Changes at AOL’s local content site, Patch: CEO Jon Brod will step down and is being replaced by COO and President Steve Kalin, according to an internal memo the New York Internet company sent to the division’s employees today.

As part of the move, Brod will be going back to run AOL Ventures, in a job where he began at the company.

In addition, sources said a little less than three percent of the 1,400-employee Patch staff will be laid off. The memo notes that downsizing, without giving the numbers, which includes consolidation of several parts of Patch by streamlining its regional structure from 20 to nine teams.

According to the memo, the layoffs are to “make Patch profitable in 2013 and a commitment to continue to improve our business model.”

AOL confirmed the contents of the memo, saying in a statement, “Patch is streamlining its regional editorial structure across the country by moving from 20 to nine teams. We are implementing this team approach based on the success of our field tests earlier this year. The team approach allows for flexibility based on the unique needs of each community and the strengths of our editors. We are not reducing our number of sites or our coverage area as a result of this change. Making these important changes came with the difficult decision to eliminate some positions. We recognize these changes are painful for individuals and for our organization — and we are committed to handling the people impacted with care and sensitivity.”

Patch is growing, according to comScore. In April, traffic was up 26 percent since last year to 13 million unique monthly visitors, who are consuming about 1.3 million pieces of content that are now being served up per month.

Still, Patch has attracted a level of investor pressure and criticism, even as AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has stuck strongly with the hyperlocal content effort and invested heavily in growing out a network of sites across the country aimed at neighborhood news and events.

But Armstrong signaled changes when he was queried about Patch during AOL’s recent quarterly call: “What you’re going to see as we approach Q4 is us trying to get to the finish line of profitability, and we will use all means possible to get there.”

Apparently, Armstrong means what he says and says what he means.

Here’s the memo:

Patchers,

Since the day Jon, Warren, and I founded Patch, we have had one mission in mind — improve the lives of people in local communities by 25 percent. Patch has become an important brand in the hundreds of towns we serve, and it is a staple of our communities. With the average Patch just over two years old, we are well on the way toward our goal of improving peoples’ lives and building a sustainable business in the process.

Over the past year, Patch has made an enormous impact in our communities. The coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings, the lifeline that Patch provided residents during the Sandy Hook school shootings and Superstorm Sandy, and the exclusive Sanford-Colbert Busch debate in South Carolina stand out as powerful examples. The new Patch platform that is rolling out now will only increase Patch’s ability to instantly improve communities.

As we have made a commitment to improve our Patch towns and communities, we made a similar commitment to make Patch profitable in 2013 and a commitment to continue to improve our business model. Just as we have rolled out new products and services to Patch, we are announcing today the rollout of the recently tested town structures, which will help us serve communities in a more local way and move Patch meaningfully toward profitability.

The changes have two main goals:

1. Improve and increase our hyper-local programming and deepen our user engagement through the Patch 2.0 platform; and
2. Implement a structure that unlocks the path to profitability.

To accomplish these goals we are taking the following steps, effective immediately:

We are combining the East, Central and West editorial zones to create a simpler structure that will enable faster decision-making and a more coordinated editorial effort across Patch. Anthony Duignan-Cabrera has been promoted to VP, Editorial Director, overseeing day-to-day editorial field operations, and will continue to report into Rachel in her role as Chief Content Officer.

We are streamlining our regional editorial structure across the country by moving from 20 to nine teams. We are not reducing our number of sites or our coverage area as a result of this change.

We are promoting Katie O’Connor to Director of Editorial Operations and Content Strategy. In this role, she will work with our editorial teams to help create new content and programming.

We are implementing a “team approach” for our sites, based on the success of our field tests earlier this year. This approach allows for flexibility based on the unique needs of each community and the strengths of editors.

Jon and I have decided to elevate Steve Kalin to the CEO position at Patch. Steve has done a fantastic job since he began at Patch in December as President and COO. Jon and I hired Steve with the thought that his extensive background in scaled, local platforms would eventually allow him to run Patch on a day-to-day basis.

Jon has led Patch since it was just an idea and helped scale it into one of the most significant brands in local communities in the U.S. Under his guidance, Patch has gained tens of millions of users and more than ten thousand advertisers; and it has covered millions of local stories. Going forward, Jon will return to AOL Ventures full-time and lead our push into several areas we have identified as significant future growth opportunities for AOL.

The changes we are making at Patch, however, come with the difficult decision to eliminate some positions. These employees have contributed greatly to Patch’s business with passion and dedication. We sincerely thank them for all they have done to make Patch what it is today. Their impact will always be felt here. We wish all affected employees continued success. They are truly Patchers for life.

This is an important time for Patch. We have many great opportunities in front of us, and we continue to make decisions to ensure Patch’s success. AOL’s Board of Directors and I remain firmly supportive of Patch and our mission. Together we are building a company for the long term, one that can grow and thrive — now and far into the future.

We will be having team calls today and a Patch All-Company call this afternoon at 6pm ET, to discuss these changes in more detail. I encourage you to join these calls. Keep an eye out for invitations to follow.

I want to thank you for your continued commitment to Patch and to serving your communities, and for staying focused on our goals. Patch is one of the fastest growing sites and brands on the Internet. We have the right plan, we have a great team, and I’m confident we can win together.

Keep going — TA

At a human resources conference yesterday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer finally commented on the massive controversy generated after the Silicon Valley Internet company decided to end its work-from-home offering to its employees.

News of the change came in February after AllThingsD published a hopelessly awkward memo on the new dictate that resulted in a firestorm of debate.

That was no surprise, since the missive was confusingly penned by HR head Jackie Reses, who noted, in part: “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.” Along with an incomprehensible aside about the “cable guy,” there were few details.

And because Yahoo PR’s goal is to not comment, except when pushing shiny new products, it was disinclined to say anything at all once the memo was public. ATD reported initially it was a couple hundred employees, but the memo made it unclear who would be impacted and how. Yahoo later made an unusually bloodless statement that work from home was not what was right for the company at that time, given its need to turn itself around.

Mayer underscored that point in her keynote speech, with Fortune reporting that she put up an image of a purple elephant with WFH letters on its side and said, “I need to talk about the elephant in the room.”

She also tried to push blame onto, well, I am not sure whom, noting, “It was wrongly perceived as an industry narrative.” This mistakes-were-made tactic was clever, but the situation spun out of control simply due to the fact that Mayer was tin-eared on a hot-button issue and was poorly advised not to give a quick and cogent explanation of it at the time, causing a lot of unnecessary external and internal confusion and worry.

What was too bad was Mayer had a valid enough point — even if it was very harsh medicine to end the popular policy — that Yahoo probably needs all hands on deck right now to return to innovative relevance. She also said in her speech that while “people are more productive when they’re alone … they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.”

As I said, it’s an excellent point, even if how Mayer delivered her message turned out to be a lesson as a new CEO in how it’s not what you say, but how you say it. And, of course, when.

One of Yahoo’s top women execs, Elissa Murphy, who is VP of engineering for cloud services, is departing the Silicon Valley Internet giant to become CTO and head of platform efforts at Go Daddy, said sources.

It’s the second talent raid on Yahoo by the company’s former product head Blake Irving, who is now CEO at one of the world’s biggest Web hosting and domain registration companies. A few weeks ago, he grabbed James Carroll, who was SVP of the consumer and global platform group at Yahoo and who is now running international efforts at Go Daddy.

Murphy is perhaps the highest-profile woman within the tech ranks at Yahoo — besides its CEO Marissa Mayer — and is very well regarded within the company and outside it, too, for her computing expertise. She has overseen a great deal of code contributions to Hadoop, a technology essential to large-scale computing, first developed at Yahoo.

She is leaving the employ of platform head Jay Rossiter, for whom Carroll also worked.

Both Murphy and Carroll had first been hired into Yahoo by Irving.

(Update: Go Daddy confirmed the move, saying she will start May 6 as CTO and EVP of platforms there. “Elissa Murphy is more than just a top ‘woman’ in technology, she’s a top ‘person’ at the top of her field,” said Irving in a statement. “Elissa just plain rocks.”)

She seems to, as currently featured on a Yahoo careers page that touts “stories from our most valuable assets.”

Read the deservedly effusive text about her: “Yahoo!’s ability to retain a fun, startup-like feel is what attracted Elissa Murphy to Yahoo!. The VP of Engineering for Cloud Services says that this unique combination makes for a creative, yet fast-paced environment that is unlike anything else in the industry. ‘You want to build cloud systems but you want to do it quickly? This is the place you want to come to.’”

I have emails into all for comment.

But here’s Murphy’s classy memo to the troops on her departure, in which she praises Mayer, so we don’t need Yahoo PR to return our email for comment:

TITLE: So long!

Hi all,

I’m writing you today to share that I’ve just resigned my position as head of Cloud Services and Hadoop at Yahoo! to pursue a new venture. The time I’ve spent working and learning with you has been wonderful, and it’s not easy to say goodbye. I have, however, been presented with a truly unique opportunity to expand my scope of impact at a company with indomitable spirit, brimming with passion and hell-bent on changing the world.

From my first experience programming a PET computer in 4th grade and throughout my career, I’ve been captivated by the potential for technology to transform people’s lives. In my time with Yahoo!, it’s been adrenalizing to push the limits on one of the world’s largest-scale cloud infrastructures — opening the door for new advances in machine learning and predictive analytics. When I look back on the achievements I’m most proud of during my time here they all center on people and innovation. I am proud to have played a role in making Yahoo! a leading voice in Hadoop by launching the next generation of Hadoop at scale. I am proud that in less than a year alone we’ve been able to accomplish more with Hadoop, Storm, OpenStack and our NoSQL stores than many thought possible. I am proud that we continue to fight for open source and open ecosystems, even as those around us profit from further locking them down. And I am proud to have helped lead the effort to pull ourselves up from our bootstraps, to get back up, and to remind the world that Yahoo! still has a place in their hearts and homes.

