Shashi Seth, former top product exec at Yahoo, has joined the Tribune Company as president of Tribune Digital Ventures, according to sources.

He will be reporting to CEO Peter Liguori and based in Silicon Valley, apparently to set up a brand new digital arm of the Chicago-based media company.

Sources said TDV would seek to invest in, buy and partner with innovative startups, not unlike the Comcast Ventures unit of the cable giant, which is run by Amy Banse.

Seth ran a wide variety of product groups for Yahoo — the last as SVP of its Connections division — and left in January, some months after new CEO Marissa Mayer took over.

Seth had been in charge of a swath of key products at Yahoo including Yahoo Mail, the Flickr photo-sharing service and many others.

Previous to Yahoo, Seth also worked at Google and AOL.

Despite largely anecdotal media speculation, it’s not clear how the acquisition of Tumblr by Yahoo for $1.1 billion will be greeted by users of the New York blogging service.

But rival blogging service WordPress’s founder Matt Mullenweg posted on his blog last night that WordPress imports from Tumblr on Sunday — after news of the deal had been broken by AllThingsD.com — had risen from a typical 400 to 600 blog posts an hour to more than 72,000.

Whoa!

That said, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Some users of Posterous fled the blogging service when Twitter bought it, and some Instagrammers huffed off when Facebook nabbed the photo-sharing site.

And, by comparison, Tumblr says it get 75 million blog posts per day — so 72,000 are just a drop in the ironic blogging ocean.

Plus, Mullenweg thinks the high price paid by the Silicon Valley Internet giant was low.

“I think we’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain, and while Yahoo’s all-cash deal by some metrics, like revenue, is very generous, I think it’s a tenth of the value that will be created in these platforms over the coming years,” wrote Mullenweg.

Here’s his post:

It now looks pretty certain that Yahoo has pulled off a deal to buy Tumblr for 1.1B. The relationship between WordPress and Tumblr has always been pretty friendly: Tumblr’s own blog used to be on WP, WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a Publicize option alongside Twitter and Facebook, our Akismet team sends them daily emails of splogs on the service, and there’s healthy import and export traffic both ways. (Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.)

News like this, whether from a friend or a competitor, is always bittersweet: I’m curious to see what the creative folks behind Tumblr do with their new resources, both personal and corporate, but I’m more interested to know what they would have done over the next 5-10 years as an independent company. I think we’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain, and while Yahoo’s all-cash deal by some metrics, like revenue, is very generous, I think it’s a tenth of the value that will be created in these platforms over the coming years.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, the Tumblr brand will continue on in the wake of its $1.1 billion acquisition by Yahoo.

That includes definitive promises by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to once-sale-shy Tumblr CEO David Karp to allow him to shepherd the fast-growing blogging product, with no forced integration with Yahoo’s many other content properties.

That said, sources added, there will be more back-end changes to marry infrastructure, such as undergirding Tumblr’s nascent advertising business and giving it more distribution opportunities.

“At the beginning, at least, it’ll be hands-off,” said one person close to the situation. “It has to be.”

While that is probably no surprise, it’s still good news for Tumblr employees as well as its very opinionated user base, which is not likely to greet a takeover by a corporate giant of the social, iconoclastic user-generated content service.

That said, Yahoo execs discussed and are aware of issues around porn published on the site, although they believe it to be fixable over time.

As Peter Kafka noted:

To spell that out: Tumblr’s advertisers don’t have to worry about their stuff showing up on blogs like We Want Porn. At worst, it’s possible that they’ll end up advertising to a user whose dashboard includes posts from We Want Porn. But in general, they ought to be pretty well insulated from that stuff.

By the same token, if Yahoo wanted to, it could end up scrubbing Tumblr of porn, and losing a lot of users and views — but it probably wouldn’t lose much in the way of monetizable users. Unless it turns out that the majority of Tumblr’s core users have signed on exclusively to use porn.

Or, as a Tumblr investor also told Kafka: “Non-story. Tumblr is the Internet. It’s a dashboard-follower model, opt-in.”

Moving on from porn, sources close to the situation — okay, pretty much everyone is chit-chatting away now — said that Mayer spent a lot of time with Karp (who was in Silicon Valley last week, in fact, visiting her) about the transition, and about how the new ownership would impact him and the service.

One source called them “kindred spirits” on the issue, and that Mayer has been given great purview by the Yahoo board to foster Tumblr to prevent it from turning out like Flickr, Delicious and many other big acquisitions dating back to GeoCities. (I was there covering that deal way back when, and what a mess that was!)

Mayer is well-liked by product and engineering entrepreneurs, and has often focused on them at Yahoo, over the perhaps more important demands of business and advertising execs.

That would appeal to Karp, who once famously said that online advertising made him physically sick. Still, he has recently begun to embrace ad sales at Tumblr.

Within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages on users’ dashboards, which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year, and sources said it could get to up to $100 million this year.

“We’re going to be very careful here,” said a source with knowledge of the acquisition.

A source at Tumblr agreed: “This will be a very delicate dance, since so much could go wrong if done without care.”

Still, some at Yahoo are worried that the company might be chasing the youthful demographic at Tumblr too assiduously. “This is a very fickle audience,” said another high-ranking Yahoo exec. “Chasing a young one is a very tricky thing.”

Yes, indeed, but Mayer thinks she is the one to be able to pull it off and make Yahoo relevant with an even wider consumer base.

