As I had previously reported, Yahoo’s key business unit — its advertising sales force — is now getting details of a reorganization by its new leader, COO Henrique De Castro.

In making the changes, just weeks ahead of Yahoo’s annual sales conference in Las Vegas on Jan. 21, De Castro is borrowing rather heavily from the set-up of the powerful ad business at Google, from whence he came.

By shifting the sales organization to a “category” model, sales reps at the Silicon Valley Internet giant will sell all of Yahoo’s ad products, as well as its search offerings, across channels in a vertical process organized around advertiser segments, such as automotive, entertainment and packaged goods.

Yahoo has long sold its advertising in a regional and tiered organization against premium and performance inventory in display and search, designed to avoid vertical conflict. Thus, the sales staff have built up advertiser relationships across many areas, which will not work in the new system.

Sources inside the company said regional leaders will now be shifted to running various verticals. There will be support specialists for those areas, too.

Mark Ellis, who was most recently VP of North American sales and global partnerships, will pay a key role in the new org, said sources. It is not clear, though, what role Peter Foster, who has headed audience advertising, will play. Another high-ranking exec, Keith Kaplan, has apparently been shifted to focus on agency relationships.

As I had previously written, there are many different ways to organize sales, but making such 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.

According to numerous sources inside Yahoo, the changes are causing some measure of worry and confusion across the salesforce at the company, since it comes after a lot of wrenching changes over the last year.

That includes the departure of well-regarded Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett in mid-October, after De Castro got the COO job. He 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 its sales organization.

He will likely have a more high-profile next week at the International CES, the huge annual consumer electronics show taking place in Las Vegas, along with new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who was a top product exec at Google. The pair is planning on meeting with major ad clients while there, which is their first significant outreach to marketers since taking their new roles at Yahoo.

De Castro had outlined the new ad reorg plan immediately after a multiday offsite with top sales leaders several weeks ago, and said the changes would come at the very beginning of 2013.

The ad staff at Yahoo begin to hear of the changes on Friday, so it looks like De Castro has met his deadline.

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.

HP shares are trading lower by more than 2 percent in premarket action in partial response to the downgrade note by Peter Misek of Jeffries and Co. Misek lowered his target price for HP shares to $14 from $17, and maintained his already low estimate on its per-share earnings for fiscal year 2013 of $3.58, which is far below the consensus estimate of $4.22.

He has lots of reasons: For one thing, Misek is worried about HP’s intentions in the tablet and smartphone arena. After failing to capitalize on the acquisition of Palm and shutting down the webOS hardware business after sales of the TouchPad tablet failed to gain traction — and a subsequent $3.3 billion write-off for goodwill and inventory — Whitman has promised to try again with another smartphone. Misek sees that “makes sense strategically,” but it carries with it a lot of risk: “On top of adding costs and working capital burdens to an already stressed balance sheet, there could be additional write-offs.”

Meanwhile, HP already has significant trouble with its bread-and-butter PC business. Overall demand in the PC market is slowing, while Microsoft’s Windows 8 doesn’t yet appear to be much of a catalyst, at least if you look at the slow demand for PC microprocessors from Intel.

On top of that, the transition to a renewed emphasis on higher-value IT hardware and services is sputtering. Documents revealed in the lawsuit with Oracle over the Itanium chip — HP won the first round, but Oracle has promised to appeal — laid bare the fact that HP has long been relying heavily on revenue-derived service-and-support contracts with customers who buy Itanium-based servers. Referring to the Business Critical Server unit that sells the servers, Misek writes that his conversations with its customers don’t bode well for HP: “Our conversations with BCS customers indicate a lack of confidence in the longevity of the product platform. While migration off of BCS is not lightly undertaken, we expect continued weakness in BCS hardware and related Services revenues.”

Then there’s the printer business: Inventories of printer ink have built up because they’re selling more slowly than before. The correction, Misek argues, will take several quarters to resolve. He thinks tablets are cutting into demand for printed pages.

Finally, there’s software: The one still-unfinished bit of messy business left over from the 11-month service of former CEO Léo Apotheker is the $11.7 billion acquisition of the British software firm Autonomy, announced 13 months ago. Misek says he expects HP to write off some of the value of Autonomy. This would follow the massive $8 billion write-off announced Aug. 22, related to the EDS acquisition from 2008. After that first big write-off, HP hinted strongly that more goodwill write-offs are in the offing, probably in Software, Misek says. “After Autonomy’s poor performance the last couple quarters, we think HP will write off half of the $6 billion goodwill from the Autonomy acquisition, which will put further pressure on its debt to equity ratio.”

Which brings us to HP’s debt situation. Misek notes that HP has $1 billion in debt payments due in the fourth quarter of this year, and another $5.5 billion due in fiscal 2013. While not unusually high for HP historically, it doesn’t exactly help the already-strained balance sheet. Investors in debt markets have certainly noticed as credit default swaps on HP bonds experienced a textbook case of “blowing out” over the summer, though in all fairness it wasn’t the only PC maker they worried about.

Misek isn’t the first to place a “sell” rating on HP shares. Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank Securities was notable for placing a “sell” on HP in August of 2011, and has remained bearish on the shares since then. The bearish case is strong, indeed, and many investors are working it: Short interest in HP shares — an indication of sentiment that the share will fall further — has increased substantially in the last year.

As markets opened for trading in New York, HP shares fell by 15 cents, or a little less than 1 percent, to $16.96 on the New York Stock Exchange, after closing yesterday at $17.11. If HP shares fall to the $14 price target that Misek has set, it would constitute their lowest price since April of 2003.

Wouldn’t it be nice, for example, if, while you were on hold, that otherwise pointless disembodied voice greeted you by name, reassured you that you’re going to be connected to someone who knows exactly what your problem is and how to deal with it, and that it will only be a few more minutes because there is only one more person ahead of you?

If that sounds like some kind of utopian vision for the otherwise infuriating world of automated phone support, it’s not that far from reality. Remember Twilio? This is the company that lets you program your own phone system. It’s the one that makes all its employees create their own application as a way of making everyone familiar with the platform and also showing how easy it is to use.

