Forbes magazine put out its much-watched Midas List today, which is kind of the Oscars for venture capitalists in tech. (Caveat: Think more khakis and dudes than glitz and glamour.)

On the Top 10 list of 100 of the best-performing and most influential tech investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz led the list at No. 1 and No. 2, as they did last year. And several others in last year’s list remained on it: Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners’ Reid Hoffman, and also David Sze, Peter Thiel and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine.

Accel scored well on the rest of the list with nine partners named; Sequoia Capital had six VCs on the list; Benchmark, Greylock and New Enterprise Associates got five slots; Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins and Meritech Capital Partners had four; and Andreessen Horowitz, Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock each had three.

As usual, there were few women on the list — only three — reflecting the lack of gender equality in the top tier of the VC business, which solidly remains a boy’s club, despite a lot of noise about changing it (see the pictures here and become depressed once again). Those women who did manage to get on the Midas List were Jenny Lee at GGV Capital, who jumped from No. 94 to No. 36; Kleiner Perkins’s Mary Meeker, who dropped from No. 42 to No. 47; and Theresia Gouw of Accel at No. 82, up from No. 92.

One notable part of the massive Forbes package of VCs on parade was the intense and multipart focus on the travails of Kleiner Perkins and its longtime leader and legendary VC John Doerr. Doerr clocks in at No. 26 on the list, dropping from No. 12 last year, a significant fall.

He does address the nagging issues at the storied firm, including ill-conceived investments in clean tech, a late-to-the-game move into social media, and even its big stake in stock-declining online gaming giant Zynga, in a video (below) and in several pieces, one of which is titled ““John Doerr’s Plan To Reclaim the Venture Capital Throne.”

More like “Game of Thrones” from reading it; there is another, more critical article in the New York Times that appeared yesterday. That piece focused on Kleiner’s investment in the troubled green-car startup, Fisker Automotive, and also the firm’s ongoing sex-discrimination lawsuit with former partner Ellen Pao.

“It was a challenging year, one of my more challenging years in the venture business,” said Doerr to Forbes.

Indeed, although Forbes does hand Kleiner a hey-we-have-some-sharpie-young-folks-here-too! gimme with its focus on “new generation” partners Megan Quinn and Mike Abbott in an interesting Q&A, as well as yet another piece on Kleiner supporters — such as Google’s Eric Schmidt — touting the firm as perhaps down but definitely not out in the “mojo” department.

“John always wins eventually, and the reason he always wins eventually is because he has the processing power and human energy,” Schmidt told Forbes. “Whatever the set of challenges, he will drive the change in the firm. They’ll have a crisis meeting and another crisis meeting, but he will do it. It may be messy but he will get them there.”

Presumably, if Doerr and team can get some mileage out of its Twitter investment next year and somehow turn around Zynga’s moribund stock. (Kleiner has held on to a pile of it, which is why Doerr recently joined the board that already had Kleiner’s Bing Gordon on it.)

On problem for Kleiner, and boon to others like Accel and Greylock, was that the firm was not early in Facebook, whose IPO — as rocky as it was — gave many VCs making the top of the Midas List the needed turbocharge in terms of performance. Other key companies to help VCs look good this year, according to the Forbes report: Workday, LinkedIn and Skype.

Here’s Doerr, who is indeed a legend, even if more bruised and battered this year, talking about it all to Forbes’s Connie Guglielmo, in the video interview:

Speaking of media attention, here’s a more provocative video interview by Forbes with Sequoia’s Doug Leone (No. 4, up from No. 18 last year), in which he takes aim at VC firms that do too much self-promotion — three guesses which pioneering browser inventor he is referring to here, and the first two don’t count. He called it an “embarrassment,” although Sequoia did hire an excellent PR person from Google this year — nonetheless making the point that the focus should be on entrepreneurs and not investors.

Except, of course, when it comes to scoring high on the Midas List.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently met with top execs at Hulu, the premium video service whose big media company owners have been considering selling it for some months.

Sources said Yahoo is “in the process,” although the Silicon Valley Internet giant has not made any kind of formal bid. Other players whom sources said are considering purchasing all or parts of Hulu include: Former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, who now has a successful and well-funded multimedia and investment company called the Chernin Group; Guggenheim Partners digital arm, which is led by former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn; and Amazon.

Sources said Mayer also had an extensive getting-to-know-you meeting, which was apparently not held at Hulu’s offices in Santa Monica, Calif., along with COO Henrique De Castro. The discussion is taking place in the wake of Yahoo’s failed bid — largely engineered by De Castro — to purchase a majority stake in France Télécom’s Dailymotion video service, after a top French government official said Yahoo could not own 75 percent of the company.

Had the deal — which was reportedly valued at $300 million — gone through, it would have been the most significant by Mayer since she took over at the company last July. Thus far, she has limited her purchases to small mobile startup.

While the meetings with Hulu are only preliminary, Yahoo has been to this video rodeo before, having seriously considering buying Hulu when it was previously being shopped by its owners, News Corp., Disney and Comcast. (News Corp. also owns this site.)

Of course, if Yahoo’s interest becomes more serious, Mayer will have to make important visits to top execs at those media giants, since they control the rights to critical content, and thus Hulu’s value.

As Peter Kafka noted in a previous post about Hulu’s possible sale, “much hinges on the licensing rights News Corp., Disney and Comcast would provide for the money-losing site, as well as what happens to the $300 million debt its owners have taken on in the last year.”

Without those rights, Hulu by itself is a very pretty Web site and video platform, but not worth the billions it would be with very long-term television rights, content that attracts users. Currently, sources said its media owners are offering two to three years of rights, with a lot of flexibility over removing content from the site, which is not quite as attractive a deal (to say the least).

But video is a key component of Yahoo’s strategy going forward. Along with mobile efforts, Mayer has explicitly told investors that video was a key to company under her tenure.

Coincidentally, today in an onstage interview at a Wired conference in New York, Mayer broadly addressed the video issue when asked a question about the topic, noting it was important across all of Yahoo’s properties.

“I think video is really important … video is something that we’re all innately designed and born to experience, everyone is born being able to watch and to hear,” she said. “Video is just this amazing format.”

Mayer would know that well, having been at Google when the search giant bought YouTube, ironically snatching it at the last minute from a competing bid by Yahoo, which was then led by Terry Semel. Since then, YouTube has become the most important and powerful player in the space by far.

Yahoo, despite being one of the largest video players on the Web, has mostly been a lackluster competitor in the arena, pinging over the years from creating original content to doing branded deals with media companies, but never establishing a major beachhead with consumers as Hulu did from scratch.

Short of a full acquisition, there may be a way for Yahoo to partner and invest in Hulu, instead of buying it outright that works for all sides — owners get a new owner to foot part of the bill and also increase distribution, and Yahoo can claim that it’s providing users with exponentially more content that would help Yahoo’s long-declining engagement problem.

Sources said News Corp. and Disney have mulled scenarios where one or both companies hang on to the site, while Comcast has no control over Hulu’s fate, having given up its management rights to the site as a concession to federal regulators.

But the strength of the Hulu brand is clear and it has had some success in building a more significant business. While a lot of its video offerings are free, about four million people are paying for a Hulu Plus subscription.

Still, Hulu’s strength might be lagging, especially given after talented founding leader Jason Kilar recently left. Last year, Hulu was a top 10 video site, according to comScore. No longer — in a report in March, it had dropped out of the top 10.

While this likely has more to do with methodology than real decline in Hulu ratings, it does show that while it’s the biggest thing Yahoo could buy or invest in, Yahoo itself has plenty of video views, many more than Hulu.

The question for Mayer then is how much of Yahoo’s multi-billon-dollar cash kitty she wants to bet on a big video play. She might also be considering buying several smaller ones, said sources, with Yahoo having also looked at some smaller video sites, including Blip and Grab Media.

A spokeswoman for Hulu declined to comment and Yahoo PR has not responded to a query for comment (if ever).

According to sources close to the situation, well-known tech exec Jon Rubinstein will be joining the board of Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chipmaker that has gotten a big boost of late for its role in the explosion of mobile devices.

Rubinstein is an interesting and logical choice for Qualcomm, having been a high-profile player for a long time in the mobile space, beginning with his work on the iPod while at Apple. After he left his last job at Hewlett-Packard last year, though, he has been very low-key.

(Update: Qualcomm confirmed the appointment in a press release.)

For Qualcomm, the selection of Rubinstein to join the board is something to watch, as he is the second exec from Silicon Valley to be tapped by the company recently. In March, Qualcomm hired tech investor Laurie Yoler as SVP of business development, making her “responsible for augmenting existing business relationships in Silicon Valley, as well as developing new strategic business opportunities for Qualcomm in the region.”

