term plan. Xmarks is transitioning to a “freemium” business model, the same model that allowed LastPass to grow into a thriving, profitable business. The browser add-on and the vast majority of what users have enjoyed remains free. Users can then opt to purchase Xmarks Premium for $12 per year, which includes new enhanced features like Android and iPhone mobile phone apps, priority support, and more. The Xmarks and LastPass Premium offerings are also available bundled together at a reduced subscription rate of $20 per year. For those of you who pledged your financial support, you can make good on your pledge today and upgrade.

The restructuring of the Xmarks offerings will accelerate the introduction of new features and service improvements. The two services will continue to require separate downloads and will be administered through two distinct extensions and websites, although there are plans to integrate them in the future.

We believe the acquisition will prove to be a success because of the common mission shared by LastPass and Xmarks. Xmarks complements LastPass’ vision of secure, universal access to the information that gives you entry to your digital life. By joining LastPass, Xmarks will also be able to accelerate the introduction of new features and developments. As the ultimate cross-browser, cross-platform team, Xmarks and LastPass will work together to help more people simplify their digital lives and access their data from anywhere, at any time.

We’re excited to join forces with LastPass and be a part of a team that will continue to provide the best data-syncing tools out there! We hope you will support both of these great services through your business and your Premium subscription. For more information, please see the FAQs.

The Xmarks & LastPass Teams

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/password-manager-lastpass-acquires-xmarks/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101111/adding-insult-to-injury-yahoo-is-prepping-layoffs-but-limited-to-product-group-and-more-like-10-percent/ http://allthingsd.com/20101111/adding-insult-to-injury-yahoo-is-prepping-layoffs-but-limited-to-product-group-and-more-like-10-percent/#comments Thu, 11 Nov 2010 22:40:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37165

Yahoo is indeed preparing to lay off employees, in a reduction in force that will be done in December.

But the layoffs, first reported in TechCrunch at 20 percent, will be closer to 10 percent and be almost completely centered on the product organization under Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, said sources close to the situation.

That would mean layoffs of about 650, since that part of Yahoo has about 6,500 employees.

Yahoo, in fact, just put out a statement saying the 20 percent figure was “inaccurate.”

Said the company in a statement: “Yahoo! is always evaluating expenses to align with the company’s financial goals. However, a 20% reduction in Yahoo’s workforce across the board is misleading and inaccurate.”

Well, kind of, because it is a big layoff nonetheless.

In addition, said sources, the layoffs might result in the outsourcing of some functions at the company.

Even at a lower figure, the move will surely be yet another blow to morale at the much-buffeted Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Just this week, for example, Google gave each of its employees a 10 percent pay raise and $1,000. Facebook, similarly, is showering benefits on its fast-growing pool of workers.

Along with a spate of top-level executive departures, Yahoo is under scrutiny by Wall Street, as well as the subject of much takeover speculation.

This has put Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz under even more pressure to show results after almost two years as top manager.

Known as an exec who knows how to cut costs, she has yet to prove she can grow the Yahoo business with new innovations.

Yahoo has just over 14,000 employees. It has undergone many layoffs and restructurings, but only once in a major one under Bartz.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101111/adding-insult-to-injury-yahoo-is-prepping-layoffs-but-limited-to-product-group-and-more-like-10-percent/feed/ 9 http://allthingsd.com/20100325/smartphone-motion-patent%e2%80%99s-authors-are-google-apple-engineers/ http://allthingsd.com/20100325/smartphone-motion-patent%e2%80%99s-authors-are-google-apple-engineers/#comments Thu, 25 Mar 2010 08:00:05 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=37267 A quick follow-up on that broad motion-control patent I wrote about Thursday. I haven’t been able to turn up any information on Durham Logistics, the limited liability company to which the patent is assigned, beyond learning that it is managed by another obscure Las Vegas LLC called Memscom. But I have uncovered a bit more about the inventors who wrote it. The first, as I mentioned earlier, is an engineering director at Google (GOOG). And the second?

He’s a hardware engineering manager at Apple (AAPL) working on the iPad.

Which is interesting, right?

Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) are both playing, aggressively–and in Apple’s case, litigiously–in the mobile space in which this patent could become a factor. That the two engineers responsible for it ended up in their employ years later seems more than a little ironic.