So yesterday the company announced on its blog a new feature. The wonky software engineer word for it is a “primitive,” which means it’s a deeply fundamental command in an API. Whatever. The command is “Queue,” and what it does is allow companies using Twilio to program their own logical flow for managing people waiting on hold.

For instance, you might decide that when a customer calls in a second or third time within a certain period of time, that they’re having a serious problem. Since presumably you know their phone number from Caller ID, you might route their call directly to the guy who helped them before. Need to get someone else on the phone to help out? It’s easy to bridge the call and bring someone else in.

It’s the sort of thing that, when used creatively, can potentially speed up an otherwise unpleasant, time-consuming and costly process. When you get right down to it, no one on either side of the call really wants to be there, right?

I had a quick chat with Thomas Schiavone, product manager for voice at Twilio, earlier this week. He told me companies using Twilio had already been trying to do some of this using the existing commands in the API. Adding the new Queue command makes it easier, and requires fewer steps to get those things accomplished. “You could have built applications that do all this previously,” he told me. “But we’re making it easier for the developers so they have to do less.”

It’s just another example of how Twilio has been busy this year. In recent months, it has been adding support for international markets in Europe and also Israel. It has also been hiring new senior execs at a fair clip: A CFO in May and before that a CMO in April. Lots of interesting customers, too, including Intuit, eBay and Sony.

Actually, if truth be told, Buffalo, N.Y., is one of the loveliest places to visit in the summer, especially if you’re lucky enough to be right next to majestic Lake Erie.

And that is where the Z80 Labs will have its grand opening today in the Queen City, home of chicken wings and lots and lots of snow, by launching its first start-up, called AppVue.

While visiting the Western New York city this past weekend, I paid a visit to the new facility, which is in a large airy room on the first floor of the Buffalo News.

What’s most heartening to see, of course, is the definitely more earnest and rawer kind of entrepreneurism on display, of a kind that is often lost in the slick, well-oiled machine of Silicon Valley.

That was the point by well-known venture capitalist Jordan Levy of SoftBank Capital, who has long split his time between New York City and his home in Buffalo. He founded the incubator with SoftBank’s Ron Schreiber.

“It’s easy for entrepreneurs in places like Palo Alto to get going,” the voluble Levy said to me on my visit. “We wanted to find a way to keep really great techies here to create an ecosystem that would be able to jump-start even more and help this city keep jobs.”

The longtime investor (pictured here) had already made scores of wins from fundings of companies such as OMGPOP (sold to Zynga) and Buddy Media (sold to Salesforce.com). But Levy appears particularly proud of Buffalo-based Synacor, where he serves as chairman. It’s a successful cloud platform service for companies that want to put video online.

As the big tech dog in Buffalo, Synacor is playing a big role in Z80 Labs, which will focus primarily on making investments in digital media and mobile Internet companies.

The tech incubator — which will provide office space, support and mentorship to its start-ups — is also getting an assist from a $4 million Innovate NY grant provided by the state.

Such a solid base is just what the founders of AppVue — which “specializes in mobile apps that make trusted recommendations among social media friends and networks” — told me they needed.

Essentially, it’s another new take on app discovery, which is a vexing issue for both app creators and users.

After AppVue won the University at Buffalo’s Henry A. Panasci Jr. Technology Entrepreneurship Competition, besting 19 other companies, its trio of founders — Matthew Epstein, CEO; Andrew Cassetti, EVP of product development; and Chief Architect Nathan Schiffer — told me that, until now, there have been no other options but to leave the area to make it in tech.

“We wanted to stay here, and now we can,” said Epstein. “And we are getting the kind of attention we need to try to make this a real company.”

Let’s hope so. It’s already looking impressive at its start — both Forbes CEO Mike Perlis and New York power VC Fred Wilson will make appearances today for Z80’s debut.

I’d suggest Frank & Teressa’s Anchor Bar on Main Street — where chicken wings were apparently invented, and an arena in which Silicon Valley will never have an upper hand.

How serious? Does $2.2 billion and 15 percent EBIT profits sound serious to you? It does to me, and also to Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore.

Having slogged through Oracle’s 72-page document dump with a better eye for detail than mine, Whitmore noticed a line in a January 2010 email from Dave Donatelli, now head of HP’s Enterprise Group (specifically Exhibit 17, for those who want to scroll through and find it) saying that HP’s Business Criticial Server business combined with its Technology Services business, which includes the support and services associated with the Integrity line of servers that uses the Intel-made Itanium chip, was at that time larger on a revenue basis than HP’s personal computer business.

The same document, he says, showed that at the time, HP’s “owned operating profit” for the combined hardware, software and services tied to the business of selling and supporting Itanium servers was about $2.2 billion. All in, HP derives — or at least at that time derived — about 15 percent of its profits on an EBIT basis from Itanium and related businesses.

No wonder, then, that HP considered Oracle’s March 2011 decision to stop creating software that runs on the Itanium chip so earth-shattering that it hauled the software giant into court last June. That case is expected to head to trial any day now.

The disclosure is the clearest sign yet of how much HP stands to lose if its Business Critical Server business can’t recover. It has always been known to be a highly profitable business; exactly how profitable was a closely guarded HP secret. But sales of Business Critical hardware have been on the decline. In 2009, sales of BCS hardware were $2.6 billion. In 2011, they had fallen by 19 percent to $2.1 billion. And in the quarter ended Jan. 31, sales were $405 million, down 27 percent from the same period in 2011.

The uncertainty about Itanium’s future is one of the many reasons that Whitmore has been particularly bearish on HP’s turnaround prospects: “Given the growing uncertainty around the long-term viability of Itanium, we expect customer defections to continue, if not accelerate in future periods,” he wrote in a research note to clients, issued yesterday.

However, much as HP lawyers would like to argue that Oracle’s motivation is to help bolster long-flagging sales of its new Sun Microsystems hardware unit, Whitmore argues that the main benefactor is IBM: “While Oracle is responsible for shining a bright light on Itanium’s precarious future, it is probably doing IBM the biggest favor. … We expect IBM to be the greatest beneficiary of Itanium defections and view Power [IBM's server chip] as the market consolidator and eventual standard in the UNIX/RISC server market over the medium to longer term.”

