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to its terms of service suggested that Instagram could sell user photos to advertisers, a change that was quickly rescinded by Systrom.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!)

As most of the free world knows by now — from the ubiquitous media coverage that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her new book, “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” has gotten of late — there are some nagging issues of women in the workplace.

That was also underscored by the huge debate that arose over Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new rule for the Silicon Valley Internet giant that eliminated work-from-home employees.

Now, Cisco CEO John Chambers is weighing in, after a meeting with Sandberg last week, ordering each of his top managers to come up with new women-focused initiatives and put them into their development plans.

More interestingly, in an internal email I obtained, he also noted that his own leadership in the area had been lacking.

“While I have always considered myself sensitive to and effective on gender issues in the workplace, my eyes were opened in new ways and I feel a renewed sense of urgency to make the progress we haven’t made in the last decade,” wrote Chambers.

He pointed out that only one-fourth of the networking giant’s employees and top execs are women, and only 20 percent out of one million networking academy students are women. Currently, Cisco’s highest-ranking woman is Padmasree Warrior, its CTO and strategy officer, and it has three women board members.

Still, wrote Chambers:

“After reading Lean In and listening to Sheryl, I realize that, while I believe I am relatively enlightened, I have not consistently walked the talk … What we have been doing hasn’t worked, and it is time to adjust.”

Here’s the whole memo:

From: John Chambers
Date: March 8, 2013, 6:21:49 PM PST
To: John Chambers
Subject: International Working Women’s Day … Cisco Resolution

To my leaders:

I had the opportunity yesterday to discuss Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In with Sheryl and a group of my CEO peers. While I have always considered myself sensitive to and effective on gender issues in the workplace, my eyes were opened in new ways and I feel a renewed sense of urgency to make the progress we haven’t made in the last decade.

The data is startling. Women hold less than 14% of CEO positions, 17% of board seats globally, and 18% of congressional officials … and these numbers have not changed in a decade. At Cisco, less than 25% of our employees — and our leaders — are women. Only 20% of our current one-million networking academy students are women.

Today is International Working Women’s Day, and I want us, the leaders of Cisco, to see this as a leadership moment. Without realizing it, we operate every day with gender stereotypes and biases, many of which we do not realize. After reading Lean In and listening to Sheryl, I realize that, while I believe I am relatively enlightened, I have not consistently walked the talk. I think each of you, on reflection, will identify opportunities to operate at a new level with your women employees, leaders, customers, partners, and peers. I believe we — together — need to drive a fundamental culture change and it is up to us as leaders to make this change happen. What we have been doing hasn’t worked, and it is time to adjust.

I have two specific asks for each of you: 1) please read the copy of Lean In you will be receiving shortly, before we get to the SVP/VP off-site and 2) determine 3-4 specific things you will do differently and detail those commitments in your development plan and if you need help, please contact Sandy Hoffman, Chief Diversity Officer.

I know each of us will have a different explanation and a different solution, and there is power in the diversity of those ideas in driving change. I am asking two champions — Chuck Robbins and Kelly Kramer — to take a leadership role in moving us forward. I will ask them to report to the Operating Committee every quarter on the progress we have made and the action plans in place.

I think Sheryl says it best: “We can no longer pretend that biases don’t exist, nor can we talk around them … the result of creating a more equal environment will not just be better performance for our organizations, but quite likely greater happiness for all.”

Kath Weslock, Chief Human Resources Officer and I look forward to discussing this topic with many of you. We believe we have an opportunity to make a tremendous difference, and in so doing benefit our people, our culture, our company and, just maybe, the world.

John

Alibaba Group said it had selected Jonathan Lu Zhaoxi to replace its co-founder and CEO Jack Ma, starting on May 10. Ma, who is only 48 years old, will remain executive chairman, and will be involved in the Chinese Internet e-commerce giant’s business strategy and management development. Alibaba has seen tremendous growth in the last year, as it is has increased both its revenue and profit, and many expect it will go public within the next 12 months. The strong performance has, in turn, boosted the stock of Yahoo, which owns a 20 percent stake in the company.

Lu, 43, has been at Alibaba for more than a dozen years, leading major divisions of the company, including its massive and important Taobao unit. He is currently Alibaba’s chief data officer and president of Aliyun Mobile OS.