AllThingsD broke news of the deal in the offing last week, which has since been approved by Yahoo’s board.

The Yahoo board has approved a massive $1.1 billion all-cash deal to buy Tumblr.

It’s not clear when the official vote was taken, but sources close to the board said the acquisition was a foregone conclusion and was unanimously approved by the directors of Silicon Valley Internet giant.

The deal will likely be announced Monday morning, said numerous sources.

AllThingsD.com initially broke the story of the acquisition efforts and later followed up with details of the exact price and the board meeting to approve the transaction.

There were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based social blogging service. That said, Tumblr had held some very preliminary discussions about various deals with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and also Twitter earlier this year.

As part of the Yahoo deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who will get a windfall of cash from the acquisition — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain a lot of control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure, said sources.

Yahoo had been mulling some kind of deal with Tumblr, from a strategic investment to an outright acquisition, for about six weeks. Sources said that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had decided that buying the company was going to be “the stake in the ground of what her strategy is going forward for Yahoo.”

And that is to attract younger audiences with just the kind of user-generated content Tumblr has pioneered to impressive growth.

According to numerous sources, Mayer determined quickly in her research that the site was just the kind of property that Yahoo needed to make it both “cool” and relevant to new consumers.

Yahoo is looking to bolster its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different demographic and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

Tumblr’s mobile usage has also been strong, which also interested Mayer. While Tumblr started as a desktop-based service, its mobile offering has ramped up quickly in the last few years. ComScore says that a quarter of the service’s U.S. visitors now come from mobile devices.

At this price, it will be Mayer’s biggest acquisition so far. Since she became CEO last summer, Mayer has made only a series of small acquisitions of mobile startups at a low cost.

According to sources, the Tumblr brand will continue.

The deal, if consummated, will be a big win for investors. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far and is now at a reported valuation of $800 million. Investors include Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners and the Chernin Group.

While Tumblr’s Karp has resisted various offers for the company over the years, Mayer spent a lot of time with him reassuring him that Yahoo could turbocharge his business. He has also been searching for a COO to help him build out the infrastructure of its business, especially its advertising one.

And as Peter Kafka and I previously wrote, Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocketship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards,” which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year and sources said it could get up to $100 million this year.

Tumblr has been represented by Qatalyst Partners’ Frank Quattrone, while Yahoo’s Mayer, as well as M&A head Jackie Reses and CFO Ken Goldman, have been on the company’s side.

Interestingly, what got me first focused on Tumblr last week were Goldman’s comments at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference last week, where he underscored the need for the aging Yahoo to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

Tumblr, apparently, fits the very expensive bill.

There’s no picture of the moment when everything changed for Kevin Systrom. But if there were, it would look something like this: A lanky, very tall, dark-haired man in his late 20s sits on a bench at the Caltrain commuter station in Palo Alto, Calif. A sepia tone and weathered patina might underscore the mood of weighty contemplation.

It was early April of last year, and Systrom was waiting for his business partner, Mike Krieger, to arrive from San Francisco. Systrom had just left Mark Zuckerberg’s nearby house and was still digesting the offer that the Facebook founder and CEO had made him: To buy Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Systrom and Krieger had launched just 18 months before. The price Zuckerberg offered was $1 billion — $300 million in cash and the rest in Facebook stock, an especially generous-seeming deal on the eve of his company’s much-anticipated initial public offering.

The offer was even more impressive given Instagram’s size and age. At the time, it had just 13 employees, operating out of a cramped space in the South Park section of San Francisco. Still, the small crew had managed to attract 30 million Apple iPhone users in just a year and a half by offering a service that allowed a person to quickly upload, prettify through the use of filters and publish images to the Web for friends to see. A version for Google’s Android mobile operating system had launched the week before, attracting another million users in a single day.

What’s more, although the app generated no revenue, it had attracted so much attention from venture capitalists that the startup had nearly closed an impressive new round of funding at a wildly high valuation of $500 million. Zuckerberg had just doubled that, leaving Systrom with a lot to think about on that train-station bench.

Click. If there ever was a money shot to take for Instagram and Systrom, that was it.

(Photo by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson, used with permission by Vanity Fair)

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

According to sources, Facebook has moved well-regarded exec Emily White to a new job as director of business operations at its Instagram mobile photo-sharing unit.

In this capacity, she will work with Instagram head and co-founder Kevin Systrom to scale nascent efforts to expand partnerships, improve user operations and, presumably, come up with ways to make some money. The fast-growing service, which the social networking site bought a year ago in a billion-dollar mega-deal, has been popular with consumers, but it has not focused as much on its business operations.

(Update: Facebook confirmed the move and also released this statement from Systrom: “I’m excited to bring Emily White onto the Instagram team. As we continue to scale our operation to support over 100 million active users, her experience with partnerships and business operations will play a major role in our future success.”)

In fact, related to business, it has waded more into controversy — such as when changes to its terms of service suggested that Instagram could sell user photos to advertisers, a change that was quickly rescinded by Systrom. That said, it left the door open to selling advertising of some sort on the app.

White has a lot of experience in the online ad space in smoothing out and organizing ops, both at Google — where she previously worked — and at Facebook, where she started in the deal-making arena and later worked on mobile partnerships.