Rubinstein has even more experience here and is also familiar with a range of mobile efforts over the years, some of which were successful and others not so much, from his work at Apple, Palm and then HP. He is also a board member of Amazon.

Aside from CEO and Chairman Paul Jacobs, Rubinstein — who has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science — will be the most technically experienced director on the 11-person board.

Qualcomm declined to comment.

Here’s a nice primer on Rubinstein by Arik Hesseldahl, in a report on his leaving HP early last year:

Best known for his work on Apple’s iconic iPod music player, Rubinstein left Apple in 2006 and joined Roger McNamee as a partner in the private equity firm Elevation Partners, following its 2007 investments in Palm.

In 2009 he replaced longtime Palm executive Ed Colligan as its CEO, and oversaw a dramatic restructuring of the company’s products, including a significant rebuild of its smartphone operating system. Gone was the legacy PalmOS that had been used in so many popular devices like the Treo that for a time competed seriously against Research In Motion’s BlackBerry.

PalmOS was replaced by WebOS, which first appeared on the Pre smartphone, then later on the Pixi and Veer devices. After HP acquired Palm, WebOS was also used on the abandoned TouchPad tablet, and is now an open-source operating system overseen by HP.

Rubinstein’s departure is no big surprise. Sources said he hadn’t been seen at HP’s offices following the decision by former CEO Léo Apotheker to get out of the business of making WebOS-based hardware. His future plans have been the subject of speculation for some time.

After HP decided to exit the WebOS hardware business, Rubinstein was assigned to a vaguely described “product innovation role” within HP’s Personal Systems Group during a management shakeup last July. It was an unusual move and one made with little explanation at the time. But sources say it was a preface to Rubinstein’s departure, one intended to lessen its PR impact when he finally left. “That ‘innovation’ gig he was given in July was his first step toward the exit,” said one source, a former Palm exec with close ties to Rubinstein.

Not the core service (tweets continue to fly as fast as ever). It’s about giving a simple, straightforward explanation of exactly what Twitter is to the masses of people who just don’t get it. An unenviable challenge, if you ask me — for such a simple product, understanding Twitter can be rather complex.

Luckily, I don’t have that job. It now belongs to Gabriel Stricker, Twitter’s current VP of communications, who will head up the company’s consumer marketing efforts from now on. That’s according to a recent change in his Twitter profile, which now lists him as VP of marketing and communications.

Stricker comes from both a PR and a marketing background: He headed search comms at Google for more than five years; in 2003, he wrote a book on marketing strategy, and he has a history in political campaigning.

Historically, Twitter hasn’t had a solid, unified consumer marketing team or a person to lead it for years. Pam Kramer did a short stint as VP of marketing back in 2011, but it didn’t work out so well; Kramer was shown the door after only three months.

Gabriel Stricker

Since then, and even before, Twitter’s consumer marketing efforts have been splintered across the company. And instead of focusing efforts on basic user education of what Twitter is, resources would often be divvied up among departments on a first-come, first-served basis.

Stricker will fold a number of design team employees into his newly christened MarComms department, while the rest of the team will remain focused on designing and building actual products (rather than occasionally being peeled off to work on a promotional launch, for instance). It’ll also likely involve hiring new people (or contractors), which Twitter is actively doing at the moment.

Sales marketing remains a separate division under the control of Tom Thai, who came in from Twitter’s acquisition of Bluefin Labs earlier in the year, and who took the reins from Shane Steele.

Twitter declined to comment on the changes.

A trio of high-profile tech communications execs from Twitter (Sean Garrett), Facebook (Brandee Barker), and Skype (Brian O’Shaughnessy), have joined forces to create a new firm called the Pramana Collective.

While PR types don’t usually get a lot of the attention, the joining of these three top Silicon Valley players is enough of a news event to warrant some mention.

(If only to try to figure out a good joke to make about its name, which sounds like a line of skin care products at a spa you can’t afford. I do like to amuse myself.)

Actually, according to a blog post from Garrett, which is below, Pramana is “the means by which one obtains accurate knowledge or true perception.”

(Namaste, and let’s hope that means Barker will finally give me a real comment when I shove my video camera in her face — inside joke alert!)

In all seriousness, communications is a critical part of the digital ecosystem, and this is a strong group. Barker, who was Facebook’s first PR head, has been doing a lot of consulting work since she left there; she was a key part of the team involved in the launch of “Lean In,” the unavoidable book by the social networking site’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg. O’Shaughnessy has just left the owner-changing Skype, and before that, he worked in key PR roles at Google. Lastly, longtime communications exec Garrett led the PR team at Twitter through some of its bumpiest years.

Here’s Garrett’s full blog post, which will give you enlightenment on the whole thing:

Finding Pramana

Brandee Barker has the calming wisdom of someone who learned a lifetime of lessons in her four years at Facebook. She started the company’s communications team and was its leader during Facebook’s most formative, fast-moving years. Brandee recognized that when you are moving at mind-bending speeds, you have to make 100 decisions a day and, within those, a few mistakes will be made. Brandee recognized and learned from both these mistakes and the many more successes gained by her and her team. She was my inspiration during my own journey of mistake/success reflection after my similar ride at Twitter.

Brian O’Shaughnessy makes things look easy. Yet, once you get past his self-deprecating jokes and his insistence on shining the light on others, you realize that you came away from a conversation with him twice as smart as when you started. And, one of most complex communications job in the last four years was running Skype’s. During that time, the company was owned by eBay, was spun out to a private equity consortium and then was sold to Microsoft. Off the 30 original eBay/Skype management team when Brian started in 2008. He left in February as the last remaining one. This wasn’t easy. It reflects on Brian’s innate ability to bring disparate people and perspectives together to forge successful strategies through leadership defined by bullshit-free objectivity and a mastery of technical knowledge.

Brandee and Brian share an unwavering sense of loyalty, strength of character and a desire to apply their learnings to something meaningful.

I feel the same way. And I’m pleased to join these two people that I have so much respect for as partners and co-founders of The Pramana Collective.

Since The Pramana Collective comes from the same place as the philosophies that I’ve clearly, if infrequently, written about here, I won’t dive into our feelings about the state of communications and the great changes that all corners of marketing are facing as lines between disciplines blur. But, practically, this change will have us focused on client needs and not definitions of marketing terminology or dated dividing lines. For example, whatever ‘PR’ was and currently may be to some is not relevant to us now — nor was it when we ran teams at Facebook, Skype and Twitter.

The Pramana Collective is a project-focused communications consultancy. This means that we will work with an organization to help meet a specific opportunity or solve a particular issue for a finite period of time. Among the offering mix will be branding, messaging, campaign development, and road mapping communications functions. This is the type of work that Brandee and I have both enjoyed doing as consultants since Facebook and Twitter.

What we won’t do is stick around to be an agency of record that provides ongoing support. We will provide objective recommendations on next steps and, as needed, suggest and help attain ongoing solutions of all stripes (in-house hires, consultants, agencies) to see through strategies. We look forward to partnering with our network of industry colleagues to find solutions for our clients long term interests.

Despite each of us having 20-plus years of experiences, multiple stints running comms teams for high-profile companies where we had amazing internal and external teams; we all would have benefited in the past from having access to a partner peer set that provided actionable intelligence, straightforward advice and a pure project solution mindset like The Pramana Collective’s offering.

When you are moving at a blindingly fast pace while trying to grow a team that’s never quite big enough, it can be a constant battle to stay ahead of being reactive to both external and internal forces and create space to form proactive campaigns around important initiatives and big moments — be they known well in advance or appear suddenly. We look forward to working with all sizes and types of organizations that share our interest in substantive, transparent and integrated communications.

This brings us to our name — The Pramana Collective. For you logophiles the full definition of Pramana is here, but, in short, it’s the means by which one obtains accurate knowledge or true perception. We believe that an organization’s sometimes hidden or obscured truths are the most powerful messages to drive a conversation. And, the “collective” will be our employees, clients and partners who both feel and act the same way.

Our first priority is hiring like-minded people from both the traditional comms world and other marketing disciplines who command the respect of entrepreneurs and executives. Indeed, getting the word broadly out to top talent who may be mapping out next moves is our primary motivation to talking about our consultancy’s formation now. If you are interested or merely curious, find me at sean at pramanacollective dot com.

And know that we believe that the best people need to have dynamic careers. As our projects will be diverse in scope, so will be the professional paths of individuals on our team. We may be a long-term opportunity for some and, for others, we might be an opportunity to attain broad perspective in between in-house jobs. Indeed, we plan to borrow the entrepreneur in residence (EIR) model that venture capital firms use.