“Serving as Alibaba Group CEO is an extremely challenging and difficult job, especially succeeding a founder CEO like me. One can only imagine the responsibilities and pressure that Jonathan will shoulder,” said Ma in a letter to employees. “Alibaba has never been only the CEO’s business, it is everybody’s business.”

Here’s Ma’s full letter to employees on the change:
alibaba

And here is some of Lu’s bio, according to Alibaba:

Lu joined Alibaba in 2000, a year after the company was founded as an Internet directory allowing China’s increasingly competitive factories to more easily connect with international buyers. After forming Alibaba.com’s sales team for South China, including manufacturing powerhouse Guangdong Province, Lu in 2004 led the launch of Alipay, the company’s online payments affiliate. He later served as Alipay’s president.

In early 2008 Lu moved to Taobao, China’s dominant online retailing platform. During his tenure Taobao’s GMV (total sales generated by sellers using the platform) soared eightfold, and the online shopping unit began developing and integrating social networking into e-commerce.

Lu, who holds a master’s degree in business administration from China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, was named chief executive officer of Alibaba.com in early 2011, presiding over the privatization of the business-to-business trading website the following year.

Since July 2012, Lu has been an Alibaba executive vice president and the Group’s chief data officer. In this role, he has been responsible for driving the company’s strategically important Big Data initiative, centered on the creation of a data-sharing platform that can be accessed by the millions of small businesses that use Alibaba services. He is also responsible for Alibaba’s Aliyun mobile device operating system.

In a wide-ranging interview with Charlie Rose on “CBS This Morning,” Microsoft Chairman and co-founder Bill Gates made a little news — or a lot of it, if you are a reader of internal tea leaves at the software giant — in noting that the company’s early mobile strategy was “clearly a mistake.”

But, perhaps more interestingly, when asked about the meh performance of Steve Ballmer, who replaced Gates as CEO some years ago, the typically non-diplomatic tech legend declined to throw his longtime confidant over the side.

Instead, he strapped himself to Ballmer, in an orgy of “he-and-I” band-of-brothers statements that clearly linked the duo, even though Rose’s question was specifically about how Ballmer was doing.

“He and I are two of the most self-critical people you can imagine,” said Gates, noting a lot of “amazing things” such as Surface and Xbox in the Ballmer regime. “Is it enough? No, he and I are not satisfied that in terms of breakthrough things that we’re doing everything possible.”

Gates did note the obvious in addressing the slowness of Microsoft in the mobile market over the last several years, which has allowed rivals like Apple and Google to dominate the key sector.

“There’s a lot of things like cellphones where we didn’t get out in the lead early,” said Gates. “We didn’t miss cellphones, but the way that we went about it didn’t allow us to get the leadership.”

No, it did not, but Gates is not blaming Ballmer for it, it seems.

Watch for yourself:

About two weeks ago, I heard about a restructuring under HBO SVP of consumer technology Otto Berkes, who also takes over the job of CTO in March from longtime vet Bob Zitter. The former Microsoft exec and Xbox co-founder was named the top tech figure at the premium cable network at the end of last year, after being the primary developer of its popular HBO Go and MAX Go streaming video offerings.

As part of the changes, the memo of the Time Warner unit said, product strategy and development exec Hans Deutmeyer is leaving HBO.

HBO has been very active in the digital space, increasingly offering its shows on a variety of mobile devices. Earlier this week, at our D: Dive Into Media conference, HBO said its subscribers will be able to stream programming from an Apple iPhone or iPad onto their television via AirPlay.

All the various details are below, in a memo HBO sent to its employees at the end of January:

HBO GO has established HBO as a company that understands the value of technology as a tool for delivering great content and experiences to consumers, and HBO.com has become a primary means of driving broad consumer engagement and awareness of our offerings. We are proud of these achievements and also recognize that we have more ahead of us to accomplish. Over the course of the next several years, our mission is to build best-in-class technology execution capabilities. That mission is central to ensuring that HBO has the tools available to support our business through the ongoing technology-based disruption of media and to support new areas of growth. Like other leading Internet-based video service providers, we will design, build, and deploy scalable products with global reach.

Achieving these goals will require focus and a disciplined approach. Roles and responsibilities must be clear and well-defined to ensure efficient distribution of work and smooth collaboration between groups and people. In order to provide the organizational framework needed to achieve our goals, I am restructuring Digital Products around four functional groups (listed alphabetically):

1. Infrastructure Operations & QA,
2. Program Management,
3. Software Engineering,
4. User Experience & Product Design.

Each of these groups will have responsibilities for both HBO GO and HBO.com as appropriate for the functional areas of each group. This will enable more efficient end-to-end integration and coordination of our design, platform architecture, and infrastructure development.

