T-Mobile and HTC did their best to do just that on Wednesday night, hiring hip band Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. and throwing a party at a hip New York City club.

They combined to fete the HTC One S — a new high-end Android phone that goes on sale April 25 for $199. The slim device is part of the One family that HTC is counting on to help it regain lost ground in the smartphone business.

It remains to be seen how far the event and resultant buzz will go toward helping T-Mobile and HTC in their bid to boost their respective images.

HTC, after seeing sales doubling year-ago levels for the first several months of last year, hit a wall and is now seeing significant year-over-year drops.

A study of mobile Web surfing shows just how far mighty HTC has fallen. According to Chitika, the share of mobile Web pages being requested from HTC devices is down 60 percent from half a year ago, though that number also reflects the rise of the iPad. Still, Samsung has gained over that period and LG has roughly held its own.

T-Mobile, meanwhile, is aiming to come up with a new strategy after last year’s failed effort to sell itself to AT&T. Parent Deutsche Telekom has promised to reinvest in the U.S. arm, agreeing to pump $4 billion into the network over the next few years in order to launch LTE service.

On the marketing side, T-Mobile plans a broader relaunch in the second half of this year. However, deciding it couldn’t wait that long, the carrier kicked off a new ad campaign this week that featured its spokeswoman, Carly, trading in her pink dresses for leather and a Ducati.

The HTC One S that was shown off on Wednesday will become a featured part of the ad campaign, starting early next month.

This version: “The Hipster Games,” with ironic young people from five districts — Portland, Austin, Brooklyn, Oakland and Silverlake in Los Angeles — fighting to the death for that old Talking Heads vinyl record album.

Enjoy:

The concept represents a huge shift in the way women shop for clothes. Currently, women’s sizes are based on standards created in the 1940s, said Christina Wallace, Quincy Apparel’s co-founder and CEO. But Wallace said a lot has changed. Women are taller and there are a larger variety of shapes.

Most importantly, “we are definitely bustier,” she said.

The idea for creating a new line of clothing, based on bra size and sold over the Internet, came after Wallace and her co-founder Alex Nelson graduated and were shopping for business suits.

“We were both misfits, but the more we talked to friends, we found that everyone considered themselves to be a misfit,” she said. “If no one can wear these clothes, our bodies aren’t the problem.”

Traditionally, men buy suits based on their inseam and waist size and have jackets tailored to fit their shoulders and arm length. In contrast, women buy suits off the rack in dress sizes, and are rarely offered tailoring as part of the sale.

The result is poorly fitting clothes. Jackets and blouses ride up, don’t provide enough coverage, gape at the chest, or fall flat because of extra room.

“Men are astounded that this is how women’s clothes are sized,” Wallace said. “I don’t know a single man who hasn’t had a suit tailored to fit him.”

Last week, the site started selling five different jacket varieties, ranging from a two-button sandstone blazer to a more hip burnt orange one-button wool jacket. For now, inventory is limited while the company gets off the ground. It has plans to expand soon to blouses, dresses, pants and skirts.

The clothes are sewn in New York City and are sold in a variety of sizes, such as 38-C/D Tall or 32-A Short. If women aren’t particularly sure of their bra size, there’s a short questionnaire that helps confirm which size you should order.

Wallace said they have raised an undisclosed amount of capital in a seed round, but generally had a hard time getting the attention of venture capitalists.

“I think it has been interesting to raise for this,” Wallace said. “We are going to middle-aged investors who don’t get the market. They go ask their wives, who haven’t been in our market for awhile, and so there’s been some questioning as to whether this is a problem or a need. We need to launch and show the need.”

The pitch is simple and intuitive: All the magazines you want, delivered digitally to your tablet, for a flat fee of either $10 or $15 a month.

There are catches, of course, and we’ll get to them in a minute. But the thrust of what NIM and its publishers are trying to do here is heartening, because it shows that they’re willing to experiment, for real.

They’re keeping their core business model — curated bundles of content sponsored primarily by advertising. But they’re making a key concession by not requiring consumers to make a commitment to any particular title and letting them swap out magazines at will.

Not a coincidence: Two years after the iPad launched, consumers have only shown a mild interest in tablet magazines — digital represents just 1 percent of the industry’s circulation. Publishers need to do something.

Now, on to the catches. The good news is that most of these are solvable. The bad news is that there are a few, and for now, they’re big:

• The digital magazines require an app that will only work on Android tablets running Honeycomb. Next Issue says it will submit a version to Apple soon and hopes to have it available this summer. No word on Amazon’s Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which run earlier — and heavily modified — versions of Google’s operating system.
• You can’t get any magazine you want: Just 32 titles from the four magazine publishers in Next Issue’s joint venture: Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc. and Conde Nast. (News Corp., which also owns this Web site, is a Next Issue backer, but hasn’t put anything it owns into this offering.) That said, the list includes lots of the publishers’ best-known titles: Sports Illustrated, Fortune, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Elle, Better Homes and Gardens, etc. Next Issue says it will add more “later this year,” and also plans to bring outside publishers into the offering.
• If you like reading magazines in both print and digital form, this offer won’t work for you. While publishers have recently started bundling print and digital subscriptions for the same price — essentially giving away digital in exchange for full-priced print subscriptions — these deals don’t include any print issues at all.

But for all of that, there’s plenty here to be optimistic about, whether you’re a magazine maker or a magazine reader.

Publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of the iPad and other tablets, and for now they’ve ended up with something that looks and works almost exactly like a paper magazine, with a couple digital bells and whistles.

That’s not a terrible thing — some of the tablet issues work well, and publishers tell me they think they are selling them to new readers, which is a good thing.

But for two years there haven’t been many compelling reasons to pick up a tablet issue instead of a print one. Changing the basic subscription proposition, though? That makes things very interesting.

It’s also very much an experiment, which is the word every publisher I talked to about the launch used in the last couple days. “No one has done this before, and there are lots of practical reasons for that,” says Hearst’s John Loughlin, who oversees the publisher’s tablet efforts.

And publishers still have basic stuff to figure out, like how they’ll get paid for their titles. The rough idea is that they’ll get a share of revenue based on the amount of time consumers spend with their magazines, but they still need to hash out details.

The same goes for conversations about circulation and advertising. Right now, for instance, the magazines you read when you give Next Issue $10 a month (if you want monthly titles — if you want weeklies like the New Yorker, it’s $15 a month) won’t be counted in publishers’ official totals.

