Twitter Courts Google's Sundar Pichai for Head of Product

Sundar Pichai, the man in charge of Chrome and Chrome OS at Google, is being aggressively courted by Twitter to be its next head of product, according to sources. But Google is apparently fighting back hard on this latest effort by high-profile Web 2.0 companies, including Twitter and Facebook, to raid its huge talent pool.

Help Wanted: Twitter Seeks Product Direction

As Twitter verges on raising funding that would value it at $3.5 to $4 billion, the departure of Product VP Jason Goldman seems to underscore an issue that has plagued Twitter for a long time: Product development. Aside from its well-documented reliability problems, new products and major upgrades at Twitter are few and far between.

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Google Tightens Its Privacy Practices

Acknowledging that its Street View cars inadvertently gathered not just fragmentary data from open Wi-Fi networks, but some URLs, passwords and entire emails as well, Google today again apologized and said it was implementing more rigorous internal privacy practices. The measures include the appointment of Alma Whitten to oversee privacy issues across both engineering and product management, enhanced privacy training for employees and mandatory documentation and auditing of privacy design for all initiatives.

IBM Sells Unit, Expands Buyback

Dassault Systèmes SA agreed to pay $600 million to buy an International Business Machines Corp. unit that sells Dassault’s design software. The sale to Dassault, which makes software for computer-aided design and product management, removes one of the last vestiges of IBM’s once vast applications-software business.

Avoiding Van Halen Fatigue on YouTube

More than 100 million U.S. users watch an average of 68 videos each on YouTube every month, according to comScore. How can YouTube get them to watch just a few more? It’s a challenge that YouTube’s engineers are zeroing in on as they try to unlock more revenue from the online video juggernaut.