In an interview BoomTown did yesterday with Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving–the video of which will be posted later today–at the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s HQ in Sunnyvale, CA, he managed to actually give me some news to report: the hire of crackerjack user experience design head Tim Parsey.

Parsey’s title will be SVP of User Experience Design at Yahoo, which is now centralizing the important task, Irving said. Previously, in the 67-ring circus that has been Yahoo’s product organization, design was widely dispersed.

Parsey certainly has the cred in the industry, with stints at Apple, Microsoft’s entertainment and devices unit, Mattel and Motorola. Most recently, he was a principal at a Seattle-based design firm called shiftalliance.

The British native ran Apple’s design studio for five years in the early 1990s and and was the main dude behind Motorola’s freaky V70 switchblade mobile phone in 2001.

Best of all: Parsey was once responsible for Barbie, as you can read below from his bio from shiftalliance, which announced his departure several days ago on its site:

[Tim Parsey] co-founded shiftalliance to focus on higher order value creation in business. The company is built on three beliefs: 1. that higher order, or meaningful, value is the next value driver in mature markets; 2. that sustainable innovation needs to consider the whole business model and; 3. that establishing a people-centric continuous change process is critical for success in today’s markets .

Prior to shiftalliance, he served as Partner, User Experience (UX) Director, Xbox Design at Microsoft, where he led a 22-person team responsible for the design and development of a new technology-enabled paradigm of interaction and entertainment that would not disrupt revenue streams from the existing Xbox gaming platform and contribute to the business in a more strategic way.

Previously, at Mattel as VP, Consumer Products Design, Tim was responsible for the Barbie, Hot Wheels and Fisher Price brands (in all non-toy categories) across 45,000 sku’s contributing nearly $2 billion in revenue worldwide. His charge was to establish the strategic and creative vision, and evolve the culture from a traditional licensing to a ‘leveraged innovation’ and ‘marketed product’ based approach. Key components of this evolution were to establish the first design languages for Mattel brands; lead design innovation for cross-functionally conceived marketing platforms (product, entertainment/web and 360 degree marketing); and nurture the individual licensee businesses and 5,000 designers across the portfolio into a community motivated to share and innovate together, thereby driving the business evolution at an appropriate pace. Before that, as VP, Wheels Design, he led 45 toy designers to advance the Hot Wheels, Matchbox and Pixar CARS toy design businesses. Activities included establishing product and brand design strategies, evolving the toy teams and building the first licensed consumer products design team, all of which led to re-energized business growth. This experience was a planned opportunity to understand toy design and specifically play innovation, and led to the formalization of the first play design methodology for Mattel.

Prior to Mattel, Tim served as Corporate Vice President at Motorola, where he built and led the Consumer Experience Design (CxD) group for the Personal Communications Sector (mobile phones) from an established industrial design team of approximately 22 in the US to a multifunctional design organization of approximately 150 distributed. This journey that included developing design as a competitive advantage for the company began 5 years after the StarTac and led to the design of Razr, the most successful brand and product range to be informed by a design strategy called ‘rich minimalism’. At the time, approximately 100 cell phones a year were being designed with a broad range of derivatives for different markets and carriers. CxD was distributed across Asia, North America and Europe and included Advanced Design and Design Planning groups that fed advanced thinking and strategies into the User Interface, Industrial Design and Human Factors groups. Specific achievements included establishing a collaborative industrial and user interface design methodology with key carriers.

Before that, Tim served as VP, Product Design and Development for ACCO, a manufacturer of office supplies and Manager, Design Studio at Apple after working as staff designer at ID Two (now IDEO) and other leading design consulting firms.

And here is a video of him speaking at a TEDx event about a year ago:

Businesses including Sprint Nextel Corp., Levi Strauss & Co. and Mattel Inc. are sponsoring college classes and graduate-level research to get help with their online marketing from the young and hyperconnected. Sprint, for example, supplies a class at Boston’s Emerson College with smartphones and unlimited service in exchange for students working gratis on the company’s local Internet push.