But all of that sounds good to me. It sounds like an industry ready to try some stuff and see what works. Just like all the start-ups that insist they want to disrupt it.

“Anybody that tells you that they have the answer, or that their model is the model that would be successful 5 years from now — they’d be suspect,” says Loughlin. “We’re very much in a learning mode.”

Third Point’s Dan Loeb, the activist Yahoo shareholder, fired back at the company today about recent board appointments that ignored his alternate slate of directors, in yet another colorful letter that compared the Silicon Valley Internet giant to the famous children’s book “Alice in Wonderland.”

And not in a nice way.

“Our view of the nomination process is further reinforced by your explanation on Sunday as to why I would not be an acceptable Director. You told me that the Board felt my experience and knowledge ‘would not be additive to the Board’ and that as Yahoo!’s largest outside shareholder, I would be ‘conflicted’ as a Director, wrote Loeb to CEO Scott Thompson. “Am I conflicted to advocate for the interests of other shareholders because we are owners of 5.8% (over $1 billion) of Yahoo! shares (unlike the non-retiring and proposed board members who have never purchased a single share of Yahoo! except for subsidized shares issued through option exercises and shares “paid” by the Company in lieu of fees)? Only in an illogical Alice-in-Wonderland world would a shareholder be deemed to be conflicted from representing the interests of other shareholders because he is, well, a shareholder too. This sentiment further confirms that Yahoo!’s approach to Board representation is “shareholders not welcome.”

We’re about to go down the rabbit hole, indeed, as the well-known New York hedge fund exec moves to significantly step up his proxy battle against Yahoo. While it will be a tough road for Third Point to attract enough investor support for his side, it’s still a noisy mess that Yahoo can ill afford, especially as Thompson readies significant layoffs as part of a major restructuring.

Here’s the full text of Loeb’s saucy letter:

TP March 28 Letter to CEO Thompson Re Board Negotiations

Last week, Yahoo’s activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point, the New York hedge fund that is waging a proxy fight against the Silicon Valley Internet giant, made a regulatory filing noting that it had spent $971.1 million to acquire 70.5 million shares of Yahoo, a 5.8 percent stake. Loeb asked for Yahoo to consider his alternate board slate, and also wanted its shareholder list to communicate with other investors.

But that’s not all: In another action last week, Third Point asked a Delaware court to give it a look at sealed documents from a now-settled 2008 shareholder lawsuit related to Microsoft’s failed bid for Yahoo.

Said Third Point in its legal request, which Yahoo is seeking to block (of course!): “It is not surprising, then, that Yahoo and its soon-to-be former directors wish to keep details of their embarrassing — and fiduciarily suspect — conduct hidden from view.”

Here’s a video I did talking about the mishegas on WSJ.com’s “Digits” online show:

Who in their right mind would lie to Ira Glass?

That was my first reaction to the revelation that the theatrical monologuist Mike Daisey had lied or fabricated — or in his words, “taken dramatic license” with — certain parts of his stage play, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”

When I met people at parties in recent weeks and told them that I write about technology and that I had devoted more than a decade to covering Apple, the first question I used to get was: “Did you know Steve Jobs?” Since about January of this year, that first question has become, “What do you think of Mike Daisey?”

I haven’t had a real answer. I hadn’t seen his show, which was favorably reviewed by the New York Times, nor had I heard the episode of the highly respected public radio documentary program “This American Life” titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” that had been adapted from his play.

The show — or shows — hit a cultural nerve at a critical moment. Apple is the biggest company in the world, sporting a market capitalization of $546 billion as of Friday, with $100 billion worth of cash and investments on its balance sheet and the most popular stable of consumer electronics products in the world, especially the iPhone and the iPad. All of them are manufactured by workers in China, who labor for wages that are low by Western standards, put in hours that by Western reckoning are long, under conditions that to Western eyes aren’t ideal, doing jobs that by any standard are incredibly tedious.

Daisey’s stage show, which became a sensation among New York’s chattering classes, sought to draw attention to the plight of allegedly oppressed workers at Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturing partner in China. As New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood put it, the play “is a mind-clouding, eye-opening exploration of the moral choices we unknowingly or unthinkingly make when we purchase nifty little gadgets like the iPhone.”

The stage show had been adapted for radio on public radio’s “This American Life,” which is probably the most-respected radio documentary program in the history of broadcasting. And the Daisey episode was presented as documentary, meaning the radio show’s staff of journalists and producers were vouching for it being true.

The problem: Much of it wasn’t.

In the show, Daisey described a trip to China, as well as a visit to Foxconn’s outer gates and other manufacturing companies in Shenzen, where many are located. He delivers a detailed and emotionally riveting account of meeting girls as young as 12, 13 and 14 years old who claimed to work for Foxconn. This would be in violation both of local laws and of Apple policies.

He also told of meeting workers poisoned by a chemical called n-Hexane, used to polish screens.

And, perhaps most movingly, he related a tear-jerking scene in which he showed a working iPad to a man who said he had crippled a hand while making its parts in a Foxconn metal press, yet had never so much as seen one of the devices powered on. Seeing the iPad’s screen in action, he tells Daisey, “is like a kind of magic.”

The word “magic” fits oddly here, because these meetings didn’t happen as Daisey said. “This American Life” yesterday aired a lengthy episode entitled “Retraction,” documenting Daisey’s many liberties with the facts.

To help do so, a reporter for another public radio show — Rob Schmitz of “Marketplace” — did what no one else in the media seemed to be willing to do, which was subject Daisey’s claims to scrutiny. Most damning of all in Schmitz’s report was the testimony of Daisey’s translator, called Cathy. She was found — after Daisey had told TAL he had lost contact with her — and disputed many of the anecdotes taken from the play and used in the radio segment about Foxconn.

Among the fabrications: Daisey didn’t speak to quite as many people nor visit nearly as many plants as he said he did. She disputed finding underage workers. The n-Hexane poisoning incident occurred not at Foxconn in Shenzen where Daisey visited, but at a Wintek facility in Suzchou, more than 900 miles to the north of Shenzen.

The stage show, and therefore the radio show that was derived from it, turned out to be a mixture of facts and fiction. Which might be fine for a production on the New York theatrical stage, where fiction and fact blend readily. And, while it might be okay in entertainment products, you don’t expect it from a prestigious radio documentary program.

And that is where the problems began.