White — who has recently been courted by other Internet startups, reportedly including scrapbooking phenom Pinterest — is also on the board of women’s yoga and running gear retailer Lululemon. That’s good since part of her new job will be to get more big brands integrated into Instagram, which has already begun to do that with some initial level of success.

Systrom will continue to focus more on product development and overall strategy and vision, which he has done since Instagram was purchased last April.

(That photo above is of White, which she just posted on her Instagram account — natch!)

One of Yahoo’s top women execs, Elissa Murphy, who is VP of engineering for cloud services, is departing the Silicon Valley Internet giant to become CTO and head of platform efforts at Go Daddy, said sources.

It’s the second talent raid on Yahoo by the company’s former product head Blake Irving, who is now CEO at one of the world’s biggest Web hosting and domain registration companies. A few weeks ago, he grabbed James Carroll, who was SVP of the consumer and global platform group at Yahoo and who is now running international efforts at Go Daddy.

Murphy is perhaps the highest-profile woman within the tech ranks at Yahoo — besides its CEO Marissa Mayer — and is very well regarded within the company and outside it, too, for her computing expertise. She has overseen a great deal of code contributions to Hadoop, a technology essential to large-scale computing, first developed at Yahoo.

She is leaving the employ of platform head Jay Rossiter, for whom Carroll also worked.

Both Murphy and Carroll had first been hired into Yahoo by Irving.

(Update: Go Daddy confirmed the move, saying she will start May 6 as CTO and EVP of platforms there. “Elissa Murphy is more than just a top ‘woman’ in technology, she’s a top ‘person’ at the top of her field,” said Irving in a statement. “Elissa just plain rocks.”)

She seems to, as currently featured on a Yahoo careers page that touts “stories from our most valuable assets.”

Read the deservedly effusive text about her: “Yahoo!’s ability to retain a fun, startup-like feel is what attracted Elissa Murphy to Yahoo!. The VP of Engineering for Cloud Services says that this unique combination makes for a creative, yet fast-paced environment that is unlike anything else in the industry. ‘You want to build cloud systems but you want to do it quickly? This is the place you want to come to.’”

I have emails into all for comment.

But here’s Murphy’s classy memo to the troops on her departure, in which she praises Mayer, so we don’t need Yahoo PR to return our email for comment:

TITLE: So long!

Hi all,

I’m writing you today to share that I’ve just resigned my position as head of Cloud Services and Hadoop at Yahoo! to pursue a new venture. The time I’ve spent working and learning with you has been wonderful, and it’s not easy to say goodbye. I have, however, been presented with a truly unique opportunity to expand my scope of impact at a company with indomitable spirit, brimming with passion and hell-bent on changing the world.

From my first experience programming a PET computer in 4th grade and throughout my career, I’ve been captivated by the potential for technology to transform people’s lives. In my time with Yahoo!, it’s been adrenalizing to push the limits on one of the world’s largest-scale cloud infrastructures — opening the door for new advances in machine learning and predictive analytics. When I look back on the achievements I’m most proud of during my time here they all center on people and innovation. I am proud to have played a role in making Yahoo! a leading voice in Hadoop by launching the next generation of Hadoop at scale. I am proud that in less than a year alone we’ve been able to accomplish more with Hadoop, Storm, OpenStack and our NoSQL stores than many thought possible. I am proud that we continue to fight for open source and open ecosystems, even as those around us profit from further locking them down. And I am proud to have helped lead the effort to pull ourselves up from our bootstraps, to get back up, and to remind the world that Yahoo! still has a place in their hearts and homes.

But most of all, I am proud to have worked with so many smart and talented people. I feel honored to call so many of you friends, and I thank you all for the opportunity to work alongside you. If you want to connect, you can find me at here.

I want to give a special thanks to Marissa, who has brought a thoughtfulness and determination to Yahoo! that promises new hope for our culture. Marissa, I can’t tell you how much I have appreciated your sponsorship and counsel, and for your support as I move forward. I believe Yahoo’s brightest days are still ahead with you at the helm, and I’ll be watching and cheering for your success in the years to come.

So long everyone — I hope our paths cross in a future more near than distant!

Best,

elissa

[Photo from Yahoo Careers Web site]

According to sources, Amazon paid about $150 million for Goodreads, the popular books recommendation service. But that number could close in on $200 million, if certain performance metrics are met.

And, while BusinessWeek ran a we-are-just-guessing story today that posited a self-described “overly simple, back-of-the-envelope estimate” of $1 billion, sources said that number is simply wrong.

I am still trying to determine how much of the deal was cash — most of it, said sources — and how much was stock.

The San Francisco-based Goodreads had raised close to $3 million from a range of angel investors, as well as True Ventures. The sale is a big win for the firm, which apparently owned between 20 percent and 30 percent of Goodreads.

The online retail giant bought the company to help its book-y social discovery efforts for customers.

Amazon declined to comment, but the Seattle-based company said previously that the deal should close in the second quarter. It’s not the first time Amazon has bought a social book site — in 2008, the company acquired Shelfari for under $10 million.

According to sources, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is close to launching a new startup called Jelly, which one person called a “native mobile” effort.

While it’s not clear exactly what that means, sources said the well-known entrepreneur has already hired four or five employees to form a team on the mystery product that will likely be aimed at smartphones and tablets.

It’s an interesting move, since Stone is also running a small incubator called Obvious with one of his Twitter co-founders, Ev Williams. They left their daily roles at the high-profile microblogging service to create Obvious, which has startups such as Lift, Branch and Medium in its portfolio.

