Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, who once employed Jobs shortly before he and Steve Wozniak started Apple, doesn’t have any specific names to answer that question. But what he does have is a new book, out today, to aid in the search: “Finding the Next Steve Jobs — How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent.”

And Bushnell should know about the importance of recognizing that talent — during Atari’s heyday, he turned down the opportunity to own one-third of Jobs’s and Wozniak’s nascent company. By 1980, he writes in the book, “I was beginning to think it might turn out to be a mistake.”

“Finding the Next Steve Jobs” is being released by Net Minds, a print/e-book hybrid publishing startup led by former Yahoo exec Tim Sanders. Bushnell said it uses Jobs as a metaphor for the creative iconoclasts who clash with corporate culture and can’t get hired. He sat down with AllThingsD to explain further.

AllThingsD: Just how close were you to Steve after his brief involvement with Atari?

Nolan Bushnell: We’d talk on the phone infrequently, but he’d come up to [my house in] Woodside about once a month, usually on a Saturday or Sunday morning, and we’d go up on the hill and talk. Occasionally, I’d go down to his place, but a lot of the time it was him coming up to my place.

Why are we even looking for the “next Steve Jobs?”

Steve took a failing computer company — and they probably would have never brought him back if they weren’t at the end of their rope — and turned it into the highest-market-cap company in the world. People were always aware that innovative solutions are good for your company. I think this just underscored it in a really powerful way. It wasn’t just through cutting costs or innovative marketing. Though Steve was a pretty good marketer.

But that was when he returned to Apple in 1997. Most of the time when people talk about the “next Steve Jobs,” they’re using that phrase to refer to entrepreneurs who are still early on in their careers. So, are those people really that hard up for work?

I believe there are Steve Jobses all around us. Really, what is happening is that they’re being edited out of importance. Right now, Google is doing some great things, but Hewlett-Packard is trying to commit suicide. Every company needs to have a skunkworks, to try things that have a high probability of failing. You try to minimize failure, but at the same time, if you’re not willing to try things that are inherently risky, you’re not going to make progress.

Speaking of progress, what’s the most exciting thing for you in videogames?

I think the next big game opportunity is Google Glasses [sic]. If I told you all my ideas for it, I’d have to kill you. And the Oculus Rift. The game business reinvents itself every five years. The last five years have been the days of mobile gaming and shortform gaming, exemplified by Rovio with Angry Birds and Zynga with FarmVille. And that is over.

(Nolan’s daughter and PR agent, Alissa Bushnell, quickly jumped in at this point, asking him to clarify what he meant by “over.”)

Most games, by their nature, have a half-life of two years or less. It’s the outlier that has a half-life that’s longer than that. But that doesn’t mean that the marketplace is synchronized. So you have the early adopters coming into something, and they soon encourage the more timid to come in. It broadens the group. But players’ engagement is not lengthened.

But smartphones and tablets continue to be hugely popular, so how are their games “over”?

All the money’s out. Do I really want to do a mobile game that’s one of 300,000, where discoverability is everything? You really have to have a little more sizzle on the steak. I would rather be one of 100 apps for Google Glass than one of 300,000 for iOS and Android.

Does the potential for a new, game-changing entrepreneur exist independently of how these different companies or industries are changing?

I really believe that the future is happening whether we want it or not. The companies that force the future to happen faster will succeed in the next 20 years, and the ones that are stuck in today will lose market share. People say, “I want to be around in 20 years.” I say, “I have no idea. But if you’re not doing 10 different things, if you don’t have four skunkworks, then you’re not going to find the next thing.”

(Clarification: an earlier version of this story said Bushnell employed both Jobs and Wozniak. Although Wozniak was involved with and paid for his work on Atari’s game “Breakout,” he was paid by Jobs rather than Bushnell’s company).

The New York-based company promises to take the technical wizardry out of app making, easing the pathway to subscription revenue for those with eager — if nonpaying — online audiences.

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For one thing, it has regularly sponsored an annual “Digital Universe” study that seeks to estimate the amount of data that’s produced by all of us every year. Last year, EMC, in cooperation with the research firm IDC, determined that surveillance cameras and smart meters had pushed the amount of digital data created in 2012 to nearly three zettabytes. And in case you’ve lost track, zettabytes come after exabytes, which come after petabytes, which come after terabytes, which is the scale at which the average hard drive inside a PC is today. And for the record, the next one is yottabytes.

Anyway. Today, as reported by Mark Hachman at Slashdot, the storage company donated a storage system with a capacity of up to 2.8 petabytes to the Vatican Library. This library, established in 1475, contains some of the oldest texts in the world, some of the earliest copies of the Bible and millions of other books, pamphlets, letters, manuscripts, ephemera and incunabula from the dim mists of antiquity.

Enter EMC, which is helping the library digitize its entire collection so that its holdings can be viewed by the outside world. Here’s an example, but don’t ask me to tell you what it says.

Protecting the documents is considered kind of important. History has a way of destroying places where knowledge has been collected to suit the political whims of the moment. Consider the case of the Library of Alexandria, destroyed in phases ending sometime around the year 391. Digitizing what’s in the Vatican helps prevent something like that from happening again, no matter how unlikely it may seem today.