When Daisey’s monologue was adapted for “This American Life,” outrage began to grow among people who wanted to do something about it. It was, Glass says, the most downloaded episode of “TAL” ever, and public radio listeners did what public radio listeners tend to do. For one thing, they started a petition. More than a quarter of a million people have signed a petition at Change.org, inspired by the TAL production based on Daisey’s work, demanding that Apple make changes.

That includes crafting a “worker protection strategy” for new products released, as well as publishing data from Fair Labor Association audits.

Feeding the frenzy, Daisey stepped up as the leading voice for worker rights in China’s electronics industry. He was seemingly everywhere in the media. Since the TAL segment aired in January, Daisey has been seen on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” in a report that, like the “TAL” episode, is now going to have to be retracted or at the very least walked back.

Another CBS-owned property, CNET, hosted Daisey as part of “Reporters Roundtable,” alongside Charles Duhigg of the New York Times, co-author of a series of front page stories in that newspaper. Duhigg ended his “Roundtable” appearance by urging people who care about the issue to go and see Daisey’s play.

Daisey also appeared on MSNBC repeating the same anecdotes and tarnishing the usually shiny Apple. And on HBO. And PBS. And C-SPAN.

Needless to say, there will have to be many more retractions in the days ahead.

At this point, it’s hard to determine what’s more outrageous, Daisey’s lies to Ira Glass and his team, or the national media’s willingness to give Daisey a platform to repeat the same lies and fabrications without making the slightest effort to vet them.

The circumstances around Apple’s manufacturing arrangements in China aren’t new. As a columnist for Businessweek I wrote about Apple’s first round of “sweatshop” allegations in 2006, well before the age of the iPhone and the iPad, which had at the time first come to light in part because of the reporting by London’s Daily Mail.

I’ve never been to China. Many people know more about the on-the-ground facts concerning Apple’s factories than I do. But there are many reporters who have been there. In 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Fredrik Balfour wrote a powerful cover story for that magazine, which aimed to get to the bottom of the string of suicides that occurred among Foxconn employees that year.

ABC’s “Nightline” visited Foxconn earlier this year. Its report was criticized in some circles, because at the time of his death, Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs happened to be the largest shareholder of that network’s parent company, Disney. Also, ABC had been invited by Apple and Foxconn. Even so, “Nightline” anchor Bill Weir, seeing conditions very different from what Daisey described in the course of his reporting, wondered if Mike Daisey’s work was questionable.

At the very least, Daisey is a dramatist who now admits he chose to lie, but for reasons known only to himself. The chance to raise his profile and sell more tickets to his monologue are obvious potential motivations. Whatever it was, his dramatic product is meant to be consumed as thought-provoking entertainment, not as fact-based journalism, which many people assumed it was.

This is the crux of Daisey’s defense for lying to Ira Glass and his fact-checker: That he’s not a journalist and took dramatic license with the events, and now regrets doing the “This American Life” segment.

And that’s the real shame here.

Clearly, people care about how workers who make our electronics are treated, or there wouldn’t have been a market for Daisey’s show, or for an hour-long radio documentary adapting it. And the subject is one we need to discuss at length as a society. The net result of Mike Daisey’s efforts to put self-promotion ahead of the facts has badly muddied the waters, and has probably done more harm to the people he sought to help.

So, instead of illumination on a serious topic, we are left with little. Mike Daisey is an opportunistic fabulist and should be ashamed of himself for lying. Ira Glass and his team are ashamed for giving him wider attention, and have said so. But there are many more people who should be even more ashamed for taking Daisey’s lies at face value. There should be many more retractions and apologies in the days ahead.

But now we have to start the conversation about Apple and Foxconn and workers’ rights all over again, this time with real, verifiable facts at our command. Is that so much to ask?

(Image courtesy of Mike Daisey’s Web site.)

According to sources, AOL will be announcing that it is making cuts of up to 40 employees in its communication products teams, specifically its AIM instant messaging and AOL Mail units. As part of the changes, its SVP of business operations, Eric van Miltenburg, and AIM head Jason Shellen will be leaving.

[UPDATE: AOL confirmed those moves to be several hours after this post appeared.]

Shellen is a particularly high-profile departure, having sold his start-up Thing Labs, maker of the Brizzly family of Web-based social software, to AOL in 2010. The Thing Labs team, headed by the Google and Blogger vet, had been integrated into AOL’s AIM and other similar offerings.

Van Miltenburg, a former Yahoo exec, had headed up business operations for the now-shifted consumer applications unit.

The departures are among a number of exits by AOL execs who had come to the New York-based Internet company, which has struggled to turn itself around in recent years under CEO Tim Armstrong. The company is now facing a challenge from an activist shareholder, one of the reasons for a renewed focus on cost-cutting and other restructuring.

(c) Tim Vetter / Flickr

This last weekend, Foursquare founder Naveen Selvadurai announced in a blog post that he was leaving the company, three years after launching the check-in service with Dennis Crowley. In a terse note, Sevaldurai wrote that he would remain on the company’s board and as an adviser, as well as the “single most vocal user” of the popular check-in service.

But, he added, “spring is time for things that are new, and i realize that i have a desire to do something new as well. i’m not sure about my exact next steps.”

Spring forward indeed, because — according to numerous sources inside and outside the company — the impetus for Selvadurai’s departure was a lot more complex and fraught than he or the company indicated.

To be fair, this is not uncommon for start-ups at all. Twitter went through the mother of all contentious partings — twice, in fact — in an ongoing battle among its founders. Tech is rife with similar examples, most often of lesser drama.

And it is much the same with Selvadurai and Crowley, who had together become New York’s highest profile entrepreneurs in recent years. The pair cut a wide swatch of fame, including doing commercials together (see video below).

But times change and sources said that they had come to the conclusion over a series of talks over the last several months that there was no place for Selvadurai any longer at the fast-growing start-up.

“This company grew very quickly and a lot of senior management has been added,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “It got to the point where Naveen was not in charge of much.”

Indeed, since Foursquare began adding execs — I have a list below — he had become ever more sidelined, ending up with a small team focused on platform efforts and supporting APIs.

“Naveen was no longer heading any meaningful area of functional responsibility, so things got tense,” said another source.

Still, according to several people familiar with the situation — unlike the highly charged parting that took place at Twitter — the departure was not ugly or closely related to either a recent stock sale by employees or its most recent funding in June that valued Foursquare at $600 million.

“Dennis and he don’t hate each other — things just changed,” said one person.