There has been low-level chatter in Silicon Valley about Stone’s startup, which some have taken to mean he is no longer working as much with Williams at Obvious. But sources said that is not the case and both are involved in helping their small group of startups.

That said, Williams has been focusing more on Medium, an effort to rejigger blogging and content platforms. Meanwhile, another Obvious principal, Jason Goldman, has been focused on Branch, an online conversation-focused site.

Presumably, Obvious will invest in Jelly, but that’s not clear.

If truth be told, Jerry Yang never really disappeared from the Silicon Valley scene, even though he did leave Yahoo rather suddenly just over a year ago — resigning from the board and all other positions at the iconic company he co-founded with David Filo in 1995, and then going very quiet.

When I met him last week at the airy and newish office space of Ame Cloud Ventures, off Camino Real, he politely declined to talk about that Yahoo tenure and departure, although Yahoo and he are inextricably linked in the history of tech.

That’s because the former Chief Yahoo has moved onto the next stage of his career, which perhaps could be called Jerry 2.0 — a term he’d hate (and give me a hard time for using).

Still, in many ways, Yang has launched a new digital life by focusing on what made him interested in tech in the first place: Entrepreneurs.

“I feel like the thing I missed the most is what really early entrepreneurs were doing,” he said of his latest efforts, which have been well known among techies, even if Yang has never been one to toot his own horn much in general. “I’m not sure at all that I’m any good at this mentoring/investing business — that’s why I’m using my own money, and that’s why it’s not a career.”

Yet. Yang is calling his nascent investment business — he’s more than an angel, but not quite a VC — a “work in progress” that might morph into something more.

“There are no LPs — just me, myself and I,” said Yang. “I invest in things for the long term and have a long horizon and the flexibility.”

That said, via Ame — which means rain (雨) in Japanese and happens to be the acronym of the names of his wife and kids — Yang has already invested in about two dozen startups in which he has typically puts in $100,000 to $500,000.

Explaining the name, Yang said: “Without rain, there is no life.”

And it’s clear that Yang has been very busy dousing the startup sector with a wide range of interesting investments, including:

• dotCloud, an application platform for developers
• AeroFS, a private file syncing and sharing service
• Impermium, an Internet security offering
• Jetpac, a travel app for the Apple iPad
• Lex Machina, IP litigation data and analytics
• Tomfoolery, which is aimed at improving mobile enterprise apps

Yang said what informs his investment choices centers on the activity around mobility, sensors, cloud and big data that is enabling the next generation of computing.

“The main investing premise is the idea that devices are more and more network connected,” said Yang, who noted that data that is being collected is now at another order of magnitude than ever before. “The cloud has become the next-generation supercomputer, and the smartphone has provided the revolution to spur its use.”

To select from the companies he sees, Yang has only one young associate, Nick Adams, who codes, helps on deal mechanics, interacts with entrepreneurs and also has had extensive experience in Asia.

That has been important, since Adams also leads business development for China’s Cloud Valley, which is run by Edward Tian, one of Yang’s strategic partners there. It was with Cloud Valley that Evernote, the hot productivity app in which Yang is also an investor, partnered to create a business there.

Still, Yang is not completely alone. He has weekly meetings with another former Yahoo, Ash Patel — who started the $10 million micro-venture fund Morado Ventures, which means “purple” in Spanish, and has a lot of ex-Yahoos as investors — as well as individual angel and former Yahoo CTO Farzad Nazem.

The trio trade ideas and deal flow, sometimes making bets together and sometimes not. Most of all, they leverage their time in the tech sector, both good and bad.

“I might not have better ideas, but I think my experience is unique and helpful [to entrepreneurs] and there is a value to my network,” said Yang. “I think what I have to contribute, besides money and a network, is that I am very candid about the experience I have had.”

That is indeed the case, because it is clear that Yang has a lot of wisdom to impart from his long and eventful history at Yahoo, as well as his stature as one of the Internet’s most important pioneers.

And, having covered the often circumspect Yang for much of that time, I would have to say that these days he looks about as energized, excited and enthusiastic as I have ever seen him.

“I’m truly humbled by the talent that’s out there, and at the same time recognize it’s a very crowded space,” said Yang. “It is not a career yet, but I’m having a lot of fun, and we’ll see.”

As I noted in a piece last week about the departure of Yahoo Mail head Vivek Sharma for a new job at Disney, the Silicon Valley Internet giant is likely to see a lot more execs unhappy with the new regime of CEO Marissa Mayer take off after annual bonuses start being handed out in March.

Today, it’s James Carroll, SVP of the consumer and global platform group at Yahoo.

In the job, the former Microsoft exec has been in charge of the company’s global R&D centers in China, India and the Middle East and been “responsible for Yahoo’s content, social and membership platforms and the international delivery of all Yahoo! products and services worldwide.” That has included all its efforts at internationalization, international infrastructure development and localization.

Sources said he is leaving to head international at Go Daddy, one of the world’s biggest Web hosting and domain registration companies. Go Daddy is led by former Yahoo product head Blake Irving, who had hired Carroll at Yahoo in 2010.

And, as NBC announced earlier today, editor in chief of Yahoo News, Hillary Frey, has taken a job there as editorial director of news at NBCNews.com, which is undergoing a major refurbishment. She had been at Yahoo since late 2011.