So what exactly is in the library? As it happens, “60 Minutes,” the TV news magazine on CBS, did a segment on it recently. A fascinating 12 minutes of television it is. After you watch it, you’ll be glad, too, that this stuff is getting preserved.

To do so, the Japanese-based company acquired San Francisco-based OpenFeint and established a U.S. headquarters in the same city. It then purchased Funzio, a mobile game developer, to help make hit games for the platform. In all, it spent $300 million.

But now the company is pulling back on its plans — just a bit.

While Gree is a massive entity in Japan, with $2 billion in annual revenue, its efforts in North America so far have produced much less. The company does not always break out revenue, but in August, it reported that sales in the U.S. totaled $16.9 million in the second quarter.

In the conclusion of a two-year spending spree, Gree announced in December that it was rethinking its platform ambitions and laid off about 25 members of its platform team to focus on mobile game development. I caught up with Anil Dharni, Funzio founder and Gree’s SVP of its studio operations, in San Francisco last week, to better understand where the the company is headed.

Here are some highlights from the conversation:

Why did Gree shut down OpenFeint in the U.S.? Does it no longer believe in the ability to build a network where players can discover games and other people to play with (a.k.a, a mobile platform like Facebook)?

Anil Dharni: We acquired OpenFeint two years ago, when Gree wanted to get into the U.S. It was working with a slew of indie developers, and over the past two years, we learned about the publishing business and the platform business. We’ve solidified our position with developers, so we didn’t need the platform team [in the U.S.] and moved production back to Japan.

So, what’s the status of the platform in the U.S.?

Dharni: It’s just being developed in Japan. It’s in beta [in the U.S.] today. Our learnings from the process is that we don’t want to have a me-too publishing strategy. We have to offer more, like game analytics, consulting, push notifications, game mechanics, etc. We are not ready to release those capabilities today, but we think we can bring it altogether.

The transfer of the platform development to Japan led to the elimination of 25 jobs in the U.S. How many employees do you have today?

There are 400 employees in the San Francisco offices, Dharni said, which are directly across the street from AT&T Park. The company has also opened a Canadian studio in Vancouver, where it has 10 employees. Both offices are hiring.

Crime City is one of the company’s oldest titles (launched in August 2010), and it continues to be in the Top 50 highest-grossing apps today. How does it continue to attract players?

“A lot of people talk about shorter lifespan of games on mobile than on Facebook,” Dharni said. But by working with his Japanese counterparts, they’ve been able to learn how to retain users for longer periods of time and increase the user base. It has required them to release more content and new mechanics inside of the games to keep people coming back.

How is hard-core being defined on mobile?

The more strategy-based the game is, the more hard-core it is, he said. “It means a smaller audience that monetizes better.” Genres may include first-person shooters, role-playing and card games (a popular category in Japan that challenges players to collect a deck of cards by completing a number of mini games). Dharni said that more developers have become focused on hard-core as the cost to acquire a player on mobile has gone up, since they can deliver a return on investment over a longer period of time.

As games become more hard-core, is the cost of developing a game going up?

No, it hasn’t, Dharni said, but the amount of time it takes to launch a game has gotten longer. “We used to launch games without events and other mechanics and then layer them in later. Now, they are included from the time of beta, which means testing the games out for a long time in either Canada or Australia.”

Is Android catching up to the iPhone in terms of revenue?

It is, if you aren’t successful on the iPad, Dharni said. But if you are, then Android is not competitive yet.

Time Inc. corporate parent, Time Warner, disclosed the number as part of its guidance for its 2013 financials.

Restructuring charges aren’t new for Time Inc., because the publisher has been downsizing itself for years. In 2012, the company racked up $27 million in restructuring charges, up from $18 million in 2011.

Time Inc.’s Q4 numbers help explain why CEO Laura Lang is cutting some 500 jobs: Revenue was down 7 percent, to $967 million, and ad revenue was down 4 percent. But the publisher is still the world’s biggest, and it still makes piles of money: Operating income was down 3 percent, to $200 million.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes may have more to say about the future of his publishing unit during his call later this am; I’ll listen in.

If you’re one of the publisher’s 8,000 employees, the good news is that many people I’ve talked to seem to believe that an earlier report (which I’ve repeated) of up to 700 layoffs may be too high, and that the total may end up closer to 500. Then again, no one has offered a definitive headcount.

The other consensus opinion is that the cuts will affect just about every corner of the company, and most of its magazines (it publishes 21 in the U.S.).

But there are plenty of other Time Inc. employees who don’t work at a particular title, and centralized departments like research and HR will be affected, too.

Bottom line: The cuts will be big, and they’ll be the most significant move CEO Laura Lang has made in her first year on the job.

No comment from Time Inc. PR.

I don’t have more details about the coming cuts. But the Time Inc. employees I’ve spoken to seem to put great stock in Keith Kelly’s report from earlier this month, which predicted that up to 700 of the publisher’s 8,000 employees may go in this round.