We’ve got a lot of work to do. Having a basic web site would be nice. Regardless, whether it’s teaming on the small stuff or the profound, getting to work with Brandee and Brian already has made this journey one worth taking.

(Photo of Garrett, Barker and O’Shaughnessy courtesy of Steve Maller)

Brunswick Group’s Michael Buckley, who has been working with Facebook on a range of corporate and other PR issues over the last several years, will be joining the social networking giant as VP of business communications.

Buckley is essentially taking the job held by well-known Washington, D.C., player Joe Lockhart, who left the company last fall.

In his new job, Facebook said that Buckley would be in charge of the company’s international, monetization, corporate, consumer and policy communications.

Buckley has been with the global strategy and communications consultancy Brunswick Group, one of Facebook’s outside agencies, for a decade, most recently as a U.S. managing partner, where he represented a number of clients at once. In tech, that has included Groupon’s Andrew Mason, as well as Mike Lynch of Autonomy, which is battling Hewlett-Packard right now.

At Facebook, he will report to Elliot Schrage, who is VP of communications and public policy, where Buckley will be one of three top execs in that organization. The others are VP of tech communications Caryn Marooney, and Marne Levine, VP of global policy.

This week in Las Vegas, the new management team running Yahoo — including CEO Marissa Mayer — is at International CES to schmooze with big advertisers and convince them that Yahoo is the place to put large chunks of their marketing budgets.

One of the longtime selling points of the company is the sheer size of its audience, especially for the key money-making parts of the site — the homepage, Yahoo Mail and search.

But private stats from comScore show that those three areas have continued their longtime decline over the last year, in some cases dropping significantly. In November and December, for example, compared to the same two months a year ago, U.S. search was down 28 percent and 24 percent respectively, while mail was down 16 percent and 12 percent.

This matters a great deal, since the troika of homepage, mail and search have been the critical driver of the Yahoo value ecosystem for advertisers.

The impact of those drops is felt all over Yahoo, whose music, movie, games and travel site have also seen massive drop-offs in traffic year over year in those same months.

Stopping the decline is critical for Yahoo, since Mayer herself has underscored the need for size in her pushing for new businesses at Yahoo that are 100 million users in size and/or have revenue prospects of at least $100 million.

While this is a lofty vision, the reality of traffic falloffs on key properties is a vexing issue, especially since they remain its main source of revenue and also an important element in launching future products Mayer is promising will turbocharge the company.

It’s not that Yahoo is not huge, especially compared to most sites on the Web.

As one of the top Internet brands, according to a recent Nielsen report, the average number of total monthly unique visitors for the longtime Silicon Valley Internet company in 2012 was 141.6 million, No. 3 behind Google and Facebook in the U.S. market. Similar rankings were reported by comScore, which placed Yahoo at the No. 2 spot after Google, with 171.4 million monthly visitors in November.

But, for many years, traffic to those important consumer destinations of Yahoo has been on a clear and unstopping decline, statistics (usually from comScore) that the company nonetheless always dutifully puts in its earnings slides — see below — for investors to get some idea of the major and vexing issues facing the company.

That was suddenly ended in the last quarter with the engagement slide removed from Yahoo’s public deck entirely. Not all companies include such stats, so when I inquired as to why the company had made the change, Yahoo PR never returned my phone call.

But it’s not hard to guess the reason for the shift — the numbers were not good and they called more attention to Yahoo’s glaring challenge, which is getting users reengaged with its products by creating what Mayer has dubbed several times “delightful” experiences.

According to numerous sources, that has also been the case within the company too, with the new regime restricting an internal transparency initiative pushed by former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving that shared product performance numbers with the top 100 leaders at Yahoo.

And while it’s an interesting strategic choice, several sources inside the company this week urged me to get ahold of increasingly worrisome numbers from comScore — available to its private clients — comparing November 2011 to November 2012 and also December 2011 to December 2012 at home and work in the U.S.

So I did, getting the same stats from numerous sources — numbers that a spokesman for comScore confirmed were correct.

And, as promised, they are worrisome indeed.

In November 2012, compared to November 2011, the monthly unique visitors to the homepage declined 17 percent to 91.8 million from 110.9 million; Yahoo Mail dropped 16 percent (from 92 million to 77.7 million); and Yahoo search dropped 28 percent (from 93.3 million to 66.9 million).

Also off significantly for all three areas, often by one-third, were a plethora of other stats: Percentage of reach, total minutes, total page views, total visits and more.

One of the only bright spots for Yahoo was the relatively small Flickr sites, which were up 37 percent — 26.7 million versus 19.4 million — in unique monthly visitors year over year. The photo-sharing site — which has been getting a much-needed refresh — was also up in all other stats.

But Flickr — which Mayer (pictured here) has laudably touted and supported after years of inexplicable neglect — is not a money-maker for Yahoo, even if its return does burnish the company’s tech and innovation cred.

In December 2011 to December 2012, the homepage was more stable, gaining four percent in monthly uniques from 109.4 million to 114.2 million, but with other key stats both rising and falling. Total visits were up 14 percent, for example, while average minutes per visit was down 13.6 percent.

But the trouble for mail or search continued, off 12 percent (89.9 million to 78.7 million) and 24 percent (88.7 million to 67.4 million) respectively in monthly uniques, with similarly major declines in all other stats.

Mail recently got a refresh too under Mayer, despite some recent security glitches, so new stats will show if that will help stem the declines. Search is another story all together, with Yahoo in what can only be described as a dysfunctional partnership with Microsoft that numerous sources tell me Mayer is seeking to end.

The homepage, too, is undergoing a redo, with a design that has a decidedly more mobile and social feel, and pushing an ethos of Yahoo becoming a hub for content discovery. It is hoped the new look will boost traffic relatively quickly from its current downward trajectory.

To be fair, there can be lots and lots of reasons for these declines, although most of Yahoo’s competitors are, at worse, seeing a flattening of growth and not outright declines.

And sometimes Internet sites complain that services like comScore undercount, although Yahoo had previously used the firm in its public documents. More to the point, as multiple sources within the company note, the stats are directionally correct in that they closely track with internal Yahoo numbers.

Which is to say, traffic is going down rather than growing. That is clearly why Mayer has loudly stressed mobile since arriving at Yahoo, an area not included in these numbers that many sources said has strong growth to about 70 million monthly unique visitors via its apps and mobile-enabled Web offerings.

But unlike the homepage, mail and search — which push and pull traffic all over Yahoo and are responsible for most of its current monetization — mobile also makes very little money now. And Yahoo — unlike Facebook, which recently did — does not break out mobile results.

So, it will be interesting to see if the company does so when it reports fourth-quarter earnings on January 28 and also if it says anything about continued traffic declines of its traditional Web business in the period and the impact on revenue.

Still, there are lots of ways to counter declining or flat revenues, even with declining traffic — via cost cuts, efficiencies, charging more and selling assets (as Yahoo did in the last quarter). And Yahoo has ably managed to keep its operating margins growing over the years, despite both the declines in traffic and moribund growth in its revenue.

But the real and only fix is the drastic fix to existing tentpoles Yahoo has and the creation or acquisition of products that excite consumers and, therefore, advertisers.

It’s not an easy thing, of course, as well-known venture capitalist Ben Horowitz recently wrote in his blog about the need to focus on products over building and improving culture — one of Mayer’s other big initiatives at Yahoo.

Wrote Horowitz in what I consider one of the clearest articulations of what it takes to win for startups, as well as big companies like Yahoo:

“The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something 10X better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out. Therefore, you must take the market before somebody else does.”

If you want to take a gander, here are some more of those old Yahoo quarterly engagement slides, which were recently eliminated from its presentations:

(Note: I reached out to Yahoo’s outside PR firm — since they do respond to queries — and also some company execs to get a comment on this story, but so far there has been none.)

It’s hard to say how serious this is right now, but Yahoo was ordered to pay $2.7 billion in a lawsuit related to a breach of contract and lost profits of a yellow pages listing service by Worldwide Directories and Ideas Interactivas.

In a statement and a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Silicon Valley Internet giant said it “believes the plaintiffs’ claims are without merit and will vigorously pursue all appeals.”

We lobbed a call into Yahoo to get more details about the “non-final” judgment from the 49th Civil Court of the Federal District of Mexico City — not that the company’s PR will actually call back on important multi-billion matters — but here is the company’s SEC filing:

SEC-YHOO-1193125-12-487828

Tonight, new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer gave her first public interview since becoming the leader of the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Not to cranky me, of course, but to the much more amenable Fortune magazine writer and editor Pattie Sellers, who hosted the former Google exec at a dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., as part of the magazine’s Most Powerful Women franchise.