But most of all, I am proud to have worked with so many smart and talented people. I feel honored to call so many of you friends, and I thank you all for the opportunity to work alongside you. If you want to connect, you can find me at here.

I want to give a special thanks to Marissa, who has brought a thoughtfulness and determination to Yahoo! that promises new hope for our culture. Marissa, I can’t tell you how much I have appreciated your sponsorship and counsel, and for your support as I move forward. I believe Yahoo’s brightest days are still ahead with you at the helm, and I’ll be watching and cheering for your success in the years to come.

So long everyone — I hope our paths cross in a future more near than distant!

Best,

elissa

[Photo from Yahoo Careers Web site]

As most of the free world knows by now — from the ubiquitous media coverage that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her new book, “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” has gotten of late — there are some nagging issues of women in the workplace.

That was also underscored by the huge debate that arose over Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new rule for the Silicon Valley Internet giant that eliminated work-from-home employees.

Now, Cisco CEO John Chambers is weighing in, after a meeting with Sandberg last week, ordering each of his top managers to come up with new women-focused initiatives and put them into their development plans.

More interestingly, in an internal email I obtained, he also noted that his own leadership in the area had been lacking.

“While I have always considered myself sensitive to and effective on gender issues in the workplace, my eyes were opened in new ways and I feel a renewed sense of urgency to make the progress we haven’t made in the last decade,” wrote Chambers.

He pointed out that only one-fourth of the networking giant’s employees and top execs are women, and only 20 percent out of one million networking academy students are women. Currently, Cisco’s highest-ranking woman is Padmasree Warrior, its CTO and strategy officer, and it has three women board members.

Still, wrote Chambers:

“After reading Lean In and listening to Sheryl, I realize that, while I believe I am relatively enlightened, I have not consistently walked the talk … What we have been doing hasn’t worked, and it is time to adjust.”

Here’s the whole memo:

From: John Chambers
Date: March 8, 2013, 6:21:49 PM PST
To: John Chambers
Subject: International Working Women’s Day … Cisco Resolution

To my leaders:

I had the opportunity yesterday to discuss Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In with Sheryl and a group of my CEO peers. While I have always considered myself sensitive to and effective on gender issues in the workplace, my eyes were opened in new ways and I feel a renewed sense of urgency to make the progress we haven’t made in the last decade.

The data is startling. Women hold less than 14% of CEO positions, 17% of board seats globally, and 18% of congressional officials … and these numbers have not changed in a decade. At Cisco, less than 25% of our employees — and our leaders — are women. Only 20% of our current one-million networking academy students are women.

Today is International Working Women’s Day, and I want us, the leaders of Cisco, to see this as a leadership moment. Without realizing it, we operate every day with gender stereotypes and biases, many of which we do not realize. After reading Lean In and listening to Sheryl, I realize that, while I believe I am relatively enlightened, I have not consistently walked the talk. I think each of you, on reflection, will identify opportunities to operate at a new level with your women employees, leaders, customers, partners, and peers. I believe we — together — need to drive a fundamental culture change and it is up to us as leaders to make this change happen. What we have been doing hasn’t worked, and it is time to adjust.

I have two specific asks for each of you: 1) please read the copy of Lean In you will be receiving shortly, before we get to the SVP/VP off-site and 2) determine 3-4 specific things you will do differently and detail those commitments in your development plan and if you need help, please contact Sandy Hoffman, Chief Diversity Officer.

I know each of us will have a different explanation and a different solution, and there is power in the diversity of those ideas in driving change. I am asking two champions — Chuck Robbins and Kelly Kramer — to take a leadership role in moving us forward. I will ask them to report to the Operating Committee every quarter on the progress we have made and the action plans in place.

I think Sheryl says it best: “We can no longer pretend that biases don’t exist, nor can we talk around them … the result of creating a more equal environment will not just be better performance for our organizations, but quite likely greater happiness for all.”

Kath Weslock, Chief Human Resources Officer and I look forward to discussing this topic with many of you. We believe we have an opportunity to make a tremendous difference, and in so doing benefit our people, our culture, our company and, just maybe, the world.

John

Lost in the sauce of the national work-from-home debate of last week that engulfed all things Yahoo, was a fascinating tidbit that several employees passed on to me from a recent Friday FYI meeting at its Silicon Valley HQ.

At the gathering, CEO Marissa Mayer talked briefly about the new telecommuting arrangements for some staffers, including the controversial new work-from-home memo that HR head Jackie Reses had issued that day.

But when Reses — who also wears another corporate hat as head of M&A at Yahoo — spoke she mentioned to the crowd that Yahoo was working on two “significant” acquisitions and about six smaller talent “acqhires.”

“It was kind of odd to telegraph it in such a big forum,” said one employee of Reses’ comments at the meeting in late February.

The revelation was unusual, to be sure, but perhaps not a surprise, given the recent run-up in Yahoo stock, its healthy cash position and, most of all, its need to add meaningful growth to the current efforts at turnaround.

And while some of its recent buys have been interesting and focused on improving its moribund mobile efforts, they have also been very small. And, as one high-ranking exec there told me, they “don’t move the needle in the way we need to in bringing in senior talent or loads of users or serious revenue.”

Indeed, while Yahoo shares have benefited greatly from the impressive performance by Alibaba Group in China, which is clearly on a roll, many think that showing actual improvement in its core business will be critical in the months ahead.

While making changes to Yahoo’s homepage and email, as well as cutting products, has been done, it is not yet clear what the impact is; the changes are aimed more at holding on to consumers rather than exciting them with new offerings.

Yahoo could also create its own new products to wow the masses, but that has been harder for it over the years. (Remember Livestand? Yeah, not so much.) In any case, an innovation infusion of such a large magnitude will take some time, given Mayer has to get the right people into place to do so.

Thus, a big purchase of an exciting new company with prominent leadership seems more likely than not and sooner than later. While Mayer has not articulated her vision for the new Yahoo in anything more than general ways, what she buys will say a lot.

Thus, sources said that Yahoo has been looking at a range of such acquisitions, in a number of categories such as advertising tech, mobile monetization and, of course, consumer “daily delight,” which is a phrase Mayer has used a lot.

It would be bold if Mayer went all out and made a mega-buy that would shake up the competitive landscape. My first choice for that is Pinterest, the scrapbooking phenom that was just valued at $2.5 billion in a new funding round. Mayer has also shown a lot of interest in blogging superstar Tumblr, while at both Google and Yahoo, as well as Foursquare, the well-known location app. Of course, there is also the troubled gaming giant, Zynga.

All are very pricey and would face rival interest, but such a move would be akin to Facebook’s billion-dollar blockbuster purchase of Instagram. Many now think that was prescient and cheap, given how important mobile photos are to the current digital ecosystem.

The list of possible big deals goes on: Hulu (which needs a tasty content element to make sense) as a video play; Millennial Media or Jumptap for mobile advertising; Quora for social answers; Flipboard for social media consumption; Rubicon or PubMatic, for ad targeting; and many more.

But all of those begin at the billion-dollar or more range and I have checked with a number of these and come up peanuts. Still, there are a whole lot of choices for Mayer and Yahoo in the $200 million to $500 million price range.

Here, Yahoo has the financial strength to make at least two of these significant purchases that Reses mentioned, as well as developing a much better reputation for Yahoo to keep real talent interested.

As one prominent startup exec, who had told me he never would consider selling to Yahoo in the past, said recently: “They are no longer complete losers, although Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon are still cooler.”

Hey, it’s a compliment, even if it’s a back-handed one, so it will be interesting to see who finds Yahoo cool enough.

New Yahoo COO Henrique De Castro has been racking up the frequent flyers miles trying to land someone who can take on a big chunk of his job, as SVP of Americas — in charge of sales, sales development, media, business development and strategy in the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s core market.

It’s a key placement for the company, whose advertising organization has undergone a drastic shift of late under De Castro and is in need of more direct leadership. In addition, Yahoo has recently overhauled its email and homepage offerings, key revenue drivers in the U.S., and needs a consistent face to marketers, some of whom have expressed confusion to me about the company’s strategic media plan going forward.

Yahoo can coast for a bit, given its stock has been rising on the actual performance of its stake in China’s Alibaba Group and the hoped-for turnaround by its CEO Marissa Mayer. She has been busy trying to overhaul a range of things at the company — from mobile to search to ad tech to, most famously recently, how and where its employees work. But it’s not clear as yet if these will provide a massive boost to its longtime difficulties with revenue growth and engagement declines.

Since U.S. ads keep the lights on for now, a top sales exec is crucial. The Americas job was most recently held by Ross Levinsohn, who lost his bid to be CEO to Mayer. And well-regarded ad head Michael Barrett left after De Castro arrived (let’s say bygones and leave it at that).

While De Castro has talked to a number of high-profile Internet execs, none have bitten as yet, for a search that is being conducted by Spencer Stuart.

As described in the memo I obtained, which you can read below in its entirety, the job will require some big shoes to fill. “S/he will be expected to be the ‘voice’ of the Americas region, serving as bridge between the region and the corporate teams,” according to the job description. “Additionally he/she will be a thought leader within the company and a well-respected industry leader as Yahoo!’s primary externally facing advertising and media executive.”

According to sources, there might also be other job movement among current top Yahoo execs, with Mayer eyeing some external replacements in media, social and communications products. She has already vamoosed some top execs, such as products chief Shashi Seth and others.

In any case, here is the job request, if you are interested:

Yahoo SVP-Americas

Flickr user Gaku

Here are our Top 10 stories from the week of Feb. 25:

1.) “Physically Together”: Here’s the Internal Yahoo No-Work-From-Home Memo for Remote Workers and Maybe More [Previously: Yahoo CEO Mayer Now Requiring Remote Employees to Not Be (Remote)]

2.) Groupon CEO: “I Was Fired Today.”