If so, that will eclipse the company’s last big round of layoffs, in 2008, when former CEO Ann Moore cut about 600 jobs. Those layoffs, and subsequent cost-cuts, have allowed Time Inc. to stay profitable as the magazine industry contracts.

But the top line keeps dropping: In the third quarter of last year, Time Inc generated $840 million in revenue, down from $1.1 billion in 2008. Meanwhile, parent company Time Warner has continued to evolve into a cable TV conglomerate.

New CEO Laura Lang has been on the job for a year, and has pushed her company to look for new revenue streams, including digital deals; last year, she brokered an agreement to sell iPad subscriptions via Apple’s iTunes store.

No comment from Time Inc. or parent company Time Warner.

Bookstore operator Barnes & Noble will now own 78.2 percent of Nook Media, and Microsoft Corp., which made a $300 million investment earlier this year, will own 16.8 percent. Pearson will also have the option to purchase up to an additional 5 percent interest in Nook Media, subject to certain conditions.

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The media conglomerate, which plans to separate its entertainment businesses from its publishing businesses into two separate listed stocks next year, said the publishing company would have reported a net loss of $2.08 billion in the year through June 30 if it had been a stand-alone company.

The loss was mainly the result of $2.8 billion in impairment and restructuring charges, which News Corp. previously disclosed. But the financial statements for the publishing company, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission early Friday, showed that earnings contributions from the businesses also declined.

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As with previous rounds of predictions he has made — like for 2011 and 2012 — some of what he predicts already kind of makes sense if you’ve been paying attention to the way things are going, but will become more pronounced in the coming year. Others are a little more surprising.

1. “Carryalongs” Dominate Global Computer Markets
Anderson lumps notebooks, tablets and everything in between into a category he has labeled “carryalongs,” and he says they will take their place as the largest segment of computing devices. “Surface and slates and iPads and Kindle Fire and Nexus 10 and everything else that’s got a 7-inch screen plus or minus an inch or so, will be the biggest category of computing device.” Okay, then.

2. Intel: Long Live the King, the King Is Dead
Intel may still be the biggest supplier of chips to the world’s computing devices, but if you look at prediction number one, you know that Intel doesn’t yet play a significant role in the “carryalong” market outside of traditional notebooks. “Qualcomm and ARM are the new William and Kate,” Anderson says. Intel is primarily a supplier to the world’s server vendors. With CEO Paul Otellini retiring in May, the one way out of its current troubles will be to name a new CEO with what Anderson says are “real tech chops.” Otellini, he says, “marked the first time a marketing guy got the CEO job at Intel. Before that they were all engineers, except Craig Barrett who was an operating guy.” Intel, he says, “has lost the consumer stuff, the handheld stuff, the slate and tablet stuff. All it has left are servers. It has lost the mastery that it had.”

3. Net TV Dominates
A majority of U.S.-based homes will have Internet-connected TVs and related products like AppleTV, Roku boxes and so on. This will fundamentally change the production of content in new and interesting ways, and the result will be a lot more cheaper content. “This is going to become what TV is, and the result is that the cable and satellite companies are going to have a tough time. With the exception of sports, this is the end of cable as we know it.”

4. The LTE vs. Fiber Battle Creates Regional Revolutions in Broadband
In certain regions where the only broadband Internet option is a DSL line, LTE wireless devices and services will become the standard replacement, where LTE service is available. “In most cases you’ll be paying more, but you’ll also be getting more. This is a really interesting flip in some regions. It will be interesting to see this fight because it has a lot to do with what’s in the ground.” It will mark the start of a fight between LTE and fiber optic technology that will take a decade to resolve and what Anderson says is a “real revolution” in broadband pricing and provision.

5. Google Gets Its Mojo Back.
Google’s efforts in email, video, smartphones, maps and driverless cars have in Anderson’s opinion opened up new long-term paths for expansion at Google. Having killed off several products and services that weren’t seen as core to its operations, Google will in 2013 look a lot more focused and powerful when compared to Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, he says. “Google has turned an important corner where after all the experimentation, it has created a number of true businesses where they have a foothold and terrific products, and there are more to come.”

6. The Driverless Car Becomes a Serious and Competitive Global Project
And speaking of Google’s driverless car, that’s going to become a thing over the long term. Volvo plans to become a player. It’s not just a curiosity, it will in the future become a real market, he says.

7. eBooks Are the books
Total ebook sales in dollars will beat adult paperback sales in 2013, Anderson says, and will continue on a growth trajectory toward dominating the entire book-publishing business.

8. Enterprise IT Struggles to Achieve Very Modest Gains
“Big Data” may be a big marketing cry that keeps people talking about enterprise IT, but combined sales of hardware, software and other enterprise tech will collectively grow very little on a global basis. “The year-to-year spending increase will be very small, maybe only 1 to 2 percent, even though the companies doing the spending are sitting on trillions in cash.” One exception: Security.