Fortune recently put a glamour shot of Mayer on the cover, and Sellers also did a profile. Now, Mayer was ready to sit down to talk about Yahoo and more.

(I wish I could have reported from the event, and almost did. I had initially been invited to the dinner at the Garden Court Hotel for about 100 guests, mostly women. But I was then waitlisted, and then told by Sellers directly that I could not attend, as the editors had decided to close out outside media and only have Fortune staffers covering it.)

Whatever! I have my ways to liveblog it and do it faster than any magazine writer can — and none involve disguising myself as a cater-waiter or solely using the Twitter feed from Fortune. As if!

Here goes:

7:50 pm: After some lovely cocktails, the audience sits down at about 10 tables of nine people and starts in on the salad course.

Soon enough, the night starts off with a speech by a McKinsey partner (and presumable sponsor of the dinner), delivering some stats as part of a study of some sort about how businesses are using — or should be using — social tools.

More than 60 percent of knowledge workers spend time exchanging information … Social can deliver an estimated $1 trillion in value.

Big news! Not! Even! Slightly! Oh dear, please get to the opening act!

Finally, Sellers gives her intro of Mayer.

8:04 pm: Sellers notes that her conference had hosted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in 2010 (she was ousted in 2011), and in 2011 had Mayer when she was an exec at Google (she became Yahoo CEO this year).

Now, in 2012, Mayer is top dog at Yahoo, and the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500.

“Why don’t we just call this ‘the most powerful Yahoo dinner,’” jokes Sellers.

Why not!

Mayer — for those who care, and forgive me, since I am fashion-stupid — is wearing a black frock and some heeled Mary Janes. She gets big applause when Sellers notes that Yahoo stock is up 18 percent since Mayer became CEO.

Note: It did go down when she made a shareholder misstep early in her tenure, but has gone up since she repeated mobilemobilemobile with confidence on a recent earnings call that got investors excited about her tenure.

8:08 pm: By the way, Mayer put in a call for people to vote for her as Time magazine’s Person of the Year (she is on the list of nominees — more kudos from a Time Inc. property).

Mayer starts off with basic PR messaging that she trotted out previously on the recent earnings call, around how she wants Yahoo to be focused on “delighting and engaging users” and how it is a brand that touches people every day.

Therefore, its products need to be inspiring and delightful.

Daily delight! This is the buzzword.

Also, she notes, Yahoo should be the bestest place to work.

As apparent proof of that, Mayer says that all Research In Motion BlackBerry smartphones have been banished, and that Yahoos will be using Apple’s iPhones, Google’s Android phones and Microsoft’s Windows phones.

This has been endlessly reported, even though most other Internet companies do this, but it’s a good line, anyway.

8:12 pm: By the way, iPhones are the most popular with Yahoo employees.

News at 11! (I will add that iPhones are the most popular with the Swisher boys, too, and — irony alert — one of their moms works at Google.)

Sellers then asks about what makes a good product, which is precisely why the product-savvy Mayer was brought in to fix Yahoo.

Says Mayer: “Acute user need.”

I acutely need doughnuts. Does this count?

Also, says Mayer, products have to be created in a way that is “frictionless and beautiful,” and that the offering cannot get in the consumer’s way.

Sellers asks her to name a great product. Mayer notes that she was not talking acquisitions, but quickly namechecks the iPhone and Google.

Since those companies’ market caps are a billionty times bigger than Yahoo’s, she def cannot acquire anything there.

8:17 pm: Mayer also apparently likes some kind of luxury paper made in Germany that looks like velvet. It’s Gmund, by the way.

The topic moves on to Flickr, the once hip photo-sharing service that Yahoo bought and proceeded to ignore. Meanwhile, Instagram.

Mayer says that Yahoo needs to focus on the “global suite” services that are excellent, and on executing them well.

She points out Yahoo’s fantasy football service, mentioning its recent breakdown on game day that sent fans into a tizzy.

It’s a they-love-us-so-much-they-hate-us point.

Yahoo will not do things like online maps, though, Mayer says, noting that where Yahoo cannot compete, it should partner.

Sellers asked about acquisitions.

Mayer: Mobilemobilemobile! (It worked before!)

8:22 pm: Mayer then mentions the importance of small teams that work together, such as its recent Stamped purchase.

She notes that the bigger and more strategic opportunities are around advertising technology. Calling the Rubicon Project!

Mayer veers away from a question about layoffs, a sad Yahoo tradition. I have reported previously that she will make cuts via performance reviews.

At Yahoo, she says, it’s now about performance, not potential: “No offense to potential, but what we really care about now is performance.”

No offense taken!

Also, everyone’s goals will be posted on the Yahoo Web site for everyone to see.

Oh, wait, there will surely be offense taken by those lazy potential people at Yahoo.

Mayer does add that Yahoo should be a “growth company,” and not one defined by cuts.

8:28 pm: “The consumer Internet is growing, and we need to invest,” she says.

To achieve this will be a hard job, and will take multiple years, she adds.

Sellers asks about the Disney turnaround, which Mayer is apparently fascinated with. Mayer does indeed love Disney.

Who doesn’t? (Well, me, but I am an outlier.)

Speaking of Disney, one of its directors, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, sent regrets, but has emailed a question from its board meeting in New York.

Sandberg once worked at Google with Mayer, though the pair is still not working on a search engine together.

Sandberg asks what was most surprising to Mayer about taking over at Yahoo.

Mayer says she thought the job would be hard, and her new baby would be fun. Mayer had her first child at the end of September.

“The job is fun, and the baby is easy,” says Mayer.

Sellers wants to know how Mayer gets it all done. The answer: “Ruthlessly prioritize.”

She notes that that’s why she has not talked to the media at all, and why she will not be talking after this event.

(Well, I guess I will go back to not waiting by the phone for Yahoo PR to call back. Hi Anne! — also looking forward to not getting the holiday media party invite, which is no prob as the Googlers are throwing one the same night and they usually have organic arugula picked by elves they employ that’s acutely delicious.)

Then, as a Wisconsin Green Bay Packers fan, Mayer does her version of the famous Vince Lombardi quote: “God. Family. Yahoo.”

Cheesehead moment! And Mayer and I have so much in common! Mine is: Dog. Family. Yahoo.

8:33 pm: Sellers throws in one more question from famed investor Warren Buffett, who apparently wants to know what, if Mayer was not CEO of Yahoo, would she want to run?

Not Berkshire Hathaway! Mayer says she would build something herself.

It seems as if that is what she is doing at Yahoo, so we await the result.

Until then, Mayer’s mum. So to speak.

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

Dex Torricke-Barton, the words man behind Zuckerberg.

He was relatively calm, cool (as in, not sweating) and collected, a strong interview at the TechCrunch:Disrupt conference, from a man who leadership has been largely questioned since day one of Facebook Inc. In a nutshell: He nailed it.

Of course, behind every good man, there’s an even better speechwriter.

Enter Dex Torricke-Barton, executive communications manager at Facebook, a.k.a. Zuckerberg’s new words man. He joined the team back in April, and has been assisting the young CEO ever since.

Take Torricke-Barton’s mission statement from his LinkedIn profile, for instance: “My goal is to support thought leaders on innovation, technology and public policy, and to advance a vision of the world not as it is, but as it should be.” That’s exactly the sort of thinking Zuckerberg does these days (having admitted he “doesn’t code much anymore”), spending most of his CEO time on the clock with executives and potential Facebook partners.

That’s fine — Zuck is a cerebral guy. But he’s also famous for his terse answers and nearly affectless demeanor from the early days of doing press for Facebook. And when you’re a CEO of one of the personal Web sites on the face of the earth, you need to come off as personable.

Along with a cadre of seasoned public relations staffers, it is Torricke-Barton’s job to help Zuckerberg become that guy.

Torricke-Barton is no stranger to the profession. Before Facebook, he was Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s personal speechwriter; quite a task, considering how many embarrassing flubs the former Google CEO has made publicly in the past.

Oh, and he also happened to do a three-year stint handling comms for a little thing called the United Nations, spearheading all the lead external press for the Alliance of Civilizations, an initiative which aimed to minimize religious extremism and ease tensions between different global religious groups. It was a pretty high-priority program under U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

In other words: Torricke-Barton is kind of a big deal.

That’s not to say that Zuckerberg hasn’t already improved by leaps and bounds in just a handful of years. Not two years ago, Zuckerberg was onstage at our D: All Things Digital conference, sweating bullets under the hot house lights, while being peppered by questions from Walt and Kara.

