One of Yahoo’s highest-ranking premium advertising sales execs–David Dickman, VP of West Coast sales–is leaving the company, people familiar with the situation said.

Sources said Dickman, who will leave Yahoo at the end of the month after three years at the company, is reportedly going to Time Warner (TWX) unit Warner Bros. to work in digital sales.

Well liked at Yahoo (YHOO), Dickman was impacted in a sales reorganization done in the spring.

At the time, Atlanta-based regional sales VP Mitch Spolan was named to lead Yahoo’s North American field sales, consolidating its display ad sales groups, which had previously been split between the East and West Coasts.

Before that, Dickman ran the Western sales and another exec the Eastern sales, serving big display advertisers. The latter exec took over agency sales, while Dickman remained running sales on the West Coast, reporting to Spolan.

Dickman’s departure comes after another top Yahoo display ad exec, Todd Taplin (pictured here), left last week. He was regional VP of sales in New England and Canada, responsible for big Yahoo display advertising accounts like Fidelity Investments in Boston.

Taplin–who was also well regarded at Yahoo–took a job at Collective Media in New York, as its new Chief Revenue Officer.

Flux at the Yahoo ad sales group in the U.S.–which accounts for most of the Internet giant’s revenues–will be closely watched by Wall Street right now since it is also charged with selling premium search ads for both Yahoo and Microsoft (MSFT) under the recent deal they struck. Yahoo is also aiming to turbocharge its premium graphical ad sales business.

Yahoo’s SVP of North American Audience, Jeff Dossett, is leaving the company.

Reasons for the departure are personal, said sources, who said that Dossett (pictured here) is most likely to do a start-up.

Dossett did not return emails asking for comment, but Yahoo (YHOO) confirmed the departure to BoomTown.

It was announced internally that Dossett has resigned and his responsibilities have been assumed by Jimmy Pitaro, who runs Vertical Audience Experiences for Yahoo, and Tim Mayer, who is in charge of Search & Social Applications. They will jointly lead the North America Audience business, reporting to U.S. EVP Hilary Schneider.

Dossett has been in charge of all of Yahoo’s media assets, including its powerful News, Sports and Finance content sites.

He has been rejiggering the media unit since he arrived last year, including centralizing product development.

Dossett joined Yahoo last November, coming to the company from Microsoft (MSFT), where he was MSN executive producer and general manager.

In his job at MSN, Dossett was the lead for audience, content and programming strategy and execution in the U.S.

He had worked at the company since 1991, in a variety of sales and marketing jobs in Canada, and later worked on strategy and business development for MSN.

Dossett was also CEO of Carpoint, now MSN Autos, and was GM of its real estate arm.

He also took two years off from Microsoft in 2002 to climb the highest mountains on each of the seven continents, finally reaching the summit of Mount Everest in May of 2004.

Dossett reached the summit of Everest again for a second time last year.

What’s in a name?

Well, a lot, actually, and BoomTown supposes it would be just like those Pacific Northwest types at Microsoft to name the new version of its search service “Bing,” presumably after the cherry that is a big product in the company’s home state.

That moniker is one of many being bandied about in a group the software giant could be considering for the big relaunch of its search service, which the company has been prepping.

Microsoft’s search service is currently called–zzzzz–Live Search.

“All About Microsoft” crack blogger Mary-Jo Foley of ZDNet recently wrote about the Bing name, which is registered to the company, as well as “Hook” and the one that Microsoft is using now as its test name, Kumo.

Kumo means “cloud” and “spider” in Japanese, which seems a wee bit esoteric.

Today, paidContent.org dropped “Sift” into the mix, although it seems to be related to mobile phones, along with “Swivel.”

I, for one, am feeling both like flour and getting dizzy at the thought of those names.

Foley at ZDnet feels the same, noting today in a post:

“(Would Microsoft be crazy enough to trademark its general Web search engine and its search engine for mobile with two different names, say Bing and Sift? As Windows Live has shown, truth can be stranger than fiction….)”

Microsoft (MSFT), of course, is keeping the name for its search service under tight wraps, but it is obviously going to be spending a shipload of money on its branding in another attempt to catch market leaders Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO).

Microsoft has been recently talking to Yahoo about a search partnership deal, although they are likely both to keep their brands and search products in any event.

Nonetheless, execs and minions in the know laugh at me loudly when I ask them to leak it to me.

(Note to anyone at Microsoft: Pretty please, someone leak it to me, even if it’s in the form of a memo from the leaky cauldron that is Yahoo.)

I doubt someone will, though. “It’s like Fort Knox secret,” said one Softie source, referring to the Kentucky fortress where the largest amount of the United States gold reserves are stored.

Hey, if Auric Goldfinger, OddJob and Pussy Galore could get into Fort Knox in that most excellent James Bond film, I can certainly find out the name of Microsoft’s search service!

Personally, I like Bing, and cherries from Washington state are indeed tasty (and coming soon too!)

