Longtime Yahoo tech leader Ash Patel is taking some time off until early 2010.
Yahoo confirmed the break to BoomTown.
In recent days, some inside the company had mistakenly thought the 44-year-old EVP for Product Architecture & Strategy was departing the company for good.
Actually, it’s more of a sabbatical for Patel.
In BoomTown’s bold quest to annoyingly stick a Flip digital video camera in the face of every Yahoo senior exec, this week I worked the last nerve of its CTO and EVP of Products, Aristotle “Ari” Balogh.
Actually, the 45-year-old Balogh is a very calm and pleasant man, especially considering the huge responsibility that has been foisted on him by CEO Carol Bartz to rejigger how Yahoo makes its products and services and deploy its technology in a more efficient, centralized and, most of all, innovative manner.
To explain all this, Balogh sat down with me twice–he is clearly a glutton for punishment–to talk about where Yahoo stood as it sought to dig itself out of its long slump and reemerge as the potent Internet force it once was.
Yesterday, Yahoo’s top search execs had a little sit-down with reporters and bloggers, including BoomTown, about some of the search innovations it has been working on.
After the presentation, which focused on open, mobile, consumer intent and the “Web of objects, not pages,” which Yahoo is calling WOO (no, really, WOO), I got a chance to chat with Yahoo’s Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy, about all that, as well as competition with Microsoft and search leader Google.
One of the first Silicon Valley start-ups to go public in a long while–OpenTable–is expected to come to market this week, with venture firms hoping it will prove a tasty treat for Wall Street.
Whether the $42 million initial public offering of the online restaurant reservation service proves to be a bellwether or not is unclear since its business has–despite strong revenue gains over the last two years–run up operating losses for much of its lifespan of more than 10 years.
In any case, OpenTable is most definitely a creature of Silicon Valley. Its CEO, Jeff Jordan, is a former top eBay exec, and one of its VC backers is Benchmark Capital, among others.
In BoomTown’s ongoing series, “Microsofties on Parade,” I spent some time earlier this week with Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s Business division.
Reporting directly to CEO Steve Ballmer, Elop is a newbie, having gotten to Microsoft only a year ago.
Which is why he is enthusiastic in his determination to tell the world that the software giant has gotten the open religion and is becoming “the most interoperable company in the world.”
Yes, he really said that.
At least he’s not going to Microsoft!
But nonetheless, sources said another major Yahoo tech exec and a longtime company veteran, Venkat Panchapakesan, EVP of the Audience Technology Group, is readying his departure from the company. This time, it’s to return to India, where he has long told colleagues he wanted to return.
Sources said Panchapakesan will not be leaving until the end of the summer, but “his departure is well along the road.”
Here’s a video interview I did with top Yahoo execs Tapan Bhat and Ash Patel yesterday, after Yahoo finally launched a lot of the new open and social elements that it has long said it was injecting into its most popular products. The initiatives Yahoo finally released into the wild have been long in the making, first discussed as just vaporware by Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Now, after the longest of gestation periods, they arrived yesterday, in an impressive rollout.
Yesterday, Yahoo held a San Francisco event where it finally launched a lot of the new open and social elements that it has long said it was injecting into its most popular products.
(BoomTown also interviewed top Yahoo execs Tapan Bhat and Ash Patel about the moves.)
For a look-see, here is an official Yahoo video about the launch and some screenshots of the changes.
We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.
Here’s an interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Federal Communications Chairman Kevin Martin and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam. We paired the two together to talk about big issues facing the wireless industry, including low broadband speeds, high prices and the opening of networks.
This is the second of three parts.
We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.
Here’s an interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Federal Communications Chairman Kevin Martin and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam. We paired the two together to talk about big issues facing the wireless industry, including low broadband speeds and high prices.
This is the first of three parts.
In its ongoing renovation of its offerings–last month it began rolling out a new homepage–Yahoo is unveiling a new online calendar, with a passel of new bells and whistles, to a small group of users worldwide.
Overall, it is a good-looking, simple and clean design–which will eventually be extended to all of Yahoo’s 8.1 million calendar users worldwide.
And, incredibly, although Yahoo’s is the top online calendar in the world, it has been 10 years since the Internet giant updated it.
Yesterday, Yahoo trotted out a range of top execs who were unusually loquacious at its “open house,” where the company made a valiant effort to explain an aggressive strategy to open up its platform and products.
So here are video interviews I did with a range of Yahoo’s top execs, including Audience Product Division EVP Ash Patel, Yahoo Media Group head Scott Moore, social media guru Marc Davis, Yahoo! Mail kingpin Scott Dietzen,, Connected Life EVP Marco Boerries and PR minion Brad Williams.
BoomTown is thinking of starting a drinking game wherein the group gathered at Yahoo’s “Open House” media event this morning, takes a shot of Cuervo every time an exec says “open.”
Except, everyone would be drunker than drunk if that was the case by now, as Yahoo lays out its strategies to open its platform and all its products to the whole wide world.
That would be developers, publishers, advertisers, content creators and my mother.
OK, not her, since she cannot turn on a computer. But definitely everyone else.
Okay, BoomTown arrived late to Yahoo’s media event to show off its “open” strategies across its properties (I had a most excellent excuse in that it was my youngest son’s very first day of school).
So it was kind of jarring to hear Yahoo Media Group head Scott Moore talk about an email demo about adding social elements that had preceded his presentation, which he had not seen himself.
“I always think of the media properties the sexy [part of Yahoo],” said Moore. “But that kind of made mail sexy.”
Sexy email! Yahoo is saved!
Yahoo–because it has decided its living-inside-a-cave press strategy has been, shall we say, a bust–has invited a passel of media tomorrow to its Santa Clara, Calif., HQ and will trot out a range of its top execs to talk specifically about the various facets of its “open” strategy.
In an attempt to redefine and refocus itself, Yahoo has correctly wed itself to the trend toward more open platforms, rather than locking consumers into its once tightly closed portal gates.
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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