In what will be a major shift in how the Silicon Valley Internet giant sells online advertising, Yahoo’s new COO Henrique De Castro has briefed employees on a plan to move its sales organization to a “category” model, according to numerous sources close to the situation.

Simply put, that means its sales reps will sell all of Yahoo’s ad products, as well as its search offerings, in a vertical process organized around advertiser segments, such as automotive, entertainment and packaged goods.

This is how Google, where both De Castro and CEO Marissa Mayer recently worked, conducts its ad sales efforts. (After copying free food and smartphones, staff evaluation efforts and more, What Would Google Do seems to be strategery at Yahoo these days.)

In contrast, Yahoo has long sold its advertising in a regional and tiered organization against premium and performance inventory in display and search.

The move from regional to vertical is a “seismic shift,” said one source quite accurately. That’s because Yahoo’s go-to-market efforts have been designed to avoid vertical conflict and its sales staff have built up advertiser relations across many areas. In a vertical organization, those reps will be forced to give up these long-term relationships with marketers, some of which have been built over years.

There are, of course, many different ways to organize sales — and each has its fans and detractors. But one thing is clear: Making such a major change has potentially large ramifications on Yahoo’s financial performance, at least in the short term, since advertising makes up the bulk of its revenue.

The change might also result in some attrition among the sales staff, said sources, although many at Yahoo are expecting that De Castro will bring in his own execs from outside to help with the transition. (One interesting name I heard floated was former Googler Penry Price, who was close to De Castro when they both worked there. He is currently president of Media6Degrees, an ad targeting start-up.)

De Castro (pictured here) will need all the help he can get as he overhauls Yahoo’s sales efforts. Well-regarded Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett left Yahoo in mid-October after De Castro got the COO job.

His departure has left a large gap in sales leadership and in maintaining strong relationships with big advertisers and agencies. De Castro himself is not as well known in the ad marketplace, despite many years at Google in sales (more on that to come).

Currently, the key ad execs at Yahoo under De Castro are Peter Foster, who heads audience advertising, and Mark Ellis, VP of North American sales and global partnerships.

De Castro outlined the new ad org plan to staff immediately after a multi-day offsite with top sales leaders last week, at which Yahoo’s acquisition options in the ad tech market were also discussed.

Sources said De Castro noted that the changes could take place as early as January 1.

De Castro is also planning to have Yahoo’s annual global sales meeting for the end of January in Las Vegas. Last March, the gathering — then set for about 1,300 advertising staffers in Florida — was cancelled due to a restructuring under ousted CEO Scott Thompson.

In addition, sources said, Yahoo is planning on having a much more prominent presence at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show — also taking place in Las Vegas in January — in order to solidify its relationships with advertisers.

Its big weapon at the giant annual confab will apparently be Mayer, who has not yet interfaced significantly with the company’s big ad clients since taking the top job in July. At CES, sources said, Yahoo is hoping the “Marissa Halo” — i.e. excitement around the telegenic exec — will help boost its business.

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

Former Yahoo exec Ross Levinsohn, who has laid pretty low since he left there earlier this year, will be joining the board of the Venice, Calif.-based video start-up, Zefr.

“Ross is a perfect intersection of everything we are in media and technology,” said Zefr co-founder Zach James. “He understands both sides natively, and we need that kind of expertise.”

Indeed — the company raised $18.5 million in additional funding this summer to turbocharge its offerings.

At the time, Zefr changed its name from Movieclips, and added sports, television and music videos to its film efforts. Zefr launched in 2009 as a niche video catalog site, focusing on helping movie studios collect and monetize fan and professional postings on YouTube, and offering advertisers a large network of premium movie clips.

The company said then that it had 600 million monthly views, 25,000 movie clips, and three billion total lifetime views on YouTube. It is about to celebrate one billion monthly views.

“Zefr has all the ingredients for success — dynamic, inspiring management, the ability to marry technology and content, and a business model that can scale,” said Levinsohn. “I’m thrilled to be part of the team.”

According to sources close to the situation, several Groupon board members have been seriously discussing making major leadership changes at the Chicago-based daily deals company, including bringing in a more experienced CEO to take over for co-founder Andrew Mason.

The board of Groupon has a regularly scheduled meeting later this week; sources said such management issues are likely to be discussed there, due to increasing frustration by some directors about the novice CEO’s performance so far.