3.) Exclusive: PayPal Co-Founder Levchin Launches New Payments Startup, Affirm

4.) Survey Says: Despite Yahoo Ban, Most Tech Companies Support Work-From-Home for Employees

5.) Why Silicon Valley Is the Next Detroit

6.) A Wristwatch Tells When Phone Calls, Emails Arrive

7.) Why Carriers Just Love Firefox OS

8.) Cook: Forget About Our Share Price, Apple Has Some Great Stuff Coming

9.) Yahoo Work-From-Home Controversy Already a Silicon Valley Billboard Meme

10.) Old Media Doesn’t Get New Media, Chapter 203: The Sheryl Sandberg Attack

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

At a Morgan Stanley investment conference today, the affable Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman put in an appearance to talk about life at Yahoo since he got there last fall.

Unfortunately, he said almost nothing new in an onstage interview and, more importantly, did not address the hot-button controversy around the work-from-home ban that CEO Marissa Mayer instituted last week.

To be fair, that’s because Goldman was not asked by anyone about the issue, which is perhaps not a surprise at these hand-holding investor events. But he did make a veiled reference when touting its “strong leadership” now.

“What gives people confidence is that we’re making decisions,” he said. “The worst thing to do in a company is to waffle.” But Goldman then added obliquely that some people like those decisions and “some people don’t.”

No, they don’t! Woo-hee, has this one blown up!

The work-from-home debate has certainly exploded across the landscape this week, after an edict to eliminate the long-time employee policy at Yahoo, especially since most other Internet companies tout flexible work arrangements.

But, apparently, Mayer thinks Yahoos have abused the privilege — she noted at an employee meeting last week that VPN logs showed work-at-home staff did not sign on enough — and a Yahoo internal memo said that working “physically together” was the way to reenergize the lagging fortunes at the company.

Opinions inside Yahoo about the topic have been mixed but heated, essentially pitting employees against each other in an awkward way. But the reaction from outside the company has been decidedly negative.

At the Morgan event in San Francisco, Goldman instead focused on the sunnier side of the street at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, noting the Mayer regime was focused on increasing user engagement, international presence and broadening its demographics.

“The thing that just struck me over and over is how much has been done by this company that is really new,” said Goldman, pointing inevitably to the new free food policy — which has long been common across Silicon Valley — as well as a quarterly goal system, employee reviews, weekly FYI meetings and more.

Referring to internal polls showing increased confidence among staff, he added: “What really strikes me is how much has been done to really improve the quality of life at Yahoo.”

Goldman also touched on the need to increase revenue, spur innovation and also some upgrades of core products such as Yahoo Mail and its famous homepage, although leaving out that this had been in the works before the new leadership team was in place.

He also talked, as Mayer has a lot, about the importance of mobile to the future there, noting that the mobile revenue was still “modest.” (Goldman declined to say just how modest, but I posted that depressing number here.)

“We just got into this is a major way,” he said, asking investors for patience to get up to mobile speed at Yahoo. “I think we have been clear it will take us some time, but we have taken some positive steps.”

Last week, a fierce debate erupted over a range of social networks and in the media about a story we posted on Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new decree that employees at the Silicon Valley Internet company would no longer be able to work from home.

In a sometimes awkwardly worded internal memo I posted from Yahoo HR head Jackie Reses, the company rolled out the new rule — pushed through by Mayer — which requires that Yahoo employees who work remotely relocate to company facilities by June 1.

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” read the memo to employees. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

The goal of Mayer to cure what ails Yahoo: Reviving a moribund and enervated workforce that has struggled to innovate and excel over many years. One of the many problems has been the liberal use of work-from-home policies that have been woefully mismanaged to create a culture that is simply not energized.

But, unless I am reading the memo wrong, the ban is not just limited to those who have arrangements to work from home full time — which number in the hundreds — but also employees who take one or two days a week at home.

Top sources told me that Mayer has been particularly irked about Yahoo parking lots that are slow to fill in the morning and quick to empty by 5 pm — which is atypical at other tech companies such as Google. (Mayer was a longtime exec at the search giant.)

At first, she tried to change culture in ways that rained down tasty perks on employees — such as free food and smartphones. Mayer has also been practical, instituting please-be-here Friday afternoon FYI weekly meetings and stricter performance reviews.

But she is now inevitably doling out more unpleasant medicine to the troops, starting with the banning of work from home, which has caused a big ruckus both internally and externally.

Some inside the company are clearly appalled, especially since it might more severely impact working mothers.

“When a working mother is standing behind this, you know we are a long way from a culture that will honor the thankless sacrifices that women too often make,” read one email I got from an internal source, referring to the recent birth of Mayer’s baby.

Many others at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ pointed to the nursery Mayer had built — for which she paid personally — next to her office as a perk others at Yahoo do not get.

“I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set em up in the cube next door?” joked a husband of another employee who will be losing her work-from-home privileges.

Yahoo employees, as far as I can see from its company careers page, offers the typical Dependent Day Care Flexible Spending Account, where staff can pay “dependent care expenses, such as day care or after-school care, with pre-tax dollars.”

While it is fair to raise the issue of how employees will cope given the sudden change in HR policy, others also think that limiting work at home is a good idea because it galvanizes culture and creates a spirit of collaboration that has been missing at Yahoo for far too long.

“Marissa is doing what good leaders do,” wrote one person on Twitter. “Making sure her Yahoo team is communicating & working TOGETHER.”

That is actually a sentiment expressed by Google CFO Patrick Pichette at a recent talk in Australia, when asked about telecommuting at Google:

“The surprising question we get is: ‘How many people telecommute at Google?’ And our answer is: ‘As few as possible’ … There is something magical about sharing meals. There is something magical about spending the time together, about noodling on ideas, about asking at the computer ‘What do you think of this?’ These are [the] magical moments that we think at Google are immensely important in the development of your company, of your own personal development and [of] building much stronger communities.”

That said, officially, many Googlers are allowed and even encouraged to work at home. The company told me when asked about work-from-home policies: “We do not have a formal policy and leave Googlers to use good judgment.”

It is the same for Facebook, which confirmed a “policy to provide flexibility as work permits.” In fact, one exec at the social network giant noted to me that its entire camera app was built from an engineer’s garage, with the group staying away from the office as long as they wanted to build it from home.

Business networking site LinkedIn also said it had “no formal policy at present,” but noted that many employees work from home full-time and part-time as the situation warrants and in consultation with managers.

It goes on and on like that throughout the tech scene, part of an ethos of letting tech talent make its own rules — from what they wear to when and where they work — that is deeply ingrained in the culture.

A Hewlett-Packard spokesperson said of the tech giant: “We do not ban [work from home] and many HP people do it … it is not at all an issue at HP and hasn’t been for years. Some folks have a regular schedule, while others can do it from time to time with the okay of their supervisors.”

An AOL spokesperson said the company doesn’t ban work from home.

A Netflix spokesperson referenced a well-known premium video company’s job deck, which stressed a “freedom and responsibility culture” and notes, “We don’t measure people by how many hours they work or how much they are in the office. We do care about accomplishing great work.”

Twitter had a different twist, but still supports working from home. Said a spokesperson: “We believe there are significant tangible and intangible benefits when employees are working under the same roof. We also recognize that every so often it’s important to be able to work remotely, and we allow for that flexibility.”

A Cisco spokesperson said the networking company also allows it, but it has to be approved by a direct manager: “It is certainly utilized by those employees who earn it. And, of course, with our collaborative suite of technologies like Webex (with video) and telepresence it is the next best thing to being there in person.”

A Microsoft spokesman said that the software company “offers flexible work schedules for all employees.”

Perhaps one of the best companies for a long time in the telecommuting space has been IBM. From its corporate Web page, also touting the environmental benefits:

“IBM was one of the first global companies to pioneer programs to reduce employee commuting. It has sustained these programs for nearly two decades. Two key aspects are its (a) work-at-home program and (b) mobile employees program. Today, more than 128,000 (29 percent) of employees globally participate in one of these programs. In 2011, in just the U.S. alone, IBM’s work-at-home program conserved approximately 6.4 million gallons of fuel and avoided more than 50,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions.”

Startups are much the same.

Said an Airbnb spokesperson of the online housing rentals site: “It’s a flexible policy and managers determine what’s appropriate on a case-by-case basis.”

At location startup Foursquare, a spokesperson said, “Our policy is to allow for ‘flexible work hours’ — and that applies to both the hours you work, and where you work from. While we don’t have any dedicated remote employees, our folks do work from home on occasion and we’re fine with that.”

Private social networking company Path is much the same, according to a spokesperson: “Path has a work-from-home policy. The manager and employee work out the details together.”

The only company I queried that did not respond immediately is Apple, which has been known for a long time to have much tighter rules with its employees. I will update when I hear from the company.

I also have emails in to Amazon, which is already known for flexible working policies.

But, overall, Mayer is forging new ground with her work-from-home ban. Whether that is enough to turbocharge the Yahoo culture is anybody’s guess.

Courtesy of a plethora of very irked Yahoo employees, here is the internal memo sent to the company about a new rule rolled out today by CEO Marissa Mayer, which requires that Yahoo employees who work remotely relocate to company facilities.

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” reads the memo to employees from HR head Jackie Reses. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

Painfully awkward as this is phrased, it means every Yahoo get to your desks stat!

I reported earlier today that the move will apparently impact only several hundred employees, such as customer service reps, who work from home full time. But numerous sources told me that the decree extends to any staffers who might have arrangements to work from home just one or two days a week, too.

The changes begin in June, according to the Yahoo memo.

After that, employees who work from home must comply without exception or quit. One top manager was told that there would be little flexibility on the issue.

The anger from impacted employees was strong today, because many felt they were initially hired with the assumption that they could work more flexibly.

In fact, even waiting for the cable guy is questionable. “And, for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration,” wrote Reses.