In subsequent interviews on “60 Minutes,” “Good Morning America” and “Charlie Rose,” Zuckerberg has come off as far more down-to-earth, relatable, even — dare I say — relaxed.

Much of that is due to the efforts of the team led by former Facebook PR honcho Brandee Barker, who left the company in late 2010.

Still, Torricke-Barton has his work cut out for him: As the head of a now-public company, Zuckerberg has years of earnings calls, keynotes and generally being the face of his organization (so to speak). And for an enterprise that asks for the public to willingly hand over its personal data on an almost hourly basis, it’s not only Torricke-Barton’s job to make Zuckerberg well-spoken — we need to like him.

Good luck with that.

Update: 12:17 PT: As was so graciously pointed out to me on Twitter, Torricke-Barton has nowhere to go but up, considering the post-Facebook activities of one of his predecessors. Katherine Losse, Facebook’s 51st employee, wrote a tell-all on the early, raucous days of Facebook culture. It was not a flattering portrayal.

Mojgan Khalili

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been trying to recruit Katie Jacobs Stanton, Twitter’s head of international markets, to take a major job on the media side of the Silicon Valley Internet giant, according to multiple sources close to the situation.

While she holds that globally-focused role at the social communications service, Stanton is an obvious choice for Mayer, who actually was once her boss at Google, including when Stanton was the product management leader in the launch of Google Finance.

More importantly for Mayer, Stanton was the key driving force in creating Yahoo Finance, perhaps its most powerful content site, when she worked there from 1999 to 2002.

In other words, she knows media.

It does not seem likely Stanton will leave Twitter, but it makes a lot of sense that Mayer would try to get her.

It’s not clear what job Mayer is offering Stanton, but it is presumably a big one. One source said it could involve running Yahoo’s powerful home page, while another said it might be an even larger role.

Ross Levinsohn, the top Yahoo exec who left recently, had been overall head of media and sales for the Americas at the company. When he was named interim CEO of Yahoo earlier this year, he had elevated Mickie Rosen as SVP of media and commerce.

Rosen is still in that role now, where she has purview over all Yahoo media and commerce efforts worldwide.

But many expect Mayer to soon begin to replace Yahoo’s top exec team with choices of her own. She has already started an overhaul of its communications team, and has been recently focusing on human resources and its product leads, too.

But media is a critical unit at Yahoo, and Stanton would easily be on any short list of candidates to fill key jobs there.

At the San Francisco-based Twitter, her focus has been on raising its profile abroad, where it has been growing by leaps and bounds. That has often been in high-profile ways, such as its use in the Arab Spring protest and after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami.

Stanton came to Twitter from a stint in Washington, D.C., including at the State Department, where she did the laudable mobile donation campaign for Haiti that raised $32 million for victims of the devastating earthquake there. She was also the White House’s first director of citizen participation, and got the Obama administration tweeting via @whitehouse.

At Google, she also worked on its Open Social efforts, as well as on launching its interactive discussion tool, Google Moderator.

But Yahoo Finance is probably still her biggest hit, and one of the few properties on the site that has remain a huge success, despite the company’s many troubles.

Stanton graduated from Rhodes College, and later got a master degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

I have an email into the apparently silent new PR spokeswoman at Yahoo, as well as the much more communicative spokesman at Twitter, and will update if I get a response.

We’ll see if Mayer can land Stanton, but if you want to get a good idea of the always affable and charming exec, here is a video of her in action — love her “can we go boy, girl, boy, girl” in the Q&A part at the end — at a recent event in Germany, when Twitter was opening its office in Berlin:

In related news, after picking up a midlevel Google product PR person last week to work closely with her on corporate communications, Mayer seems to have grabbed another exec from the search giant. She’s hired a policy manager named Patricia Moll Kriese to become Yahoo’s senior director for corporate projects (whatever that means!).

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Today, Yahoo reported fair to middling — although still predictably unspectacular — second-quarter earnings earlier today.

Now it’s time for its financial call with Wall Street analysts, which most notably will not include its spanking new CEO Marissa Mayer.

Giant, prolonged sigh, but not entirely unexpected, since she just got to the Silicon Valley Internet giant today. Of course, that did not stop former CEO Carol Bartz from hopping on right after she was hired and cussing up a storm.

That did not end so well for Bartz, so perhaps Mayer has already made one good decision. Minimize, minimize, minimize expectations!

Here we go:

2:04 pm: The call starts off with the tireless CFO Tim Morse, telling people that he was very excited about the new CEO, but that he could not talk about it much.

Bummer!

But there was a message from Marissa Mayer, though: She cares about investors and you will be hearing from her soon!

2:06 pm: Morse, the numbers guy goes right into the script reciting the meh numbers, which boil down to the fact that earnings were better than expected on lackluster revenue growth.

Getting that up will be Job #1 for the missing Mayer — you just know she is sitting at the table right now — who will have to pull some major rabbits out of the hat to get Yahoo back into the conversation.

That would be the good conversation — about how it is innovative — and not about the bad conversation about what a management goat rodeo it has been for far too long.

2:09 pm: Morse is still repeating what you could read in the press release.

But ho! Morse notes that the problems with Microsoft and its search partnership still has not gotten better and thank goodness for that guarantee. This one’s on the software giant, but it is still not good.

2:13 pm: Morse notes there will be no guidance until Mayer gets up to speed on the situation at Yahoo.

Let me give you the Cliff Notes version, Marissa: Revenue growth flat. Employee morale weak. Product innovation non-existent. Mobile — don’t make me cry. But you do have a video deal with Tom Hanks called “Electric City” that is launching today!

Yay! Except you are now not a media company now that former interim CEO Ross Levinsohn has gotten jacked.

But the Olympics are coming, as are the U.S. elections, so you might want to hold onto that media excellence at Yahoo for a little while longer.

2:17 pm: Morse finishes up the non-news script and we move into the Q&A.

He warns: No Marissa queries!

The Wall Street analysts behave on cue — they never fail me on not asking the tough questions — and ask about the weakness in advertising pricing rates.

Morse talks about weakness in Europe, but gives a non-answer.

2:18 pm: Next a question about the stock buyback that Yahoo announced to get its shares back up to speed, using money from its partial sale of its Alibaba assets.

It’s not working yet, given the stock has remained flat since forever.

A question on the advertising softness and comments on revenue per search. Good one!

Headwinds from broadband advertising! “We’ll have to live through it,” says Morse, which means when crappy comparisons will return to make the revenue fall-off seem less worse.

Onto declining engagement and declining search revenue. And a good query about what to do about Microsoft?

Perhaps another partner, like Google, to replace it? Actually, until Mayer was appointed yesterday, Yahoo execs were in talks with the search giant about various partnerships.

That’s presumably on hold for now, but we’ll see.

Yahoo has about nine months until the Microsoft guarantee falls off the cliff and Morse notes there is an out.

Tasty!

2:25 pm: I’ll be honest — I am getting hugely bored hearing non-news about yet another unremarkable performance from Yahoo.

I needs me some Mayer ASAP — since she is, without a doubt, a fantastic character for Yahoo’s next chapter. As has been reported, it’s correct that she is not talking to me so far, but I am sure there will be plenty of material for me to work with going forward.

The next question is on mobile, which is a “big priority” for Yahoo, says Morse. Actually, it has hardly be a priority at all, despite the fact that the kids seem to love their smartphones.

Another Alibaba question, which is in all the filings. Let me break it down: Yahoo owns less, but it’s still a good investment for the future.

2:33 pm: Did I tell you I am bored. I am at the offices of Vanity Fair magazine blogging this and I am now reading a very good book they have on the shelf here titled “Vanity Fair’s Hollywood.” Does Sophia Loren ever take a bad photo? No, she does not!

Back to Yahoo! A question if Mayer will be talking before the next earnings call.

“I honestly just don’t know,” says Morse. But she is “mindful” of how much investors want to get a good gander at her.

A question on Yahoo Japan, another endless asset sale that the company has not yet completed. “There really is no update,” says Morse, blaming a valuation gap.

What a shock!

Morse is being very polite today and I like it. He’s been through the wringer at Yahoo since he got there, including a short stint as a temporary CEO.

I hope you have been taking notes, Tim!

2:39 pm: A question on Facebook and, thankfully, on the choice of Mayer. I love when someone asks a question they have been asked not to ask.

“I don’t have a whole lot of color,” says Morse, noting her “resume speaks for itself.” It is apparently safe to say, adds Morse, that Yahoo has to be good at both tech and content.

You’re kidding! I had no idea! Thanks, polite Tim!