And even if HP prevails in its suit, Whitmore isn’t seeing much benefit: “Regardless of the outcome of this particular suit, we expect HP-UX customers to continue fleeing what is increasingly looking like a dead platform — creating a major headwind for HP’s medium-term earnings.” Ouch.

While he has only been CEO of Yahoo for less than five months, in the next several days Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is facing perhaps the most critical moment of his short tenure.

According to sources with knowledge of the situation, the board of Yahoo is not likely to take long in assessing whether he will stay or if he will be let go, due to a controversy around how a non-existent computer science degree got on his bio and also in Yahoo regulatory filings.

A special committee of independent directors is now investigating the matter, including trying to assess the damage has had on Thompson’s ability to lead the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

How quickly the board moves is likely to be a sign of their intent. If within the next days, it is likely to let the former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit go and replace him with a current company exec; if it waits longer and shows some public support of him — which the board has not done since the scandal erupted — Thompson’s chances are better that he will only be given some sort of censure.

One important task is also closely considering the impact of possible legal problems related to Thompson and others signing documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission that were not accurate.

One thing is clear from interviews with multiple sources, many members of the board have not been happy with how Thompson has handled the matter since activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point uncovered the problem a week ago.

While first tossing the borked bio as an “inadvertent error,” Thompson was then largely silent about the issue with staff, despite being in close meetings with them, which caused stress among key execs.

Then, he made a public announcement in which he apologized for only the “distraction” caused by the incident and not the error itself as some had hoped he would.

Yesterday, apparently feeling it was time to try to explain things face-to-face, Thompson made another attempt to explain what happened in two separate meetings with his direct reports and then his senior staff, apparently trying to get through to employees that he did not fake his resume nor did he give an inaccurate bio to Yahoo when he was being hired for the job earlier this year.

Thompson thought it was time — now that the board investigation was underway — to answer questions directly, said a source.

Among other things, Thompson gave a somewhat convoluted explanation that it appeared in his bio due to a misunderstanding during an interview with a headhunting firm. And that he never noticed it once it proliferated And that when an NPR interviewer asked him directly about his CS degree, he did not want to correct her in mid-discussion — although others report he said he did not hear the question fully.

Sources said Thompson — who is on the midst of initiating changes across a large and troubled organization, after laying off 2,000 employees — thought the sessions went well, that he clearly communicated that he was taking blame for the problem and its repercussions. Those sources also noted that he received support for doing so after the talks.

But, more than a dozen others I interviewed who were listening remotely — some of whom I sought out and some who contacted me directly — thought Thompson’s complex explanation was deeply problematic and that he tried to foist the blame on others rather than on himself.

Every one of these people expressed the need for him to step down to allow Yahoo to move forward.

What the board thought about the performance is still not clear, said sources, but things are coming down to two distinct scenarios.

The first is a quick parting of the ways with Thompson, within days, either for cause or via a negotiated settlement. Others at Yahoo involved with perpetuating the mistake in the bio are also at risk.

This option is perhaps the more likely at this moment, unless the scandal dissipates and employees continued rancor over the situation can be assuaged soon.

In this case, sources said, Thompson will be replaced by a current board member or a member of the top staff. When directors fired Carol Bartz last fall, CFO Tim Morse became interim CEO and he is one of the likely candidates for the job again.

The second scenario centers on needing Thompson to complete a number of complex transactions related to the sale of Yahoo’s Chinese assets and its re-negotiations with Microsoft over its troubled search partnership, among other things.

In that case, Thompson will be censured in some manner by the board and will also probably have to endure some punishment for allowing false regulatory documents to be filed by Yahoo. Others at Yahoo will also be subject to the same treatment in such an outcome.

How will it turn out?

Only board member Patti Hart has so far paid for her faulty vetting of Thompson, stepping down from the board earlier this week.

But whether she will be the only shoe to drop in what has turned out to be a bizarre wildfire that as raged across Yahoo’s troubled landscape remains to be seen.

Thus, most definitely watch this space this weekend.

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
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• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
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• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
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One of Yahoo’s biggest long-term investors, Capital Research and Management, which owns more than 10 percent of the company in two different funds, is leaning toward voting for the slate proposed by activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point, in the wake of the controversy around the botched bio of its new CEO Scott Thompson.

“Having a CEO with that hanging over his head is really a problem going forward,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “It’s hard to pretend this is not a problem.”

While sources said Yahoo’s longtime institutional investor — which currently holds large stakes via its Capital Research Global Investors and Capital World Investors funds — is not likely to go public with their voting choice until close to the annual meeting, which will take place sometime this summer.

But its fund managers have told key Yahoo board members of their grave concerns over the situation.

Ironically, in the last proxy fight showdown with Carl Icahn, Capital removed its support of Yahoo’s slate too and was an important influence to many major changes at the company.

Such a move is problematic for Thompson, since the rejection of another big shareholder at its upcoming annual meeting will keep the unusual issue and right in the middle of a noisy proxy fight.

A special committee of the Yahoo board is investigating the situation — in which a fake computer science degree somehow got on the resume of the former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit and later into official Yahoo regulatory filings.

The problem was uncovered last week — unfortunately for the Silicon Valley Internet giant — by Loeb, who has been banging away on Yahoo since.

A trio of independent Yahoo directors is looking into the mess, with a focus on how that happened, whether anyone at Yahoo knew of the inaccurate bio and how it got there in the first place.

Also of great concern, is how Thompson could have not seen the error in the many years it was on the Web site of eBay and also how he approved a bio that had the inaccuracy in it when he was hired by Yahoo in January.

Worse still, in a 2009 interview, he clearly did not say he did not have such a degree in with a radio show host when directly asked about it.

“It’s a little hard believe an executive of this level would have missed such a thing, when he had so many opportunities to fix it,” said one source. “And, if he did overlook it that many times, that’s a problem too.”