To be clear, a move to replace Mason is not likely to happen immediately, if at all. And, in any case, any changes are likely to be done with his involvement. In addition, Mason also has support on the eight-member board — director and former AOL exec Ted Leonsis has always been a key mentor to him, for example.

But it has become obvious over the last months that a substantive rift has been developing between Groupon’s key players.

That has centered on Mason’s co-founder and Groupon executive chairman, Eric Lefkofsky, and board member and co-founder Brad Keywell. They, as well as several other directors, have been urging Mason to be more aggressive and public about the company’s turnaround efforts, sources said.

“The question is not whether Andrew is a good guy, but whether Groupon needs an Eric Schmidt,” said one person close to the situation, referring to the former Google CEO who was brought in to work closely with the company’s two founders. “And there’s been a lot more pressure now on the board to consider this seriously.”

The thoughtful and affable Mason — who has been the heart and soul of Groupon’s quirky culture and innovative product strategy — has indeed sometimes seemed to be in over his head in terms of leadership once the stakes got higher and the pressure increased after its IPO was announced last June.

While the company’s struggles have been well known for a while now, discussions about Mason’s tenure as CEO have increased as its stock has dropped precipitously. That has prompted its directors and management to seek to find a way to get the company on more stable footing as a business and, perhaps more importantly, with investors.

That has included the promotion of former Amazon exec Kal Raman to COO recently to give Mason more support. Raman is now, in effect, in charge of many operational aspects of the company, although not product, marketing or technology.

Another bright light recently has been a major investment by Tiger Global Management, a well-regarded hedge fund and private equity firm, which bought up close to 10 percent of Groupon. The move sent its shares up 24 percent in the last week, to $3.88, with a $2.5 billion valuation.

But that’s still 85 percent below its public offering price a year ago, and a far cry from the hype around the company when it exploded on the scene several years ago. Once the darling of the start-up space, with its innovative new social e-commerce model and lightning-fast growth, Groupon attracted huge funding from a panoply of top-tier Silicon Valley investors.

With that came a stunning $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and, later, an even huger valuation of more than $10 billion.

All that goodwill changed immediately after the company announced its IPO last June, with continued controversy around everything from Groupon’s accounting to management turmoil to its business model to rocky relations with merchants.

And while Mason has labored to affect a more professional tone in his own style, and seemed to have created a more stable management team, continued issues in Europe and getting enough traction for a number of new promising product initiatives has been tougher to solve.

Therefore, Mason’s performance is naturally under increased scrutiny, said sources. He will surely get questions on his record tomorrow, when he is scheduled to appear onstage at Business Insider’s Ignition conference in New York.

Charles Sipkins, a spokesman for the board, declined to comment, as did Groupon spokesman Paul Taaffe.

While it is one of the largest consumer electronics and mobile companies in the world, Korea’s Samsung has a relatively quiet profile in Silicon Valley.

In fact, while it has had a longtime facility in San Jose for two decades, its execs are not well known to many except the top echelons of the tech sector here and Samsung’s interactions with the entrepreneurial culture have been decidedly low key.

No longer, it seems.

Besides a previously announced new 8.5-acre campus in Mountain View for its U.S. research and development center, slated for completion in 2014, sources said the company is close to signing a deal for a prominent venue in downtown Palo Alto that will house a start-up accelerator.

The location that the company is now negotiating is the second floor of the former Borders Books space on University Avenue. The historical property has a splashy movie marquee, since it used to house the Varsity Theatre.

It’s not quite Oppa Gangnam Style, it is a big move for Samsung.

While it is unclear if the new office will focus on making investments in start-ups or incubating its own innovation, sources said it will be aimed at linking Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and other players more closely with Samsung.

Sources said the move is being spearheaded by a relatively new hire by Samsung: David Eun, who became its EVP to lead a new push to create more media offerings in December. Previous to Samsung, Eun has been an exec at both Google and AOL.

Eun is well known in the Valley already, but a new location that will focus Samsung’s digital efforts should raise the company’s profile with the digerati here.

Also on the docket to do that is Samsung’s other new major facility. In September, right in the middle of its high-profile patent trial with Apple, the company announced that Samsung Information Systems America, its U.S. R&D Center, would expand and relocate to a new campus.

“The R&D Center will provide a state-of-the-art campus that can support the current rapid growth in the organization, and also provide the infrastructure to support Samsung’s open innovation and university collaboration activities,” Samsung said in a press release at the time. “Construction is anticipated to start in the second half of 2013 on the company’s two new six-story class-A office buildings totaling approximately 385,000 sq. ft. and two 5-6 story parking structures, with occupancy expected in 2014.”