COMPLETE COVERAGE:

• New Motion Control Patent Could Shake Up Smartphone Industry
• Smartphone Motion Patent’s Authors Are Google, Apple Engineers
• Confirmed: Intellectual Ventures Owns Smartphone Motion-Control Patent

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100325/smartphone-motion-patent%e2%80%99s-authors-are-google-apple-engineers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090907/sticky-situation-of-the-month-ex-yahoo-communications-head-and-peanut-butter-manifesto-scribe-garlinghouse-to-helm-similar-unit-at-aol/ http://allthingsd.com/20090907/sticky-situation-of-the-month-ex-yahoo-communications-head-and-peanut-butter-manifesto-scribe-garlinghouse-to-helm-similar-unit-at-aol/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 03:45:02 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=18169

In the ongoing game of musical chairs among top managers at Internet companies, former Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse–famous for his controversial “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” which correctly chided the Internet giant for becoming so lugubrious several years ago–is taking a job at AOL very similar to the one he left at Yahoo last year.

Garlinghouse, 38, has been named president of Internet and mobile communications at AOL, putting him in charge of the New York-based Time Warner (TWX) online unit’s powerful email and instant-messaging properties, including ICQ and AIM.

He has only been in talks with AOL–which used Spencer Stuart’s Internet-top-exec-finder-in-chief Jim Citrin–for a few weeks, in a deal that came together quickly, he and the company said.

Garlinghouse, a longtime Web entrepreneur and exec, had reportedly been considering a number of start-up and venture-related jobs since he left Yahoo last summer after six years there.

Sources said he was seriously considering becoming the CEO of a mobile firm.

He was most recently at Silver Lake Partners, as an “in-house senior advisor,” the private equity firm that recently bought the Skype Internet telephony firm for $1.9 billion. Garlinghouse also reportedly helped work on that deal.

“It’s really exciting to be to able to rebuild and revitalize an industry giant,” said Garlinghouse in an interview with BoomTown earlier today. “I make no bones that these [properties] are in need of that…but there is also a huge opportunity to do something cool.”

Garlinghouse has to hurry. Despite being among the top communications players online–a group that also includes Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) and, more recently, Google (GOOG)–AOL has lost relevance with key audiences, even as social networking properties like Facebook and the microblogging service, Twitter, have innovated in the communications space.

The hiring of Garlinghouse, well known in Silicon Valley circles, is meant to counter that.

He will head up AOL’s operations from its Mountain View, Calif., campus–which is also the former HQ of AOL-acquired Netscape Communications–where, said AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Garlinghouse will “be CEO of Silicon Valley for us.”

Between all its various properties, AOL has several hundred employees in the Northern California area.

Armstrong said AOL–which was founded 25 years ago on the East Coast and has tried and failed many times to get a true foothold in the West–thinks having an important player at the center of the tech industry is critical as it moves to spin off as an independent company by the end of the year.

“We have a triple play in getting a great executive, who is a master in the communications on the Web and who is well known out there,” said Armstrong. “Brad is our senior AOL manager there.”

Along with running all of AOL’s communications properties, Garlinghouse will inherit some of its community properties, although AOL’s Bebo social networking unit–now considered to be an overpriced acquisition error–now resides in its ventures unit, headed by Jon Brod.

Garlinghouse will also be aiding Brod, said Armstrong, with AOL on the lookout for acquisition opportunities in communications and other arenas.

While Garlinghouse declined to be specific about what would pique his buying interest, he was responsible for such big Yahoo deals as its $350 million purchase of Zimbra in the fall of 2007.

He was also key to bringing both Oddpost, which is at the heart of Yahoo’s email offering, and the popular Flickr photosharing service to Yahoo.

Garlinghouse said he has admired what Twitter and Facebook have done, but that they were not destroying traditional online communications, pioneered by AOL, as some assert.

“It’s a vibrant segment and this just means there are a lot of opportunities to enable integration,” he said. “I think of it as an expansion of online communications and I hope AOL can do more collaboration and partnerships.”

Garlinghouse also has to watch AOL’s basic products like email, which was recently passed by Google’s Gmail as the No. 3 email service in the U.S. Yahoo Mail is the top email, while Microsoft’s Hotmail is second.

How much Garlinghouse can do will depend on the future financial strength of AOL. Its advertising business has been hit hard in the econalpyse, with hopes it will return before its money-generating access business continues its slow decline.

Armstrong is now in the midst of looking over AOL’s cost structure and employee base, which most expect will eventually result in another round of layoffs and cuts.

He has been busy creating a different strategy for the company since he arrived earlier this year, as well as hiring (and firing) top execs to create a new management structure.

Now, that includes Garlinghouse.

So, for a look-see at AOL’s latest talent acquisition, here’s a video interview I did with him, just after Yahoo bought Zimbra:

[ See post to watch video ]

And here’s the full press release from AOL about the hiring of Garlinghouse:

AOL NAMES BRAD GARLINGHOUSE AS PRESIDENT, INTERNET AND MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS

NEW YORK, N.Y.–September 8, 2009–AOL today named Brad Garlinghouse as President of Internet and Mobile Communications, spearheading AOL’s global efforts to expand the reach of its e-mail and instant messaging. Garlinghouse will also take on an expanded leadership position for the company, heading up AOL’s Silicon Valley operations from its Mountain View campus and serving as the West Coast lead for AOL Ventures, the company’s venture capital arm headed globally by Jon Brod. Garlinghouse was most recently at Silver Lake Partners as an in-house Senior Advisor.