He also said Yahoo feels good about being on a steady footing with Facebook. Last call, the comments were about how much Yahoo was going to get Facebook to pay.

Bygones!

I am back to the shelf at Vanity Fair, which is as delightfully entertaining as this call is not. Now, I am perusing the book, “Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionaire.”

Did you know Sandra Bernhardt’s motto is: “Kiss ‘em, slap ‘em, send ‘em home.”

I am considering stealing that one as my new operating policy.

I missed the question about Yahoo’s ad consortium with AOL and Microsoft. “We’re making progress,” says Morse.

Aaaaagh. But did you also know that Katie Couric’s motto is: “Nobody puts Baby in the corner.”

That is definitely my motto too if Yahoo PR does not get back to me on my 26 questions from this morning (you would think I would have gotten used to this by now!).

How I wish Mayer was not in the corner right now and we were listening to her. She talks really quickly, like a supernova, so I would love to see how analysts react to it. Not today!

Did you know Keith Richards’ motto is: “I told you I was sick.”

Now that is funny.

There are no more questions, which is unusual, and Tim politely says his goodbyes and says to be in touch any old time.

Thus, I have to have a better ending for this and it comes via Donald Trump, whose motto is: “Think big and get the job done.”

And it’s a pretty good tip for Yahoo and Mayer going forward.

According to sources both inside and outside of Yahoo, outgoing interim CEO Ross Levinsohn — who lost the race for the company’s top job to Google exec Marissa Mayer — is unlikely to remain at the company.

The board, who unanimously bypassed the media-focused exec to select a candidate with deeper product experience and a much higher tech profile, has apparently hoped that Levinsohn might stay in the company and return back to running its media and sales arm.

But that fat-chance possibility seems remote, according to people close to the board, who said they expect that Levinsohn will only remain for a short amount of time before moving on to another job.

You think?

Last week, in fact, I reported that Levinsohn was considering several exit options, after the Yahoo board declined to name him — as some had expected — at its annual meeting, and was still considering other candidates.

Levinsohn was named interim CEO earlier this year, in the wake of the ousting of Scott Thompson over the appearance of a fake computer science degree on his bio.

Also in question are the members of the team he has put into place at Yahoo, and whether they will remain. The most prominent is Levinsohn’s recent hiring of well-regarded advertising exec Michael Barrett — who came to Yahoo from, yes, Google — to run sales.

According to sources, Mayer is already aiming to attract several former and current Googlers to Yahoo to help her turn around the troubled Silicon Valley company.

Among the names raised is longtime former Googler Ben Ling, who worked closely with Mayer, as well as current Google exec Henrique De Castro, who is president of global media, mobile and platforms there. De Castro has been previously targeted by Yahoo to run global sales.

Mayer is likely to aim at grabbing some top product execs rather than on a big PR hire. In fact, some close to Mayer said that she could minimize her profile in the new role, which would be in stark contrast to her prominent efforts to establish a large public media presence while at Google.

One person close to the situation said she might take a page from new Google CEO Larry Page, who has been initially quiet as he drastically reformed the search giant.

“Marissa likes to be in the press, but she knows she has to manage expectations at Yahoo from the start and cannot over-promise anything,” said one person familiar with her thinking. “While she is well-known, she has never been in such a big job or in such a spotlight.”

No, indeed, a spotlight that starts tomorrow, when Yahoo announces what are likely to be meh second-quarter earnings, and when the world presumably meets the latest of Yahoo’s CEOs.

Mayer will be Yahoo’s fourth top leader in the last 12 months, so it would be nice if she stays for a while.

“So, is Marissa the ‘unicorn’ CEO?,” joked one person, about my description of the Yahoo search as a magical quest for leadership perfection.

We’ll see. Unicorns don’t exist, of course, and Mayer is now living in the real world, where Yahoo will need more than magic to return to its former glory.

While former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson fades from the tech scene — besides getting jacked from the top job at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, he’s also just come off two tech boards he had served on — the investigation over his hiring and how a fake computer science degree got into the company’s regulatory filings continues.

While the quick-fire controversy burned Thompson, as well as now former Yahoo director Patti Hart, the special committee of independent board members is still at work trying to figure out how such a mess was made in the first place.

And, more importantly, who knew what when and told whom.

At the time the committee was announced, Yahoo said it would “conduct a thorough review of CEO Scott Thompson’s academic credentials, as well as the facts and circumstances related to the review and disclosure of those credentials in connection with Thompson’s appointment as CEO.”

The special committee is chaired by Yahoo’s new Chairman Fred Amoroso and includes John Hayes and Thomas McInerney, two independent directors who joined the board in April.

Yahoo also hired independent counsel Terry Bird of the law firm Bird, Marella, Boxer, Wolpert, Nessim, Drooks and Licenberg in Los Angeles to handle the inquiry.

The company also noted at the time that “the special committee and the entire Board appreciate the urgency of the situation and the special committee will therefore conduct the review in an independent, thorough and expeditious manner. The Board intends to make the appropriate disclosures to shareholders promptly upon completion of the review.”

Gripped by urgency myself, I have grown weary waiting by the phone for some official answers, which sources said will not be forthcoming for some time.

But since I am the most curious of cats — uh-oh! — I started dialing around on my own to find out what’s what.

And, according to sources — especially since Thompson has settled with Yahoo and will not get severance due to the academic falsehood — the big focus is now centering on if the company’s staff screwed up the background check of his academic credentials, thus allowing it to get into its official filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and also on Yahoo’s corporate Web site.

When Thompson was hired from eBay, where he was president of its PayPal payments division, the online commerce company had the correct bio information in its SEC filings, although not on its Web site or in its PR materials.

The question is: Did someone from Yahoo simply rely on Web bios and not check eBay filings and did anyone ever re-check Thompson’s college records? (Note: It took me 15 minutes flat to find out he did not have such a degree at Stonehill College in the Boston area.)

If lazy checking was the case, it spells rank incompetence on the part of staffers, as well as Hart, who headed the search after Yahoo fired its previous CEO Carol Bartz last fall.

A much more troubling line of inquiry taking place is aimed at the possibility that someone at Yahoo did discover the discrepancy in Thompson’s resume and either did not report it up the chain of command or did and it was either lost or ignored or, well, worse.

While this certainly ain’t Watergate, such a situation would be very hard for Yahoo to explain away as easily to shareholders, especially potentially litigious ones. As it is always said, the coverup can often be more damaging than the crime itself.

And, if it is determined by the special committee that certain employees knew of Thompson’s resume inaccuracy, it will most certainly result in dismissals of Yahoo employees.

The focus on the committee — which truly cannot sweep this under the rug, if it occurred in this much more serious scenario — is most obviously the legal department of Yahoo, which is responsible for making certain filings are accurate.

Also under scrutiny is the quickness of the hiring of Thompson.

Among the questions is how much vetting was done and whether adequate questions about him were asked among a variety of possible sources.

When he was picked in January, Thompson was a dark-horse candidate for many, including some Yahoo board members.

In fact, he was not on the initial headhunting lists prepared by outside talent search firm Heidrick & Struggles.

That’s because Heidrick had placed Thompson at eBay in mid-2000 and could not then recommend him to Yahoo. As it turned out, Thompson took it upon himself to cold email Yahoo board member and Intuit CEO Brad Smith about the job, who then passed Thompson’s interest to Hart.

Heidrick had no involvement in the checking of Thompson, although he later blamed the firm in a public meeting with Yahoo employees for putting the error in his bio in the first place from when he was hired at eBay. Heidrick quickly called the accusation “verifiably not true” in a memo to its own employees.

Sources said that meant that the firm had a resume that Thompson had submitted to it that also contained the error.

But the central mystery of how that mistake appeared on his bio will likely remain just that without further explanation from Thompson.

In a radio interview in 2009, he did not correct a specific question about the twin degrees he appeared to have held and seemed to even agree with the show’s host, Moira Gunn, about them.

Later, she told me in a video interview that Thompson had clearly indicated to her in the prep for that interview that he indeed had a computer science degree.

Still, it is still not clear — and may never be — who put the faux computer science credential on his resume in the first place.

So, with all apologies to Winston Churchill: It might remain a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

When last we tuned in to the ongoing drama that is the patent-infringement lawsuit that Yahoo aimed at Facebook, Yahoo had a CEO — Scott Thompson — who was full steam ahead in pressing the controversial legal action.

Now, multiple sources said, the Silicon Valley Internet giant has got a new one — interim CEO Ross Levinsohn — who is already reaching out to top execs at the social networking giant in hopes of finding a settlement.

