Quincy Smith, the high-profile CEO of CBS Interactive, is planning on leaving his job at the media giant in January to start an advisory firm in Silicon Valley, according to several sources.

But, in an interesting twist, Smith will remain an adviser to CBS under a multiyear contract, sources added, making it his first client. Apparently, Smith will focus intently on authentication issues for the company.

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Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been speculated last week, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.

Van Natta’s arrival at Playlist was not the only news for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up–former AOL exec Bob Pittman’s Pilot Investment Group is also investing an undisclosed amount of money in Playlist, and Pittman will join its board.

The site, which has been called Project Playlist, had previously raised several million dollars. The new round of funding super-sized that, sources said, hovering at about $18 million.

“Discovery around music is exploding on the Internet,” said Van Natta to BoomTown, in an interview this afternoon, giving it as his main reason for joining Playlist.

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On my recent trip to Seattle, I visited the offices of iLike, in the Capitol Hill section of that lovely Pacific Northwest city, to take a video gander at one of the more interesting start ups to emerge from the social networking arena.

The music discovery site, unlike a lot of others in its sector, has been plugging away for several years with much less funding (about $16 million from the founding Partovi twin brothers, former AOL wunderkind Bob Pittman and a big slug from Ticket Master), but a lot more impact.

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Walt Mossberg interviewed CBS CEO Les Moonves at the fifth edition of our D: All Things Digital conference last May, where he talked about the media giant’s Internet aims.

The 53-minute interview is highly pertinent to today’s acquisition of CNET by CBS for $1.8 billion in cash.

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Les Moonves is getting into the Internet in a big way, it seems, if you watch this onstage interview with the CBS CEO.
While it used to be that big old-media companies, including the powerful television networks, always seemed to display disdain for the online space, but these days they are talking it up like [...]

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