The tone and tactics have infuriated some at the company. Wrote one impacted Yahoo employee to me: “Even if that was what was previously agreed to with managers and HR, or was a part of the package to take a position, tough … It’s outrageous and a morale killer.”

Most tech companies encourage workers to stay on their campuses, offering free food and other perks. But none enforce such rules beyond staff needed to operate an office.

“Our engineers would not put up with that,” said one tech exec. “So, we’d never focus on it.”

In the comments section of my first story on the HR change at Yahoo, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg wrote:

“For anyone who enjoys working from wherever they like in the world, and is interested in WordPress, Automattic is 100% committed to being distributed. 130 of our 150 people are outside of San Francisco.”

The issue is an interesting and controversial one, with some certain that working at home is the wave of the future, while others considering it hurtful to productivity.

Well, we’ll presumably see which this way goes in time.

Earlier, when asked about the change, a Yahoo spokesperson said the company does not comment on internal matters. The memo was released after my story on the change was published this morning.

But, you don’t need any comment when you can read for yourself the new working order at the Silicon Valley Internet giant:

YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD

Yahoos,

Over the past few months, we have introduced a number of great benefits and tools to make us more productive, efficient and fun. With the introduction of initiatives like FYI, Goals and PB&J, we want everyone to participate in our culture and contribute to the positive momentum. From Sunnyvale to Santa Monica, Bangalore to Beijing — I think we can all feel the energy and buzz in our offices.

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo! offices. If this impacts you, your management has already been in touch with next steps. And, for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration. Being a Yahoo isn’t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices.

Thanks to all of you, we’ve already made remarkable progress as a company — and the best is yet to come.

Jackie

Longtime Yahoo techie Laurence “Laurie” Mann, who has recently been SVP of engineering operations at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, has been given the new job of heading its search efforts, according to sources inside the company.

The appointment by CEO Marissa Mayer, also announced in an internal memo last week, puts Mann in a key position at Yahoo, given the need to fix its troubled search partnership with Microsoft, which was struck in 2010.

That is likely to come under great pressure in the days ahead, given that its performance has not been as expected, although that did improve in Yahoo’s most recent quarter.

Still, despite the improvement, Mayer called attention to the overall problem at a recent appearance at an investment conference.

“One of the points of the alliance is that we collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other,” she said. “We need to see monetization working better, because we know that it can, and we’ve seen other competitors in the space illustrate how well it can work.”

By competitors, Mayer meant Google, whose share of the search market is close to 67 percent. Microsoft has just above 16 percent now, and Yahoo above 12 percent, a near flipping of share from two years ago.

Mann, who came to Yahoo in 2002, had been one of the execs at Yahoo who worked on the original deal under former CEO Carol Bartz, vetting the terms of the agreement for the company. While he has a degree from Canada’s University of Regina in business administration and computer science operations research, he is better known at the company for his deal-making and negotiating skills than as a techie or product exec.

That will be important, given that the end of the performance guarantee that Microsoft has had to pay to Yahoo since the partnership began comes in April.

Sources at Microsoft said the company is likely to extend the agreement without major concessions, but that any efforts to end the overall deal will be difficult for Yahoo.

“There is what [Yahoo] wants, and what’s possible,” said one person close to the situation.

In his new job, Mann will be in charge of improving the situation, which he has had some experience with. Mann, said one source, “used to spends hours at night on the phone with Microsoft trying to get concessions from their lack of RPS achievement,” referring to revenue per search.

Whether that means he can fix the situation — either by extricating Yahoo from the deal or improving Yahoo’s search experience to boost revenue and market share — is unclear. Mayer herself has a lot of search product chops from her time at Google, so she is expected to play a dominant role in the arena.

Another important effort for her, obviously, is still recruitment, given that a number of her choices for top product and tech jobs at Yahoo have been longtime veterans who were in place when the company was experiencing its continuing downward slide.

Among her options is buying a small search company, trying to end the Microsoft deal and perhaps strike another one with Google, or even reenter the search business with innovative engineers.

That is a big job. When Mayer was hired last summer, it was thought that she would bring in talent to reinvigorate Yahoo’s top echelons from outside the company.

But, for the most part, that has not happened, and she has appointed a lot of Yahoo’s longtime veterans to important roles in the turnaround.

For example, Mayer brought back Jay Rossiter to run platforms, appointed Scott Burke to head advertising tech, and now has put Mann into a top job in search — all of whom report directly to her on her executive staff.

About two weeks ago, I heard about a restructuring under HBO SVP of consumer technology Otto Berkes, who also takes over the job of CTO in March from longtime vet Bob Zitter. The former Microsoft exec and Xbox co-founder was named the top tech figure at the premium cable network at the end of last year, after being the primary developer of its popular HBO Go and MAX Go streaming video offerings.

As part of the changes, the memo of the Time Warner unit said, product strategy and development exec Hans Deutmeyer is leaving HBO.

HBO has been very active in the digital space, increasingly offering its shows on a variety of mobile devices. Earlier this week, at our D: Dive Into Media conference, HBO said its subscribers will be able to stream programming from an Apple iPhone or iPad onto their television via AirPlay.

All the various details are below, in a memo HBO sent to its employees at the end of January:

HBO GO has established HBO as a company that understands the value of technology as a tool for delivering great content and experiences to consumers, and HBO.com has become a primary means of driving broad consumer engagement and awareness of our offerings. We are proud of these achievements and also recognize that we have more ahead of us to accomplish. Over the course of the next several years, our mission is to build best-in-class technology execution capabilities. That mission is central to ensuring that HBO has the tools available to support our business through the ongoing technology-based disruption of media and to support new areas of growth. Like other leading Internet-based video service providers, we will design, build, and deploy scalable products with global reach.

Achieving these goals will require focus and a disciplined approach. Roles and responsibilities must be clear and well-defined to ensure efficient distribution of work and smooth collaboration between groups and people. In order to provide the organizational framework needed to achieve our goals, I am restructuring Digital Products around four functional groups (listed alphabetically):

1. Infrastructure Operations & QA,
2. Program Management,
3. Software Engineering,
4. User Experience & Product Design.

Each of these groups will have responsibilities for both HBO GO and HBO.com as appropriate for the functional areas of each group. This will enable more efficient end-to-end integration and coordination of our design, platform architecture, and infrastructure development.

The attached “Digital Products Organizational Pillars” slide illustrates the roles and responsibilities of each of these four functional groups in greater detail. The leaders of these groups will report directly to me and will continue to do so after my transition to the CTO role.

Donna Stalworth will continue to head up the infrastructure operations and QA efforts in Digital Products. She will also add build and release management to her responsibilities.

Rebekah Calabrese will be stepping into the role of VP of Program Management for Digital Products. She and her team will be responsible for cross-group coordination, project management, budget management, technology vendor relationships, and overall status communication for Digital Products. Rebekah will also continue to provide contract support for Digital Products as well as the other technology groups. Her team will consist of the existing Digital Products program and project management staff and her current reports.

Drew Angeloff will lead all of Digital Products’ software engineering activities in New York as well as in Seattle. Centralizing consumer software engineering in one group under one leader will maximize coordination and the flow of information, and will help ensure a consistent and robust software architecture. This is especially important given geographic distance between the New York and Seattle teams. The engineering staff working on device application development and the GO service currently on Rob Caruso’s team will now report to Drew.

Rob Caruso and the workflow team led by Jason Kui will transition to Diane Tryneski’s organization; Rob will report to Diane. Rob’s new charter is to build software engineering capabilities to optimize digital asset creation, management, and security, and to create technologies that unlock the full potential of software in the digital content area. Rob and his team will collaborate closely with Digital Products to ensure that our digital content technologies and our consumer-facing products inform each other to enable unique and innovative content-driven user experiences. This new role and group will be critical to achieving end-to-end software technology excellence.

Dina Juliano will lead the User Experience & Product Design organization. Her team’s responsibilities will include HBO GO, HBO.com, and HBO On Demand. Dina’s team will conceive, design, and realize new digital experiences in partnership with key stakeholders across HBO. She and her team will incorporate consumer and market insights to create a coherent product vision and roadmap that engages our users. Dina’s team will consist of her existing team and the groups formerly in Hans Deutmeyer’s organization.

Hans has decided to leave HBO to pursue opportunities that better align with his future interests. Hans has been a part of the HBO GO story since its genesis and has played a key role in bringing it to the market successfully. Given the new organizational direction, he has decided that this is the right time for him to pursue other opportunities. I want to thank Hans for his contributions and wish him success in his new endeavors.

Please welcome Donna, Rebekah, Drew, Rob, and Dina in their new roles. The changes in their teams and roles are effective immediately.

I am very excited about the new organization and am confident that we have the right the structure, leadership, passion, talent, and creativity needed to deliver best-in-class digital products to our users.

Please let your manager or me know if you have any questions.

Thank you-

— Otto —

Michael Katz, one of Yahoo’s high-ranking online advertising execs, is leaving the company, according to a memo he sent out to staff on Friday.

Considered a savvy online ad player and a well-regarded entrepreneur, Katz came to the Silicon Valley Internet giant a year ago when it bought Interclick, the ad-targeting company he co-founded and headed, for $270 million.

Yahoo later used Interclick’s technology in its audience-buying platform called Genome. In a reorganization announced in January, Katz was placed in charge of sales operations and data and performance optimization for Genome.

The data unit is at the center of efforts by Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer to turbocharge its ad business.

But the Katz missive, which is below in its entirety, clearly signaled that his departure was not an amicable one, which sources underscored was part of a larger rejiggering of the ad sales staff under new COO Henrique De Castro.

“As some of you are starting to learn, my last day with the company will be today,” wrote Katz on Friday. “Leaving Y! is not the hard part — how it happened and leaving all of you is what makes this difficult.”