The attached “Digital Products Organizational Pillars” slide illustrates the roles and responsibilities of each of these four functional groups in greater detail. The leaders of these groups will report directly to me and will continue to do so after my transition to the CTO role.

Donna Stalworth will continue to head up the infrastructure operations and QA efforts in Digital Products. She will also add build and release management to her responsibilities.

Rebekah Calabrese will be stepping into the role of VP of Program Management for Digital Products. She and her team will be responsible for cross-group coordination, project management, budget management, technology vendor relationships, and overall status communication for Digital Products. Rebekah will also continue to provide contract support for Digital Products as well as the other technology groups. Her team will consist of the existing Digital Products program and project management staff and her current reports.

Drew Angeloff will lead all of Digital Products’ software engineering activities in New York as well as in Seattle. Centralizing consumer software engineering in one group under one leader will maximize coordination and the flow of information, and will help ensure a consistent and robust software architecture. This is especially important given geographic distance between the New York and Seattle teams. The engineering staff working on device application development and the GO service currently on Rob Caruso’s team will now report to Drew.

Rob Caruso and the workflow team led by Jason Kui will transition to Diane Tryneski’s organization; Rob will report to Diane. Rob’s new charter is to build software engineering capabilities to optimize digital asset creation, management, and security, and to create technologies that unlock the full potential of software in the digital content area. Rob and his team will collaborate closely with Digital Products to ensure that our digital content technologies and our consumer-facing products inform each other to enable unique and innovative content-driven user experiences. This new role and group will be critical to achieving end-to-end software technology excellence.

Dina Juliano will lead the User Experience & Product Design organization. Her team’s responsibilities will include HBO GO, HBO.com, and HBO On Demand. Dina’s team will conceive, design, and realize new digital experiences in partnership with key stakeholders across HBO. She and her team will incorporate consumer and market insights to create a coherent product vision and roadmap that engages our users. Dina’s team will consist of her existing team and the groups formerly in Hans Deutmeyer’s organization.

Hans has decided to leave HBO to pursue opportunities that better align with his future interests. Hans has been a part of the HBO GO story since its genesis and has played a key role in bringing it to the market successfully. Given the new organizational direction, he has decided that this is the right time for him to pursue other opportunities. I want to thank Hans for his contributions and wish him success in his new endeavors.

Please welcome Donna, Rebekah, Drew, Rob, and Dina in their new roles. The changes in their teams and roles are effective immediately.

I am very excited about the new organization and am confident that we have the right the structure, leadership, passion, talent, and creativity needed to deliver best-in-class digital products to our users.

Please let your manager or me know if you have any questions.

Thank you-

— Otto —

According to sources, two high-ranking Yahoo execs have departed the company — longtime strategy exec Raymond Stern and advertising exec Liz Ritzcovan.

Stern — whose recent Yahoo title has been SVP of business development and partnerships — was hired at the Silicon Valley Internet giant in 2009, and has held a number of jobs in areas such as business development, audience, mobile and local. Ritzcovan has been at the company since early 2011, most currently as a VP of marketing solutions.

Meanwhile, SVP of advertising and data platforms Scott Burke has been elevated to the executive staff, reporting directly to CEO Marissa Mayer. Sources said Mayer has put him in charge of all ad tech platforms in a continuing product overhaul at Yahoo.

As March approaches — a time when stock options and bonus payments come due — insiders at Yahoo said to expect a lot of such talent movement within the company. Sources also noted that Mayer has been working hard to bring in new execs from outside Yahoo, but has been having a harder time than she expected recruiting high-level talent.

Brunswick Group’s Michael Buckley, who has been working with Facebook on a range of corporate and other PR issues over the last several years, will be joining the social networking giant as VP of business communications.

Buckley is essentially taking the job held by well-known Washington, D.C., player Joe Lockhart, who left the company last fall.

In his new job, Facebook said that Buckley would be in charge of the company’s international, monetization, corporate, consumer and policy communications.