Said another source: “When you look at all the external stuff, Naveen’s leaving was really not tied to anything in particular. The business was really starting to mature … and there is eventually a line in the sand between building a product and building a company.”

Indeed, rather than a scrappy start-up, Foursquare now has 111 employees, up from 50 last year, and has moved into a new phase of trying to evolve from simply being a check-in service.

As that was happening, said multiple sources, the discussions about roles at the company became more pronounced.

“The way this company has been structured, the talks centered on how to contribute to a company and Naveen and Dennis agreed that there was not a place for him day to day,” said one person. “But that does not mean he still will not be contributing to the future of Foursquare in a different way.”

The pair both emailed Foursquare’s staff about the change, although Crowley’s public goodbye on Twitter was short and, yes, sweet:

After 3 yrs, my @foursquare co-founder is moving onto new projects & big ideas. Can’t wait to see what’s next @naveen! naveenium.com/stream/next

— Dennis Crowley (@dens) March 5, 2012

Like I said: Things change.

Here’s the current Foursquare management team:

Dennis Crowley, CEO & co-founder
Evan Cohen, COO (joined January 2010)
Holger Luedorf, head of business development (joined summer 2010)
Alex Rainert, head of product (joined April 2010)
Harry Heymann, head of engineering (joined summer 2009)
Susan Loh, head of talent (joined fall of 2010)
Jon Steinback, director of marketing and communications (joined fall of 2010)

And here are some of the latest stats from the service:

* Over 15 million users (up from just over five million this time last year).

* Over 1.5 billion check-ins.

* Five million check-ins per day.

* Over 750,000 businesses affiliated.

And here’s the video that Foursquare’s co-founders did together for USA Network last year:

Image: (c) Tim Vetter / Flickr

According to sources close to the situation, AOL’s CTO Alex Gounares is leaving the New York-based Internet company.

At AOL, he was in charge of all of AOL’s vast technical operations. He is among a number of execs who have been hired by CEO Tim Armstrong and then have departed.

Gounares came to AOL from Microsoft in May of 2010. He was corporate VP of Advertising Research and Development and CTO for the software giant’s Online Services division.

Sources said Gounares wanted to move back to the Seattle area.

His departure is certainly bad timing, in any event.

AOL has recently been targeted by activist shareholder Starboard Value, which put up an alternate slate of directors last week in a brewing proxy battle.

An AOL spokeswoman declined to comment.

As I reported this morning, an activist fund aiming at AOL took a shot today, by putting up its slate of alternate directors.

In a nutshell, Starboard Value does not like the way CEO Tim Armstrong is running the company and thinks it can do better.

My two cents: The New York-based investment firm might have actually named some directors with some more recent media or Internet operating experience.

Several Internet execs approached by Starboard said they declined because they did not want to engage in a hostile action against AOL, even if they might agree with its assessment of the dicey situation for the company.

Instead, it’s investor guys, advisor guys and even an intellectual property guy. (Oh joy, so the plan is patent lawsuits a la Kodak?)

Yes, it is, according to Starboard’s letter to the AOL board.

It read, in part:

“We appreciate the ongoing dialog we have had with management and certain members of the Board over the past two months. However, we are extremely disappointed that our conversations regarding the issues raised in our letter have stalled. Specifically, we are troubled that the Company remains closed-minded to alternative value creation initiatives, and instead appears solely focused on pursuing the status quo.”

AOL fired back with a statement of its own, essentially saying things are just fine and Starboard’s characterization of the company was inaccurate.

Said AOL in a statement:

“We ended 2011 with our best performance as a company in the past five years, with substantial growth in advertising revenue, improvements in legacy revenue streams, and significant cost reductions. Our stock price has acted in kind, appreciating approximately 80% from our 2011 low and 20% year-­‐to-­‐date.”

Starboard declined to agree apparently.

Nothing like a he-said-he said, which follows a similar proxy fight situation at Yahoo!

Here is Starboard’s official press release with board selections, followed by AOL’s full statement:

Starboard Delivers Letter to AOL Board Nominates a Slate of Highly Qualified Candidates for Election at the 2012 Annual Meeting

NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Starboard Value LP (together with its affiliates, “Starboard”), one of the largest shareholders of AOL Inc. (“AOL” or the “Company”) AOL -0.95% with current ownership of approximately 5.2% of the outstanding shares, today announced that it has delivered a letter to the Company’s Board of Directors and has nominated a slate of highly qualified candidates for election to the AOL Board at the Company’s 2012 Annual Meeting.

The full text of the letter to the Board follows:

February 24, 2012

AOL Inc.
770 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Attn: Members of the Board of Directors

To the Board of Directors,

Starboard Value LP, together with its affiliates (“Starboard”), currently owns approximately 5.2% of the outstanding shares of AOL Inc. (“AOL” or “the Company”), making us one of the Company’s largest shareholders. As you know, we have strong views regarding the current state and future direction of AOL, which we articulated in our comprehensive letter to the Board of Directors (the “Board”) on December 21, 2011 (the “December Letter”). We appreciate the ongoing dialog we have had with management and certain members of the Board over the past two months. However, we are extremely disappointed that our conversations regarding the issues raised in our letter have stalled. Specifically, we are troubled that the Company remains closed-minded to alternative value creation initiatives, and instead appears solely focused on pursuing the status quo. AOL is a diverse company with tremendous assets in a variety of different businesses that collectively are being undervalued in the marketplace. We continue to believe that significant opportunities exist to unlock value based on actions within the control of management and the Board.

As one specific example, in addition to the valuable assets highlighted in our December Letter, AOL owns a robust portfolio of extremely valuable and foundational intellectual property that has gone unrecognized and underutilized. This portfolio of more than 800 patents broadly covers internet technologies with focus in areas such as secure data transit and e-commerce, travel navigation and turn-by-turn directions, search-related online advertising, real-time shopping, and shopping wish list, among many others.

Since our initial public involvement in AOL, we have been approached by multiple parties specializing in intellectual property valuation and monetization, some of whom believe that (i) a significant number of large internet-related technology companies may be infringing on these patents, and (ii) AOL’s patent portfolio could produce in excess of $1 billion of licensing income if appropriately harvested and monetized. Unfortunately, several of these parties have expressed severe frustration that AOL has been entirely unresponsive to their proposals regarding ways to take advantage of this underutilized asset. The Company’s inaction is alarming given our understanding that many of the key patents have looming expiration dates over the next several years which could render them worthless if not immediately utilized.