In other words, Apple: Samsung is now officially in the house in Silicon Valley.

Greycroft Partners has closed a $175 million fund, its third since it began investing in consumer Internet and media companies in mid-2000.

In a press release, the New York- and Los Angeles-based venture firm said the fund was oversubscribed. But general partner Alan Patricof noted that Greycroft capped the amount and kept it small compared to other VCs, in order to maintain its focus on investing in early-stage capital-efficient start-ups.

“It’s always been our philosophy not to overfund the companies we invest in,” Patricof said in an interview. “It’s sometimes been hard in an environment where there is a lot of money available to entrepreneurs, but we are looking for start-ups that understand that it’s important to maintain the right balance of funding.”

The concept of a small fund is important to Greycroft, which has only three general partners and three venture partners, said general partner Dana Settle. The firm typically invests from $500,000 to $5 million, with more of a focus on online media, mobile and video, and also has a small seed fund.

“I think we are very hands-on helping our companies, but you don’t have to always do that in the traditional way most VCs do,” Settle said. “We want to maintain focus on giving our companies the right kind of advice, and let the entrepreneur take the lead.”

In fact, Patricof and Settle stressed, Greycroft does not often take board seats on the start-ups it invests in, and typically invests with other VCs in syndicates, which sometimes means the firm has less equity.

So far, Greycroft maintains that its system has worked. Its first fund of $75 million was raised in 2006 and has invested in 34 companies, with 11 sold and 130 percent of committed capital returned to partners; its second fund of $131 million, in 2010, put investments in 32 companies, several with valuations over $100 million.

Patricof noted that “the sale of our companies is usually our goal,” rather than an IPO event.

Exits include Vizu, acquired by Nielsen Holdings, Huffington Post (AOL), Babble (Walt Disney) and Buddy Media (Salesforce.com). More recent investments include Klout, Pulse and Maker Studios.

Most previous Greycroft investors have re-upped in the latest fund, the firm said, including J.P. Morgan, BlackRock Private Equity Partners, Fairview Capital and Invesco Private Capital. It also added new investors including Hall Capital, Hamilton Lane, Greenspring Associates and Cambridge Associates.

Overall the amount invested in consumer information services was off 42% in the first nine months as the difficulties of newly public Internet companies such as Facebook and Zynga cast doubt on the business models and valuations of social media companies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

They like her, they really like her.

Wall Street, that is, in regards to new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, assigning the former Google exec a clear premium.

And whether it is deserved or not yet from a pure performance perspective — we actually won’t know for several quarters ahead — the shares of the Silicon Valley Internet giant over the past three months have gone up 22 percent. The rise has taken place pretty much on the promise that she will finally be the one to deliver what no other Yahoo leader has done.

And that is, besides making the company relevant and innovative again: Getting Yahoo’s stock past $20 a share again.

That’s within striking distance now. Shares are at $18.40 today, close to an all-time high for the year. The recent rise certainly isn’t taking into account the results of the recent lackluster third quarter, which continued to show the worrisome downward trends — even though partial asset sales of the company’s Chinese Alibaba stake successfully masked the problems — in growth, engagement and overall profitability.

But Mayer’s confident I’ve-got-this tones on the earnings call itself — especially in pushing a mobile strategy that has not been put in place as yet in any substantive way — won over Wall Street investors, who apparently like how she sounds and, thus, are intrigued with what she might do.

While this kind of perceptual game will only get Yahoo so far, moving out of the teens in share price would be an important benchmark for the company.

The stock was last at that level in August of 2008. At the time, in fact, $20 a share was considered very disappointing, taking place after Microsoft dropped its $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo a few months earlier. Indeed, $20 was a big comedown from when Yahoo shares were above $43 in 2006.

The lowest price Yahoo shares got in recent years were $9.39 in November of 2008, just before then CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang stepped down.

Now the stock is close to double that sad trough, fueled in part by some cosmetic moves to improve culture by Mayer — including free food, smartphones and a promise to end the slow-moving decision-making at Yahoo.

There has also been a start of the promised multi-billion-dollar stock buybacks by the company, although Yahoo has been cagey about how and when it is purchasing. Also helping, more recently, is that several big hedge funds are buying into the story of hope.