In fact, according to a report earlier today by Business Insider that I also confirmed, Thompson told employees today in two separate meetings that he did miss the error since it was placed there — inexplicably — in 2004. In the meeting, he blamed a low-level headhunting staffer who added it incorrectly, an error that then proliferated.

Thompson also said he did not provide a resume to the company in his hiring process — say whaaaat, but true — although this still does not absolve him from the original error.

As to the interview: Thompson said he did not want to be rude and correct the host of TechNation, Moira Gunn, after she clearly asserted to him he had a computer science degree as part of a question on his qualifications. Others present at the meetings said he said he did not hear the question.

But, in an video interview with me yesterday, though, Gunn said she and Thompson discussed a computer science education in a way that left the clear impression that he had obtained one.

While Thompson’s excuse may beggar the imagination of some, it’s his story and he’s sticking to it. In all seriousness, his complete lack of willingness to take responsibility for the error — even if it was not his fault — itself is a little startling.

Because what’s not clear is how the bio was miraculously correct in eBay’s official filings and also if it is plausible that he never saw the mistake.

Numerous communications execs at Internet companies told me that it was unusual for a high-level exec not to pay close attention to information that went out about them, especially in legal filings. In addition, just as many execs are made to check and swear on their bios that go into such documents.

In fact, it was Thompson’s job to make sure the things written about him were correct at all times. As CEO, as a major Silicon Valley player pointed out, he is required by federal law to personally certify Yahoo’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Violations of these rules carry financial and also potential criminal penalties.

Sources said the board is worried about that credibility issue too and it puts Thompson in an ever-dicier position. Noticeably, the board has yet to make a public statement of support for him on the issue.

Also a major worry for the directors is the mostly negative response to the situation from Yahoo employees, who are deeply upset that Thompson’s error was not caught and that he might not be treated in the same way as anyone else who turned in a false resume, whether it was by accident or not.

A Yahoo spokeswoman told me last week that there was also support internally for Thompson, but in many dozens of interviews I have done with Yahoo employees and a continued monitoring of internal bulletin board, the tone is not in his favor by any means.

Like I said, it’s a dicey time to be Scott Thompson right now.

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

As expected, activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point released a new letter on the bio controversy he set off at Yahoo, again calling for the firing of its CEO, Scott Thompson.

“It seems farcical to us that the Board will most likely spend more time deliberating over whether Mr. Thompson should be fired than it did properly vetting whether he should have been hired,” read the letter in part. “The necessary investigation into whether certain senior executives and Board Members knew of Mr. Thompson’s deceptions before hiring him should not delay decisive action over his ethical breaches.”

Loeb, who is waging a proxy fight with Yahoo over board seats he wants, also offered to work with the Yahoo board to find a new CEO if it accepted his slate of directors. In the interim, he suggested Yahoo put either CFO Tim Morse or media head Ross Levinsohn in the job. Morse had taken that position temporarily after Yahoo fired its last CEO Carol Bartz last fall.

Confused yet?

Loeb set off a management crisis there last week with the revelation that Thompson had added a fake computer science degree to his bio.

The first casualty came yesterday with the stepping down of Yahoo director Patti Hart, who was charged with vetting Thompson for the job.

The Yahoo board also announced yesterday that it would be conducting a probe of the circumstances around the hiring, as well as how the faux academic credentials got in Thompson’s bio and also the company’s regulatory filings.

The new letter was a reaction to Thompson’s apology on Monday for the borked bio becoming a “distraction” (but not, oddly, for the mistake itself). Loeb had previously called for Thompson’s firing over the bio fibbing.

Loeb will be appearing at an investor conference in Las Vegas later today, where he will surely be asked about the situation.

In related news, eBay CEO John Donahoe, Thompson’s former boss, lent words of support, but also underscored that the online commerce company’s legal filings of his bio were always correct, even if its Web site and other PR documents handed out were not. Thompson came to Yahoo from a stint as president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit.

As reported by Bloomberg, Donahoe said:

“When Scott was hired at EBay Inc., all of EBay’s filings had the accurate information. Some of EBay’s PR materials had that bio. Our legal filings were taken care of by our legal department. Some of the PR materials had that info,” he said while in Tokyo of the correct bio versus the incorrect one.

Donahoe added: “I think Scott Thompson did a great job at PayPal. I think he’s a very talented leader and I believe he can help Yahoo. I hope they get through this and he can continue to do the very challenging job he’s got of helping to turn Yahoo around. I’m Scott’s biggest fan.”

This has been the first public support of Thompson by a prominent Internet figure, which might help lagging morale at the company.

Here’s the full version of the latest Loeb letter:

Third Point May 9 Letter Release

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

Even as Yahoo’s board was kibitzing all weekend about how to handle the continuing resume-padding controversy around its recently hired CEO Scott Thompson — including hiring its own outside crisis communications firm to represent it — he was working the phones to keep top staff apprised of the evolving situation.

While Thompson told those he spoke to that he was limited in what he could say and blamed a “personal vendetta” by an activist shareholder for his troubles, being proactive in this regard is probably a good idea.

That’s because multiple sources said he said exactly nothing in various strategy meetings with top employees last week about allegations leveled by Dan Loeb of Third Point, which proved correct, that Thompson had not gotten a computer science degree in college, as his longtime bio had claimed.

“It was the gorilla in the room and it was awkward in the extreme,” said one exec present at the meetings. “He never brought it up, which was even worse.”

At this point, it seems unlikely that Thompson can regain the confidence of many at Yahoo — even though a company spokeswoman said he received a lot of incoming support too, both externally and internally — until he can render some cogent explanation about how the borked bio got into both Yahoo’s public site and also its more critical regulatory filings.

Even more mysteriously, how the error was never present in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission made by eBay, where Thompson led its PayPal payments unit, although his public eBay bio has also been wrong for close to a decade.

And, most of all, how was it that Thompson never caught the mistake himself — even when directly asked about it — despite the likelihood of reviewing it multiple times over those many years and ultimately certifying it for Yahoo’s own SEC filings.

Calling Encyclopedia Brown to solve the Case of the Computer Science Degree That Wasn’t!

Thompson has given no explanation about the debacle to the bulk of the Yahoo staff at all levels, save for an information-free and terse note to employees on Friday afternoon that essentially asked them to focus on their work instead of his bizarre crisis.

Unfortunately for him, many Yahoos are focusing a lot on Thompson, with message boards at the Silicon Valley Internet chastising their CEO and giving him support that is tepid at best. From interviews I have had with two dozen employees this weekend, to say morale is at an all-time low is perhaps understating the situation.

Here is a short selection of comments that were read to me, for example:

“Resume padding is one thing, but lying about something that is so easy to check is puzzling.”

“There is no reason to let it slide by … This isn’t some guy who’s trying to impress a date … It’s sad that we just accept this kind of stuff from corporate heads and politicians.”

“Having some document to prove you can do a job is not all that important, lying about it is.”

What appears to trouble employees the most in the threads I was read was the nonchalance of the initial Yahoo statement about the issue, which called the addition of a fake degree on Thompson’s bio an “inadvertent error.”

“From a pure employee perspective, it feels like it is a violation of their principles,” said one person, reflecting a dozen or more conversations I had this weekend up and down the organization. “And anyone else would probably be immediately fired for this, even with an explanation.”

Said another: “He clearly knew and lied for years; and his handling since exposed has been unacceptable.”

As I noted above, a company spokeswoman said there was also much support for Thompson (pictured here) within the company, but declined to provide any quotes or details.

Presumably, some answers will be coming from a board investigation aimed at getting to the bottom of the situation, including trying to grok who put the error in the bio in the first place.

My bet: They’ll try to pin it on a lower-level minion, although that will not fly with a lot of people.

Including me, because whoever typed in the faux degree, its presence there has been too long for Thompson not to be responsible for it.

Flunky error or not, there are important questions about whether Thompson himself provided a bio that contained the inaccuracy to the board when he put himself forth for the job via direct emails to Yahoo director and Intuit CEO Brad Smith.

That line of thought basically boils down to: Can Thompson not read?

More problematic is the fact that the placement did not come via Yahoo’s headhunter on the CEO search, Heidrick & Struggles, which apparently was not charged with doing a background check on Thompson.

Instead, the director in charge of the search, Patti Hart, sources said, hired another forensic firm, which appears to have missed Thompson’s erroneous academic record.

The only thing completely clear amidst all the confusion: Hart screwed up by botching an extremely simple part of a vetting she was charged with. That makes her vulnerable, of course, along with other Yahoo board members or staffers closely involved in the talent search.

While Hart (pictured here) is in a much dicier position, Thompson still appears to have initial board backing — at least for today — as it’d be a very tough call to fire yet another CEO so quickly in the middle of several key deals for Yahoo, as well as a proxy fight.

Said one person close to the situation, the board is still considering its “options,” in an effort that is being led by independent board member Fred Amoroso.

So, it will be instructive to see how the board will proceed tomorrow — especially since it is likely that Loeb will lob a lawsuit to try to get more information on the Thompson hiring process.

But it’s started by hiring its own outside communications firm, Sard Verbinnen, which has handled other crises for Yahoo in the past.

Sard’s Charles Sipkins — welcome back, Charlie! — had no comment about the board’s next move, except to reiterate its statement from last week that it is looking into the Thompson bio mess and will make appropriate disclosures at some point.

We can’t hardly wait.

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

Walt Mossberg and I could not be more thrilled to announce that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, will be the opening-night speaker at our 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

It will be Cook’s first appearance at D, as well as his first time being onstage at an event not run by Apple or for investors since he was named CEO last August.

Since then, Cook has increased the enormous progress made under the late Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs, with the iconic Silicon Valley giant putting out a number of new and innovative products and also becoming one of the most valuable companies on earth.

(Of course, Jobs had made a half-dozen always memorable visits to our stage over the last decade, the last of which was in 2010 at D8.)

So we are looking forward to hearing Cook’s perspective on where the industry and Apple is going, and perhaps to get a glimpse into what makes its new leader — who is also a longtime Apple vet — tick.

And Cook knows a lot, to be sure.

Before he was named CEO, Cook played a critical role as COO at Apple, responsible for worldwide sales and operations from its supply chain to sales activities to service and support globally. Cook also ran Apple’s Macintosh unit.

Before Apple, he worked at Compaq, Intelligent Electronics, and even spent a dozen years at IBM.

Cook joins a D10 speaker list that is full of major players in tech and media, including: New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, as well as many more.

(And we still have more speakers to come.)

Third Point’s Dan Loeb, the activist Yahoo shareholder, fired back at the company today about recent board appointments that ignored his alternate slate of directors, in yet another colorful letter that compared the Silicon Valley Internet giant to the famous children’s book “Alice in Wonderland.”

And not in a nice way.

“Our view of the nomination process is further reinforced by your explanation on Sunday as to why I would not be an acceptable Director. You told me that the Board felt my experience and knowledge ‘would not be additive to the Board’ and that as Yahoo!’s largest outside shareholder, I would be ‘conflicted’ as a Director, wrote Loeb to CEO Scott Thompson. “Am I conflicted to advocate for the interests of other shareholders because we are owners of 5.8% (over $1 billion) of Yahoo! shares (unlike the non-retiring and proposed board members who have never purchased a single share of Yahoo! except for subsidized shares issued through option exercises and shares “paid” by the Company in lieu of fees)? Only in an illogical Alice-in-Wonderland world would a shareholder be deemed to be conflicted from representing the interests of other shareholders because he is, well, a shareholder too. This sentiment further confirms that Yahoo!’s approach to Board representation is “shareholders not welcome.”

We’re about to go down the rabbit hole, indeed, as the well-known New York hedge fund exec moves to significantly step up his proxy battle against Yahoo. While it will be a tough road for Third Point to attract enough investor support for his side, it’s still a noisy mess that Yahoo can ill afford, especially as Thompson readies significant layoffs as part of a major restructuring.

Here’s the full text of Loeb’s saucy letter:

TP March 28 Letter to CEO Thompson Re Board Negotiations

One of Yahoo’s most respected researchers, Raghu Ramakrishnan, who is the author of one of the most famous database textbooks, “Database Management Systems,” has left the Silicon Valley company to join Microsoft. He was also critical to the development of much of Yahoo’s personalization technology.

Sources said the chief scientist for search and cloud platforms at its Yahoo Labs unit will be a fellow on the software giant’s SQL team.

Ramakrishnan, who has been at Yahoo since 2006, is one of many key researchers to depart before what is expected to be a gutting of the company’s research division in upcoming layoffs and other cuts by new CEO Scott Thompson.

None of this exodus of high-level research talent comes as a surprise. Prabhakar Raghavan, the well-respected head of the Yahoo Labs unit and also recently its head of strategy, has recently left the company to take a job at Google.

Ramakrishnan came to Yahoo from a professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. According to his bio from Yahoo, he was the “founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered crowd-sourcing, specifically question-answering communities, powering Ask Jeeves’ AnswerPoint as well as customer-support for companies such as Compaq.”

A Yahoo spokesperson declined comment (but, trust me, it is true).

One thing Judge James Kleinberg did was dismiss a fraud claim by Oracle that said HP had been all sneaky when it concluded a settlement with Oracle that included an agreement to continue building software for systems using the Itanium chip. The settlement was struck only a few weeks before HP hired Léo Apotheker as its CEO and Ray Lane as its chairman.

But that’s not the important part of what Judge Kleinberg did. The most important aspect of yesterday’s action in Hewlett-Packard v. Oracle was the release of the unredacted version of Oracle’s cross-complaint. And it’s a juicy read.

I’ve posted the redacted version before. Now you can read all the bits that were blacked out.

What you’ll find is a lot of information that goes to the core of Oracle’s argument that HP has a lot to lose if the Itanium chip goes end of life, which is exactly what Oracle has said Intel plans to do. As the only major server vendor who sells boxes running Itanium chips, HP makes a lot of money — billions of dollars, according to a newly unredacted statement in the filing — on service-and-support contracts with its Itanium customers. As one HP executive is quoted on page four of the filing, without Itanium, HP would be “strategically screwed.”

Intel, on the other hand, was more or less ready to let the chip die. Having spent billions, dating back to 1989, to develop the Itanium chip, which outside of HP never saw any market success, Intel had to be convinced to keep building them. To do that, HP, the filing reads, paid Intel $440 million to keep Itanium chips in production for a few more generations, through 2014. The deal didn’t even cover the cost of the chips, as HP had to pay for them, as well, the filing reads. Oracle calls the arrangement a “pure pay-off to induce Intel to keep churning out processors that it really wanted to kill.”

And while there’s nothing specifically wrong with the arrangement by itself, Oracle’s point is that HP was misleading the marketplace about the true status of the keystone product in its Business Critical Service business. That unit, in no small part because of the uncertainty wrought by this lawsuit, saw its sales fall by 23 percent in HP’s most recent quarter.

Having won the release of the unredacted complaint, Oracle claimed something of a victory in a statement:

“Oracle is delighted that the Superior Court of the State of California, Santa Clara County, has rejected HP’s attempt to hide the truth about Itanium’s certain end of life from its customers, partners and own employees. We look forward to seeing all of the facts made public that demonstrate how HP has known for years that Itanium is end of life.”

It all sounds very reasonable, until you take into account the fact that Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010 and is now a big server vendor that competes with HP, and would by no real stretch of argument benefit from an exodus of HP’s Itanium customers toward other vendors. HP called the decision by Oracle to cease support for Itanium part of a “calculated business strategy” to mess up HP’s Itanium business and capture those customers. Yet the evidence so far suggests that the one benefiting from this fight is actually IBM.

HP claimed victory of its own, in a statement:

“HP is pleased that the Superior Court of the State of California, Santa Clara County, has rejected Oracle’s attempt to use a fraud claim to undo its contract with HP. We look forward to seeing the facts made public that demonstrate how Oracle’s March 2011 announcement to no longer develop software for Itanium servers was part of a calculated business strategy to drive hardware sales from Itanium to inferior Sun servers. This further demonstrates the fact that Oracle breached its contractual commitment to HP and ignored its repeated promises of support to our shared customers.”

HP has portrayed itself as the defender of the interests of Itanium customers, under attack by Oracle. As HP puts it in its statement, Oracle tried to induce customers running Oracle software on HP Itanium systems into replacing that hardware by limiting support and withholding software patches and bug fixes. “Customers were left without options to address bugs and other defects in their Oracle software,” HP says.

For HP, this is all a simple argument over whether or not Oracle can be held to the contract they agreed to in 2010.

The agreement stems from the circumstances of former HP CEO Mark Hurd’s resignation, and his subsequent hiring by Oracle as its president. HP sued Hurd and Oracle, and soon they settled. HP says that a clause in that settlement included a provision that Oracle would continue to port its database software to HP servers running the Itanium chip. Oracle has argued that this clause is not part of the final agreement. The settlement document itself remains confidential, but its details will likely emerge in the trial. Expect lots of arguing over different versions of the agreement.

I have embedded two documents below, for your reading pleasure. The first is Oracle’s unredacted cross-complaint, with all the blacked-out bits from the previous version now fully revealed for the world to see. Below that is a Case Management Conference Statement filed by HP lawyers, also unredacted, where it seeks to expose Oracle as making cold-blooded moves that would appear to be attempts to spur Oracle’s own software customers to abandon HP hardware. It’s not quite as juicy as Oracle’s document, but it has its moments, too. Enjoy them both:

HP v Oracle – Amended Cross Complaint

0077a 2011121 Hp Cmc Stmnt Unredacted

As happened last week to its centralized marketing division, Yahoo has broken up its Customer Advocacy organization, with its staff distributed to the various regions and the product unit of the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Customer Advocacy has been led by EVP Jeff Russakow, whose fate is now similarly unclear as it is for CMO Elisa Steele, whose division was diced up to the regions last week.

Both execs — who were hired by fired CEO Carol Bartz — plan to remain at the company until at least January, sources said.