How it happened, said several sources, was that Katz was suddenly told by HR head Jackie Reses last week that there was not a place for him, only days before a large 12-month retention bonus was to be paid out to him for the Interclick acquisition.

While it is an unusual thing to part on willfully difficult terms with an entrepreneur, as it sends a bad signal to others considering joining the company, Yahoo’s new leadership has been playing hardball with a lot of top execs it is parting ways with, and is also limiting departure packages.

Former marketing head Mollie Spillman, for example, was suddenly let go after she was replaced by former Lockerz CEO Kathy Savitt. And, though he had wanted to leave, former CFO Tim Morse was also told of his replacement in a swift exec house-cleaning move, as was former HR head David Windley.

Of course, such moves are not unusual when a new set of leaders enters the corporate picture. That’s why many at Yahoo expect even more changes to come soon in the ad unit, with most assuming that Mayer and De Castro will bring in new staff they had previously worked with at Google.

Currently, top Yahoo ad execs include Peter Foster, GM of audience advertising at Yahoo; and Mark Ellis, VP of North American sales and global partnerships.

It will be interesting to see what happens to them and others as part of a large ad reorg at Yahoo now taking place, which will definitely include a variety of departures and arrivals. One recent notable Yahoo ad exec departure, for example, was Debbie Menin, who headed entertainment and travel sales strategy, and is now a top sales exec at hot video entertainment network Machinima.

More will come in the new year, given that De Castro has recently briefed employees on a plan to move its sales organization to a “category” model. Simply put, that means its sales reps will sell all of Yahoo’s ad products, as well as its search offerings, in a vertical process organized around advertiser segments.

That massive shift is not Katz’s to worry about anymore, it seems. Here’s his entire email to staff, which is a pretty eloquent one, as goodbye letters go:

Friends and Colleagues,

6 years ago if someone would have told me that the hardest part about building a business would be to one day say goodbye, I would not have believed them. As some of you are starting to learn, my last day with the company will be today. Leaving Y! is not the hard part — how it happened and leaving all of you is what makes this difficult. I will miss the daily interactions and will take with me the many memories. This has honestly been so much fun.

I have learned a lot along the way:

Sometimes winning looks like losing. If you don’t fail, you can’t progress and the stakes only get bigger as you go further down your path.

Be genuinely happy for those that are successful at reaching their goals. If you spend anytime wishing it were you, it will never be.

Stay humble, and never declare victory.

Approximately correct is better than definitely wrong. Do not let perfection be the enemy of excellence.

We are all human — we may make mistakes, we must forgive, forget, and move on together.

Treating people right is not an option.

Treat adults like adults and they will behave like adults. Rules are for children.

People and culture are everything. It’s about so much more than free food and parties, it cannot be forced and without it a business cannot succeed.

I consider myself so very lucky to have known a handful of loyal friends that took a chance, quit their jobs and risked a lot to build this business with me. Their loyalty and hard work helped interclick get off the ground and for that I will forever be grateful. The team they helped to build has truly made this the greatest place to work. Each and every one of you made interclick the very best company to work for.

I would like to leave you all with a reminder of what together we built:

– A company that started with $27,000 and sold for $270,000,000

– A company that redefined the way that marketers think about audience targeting and data

– A company that went public in 2009 on NASDAQ defying all odds

– A company that spit in the face of adversity early in 2011 and came out victorious

– A company whose people are the future of this organization.

So be proud of what together we achieved, look back and know you were part of something big. Then look ahead and know that this is just the beginning, we will all one day build again. For those of you that continue your career at Y!, I ask that you don’t lose sight of greatness. Remember what you are capable of and continue to make me proud.

Thank you for your loyalty, passion, dedication, and collaboration. The finish line is only the beginning of a new race.

-MK

According to an internal memo, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has brought back Jay Rossiter, who left the company under the regime of Scott Thompson, to lead its platforms effort “focusing on the tools and technology supporting our externally facing products.”

The move also take back a huge swath of engineering responsibilities at the Silicon Valley Internet giant from David Dibble, who was given a wide purview over all technology in June under interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.

Mayer smoothed over the change — Dibble will now be back in charge of internal infrastructure — in the memo to staff about the change, noting: “I want to call out that Dibble has been an incredible technical leader and tremendous member of my staff, and I’m confident this realignment will help us bring clear focus and faster execution within each organization.”

Rossiter was at Yahoo for five years, before leaving for a short time, having led its cloud efforts and other tech projects.

The hiring back of Yahoo is interesting, given that Mayer was widely touted as someone who would attract big-time new talent to gird its tech efforts.

In any case, here’s the memo:

From: Marissa Mayer
Date: November 13, 2012, 4:42:53 PM EST
To: “all-worldwide@yahoo-inc.com”
Subject: Welcome back Jay Rossiter!
Reply-To: Marissa Mayer

YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD

Hi All –

Today, I’m excited to welcome back a long-time Yahoo, colleague and friend. Jay Rossiter is returning to Yahoo! reporting to me as EVP of Platforms, focusing on the tools and technology supporting our externally facing products. As many of you know, this is an area of in which Jay has spent much of his career, including his five years here at Yahoo!. As a true engineering leader, Jay fully understands the intricacies of platform excellence — especially how important it is for us as we build great products for our users and advertisers.

Jay will lead our efforts in creating a world-class platform technology stack for the company. The technologies created by Jay’s team will include Cloud Services, Hadoop, Personalization & Targeting, Mobile/Presentation platform technologies, Consumer Platforms, Membership and supporting Development Tools. As part of this alignment, Elissa Murphy, Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, James Carroll, Charles Marker, Rammohan Kordale, and Ty Lee will now join Jay’s team.

Additionally as we continue to ensure we are architecting our products with excellence, Amotz Maimon will join Jay’s leadership team. This new structure, focus at the E-Staff level coupled with Jay’s track record at Bell Labs, 3COM, Oracle and at Yahoo!, position us well for some big wins in the platform space.

David Dibble will continue to lead many of our critical technology functions as EVP of Central Technology — focused on the internal infrastructure that is so critical to our success. Dibble will lead our data centers, service engineering, CIO, IT, and internal security functions with Mark Morrissey, Randy Roumillat, Randall Gannaway, and Justin Somaini on his team. Scott Burke and RonBrachman will also continue to report to Dibble. I want to call out that Dibble has been an incredible technical leader and tremendous member of my staff, and I’m confident this realignment will help us bring clear focus and faster execution within each organization.

In Jay’s words: “I am absolutely thrilled to rejoin the ‘new Yahoo!’ with the increased momentum and focus on building great products leveraging world-class technology. I’ve been watching the changes from afar, having spent the last few months fulfilling a lifelong dream of traveling across Africa, Asia, and Europe with my family. I am ready to re-engage.”

Please join me in welcoming him back!

Marissa

Adam Cahan

A very important management shift at Yahoo got a bit lost in last week’s news of CEO Marissa Mayer’s first acquisition, a small mobile start-up called Stamped.

That would be the appointment of former IntoNow founder and CEO Adam Cahan to oversee all of Yahoo’s mobile efforts, as well as its Flickr photo sharing service.

According to an internal memo that Mayer sent out last week to employees, Cahan has been given the title of SVP of Emerging Products and Technology, with a spot on the exec staff, reporting directly to her.

Said the memo (in its entirety below):

“[Cahan] will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.”

Mayer’s promotion of the slick exec, who has been described by almost everyone I spoke to at Yahoo as smoothly political, is an interesting internal choice by Mayer. He only got to Yahoo recently, after IntoNow was bought by Yahoo for more than $20 million in the spring of last year.

IntoNow was a spinoff from the video advertising company Auditude, which was sold to Adobe for a reported $100 million.

The television indexing start-up had launched in early 2011 as an Apple iPhone app that recognized what was playing on the screen by analyzing the audio from satellite feeds and matching it to listings. The start-up had hoped to eventually license its technology as offer-measurement services for TV advertising and viewership.

As Liz Gannes noted in a post on AllThingsD:

“It’s similar to the Shazam mobile app that many people know and love, which IDs an ambient song by recording it and quickly matching it to an archive. IntoNow users can “check in” to a particular episode once it’s been recognized, like one would check into a restaurant on Foursquare. The goal is to enable conversations around the watercooler and on social networks by helping users connect around what they’re watching and discover new things to watch.”

Cool, although IntoNow’s technology was far more compelling than its consumer promise.

Now, Cahan will be charged with doing both of Yahoo in mobile — which is most likely to be accomplished via a series of small mobile acquisitions, presumably to be stitched together into a cohesive and successful whole.

At least that’s the idea.

Cahan is an experienced exec, having worked at a number of places before founding IntoNow, including MTV Networks, NBC, McKinsey, National Geographic Television and — wait for it — Google, in business operations.

(Being an ex-Googler, which Mayer is, seems to have its advantages at Yahoo these days, with Cahan as the latest example.)

He is most definitely a key hire, because Mayer spent a lot of time stressing how mobile was Yahoo’s No. 1 priority on its recent earnings call with investors.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said, noting a “focused, coherent” mobile strategy was the top initiative.

Mayer had to say that, of course, even if being a mobile giant is now mostly just wishful thinking at Yahoo, since most of the many efforts the company has made in the arena have been duds. Yahoo has also lost a lot of mobile engineering talent over the years, remaining largely a desktop offering, even as the area has increasingly become where consumers are getting their information.

A blog post by Cahan at Yahoo was widely quoted when the tiny Stamped — which is an online recommendations app — was bought for under $10 million last week by Yahoo.

In it, he noted:

“Most people are always within arm’s reach of their mobile phones. For many of us, it’s the first thing we look at in the morning and the last thing we check at night. Mobile is at the center of how we connect with people, consume information, and pass the time, and we’re focused on making Yahoo! the most inspiring and entertaining way to do just that.”