9. Hacktivists Rule.
Hacktivists like Anonymous and those like them will take on an increasingly important and, Anderson argues, permanent role in forcing political entities to become more transparent. They’ll cease being annoying and actually become a longer-term part of the political and cultural landscape. The result? After struggling to keep their secrets, governments will be forced, in time, Anderson says, to become more open.

10. Supply Chain Security Becomes a Major Factor in Global Technology Purchases
“Maybe all that outsourcing wasn’t such a good idea after all” will be the thinking of many CEOs who’ve spent the last decade or more arguing that lower production costs brought about by inexpensive labor costs in China, Taiwan and other countries will cause a big re-think over security concerns. Academic researchers in the U.K. claim to have found what many people have only silently worried might be possible: An unpatchable backdoor on a military grade encryption chip built in a Taiwanese fab. Companies in what he calls “inventing nations,” exasperated by the constant theft of intellectual property that is often traced to China, will grow increasingly uneasy at their relationship with that country and look for ways to bring more production back to their own shores. A new phrase — “clean supply chains” — will gain currency in tech manufacturing circles and will amount to an admission across many industries, not just tech, that today’s supply chain arrangements are “virtually all compromised,” Anderson says. This will lead to talk of ways to relocate manufacturing operations back in the U.S. and other countries. It won’t be easy — China will retaliate against companies that say anything like this publicly. “You almost have to decide to do what Google did and all but leave the country.” Apple is already doing it. Others, he said, will follow.

Not more than two weeks after Chris Anderson announced he was leaving tech publication Wired after an 11-year tenure as editor in chief, Conde Nast has named a successor.

Conde Nast creative director Scott Dadich will assume the position, returning to the tech publication at which he formerly served as creative director from 2006 to 2010.

“I’m excited to return to Wired, which has had such a tremendous impact on my life and my career,” Dadich said in a statement released Friday morning. “I look forward to finding new opportunities to delight and surprise the Wired community, both with the stories we tell, and in the ways that we tell them.”

That last part is important. Dadich was responsible for leading Conde Nast — which is traditionally known for its legacy print titles — into the digital age with the release of the Wired iPad app. Ostensibly, Dadich will continue to focus on bringing together Wired’s three publishing mediums — print, tablet, and on the Web at Wired.com.

A bit of disclosure: I worked for Wired up until about six months ago, when I left to join AllThingsD, though I missed Scott’s tenure by a matter of months.

Dadich is regarded highly within Conde, though, so it’s a pretty big appointment back at the publisher’s flagship technology publication. And, considering Dadich’s background overseeing all of Conde’s digital publishing channels over the past two years, it certainly speaks to Wired’s digital focus going forward.

German media giant Bertelsmann said Monday that it plans to create a joint venture between Random House and Pearson’s Penguin, with Bertelsmann taking a 53 percent stake in the new company and Pearson taking 47 percent. Bertelsmann and Pearson didn’t disclose the value of the joint venture, but a person familiar with the matter indicated that the equity valuation would be somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion.

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For Zynga, which has struggled to develop a new hit game recently, the strategy has two aims. Obviously, it wants to generate more ad revenue. But, just as important, it wants to give game developers a reason to work with its CEO and founder, Mark Pincus.

Multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans say the platform is still under development, but some of the components could launch by the end of the year. It may not be available to third-party developers immediately. A Zynga spokesman declined to comment.

Up until now, the social game maker has been slow to adopt advertising, opting instead to rely on the sale of virtual goods for the bulk of its revenue.

The advertising efforts will be a part of its push into third-party publishing and will be used as another way to attract developers looking for a complete package when it comes to bringing games to market. Sources said the initiative is being headed up by the company’s long-time CTO, Cadir Lee, who has also been in charge of other major platform projects, including the build-out of its own cloud network.

Over the past year, Zynga has been slowly ramping up its advertising efforts. Recently, it announced a deal where Words With Friends players were rewarded for using Honda-related words on their game board. Another example: A virtual State Farm blimp that players used in FarmVille to revive crops.

Last quarter, ads generated $41 million for Zynga. That’s up 170 percent year over year, and represents 12 percent of the company’s overall revenue.

The spike in advertising over the past year likely has a lot to do with the acquisition of OMGPOP, which was generating massive amounts of ad inventory at the peak of its hit game Draw Something.

But it’s not enough. Earlier this month, Zynga updated its full-year guidance, saying that revenue will fall below previous expectations for the second time this year. Zynga will report final results for the third quarter on Wednesday.

So, what could a Zynga-built advertising platform look like?

The platform could enable the company to expand beyond brand integrations and sponsorships into more lightweight experiences, including banner ads, interstitials, video pre-rolls and incentivized downloads. While it will span both Facebook and mobile, it will likely focus more on mobile games, since Zynga has repeated over and over again that they don’t bring in as much revenue as its social games.

To bolster its efforts in the space, back in April Zynga hired Julie Shumaker (formerly of RockYou and Electronic Arts) to be the VP of global ad sales. Since then, sources say, Zynga has hired a few more direct ad sales employees, and lists several more job openings on its Web site, including roles for sales managers and directors.

It is not entirely clear why Zynga is choosing to compete with so many ad platforms that already exist today, but according to sources, there are a few benefits that may outweigh the costs.

For starters, it will keep more of the revenue that way, without having to work with a middleman — important for a company that has been forced to give 30 percent of its virtual-goods revenue to Facebook.

Another theory is that Zynga wants to ensure that it owns all of its own data. Zynga has an incredibly large audience — roughly 300 million monthly active users — and a lot of rich information about them in terms of their behaviors and their social graph.

anxiously awaiting The Daily Planet’s move to three day per week publishing.

– From commenter Everett Will, on a post about DC Comics’ decision to have Clark Kent quit the Daily Planet in Superman #13

Take one of Amazon’s biggest titles for fall, actress and director Penny Marshall’s memoir “My Mother Was Nuts.” In its first four weeks on sale, it has sold just 7,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan. By comparison, actor Rob Lowe’s memoir, 2011′s “Stories I Only Tell My Friends,” published by Macmillan’s Henry Holt & Co., sold 54,000 hardcover copies in its first four weeks.

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Yahoo said today in a regulatory filing that it had hired one of Google’s top sales execs, Henrique De Castro, as its COO.

Earlier today, I had reported that CEO Marissa Mayer had been close to nabbing the advertising exec, who has most recently been Google’s president of partners business solutions.

De Castro is getting a pile of money for taking the job, including a $600,000 yearly base salary and an annual bonus that could double that figure. In addition, the Silicon Valley Internet giant will give him $36 million in stock grants, including a one-time retention equity award of $18 million and $18 million in the form of performance-based stock options.

He is also getting $1 million in “make-whole” cash for forgoing compensation from Google and $20 million in stock to replace his shares at the search giant that will vest over four years.

That is a very big check, although Mayer garnered an even bigger one when she joined the company in July.

Yahoo’s regulatory statement on the De Castro hiring is embedded below in its entirety, so you can read about his new riches for yourself (unless Yahoo’s persnickety legal head tries to block it).

Said a Google spokesperson about the departure: “We’re grateful to Henrique for all of his contributions at Google and wish him all the best in his new role at Yahoo!”

Both Mayer and also former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson have made previous overtures to nab De Castro, who has held a number of high-level jobs for Google across the globe, including at DoubleClick, in display ads and with major partners.

While he had previously rebuffed those efforts, this time De Castro bit.

There were signs he might this past week, after De Castro canceled a major offsite for his employees, and several attendees who know him well said he was not present at the company’s first night of its annual Zeitgeist event for advertising and publishing clients. The suave De Castro is usually a more noticeable fixture at such gatherings.

This is Mayer’s first big hire at Yahoo, having added only lower-level or less well-known execs to her stable of talent since she was appointed.

She touted the hire in a tweet, although the news was long out the door, while also noting on Twitter it was her first full day at the office since having her first baby two weeks ago.

My first full day back in the office, and I’m excited to kick it off by announcing my new COO, Henrique de Castro: businesswire.com/news/home/2012…

— marissamayer (@marissamayer) October 15, 2012

The hiring does create a potential issue in the sales arena, especially with current head of revenue Michael Barrett. De Castro and Barrett worked together at Google and multiple sources said the pair did not get along there.

It might not matter. While Barrett has publicly said he planned to stay at Yahoo under Mayer — he was hired by interim CEO Ross Levinson this summer before she arrived — many sources said he does not want to be at the company for the long term.

De Castro has a lot of work to do for the big payout he is getting and it will be a big challenge for him to turn around the troubled organization.

Along with declining growth, search market share, engagement and more, Yahoo also has had a management turnover issue of epic proportions.

De Castro will presumably be in charge of making it all better at Yahoo when he arrives sometime before the beginning of the year and is likely to focus on operations while Mayer zeroes in on products.

One area of trouble: While she has lavished attention on cultural issues and on the company’s tech troops, sources said most of the advertising and media leadership at Yahoo have had little interaction with Mayer since she arrived this summer.

Advertising, of course, is Yahoo’s biggest money maker.

The Portugal-born De Castro has a lot of experience here and is decidedly more of a charmer than Mayer.

More importantly, he is a very high-profile hire, as well as a colorful one. He speaks a menu of languages, dresses with a lot of style and is a worldwide traveler. I know him a little bit and find him to be smooth and confident, even if a little cagey.

Before Google, De Castro worked at Dell and also McKinsey.

All this makes him a perfect choice for Mayer, who is also a former Googler, since she has been considering purchasing a range of companies in the advertising tech space. The most likely candidate of late is PubMatic, which has been in early talks with Yahoo about being acquired.

The Silicon Valley start-up would be a solid add to Yahoo’s ad platform offerings, especially if it wants to stay competitive with Google. PubMatic helps publishers effectively manage their display ad inventory, and competes with Google’s AdMeld.

(Ironically, Barrett ran that start-up, which he sold to Google for $400 million about a year ago.)

Here is the De Castro hiring document from Yahoo:

YHOO-20121015-8K-20121015

And here is the official press release from Yahoo:

Henrique de Castro Named Chief Operating Officer of Yahoo!