As a result of the dynamics highlighted above, we are increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of the Company and the leadership of the Board. To this end, and as a result of our inability to arrive at a mutually agreeable resolution on the composition of the Board, we have identified the following highly-qualified candidates who have agreed to be nominated to the AOL Board at the 2012 Annual Meeting. We believe these nominees possess a well-balanced mix of skill sets to ensure that the Company evaluates, with an open mind and a keen sense of urgency, all alternative strategies to determine the best path forward to maximize value for all shareholders.

Starboard’s Director Nominees:

Ronald S. Epstein is the Founder and CEO of Epicenter IP Group LLC, a company dedicated to assisting patent owners in obtaining maximum value for their intellectual property. Previously, Mr. Epstein was Vice President and General Counsel of Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., and Director of Licensing at Intel Corporation. Before joining Intel, Mr. Epstein was a member of the Technology Licensing Group at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati. Mr. Epstein has more than 20 years of experience in developing, optimizing, and transacting intellectual property asset portfolios, and has delivered significant value to patent owners from the sale or licensing of patents in over 150 transactions.

Steven B. Fink is currently a private investor with extensive experience building and managing technology companies. Mr. Fink is the former CEO of Lawrence Investments, LLC, a venture with Larry Ellison that owns and manages all of Mr. Ellison’s non-Oracle investments. Lawrence Investments founded and invested in numerous technology, education, medical, and biotechnology companies. Mr. Fink previously served as Chairman and CEO of Anthony Manufacturing Company, Chairman and Managing Director of Knowledge Universe, and Chairman and CEO of Nextera. Mr. Fink currently serves as Vice Chairman of Heron International, and as a member of the Board of Directors of K-12. Previously, Mr. Fink served as the Chairman of the Board of Leapfrog, Inc., and Spring Group until its sale in 2007.

Dennis A. Miller is a strategic advisor to Lionsgate Entertainment and has been focused primarily on investing at the intersection of media and technology. Previously, he was a General Partner at Spark Capital, a venture fund where he invested in companies including Twitter, CNET, and AdMeld. As a Managing Director for Constellation Ventures, he invested in companies such as Capital IQ. Mr. Miller has also served as Executive Vice President of Lionsgate Entertainment, Executive Vice President of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Executive Vice President of Turner Network Television.

Jeffrey C. Smith is co-Founder and CEO of Starboard Value, a New York-based investment firm that is one of the largest shareholders of AOL. Mr. Smith has extensive public company board experience. Currently, he serves on the boards of Regis Corp., and SurModics Inc. Previously, he was the Chairman of the Board of Phoenix Technologies Ltd., and a director of Zoran Corporation, Actel Corporation, S1 Corporation, and Kensey Nash Corp. Mr. Smith also served as a member of the Management Committee for Register.com.

James Warner is the principal of Third Floor Enterprises, an advisory firm specializing in digital marketing and media. Previously, he was Executive Vice President of Avenue A | Razorfish, and served on the executive committee of aQuantive, its parent company. He has also served as President of Primedia Magazine Group, President of the CBS Television Network, President of CBS Enterprises, and Vice President at HBO. Mr. Warner served as a director on the board of MediaMind Technologies Inc until its sale to DG FastChannel, Inc. in July 2011.

It is our understanding that the terms of eight directors currently serving on the Board expire at the 2012 Annual Meeting. We would view any attempt by the Company to expand the size of the Board following the receipt of this letter, and given our previous discussions regarding board composition, as a tactic designed to manipulate the composition of the Board with regard to this year’s Annual Meeting. To preserve our rights, and in the event that the Company expands the Board prior to the 2012 Annual Meeting, we are therefore nominating five director candidates. We do not currently intend to seek to replace a majority of the Board. However, we do believe significant change to the composition of the Board is warranted given the qualifications of our nominees and the long-term underperformance of AOL.

We remain prepared to engage in constructive dialog with the Board to reach a mutually agreeable resolution. However, if an agreement is not reached, we are fully prepared to solicit the support of our fellow shareholders to elect a new slate of directors at the 2012 Annual Meeting who are committed to representing the best interests of all AOL shareholders. Starboard has a long history of working constructively with undervalued public companies to improve board effectiveness and enhance shareholder value. We hope that the Board will begin to recognize that our interests are directly aligned with those of all shareholders and that we only want what is best for AOL and its shareholders.

Best Regards,

Jeffrey C. Smith
Managing Member
Starboard Value LP

AOL ISSUES STATEMENT

NEW YORK, NY — February 24, 2012 – AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) issued the following statement in response to Starboard Value LP’s Letter to the AOL Board

The recent improved earnings results of AOL Inc. (“AOL” or “the Company”) highlight the significant progress we are making in executing our strategy to improve AOL’s growth trajectory and create meaningful shareholder value. We ended 2011 with our best performance as a company in the past five years, with substantial growth in advertising revenue, improvements in legacy revenue streams, and significant cost reductions. Our stock price has acted in kind, appreciating approximately 80% from our 2011 low and 20% year-­‐to-­‐date.

AOL’s Board of Directors and management team consistently review the strategy and performance of the Company and have taken meaningful actions to enhance shareholder return including the divestiture of non-core assets, significant cost reduction, a meaningful buyback of Company equity, and the implementation of an accountable and performance-based culture to operate against our clear strategy.

AOL has held several meetings with Starboard Value LP to address their questions. AOL communicated our continued intent to simplify AOL’s business and our efforts to accelerate shareholder value creation. AOL has offered Starboard Value LP an opportunity to help shape the Company’s Board of Directors composition and size. Unfortunately, Starboard Value LP has a singularly focused agenda and rejected this productive path to address their stated concerns and drive increased shareholder value.

Our Board of Directors and management team remain firmly committed to creating value for all shareholders. We have a valuable patent portfolio and several months ago, prior to Starboard’s first letter, the AOL Board of Directors authorized the start of a process, and hired advisors, to realize the value of these non-strategic assets. AOL has a clear plan to provide our consumers and customers with exceptional value, which we believe will lead to the creation of shareholder value. We will continue to aggressively execute and innovate on our strategy as we continue the turnaround of AOL.

Have you never heard of Starboard Value?

Me, either!

But the New York activist fund is readying to make a splash as soon as today, several sources said, if it follows through on the expected naming of an alternate board to challenge AOL.

Saturday is the official deadline to nominate directors to the board of AOL, also based in New York, which will have all eight up for reelection.