We’ll see if Yahoo can be a significant mobile player, as Mayer has promised Wall Street. But Cahan has certainly been busy since he got the job, sources said, beginning with the rejiggering of Yahoo’s mobile teams, as well as visiting the Flickr office this week.

Until it all sorts itself out, please enjoy this Oct. 25 internal memo on Cahan and the Stamped acquisition:

YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD

Hi All –

As we discussed in our strategy all-hands earlier this month, innovation and talent are essential to delivering against our vision to inspire and delight our users as a part of their daily lives. Many of the areas that require special attention are emerging technologies and Yahoo! products where we’ve not yet reinvented, re-imagined and rebuilt in order to keep pace with changes in user behaviors and platform shifts.

To aid our efforts, I’m promoting Adam Cahan to lead this effort as Senior Vice President of Emerging Products and Technology. Adam will be a member of e-staff and report directly to me. He will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.

And he’s already making great progress! Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve acquired a very talented mobile team, based in New York City.

Robby, Kevin, Bart, Paul and the entire team at Stamped are a natural fit for Yahoo!. Their experience building fun, useful, personalized mobile products aligns well with our vision to create the best everyday mobile experience for our users. The team will be a great asset for us as we expand Yahoo!’s mobile efforts and create another key center for mobile innovation in New York.

I’m excited that we’ve been able to move quickly and execute well in order to bring on such a talented team. Please join me in congratulating Adam in his promotion and welcoming Anthony, Bart, Geoff, Kevin, Landon, Michael, Paul, Robby and Travis to Yahoo!

Thanks,

Marissa

Yahoo’s David Hantman, who has been its deputy general counsel and VP of global public policy, is taking a similar job at the online rentals start-up Airbnb, according to an internal email memo he sent today.

The job move is interesting, given the many regulatory issues that the San Francisco-based company faces in local markets as it grows.

Hantman is already coming out swinging in his internal memo to Yahoo staffers about the departure:

“[Airbnb has] some huge challenges with a few antiquated laws in their biggest markets, so my job will be to help them convince governments that allowing people to rent out their own homes or apartments should not be a problem, and that in fact it is great for the economy and for the tons of people that can only pay their mortgage or rent through the extra income they get from airbnb … As always, I like to be on the right side of history, and I believe in the mission and the team over there.”

An Airbnb spokewoman (also a former Yahoo) confirmed the hiring. (I did not even try Yahoo’s current PR personage, as I already have the memo and she never calls back, anyway.)

Here’s Hantman’s full email to Yahoo staffers on the move:

From: David Hantman
Date: Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 9:41 AM
Subject: A brief announcement to help clutter your inbox
To: David Hantman

Friends –

With apologies for the impersonal nature of this e-mail, I wanted to let you know that I recently accepted a job at an exciting new company called airbnb, and will thus be leaving Yahoo! next month. I am already assisting in the process to select my successor, which will hopefully be complete soon.

This is a bittersweet departure for me, since I leave behind an awesome team and a company I love and believe in. But while I have loved every day of my 5+ years at Yahoo!, I am very excited to return to my startup roots. When I graduated law school way back in 1994, the first thing I did was to co-found an Internet company with a couple of friends. That company eventually went public, but I walked away for my Capitol Hill dream long before it had a viable business model (or really anything other than a few of us trying to convince the world that the Internet was going to be awesome someday). For the last five years, I have had the privilege of working for and among my heroes — people who turned a simple list of neat web sites in 1995 into a company that serves 700 million users and helped revolutionize the way people get and share information around the world.

Now, though, I have a second chance at the startup life — this time at a company whose brilliant founders have already proved it to be an amazing and disruptive business. I am excited to join an incredible team at airbnb and, hopefully, to be a small part of their future success. Airbnb is maybe the most successful little known company in the world. Millions of people have used the service to rent rooms or entire apartments — even private islands — as an alternative to hotels. They have some huge challenges with a few antiquated laws in their biggest markets, so my job will be to help them convince governments that allowing people to rent out their own homes or apartments should not be a problem, and that in fact it is great for the economy and for the tons of people that can only pay their mortgage or rent through the extra income they get from airbnb. For hundreds of years families have been taking in boarders or renting out extra space, and this service is just bringing that process into the 21st century, at a time when it is more needed than ever. As always, I like to be on the right side of history, and I believe in the mission and the team over there.

Anyway, please let’s stay in touch. I will be headquartered in DC to start, and while this yahoo-inc e-mail will soon stop working, my personal e-mail will stay the same:

xxx@xxx.com [redacted by ATD, since it is Hantman's personal email]

All the best!

David

Yahoo could announce in the coming week what it plans to do with the billions of dollars it recently garnered after closing the sale of a portion of its stake in China’s Alibaba, according to sources close to the situation.

As AllThingsD has previously reported, the company is most likely to do a share buyback with the $3.65 billion, a move that could boost its still-lackluster stock.

That’s what happened when AOL did one in late June after it got a pile of cash from hawking its patent assets. Its shares are up more than 25 percent for those last three months, while Yahoo’s have gone up less than one percent in the same time frame.

When it announced the completion of the deal in mid-September, Yahoo said that it would hand over 85 percent of the after-tax proceeds to shareholders. (The Silicon Valley Internet giant will keep about $650 million for its own use.)

At the time of the transaction, a Yahoo spokeswoman said that the company declined to give any specifics around the form of return. The company could also, for example, decide to give investors a dividend, too, although Yahoo has long explicitly favored stock buybacks.

“The form and timing of returning proceeds will be determined by the board and management, taking into consideration the best interests of the company and its shareholders,” said the Yahoo flack.

Speaking of flak, new CEO Marissa Mayer tried to give some to tech journalists, some of whom have been giving her a bit of a hard time of late for showing signs of potentially being too spendy.

In a memo to staff announcing the date of its employee holiday party — it’ll be on December 1 on Pier 48 in San Francisco — Mayer took issue with a particular report from Business Insider about how she tussled over costs with departing CFO Tim Morse, whom she ousted last week.

Business Insider claimed that included her taking the price of the holiday shindig from $100,000 to $3 million, due in part to a change in venue location.

Mayer begged to differ, noting in the internal memo that the event would not bust the bank and still be tons of fun:

“Building on the theme of tech reporters not being great with math or numbers, rumors of this year’s party budget have been greatly exaggerated.”

(Is there actual time for tech reporters being math-impaired to become a theme that’s being built upon at Yahoo? I thought Mayer said the company would be building innovative products.)

But since we in the media are apparently dunces, I suppose we’ll just have to rely on Yahoo’s own numbers from its last quarter — which I embedded below — to tell the tale of continuous troubling declines in search queries and page views, declines in minutes spent on its media properties, declines in growth of unique visitors and flat-as-a-sugar-cookie growth in revenue.

Or, as Mae West famously said in the most delightful math quote ever: “A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars. That’s subtraction.”

So is this Q2 financial performance at Yahoo — which is certainly not Mayer’s fault since she just arrived, but will be her responsibility to fix going forward:

YHOO_Q212EarningsPresentation

As most readers know, I love a good internal memo from Yahoo — and now I have landed a really meaty one.

It’s the “Yahoo! Three-Year Product Strategy” plan, a 21-page report that was completed in mid-2011 by a team headed by former product head Blake Irving.

While it is a year old — and five CEOs ago (no, really) — it’s an important read since it tracks closely to the strategic vision that Yahoo’s latest CEO Marissa Mayer discussed earlier this week at an all-hands employee meeting and, according to sources, is very similar to one she seems to be pursuing.

That includes a focus on personalization, mobile, social, improving Yahoo’s advertising tech platforms and more.

And here’s the centerpiece of goals — called “Five Strategic Elements” — from the Irving memo:

1. Infuse deep personalization using science and data into every consumer and advertising experience we build.

2. Delight our customers with best-in-class products, iterating frequently for constant improvement.

3. Build for connected devices first with localized, in-context, multi-screen experiences in mind.

4. Power real social relationships with features that enable 1:few conversations around content.

5. Build a digital media ecosystem that creates a premium marketplace for advertising and content and distributes Yahoo! experiences across the Web.

Sound familiar?

In fact, at the event’s Q&A part yesterday, one staffer specifically pointed out that her broad presentation to employees sounded a lot like the one Irving had proposed the year before.

Since that was never truly implemented, due to never-ending management crises, the obvious question was asked: “Why would things be different this time?”

Mayer answered that the execution against that strategy wasn’t good and she would have a better model to pull it off.

The memo, embedded in its entirety below, is really instructive to use as a possible roadmap, outlining Yahoo’s challenges, as well as the competitive landscape.

Noted the report, quite clearly: “Yahoo! does not have an audience problem, as we are growing on pace with the Internet. Yahoo! does, however, have an engagement problem, as our share of time spent is flat, relative to our competitors.”

It’s aim is to fix that by building the “One Yahoo! experience, in which each of our current and future products fortifies the whole.”

Easier said than done, especially in building up its ad tech business, as the report adds, zeroing in on its most potent rival:

“To defend and grow our share of the premium advertising market, Yahoo! must continue investing to reach parity where necessary and achieve sustainable differentiation against Google with our premium marketplace and technology stack.”

There’s a lot more than that, so dig in to the document, which suggest a whole lot of spending to turn around Yahoo.

Since Mayer is well on her way in that department — including bouncing CFO Tim Morse, who was very bottom-line wary — more on that, next!

You must now download the full report here, which was removed from DocStoc here after a takedown request from Yahoo’s lawyers.

At Yahoo’s Friday regular weekly FYI meeting for employees, one of the topics for its Q&A moderation system that got read in front of the crowd was that there should be a “shout-out” to recently promoted general counsel Ron Bell for his new hardline public stance against leaks at the company.

It was a reference to an internal memo that the longtime Yahoo lawyer sent last week to all employees, titled “Leaks Uncool,” in response to the umpteenth company missive that had somehow gotten out into the wild.