Prior to Silver Lake, Garlinghouse spent nearly six years at Yahoo!, where he led that company’s communications and community products. Garlinghouse will report directly to AOL’s Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong.

” Brad Garlinghouse is an all-star in the Internet industry with an unparalleled background and proven track record, having led Yahoo’s communications products to unprecedented growth,” said Armstrong. “In addition to leading our efforts to grow our communications products, Brad will be bringing his global leadership and business experience as a key member of our company’s executive leadership team. He will also be a major force for AOL in Silicon Valley, working to expand our presence there and in the tech community in general. We’re delighted to have Brad on board and know he’ll do great things for AOL.”

“It’s a tremendous opportunity to join AOL at this pivotal moment in its history,” Garlinghouse said. “Tim has set out a clear strategy and vision for where he is taking this company as it becomes independent again. I’m looking forward to working with him and the rest of the team to realize that vision.”

Armstrong, who joined AOL in April, identified Communications as one of the five key areas of strategic focus for AOL after an extensive 100-day review of the company’s business. Other focus areas include Content, Advertising, Local & Mapping and AOL Ventures.

Garlinghouse spent nearly six years at Yahoo! where he most recently served as SVP of Communications and Communities. Prior to that he served as SVP of Communications, Communities and Front Doors, which included the Yahoo! home page. He came to Yahoo in 2003 as VP, Communication Products. During his time there, Yahoo! Mail went from No. 3 to leading all competitors by a wide margin, and the company’s instant messaging service rose to become the leader in that market as well. Garlinghouse also oversaw the company’s Flickr photo-sharing service and Yahoo! Groups.

Prior to Yahoo!, Garlinghouse was CEO of Dialpad.com Inc., responsible for all aspects of the company’s operations, finance, sales and marketing. He was also General Partner at @Ventures, Category Manager of Media Development for the @Home Network, Inc., and Manager at SBC Communications.

Garlinghouse, 38, received his BA in economics from the University of Kansas and his MBA from Harvard Business School.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090907/sticky-situation-of-the-month-ex-yahoo-communications-head-and-peanut-butter-manifesto-scribe-garlinghouse-to-helm-similar-unit-at-aol/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081119/time-inc-layoffs-cottage-living-yesterday-hundreds-today/ http://allthingsd.com/20081119/time-inc-layoffs-cottage-living-yesterday-hundreds-today/#comments Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:38:27 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1207 Time Inc. is cutting something like 600 employees, but for the past few weeks it has been doing so in small steps: 10 here, 30 there. That will change today, reports the New York Post’s Keith Kelly, when up to 250 people at Time Warner’s (TWX) magazine unit are expected to get pink-slipped.

Kelly’s number for today “may be on the high side,” a person familiar with the matter counsels me. In any event, I expect to have more details later in the day. As always, I value your input, and I keep all correspondence anonymous: peter@allthingsd.com.

In the meantime, an update on this week’s cuts: I’m told Time Europe editor William Green and senior editor James Graff were laid off via phone yesterday, and that more cuts in the London office are expected today. And four-year-old Cottage Living magazine has been shut down, which means that 38 out of 47 people who worked on that title are out of work; the remainder will be placed elsewhere in the group. Announced along with the job cuts today were the departures of executives from Cooking Light and Southern Progress. Chris Allen, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Cooking Light is resigning his position, as are Southern Progress execs Bruce Akin, Karla Hardy and Dick Gardner. Here are the memos:

November 18, 2008

To:Time Inc. Employees
From:Sylvia Auton
Re: Cottage Living Magazine

I regret to inform you that we will no longer be producing Cottage Living magazine. The November/December 2008 issue, on newsstands now, will be the magazine’s last. Cottageliving.com will also shutdown. However, the company will keep the brand alive in one of its other leading shelter titles and these plans will be finalized over the next few weeks.

Since its inception, Cottage Living attracted significant advertiser support and fostered a loyal following among readers. However, the economic downturn has particularly affected the shelter market and while the brand was genuinely loved by readers and advertisers alike, the economy inhibited its ability to grow and therefore, sadly, we had to make the decision to close it.

Cottage Living launched with a unique editorial mission. Its readership celebrated community and character over conformity, personality rather than perfection, and informality instead of pretension. The brand’s tagline: ‘life just right,’ showed how one could ‘live large,’ even luxuriously, in a lighter footprint.