Universities, in some cases, receive funding or proprietary consumer data from companies for their research. Students get experience they can display on their résumés, and add lively classes to the usual mix of lectures and written exams.

“We are helping students to go out and get hired,” says Randy Hlavac, an instructor at Northwestern University’s Medill School. “They’ve done the work.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Stay tuned!

Plans are underway for a Hulu-only mini-show slated to run on the video site daily, offering up zippy commentary about TV and pop culture.

Some limited details: The show, which is casting now, will run five minutes an episode Monday through Friday. It’s supposed to offer “a quick and humorous survey of the past 24 hours of Media and pop culture.”

In other words, think of all of the TV shows that do something like this already–pretty much everything that runs on E! and half of what runs on VH-1–and shrink it down to a bite-size Web creation. They’re not reinventing the wheel here.

You can glean a tiny bit more about the show, via a casting call ad, at the bottom of this post. An actress who auditioned last week tells us the sessions were “mobbed.”

(Of course! But note that anyone who does get the gig won’t be hitting the jackpot–$1,000 a week, leave your SAG card at home.)

I’m assuming that “HD Films,” the show’s producer, is the same studio that is already producing “The Jace Hall Show,” a Web show about videogames, which runs on Hulu and other sites. Jace Hall is listed as a producer on this one, too.

Hulu rep Elisa Schreiber declined to discuss the show, telling me via email that “we’re not sharing any details because it’s still in the early stages.”

So why do we care? Because Hulu’s primary purpose in life, for now, is to provide a place for people to watch bona fide TV shows on the Web–and primarily shows from its three broadcast TV owners: News Corp.’s Fox, GE’s NBC and Disney’s ABC. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

But it has also been dabbling in Web originals over the past year or so: See “The LXD,” and “If I Can Dream.”

Hulu now has an original show in the works starring Whitney Port (who was on “The Hills,” Google tells me), designed to promote Mattel’s Ken doll (really). And there’s something coming from Ford and the producing team behind “The Amazing Race.”

The through-line behind all of this stuff: Webby takes on reality shows, which are cheap to produce for conventional TV and  even more so on the Web (again, note the union-free note on the casting info below).

Nothing revolutionary, but it does point to an interesting question: At what point does the line between the best Web video and mediocre TV disappear?

No one thinks the Web is going to replace TV at its best–expensive original fare like “Lost” or “Glee,” or big-time events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars. But there’s not that much high-end, original stuff on TV.

And lots and lots of your programming grid is filled with repeats, which the Web can do just fine. And then lots of less exciting, and less expensive, fare like “The Biggest Loser” and the like, which the Web hasn’t done. Yet.

But there’s no reason that it couldn’t. And when and if that starts happening with some frequency, there will be even less reason to keep paying for expensive TV packages….

Here’s the text from the casting notice (click to enlarge):

How could we not, what with Microsoft, Mattel and the Girl Scouts of America holding a joint event last week to talk up their new partnership aimed at halting the expanding gender gap in the tech sector.

Their weapon of choice? Barbie.

Bear with us here.

According to Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the percentage of women receiving computer science degrees are at about 20 percent, down from almost 40 percent in 1985.

The decline is even sharper when compared to gains made by women in almost every other academic arena in the same time period.

Recognition of the problem has sparked numerous summits, associations and research grants in tech in recent years.

Enter Microsoft and, um, Barbie.

As part of its larger DigiGirlz program, Microsoft announced a $5,000 grant supporting technology education in Girl Scouting, along with a mentorship program that will match women working in tech with girls interested in science and engineering.

The summit, held at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus, also featured Mattel’s signature doll donning hipster glasses, a Bluetooth wireless headset and some techie duds to start her umpteenth career, this time as a computer engineer.

Thus, a video, where highlights include a quick chat with Sid Espinosa–Microsoft’s director of citizenship–a backstage chat with California’s acting Chief Information Officer Christy Quinlan, a sneak peek at the geeky Barbie and a chitchat with a troop of Brownies about their computer-use habits.

Here’s the video: