BoomTown has learned that AOL is offering those who “volunteer” to leave the company now a departure package that ranges from three to nine months of pay, compared to one to four months for employees laid off in the first quarter of next year.
It’s a depressing rock-and-a-hard-place choice.
An AOL spokesperson confirmed the offer, which is part of a massive layoff of 2,500 of its 6,000-person workforce.
Yahoo introduced its new $100 million marketing and branding campaign in New York today with “It’s Y!ou” as the new motto, making use of the Internet giant’s famous exclamation point and aimed at its customers.
Sure, it’s clever and all, but All Things Digital has come up with a much better advertising idea focused on Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, a sassy and ofttimes salty exec whose pugnacious utterances have become legend quickly.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave what he just had to know would be a much quoted comment to the Nikkei today, explicitly saying that the company had “begun seriously looking into acquisitions again.”
Music to the beleaguered mergers and acquisitions market, to be sure, especially after a recent uptick from other big companies pulling out their wallets again as the impact of the econalypse subsides.
According to sources, Google is working on at least a half-dozen acquisition deals, most of which are small start-ups in the online advertising and cloud-computing arenas.
That would be welcome news for many.
The board of iLike planned a meeting earlier tonight to go over a buyout offer by MySpace, several sources close to the situation said. But it was suddenly canceled because of some thorny tax implications related to the talent-retention part of the deal to purchase the social music start-up.
This does not mean the pending acquisition is in jeopardy, sources said, and it could be on track to be signed as early as today, barring any more complications.
What’s also been unclear is the actual price the social networking giant is paying for iLike, which has been reported as about $20 million. In fact, only $13.5 million will be paid in cash, with $6 million slated for forward payments to retain key talent.
One of my favorite “world-of-the-future” videos recently has been one done by Microsoft Office Labs, because it does not seem ridiculously fanciful or impossible to imagine actually happening sooner than much later.
But, of course, the folks at IGN.com’s Sarcastic Gamer managed to find the perfect way to poke fun at the video in a spoof that hit the target deftly.
Multiple sources close to the situation said that the online search and advertising deal between Microsoft and Yahoo has been struck and will be announced within the next 24 hours.
While it is not clear if the actual papers have been inked or approved by the boards of the two companies, sources said it was a formality and that negotiations are complete on a deal that is less sweeping than originally conceived.
In any case, making any partnership is likely to be the cause of much relief at both companies, since they have been trying–without success–to join together to mount a better offense in the search sector against the dominant Google.
That would be Walt Mossberg and his well-known Personal Technology and Mossberg Mailbox columns–as well as BoomTown, John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily, Peter Kafka’s MediaMemo, Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution and video and pictures from our famous D: All Things Digital conferences.
Today, All Things Digital is introducing its very own app for Apple’s iPhone and the iPod touch, offering all the posts and columns you get on this Web site–including news, product reviews, analysis and video–from our crack team.
Just smaller and cuter.
So download us and take us along everywhere you go–ATD really enjoys long walks on the beach.
Finally, Owen Van Natta is about to win out over a founder.
The former Facebook COO is poised to become the CEO of MySpace, replacing co-founder and current CEO Chris DeWolfe.
DeWolfe will likely get a title as a special adviser to MySpace in a deal that is still coming together.
But the die seems cast for Van Natta to take over the thorny job of rehauling MySpace, which is owned by News Corp.
It’s familiar territory for him.
As of today, we have made important changes to the All Things Digital Voices section.
Why? Well, a few weeks ago, ATD was caught up in a bit of the controversy that broke out due to louder-than-usual complaints by several traditional media companies about how their content is treated on the Web.
Without going into a long explanation: They expressed displeasure that some sites were misusing their content via aggregation. Those complaining included the editor-in-chief of Dow Jones, which owns this site.
The ensuing debate made us realize we needed to be a lot clearer and more explicit about what we are doing in our Voices section, which includes short excerpts of third-party content from outside our site, and to make those policies more prominent and transparent.
Some will disagree with the changes we have made and some will not think they go far enough. But we hope we have addressed the key issues.
That was fast.
Longtime–well, five years, which is a dog’s age at the search giant–Google sales exec Dennis Woodside will become VP, Americas Operations, replacing outgoing exec Tim Armstrong, who was named chairman and CEO of Time Warner online unit AOL last week.
Woodside will start in the next few weeks, said Google in an internal communication about the appointment, as Armstrong transitions from Google to AOL.
Twitter–the non-money-making start-up that lets a user update status in a pithy manner–had a banner day last week with the inauguration of President Barack Obama, which followed all the tweets about the successful airline crash in the Hudson River in Manhattan, which came after…well, you get the point.
That kind of frenetic news cycle has kept Twitter growing quickly, and apparently is setting the stage for raising a big new round of funding.
But before the valuation becomes so rich as to make Twitter completely impossible to buy by anyone, the company might want to reconsider what it considered and abandoned late last year, which was an acquisition of Twitter by Facebook.
BoomTown, MediaMemo, Personal Technology Godfather Walt Mossberg and Mossberg Solution columnist Katie Boehret traveled to Las Vegas this week for the Consumer Electronics Show. They’re navigating the crowds in order to bring you the most important, the most interesting, and the most entertaining moments of the CES melee. They’ll probably have some interesting tidbits about boring stuff as well. All of our CES coverage will be centralized and updated in one place for the sake of convenience.
With Macworld out of the way, a chunk of the crack All Things Digital squad is now winging its way both east and west to the annual gadgetopocalypse in Las Vegas, a.k.a. the Consumer Electronics Show.
Despite the fact that the show is feeling the pinch of the economy and that there are really no big products to speak of, CES is still one of the biggest and most important gatherings of the tech year.
Las Vegas turns into a geek moshpit every year, as legions of vendors, buyers, press and others converge to be overwhelmed for days by noise, long lines for cabs, keynotes, demos and more (like the Pussycat Dolls).
Here’s a video I did while attending YouTube Live on Saturday–well, live–at the Herbst Pavilion at the Fort Mason Center, right on the San Francisco Bay.
The last time I had attended a big tech industry event here, it was the launch of Windows 97 from Microsoft–which was quite a different scene than this entertaining but freaky show, in which online celebrities jumped a little shakily into the analog word.
Oh, BoomTown could not resist making the obvious literary pun on the debut of Peter Kafka’s new daily blog, MediaMemo, on AllThingsD.com.
I am referencing, of course, Franz Kafka’s famous 1915 novella, “Metamorphosis,” about a man who turns into a bug–except that the transformation is fraught with so much more meaning.
And thus it will be in Peter’s column, as the most excellent writer and reporter plunges into the topic–as he writes in his first explanatory post–of “the ongoing battle between the established media business and the technology that is reshaping it day by day.”
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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