According to the Heart of Washington Web site, its state’s cherries rate. Some fun factoids:

- Washington State produces more than 50 percent of all the sweet cherries in the United States.
- The Rainier cherry, which is yellow with a red blush, was made from a cross between two dark red cherries, the Van and Bing.
- Americans eat approximately 2.6 pounds of cherries per year.
- There are approximately 53 pitted cherries in one pound of cherries.
- The Bing cherry, which all cherries are measured against, was first developed in 1874 in Milwaukie, Ore.
- The Bing cherry was named after one of Seth Lewelling’s workers. The Bing cherry was developed by Seth Lewelling.
- Washington cherries are shipped around the world; the top three foreign markets are Canada, Taiwan and Japan.
- In 2001, there were 29,000 acres of sweet cherries in the state.
- The Washington cherry season begins in late May with some product seen at farmer’s markets. Commercial shipping begins around June 5, and will continue until mid-August. The peak of the season runs from June 20 to Aug. 1.

Plus, if Microsoft uses Bing, they could also rebrand their MSN online service, “Bada” and their email product, “Boom.”

Then, they can get Tony Soprano as their spokesman with the motto: “Bada Bing, Bada Boom, Notta Bada Algorithm!”

Or better still: “If you use Google, we’ll whack you!”

Now, that’s more like it.

Last week, StumbleUpon announced it was buying itself out of its much-vaunted previous corporate buyout, by being born again as an “investor-baked start-up.”

The Canadian-born social-bookmarking company, which was launched earlier, had come to the Bay area in 2006 and got some fancy angel investors, who ponied up a couple of million dollars. It soon became a traffic-generating hit.

Then, StumbleUpon was bought by eBay (EBAY) two years ago for $75 million in one of Web 2.0’s high points.

End of a fairy tale? Um, nope.

Soon enough, due to both buyers’ and sellers’ remorse, rumors of the San Francisco-based company being sold by its new owners swirled around it, although there was no sale.

Instead, last week, StumbleUpon announced that a roster of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners and August Capital, would return it to its roots.

Its founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith were included, with Camp as CEO.

In a video interview he did with BoomTown, here’s Camp talking all about the latest shift for his start-up, including discussing some more changes on the site, such as an even more personalized Webification of the content discovery service.

Here’s the video:

Yahoo is losing yet another top executive–Toby Coppel, its EVP and managing director of Europe and Canada, is set to announce today that he is stepping down.

The departure, which has been in the works for months, is not related to the recent news that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is also relinquishing his job as soon as the company completes its search for another CEO.

Coppel’s job covers the major Western European markets (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia), as well as Canada, for Yahoo (YHOO).

His successor will be Rich Riley, who is currently SVP of Europe’s Advertiser & Publisher Group, which put him in charge of all revenues for the division. Riley, who came to Yahoo a decade ago, was previously the head of Yahoo’s Small & Medium Business Group in the U.S.

Coppel, who came to Yahoo with former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel in 2001, has run European operations for Yahoo for 18 months. And most of his time has been spent restructuring and making massive cuts.

The unit will have about one-third of the people as when Coppel arrived by the first quarter, after the current round of layoffs. And, if you include Yahoo’s sale of the comparison-shopping site Kelkoo last week, the cuts total 45 percent of its former size.

Coppel also shepherded the move of Yahoo’s European HQ to Switzerland from higher-priced London. Most of its top managers are now located there, although London remains an important Yahoo outpost, since it is the largest online ad market in Europe.

Coppel will remain with Yahoo until the end of the first quarter to ensure a smooth transition. He told BoomTown in an interview that his future plans are undetermined, except to welcome his third child into the world very soon.

“I have been transitioning our European business, restructuring it and making it stronger, as Yahoo is moving to product development on a global platform,” said Coppel. “While there is more work, there is now a strong team in place, focused on going forward and it needs to spread its wings.”

Coppel noted, although a lot of his tenure was occupied by restructuring the European unit, that “we have taken display advertising market share from MSN, AOL and other competitors in almost every one of our European markets in 2008 and we grew our Canadian business over 50 percent this year.”

And, indeed, Yahoo’s online display advertising business is stronger in Europe, although subject to the same vicious economic downturn that has hit the U.S. market.

In addition, Yahoo–and everyone else–lags well behind Google (GOOG) in the more lucrative search business in Europe, even more so than in the U.S., forcing competitors like Yahoo to streamline to compete.

That has meant layoffs, but also re-architecting Yahoo’s product development toward a global model to cut costs and also getting rid of some noncore assets like Kelkoo.

It was revealed last week that Kelkoo was sold to a U.K.-based private equity firm called Jamplant, at a reported discount from what Yahoo paid for it–$576 million–in 2004.

Now that all these kinds of major changes were made, Coppel said, it seemed a good time for him to go too.

“My value add-was not what it was going forward,” said Coppel, who noted that several layers of management in Europe had been collapsed in his tenure. “If we are streamlining and we mean it, it has to also start at the top.”

Here’s the internal Yahoo memo from President Sue Decker about the stepping down of Yahoo European head Toby Coppel, which BoomTown wrote about here.

The departure, which has been in the works for months, is not related to the recent news that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is also relinquishing his job as soon as the company completes its search for another CEO.

Coppel’s job covers the major Western European markets (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia), as well as Canada, for Yahoo (YHOO).

His successor will be Rich Riley, who is currently SVP of Europe’s Advertiser & Publisher Group.

Here’s the memo:

From: Sue Decker
To: XXXX
Sent: Thu Nov 27 09:02:28 2008
Subject: Yahoo! Europe & Canada update

Sue