Joost and Joltid filed a motion for preliminary injunction against former Joost CEO Michelangelo Volpi and Index Ventures, where Volpi now works as a partner, asking that he not use knowledge or confidential information he got at the video start-up in current dealings with Skype.

The move is yet another legal attack from the founders of Skype, who were on the losing side of the $2 billion deal to buy the Internet telephony giant from eBay.

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Linda Avey, co-founder of 23andMe, the personal genetics start-up, will be leaving to start a foundation related to Alzheimer’s disease.

With Anne Wojcicki, she founded the high-profile company–whose Series A investors include Genentech, Google, and New Enterprise Associates, as well as Wojcicki’s husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin–in 2006.

Avey noted in an email to staff, which is posted in its entirety below: “I also recognize that the company has reached a critical point in its growth where new leadership can take it to the successful heights we all think it can achieve.”

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A report in the Times of London in which Microsoft would buy Yahoo’s search business in a convoluted $20 billion deal that would include well-known Internet execs Jon Miller and Ross Levinsohn, is–in the words of one key player–”total fiction.”

Actually, that’s Levinsohn speaking, on the record. But that’s also the essential word from all key players regarding the Times’s report.

While Microsoft has long been interested in doing a search deal with Yahoo, BoomTown has spoken to top sources at Yahoo and Microsoft too and all scoff at such a deal taking place right now or that either side has been in any such discussions of late.

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Maybe it would be easier to sell Facebook to Microsoft for billions and billions, even though it is not likely you will.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s take the opposing position about the best future for the hot social-networking site.

In other words, make a friendly Microsoft takeover of Facebook your own version of an IPO, as John Furrier has suggested, and walk away a Silicon Valley legend.

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Off with the Yahoo CEO’s head!
OK, maybe not so much, at least today.
Indeed, according to many sources, Jerry Yang’s head still sits squarely on his neck.
And, moreover, his job as CEO has not been usurped by Yahoo (YHOO) Chairman Roy Bostock, who was allegedly–as one rumor went–authorized by Yahoo’s board, instead of Yang, to restart [...]

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After dissident shareholders, led by Jana Partners, landed one right in the kisser to the board and management of CNET Networks yesterday–releasing a 38-page report that essentially called the company’s leadership incompetent, the tech news and review site gave the literary effort a kiss-off of its own.
First, rather politely, CNET said that Jana’s proposed strategies, [...]

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So, I was making the rounds again of my sources at Yahoo’s major institutional investors yesterday and here’s the overall 411: Frustration. Confusion. Impatience.

And the bottom line from several of them–if Yahoo does not wise up and start seriously kibitzing with Microsoft over its takeover bid sooner than later, than some investors have signaled to the company’s top execs that they would likely back Microsoft if a proxy fight came to pass.

I really don’t think such a battle should happen, of course, as such a fight seems like it would only benefit the party that the pair should be concentrating on fighting: Google.

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