Many more to come, I am told, as execs either decide to depart or Mayer continues to clean house. It’s still unclear who will be taking over these key jobs at Yahoo.

One thing for sure: I don’t expect a comment from Yahoo PR on the changes.

Many of them, of course, have also faced cease-and-desist orders or other obstacles from local governments that have expressed concern about liability — and legality.

So, Lyft, probably best known for the giant, hot-pink mustache emblem that drivers slap on their cars, has come up with a SXSW stunt that gets them a little bit of attention without getting into legal hot water in Austin: Free Lyft piggyback rides.

The startup has dispatched around 20 ride-givers — some of them semiprofessional rugby players — to give conference-goers a literal lift around the town.

If you’re not lucky enough to run into one of these pink-mustache-wearing men on the street, as I did today, you can request a Lyft piggyback ride as a temporary option from within the Lyft mobile app. (The full version of the Lyft mobile app, which connects you with real-people drivers willing to use their own cars to give rides, is currently only operating in San Francisco and Los Angeles.)

John Zimmer, co-founder and COO of Zimride, the company behind Lyft, says the piggyback rides were mostly just about having a little bit of fun in Texas.

Lyft isn’t the only one getting creative in Austin, where taxis, pedicabs, and limousines are tightly regulated. SideCar is making all rides free during the fest, and Uber, which primarily hooks users up with town car service, is offering pedicab rides around the city.

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RealNetworks said it has hired Max Pellegrini to run its mobile entertainment division, which offers a range of services to carriers and device manufacturers.

He replaces Mike Lunsford, who is leaving the Seattle-based company after five years.

In his new job, Pellegrini will also be charged with developing new consumer services for smartphones. Pellegrini comes from premium mobile Web firm Dada.net, where he was chairman and CEO. Dada was acquired by mobile entertainment company Buongiorno in 2011, which was then bought by NTT DoCoMo last year.

RealNetworks is attempting to reinvigorate its business under the leadership of its founder and chairman, Rob Glaser, who is currently interim CEO, by focusing on some core areas, such as mobile entertainment.

It reaches consumers via partnerships with carriers such as T-Mobile and Verizon, offering ring-back tones, ring tones and music on demand.

According to multiple sources close to the situation, Yahoo Connections SVP Shashi Seth is leaving the company. CEO Marissa Mayer sent an email to staff earlier today saying the last day for one of the top execs of the company would be tomorrow.

[UPDATE: A Yahoo spokesperson confirmed the departure of Seth, as well as that of Chief Information Security Justin Somaini, which I reported yesterday.]

As I reported last night, rumors of the former Google and AOL executive’s departure have been running through Yahoo for months and now it appears to be true.

Sources said Mayer is in the midst of culling top execs, even as some are contemplating departure due to unhappiness under her new regime.

Seth has been in charge of a swath of key products at Yahoo including Yahoo Mail, the Flickr photo-sharing service and many others. Mayer is an experienced product exec from her tenure at Google and has been involving herself deeply in that arena.

Seth also posted a goodbye on the LinkedIn social network, writing:

“After three years I have come to the incredibly hard decision to move on from Yahoo. I truly enjoyed working with an amazing team, that was passionate, hard working, and truly brilliant. I will miss working with them!”

YouSendIt, the file-sharing and enterprise collaboration company, said it had bought a small startup called Found Software that helps users find and discover a wide range of data across many devices and cloud services.

The Campbell, Calif.-based YouSendIt, whose newish CEO is former Yahoo and AOL exec Brad Garlinghouse, said it had found a “cloud-nostic platform” — no, really, it did coin that term — to increase the mobile capabilities of its services.

YouSendIt did not disclose the price it paid for San Francisco-based Found, which was co-founded by Stephen Brady, Vijay Sundaram and John Mitchell. They will all join YouSendIt.

But the acquisition does give the company some differentiation in search and discovery in the fast-growing data storage and sharing space, as it seeks to compete with powerful rivals from Dropbox to similar offerings by big companies like Google.

I talked to Garlinghouse about this, as well as why he went to YouSendIt, and how it might be rebranded going forward, in the video below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130115/yousendits-brad-garlinghouse-talks-about-found-acquisition-rebranding-and-more-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130114/special-projects-head-shakil-khan-moves-on-from-path/ http://allthingsd.com/20130114/special-projects-head-shakil-khan-moves-on-from-path/#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2013 07:30:17 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=285399

Shakil Khan — the well-known head of special projects for the popular Spotify music service, who took the same kind of job at Path last year — is departing the personal social networking site.

He will remain a special adviser, and is also an investor in the San Francisco-based startup.

The globe-trotting Khan (pictured here), who arrived at the startup only last March, had worked with Path on a number of efforts, especially in expanding its international presence. Path recently hired Shindo Kimihiko to turbocharge the company’s efforts in the fast-growing Asian markets.

A Path spokeswoman confirmed the departure after I inquired, and the London-based Khan also emailed me this statement:

When I joined Path, the company was just 20 people, only available in a handful of languages and the resources were mainly U.S.-focused. During my time there, we launched in 17 languages, established great teams in marketing, localization, growth and international and doubled the number of staff. As more than 50 percent of Path’s usage is now international, I’d say that my original objective of helping Path to think in more international terms and capitalize on global opportunities is done :) Moving to the next stage of Path’s growth, I remain as a Special Advisor to the company, as well as continuing to spend time with my other investment companies, including Spotify, SecondMarket, Summly, Blackjet and a couple of exciting startups at incubation stage.