Russakow, according to his Yahoo bio, has had “global responsibility for all of Yahoo!’s customer support functions, including audience, small business, ad operations, and search network quality.” He came to Yahoo from previous jobs at Symantec and Adobe.

Interim CEO Tim Morse sent a memo to employees about the change, noting Russakow is looking for his next opportunity, using much the same language as Steele used in her internal email.

The moves are interesting, given Yahoo’s current effort to find a new strategy, which includes a possible sale of all or parts of the company. But there is also a strong sentiment within the company to reorganize around strengthening its advertising platform and products.

I have a call into Yahoo PR for comment (but let’s assume I am accurate about this, shall we?).

More, obviously, to come.

Now, the five-person start-up is racing to rapidly improve its second program, a panorama photo-taking app called 360.

The app uses the iPhone’s video-recording feature to create an immersive panoramic photo (see YouTube video to really get a sense for what it does). I’ve used it a bunch in recent months to capture everything from interior scenes of the Boston Library to a snowy Copley Square to shots of Stanford’s women’s basketball team snapping UConn’s 90-game winning streak. The app debuted at the end of July, mere weeks after the team sold RedLaser to eBay.

However, the Occipital team feels a renewed urgency to add a bunch of features quickly. In December, Microsoft offered a demo of a similar technology it hopes to add into its Bing for iPhone app.

What the 360 app does well, said co-founder Jeff Powers, is create such panoramas quickly and easily. However, the options to share that panorama are limited, especially if one wants to share an immersive photo as opposed to just an unrolled flat image. Also, one of the downsides of the app’s speeds is that it only captures a part of the scene once, meaning it misses out on the opportunities to improve on that initial image with additional data. Also, unless a user is particularly skilled, there can be visible seams within the panorama.

Powers said the company hopes to address all of those issues in the next release.

“We’re trying to satiate that exact urge to capture the scene and share it with other people,” Powers said in an interview. “We’ve nailed the ‘It’s really fast and easy [part]‘; we havent nailed the ‘It’s really good quality and easy to share’ part.”

Powers said he is also hoping to get the next version of 360 out in the coming months, “hopefully before they [Microsoft] come out with whatever they come out with and before any others.”

Occipital, which grew out of the TechStars Boulder program, also hopes eventually to bring 360 to other mobile devices.

“We’re very very interested in Android,” Powers said. One of the challenges, though, is 360 works very closely with the phone’s camera. With the iPhone, that only means understanding one or two different models, as compared to dozens of Android phones–meaning lots of extra support and development time.

“It is a big endeavor to support all of these devices,” Powers said.

The company also hopes to create an expanded Web presence, beyond a current gallery of 360-created panoramas.

As for Microsoft, it says its panorama feature is still a prototype, with no firm date for when it will be added to the Bing iPhone app.

At the December event, Microsoft’s Blaise Agueras y Arcas demonstrated Bing’s forthcoming panorama abilities in a video interview with Mobilized.

“This is still experimental, but we are coming out with it very soon,” he said.

Here is the video that shows what the 360 app can do:

I am considering buying an iPad, but am wondering if I should wait for the second edition which is rumored to be coming soon. What do you advise?

A:

I regard the current, original iPad as an excellent product, and can’t say you’d go wrong with it. But while Apple is famously secretive, I’d be surprised if there isn’t a new model announced in the next few months that will have added or improved features. There’s wide speculation, for instance, it will gain a camera or two. The company has a long history of improving its products, and, in the case of the iPad, must keep making it better to deal with a host of coming tablet rivals. So, if you can wait a few months, I’d do so.

Q:

I see that many of the newer wireless routers with attractive features do not support printer sharing. Does that mean you cannot connect a printer via Ethernet cable to the router and be able to access that printer through the wireless network? Why do so many of the newer routers not support printer sharing?

A:

In the context you seem to be using it, the term “printer sharing” referred to plugging in an otherwise non-networkable printer via USB to a router, which would then make the printer usable over the network. I presume that this feature has declined in popularity as more home printers now have wired or wireless networking built in, and the latest Windows and Mac operating systems make it much easier to share even a printer without its own network features through the computer’s connection to the network. If the printer has wired networking built in, you should be able to plug it into one of the Ethernet jacks on most wireless routers and make it usable on your wireless network.

Q:

I have an almost two-year-old MacBook Pro. The hard drive is nearly full, and I wondered if you knew of any tricks to free up some space. I’m particularly interested in cost-effective fixes.

A:

One useful free utility for freeing up space on a Mac is called Monolingual, and is available at http://bit.ly/dqTCSC. This little utility allows you to remove all the obscure files on a Mac that allow the computer to operate in languages you can’t read or don’t use. For instance, if you only speak and read English, you can erase the files that enable the computer to run in, say, Albanian and Portuguese. Its maker says this can free up hundreds of megabytes of space. I have tried it and it works. Of course, whether you have a Windows PC or a Mac, you can free up space in many other ways, such as by deleting files and programs you don’t use, archiving or deleting old email, and removing temporary browser files.

Email mossberg@wsj.com.

Think of it as the equivalent of iTunes for Android.

Developers will be able to upload apps–including games and other digital content–to Amazon, which in turn will promote and distribute them on Amazon.com and also on mobile phones. (I can hear the promotions now: “If you liked that app…what about this one?”)

In a blog post aimed at developers, Amazon writes that it’s trying hard to get developers recognized among the hundreds of thousands of apps out there: “Amazon’s innovative marketing and merchandising features are designed to help customers find and discover relevant products from our vast selection, and we’re excited to apply those capabilities to the apps market segment.”

For the past few months, Amazon employees have been reaching out to developers to find out pain points and drum up support for this day.

So far, it looks like Amazon has listened to concerns. The developer portal looks insanely easy to use–anyone with a regular Amazon username and password can access it. Right now, the annual fee of $99 has been waived, and once you agree to a seven-page app-store distribution agreement, you can start uploading applications to the network, and eventually see metrics on how well they are performing.

Much of it sounds like iTunes.

Amazon will share 70 percent of revenues with developers, and the distribution agreement hints it will go worldwide. For now, it will be limited to the U.S. Amazon will handle all the bill processing, which is complex, especially on a global basis. Google learned this the hard way, and continues to support only paid apps in some countries. Amazon will also have some sort of approval process, but it’s unclear how rigorous that will be.