Following in the footsteps of successful activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point, who is now on the board and is a major Yahoo investor, others like him have now joined in the party in a bigger way. That includes David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital and Chase Coleman of Tiger Global Management.

The thoughtful Einhorn, who is a friend of Loeb’s, has been in and out of the stock before, buying it on hopes that now ousted CEO Carol Bartz would be Yahoo’s savior and selling it soon after it was clear she might not be. He came back in February with three million shares, sold them in May, but now has upped his stake to just over five million more under Mayer’s regime.

More substantively, Tiger’s Coleman has grabbed 25 million shares (interestingly, he’s also upped his stakes in Groupon and Facebook).

Obviously, they must believe Yahoo is set to move upward, which all depends on Mayer. She’s made one critical stock misstep early in her tenure, by announcing that she was considering keeping the huge cash windfall from its sale of Alibaba stock and not giving it back to shareholders in some form.

That dropped Yahoo’s shares to under $15, but Mayer walked back that mistake and the stock has been climbing since.

For the year to date, it’s up almost 14 percent — a nice rise — although that pales in comparison to Apple’s 39 percent rise, Amazon’s 37 percent rise and, most of all, AOL’s 136 percent leap.

The comparison to the massive stock run that AOL has had, after CEO Tim Armstrong — also a former Googler — cut costs, focused units, sold patents and bought back stock, is often made. It’s perhaps apt, but arguably Yahoo has much better and fixable assets than AOL.

More to the point, Yahoo’s price-to-earnings ratio remains unusually low — it’s 5.6, compared to the S&P’s 14.2 average — which means that the entire business is severely undervalued by Wall Street.

It is if Mayer can create real value by actually staging the comeback she is already getting credit for accomplishing. She certainly has a lot of levers to improve results, from the stock buyback to finally making a deal to sell its multi-billion-dollar stake in Yahoo! Japan to making expense cuts to buying some innovative small start-ups to creating products that aren’t, well, lame.

Most importantly, Mayer has to stop the decimation of Yahoo’s once mighty advertising business, which makes up the bulk of its revenue, as well as improve its search monetization by rejiggering its heretofore dysfunctional partnership with Microsoft. (But, as I wrote earlier this week, she will not be making new search engines with Facebook.)

A gander at this chart of Yahoo’s declining quarterly revenue should give you a good visual of the problem with the core business:

YHOO Revenue Quarterly data by YCharts

And, indeed, Yahoo’s sales have dropped 29 percent since 2007, with typically flat display revenue and declining search revenue, which was once Yahoo’s crown jewel. While operating margins have risen over the years, very few point to the company as an exciting growth story.

And it still isn’t, although investors are starting to consider it a possibility. We’ll see as Mayer makes more significant changes in 2013, hopefully underpinning the stock’s recent rise with a true story of financial strides.

But, for now, giddy shareholders probably should not get too far ahead of themselves. Not that you can stop them: Mayer fan Eric Jackson is calling for Yahoo’s stock to be over $40 again by end of 2013.

Whether the Mayer premium can do pull off that particular investor miracle or not remains to be seen.

Luke Beatty, the founder of Associated Content, has been named managing director of TechStars’ Boulder, Colo., program.

Beatty, who had been an entrepreneur in residence at the start-up accelerator, had previously been a top-level content exec at Yahoo before leaving in April. The Associated Content unit had been bought by the Silicon Valley Internet giant in 2008 for $90 million.

As described on its Web site, the organization takes only 10 companies per city: “TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment program. We run a three month long program in Boston (MA), Boulder (CO), Cloud (San Antonio, TX), New York City (NY), and Seattle (WA) once each year … These companies get $18,000 in seed funding. In addition, companies accepted into the program are offered a $100,000 convertible debt note by a group of prominent VCs immediately upon acceptance into TechStars.”

“I really believe in the TechStars community-driven model and the viability of the start-up scene in Colorado,” said Beatty. “It is my good fortune to be able to work with the diverse group of successful entrepreneurs that TechStars supports — both existing and prospective.”

Added TechStars CEO David Cohen: “Luke has been a mentor here at TechStars for some time. Not only is he an amazing entrepreneur, but he’s the kind of person that digs in and goes deep. It’s obvious that he genuinely loves working with start-ups, and that makes him a natural fit here at TechStars.”

Chris Dixon will indeed be the latest VC to join Andreessen Horowitz, as I had reported earlier was likely, starting in January.