Path recently announced that the service — which has raised $55 million in funding — had five million users.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130114/special-projects-head-shakil-khan-moves-on-from-path/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130114/taskrabbit-hires-googles-brown-philpot-in-a-renewed-management-expansion-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130114/taskrabbit-hires-googles-brown-philpot-in-a-renewed-management-expansion-video/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2013 16:00:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=285019

TaskRabbit, the San Francisco-based marketplace for personal projects and services, has hired longtime Google exec Stacy Brown-Philpot as COO.

As both its funding and also competition have increased, the move is another major effort by TaskRabbit to up its management game.

Brown-Philpot certainly fits the bill, having worked at a wide range of jobs at Google for more than a decade. The Detroit native was most recently an entrepreneur in residence at Google Ventures, and has worked on global operations for a wide range of products — including as head of online sales and operations for Google India — and also in high-level finance jobs at the Silicon Valley search giant.

Previous to Google, Brown-Philpot worked at the PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting firm and also in M&A at Goldman Sachs. She attended the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and has an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

In other words, a very impressive resume — more impressive, given that she has always been a straightforward and charming exec in my many encounters with her over the years.

Brown-Philpot will be the second time that TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque has tried to expand the company’s top talent base. In June of last year, Busque took back the title of CEO from Hotwire founder Eric Grosse, who had been hired in late 2011.

But in November of 2012, TaskRabbit bought One Jackson, adding Anne Raimondi (pictured above with Brown-Philpot and Busque) as chief revenue officer. And now Brown-Philpot.

The trio has their work cut out for them. Last July, the company garnered another $13 million in funding in a Series C round, led by Founders Fund and including existing investors such as Shasta Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Parters. The startup has raised $38 million in total over its five-year history.

Here’s the video of an interview about the expansion plans that I did late last week with Busque and Brown-Philpot at their SOMA offices in San Francisco:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130114/taskrabbit-hires-googles-brown-philpot-in-a-renewed-management-expansion-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130114/anne-wojcicki-of-23andme-on-one-million-dna-march-and-more-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130114/anne-wojcicki-of-23andme-on-one-million-dna-march-and-more-video/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2013 11:00:43 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=284541

Last week, I paid a visit to the Mountain View, Calif., offices of personal genomics company 23andMe, which just raised more than $50 million in a new funding round, to add to the $68 million it has garnered since it was founded in 2006.

The new financing includes Russian investor Yuri Milner, as well as existing ones including Sergey Brin of Google, New Enterprise Associates, Google Ventures and MPM Capital.

While there, I interviewed CEO Anne Wojcicki about what she plans to do with all that money, including the company’s effort to get one million people to get detailed information on their DNA by cutting the price of its tests to $99.

23andMe’s Personal Genome service now offers 244 reports on health and personal traits, as well as genealogy and ancestry information that people can share socially. That’s down from the original $999 price that provided only 14 reports.

Wojcicki said she hopes that will spur more interest about from whence we came, and also how important it is to know your own genetics, to be aware of, prepare for and also prevent diseases of all kinds.

(On a personal note, that is exactly what happened to me after Wojcicki contacted me in China, after I had a serious stroke, to give me critical info from my own 23andme profile about a blood anomoly I had that was key to my care.)

Here’s the video of my interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130114/anne-wojcicki-of-23andme-on-one-million-dna-march-and-more-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130105/yahoos-new-homerun-homepage-is-rolling-out-more-widely-across-several-browsers/ http://allthingsd.com/20130105/yahoos-new-homerun-homepage-is-rolling-out-more-widely-across-several-browsers/#comments Sun, 06 Jan 2013 07:41:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=282676

Yahoo appears to be rolling out the newest version of the redesign of its homepage even more extensively across several major browsers, including Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

As AllThingsD has previously reported several times, the Silicon Valley Internet giant has been working on a new homepage look, designed to improve its declining consumer usage.

The latest look has been present on all my browsers all day, rather than cycling off to the old version as before. The design is cleaner, with a more touchscreen tablet approach, new icons, and a scrolling news feature. With a more mobile feel, it’s slightly different than previous new versions that Yahoo has been testing over the last few months.

After redoing its Yahoo Mail and Flickr photo-sharing service, sources inside the company said that Yahoo is now close to launching the new homepage. It’s part of an effort called Project Homerun and also a larger effort called Project Zed, which will also include more personalization and a focus on bringing in a range of third-party content.

More on what that means soon …

Until then, here are three different screenshots from tonight from Chrome, Safari and Firefox:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130105/yahoos-new-homerun-homepage-is-rolling-out-more-widely-across-several-browsers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121225/netflix-hit-by-outage-blames-amazon/ http://allthingsd.com/20121225/netflix-hit-by-outage-blames-amazon/#comments Tue, 25 Dec 2012 18:26:53 +0000 Greg Bensinger http://allthingsd.com/?p=280576 Netflix Inc. said its streaming video service was hit by an outage as a result of problems at Web service provider Amazon.com Inc.

“Netflix is down for some customers this Christmas Eve, thanks to an outage of some of Amazon’s cloud infrastructure,” the company said on its Twitter account.