Buckley has been with the global strategy and communications consultancy Brunswick Group, one of Facebook’s outside agencies, for a decade, most recently as a U.S. managing partner, where he represented a number of clients at once. In tech, that has included Groupon’s Andrew Mason, as well as Mike Lynch of Autonomy, which is battling Hewlett-Packard right now.

At Facebook, he will report to Elliot Schrage, who is VP of communications and public policy, where Buckley will be one of three top execs in that organization. The others are VP of tech communications Caryn Marooney, and Marne Levine, VP of global policy.

The Los Angeles-based Rubicon Project has hired two execs to fill top spots at the digital advertising company, in what looks like preparations for an eventual public offering.

Greg Raifman, the founder, chairman and CEO of Dragon Media, will become president, reporting to Rubicon CEO and co-founder Frank Addante. And SocialVibe CEO Todd Tappin will take over in the role of COO/CFO, reporting to Raifman.

Founded in 2007 and armed with more than $50 million in funding, Rubicon is one of the larger real-time bidding platforms that allows automated buying and selling of global online ads.

“Greg and Todd are extremely intelligent and capable executives who have guided significant, publicly traded companies,” said Addante in a statement. “Both Greg and Todd have great relationships within our industry as well as on Wall Street. Their presence will enable me to focus on our overall vision and product strategy so we can take best advantage of the opportunities we see.”

Tappin is replacing Brian Barnum, who will leave the company, along with Chief Revenue Officer Nick Hulse. The pair only arrived less than two years ago, presumably to also help professionalize the organization.

In addition to the other exec moves, general counsel Victoria Von Szeliski will add the title of EVP of culture and business affairs and will also be adding 100 employees this year via organic growth and acquisition.

Rubicon said Raifman — who recently served as the executive chairman of video ad-serving company LiveRail, as well as being founding and running ad-serving pioneer Mediaplex — will “manage the day-to-day operations of the Rubicon Project as he ramps the company’s buy-side automation initiatives.”

Tappin will be in charge of Rubicon’s operating and financial plan and also lead mergers and acquisitions for the company. Before running SocialVibe, a video real-time buying startup, he was founding CFO of Overture and helped sell the search automation company to Yahoo many years ago.

The exec roundelay — a not entirely uncommon thing for Rubicon over the years — is apparently part of a larger bid to eventually IPO the company. Rubicon had also been in recent preliminary discussions with several larger companies — Yahoo and Adobe — about being acquired. The ad tech space has heated up of late, with a range of startups, such as AppNexus, Pubmatic, Turn and others, looking to gain ground, get funding or sell out.

But with a large price tag and some strong growth over the last year, along with becoming profitable, Rubicon appears to now be aiming to remain independent. Over the last few years, the company has grown its business significantly — according to comScore, Rubicon Project reached 214.2 million monthly unique users.

Whether that is enough to keep up with powerful rivals such as Google is, of course, the big question, especially as the way publishers and marketers interact with the online ad market is changing quickly.

Michael Katz, one of Yahoo’s high-ranking online advertising execs, is leaving the company, according to a memo he sent out to staff on Friday.

Considered a savvy online ad player and a well-regarded entrepreneur, Katz came to the Silicon Valley Internet giant a year ago when it bought Interclick, the ad-targeting company he co-founded and headed, for $270 million.

Yahoo later used Interclick’s technology in its audience-buying platform called Genome. In a reorganization announced in January, Katz was placed in charge of sales operations and data and performance optimization for Genome.

The data unit is at the center of efforts by Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer to turbocharge its ad business.

But the Katz missive, which is below in its entirety, clearly signaled that his departure was not an amicable one, which sources underscored was part of a larger rejiggering of the ad sales staff under new COO Henrique De Castro.

“As some of you are starting to learn, my last day with the company will be today,” wrote Katz on Friday. “Leaving Y! is not the hard part — how it happened and leaving all of you is what makes this difficult.”

How it happened, said several sources, was that Katz was suddenly told by HR head Jackie Reses last week that there was not a place for him, only days before a large 12-month retention bonus was to be paid out to him for the Interclick acquisition.

While it is an unusual thing to part on willfully difficult terms with an entrepreneur, as it sends a bad signal to others considering joining the company, Yahoo’s new leadership has been playing hardball with a lot of top execs it is parting ways with, and is also limiting departure packages.

Former marketing head Mollie Spillman, for example, was suddenly let go after she was replaced by former Lockerz CEO Kathy Savitt. And, though he had wanted to leave, former CFO Tim Morse was also told of his replacement in a swift exec house-cleaning move, as was former HR head David Windley.

Of course, such moves are not unusual when a new set of leaders enters the corporate picture. That’s why many at Yahoo expect even more changes to come soon in the ad unit, with most assuming that Mayer and De Castro will bring in new staff they had previously worked with at Google.

Currently, top Yahoo ad execs include Peter Foster, GM of audience advertising at Yahoo; and Mark Ellis, VP of North American sales and global partnerships.

It will be interesting to see what happens to them and others as part of a large ad reorg at Yahoo now taking place, which will definitely include a variety of departures and arrivals. One recent notable Yahoo ad exec departure, for example, was Debbie Menin, who headed entertainment and travel sales strategy, and is now a top sales exec at hot video entertainment network Machinima.

More will come in the new year, given that De Castro has recently briefed employees on a plan to move its sales organization to a “category” model. 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.

That massive shift is not Katz’s to worry about anymore, it seems. Here’s his entire email to staff, which is a pretty eloquent one, as goodbye letters go:

Friends and Colleagues,

6 years ago if someone would have told me that the hardest part about building a business would be to one day say goodbye, I would not have believed them. As some of you are starting to learn, my last day with the company will be today. Leaving Y! is not the hard part — how it happened and leaving all of you is what makes this difficult. I will miss the daily interactions and will take with me the many memories. This has honestly been so much fun.

I have learned a lot along the way:

Sometimes winning looks like losing. If you don’t fail, you can’t progress and the stakes only get bigger as you go further down your path.

Be genuinely happy for those that are successful at reaching their goals. If you spend anytime wishing it were you, it will never be.

Stay humble, and never declare victory.

Approximately correct is better than definitely wrong. Do not let perfection be the enemy of excellence.

We are all human — we may make mistakes, we must forgive, forget, and move on together.

Treating people right is not an option.

Treat adults like adults and they will behave like adults. Rules are for children.

People and culture are everything. It’s about so much more than free food and parties, it cannot be forced and without it a business cannot succeed.

I consider myself so very lucky to have known a handful of loyal friends that took a chance, quit their jobs and risked a lot to build this business with me. Their loyalty and hard work helped interclick get off the ground and for that I will forever be grateful. The team they helped to build has truly made this the greatest place to work. Each and every one of you made interclick the very best company to work for.

I would like to leave you all with a reminder of what together we built:

– A company that started with $27,000 and sold for $270,000,000

– A company that redefined the way that marketers think about audience targeting and data

– A company that went public in 2009 on NASDAQ defying all odds

– A company that spit in the face of adversity early in 2011 and came out victorious

– A company whose people are the future of this organization.

So be proud of what together we achieved, look back and know you were part of something big. Then look ahead and know that this is just the beginning, we will all one day build again. For those of you that continue your career at Y!, I ask that you don’t lose sight of greatness. Remember what you are capable of and continue to make me proud.

Thank you for your loyalty, passion, dedication, and collaboration. The finish line is only the beginning of a new race.

-MK

In yet another instance of a Silicon Valley venture firm bringing in big government guns to class up the place, Khosla Ventures said that it had signed the international consulting firm run by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to “bring global and domestic insight to Khosla’s portfolio companies, helping them achieve their strategic goals in industries such as technology, energy, security and healthcare.”

In other words, strategery plus!

That will presumably be provided by Rice and her partners at RiceHadleyGates, which has offices in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., in an undisclosed financial arrangement with Khosla. RiceHadleyGates also includes former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former State Department official Anja Manuel.

In an interview yesterday, Manuel said that the goal was to help in areas that VCs might not be as familiar with, from Internet freedom laws in India to the challenges of moving into emerging markets.

“There are a lot of policy issues that entrepreneurs will be facing and we will try to be helpful as they sort through them,” she said. “We love working with innovative companies and want to make their global experience better.”

Khosla partner Samir Kaul said the firm was still figuring out how they will work together, but that Rice’s team would serve as “strategic advisers on an as needed basis.”

“What [RiceHadleyGates] does fits in very well with a lot of our themes as investors in energy and security, for example,” said Kaul. “We want to offer the companies we invest in as much help as possible and this is a real win in that regard.”

It’s certainly a high-profile move, although Khosla has done this before, signing former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on as a strategic adviser in 2010.