Dixon is a lively and interesting choice for the high-profile Silicon Valley venture capital firm, having been a successful serial entrepreneur, a savvy angel investor and also a voluble tech scene commenter in blogs and on Twitter.

Perhaps most interesting is that Dixon, who is largely based in New York, will move to California to join what Marc Andreessen describes as a “single-office” firm.

In other words, Chris, get ready to be force-fed at Hobee’s!

In all seriousness, Andreessen said in an interview today that his big criteria for picking Dixon was because, “when the next Mark Zuckerberg walks into the room, we want them to say, ‘I want that person.’”

In addition, he noted that Andreessen Horowitz has a “bias for entrepreneurs … and Chris is the real deal when it comes to being an entrepreneur.”

Indeed, Dixon was CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, as well as recommendations engine Hunch, which was bought by eBay a year ago.

He is one of the founding members of Founder Collective, an East Coast-based seed-stage venture firm run by entrepreneurs, and is also an active angel investor, including in Skype, Invite Media and OMGPOP. Previously, he programmed financial algorithms at a high-speed options trading firm and has also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners.

Dixon, whose job at Bessemer was junior, said that he became interested in Andreessen Horowitz once he learned more about them after helping the start-ups he had invested in with fundings. He was especially struck by all the added help the firm provided in areas such as recruiting.

While he said his investing as a partner there would be “non-thematic,” he noted that it was likely he would “tilt more toward consumer” investments.

“I am going to try to pick the special bird,” he said, paraphrasing a quote by famed Sequoia Capital VC Mike Moritz. “And not the flock.”

Here is a blog post on the move by Dixon and one by Andreessen, in which he apparently thinks I leak for a living.

According to sources, well-known New York techie Chris Dixon is in the final stages of discussions to become a partner at the high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

While the deal is not yet complete, Dixon seems likely to become the firm’s latest addition. It’s not clear what his area of specialty will be, but it is likely to center on start-ups, given his experience.

Dixon is one the more voluble and energetic tech players on the New York scene, as well as a serial entrepreneur with several prominent exits. He was CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, as well as recommendations engine Hunch, which was bought by eBay a year ago.

He is one of the founding members of Founder Collective, an East Coast-based seed-stage venture firm run by entrepreneurs and is also an active angel investor, including in Skype, Invite Media and OMGPOP. Previous to this, he also programmed financial algorithms at a high-speed options trading firm and has also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners.

In his bio on the Founder Collective site, Dixon said: “I think one of the reasons I can be helpful to entrepreneurs is I’ve worked in the trenches on both the startup side and the investor side.”

His selection by Andreessen Horowitz is an interesting one, since it is the first by the firm of a solidly New York-area techie, although it is not clear if Dixon will move to California or not.

He’s also not been afraid to tangle with VCs in his frequent blogging. In one post in July, titled “Shoehorning Startups into the VC Model,” he noted:

“A startup should raise venture capital (or ‘venture-style’ angel/seed funding) only if: 1) the goal is to build a billion-dollar (valuation) company, and 2) raising millions of dollars is absolutely necessary or will significantly accelerate growth. … Unfortunately, many of these startups graft VC-friendly narratives onto their plans and raise too much money. Short term it might seem like a good idea but long term it won’t.”

Silicon Valley is really quite a boring place. The story of start-ups should be a documentary on PBS, not a weekly reality show on Bravo.

– Nick Bilton on “Start-Ups”

Marissa Mayer — the typically press-loving Silicon Valley exec who has avoided much media interaction since she took over as CEO of Yahoo — will be doing her first sit-down interview at the end of the month at a Fortune magazine event.

In the chat, according to an invite for a November 27 Silicon Valley dinner for its Most Powerful Women franchise, “she plans to talk about where she is taking Yahoo and what excites her about the future of technology.”

Pull up your chairs, people!

Actually, Mayer has recently spoken most specifically about her plans for the long-troubled company, but it was more formally during Yahoo’s third-quarter earnings call, in which she outlined a mobile-heavy strategy and also a plan to make smaller acquisitions.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said then to Wall Street analysts, soon after which she bought a tiny mobile start-up called Stamped.

But Mayer has yet to sit down live with a journalist — she had agreed to appear for a sit-down stage interview at a recent TechCrunch Disrupt event, but she opted instead to be a demo judge, where the former Google exec said nothing about her new job at Yahoo.