Launching an app store is not a stretch for Amazon. It’s been selling MP3s on phones for some time and has a large digital catalog, spanning books and videos. It also has a built-in payment system and access to tens of millions of Amazon customers, many of whom have their credit card information on file, as with iTunes or PayPal.

The one question is whether the business will provide enough scale for an e-commerce company of its size. After all, most applications today are free, or really cheap. And at least for now, Amazon is limited to the Android operating system.

True, Android is quickly gaining on Apple, especially in the U.S. According to Nielsen’s latest figures, the iPhone’s market share is 28.6 percent vs. RIM’s BlackBerry and Google’s Android platforms, which are essentially tied in second place with 26.1 percent and 25.8 percent, respectively.

There are two potential scenarios that will help pencil this out: The app store could help drive more sales of other content or products on the phone for Amazon. A more farfetched scenario is that Amazon does such a good job that other platforms or handset makers, like BlackBerry, Windows Phone, HTC or Samsung, will choose to outsource or adopt Amazon’s platform for a cut of the revenues.

CIO Lars Rabbe says in a blog post that a set of support servers responsible for Skype instant messaging became overloaded, and as a result sent delayed responses. A bug in the latest Windows version of the Skype desktop software failed to process these delayed responses, causing them to crash. About half of the world’s Skype users who were signed on at the time the problem began were using that version of the software, and of those, about 40 percent crashed. Among them were users whose machines were serving as supernodes. Rabbe says as many as 30 percent of the Skype network’s supernodes were among the crashed machines.

Losing those supernodes increased the load on other still-functioning supernodes, which was compounded by all the crashed Windows users trying to restart their software and get back on the network. He says traffic to these supernodes surged to 100 times normal volume for that time of day.

What he doesn’t go into great detail about was why the instant messaging servers became overloaded in the first place. Was this another bug in the server software? It’s a little unclear from this explanation.

Rabbe says Skype is trying to learn from the incident and has instituted new procedures to try to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. But this can’t help but hurt its reputation as it looks for ways to diversify its base beyond the millions of free users it has and make some actual money.

The whole reason Skype is supposed to work as well as it usually does is the strength and resilience of the network, and the fact that the network gets stronger as more people are signed on to it. To say that two bugs in a strange confluence of events could bring that entire network down raises a lot of fundamental questions about Skype.

Rabbe says an investment program to increase capacity to support paid consumers and enterprise customers is underway and will continue into 2011. I’m betting Skype will speed it up.

A page deep in the company’s support site confirms the issue, but appears to significantly understate the problem.

“We are aware that some people are encountering difficulties signing in to Skype,” reads the company’s response on a FAQ page for those having connection issues. “Rest assured, we are working hard to fix this. In the meantime, we apologise for any inconvenience this may be causing you.”

Maybe the company was just trying to reinforce its warning that Skype is not a replacement for the telephone in an emergency:

Needless to say, this isn’t the kind of conversation the company was seeking to spark as it tries to build momentum for a pending stock offering.

Update, 10:45 am PT: A Skype representative said in an email that the company is examining the cause and extent of the outage and again apologized to users for the inconvenience. Skype said to follow its Twitter account (@skype) for updates.

At least theoretically: I just tried to download the new app to my year-old Tour, and got an error message. And BlackBerry’s support link for the app gave me a 404 error.

Meanwhile, some context: Various retailers, carriers and phones have offered over-the-air downloads for years, and Apple brought them to the iPhone in 2009.

Despite the music industry’s big hopes, they’ve never really taken off in the U.S.

“We see 3 immediate effects of expansion of the distribution of the iPhone at Verizon,” Bernstein Research analyst Pierre Ferragu said in a note to clients today. “A) Migration of existing iPhone users from AT&T to Verizon; B) Some migration of Android users at Verizon to the new iPhone; C) More support to Android from AT&T, as a consequence of the loss of the iPhone exclusivity.”

Worst-case scenario, Ferragu figures Motorola, HTC and RIM will lose 10-30 percent of their business to Verizon. But that loss will likely be offset by new gains at AT&T–at least for Android vendors like HTC and Motorola, for whom Ferragu predicts a 0-30 percent increase in shipments at the carrier. Says Ferragu, “If Verizon starts selling the iPhone, we believe there will not be a visible impact for HTC and a limited one for RIM. If there is a medium term impact on Motorola, we believe that the shortfall will be easily made up in the full year.”

As public relations moves go, “moderation into oblivion” is a poor strategy. Though the deleted threads are no longer viewable on Apple.com, you can still find them in Bing’s cache. As a wise man once said, “You can’t take something off the Internet…that’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.”

“I have…noticed very weak wifi signal in my 16GB iPad,” one post to Apple’s iPad support discussions reads. “Even when standing in front of the wlan router the signal fluctuates from strong to very weak. The router has very strong signals as every other computer here has full signal strength, even 20-30 meters from the router. So there is definitely a wifi signal issue here with the iPad.”

“I’m having the same problem,” reads another. “iMac, Macbook, Macbook Pro and iPhone all work great 3 rooms from my house (all connecting through an airport). My iPad is only getting 1/3 on Wifi and frequently dropped the connection.”

This is obviously a supremely annoying problem since Wi-Fi is the iPad’s only means of connecting to the Internet.

It is not yet clear how widespread this issue is. As I write, there are several iPad Wi-Fi-related discussions on Apple’s support forums, the largest of which hosts about six pages of comments.

That said, I have not had any problem with my iPad–moments ago, I streamed a Netflix (NFLX) movie to it from the sidewalk in front of my house–and my informal poll of friends and colleagues who own the device turned up no reports of weak or temperamental Wi-Fi connections. Which is not to say they don’t exist or that they’re the result of user error, just that they appear to be fairly limited in scope at this point.

In any event, Apple (AAPL) has posted two support documents (1, 2) for iPad owners to troubleshoot ornery Wi-Fi connections.

UPDATE: A commenter below points out a list of potential fixes.