A Netflix spokesman added that the outage stretched “across the Americas.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121225/netflix-hit-by-outage-blames-amazon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121217/tasty-foodydirects-gets-3m-as-former-goldman-banker-turns-entrepreneur/ http://allthingsd.com/20121217/tasty-foodydirects-gets-3m-as-former-goldman-banker-turns-entrepreneur/#comments Mon, 17 Dec 2012 19:01:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=278386

For a long time in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, Brad Koenig was one of Silicon Valley’s top investment bankers, shepherding deals such as Yahoo’s IPO and a plethora of others.

That’s no surprise, given that he was the managing director and head of global technology investment banking at Goldman Sachs. Goldman, as well as Morgan Stanley, led many of the big-name, big-money transactions for the digerati.

But no matter how you slice it, Koenig’s job was on the sidelines as a facilitator rather than as a participant.

No longer. After retiring in 2005 from Goldman and doing a bunch of advising work, Koenig decided to jump into the fray, putting his money into a new start-up called FoodyDirect.

Simply put, the service ships food from iconic restaurants, bakeries and other specialty food outlets, adding in a variety of information about the products and also making it easier for those businesses to ship.

Some of the offers being coordinated include well-known — among foodies, at least — fare from places such as Anderson’s Frozen Custard in Buffalo, N.Y.; Black’s Barbecue in Lockhart, Texas; Sable’s Smoked Fish in New York City; and Hancock Gourmet Lobster in Cundy’s Harbor, Maine.

I tried both Anderson’s and Sable’s and they arrived on time and fresh — as well as delicious — which is presumably the selling point that FoodyDirect pitches to merchants.

While many of these restaurants do this on their own, Koenig is hoping that the systems FoodyDirect creates are easier and more efficient, from packaging to shipping.

Of course, FoodyDirect faces a lot of competition — from big online retailers like Amazon to smaller ones like Gilt Taste — as well as an uphill battle to acquire frequent customers.

But Koenig believes in the concept so much — which he is doing with his brother, who has been in the restaurant biz for 25 years — that he invested his own money in the initial effort.

Now, along with more money from him, a bunch of angel investors and venture interest, FoodyDirect is getting $3 million more to see if the concept pans out.

Here’s Koenig talking about his new life on the other side of the table:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121217/tasty-foodydirects-gets-3m-as-former-goldman-banker-turns-entrepreneur/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121213/along-with-flickr-mail-and-homepage-yahoos-board-will-also-get-a-refresh/ http://allthingsd.com/20121213/along-with-flickr-mail-and-homepage-yahoos-board-will-also-get-a-refresh/#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:05:47 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=277476

In the last week, Yahoo has redone its powerful Yahoo Mail, refreshed its Flickr photo-sharing service and is also set to release a spanking new homepage design.

It’s part of a series of changes made since new CEO Marissa Mayer arrived this summer from Google, including detailed employee performance reviews, free food, new smartphones and a hunt for innovative mobile properties to scoop up to improve Yahoo’s creaky Silicon Valley reputation.

Now, according to sources close to the situation, that rejiggering will extend to Yahoo’s board too, with an effort to add more Internet savvy members as directors.

That’s actually be an aim for a while, including a board appointment for longtime entrepreneur Max Levchin, which sources said will occur soon.

In fact, Levchin has been mulling the Yahoo board job for a while, having long been intrigued by the company’s troubles and seeing it as an opportunity rather than a liability.

The wooing of Levchin is also not new. As I wrote in February, he had been pegged for a board seat by then-activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point — who is now on the board after winning his fight with Yahoo and ousted former CEO Scott Thompson. But Levchin, as well as SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg, did not want to be part of a dissident slate against Yahoo co-founder and then-board member Jerry Yang.

I had written in September that the board was again looking at Levchin, for a seat designated under an agreement Yahoo had made with Loeb.

The hedge fund investor, who owns a large chunk of Yahoo, had the right to nominate a mutually agreed-upon fourth director after the company settled the proxy fight with him earlier this year. The other directors he nominated previously were Michael Wolf and Harry Wilson.

The thoughtful and cerebral Levchin (pictured here) is best known as a top exec at PayPal. He then founded Slide, a then-hot start-up that made apps — then called “widgets” — for Facebook, including some that let you toss sheep (remember SuperPoke!?!).

(I had been hard on Slide back then, noting that the idea of a “Widget IPO” was ludicrous: “It’s a sign to me that suddenly makes the scene feel very bubbly, given that Slide certainly has traffic, but no proven track record to continually make money.”)

But Slide, which Levchin considered a disappointment despite a huge funding valuing the company at $550 million, was sold to Google for $180 million in mid-2010.

Levchin quickly chafed at the search giant, after working on a variety of social efforts there, including clashing with Google+ leader Vic Gundotra. Levchin did not work that closely with Mayer while at Google, although they are friendly.

He eventually left the company in mid-2011, with Google shuttering Slide, and has since been working on a new start-up in San Francisco.

An active angel investor, he’s one of many entrepreneurs in the Web arena that young start-ups look up to, which is the presumable reason for bringing him onto the Yahoo board. Once added, he’d easily be the hippest director in the group.

The Yahoo board changes will also include the departure of some board members, including Weather Channel CEO David Kenny, who had once been considered as a possible CEO of Yahoo. Other rumors that had been raised included a change in chairman, but sources said that this is not the case for now.

