search deal

Owen Van Natta Out at MySpace

Peter Kafka in Media on February 10, 2010 at 5:45 pm PT

Owen Van Natta, the prominent Internet executive brought in to overhaul MySpace, has left after less than a year. News Corp., which owns the social network, has replaced the CEO with his former lieutenants, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who have been named co-presidents.

Google Makes AOL’s Turnaround Task Even Harder

Peter Kafka in Media on November 13, 2009 at 6:43 am PT

Little by little, AOL is offering investors more and more details about what the company will look like after it spins off from Time Warner. But the more AOL discloses, the less attractive the company looks. The newest problem: AOL’s steady flow of Google money is going away.

Yahoo’s Bartz: Microsoft Deal Was “Very Clever”

Peter Kafka in Media on September 22, 2009 at 10:35 am PT

More from the post-Q&A Q&A: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says major investors like Gordon Crawford support her, and that she’s in the market for medium-sized M&A. Here’s what she had to say.

D7 Interview: Jon Miller and Owen Van Natta Say MySpace Needs to Innovate

Peter Kafka in D7 on May 27, 2009 at 4:49 pm PT

A couple of years ago, MySpace was the hottest thing on the Web. But that was a couple of years ago. Now the social network has gone cold: It is losing audience to Facebook and other sites and may well lose a very lucrative search deal with Google. Fixing MySpace is the chief priority of Jon Miller, the former AOL boss who was brought on as News Corp.’s chief digital officer in March. About a month after that, Miller brought on former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta and a new management team to run MySpace, displacing the site’s founders. Time for Van Natta to tell us just how he intends to save what was once one of the most important sites on the Web. And time for Miller to explain the digital future for the rest of News Corp.–which happens to own this conference.

Microsoft CFO: With or Without YHOO

John Paczkowski in News on February 27, 2009 at 5:15 am PT

Microsoft is still interested in a search deal with Yahoo, but for now it’s assuming one’s not in the cards. That’s the word from Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell, who, in remarks at a Goldman Sachs conference in San Francisco Thursday, said Yahoo is not a “silver bullet” solution for the problems with its search business.

Yahoo CFO Blake Jorgensen Out as Bartz Starts Reorg

Peter Kafka in Media on February 26, 2009 at 9:52 am PT

Time to start “getting our house in order,” Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has declared. One of the first steps: Sweeping out CFO Blake Jorgensen. Jorgensen, you may recall, was the Yahoo executive who was signaling the company’s interest in a Microsoft search deal just yesterday.