Mayer will presumably be doing just that with Fortune editor-at-large Pattie Sellers, who helms the high-profile annual Most Powerful Women conference and also the magazine’s list that featured Mayer on the cover this year (see above). Sellers has also just written a profile of Mayer titled “Ready to Rumble at Yahoo,” which did not include her participation but did have quotes from one of her recent hires — Patricia Moll Kriese — at Yahoo.

But Sellers appears to be the only reporter that Mayer has spoken to on the record since she got the job, although her comments in one piece just after she got the job were mostly limited to the topic to her pregnancy. Sellers also announced the name of Mayer’s baby — Macallister — in another recent post.

Presumably, Mayer will talk about her new son with Sellers, but it will be interesting to see what she says about Yahoo, as well as on the future of technology. At an annual Churchill Club gadget event the techie did with Walt Mossberg and me in 2007, Mayer showed off a keyboard whose keys had embedded LCD screens, a wireless rabbit, an alarm clock that can jump off your nightstand and a T-shirt with a wireless signal locator in it.

Here is a video of her in full geek mode talking about that way back when:

Tonight, the controversial “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley” airs on the Bravo cable television channel.

But, on Wednesday, a less splashy — and perhaps more amusing — tech-oriented program is also making its debut on Bravo: “LOLwork.”

Yes, it’s about the wacky start-up with those grammatically incorrect online cats that I so love.

“LOLwork” takes the viewer inside the Seattle-based humor company, focusing a lot on its CEO Ben Huh, as well as his Cheezburger team.

Here is a video interview I did with Huh last week at the AllThingsD.com global HQ about the show, as well as a Bravo clip of it:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121105/ben-huh-talks-about-the-other-new-reality-show-lolwork-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121102/after-declaring-it-the-future-of-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-appoints-intonows-adam-cahan-as-mobile-kingpin-internal-memo-natch/ http://allthingsd.com/20121102/after-declaring-it-the-future-of-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-appoints-intonows-adam-cahan-as-mobile-kingpin-internal-memo-natch/#comments Fri, 02 Nov 2012 14:03:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=266148

Adam Cahan

A very important management shift at Yahoo got a bit lost in last week’s news of CEO Marissa Mayer’s first acquisition, a small mobile start-up called Stamped.

That would be the appointment of former IntoNow founder and CEO Adam Cahan to oversee all of Yahoo’s mobile efforts, as well as its Flickr photo sharing service.

According to an internal memo that Mayer sent out last week to employees, Cahan has been given the title of SVP of Emerging Products and Technology, with a spot on the exec staff, reporting directly to her.

Said the memo (in its entirety below):

“[Cahan] will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.”

Mayer’s promotion of the slick exec, who has been described by almost everyone I spoke to at Yahoo as smoothly political, is an interesting internal choice by Mayer. He only got to Yahoo recently, after IntoNow was bought by Yahoo for more than $20 million in the spring of last year.

IntoNow was a spinoff from the video advertising company Auditude, which was sold to Adobe for a reported $100 million.

The television indexing start-up had launched in early 2011 as an Apple iPhone app that recognized what was playing on the screen by analyzing the audio from satellite feeds and matching it to listings. The start-up had hoped to eventually license its technology as offer-measurement services for TV advertising and viewership.

As Liz Gannes noted in a post on AllThingsD:

“It’s similar to the Shazam mobile app that many people know and love, which IDs an ambient song by recording it and quickly matching it to an archive. IntoNow users can “check in” to a particular episode once it’s been recognized, like one would check into a restaurant on Foursquare. The goal is to enable conversations around the watercooler and on social networks by helping users connect around what they’re watching and discover new things to watch.”

Cool, although IntoNow’s technology was far more compelling than its consumer promise.

Now, Cahan will be charged with doing both of Yahoo in mobile — which is most likely to be accomplished via a series of small mobile acquisitions, presumably to be stitched together into a cohesive and successful whole.

At least that’s the idea.

Cahan is an experienced exec, having worked at a number of places before founding IntoNow, including MTV Networks, NBC, McKinsey, National Geographic Television and — wait for it — Google, in business operations.

(Being an ex-Googler, which Mayer is, seems to have its advantages at Yahoo these days, with Cahan as the latest example.)

He is most definitely a key hire, because Mayer spent a lot of time stressing how mobile was Yahoo’s No. 1 priority on its recent earnings call with investors.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said, noting a “focused, coherent” mobile strategy was the top initiative.