When I emailed and texted him yesterday afternoon about the board changes I had heard were coming, Yahoo Chairman Fred Amoroso wrote me: “As a matter of policy, I don’t comment on rumors.”

Kenny also declined to comment yesterday, noting he was on a plane and was not reachable.

Presumbly, he was returning east from the Yahoo board meeting that was held earlier this week in Silicon Valley.

The Yahoo board moves echo similar changes that were made when former CEO Carol Bartz came into office.

The New York Times also posted on the changes, noting Intuit CEO Brad Smith was also leaving the board. Last year, Smith had become a very active board member, especially after Bartz and then Thompson were ousted, but his own board at the financial software company had been asking him to cut back.

Sources said other new directors might also be named to replace him, but that this was not going to be announced by Yahoo at this time.

Until the inevitable board news, here’s a video of one of many interviews I did with Levchin — this back in 2009 — to give you an idea of his stylings:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121213/along-with-flickr-mail-and-homepage-yahoos-board-will-also-get-a-refresh/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121211/former-yahoo-exec-blake-irving-named-ceo-of-domain-giant-go-daddy/ http://allthingsd.com/20121211/former-yahoo-exec-blake-irving-named-ceo-of-domain-giant-go-daddy/#comments Tue, 11 Dec 2012 15:05:01 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=276719

Go Daddy, the world’s biggest Web hosting and domain registration company, has hired former Yahoo Chief Product Officer and Microsoft exec Blake Irving to be its new CEO.

The privately-held Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company said Irving would start his new job on January 7 and will also join its board of directors. He is replacing Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’ Scott Wagner, who served as interim CEO since the summer, after Warren Adelman stepped down after only eight months on the job.

Private equity firm KKR is a major investor in Go Daddy, along with Silver Lake. The pair, as well as Technology Crossover Ventures, purchased a major stake in the company for $2.3 billion in a leveraged buyout in 2011. Go Daddy Executive Chairman and founder Bob Parsons — well known for being outspoken — also still holds a large percentage.

Go Daddy — which had sales of $1.3 billion in 2012 from fees from a wide variety of services offered to 11 million small business customers — is the largest registrar of Web sites, managing 54 million domains and hosting more than 5 million accounts. But it has been expanding the suite of services it offers.

“Go Daddy is an on-ramp for small business and I view it as a platform at tremendous scale for them,” said Irving in an interview yesterday, who noted he had 45 domains at Go Daddy himself. “There is a real vision here at further combining all these capabilities and opportunities here in the U.S. and internationally.”

For example, Go Daddy said that it recently bought Outright.com, a cloud-based financial management app, and also launched a mobile Web site-building tool.

Irving, as well as Wagner, underscored the global opportunities he intended to focus on. “If we move quickly, we can manage these opportunities into a bigger juggernaut,” he said, noting companies like Google, Intuit and others were also seeking to expand.

Currently, said Wagner, about one-third of customers added are internationally based and the business is about 25 percent of revenue, although most of the 3,400 Go Daddy employees are based in Arizona.

Go Daddy is not without its controversies — it has gotten dinged in recent years for its racy advertisements featuring scantily-clad women and also its support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which it later pulled.

Irving was a longtime Microsoft exec, including heading its Windows Live platform. Most recently he served as Chief Product Officer at Yahoo, before resigning earlier this year under the regime of now-ousted CEO Scott Thompson. He is a graduate of San Diego State and got his MBA degree from Pepperdine University.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121211/former-yahoo-exec-blake-irving-named-ceo-of-domain-giant-go-daddy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121130/yahoo-ordered-to-pay-2-7-billion-yes-billion-by-mexican-court/ http://allthingsd.com/20121130/yahoo-ordered-to-pay-2-7-billion-yes-billion-by-mexican-court/#comments Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:46:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=274227

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

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121130/yahoo-ordered-to-pay-2-7-billion-yes-billion-by-mexican-court/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121128/first-saas-now-waas-bityota-moves-from-stealth-with-12m-in-big-data-play/ http://allthingsd.com/20121128/first-saas-now-waas-bityota-moves-from-stealth-with-12m-in-big-data-play/#comments Wed, 28 Nov 2012 20:00:43 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=273329

BitYota — a data “warehouse-as-a-service” start-up led by a former top Yahoo engineering exec — has emerged from stealth mode with $12 million in funding from some top Silicon Valley investors, including Jerry Yang.

The company describes it as a “SaaS-model Data Warehousing platform” — which essentially means it is in the explosive business of helping businesses better manage and understand ever larger troves of digital data in the cloud.

BitYota said its service will first be available on Amazon Web Services.

“Companies across every spectrum have an undeniable need to use data to unlock new sources of economic value but relatively few companies have invested sufficient time, money or people to do this right,” Dev Patel, CEO of BitYota, said in a statement. “We believe that data and analytics should be broadly accessible to everyone inside the company and it shouldn’t take a fortune to analyze data.”

Patel should know big data — he was, until last summer, a top engineering exec at Yahoo, working on advertising products and data platforms. Previously, he was CEO of Whereonearth, a geo-targeting company that Yahoo bought in 2005.

The start-up got its $12 million funding from a range of investors, including Globespan Capital, the Social+Capital Partnership, Dawn Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Crosslink Capital and Morado Ventures, as well as individual investors such as Yang and others.

Here’s BitYota’s official press release, for those who want more deets:

BITYOTA Press Release_FINAL

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