Launched in September 2004 with a circulation of 500,000, the brand quickly grew to 650,000 in January/February 2005. One year later, Cottage Living increased its rate base to 900,000, and then to one million in January/February 2007. Cottage Living also produced many one-time special-interest publications including Cottage Christmas and Cottage Makeovers.

Cottage Living also received many industry accolades including AdWeek’s ’2005 Startup of the Year’ and Advertising Age’s ’2005 Launch Worth Watching.’ It was also named to AdWeek’s ‘Hot List’ 10 Under 50 list for two consecutive years: 2006 and 2007.

I want to thank the many dedicated and talented Cottage Living staffers. It was developed, edited and published by some of the best talent in the business and we can remain proud of its many achievements.

S.A.”

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Subject: Staff Announcement
To:       Lifestyle Business Unit Employees
From:   Sylvia Auton and Steve Sachs
Re:       Staff Announcement  

With the departure of Bruce Akin, we’re pleased to announce that Bruce Larson will assume the role of Senior Vice President and the lead executive in charge of SPC operations for Time Inc. He will be responsible for the general management of all operations in the Birmingham office, Oxmoor House and Southern Living at HOME.

Bruce joined the company in 1991 as a manager of corporate reporting. Over the last 17 years he has been promoted numerous times and has held jobs in a variety of areas, from corporate accounting to IT to consumer marketing and production.

During his tenure with Southern Progress, Bruce has shown outstanding decision-making and leadership skills and has been a key player responsible for the strong financial growth the company has enjoyed over the years.

Please join us in congratulating Bruce on his new assignment.”

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To:  Southern Progress Colleagues
From:  Bruce Larson

I regret to announce that two longtime, trusted Southern Progress colleagues, Karla Hardy and Dick Gardner, have decided to retire at the end of the year.

Karla has been a steady presence in our advertising production circles ever since she joined the company in 1977 as advertising traffic manager for Progressive Farmer. In 1985, she accepted a position as assistant to the editor and advertising/production coordinator for Southern Living Classics, which merged later that year with the newly acquired Southern Accents, where she eventually moved up to advertising production manager. When we launched Coastal Living, Karla began working on both titles, and in 2007 she began helping manage advertising production for Cottage Living as well. And let’s not forget her work on Entrée. With her incredible depth of knowledge of advertising production and her keen eye for detail, it’s no wonder that Karla is so highly regarded. She knows how to best position each ad for space efficiency and visibility, and she knows how to work with our sales staff and advertisers to ensure that everyone is happy with the outcome.

Dick began his Southern Progress career just nine months after Karla, back in 1978. He spent the first 13 years of his SPC career on the corporate side, managing building operations, office services, and purchasing, before moving to the magazine side of the business as financial manager for Southern Living and Southern Accents. In 1995, he was named general manager of Southern Accents. One short year later, he added responsibility for the soon-to-be-launched Coastal Living. In 2004, he was named vice president and general manager for Coastal Living alone, and in 2007 he took on the GM role for Cottage Living as well. Dick is well respected for his wisdom, leadership. and kindness, not to mention his astute business sense. He knows his titles—and his staff—inside and out and never fails to find the right solution to any challenge. Plus, he has a great sense of humor.

There have been several times over the years when both Dick and Karla have been counted on to work on more than one title—a sure sign of how highly they’re valued around here—and each did so while managing to maintain a positive, calm outlook. Please join me in thanking them for all they’ve done for us and letting them know how much they’ll be missed.”

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Subject: Staff Announcement
To: Lifestyle Business Unit Employees
From:  Sylvia Auton
Re:  Staff Announcement

After careful consideration, Chris Allen, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Cooking Light, has decided to leave the company.

A 26-year veteran, Chris first joined Cooking Light in 1991 as eastern advertising sales director and quickly rose through the ranks. Chris’ leadership and expertise resulted in enormous successes for the Cooking Light brand: Under his direction, Cooking Light has grown to become the world’s largest epicurean and healthy lifestyle magazine.

During his tenure, Cooking Light was named to AdWeek’s Hot List four times, Advertising Age’s ‘A List,’ Capell’s Circulation Report’s prestigious ‘Triple Play Award’ three times, and ‘Most Notable Launch of the Past 20 Years’ awarded by Media Industry Newsletter and Samir Husni in 2005. Chris also presided over the launch of several groundbreaking marketing campaigns, including The Cooking Light Cruise, the Cooking Light Fit House, and Cooking Light Supper Clubs.

An avid cook and exercise enthusiast, Chris lived the Cooking Light brand. He’s also a rock star: The Cooking Light band, Way Past Close, has performed throughout New York City and Birmingham to clients and colleagues.

Earlier in his career, Chris spent eight years at PEOPLE rising from salesperson to New York divisional sales manager.

Please join me in thanking Chris for his many contributions to Southern Progress and Time Inc. and wishing him the very best.”

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