Mayer had to say that, of course, even if being a mobile giant is now mostly just wishful thinking at Yahoo, since most of the many efforts the company has made in the arena have been duds. Yahoo has also lost a lot of mobile engineering talent over the years, remaining largely a desktop offering, even as the area has increasingly become where consumers are getting their information.

A blog post by Cahan at Yahoo was widely quoted when the tiny Stamped — which is an online recommendations app — was bought for under $10 million last week by Yahoo.

In it, he noted:

“Most people are always within arm’s reach of their mobile phones. For many of us, it’s the first thing we look at in the morning and the last thing we check at night. Mobile is at the center of how we connect with people, consume information, and pass the time, and we’re focused on making Yahoo! the most inspiring and entertaining way to do just that.”

We’ll see if Yahoo can be a significant mobile player, as Mayer has promised Wall Street. But Cahan has certainly been busy since he got the job, sources said, beginning with the rejiggering of Yahoo’s mobile teams, as well as visiting the Flickr office this week.

Until it all sorts itself out, please enjoy this Oct. 25 internal memo on Cahan and the Stamped acquisition:

YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD

Hi All –

As we discussed in our strategy all-hands earlier this month, innovation and talent are essential to delivering against our vision to inspire and delight our users as a part of their daily lives. Many of the areas that require special attention are emerging technologies and Yahoo! products where we’ve not yet reinvented, re-imagined and rebuilt in order to keep pace with changes in user behaviors and platform shifts.

To aid our efforts, I’m promoting Adam Cahan to lead this effort as Senior Vice President of Emerging Products and Technology. Adam will be a member of e-staff and report directly to me. He will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.

And he’s already making great progress! Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve acquired a very talented mobile team, based in New York City.

Robby, Kevin, Bart, Paul and the entire team at Stamped are a natural fit for Yahoo!. Their experience building fun, useful, personalized mobile products aligns well with our vision to create the best everyday mobile experience for our users. The team will be a great asset for us as we expand Yahoo!’s mobile efforts and create another key center for mobile innovation in New York.

I’m excited that we’ve been able to move quickly and execute well in order to bring on such a talented team. Please join me in congratulating Adam in his promotion and welcoming Anthony, Bart, Geoff, Kevin, Landon, Michael, Paul, Robby and Travis to Yahoo!

Thanks,

Marissa

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121102/after-declaring-it-the-future-of-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-appoints-intonows-adam-cahan-as-mobile-kingpin-internal-memo-natch/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121031/foursquares-dennis-crowley-talks-about-hurricane-sandys-impact-on-nyc-start-ups-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20121031/foursquares-dennis-crowley-talks-about-hurricane-sandys-impact-on-nyc-start-ups-video/#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:01:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=265400

While stranded in Hurricane Sandy-soaked Manhattan this week, I got a chance to chat with Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley about the impact of the epic storm on his social check-in company and other start-ups in New York City.

The weather event — which ran through the area with great force early this week — flooded the subways and plunged huge swaths of lower Manhattan into darkness after major electrical outages.

That has meant that many Internet start-ups located in the area, including Foursquare, have had to scramble to keep their businesses going amid the many issues during and after the storm.

Here’s Crowley talking about it all, in a lovely candlelit setting:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121031/foursquares-dennis-crowley-talks-about-hurricane-sandys-impact-on-nyc-start-ups-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121030/seo-start-up-conductor-raises-20-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20121030/seo-start-up-conductor-raises-20-million/#comments Tue, 30 Oct 2012 12:55:29 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=264929

Lots of start-ups are telling marketers they can help them navigate social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But there’s still plenty of demand for companies that promise better results on Google and Bing.

Here’s one: Conductor, a New York-based firm that has raised a $20 million funding round led by Investor Growth Capital. Existing investors like FirstMark Capital and Matrix Partners reupped as well.

CEO Seth Besmertnik describes his company as a search engine optimization company, not a search engine marketing company. The difference: He’ll tell clients how to tweak their sites for Google, et al, but doesn’t buy Google search ads for them.

Besmertnik says Conductor grew 300 percent in the last year, and is now approaching “low double-digit millions” in revenue. He says he’s added 45 employees in the last year, and now has a staff of 85.