Sources said Starboard has talked to several Internet types, but that it has plans to put up a slate made up more of Wall Streeters to present at the company’s annual meeting later in the year.

In a filing last week, Starboard said it had been in discussions with AOL management about its concerns, so it is certainly possible the investor and the company could come to some agreement over board seats and strategic direction before it gets Yahoo-ugly.

That would make it a kind of an East Coast proxy battle version of what’s been going on over at Yahoo and its tussle with Third Point’s Daniel Loeb. He recently followed through on long-expressed unhappiness with the Silicon Valley Internet giant, and named a slate of directors — including well-known media exec Jeff Zucker — to replace current ones there.

The same kind of thing has been in the works at Starboard, which sent a letter in late December to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, saying his much-touted strategy around content was not a good one for investors.

Like Loeb at Yahoo, Starboard is one of AOL’s largest shareholders, with a stake of just over five percent.

The letter signaled an increasing impatience with the pace of Armstrong’s turnaround efforts, which are still in turnaround. Meanwhile, AOL’s stock has rebounded from last summer’s lows of near $10 a share.

The stock is up more than 22 percent this year, to $18.44. But that’s still down almost 20 percent from when AOL spun off from Time Warner and went public in late 2009.

The grumpy (and opportunistic) Starboard entered the picture late last year.

According to The Wall Street Journal:

“Starboard, which focuses mainly on small-cap companies, was spun off from Cowen Group Inc.’s Ramius Capital LLC in March. In October, the fund successfully waged a proxy fight against hair-salon chain owner Regis Corp. when three of its director nominees were elected to Regis’s board. AOL, which was spun off from Time Warner Inc. in 2009 after a failed merger, is its most high-profile target yet.”

One of the investment fund’s bugaboos is Patch, the local news network that AOL has sunk a lot of dough into. Also under fire is Armstrong’s content efforts and the pace of its display advertising sales, including the high-profile acquisition of the Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

I have emails into all the bigs at AOL and Starboard, so we’ll see who calls back first, if at all.

I realize that this will be a bummer for some of you who thought you could enter an athletics-free zone, now that the Super Bowl is over.

But in the last week, Jeremy Lin has become a national sensation, and one who resonates with a certain slice of tech-savvy Twitter and Facebook users. Which means you’re going to see a lot of him, at least in the very near future.

Who is Jeremy Lin? Easy enough to Google him, or to read any number of profiles, like this nice piece from the New York Times. But if you’re in a real hurry, and/or lazy –

Guys, I’m tired. Can someone Cliffs Note this “Jeremy Lin” thing for me?

— ericspiegelman (@ericspiegelman) February 11, 2012

We can help you out here:

• Jeremy Lin’s parents emigrated from Taiwan to the Bay Area in the 1970s.
• Jeremy Lin played basketball at Palo Alto High School.
• Jeremy Lin played basketball at Harvard, where he earned an economics degree.
• After Harvard, Jeremy Lin played briefly for the Golden State Warriors, who let him go, and the Houston Rockets, who let him go.
• Last December, the New York Knicks hired him as a backup player, and he only played briefly for the team until last week.
• Last week, Jeremy Lin started playing a lot for the Knicks, because they had run out of bodies in his position. Since then, he’s played at a very high level. And the Knicks, who have been very bad for a long time, have won all of their games.
• The Knicks’ last game was last night, where they beat the Los Angeles Lakers and Kobe Bryant in a game that lots of people watched.
• Jeremy Lin’s instant celebrity comes from the conflation of several currents: He is a very rare Ivy League graduate playing and succeeding in the NBA. And he is an even rarer Asian-American playing in the NBA — just the fourth in the league’s history. And he plays in New York, a city that loves basketball and winners, and which still has an outsized influence on media. It’s an underdog story that is almost literally unbelievable. And one that touches on race and culture in a way that’s exciting without making (most) people uncomfortable.*
• If none of this appeals to you, you must really, really hate sports. Weird. But simple probability is in your favor, since Lin can’t keep this streak going indefinitely. And at some point, the hysteria will dissipate, and you won’t have to feign interest in three-point shots when you talk to prominent angel investors, entrepreneurs, etc.
• Then again, we would have said that six days ago, too.

Too many words? Okay. Some moving pictures:

*Now that Jeremy Lin is a meme, some of the race/class stuff will unfortunately become much less pleasant.

Okay, okay, we get it: Morgan Stanley got the coveted left-hand lead position on Facebook’s blockbuster IPO filing. Goldman Sachs is there, too, but in the third-place, always-a-bridesmaid spo,t and is crying big salty tears about the injustice of it all.

It’s hard to feel badly for overpaid investment bankers, and focusing on them is kind of like endlessly discussing the lawyers who processed your mortgage, when the focus should be on the house you’re buying.

Does anyone except a few Richie Rich ZIP Codes in Manhattan care about this one deet of the initial public offering of the social networking giant?

Nope, but there is so little real news ahead of the IPO filing expected today that this is what we are chomping on this morning, as everyone awaits the big doc drop at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Sources said it is likely to come this afternoon rather than this morning, though. And, perish the thought, all that dotting of I’s and crossing of T’s could delay it to tomorrow, even (unlikely, but mebbe!).

Sigh.

Tidbit: Facebook was actually founded the first Wednesday in February of 2004 in an undergraduate dorm room at Harvard University, like today but eight years later.

Thus, here’s a boring Facebook history timeline chart to look at:

Okay, that was really dull.

What up? The board met, the spinmeisters are at the ready and, most of all, Silicon Valley is stoked to make some more arrogant badillionaires.

Now, hopefully, we’ll get the real news about Facebook.

Namely, who’s getting the big dough in this much-anticipated Web 2.0 gambit? Co-founder and CEO and Hoodie Commander Mark Zuckerberg fer sure, but who else?

Plus all the juicy financials from Facebook, along with stats in usage, growth and just how much the company sticks it to its gaming serf — oops, partner — Zynga and others for the privilege of being on its all-powerful platform.

Me? I pay nada, like other Facebook users, for being able to show off pictures of my vacations and decline friendships from PR people I like, but still … well, you know.

Here is another Facebook financial chart that will not knock your socks off unless you are an accountant:

I am now so comatose waiting for the show to begin that I briefly began a liveblog of my activities this morning.

It went like this:

4:45 am PT: Done with AOL Q4 earnings, which were meh, but better meh than expected. AOL, if you recall, used to be Facebook and now is, um, not.