The particular memo that got Bell in a huff was one CEO Marissa Mayer sent out to staffers last week, related to the closing of the sale of part of Yahoo’s stake in China’s Alibaba Group. It was quickly published by Business Insider.

That the exact same wording was in a public press release sent out moments later, or — more to the point — that the detailed news of the transaction’s culmination had already been reported by me here a week before, seems not to have mattered to Bell.

Also off-limits for sharing, or else, he warned: Internal presentations and emails, confidential product and business plans, and revenue projections.

“It’s never OK to share information in an internal memo EVEN if the company issues public communications about the same subject,” tsk-tsked Bell, who reminded staff of Yahoo’s Code of Ethics. “We will fire employees who leak company confidential information and we will avail ourselves of all other legal remedies to protect those confidences.”

Jeepers, I better lob a call in to Ally McBeal, stat!

(Hypocrite alert: It’s also kind of fascinating, since that would also put at least one of Yahoo’s current and most active board members in the line of Bell’s fire, too, noted several sources, given previous reliance on encouraging leaking at the company.)

More ominously, Bell also dangled the possibility of jail time, tossing in the memo that employees making disclosures could be a “criminal offense.”

Wrote Bell: “If you do it, you can go to jail and face a very large fine.”

The jail part of Bell’s assertion was mostly a pre-Halloween scare, and also largely a canard, since every bit of information in the Alibaba memo had already been made public many times over.

Still, he pressed on, patting management on the back for “working hard to create an environment in which we share much more information with all of you than we’ve ever shared before.”

Actually, Yahoo has had a long record of giving employees lots and lots of information, whether it be on its Backyard comment system or via its once informative and quite adorkable Yodel Anecdotal corporate blog.

In my experience covering the company since the mid-1990s — that’s right, folks, I have been here almost since the beginning (and I am here to stay) — and through some much tougher times, Yahoo management has not hidden away from employees.

Case in point: Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang, who has always been a stand-up guy and made a point of responding fully to Yahoos, even if not every utterance was perfect.

He didn’t like leaks, either, but such is the situation at Yahoo, which continues to be a riveting corporate drama of great interest both inside and outside the company.

(Even still, try being Apple for a day and see what real scrutiny is like from a constantly rabid media.)

Memo to Ron Bell: Humans like to talk and they like to share, especially at a media company.

Still, I do get the concern about keeping internal information secret and under wraps, and it certainly can sometimes impact business.

But — given all the other much more important stuff that management should be more concerned with at Yahoo, such as improving moribund results and making innovative products that consumers want to use — it’s a silly, mean-spirited and even frivolous focus.

If Yahoo’s new team actually managed to turn the company around, even a mountain of leaked memos wouldn’t matter one iota.

But, like politicians who would rather bash the media than actually fix our nation’s problems, it’s easier to point fingers.

Which brings me to the one line in Bell’s memo that really was irksome and simply wrong: “Leakers put their personal agendas ahead of everyone else’s and directly undermine trust.”

It was followed by his urging employees to drop a dime on other employees, “if you know something about a leak or how it happened.”

Hey Javert, let me clue you in on something: Almost all Yahoos who send me information about what’s happening at the company have done so because they care about it deeply and have wanted much-needed change to happen as Yahoo’s fortunes have inexorably declined over the years.

It was those employees who first warned me, for example, about the critical problems in the regime of CEO Carol Bartz, and those employees who helped me ferret out troublesome issues around the false resume of Scott Thompson.

Instead of ratting out fellow workers, Yahoos might want to thank them for that, since, in both instances, the lackluster and incompetent board of Yahoo did not act — even with the massive damage being done — until forced to by increasing media and investor pressure.

Now there’s the possibility for hope in a mostly new board and a new CEO and a new strategy to be unveiled tomorrow to staff.

In order to start fresh and be successful in making much-needed changes, yammering on about memo-leaking betrayals and conducting a variety of mole hunts (and management is surely doing that using a variety of sneaky tech tools) seems both petty and, well, pointless.

In addition, most of the internal memos aren’t really that juicy, anyway, no matter how many “YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD, SHARE, OR REDISTRIBUTE” notes you slap on them.

In any case, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.”

So true — but if that’s not enough, I would offer some words of advice from Benjamin Franklin, our nation’s first and best journalist: “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

On Friday, I began a series about the various and sundry things new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was up to at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

First up was a look at how she is zeroing in on improving its troubled search efforts and advertising platforms, two business arenas that will get more focus this week when Mayer unveils her plans to the employees of Yahoo at an all-hands meeting.

According to an internal memo Mayer sent out Friday, the confab is scheduled for Tuesday. It comes after two days of meetings with Yahoo’s board of directors last week, in which Mayer outlined the plans for she has come up with to turnaround the company.

[Special note to readers: I would, as usual, embed the entire memo below, but Yahoo's top execs -- most especially, newly installed general counsel Ron "Leaks Are 'Uncool'" Bell -- have worked themselves into quite a lather over the issue of late. Apparently, according to numerous sources, the company is using all kinds of leak-catching tech tools -- free smartphones aren't as free as you might think, if you catch my drift, Yahoos, and I would also advise turning up the music loud when whispering in the Sunnyvale HQ offices -- so I will only quote internal emails only in part going forward to thwart such silliness.]

Pressing on!

In the memo, titled “Board slides, strategy and goals,” Mayer talked about the meetings. There will be two this Tuesday, one in the morning and one later in the day, in order to accommodate Yahoo staffers internationally.

“In an act of radical transparency that will be a tradition moving forward,” Mayer promised that she will go over the slides — which are usually not shared widely — of her “strategy and vision” that she presented at the board meeting on Friday.

“We want to offer you transparency into what happens at the board level as well as guidance as to where the company is going,” Mayer noted.

Kudos to that! (And send all that transparency my way, please!)

Mayer also said in the memo that she will have another all-hands meeting on October 1, where she will begin “rolling out a new system and process for goals for the company,” including annual goals that will be tracked and graded — first on a company level, then to departments, teams and, finally, individuals.

That’s a good idea, of course, because tracking such things has not been a focus of Yahoo for a while now. Not surprisingly, it is very much a practice at Google, from whence Mayer came and where she has been liberally borrowing a wide variety of management concepts.

But she has a few of her own tricks up her sleeve too, according to many sources, in terms of the strategy.

As I previously wrote, Mayer is planning on doubling down on search, as well as advertising platforms. Expect more money spent in both places, as well as a redo of Yahoo’s long-rocky search partnership with Microsoft.

Also up for a refresh is both email and also the critically important Yahoo home page. Both are being redesigned substantially to focus on consumer experience. People who have seen the mock-ups describe them both as more social and as more of a dashboard approach for users than the traditional catch-all portal.

It’s all based around learning technology that Yahoo has been working on called CORE, or Content Optimization and Relevance Engine. There will be lots of linking out and an attempt to make Yahoo more of a platform for others to develop on top of.

It’s a little Facebook-like, said several sources, but more focused on content and other products that differentiate Yahoo. Mayer has decided to back 10 key arenas, such as its powerful Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports sites, as well as its Flickr photo offering.

Still, no redesign is set in stone yet, so we’ll see what Mayer has decided on.

It’s also not clear what the e-commerce focus will be, but it is also an area that Mayer has a lot of experience in. Also a big question: What the heck is Yahoo’s non-existent mobile strategy going to be?

In addition, Mayer has already ordered the removal of some ads from both Yahoo’s email service and also its home page, cutting them back to improve the consumer experience. That’s a dicey move since Yahoo makes a big chunk of change from those ads, especially on the home page.

No matter. “Everything she is doing is about the consumer experience,” said a source. “Nothing else matters to her, even if it might matter to the bottom line.”

So far, Wall Street has been wary of Mayer until they see a strategy — the stock has been sitting in the $15 range since she arrived. That said, the high-profile exec does have more leeway from investors, and — perhaps most importantly — from the board.

In fact, at her now weekly Friday meeting for employees, a big group of the directors appeared onstage in a show of support.

A purple show, apparently — all were wearing lavender Yahoo t-shirts with “BoD” stamped on them.

Awwwwww! It’s like a mostly all-boy band! One, by the way, that might get more members soon. Sources told me that director Dan Loeb has been on the hunt to add at least one more person to the group, focusing on landing a Silicon Valley star.

When he was waging his proxy battle on Yahoo he tried to recruit both SurveyMonkey and former Yahoo David Goldberg and also well-known entrepreneur Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide.

While Goldberg joining the Yahoo board is not happening — he just joined the board of the Washington Post — getting Levchin to sign on seems more likely, especially with the focus on attracting innovative talent to the company.

Levchin is definitely that, as are many others Loeb has apparently been trying to buttonhole of late.

More on talent in our next episode.

Remember the infamous “Peanut Manifesto,” in which former Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse likened the company’s innovation process to peanut butter?

In it, he wrote:

“I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: A thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter. We all should.”

Not new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who has cooked up a new recipe for the longtime company albatross by sweetening it up.

Thus, yesterday, she sent out a new memo announcing a new sandwich topping to get the Silicon Valley Internet giant moving again: PB&J.

That stands for “Process, Bureaucracy & Jams,” and it is kind of like a city’s pothole alert line, except with more geeky pep.

Wrote Mayer and Patricia Moll Kriese — the ex-Googler who is now senior director of corporate projects at Yahoo — in a memo to employees, in part:

“Do you see a problem and know how to solve it? Want to brainstorm with colleagues about what to fix and how to fix it? Give us your ideas. Or be heard loud and clear by simply voting.”

In the missive, the pair also noted that besides the free food and new Friday FYI staff meetings, both of which I have previously reported on, the new leadership of Yahoo has been busy with some other stuff.

That apparently now includes: Turning off the turnstiles in building D at its Sunnyvale HQ, removing parking lot barriers, eliminating mandatory orientation at the gym.

