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.
Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will be named CEO of MySpace as early as tomorrow said sources close to the situation.
He will replace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, who stepped down from the job yesterday. DeWolfe will remain a strategic adviser at MySpace.
No other top execs at the huge social-networking site will be named yet, as some have reported.
Finally, Owen Van Natta is about to win out over a founder.
The former Facebook COO is poised to become the CEO of MySpace, replacing co-founder and current CEO Chris DeWolfe.
DeWolfe will likely get a title as a special adviser to MySpace in a deal that is still coming together.
But the die seems cast for Van Natta to take over the thorny job of rehauling MySpace, which is owned by News Corp.
It’s familiar territory for him.
Facebook CFO Gideon Yu is leaving Facebook, as the company announced internally today that it was replacing him and searching for a new CFO on the path to an eventual IPO.
The Wall Street Journal also reported the news, noting that the huge social-networking start-up was looking for a CFO with “public company experience.”
But several sources within the company said the departure was more due to an increasingly strained relationship between Yu and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg over strategic disagreements about a wide range of issues, from increasing ad revenue to fund-raising discussions with investors.
BoomTown has confirmed a report that former AOL head Jon Miller is set to take over as digital head at News Corp., replacing Peter Levinsohn.
But Miller has not actually signed up for the job officially, since he is still under a noncompete agreement with Time Warner from his AOL stint. It runs out in three days, in fact.
But sources said News Corp. is likely to announce Miller as its “chief digital officer” by Monday or Tuesday at the latest.
Once he does sign, which seems likely, Miller will be reporting directly to the media giant’s head, Rupert Murdoch. Based in New York, he will also be chairman and CEO of the newly created News Digital Media group.
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.
Another week, another nonpick for the still-outstanding position to lead Microsoft’s digital business.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has cast about for more than three months, both internally and externally, for the person who will turbocharge Microsoft’s Web efforts, but no one has emerged a favorite.
Nonetheless, new prospects include former Cisco exec and current Joost CEO Mike Volpi, sources said.
Time waits for no man–but Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seems to be taking an awful lot of it in picking who will head the software giant’s long-foundering digital efforts.
Two months after the departure of former top exec Kevin Johnson, most inside the company had expected Ballmer to make the most obvious internal choice of SVP Brian McAndrews. Longtime digital SVP Yusuf Medhi has been seen as the No. 2 candidate.
But many sources report that Ballmer remains more intent on hiring someone outside the company, with the idea that such a person could better re-energize Microsoft’s moribund Internet efforts and bring in a fresher perspective.
One thing is absolutely true: It is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and only Ballmer who knows for sure whom he is most interested in to take over the dicey job of head of the software giant’s long-suffering online services business.
But there is a movement afoot among its developers and other execs at Microsoft to push for Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who replaced Founder Bill Gates in the job just over two years ago.
It looks like Facebook will definitely be moving from its funky multi-building setup in downtown Palo Alto, Ca. to a centralized campus in Silicon Valley, said several sources.
The high-profile social networking company–which has been undergoing a major managerial shift of late as it matures from its startup status to that of a more established Web player–has been growing quickly to almost 600 employees today from a couple hundred last year.
In the second of three discussions with Yahoo Finance’s Tech Ticker’s Sarah Lacy (the first was on politics in Silicon Valley), we talk about the management issues at Facebook.
BoomTown broke the news recently about the departure of longtime top exec Owen Van Natta at the hot social-networking site. I also reported on the start-up’s search [...]
After BoomTown broke the news on Tuesday that longtime Facebook executive Owen Van Natta was leaving the social-networking site, we started hearing rumblings that the company will be making some significant management moves soon.
Sources with knowledge of the situation said the company is looking at naming a well-known tech executive to top management, as perhaps [...]
One of the earliest executives at Facebook, Owen Van Natta, will be transitioning out of the social-networking company in the next few weeks.
Van Natta played a key role in important negotiations related to Facebook’s early lucrative ad deal with Microsoft and the software giant’s recent $240 million investment in Facebook.
Over the next week, I will be posting the most popular videos on BoomTown from 2007.
Here’s a video I did on a visit to Facebook’s HQ in Palo Alto, Calif., that I made in July, 2007. In it, I take a gander at the offices (complete with artistic graffiti) and chat with a passel of [...]
While BoomTown was abroad recently, we did video interviews with lots of folks, like Facebook’s Owen Van Natta. We also talked with MySpace’s SVP and GM of international, Travis Katz, but did not get around to posting it.
So here’s the video, where we talk about key trends abroad, the markets that will really matter [...]
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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