Conductor, which has raised $35 million to date, also qualifies as a pivot, since it started out life as a link-building company, which promised to boost clients’ search ranking via a strategy Google no longer allows. Now it sells customers “software as a service,” where they pay a monthly fee in exchange for a dashboard and other analytic tools.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121030/seo-start-up-conductor-raises-20-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121025/first-clip-from-start-ups-silicon-valley-dave-mcclure-is-disrespectful-for-doing-his-job/ http://allthingsd.com/20121025/first-clip-from-start-ups-silicon-valley-dave-mcclure-is-disrespectful-for-doing-his-job/#comments Thu, 25 Oct 2012 15:45:54 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=263659

Here are two clips from the first episode that Bravo has put up about its new and controversial-before-it’s-aired reality television show, “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley.”

The cable program chronicles the ups and downs of a group of young entrepreneurs in tech, and some have decried it from simply seeing the promo sizzle reel that featured lots of partying and pool-hanging.

No frolicking here in a short clip, as super angel investor Dave McClure looks over a pitch deck of brother-and-sister team Ben and Hermione Way for their health-and-lifestyle start-up, apparently called Ignite.

With that reality show rut-roh music playing in the background, Ben inexplicably says he thinks McClure was “slightly disrespectful, him going through the whole thing and making his own judgments.”

Which is, of course, an investor’s job, going all Judge Judy on entrepreneurs. And, in my experience, McClure was awfully polite about grabbing the deck.

And alls I can say is that Ben is very lucky he managed to avoid bringing his pitch deck near me.

There’s also one that seems a lot more reality-show, with Hermione arguing over a botched event with another person on the show, Sarah Austin. There is mention of “making out” with Ben and SXSW.

In any case, the show looks interesting enough to take a gander when it airs on Monday, November 5 at 10 pm.

Here are the video clips:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121025/first-clip-from-start-ups-silicon-valley-dave-mcclure-is-disrespectful-for-doing-his-job/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121022/crowdsource-raises-12-5-million-for-enterprise-tasks/ http://allthingsd.com/20121022/crowdsource-raises-12-5-million-for-enterprise-tasks/#comments Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:39:11 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=262224 CrowdSource, which uses hundreds of thousands of workers to manage labor-intensive enterprise tasks, raised $12.5 million in a Series A round. The funding was led by Highland Capital Partners. The start-up, which focuses on content creation and structuring big data, said it will use the investment to expand offerings, add more workers and increase sales and marketing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121022/crowdsource-raises-12-5-million-for-enterprise-tasks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121019/grokr-raises-4-3-million-in-quest-to-bring-google-now-like-service-to-ios/ http://allthingsd.com/20121019/grokr-raises-4-3-million-in-quest-to-bring-google-now-like-service-to-ios/#comments Fri, 19 Oct 2012 12:00:08 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=261699 For the past couple of years, Srivats Sampath has quietly been trying to redefine search for the mobile device.

“Traditional Web search makes you work hard for your information,” the former McAfee.com CEO told AllThingsD in an interview this week. “It’s almost like the DOS prompt.”

That’s a luxury people can afford when sitting at a computer and keyboard. But phones, Sampath said, have small screens and virtual keyboards, necessitating a better option.

Enter Grokr, Sampath’s Sunnyvale-based start-up that aims to deliver information before someone even knows they need it. Think of it as Google Now on steroids, focused on Apple devices.

“The future of search is not about searching,” Sampath said. “Information that we will need will just find us. Search transitions into this virtual mind reader and tells you things before you need to ask.”

Sampath, who also previously worked at U.S. Venture Partners, Mercora and Netscape, said the app will be able to do things like let you know if the band you’re listening to is coming to town, or if there is a delay on the roads you typically take to work.

Grokr is revealing Friday that it has raised a further $2.4 million in funding to finance its effort. Backers including NEA, U.S. Venture Partners, Triple Point Ventures and Lerer Ventures have so far pumped $4.2 million into the company.

Its product, an iPhone app, is still in private testing, with a public release slated for later this year.

Some of the information it locates will be pushed automatically, while less urgent matters will appear only when the app is opened. The goal is to be “just noisy enough,” Sampath said. Likewise, the company will have to strike a balance between fetching information a person might want and not draining the battery by constantly pinging a server.

Sampath gets that in tackling search, even mobile search, the company will necessarily be putting itself in competition with Google and Microsoft, among others. But he’s not shying away from the challenge.

“Someone needs to step up and say ‘Hey guys, this is what market needs.’”

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