October 15, 2012

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) announced today that Henrique de Castro has been hired as chief operating officer (COO). Reporting directly to Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, de Castro will be responsible for strategic and operational management of Yahoo!’s sales, operations, media and business development worldwide.

“Henrique is an incredibly accomplished and rigorous business leader, and I’m personally excited to have him join Yahoo!’s strong leadership team,” said Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!. “His operational experience in Internet advertising and his proven success in structuring and scaling global organizations make him the perfect fit for Yahoo! as we propel the business to its next phase of growth.”

“The combination of Yahoo!’s unique properties with high quality content, its renewed focus on outstanding user experience and its massive reach bring tremendous value to users, advertisers and partners,” said de Castro. “This is a pivotal point in Yahoo!’s history, and I believe strongly in the opportunity ahead. I can’t wait to join Marissa and the team and get started.”

De Castro brings more than 20 years experience leading operations, strategy, partner management and revenue generation for some of the world’s leading brands. Most recently, he was vice president of Google’s worldwide Partner Business Solutions group, where he was responsible for advertising platforms and services for Google’s publisher and commerce partners. Prior to that, he led Google’s media, mobile and platforms organization, where he helped to grow the business significantly. Prior to Google, de Castro spent two years at Dell Corporation, where he managed sales and business development operations across Western Europe. He has consulted for McKinsey & Company, where he advised numerous clients across many different industries. His career also includes senior positions in private equity and advertising businesses.

De Castro will join the company on or before January 22, 2013, or as soon as he has satisfied his obligations to his current employer.

But don’t get too excited, unless you’ve been a really heavy buyer. In an email to Kindle customers today, the retailer said that a legal settlement between the attorneys general of most of the states in the union and publishers including Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Harper Collins (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.), entitles consumers to refunds of between 30 cents and $1.32 on each book purchased.

Additionally, the publishers will have less power to set future prices, which means that the prices on e-books for the Kindle may be a little lower in the near future.

Collectively, the three publishers agreed to pay $69 million to settle charges that they were fixing prices on electronic books. The settlement must still be approved by the court, and a final hearing is scheduled for February of next year.

This all came about when the U.S. Department of Justice decided to sue Apple and several publishers in a federal court in New York, alleging that they colluded to inflate prices on electronic books as part of a plan to fight back against Amazon’s dominance of the e-book business. There’s a lot of detail in the original complaint via The Wall Street Journal here, and it’s worth reading The Journal’s story covering the initial filing of the suit from April.

Essentially, the DOJ claimed that the five publishers named in the suit banded together to boost the prices on best-selling books on the iTunes store to $12.99 or $14.99, and then agreed to force the same pricing structure onto Amazon. Attorneys general from many states quickly followed with a suit of their own.

The three publishers named today had agreed to settle the case right away, rather than bother with time-consuming and expensive litigation. Two others, Macmillan and Pearson, haven’t settled. Amazon was never a partner to the suit, but now is in the enviable position of letting Kindle customers know that they’re getting both a refund and probably better pricing.

At $69 million, the settlement fund is relatively small, amounting to a little less than 3.5 percent of the $2 billion worth of e-books sold last year, and even smaller when compared to the $11 billion worth of old-fashioned paper books sold last year.

The federal case is still ongoing, and as you can see from this collection of documents on the DOJ Antitrust Division site, Apple is still fighting the issue. At the time the complaint was filed, it called the accusation of collusion “simply not true,” and said that publishers, just like developers on the App Store, have been allowed to set their own prices.

Anyway, here’s the text of the email Amazon sent out today. If you’re one of the lucky ones getting a refund, you don’t have to do anything. After the court approves the settlement, it will just appear in your account.

Dear Kindle Customer,

We have good news. You are entitled to a credit for some of your past e-book purchases as a result of legal settlements between several major e-book publishers and the Attorneys General of most U.S. states and territories, including yours. You do not need to do anything to receive this credit. We will contact you when the credit is applied to your Amazon.com account if the Court approves the settlements in February 2013.

Hachette, Harper Collins, and Simon & Schuster have settled an antitrust lawsuit about e-book prices. Under the proposed settlements, the publishers will provide funds for a credit that will be applied directly to your Amazon.com account. If the Court approves the settlements, the account credit will appear automatically and can be used to purchase Kindle books or print books. While we will not know the amount of your credit until the Court approves the settlements, the Attorneys General estimate that it will range from $0.30 to $1.32 for every eligible Kindle book that you purchased between April 2010 and May 2012. Alternatively, you may request a check in the amount of your credit by following the instructions included in the formal notice of the settlements, set forth below. You can learn more about the settlements here:
www.amazon.com/help/agencyebooksettlements

In addition to the account credit, the settlements impose limitations on the publishers’ ability to set e-book prices. We think these settlements are a big win for customers and look forward to lowering prices on more Kindle books in the future.

Thank you for being a Kindle customer.

The Amazon Kindle Team

(Image courtesy of cheezburger.com)

The settlement disclosed Thursday allows U.S. publishers to remove digitized titles from the Google Library Project if they want. The settlement also “acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright-holders.” Court approval isn’t necessary.

The Authors Guild is still pursuing the legal case.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

But that will change after the first of the new year, Williams said, when the lightweight publishing site becomes more widely available to the public.

Williams, who now runs Obvious Corporation with Stone, took a few minutes to chat last night after an event in New York City, where he sat on a panel with BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti and Josh Miller, the founder of another Obvious-backed company called Branch.

The trio touched upon varying aspects of the future of digital content production and distribution, topics that would probably be boring to normal folk but enthralled the who’s-who of New York’s tech and digital media scene.

A few key points: Williams would like to keep Medium relatively high-quality, though he recognizes that, in publishing, low barriers to entry feed the content machine by making people feel good, thus spurring them to share more content (Instagram, Williams noted, is a key example of this). Also, he believes more and more media consumption will come via networks and platforms instead of individual websites.

“If you’re a Web publisher, you’re primarily paying attention to page views,” he said. “But whether people are actually reading your stuff, whether they’re on the page for five seconds or five minutes, is something we’re looking to measure.”

Williams also said that he believes valuable content can come “from anyone” — though, at the moment, not just anyone can fully access the site.

Williams later said that Medium — aptly described by my AllThingsD colleague Liz Gannes, following its launch last month, as a “collaborative publishing platform” — would open to the public sometime next year, and that despite its singularly-focused branding, would be open to media beyond blogs and texts, including videos and photos.

Medium will use basic Web algorithms that push popular stories up the content pile, Williams said, much in the way Google works. So highest-rated posts will appear at the top of the Web page, while the rest tile down.

“So much of Twitter’s value comes from real time,” Williams said during the panel. “I just think there’s room for other things.”

The approval comes as Apple Inc. and two other publishers are preparing to defend themselves next June over antitrust allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice that they agreed to keep e-book prices artificially high in an effort to force Amazon.com Inc. to stop its steep discounting.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The concept is similar to a sportsbook in Las Vegas, where fans drink beer, place bets and watch their favorite teams play on giant screens.

Now, instead of traveling all the way to Sin City, players can tune in to Facebook to check out the odds and place bets while watching the game from their living rooms. And, because sports betting is illegal in the U.S., the free-to-play game doesn’t require players to spend a dime, making it a much more innocent form of entertainment.

The game, called Sports Casino, goes live today, just in time for the NFL’s season opener tonight between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants.

In the game, players place their bets based on RocketPlay’s odds for a chance to beat the house. Initially, it will cover professional and college football, baseball and soccer games, with other sports, such as basketball, cricket and rugby, coming later.

RocketPlay, which has offices in both San Francisco and Tel Aviv, will be one of the first third-party developers to partner with Zynga. As part of that partnership, Zynga will publish the game on both the Facebook and Zynga.com platforms, and, in theory, direct thousands of players to use it. In return, RocketPlay will share the revenues with Zynga.

Matthew Cullen, president of RocketPlay, said the partnership with Zynga was attractive because of the 40 million users who play Zynga Poker every month, which makes it the second-most-popular game on the social network.

“Zynga Poker is an awesome game and it has a huge following — it hasn’t lost speed for them at all,” Cullen said. “We think sports betting is exactly the same thing, and that it’s going to complement them really well. We had a number of options for distribution, and partnering with Zynga made too much sense not to do.”

Third-party publishing is just one area where Zynga hopes to boost the company’s growth. The second is in real-money gaming, making Sports Casino a good match on two fronts. Last week, AllThingsD reported that Zynga hired Maytal Ginzburg as the company’s chief operating officer in charge of new markets, which includes gambling. Ginzburg was a high-level executive at 888 Holdings, which offers real-money games such as poker, bingo and sports betting online, where it is legal.

Cullen said RocketPlay was founded in 2008 as the developer behind Footbl.com, a social network for soccer fans, which managed real-money games based on fantasy teams. That is legal in the U.S. A little more than a year ago, it got serious about the opportunity on Facebook, given the popularity of virtual casino games, like slots, bingo and poker.

“We sat back and asked ‘why the hell hasn’t someone done sports betting?’” Cullen said, adding that sports betting is bigger than all the other kinds of gambling combined.

Cullen said that in addition to sports bets, Sports Casino will also incorporate other games you would normally find in a casino, like poker and slots, to keep people playing. Additionally, the Sports Casino offers “in-play betting,” which means that people will be able to place bets after a game begins on all kinds of propositions, such as which team will be the next to score, or what are the odds of a turnover.

Next, he said, the company will be bringing the game to mobile, and down the road, it will investigate the opportunity for real-money gaming, especially in Europe, where Facebook is already conducting experiments.

The company, which has 21 employees, is backed by $10 million in funding from Pitango, an Israeli-backed venture capital firm.