In addition, Andreessen Horowitz brought in former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, as well as former D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, to lend its portfolio companies additional expertise.

Rice’s firm certainly has a lot of that, especially related to thorny international issues. Rice, who was once the provost at Stanford University, was also the National Security Adviser in the administration of former President George W. Bush, before moving to the State Department.

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.

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.

Now, as the lion’s share of the social giant’s user base accesses the site via mobile devices, Facebook has undergone a major internal organizational shift, retooling product workflows to better focus on the phone.

Engineering teams are morphing. Software cycles are being rejiggered. It’s a materialization of the company’s newest mantra: “Mobile first.“

The Old Days

Facebook has taken flak for its mobile strategy for some time. Its smartphone apps, for example, were sluggish and underperforming compared to others like Twitter.

Some of the blame for these deficiencies is placed on a technology bet Facebook made years ago, making HTML5 a key component of its mobile strategy. Put simply, HTML5 is a coding language that can handle some of today’s more taxing Web features. And Facebook’s apps were built with heavy use of HTML5.

Using a language like HTML5 has its benefits. For one, it let Facebook spread much faster. Any phone with a Web browser can access Facebook’s mobile site, which the company spent much of its effort refining early on.

Not to mention that many of today’s engineers grew up using Web-based languages back in the early dot-com days. That makes it much easier to recruit talent for Facebook’s ever-growing engineering team.

But as we’ve moved toward a “native” world of smartphone app development, the classic Web-centric engineering emphasis is harder to maintain. “Pushing” a piece of new code live to the desktop and mobile Web is a much faster process than making changes to a native iOS or Android application. For native apps, there is a mandatory review of app changes from Apple’s App Store. And with every change made to an app, that means users need to download a new update to the app.

Previously, Facebook split dealing with these problems in two. Desktop coders were part of one group, while the mobile apps teams were separate. In fact, as product manager Dirk Stoop told me, the native iOS and Android apps were so small in the early days, only a handful of people were responsible for maintaining the iOS and Android applications — two of the most-downloaded apps in the entire world.

This wasn’t enough. Facebook’s Web-centric culture didn’t translate over to native app development the same way. Something had to change.

A Different Framework

The Facebook product structure of today looks very different than it did before. Teams are separated across the company by product rather than platform.

So, for example, the Facebook Messenger group, led by Facebook veteran Peter Deng, is one team composed of desktop, mobile and native engineers who create features for every place that this product appears. This is the same for Photos, the team which Stoop leads.

Both of those teams, you may recall, produce standalone apps outside of the proper “Facebook” native application. This, Deng tells me, is part of a strategy focusing on improving these products faster, essentially making each app a “testing ground” for the main Facebook app. If the team sees increased use in a specific feature in the standalone app, for example, that feature could be integrated into the main app.

Timing is also a focus. To shift the “push-whenever” mentality of a Web-focused coder, Facebook has put all new code updates into staggered release cycles.

Deng’s team, for instance, updates the iOS Messenger app every six weeks, like clockwork. This gives the team a better sense of deadlines and timing, while minimizing the amount of updates users need to download. Desktop coders still push more frequently, but are now relegated to doing so twice a day.

Perhaps the most drastic change is philosophical. Product managers want teams to “own their code,” to put more intention and responsibility behind any changes they make.

“This is about understanding that there is some level of permanence in the code you ship,” product manager Michael Sharon told me. “This is educating our people about quality.”

End Game

Facebook talks a big game. But is this shift actually going to benefit users?

Deng and his fellow product managers believe so. In a recent update, two of the most popular features from Messenger and Camera were integrated into the Facebook main iOS app. The idea is, Facebook’s app will get better, faster and stronger with the modular approach.

Not every timed release will be groundbreaking. Most have included bug fixes and optimizations, while others include better feature additions. It’s less about revamping the application and more about getting into a timing groove.

Ultimately, Facebook hopes the shift will pay off in the masses being happier with their mobile experience, unlike the old days when the native apps were built heavily with HTML5. Ideally, that makes for a more engaged, more active Facebook user.

That’ll let the engineering team rest a bit easier. At least until the next product cycle begins.

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:

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

Yahoo turned in a meh third quarter, which came as no surprise to anyone. But none of it matters, since all eyes were on what new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer would say on the investor call today.