Still, until peace reigns in the digital kingdom, the legal wrangling grinds on and, today, Facebook has answered Yahoo’s most recent claim of “inequitable conduct” because of false statement by moving to dismiss it.

Yahoo had called many of Facebook’s counterclaims — using some of its own newly obtained patents — “tainted,” and said Facebook’s actions were “retaliatory.”

Not so, answered Facebook lawyers today, claiming that Yahoo did not do its homework, and also that Yahoo had “no coherent theory or facts suggesting deceptive intent.”

Among other issues, Facebook alleges in the claim that Yahoo did not check if Facebook had filed an inventor affidavit with the Patent Office, related to two of the patents. Except, um, it did.

“Yahoo claims that two of the ten patents Facebook asserts are unenforceable due to inequitable conduct. But all of these allegations are unsupportable and/or deficient,” said the Facebook filing, which is embedded below. “First, Yahoo claims these patents do not list Joseph Liauw as an inventor and that there is no sworn statement by Mr. Liauw in the Patent Office records explaining his omission. Yahoo’s claim is demonstrably false. Yahoo made this allegation without actually reviewing the publically available Patent Office records, because these records include the exact sworn statement from Mr. Liauw Yahoo claims is missing.”

What? Yahoo not good at checking? Hmm … that sounds familiar!

It’s interesting that Facebook struck on the eve of its IPO on Friday, perhaps making it clear to investors that it was not going to pay up big bucks to Yahoo in what it clearly considers a patent shakedown.

I have a call into Yahoo PR for a comment, but have not heard back as yet.

Here is the latest filing, which is getting more legally confusing by the millisecond (I am now totally glad I decided not to go to law school, so make it stop, Ross!):

FINAL

And here is more affidavit stuff:

FH-60104311

As expected, activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point released a new letter on the bio controversy he set off at Yahoo, again calling for the firing of its CEO, Scott Thompson.

“It seems farcical to us that the Board will most likely spend more time deliberating over whether Mr. Thompson should be fired than it did properly vetting whether he should have been hired,” read the letter in part. “The necessary investigation into whether certain senior executives and Board Members knew of Mr. Thompson’s deceptions before hiring him should not delay decisive action over his ethical breaches.”

Loeb, who is waging a proxy fight with Yahoo over board seats he wants, also offered to work with the Yahoo board to find a new CEO if it accepted his slate of directors. In the interim, he suggested Yahoo put either CFO Tim Morse or media head Ross Levinsohn in the job. Morse had taken that position temporarily after Yahoo fired its last CEO Carol Bartz last fall.

Confused yet?

Loeb set off a management crisis there last week with the revelation that Thompson had added a fake computer science degree to his bio.

The first casualty came yesterday with the stepping down of Yahoo director Patti Hart, who was charged with vetting Thompson for the job.

The Yahoo board also announced yesterday that it would be conducting a probe of the circumstances around the hiring, as well as how the faux academic credentials got in Thompson’s bio and also the company’s regulatory filings.

The new letter was a reaction to Thompson’s apology on Monday for the borked bio becoming a “distraction” (but not, oddly, for the mistake itself). Loeb had previously called for Thompson’s firing over the bio fibbing.

Loeb will be appearing at an investor conference in Las Vegas later today, where he will surely be asked about the situation.

In related news, eBay CEO John Donahoe, Thompson’s former boss, lent words of support, but also underscored that the online commerce company’s legal filings of his bio were always correct, even if its Web site and other PR documents handed out were not. Thompson came to Yahoo from a stint as president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit.

As reported by Bloomberg, Donahoe said:

“When Scott was hired at EBay Inc., all of EBay’s filings had the accurate information. Some of EBay’s PR materials had that bio. Our legal filings were taken care of by our legal department. Some of the PR materials had that info,” he said while in Tokyo of the correct bio versus the incorrect one.

Donahoe added: “I think Scott Thompson did a great job at PayPal. I think he’s a very talented leader and I believe he can help Yahoo. I hope they get through this and he can continue to do the very challenging job he’s got of helping to turn Yahoo around. I’m Scott’s biggest fan.”

This has been the first public support of Thompson by a prominent Internet figure, which might help lagging morale at the company.

Here’s the full version of the latest Loeb letter:

Third Point May 9 Letter Release

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On March 25, 2009, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson — when he was then president of PayPal — appeared on the TechNation radio show to talk about the revival of the eBay payments unit.

At the end of the largely charming interview, Moira Gunn asked him a direct question about his college degrees, specifically noting they were in accounting and computer science.

“Your bachelor’s degree is in accounting and computer science. Now, from both of those, I mean that’s, that’s pretty obvious that’s PayPal,” said Gunn. “What are the most important things you learned?”

“Yeah,” begins Thompson, failing to correct her at all on the fact that he does not actually have a computer science degree — only one in accounting.

He then went even further, touting his early tech training at Stonehill College, near Boston, which did not offer a computer science degree at the time he went there, from 1975 to 1979.

“And that’s really the background that I have, and it started back in my college days, and I think that’s really the wonderful part of being an engineer is you think that way,” said Thompson.

In the most generous interpretation, it’s not quite clear whether Thompson was saying “Yeah” to her statement of his academic credentials, or if he was not actually listening.

But it’s a careless oversight on his part not to have corrected her about the degrees, which could also be said about a computer science degree being present on his bio for more than a half-dozen years at eBay and later at Yahoo without some notice by him.

Because while Thompson has had a long career as a tech exec, as well as a stint as a CIO, academically speaking, a computer science degree did not happen in his college days nor did he graduate as an engineer.

That became apparent earlier today, when Yahoo confirmed that it included inaccurate information about Thompson’s academic background on its Web site and in its regulatory filings.

The admission came after activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point correctly asserted that Thompson’s resume was overstated related to his education.

Yahoo called the inclusion of the computer science degree on his bio an “inadvertent error,” but gave no other explanation as yet. Tonight, the Yahoo board said it was reviewing the matter and would then make appropriate disclosures afterward.

While it is entirely possible that Thompson did not correctly grok what Gunn was saying, it seems pretty clear that he implied his college background was in tech and he was an engineer.

It is true that Thompson did take some computer science classes at Stonehill. And it is entirely possible that he thinks of himself as an engineer by work training and not by college degree.

I am awaiting comment from Yahoo PR, which has its hands full today (welcome to the circus, Amanda!).

Until then, here is the actual audio of that part of the interview and the pertinent part of the transcript, which began at the 26:33 time on the audio, to judge for yourself:

Gunn: Your bachelor’s degree is in accounting and computer science. Now, from both of those, I mean that’s, that’s pretty obvious that’s Paypal. What are the most important things you learned?

Thompson: Yeah. You know, I think and I, I mention this to young kids when I’m on campus, and my son who I was just talking about at Santa Clara, what I’m happiest about in my background is if you work in technology you’re trained to solve problems.

And that’s really it, you’re trained to pull apart very complex things and think about okay, how can I do this or how can I do that or how can I make it better?

And that’s really the background that I have and it started back in my college days, and I think that’s really the wonderful part of being an engineer is you think that way.

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Pires, who is currently senior director of communications and brand at PayPal, worked with new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson for many years when he ran the popular payments service. Sources at Yahoo said she would begin April 16, taking up the position of SVP of global communications that has been held by Eric Brown. He’ll apparently be leaving the company.

The well-regarded Pires comes to Yahoo at a particularly dicey time, having just announced the firing of 2,000 employees today with more to come, along with an expected restructuring next week. The Silicon Valley Internet giant is also facing a noisy proxy fight with activist shareholder Third Point and is contemplating the sale of big parts of its business. (And then there’s me, so I’ll pay for lunch, Amanda!)

Stricker, who is director of global communications and public affairs at the search giant, will be VP of communications at Twitter. I wrote him about the new job this morning without a response until tonight, after he tweeted the new job. The affable Stricker will start in a few weeks at the social communications service, where his big challenges will be explaining how Twitter is making bank and when the heck it is going public.

I’m thrilled to be joining Twitter — and thankful for my time at Google. Both are more than just companies. They’re movements.

— Gabriel Stricker (@gabrielstricker) April 5, 2012

(Tip o’ the day, Gabe: Don’t tell CEO Dick Costolo that bloggers are funnier than he is. ’Cuz we are.)

What is Yahoo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In what is either the boldest gamble of its history or the most boneheaded, Yahoo has filed a massive patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook.

The attack by the Silicon Valley Internet icon against perhaps the most powerful consumer social networking site today — also based in tech’s heartland and also an important partner of Yahoo — is sure to be a controversial one, pitting Yahoo against a company that has surpassed it handily in recent years in regards to popularity among consumers.

“Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology,” Yahoo’s lawsuit reads, in part.

That includes, Yahoo alleges, Facebook’s popular News Feed, advertising methods, privacy settings and more. The company adds that Facebook has been “free riding” on Yahoo’s intellectual property and that royalty payments alone will not suffice.

So what does Yahoo want for this alleged free ride? Triple damages and to enjoin Facebook from operating by using said patents.

The 19-page lawsuit over 10 patents — related to advertising, privacy, customization, messaging and social networking — comes as Yahoo is seeking to right itself under new CEO Scott Thompson.

Multiple sources said he is primarily driving this new aggressiveness from Yahoo.

Since Yahoo told the New York Times that it was considering such a move last week, the issue has been widely debated within the company, with many top techies there opposed to it, due to the company’s longstanding ethos of using patents for defense rather than offense.

Thus, the decision to move was closely held, sources said, with only Thompson and legal chief Michael Callahan largely working on it.

Still, patent lawsuits have become ever more prevalent among tech companies, as they seek to battle for advantage in a rapidly changing competitive landscape. Apple, Google, Microsoft and others are involved in several legal actions, although they are largely related to mobile technology.

Yahoo’s lawsuit is the most prominent in the social networking arena, a sector that has seen a huge explosion of late. Its timing could not be worse for Facebook, since it is in a quiet period for its upcoming IPO, which is expected to value the company at close to $100 billion.

Yahoo has done this kind of thing before, of course, having wrangled with Google until right before it went public in 2004 over search patents from its Overture acquisition. The pair settled 10 days before the Google IPO, with Yahoo getting several million more shares of that stock.

Yahoo is shaking Facebook down for much more here and with much higher stakes for both companies. If successful, Yahoo could seriously damage Facebook’s initial public offering; if not, Yahoo will cement its growing reputation as a company with nothing to lose, whose value is built not on its current business, but on non-operating assets.

More importantly, at least initially, the move did nothing to boost Yahoo’s moribund shares — the stock was down about one percent to $14.49 in after-hours trading.

More to come, but here is the entire document below. The lawsuit has been filed in San Jose, Calif., federal court.

Lastly, the official PR back-and-forth:

Said Yahoo, in its statement:

“Yahoo! has invested substantial resources in research and development through the years, which has resulted in numerous patented inventions of technology that other companies have licensed. These technologies are the foundation of our business that engages over 700 million monthly unique visitors and represent the spirit of innovation upon which Yahoo! is built. Unfortunately, the matter with Facebook remains unresolved and we are compelled to seek redress in federal court. We are confident that we will prevail.”

Facebook, obviously, disagrees, and also threw in a jab about the lack of discussions over the issue between the pair:

“We’re disappointed that Yahoo, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation. Once again, we learned of Yahoo’s decision simultaneously with the media. We will defend ourselves vigorously against these puzzling actions.”

I’ll admit to also being puzzled about the strategery here, but I am sure there will be much more to come.

Until then, read on:

Complaint

And here is what I wrote last week on the subject:

Apparently, Yahoo’s new motto: If you can’t beat ‘em — and it can’t — sue ‘em.

That would be Yahoo — the perpetual 98-pound weakling of the Internet these days — threatening powerful Facebook, which had cleanly bested it by attracting hordes of users with a plethora of popular products and services.

Yahoo has already lost its audience to Facebook, which was most recently followed by its frittering away a commanding lead in display advertising, too.

That would also be the Yahoo whose most recent success in improving its increasingly tenuous connections with customers was, in fact, by deeply integrating Facebook’s social hooks into its Web properties.

That would be the Yahoo which has failed time and again to innovate its own offerings so drastically over the years that it has now apparently decided that its first and best strategic move under Thompson’s rule is a shakedown.

Such a cynical move on rights Yahoo has long held seems more a play for the cheap seats of Wall Street, given that the company needs to look like it is doing everything it can to turn things around right now as it faces a proxy challenge.

First, it ended difficult talks with its Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank, over selling back lucrative stakes there.

Now, according to sources, Yahoo’s Thompson has actually been trying to make very nice with activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point — on-the-down-low chitchats that might have played a part of this latest unusual move.

At least Kodak had a good excuse. The once iconic camera company had recently been trying to take advantage of its trove of patents as a way to stave off declaring bankruptcy.

That didn’t work for Kodak, and it will also not work for Yahoo, whose only real option is to try to innovate its way out of the mess it has landed itself in.

You know, with good ideas.

Instead, the company’s leadership has opted for a road that could rain down trouble and paint Yahoo as a company bereft of talent to win any other way.

And while a range of intellectual property lawsuits have broken out all over the digital sector, involving Apple, Microsoft, Google and many others, such a strategy for Yahoo could be dangerous if it fails in its legal effort to take advantage of its 1,000-plus patents, including those related to search and advertising.

Others — including such tech luminaries as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, who co-owns the seminal Six Degrees patent for constructing a networking database and system — hold a number of critical social networking patents, too, so who knows where this thing will go.

Nonetheless, Yahoo has decided to emulate those companies with one of the few valuable assets it might have, waging its little war, right as Facebook is in the midst of its initial public offering period.

Yahoo has done this before, of course, having wrangled with Google until right before it went public in 2004 over search patents from its Overture acquisition. The pair settled 10 days before the Google IPO, with Yahoo getting several million more shares of that stock (which it then, of course, sold too soon).

That certainly could happen here, with Yahoo managing to grab a chunk of Facebook’s pre-IPO stock.
That would mean that Yahoo’s most valuable asset would be those shares, as well as its stake in Asian companies it bought a while back for a bargain and now makes up a bulk of the company’s valuation.

As to Yahoo’s core business — investors consider it almost entirely worthless.

And let’s not forget: Facebook could also sue right back, which it very well might do. Or, perhaps, cut off agreeable ties that have aided Yahoo in recent years.

In other words, in poking Facebook, Yahoo might now learn what it is really like to be de-friended.

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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Through many years of working together, first at eBay and then during the failed California governor’s race, Meg Whitman has relied heavily on Henry Gomez for communications advice.

Their close working relationship even earned them the mash-up nickname among those at eBay and elsewhere: Menry.

So when she got the CEO job at Hewlett-Packard, it was a bit of a surprise that Gomez — who has recently been living on the East Coast (see baseball cap above) — helped out a lot, but was not named to the top PR slot at the tech giant.

No longer, it seems, with Gomez being named EVP and Chief Communications Officer at HP today.

It’s a big job, given the hard work that Whitman faces reviving the iconic tech company, which has been beset by strategic and business challenges of all kinds, shapes and sizes in recent years.

While it might be seen as an adjunct to the business, the forward-facing parts of HP are in need of a powerful public relations initiative, which is presumably why Whitman wanted one of her most trusted and longtime staffers in the post.

According to HP, Gomez will become a member of the company’s executive council and report directly to Whitman.

Said HP in its press release, which you can also read below: “Gomez will be responsible for HP’s media and industry analyst relations, executive communications, employee communications, government affairs and global social innovation.”

As in, the voice of Menry is back!

Here’s the release:

HP Names Henry Gomez Executive Vice President and Chief Communications Officer

PALO ALTO, CA, Jan 10, 2012 – HP today announced that Henry Gomez will join the company as executive vice president and chief communications officer.

Gomez also will become a member of HP’s executive council, reporting to Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer.

In this newly expanded role, Gomez will be responsible for HP’s media and industry analyst relations, executive communications, employee communications, government affairs and global social innovation.

Gomez, 48, comes to HP with 26 years of communications experience. He spent most of the last decade working at eBay, where he served in a variety of roles including senior vice president for Corporate Communications and president of Skype. Gomez played a crucial role in building eBay’s brand during the critical years following the company’s initial public offering.

Prior to joining eBay, Gomez was vice president of Corporate Affairs at HBO in New York. He started his communications career at Hill and Knowlton and has worked on a wide array of public relations and marketing communications challenges in numerous industries.

Most recently, Gomez ran his own consulting business, providing communications counsel to clients such as H&R Block. He was on the leadership team of Whitman’s 2010 campaign for governor of California and has been involved in government and political affairs throughout his career. In 2011, Gomez was appointed to the board of BJ’s Restaurants, Inc. He is a graduate of Boston College.

“Henry is an excellent manager and communications executive,” said Whitman. “People around the world care deeply about HP, and I believe we have an important obligation to clearly explain where we’re headed and why. Henry will work closely with the entire leadership team to make certain customers, partners, employees, and shareholders fully understand our vision and strategy.”

About HP HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure to solve customer problems. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com .