Here’s the press release:

RocketPlay Partners with Zynga to Bring Social Sports-Betting to Facebook and Zynga.com

Sports Casino Delivers Engaging Second-Screen Sports Experience with Live In-Game Betting

SAN FRANCISCO — Sept. 5, 2012 — RocketPlay, creators of groundbreaking social sports-betting games, today announced that it has launched Sports Casino, a social sports-betting title on Facebook and Zynga.com. Along with the game’s release, RocketPlay also announced its partnership with Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA), the world’s leading provider of social game services, to bring Sports Casino to the 306 million monthly active players on Zynga’s network of games across Facebook and other platforms. Sports Casino is available to play at www.zynga.com and on Facebook at http://apps.facebook.com/sportscasino/.

“Sports Casino delivers an authentic virtual sports-betting experience to social gaming and sports fans,” said Mani Honigstein, CEO, RocketPlay. “We’re thrilled to launch with Zynga’s support, a company that has set the social gaming benchmark and will help us bring a great game to a wide range of players.”

Sports Casino players enjoy an authentic Las Vegas-style sportsbook experience, placing virtual bets on global sports with real-time odds, while enjoying integrated casino games such as video poker, slots, and blackjack. Players can enjoy in-game, real-time betting while competing with their friends – a perfect second-screen complement to watching live sports on television. Sports Casino arrives just in time for action-packed betting on professional and college football, baseball, and international soccer.

The game appeals to the highly sought-after male gamer demographic on Facebook, particularly as social betting games continue to grow in popularity. Though the game currently uses only virtual currency, RocketPlay has developed Sports Casino to take advantage of the rising importance of real-money gambling in the social space as opportunity arises and legal restrictions are eased.

The Zynga Platform is a social gaming platform designed to give players the most social and fun gaming experience wherever they play, while helping third-party developers of all sizes launch, promote, scale and grow their games and business.

Following the Sports Casino’s release, RocketPlay will continue to update the game with new features and sports, including hockey, basketball, and more.

About RocketPlay
RocketPlay, formerly known as Gamingo, is a leading entertainment and gaming company, bringing sports and casino games to the Web, Facebook and Mobile. Developed by an experienced team comprised of social gaming and iGaming veterans from Betfair, Kabam, 888.com, and bwin.party, the company’s flagship product, Sports Casino, is the first of its kind on Facebook. RocketPlay is funded by Pitango Venture Capital and has offices in London, San Francisco and Tel Aviv.

According to sources close to the situation, News Corp.’s Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller will soon be leaving the media giant.

It seems to be a cordial, although perhaps inevitable, parting — sources said Miller will remain an adviser to chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, as well as COO Chase Carey and deputy COO James Murdoch, for a year after his departure in late September.

Update: News Corp. confirmed the departure in a press release, which is embedded below.

His leaving brings into focus the fate of News Corp.’s overall digital strategy in an upcoming new structure. Miller was hired in 2009 to turbocharge the company’s long-troubled digital assets.

But I had noted in an article in July that the well-known Internet exec was not likely to continue at News Corp. in the wake of a complex transaction that will ultimately break the company apart into two separate entities — an entertainment company and a publishing one.

That’s a very different situation from when Miller was hired by the media giant to lead its tech and online initiatives and make digital a priority across its many divisions.

Not for lack of trying or access to powerful News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch — it has been a mixed bag for Miller in his tenure.

That’s due in no small part to a problem faced by many execs like Miller: The difficulty of successfully pushing digital initiatives inside a large traditional media organization.

His job has encompassed everything from a failed effort to revive its once mighty Myspace service to selling it and other properties off to working to improve its Hulu partnership, where he serves on the board.

It is not clear who will replace Miller as one of the News Corp. directors at the complexly-owned premium video service, which had been for sale and then not recently.

One of the brighter Miller accomplishments for News Corp. has been forging decidedly better relationships with key Internet companies, both large and small, as well as with venture investors in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

That was most pronounced and visible between Apple and News Corp., which struck a number of deals to work together, some of which worked and some that had much less success.

Miller has also been active in China, working on several digital investment opportunities for News Corp. there. That included a recent $70 million investment in Bona Film Group.

He was key to a recent $45 million investment by the company and others in the company that sells the Roku video streaming device.

He also worked on various New Corp. efforts on creating channels on Google’s YouTube, including WIGS, a drama series. The jury is still out on these kinds of creative endeavors, of course, especially to a company with much more lucrative traditional film and television assets.

There was a possibility that, in his leaving, Miller might form a separate investment fund to focus on digital publishing and media, funded by News Corp. or even by the Murdoch family, who control the company.

But that has appeared not to have worked out, said sources.

Before he came to News Corp., Miller ran an investment fund with former Yahoo exec Ross Levinsohn called Fuse Capital. He also was chairman and CEO of AOL under its Time Warner ownership and was a top exec at IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Miller has remained an active angel investor, funding a range of start-ups such as Maker Studios, Voxer, Science, Solavei, Personal.com, as well many as others.

He is also chairman of OpenX and serves on the boards of Shutterstock and TripAdvisor.

Clearly, this is a world Miller will return to easily and it’s likely he’ll be starting something sooner than later. (Maybe bringing the band back together with Levinsohn?)

JonathanMillerAug23.2012

(Full disclosure: This Web site is owned by Dow Jones, which is owned — in turn — by News Corp.)