Note to Zuckerberg: Be nice to people on your way up, since you’ll meet them again on the way down.

4:46 am PT: I check the SEC site and get zip. Click, click, clickety-click over to find out the latest on Demi Moore and her fake-pot debacle.

Who knew there was synthetic cannabis and it is called K2 or Spice? Not me! According to Wikipedia: “It seems likely that synthetic cannabis can precipitate psychosis and in some cases it is prolonged.”

I decide to blame Ashton Kutcher and then wonder if he is an investor in Facebook via BFF-to-errant-celebrities-who-like-tech Ron Conway, also a Facebook investor.

Note to self: Call Ashton! That dude plays village idiots all the time, but I am not fooled by Mr. Pretty Face.

4:47 am PT: I consider email bombing Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, who is probably not so busy right now, and asking him what he thinks about the Demi Moore crisis and also Facebook’s IPO.

Remember when Yahoo was king of Silicon Valley and Yang posed in that purple VW on the cover of that magazine? Better still, remember when Yahoo was going to buy Facebook for just over $1 billion and then borked it?

Just sayin’, Mark — so, keep it reals!

4:48 am PT: I consider going out for doughnuts — and not because of any real weed need. I just would like me some glazed and sprinkled sugar treats right about now. Then, I could post the pictures of them on my Facebook page.

Sweet.

But you-know-who would file right when I left the house on the munchie run. Click, click, clickety-click over to the SEC site and I come up peanuts.

Time to check in on the Kardashians.

You get the idea — so, Facebook IPO, take me away!

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AOL said it earned 23 cents a share for the fourth quarter on revenue of $576.8 million, compared to 60 cents per share on $596 million in the same quarter a year ago.

Wall Street analysts had expected the New York-based Internet company to earn 16 to 17 cents on revenue of $572 million.

While the results are still down significantly from a year ago, AOL’s stock has been rising — gaining more than 25 percent in the quarter — since CEO Tim Armstrong has improved advertising revenue.

That was up 10 percent in the quarter, the third consecutive quarterly increase.

Subscription revenue from its access business continued to fall — down 18 percent — although that was the lowest rate of decline in five years.

AOL also noted that it had encouraging improvements in certain areas of its business:

Video: AOL grew its videos, video views, video ad impressions and revenue at double-digit rates.

Brand Advertising: Project Devil advertisers, impressions and revenue grew at double-digit rates.

Local: Patch grew traffic, advertisers and ad impressions more than 100% year over year.

Traffic: Consumer usage was flat to Q3 2011, as growth in the Huffington Post Media Group sites offset declines at MapQuest and AIM.

But read for yourself — here are all kinds of charts and graphs from AOL:

AOL_Q4_2011_Earnings Release

AOL_Q4_2011_Earnings_Presentation

AOL_Q4_2011_Trending_Schedules

In an unusual gift, Helen Gurley Brown has given Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University’s School of Engineering $30 million to create a bi-coastal Institute of Media Innovation.

Said the schools in a joint press release about the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, “it is designed to encourage and support new endeavors with the potential to inform and entertain in transformative ways. It will recognize the increasingly important connection between journalism and technology, bringing the best from the East and West Coasts.”

Each university will get $12 million, with the additional $6 million to build a “state-of-the-art, high-tech newsroom” at Columbia’s famous J-School in upper Manhattan in New York.

(Full disclosure: I went to graduate school there, but we used typewriters way back then.)

Among the advisors to the project is well-known Silicon Valley exec Bill Campbell.

The move will be interesting as a collaborative venture between the East and West coasts, although it is unclear what it might yield.

Interestingly, last week, Harvard University announced an on-campus venture fund with New Enterprise Associates to better compete with the enticements of California.

Great content needs useable technology. Sharing a language is where the magic happens,” said Gurley Brown in a statement. “It’s time for two great American institutions on the East and West Coasts to build a bridge.”

Here’s the official press release on the Brown gift:

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL AND STANFORD SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING ANNOUNCE JOINT $30 MILLION GIFT FROM DAVID AND HELEN GURLEY BROWN

Gift Establishes First of Its Kind Bi-Coastal Institute for Media Innovation — Bringing Together the Best in West Coast Technology with East Coast Content

NEW YORK and PALO ALTO, Calif., January 30, 2012, 1:00 p.m. ET – Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University’s School of Engineering today announced a $30 million gift from longtime Cosmopolitan magazine editor and author Helen Gurley Brown to establish the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

The Institute and the collaboration between the two schools is groundbreaking in that it is designed to encourage and support new endeavors with the potential to inform and entertain in transformative ways. It will recognize the increasingly important connection between journalism and technology, bringing the best from the East and West Coasts.

The Institute, the first of its kind, is inspired by the memory of Ms. Brown’s late husband, David Brown, a graduate of both Stanford University and the Columbia School of Journalism. Brown, who along with partners Richard Zanuck and Steven Spielberg created such classic American films as Driving Miss Daisy, The Verdict and Jaws, was also a former journalist, publisher and, late in his career, a stage producer whose credits included the musicals Sweet Smell of Success and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Of the total gift, each school will receive $12 million for Institute activities. The gift to Columbia’s Journalism School, the largest in its history, will endow a professorship whose holder will be the Institute’s East Coast director. The gift to Stanford’s Engineering School will similarly endow the position of the West Coast director. An additional $6 million will go to Columbia which will also pay for the construction of a highly visible signature space at the eastern end of the J-School’s landmark building, featuring a state-of-the-art high-tech newsroom.

The funding of the Institute will support graduate and postgraduate fellowships, both at Stanford and Columbia, and competitively awarded “Magic Grants,” intended to seed the most innovative and promising ideas for future development conceived of by Brown Fellows.

Commenting on the announcement, Helen Gurley Brown said, “David and I have long supported and encouraged bright young people to follow their passions and to create original content. Great content needs useable technology. Sharing a language is where the magic happens. It’s time for two great American institutions on the East and West Coasts to build a bridge.”

The east-west collaboration of the two schools will enable students at both institutions to build upon their ideas with professors and innovators at both universities. At both locations there will be a strong emphasis on executing new ideas and demonstrating products and prototypes. The
Institute will establish ongoing links to business leaders and media companies to bring its innovations to market.