Here we go! It is Mayer’s first outing as a public company CEO. She’s been an exec at Google her whole career and, while she has been a prominent public figure in Silicon Valley, she has never run the whole show herself.

Until today, that is!

2:01 pm: Finally, we are hearing from Mayer, who arrived from Google in July.

She is “thrilled to be at Yahoo” and the first 100 days at the company have been a lot of fun.

She’s apparently been a fan since her undergraduate days at Stanford University.

Finally, she tries to answer the big question: “Why did I in particular come to Yahoo?”

Why, indeed, given she and others at Google have spent those years since college putting Yahoo directly into the ground. (Did you know Yahoo gave Google its first big search break, a deal engineered by Mayer and others?)

But, says Mayer, Yahoo is “tailor-made for me,” ticking off arenas such as “search, mail, advertising, home page.”

It’s what she built her career on, apparently — yes, in kicking Yahoo’s behind — but now she wants to help the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant “grow and help redefine” itself.

Still, she stresses, trying to buy as much time as possible from investors: “It will take multiple years to get to where I want the company to be.”

2:08 pm: Mayer, of course, touts her Apple iPhone-and-free-food spending to make the life of Yahoos better (and on parity with the rest of the digital sector).

To be fair, given the past two CEOs, anyone who did not come in and kick the employees where it counts was going to get some claps.

Mayer’s goals are “simple,” she says, “to execute fast, attract the best talent and make Yahoo the best place to work.”

She says she has assembled a stellar world class exec team to accomplish that.

2:11 pm: Now we get to meet one of that team and a Yahoo newbie — CFO Ken Goldman (pictured here). It’s his first day.

He repeats the results that Yahoo has already put in its press release, which is why I usually zone out here and focus on superficial stuff.

Like how much he sounds like former and ousted Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson. Eek!

Goldman touts Yahoo’s recent Alibaba Group deal in China (done not by Goldman, but by outgoing — jacked by Mayer, really — CFO Tim Morse) and notes a $765 million credit facility that Yahoo apparently got this month.

That’s more dough to add to Mayer’s ever-growing pile to spend on fixing Yahoo.

2:23 pm: Mayer is back — Goldman is nice enough, but everyone wants to hear from the former Google wunderkind.

She makes an obvious statement: Yahoo has to “grow at the same pace as the market we are in.” Yep. Yahoo’s growth has been practically non-existent, while the industry has seen robust increases for years.

Mayer is now hitting all the high points on what needs to be fixed.

Search, communications, a desperate need to invest in mobile. “Our top priority is a focused, coherent” mobile strategy, she says. It’s everybody and their mother’s top priority in the Internet space, but it’s gotta be said.

So Mayer says it again: “Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company.”

She also name-checks “delighting users,” improving advertising and personalization.

2:27 pm: She also underscores that Yahoo will now hold onto its ad tech business.

“No one wants Yahoo to grow more than the people who work here,” says Mayer, who says she is going back to Yahoo’s roots. “We believe Yahoo’s best days lie ahead … and we intend to win.”

It sounds very good, but Mayer has been relatively unspecific overall.

Now to Q&A to see if she will drill down more.

2:30 pm: The first question is about Mayer’s vision as compared to others.

Apparently, it does not mean a “pivot” into different and new businesses. It does mean improving what Yahoo has done well.

“I don’t think this is a situation where there’s a giant pivot and we go into a completely different business,” Mayer says flatly. In other words, no string of Yahoo diners in the offing.

In addition, Mayer says that Yahoo occupies a unique spot that does not put it into “channel conflict” with other rivals and, presumably, can be a better partners.

Also asked about search versus display, she’ll take both, but found display “more compelling.”

The next question is about international markets and the local ones.

Growth, says Mayer, although Yahoo will be narrowing the offerings to be more compelling.

She refers to the recent closing of Yahoo operations in Korea. “We had a very hard time finding a growth story moving forward,” says Mayer.

As to local, which Mayer worked on at Google right before she left, Yahoo’s efforts are merely “good” and it’s not slated for investment going forward.

The next question is about metrics to judge progress. Yahoo left out user numbers it has usually provided in the past and Mayer is not giving up any data now either.

Instead, she is going to rely on internal data and not use third-party data any longer. (It makes some sense since the numbers have been not so pretty over time.)

2:37 pm: Mayer did not want to go into acquisition strategy, which came in a question about its giant pile of dough.

