Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta has finally been officially named as CEO of MySpace, as BoomTown reported yesterday and News Corp. announced this morning.
He will replace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, who stepped down from the job earlier this week. DeWolfe will remain a strategic adviser at MySpace.
Here’s the full press release.
As everyone knows by this morning, Spot Runner–the heavily-funded and once-hyped online-offline advertising agency–is being sued by one of its more prominent investors.
Ad behemoth WPP essentially paints an ugly picture of Spot Runner as the Bernie Madoff of Web 2.0.
It is alleging in a lawsuit that Spot Runner, in a “pump and dump” scheme, sold over $54 million in “secondary” shares to line its own pockets without telling WPP much, all while losing money, running out of funding and not building a sustainable business.
Here’s the background and also an interview BoomTown did with CEO and co-founder Nick Grouf in better days.
Former Yahoo music head Dave Goldberg–who has been an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital since he left the Internet company more than two years ago–has finally landed at another company, sources said, taking over as CEO of SurveyMonkey.
Goldberg will head the Portland-based private company, which is an online survey creator, including offering analytics of the results.
Sources said he will also become a minority investor in SurveyMonkey, as part of a deal in which Spectrum Equity Investors and other investors, including Bain Capital Ventures, are acquiring a majority interest in the company.
Here is the letter AOL CEO Randy Falco has penned to the entire staff about its layoffs of 10 percent of its workforce–or 700 people–and other cost cuts, which the online service is announcing today.
“We’re at a pivotal point in AOL’s transformation, and need to be even more strategically focused and operationally efficient as we weather the economic storm,” wrote Falco, in part, about the move.
Time Warner online unit AOL is cutting 700 employees due to the weak economy and the ensuing falloff in advertising revenue, but also because of recent structural changes made to refocus the once-mighty service.
AOL CEO Randy Falco sent a memo this afternoon to AOL staff about the layoffs and other cost cuts being made, confirming the moves.
Other changes: Goodbye to raises and a hello to a consolidation of AOL’s facilities.
There it was again–like the gnarly ghost of Christmas past–in the Los Angeles Times this week. But this time Lloyd Braun wasn’t going to take it anymore. The object of his ire was dropped right in the middle of a blog post about how Yahoo was “reversing its Hollywoodification” at its Santa Monica media unit offices. The piece also included old allegations from a devastating story in November of 2005 about Braun, which made him look like a digital version of Ari Gold from “Entourage.” Unfortunately, as BoomTown has found out, the bulk of those juicy anecdotes about him don’t actually check out. And therein lies a complex tale that still reverberates at Yahoo today.
While recently in Los Angeles, I paid another visit on Jason Kilar, who has been quietly making the Hulu premium online video service one of the brightest spots in the Web 2.0 space. The joint venture between News Corp. and General Electric media unit NBC Universal has shown an astonishing growth since its launch in late 2007. Yesterday, for example, comScore reported that it had risen to No. 6 in online video market share in October, after big players like Google’s YouTube, Microsoft and Yahoo and in front of Disney and AOL. Here’s my latest video interview with Kilar about it all.
The Huffington Post, co-founded by Arianna Huffington, will announce this morning that it has raised $25 million, in a single investment from Oak Investment Partners.
The large round, which was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist Fred Harman, will give the popular online news and blogging site a valuation of “just south of $100 million,” a source said.
The new funding, the Huffington Post’s third, will be used for expansion of its offerings and the hiring of editorial and business talent.
“I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site,” said Harman in an interview with BoomTown last night.
Obviously, the dream CEO for Yahoo is News Corp. President and COO Peter Chernin.
And, no surprise, he is the No. 1 choice of most inside and outside Yahoo in the wake of the news late yesterday that its current CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang is stepping down.
Well, Yahoo would certainly be a challenge for Chernin, in terms of a corporate cleanup challenge, especially compared to figuring out how to make bank on plush toys from “The Simpsons.”
But there are many other contenders for the job, despite the slog it could be. Here’s BoomTown’s list…
About a month ago, BoomTown reported that MSN executive producer and general manager Jeff Dossett was contemplating joining Yahoo.
Microsoft released a statement that day saying Dossett was indeed stepping down from his MSN duties, as I had posted, but noted that he was staying put at the software giant.
Oops, it looks like I was right in my report: “The Secret Microsoft Invasion of Yahoo Continues: MSN GM Headed There Soon?”
Dossett has accepted a job as SVP, U.S. Audience at Yahoo, Yahoo said this afternoon, while also confirming my previous report that Yahoo Media Group head Scott Moore was departing.
With all the information Microsoft is releasing at its launchtastic Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week, CEO Steve Ballmer sent out a honking long letter to customers who have opted into the software giant’s “Executive Email” program (who knew?).
Along with the Azure–at long last, a lovely and apt brand name from Microsoft–cloud services offering, the letter also outlines the inevitable and unavoidable path for the company, which has long struggled in getting its digital strategy right.
BoomTown has been lagging in getting up this lovely video I did from a dinner party last Thursday, thrown for NetSuite’s tenth anniversary, which was held at one of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s many houses–this one in the tony Pacific Heights section of San Francisco.
NetSuite is one of the pioneers in the broadly termed software-as-a-service space, selling an “integrated web-based business software suite.” Sounds dull? Yep!
But the party was not and, actually, this is an important topic, as businesses actually do begin to embrace the idea of putting themselves increasingly in the so-called cloud.
Next week in Los Angeles, Microsoft will kick off its Professional Developers Conference, a place the software giant likes to unveil all kind of news in a big launchtastic flourish.
For all the noise, it’s worth paying attention, because Monday’s outlook will be cloudy, as in cloud computing.
The day will include a speech from Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, and others on, among other topics, its cloud infrastructure service initiatives–designed to match aggressive efforts from Amazon in the space.
But who knows what else is up Microsoft’s sleeve?
Jeff Dossett, a longtime Microsoft exec and current executive producer and general manager of MSN, is leaving the company, sources said, and is likely to land at Yahoo soon.
A longtime and experienced mountain climber, Dossett has been one of the more senior digital execs at Microsoft.
It is an interesting digital-musical-chair trend, in fact. On Monday, another former Microsoft big shot, Joanne Bradford, will start her job as Yahoo’s top U.S. sales exec.
On one of my many trips to Los Angeles (what can I say? I like to hang where LoRo* hangs), I dropped in to see Nick Grouf of Spot Runner.
As many might know, Spot Runner is an online-offline ad agency play that has gotten big funding and even bigger hype of late.
Usually, BoomTown runs screaming from such Web 2.0 dandies, but there is definitely some there there at Spot Runner.
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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