“New York City, as the major center for the television, music, print media and advertising, is profoundly affected by rapidly evolving digital technology,” said Stanford engineering professor Bernd Girod, who will serve as the Institute’s founding director until Columbia appoints his East Coast counterpart. “The Brown Institute will bring together creative innovators skilled in production and delivery of news and entertainment with the entrepreneurial researchers at Stanford working in multimedia technology.”

“This gift from David and Helen Gurley Brown is truly transformative for the school,” said Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. “As we enter our Centennial year, the Browns’ generosity will enable us to explore new and exciting realms of leadership in our field. We are thrilled to have this opportunity to collaborate with Stanford Engineering.”

“Stanford brings to this partnership its exceptional research and teaching, a history of transformative technology innovation and a tradition of multidisciplinary collaboration,” said Stanford University President John Hennessy. “We are excited about the opportunity to partner with Columbia University’s truly outstanding School of Journalism, and look forward to combining the expertise of New York and Silicon Valley at a critical point in the evolution of media.”

Stanford Engineering has a storied history of achievement and entrepreneurship. Its faculty and graduates have founded such iconic companies as Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems and Yahoo! and contributed to such groundbreaking technologies as lasers, global positioning, magnetic resonance imaging, digital sound synthesis and modern web-search algorithms.

“Under Dean Nick Lemann, Columbia Journalism School is building on its tradition of leadership by developing innovative teaching and research addressing the future of a fast-changing news media,” said Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar who has written extensively about press freedom. “We are deeply appreciative of Helen Gurley Brown’s vision in honoring her late husband by bringing together his two alma maters to develop the next generation of digital journalism. We look forward to working with Stanford in seeking new ways for technology and creativity to enhance a robust free press in our society.”

The Institute will have a distinguished board of advisors including leaders from technology, venture capital and media including, among others, Frank A. Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation; Bill Campbell, Chairman of the Board at Intuit and an Apple Inc. board member; and Eve Burton, Vice President and General Counsel of Hearst Corporation.

Helen Gurley Brown, who turns 90 in February, is one of the world’s most popular and influential editors. She led Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 to 1996 and authored many books, including the 1962 bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl. Her impact on popular culture and society has reached around the globe, largely due to the three-plus decades when she put her personal stamp on Cosmopolitan in a way that has rarely been replicated. Under her reign, Cosmopolitan became the go-to magazine for women worldwide and remains the best selling young women’s magazine around the world today with 64 editions, in 35 languages and more than 80 countries.

“As both CEO of Hearst Corporation and advisor to the Brown Institute, today marks a very special day for education, journalism and technology,” said Bennack. “I’m very proud of David’s legacy and Helen, who understood the power of community, in particular, and its importance to women, long before social media had a name.”

(Photo credit: Hearst Corp.)

In 2007, after its CEO, Antonio Perez, appeared on stage at the fourth D: All Things Digital conference, I was invited to visit the HQ of Kodak in Rochester, N.Y., to see up close the transition to a digital imaging company he was attempting.

At the time, I wrote:

“That shift has obviously been painful, including huge cuts in its employee base, due to the sharp decline of its market might. Since 2004, Kodak has cut its employee head count from about 64,000 to 30,600 as it has undergone a massive restructuring.”

Yesterday, Kodak gave up that effort and filed for Chapter 11 reorganization. Where it will go from here is anybody’s guess.

While the iconic company has tried to leverage its patent portfolio, suing Apple, HTC and Samsung, it needs more than just that as it seeks to remake its ailing business.

Here are the two videos I did with its execs of the ideas back then that obviously did not work out, as well as one of the classic “The Times of Your Life” commercials (I dare you not to tear up watching it, a potent memory of the emotional power Kodak once had over consumers):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120119/the-times-of-its-troubled-life-a-2007-visit-to-kodak-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120109/come-west-daniel-loeb-a-silicon-valley-visit-as-as-yahoos-activist-shareholder-mulls-proxy-fight/ http://allthingsd.com/20120109/come-west-daniel-loeb-a-silicon-valley-visit-as-as-yahoos-activist-shareholder-mulls-proxy-fight/#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:21:36 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=160849

When you own a large chunk of a major Silicon Valley Internet company, it’s probably not a surprise that you want to come to the center of the tech world to have a look around.

But Yahoo — of which Third Point’s Daniel Loeb owns over five percent — is unlikely to get a visit from the activist shareholder, who is in California this week.

Several sources said he has contacted many former Yahoos and other tech execs for meetings in the Internet heartland to chitchat about digital issues.

And, of course, search for possible board members for an alternate slate of directors, in case he decides to wage a proxy fight against Yahoo.

The earliest nominations for directors can be submitted is February 24 for those “shareholder proposals not intended for inclusion in proxy materials and for nomination of director candidates,” according to Yahoo’s corporate bylaws on such matters.

Loeb then has a month after that to submit a competing slate. In addition, many of Yahoo’s major investors are mulling backing Loeb if he initiates a battle for control of the company.

But it’s not a definite move as yet. The New York-based investor has not decided whether he will take on a proxy fight, sources said, given he has yet to assess Yahoo’s new CEO, former eBay exec Scott Thompson.

Thompson was president of the online commerce site’s PayPal payments division.

But while there is a formal process, you will hear a lot of noise coming long before that, unless Yahoo gives Loeb board seats to quiet him down — which is unlikely but possible.

Such an ugly fight is not one Yahoo can afford to have, and it has already shown some cloddish sensibilities in its response to a recent letters by Loeb asking for the ouster of its Chairman Roy Bostock and co-founder and director Jerry Yang.

But given how badly the last Yahoo shareholder tussle with Carl Icahn went, another proxy battle could be deadly, and might drag on through the first half of 2012. In his Yahoo tussle, Icahn ultimately got three seats on the Yahoo board, but eventually went away with everyone the poorer.

And no one wants a replay of that.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120109/come-west-daniel-loeb-a-silicon-valley-visit-as-as-yahoos-activist-shareholder-mulls-proxy-fight/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120104/viral-video-secret-code-about-apples-new-york-media-event/ http://allthingsd.com/20120104/viral-video-secret-code-about-apples-new-york-media-event/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:14:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=159496

Yesterday, on WSJ.com’s “Digits” online tech show, host Simon Constable asked me if some parts of my scoop on Apple holding a media-focused event in New York at the end of this month were secretly implying anything.

Simon apparently read “The Da Vinci Code” one too many times! I don’t know from clandestine signals, but here I am talking about the event, along with AllThingsD.com media ace Peter Kafka.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120104/viral-video-secret-code-about-apples-new-york-media-event/feed/ 0