(Yahoo really has been hopelessly bureaucratic, if it is requiring engineers to get schooled on how to work an exercise bike.)

In any case, it’s another interesting idea from Mayer to instill more ease and transparency to logistical aspects of running Yahoo (except when it comes to talking to media, of course — in that case, it’s awfully dark in here!).

These are important culture changes, of course, but the real rubber hitting the road will be what major execs Mayer brings in from elsewhere to really foment managerial change and innovation.

Sources say that at least one big hire is happening soon, with Mayer looking at candidates from “outside the box” from the regular suspects in the industry.

She has certainly been active in buttonholing important tech players on the subject over the last month, said sources, and asking for their input — from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel to a variety of others.

So far, her outside hires have been from Google, including Kriese (pictured here). While she had been listed as a project manager at Google, several sources said her last contracted job there was primarily to organize the annual trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for top execs at the search behemoth. Apparently, Kriese is a whiz with a spreadsheet in marshaling the tetchy potentates of Google, so PB&J seems right up her alley.

Here’s the full memo:

From: Marissa Mayer
Sent: Friday, August 24, 2012 10:00 PM
To: [All Yahoo]
Cc: Patricia Moll Kriese
Subject: Announcing PB&J — Process, Bureaucracy, & Jams!

YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD

Process blocking your success?

Bureaucracy getting you down?

Jammed by problems and see a solution? We are looking at how to streamline process, reduce bureaucracy, and remove jams — PB&J!

We’re launching PB&J today to gather your feedback on how to make Yahoo! the absolute best place to work. Share your ideas on what would make your job easier, boost your productivity and help solve problems.

What’s on your wish list for our corporate culture and work environment?

For example:

* GitHub for Code Review

* Dogfooding Yahoo! Mail & Calendar

* SSD’s (Solid State Drives) for faster machines

* Mi-Fi’s (mobile wi-fi cards)

We have done a few things already — free food, FYI, turning off the turnstiles in building D, removing parking lot barriers, eliminating mandatory orientation at the gym, etc. However, we know there’s more we can do!

Do you see a problem and know how to solve it? Want to brainstorm with colleagues about what to fix and how to fix it? Give us your ideas. Or be heard loud and clear by simply voting.

PB&J is available globally on Backyard: http://allhands.corp.yahoo.com/qna/pbj/latest

We will review your ideas and votes, reporting back in FYI each month on
actions taken. August PB&J starts now — and look forward to an update at
the next FYI in early September!

Questions/concerns/suggestions around PB&J, please contact Patricia Moll
Kriese, who’s our lead on PB&J.

Marissa & Patricia

And here is my fave depiction of PB&J, in the fantastically addictive “It’s Peanut Butter Jelly Time” dance:

After Apple’s legal victory over Samsung in the much-disputed patent infringement battle earlier today, its CEO Tim Cook sent a memo to the tech giant’s employees.

Cook, who took over at the company exactly a year ago, said Apple had gone to court “very reluctantly and only after repeatedly asking Samsung to stop copying our work.”

He stressed that the lawsuit “has always been about something much more important than patents or money. It’s about values.”

The memo was similar, though perhaps more emotional, than a company statement earlier today.

Apple said, in part,

“The lawsuits between Apple and Samsung were about much more than patents or money. They were about values. At Apple, we value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth. We make these products to delight our customers, not for our competitors to flagrantly copy.”

Here is the full Cook memo, which was obtained by 9to5Mac:

Today was an important day for Apple and for innovators everywhere.

Many of you have been closely following the trial against Samsung in San Jose for the past few weeks. We chose legal action very reluctantly and only after repeatedly asking Samsung to stop copying our work. For us this lawsuit has always been about something much more important than patents or money. It’s about values. We value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth. And we do this to delight our customers, not for competitors to flagrantly copy.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the jury who invested their time in listening to our story. We were thrilled to finally have the opportunity to tell it. The mountain of evidence presented during the trial showed that Samsung’s copying went far deeper than we knew.

The jury has now spoken. We applaud them for finding Samsung’s behavior willful and for sending a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right.

I am very proud of the work that each of you do.

Today, values have won and I hope the whole world listens.

Tim

Apple versus Samsung Full Coverage

The founder and chairman of eHarmony, Dr. Neil Clark Warren, is returning to the job of CEO at the well-known and oftimes controversial matchmaking site, according to an internal memo I obtained.

He replaces Jeremy Verba, the former Zynga exec who was named to the job a year ago at the Southern California-based eHarmony.

Prior to Zynga, Verba was president and CEO for online teen community Piczo and he also had worked at AOL and CNET.

It’s not clear why the sudden breakup at the dating service — whose motto is, “Fall in love for all the right reasons” — but in the memo Verba sent to staff today, he noted:

“The Company’s Board and I agreed upon this mutual separation on Friday. Our visions of the future of the business are not entirely aligned and we decided that this step is the best course of action.”

I get it: Not compatible.

The company recently lost its CTO, Joseph Essas, to OpenTable.

Verba had no comment when I contacted him.

Here’s the full Verba memo:

To the eHarmony Team:

I wanted to announce to you that I am leaving eHarmony Inc. The Company’s Board and I agreed upon this mutual separation on Friday. Our visions of the future of the business are not entirely aligned and we decided that this step is the best course of action. Dr. Neil Warren, eHarmony’s Chairman, has assumed the CEO role and will be outlining more details concerning the path forward very soon.

I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished in the time that I’ve been here. We have a site redesign in beta and improving every day; we are on our way to a new creative campaign scheduled to launch later this quarter; our mobile apps and development continue to evolve and capture more share of our users’ time; we continue to diversify our acquisition channels (mobile, social, digital video); and we’ve both welcomed several new executives to the company and promoted several from within the ranks.

This is a great team of people, driven by a belief in the mission laid out by Dr. Warren many years ago to reduce the divorce rate in America and create more love in the world. Our recent research studies have shown that we are succeeding at that and much more.

I have confidence in your abilities and future success. I wish you all the best and thank you for a great year.

Jeremy

PS. Going forward, I can be reached via FB or LinkedIn. I look forward to staying in touch.

As I just reported, former interim CEO Ross Levinsohn is leaving Yahoo.

Here’s the memo that its new CEO, former Google exec, Marissa Mayer just sent out to the troops, which is a very classy one, as well as Levinsohn’s adieu to staff and the regulatory documents that the Silicon Valley Internet giant filed about the departure with the Securities and Exchange Commission:

Subject: Thank You to Ross Levinsohn

Do Not Forward

I am writing to let you know that Ross Levinsohn will be leaving the company at the end of July.

Ross has been an important and powerful contributor at Yahoo since he joined in 2010. During May and June, Ross stepped into an incredibly tough role as interim CEO and did a terrific job — he really helped keep the company moving, closed important deals, and assembled a very talented team. I am very grateful to Ross for his leadership and work throughout his tenure at Yahoo. His contributions will be missed.

Ross will be in Sunnyvale tomorrow (Tuesday, July 31). Please take the opportunity to drop by and thank him for all he has done for the company. I hope you can join me in wishing Ross well and letting him know how much you’ve appreciated him as a colleague.

– Marissa

I wanted to let you know that my time at Yahoo has come to an end. It has been an incredible journey for me and I could not be prouder of what we accomplished over the past few years helping define Yahoo as a leader in digital media and advertising. Yahoo is an amazing brand and company, and I leave knowing we did all we could to help inform and entertain more than 700 million users each month. Leading this company has been one of the best experiences of my career, but it is time for me to look for the next challenge.

– Ross

YHOO-20120730-8K-20120726

While I might abandon my internal memo-quest at Yahoo at some point soon, I wanted to make sure to post the very first one from newly installed — and well-paid — CEO Marissa Mayer.

“You are doing important work — please don’t stop,” the former Google exec wrote to her new flock of employees in a missive sent yesterday. “Yes, keep moving!”

I took that to heart in tracking down this do-not-forward-oops memo — which I changed around a bit to thwart those who try to stop me from getting these emails via tricky computer programs — so enjoy.

Update: After getting questions, let me clarify: I only changed punctuation, such as “it’s” to “it is” or adding or subtracting a comma, but no text was altered and no sentences were moved or removed. I would never do such a thing, but I should have been more clear. Sorry!

Privileged and confidential — Do not forward

Dear Yahoos!

I couldn’t be more excited to be here — thank you for the warm welcome over the past two days! I can’t wait to get to know more about Yahoo’s products, culture, and all of you. I’ve always had a deep respect for Yahoo! — I first experienced it as a student at Stanford in 1994 as “David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” — and I’ve been fan ever since. I’m incredibly honored to now be a part of the team and work with all of you. Yahoo! is an Internet icon — in terms of brand, reach, user following, in its products and service. There is an enormous amount of opportunity in front of us.

The company has been through a lot of change in the past few months, leaving many open questions around strategy and how to move forward. I am sensitive to this. While I have some ideas, I need to develop a more informed perspective before making strategy or direction changes. In the meantime, please do not stop. You are doing important work. Please don’t stop. If you have questions or concerns about whether to continue or not, please ask. However, with the exception of a few things that might heavily constrain us in the future, the answer is most likely: “Yes, keep moving.”

Companies are all about people and the companies with the best talent win. Joining was an easy decision, because the strength of Yahoo!’s talent and the whole team here is apparent. We will continue to invest in talent, so we can produce the most compelling and exciting user experiences anywhere.

In recognizing our team’s deep talent, we all owe thanks to Ross Levinsohn, for his leadership and direction as interim CEO over the last couple of months. Ross has done a terrific job for the company.

Looking forward, we need to continue Yahoo!’s tradition of bold innovation, encourage creativity, and ultimately inspire and delight users and advertisers.

Please come by my office in building D on the third floor and say hello. I cannot wait to hear your ideas for Yahoo!’s future.

Marissa

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.