No billion-dollar buys for her, she claims, so cancel that Tesla order for Foursquare, Dennis Crowley!

Mayer noted that most acquisitions will be smaller scale and under $100 million. She noted she had done about 20 of those in her career at Google.

A question about Microsoft.

While there has been “disappointment,” Mayer says the goal is to work with the software giant. In other words, she’s not calling her old pals at Google quite yet (she hasn’t yet, in fact).

The next question is about mobile, with Mayer noting once again that the company has to be primarily mobile-focused going forward.

She’s going to hire as many mobile peeps as possible, especially via smaller-scale acquisitions.

2:44 pm: Goldman gets a little awkward in noting that his young-adult kids think Yahoo is all happening. Hmm, I suppose since he comes from the deservedly defunct Excite@Home and the successful but security-dull Fortinet, that makes sense.

In fact, getting back the young folks is one of Mayer’s top challenges.

A very good question — these are all good ones on the call — is how Yahoo can compete without a mobile operating system, such as Google Android and Amazon Kindle and Apple iOS.

Mayer notes that Yahoo has compelling content that others do not.

Another question on search and, specifically, on mobile search.

Mayer is unspecific, except to note that Yahoo has the ability to be pertinent and competitive.

She is a little more clear on the issues with the Microsoft Bing search relationship. Mayer does know this stuff well, and it is clear there is some serious low-hanging fruit to be plucked by someone who knows what they are doing.

Mayer knows search, to be sure, so I am thinking she will make some bank here.

A question about “overmonetizing” the Yahoo site — i.e. cluttering it up with icky ad units that drive consumers nuts.

Mayer notes that cutbacks in ads to improve user experience will only be done to increase traffic, which is a dicey proposition as it can also kill revenue.

A question about content and where that us going.

Mayer touts the Olympics programming — hat tip to former interim CEO Ross Levinsohn — as something unique to Yahoo. Interestingly, the media folks at Yahoo are still wary of pro-engineering Mayer.

2:55 pm: Another question about her interest in content and investment focus in ad tech.

“I am very product focused,” says Mayer, who uses the term “low latency,” a term that no media person ever would use as a hallmark of success.

She is much more comfy talking tech and that’s an area she knows better. Still, she says little about possible investments.

Mayer is then asked about goals for growth at Yahoo. She does not just want to grow at industry rate, but beyond that! But she’ll take industry rate for now (actually, that would be a huge accomplishment).

Goldman says little on the stock buyback, using the Alibaba dough, except they are buying.

3:01 pm: There are a lot of questions today for Mayer — which is no surprise — but now they are beginning to repeat.

(Plus, I have LOLcat’s Ben Huh waiting for me in the ATD Global HQ lobby — and you all know how I feel about them cats!)

Ah, the last question: It’s about data and personalization and what’s been lacking at Yahoo in not taking advantage about the pile of data it has about .

Yes, that should happen and it will under the regime of Marissa Mayer.

Mayer ends by noting, “It’s time for Yahoo to execute and bring our results back to growth.”

So it is written, so it shall be done.

Another big media departure from Yahoo: David Rice, VP of media properties, has left the Silicon Valley Internet giant to take over as SVP and GM of CBS Interactive Games, according to sources close to the situation.

Rice left Yahoo Monday and starts at CBS on Monday, sources said.

Earlier this week, the head of Yahoo’s Omg! and Yahoo TV, Liz Coughlin, left to run business operations at next-gen digital content site Young Hollywood.

The media properties at Yahoo have always been its most successful and powerful units, including powerhouse sites such as Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports.

Which is why Rice is a great get for CBS. Hired in 2010 as part of the crew brought in by former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, the former Microsoft exec was the key media product manager in charge of strategy and execution of Yahoo’s home page, news, sports, finance, entertainment, lifestyle, games and more.

CBS Interactive Games is a big digital division at the company, with more than $50 million in annual revenue, 32 million unique monthly visitors and one billion page views a month, according to comScore. GameSpot is its flagship site, along with GameFAQs, Metacritic, ComicVine and a variety of video streaming and eSports offerings.

Rice will be in charge of all operations at CBS Interactive Games — at Yahoo, he had only media product duties, although the many properties are all huge.

In a related move this past week, new CEO Marissa Mayer hired former Google sales exec Henrique De Castro to become COO at Yahoo. Mayer also told staff that all media units would report to him.