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.
Lonely Planet, best known as a traditional travel guidebook publisher, is announcing a new U.S. head tomorrow–John Boris of Zagat Survey–as it increasingly moves to reposition the company as much more of a “cross-media” platform.
As the paid versus free content online debate gets louder over the next year, how well known brands like Lonely Planet–which has a strong reputation among consumers–handle the fallout will be more and more interesting to watch.
Last Friday, National Public Radio top execs came to San Francisco for a “Digital Think In” to pick the brains of some Silicon Valley types about where the public radio icon should go, digitally speaking.
While NPR actually has been pretty fast-forward with podcasts and a robust Web site, it still has to think about what social networking means to it and whether a day is coming when broadcasting online will be bigger than offline.
Also, what’s up with Twitter?
Is there gold in them thar tweets?
Maybe so, because–according to sources familiar with the situation–Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines.
Sources said a number of scenarios are being discussed to compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets from its 54 million monthly users.
In a week, the entire advertising sales staff of MySpace will gather at a swanky new seaside resort about 20 miles south of Los Angeles to get a first glimpse of the fresh direction the company is preparing to take under its new management.
The beleaguered social networking site has been in the midst of an effort to reinvigorate its image, spur innovation in its product and–most of all–pull itself out of a too-long slump, even as longtime rival Facebook has seen explosive growth.
On the possible agenda: A new strategy aimed at music and entertainment; a new look; and, perhaps, a new boss for the ad sales team.
One of Microsoft’s top execs, Debra Chrapaty, who heads its infrastructure business, is leaving the software giant to take a top job at Cisco, sources said.
Chrapaty–whose title is corporate VP of Global Foundation Services–is also one of increasingly few top women tech execs at Microsoft, where she has worked for seven years.
Chrapaty will now shift to products at Cisco, running the collaboration software group, according to sources.
Oh, BoomTown fears this is not going to end well for the weensy little smart phone Palm is debuting today on–what an amazing coincidence!–the very same day Apple is throwing its big product bash in San Francisco, at which Mac fanboys fervently hope that Supreme Leader Steve Jobs might even appear.
You don’t step on Superman of Silicon Valley’s cape, of course, but the device with the aggressively cute name of Pixi is apparently attempting just that.
Thus, this fairytale might have a not-so-happy ending.
In a risky but interesting move that has some at the company nervous and others excited, Yahoo is in the process of moving key development responsibility for its juggernaut Yahoo News unit to Taiwan.
Under the new system, product management, engineering and user interface design for one of Yahoo’s flagship properties will become the responsibility of staffers there.
Editorial employees for Yahoo News–which is the No. 1 news site on the Web with 48.4 unique monthly visitors, according to comScore data –will remain in the U.S., largely located at its Santa Monica, Calif., office.
Yahoo confirmed the change to BoomTown yesterday.
Longtime Internet entrepreneur Al Warms paid a visit to BoomTown HQ today to show off a new company he has founded called Appolicious.
That is the unusual name Warms–who sold his Participate Media, along with its BuzzTracker content aggregator, to Yahoo in late 2007–has given to a start-up aimed at encouraging discovery and social networking in the Apple iPhone mobile apps market.
The site is kind of a combination of Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo, but devoted solely to organizing and making sense of the app galaxy in the universe of smart phones.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone can be seen tomorrow night in an interview with Tavis Smiley on his PBS show, talking about the denial-of-service attacks on the hot microblogging service recently.
In the interview, noting that Twitter had spent 2008 scaling up its platform to deal with its exploding popularity, Stone said the San Francisco-based start-up was now trying to get up to speed on malicious attackers.
This morning, in a blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone gave more of an explanation for the outage that the microblogging service endured due to a denial-of-service attack.
Fortunately, BoomTown can read between the lines in order to decipher the secret message herein!
Biz wrote: The Adventure Continues.
Translation: By “adventure,” I mean yet-another-friggin’-Twitter-birdie-crisis.
BoomTown was so glad we had this time together with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, just to have a laugh or sing a song about a major search and advertising deal.
I liveblogged the conference call, which I updated as it happened.
Did Ballmer scream and jump up and down? Did Carol say something naughty?
Read on!
Yahoo plans on announcing Thursday that it has bought Xoopit for a price in the $20 million range, according to several sources, one of its first acquisitions in a long while.
Reached late this afternoon by BoomTown, a Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment about the purchase. Xoopit did not respond to emails earlier today.
But sources said it was a done deal to buy the San Francisco-based social email start-up that finds photos, videos, links and other files in email so that users can surface and then share them.
Xoopit’s investors–Accel Partners and Foundation Capital, along with several angel investors–have pumped about $6.5 million into the company since 2006.
After his 100-day VisionQuest to figure out what to do at AOL, Tim Armstrong is in a chattier mood.
So, BoomTown did not waste a New York minute in getting on the horn with him to finally hear his take.
There’s not a lot of new stuff to reveal, of course, beyond what Armstrong has already said about AOL’s new direction.
That would be a spinoff in November, a focus on advertising, content, local, communications and starting a venture unit. But there is also the question of AOL’s ad deal with Google and more.
Here is the interview.
We kick off the week of full posts of the onstage interviews at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference with Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO of Research in Motion, which is best known as the maker of the BlackBerry.
Lazaridis has been key to developing the BlackBerry smartphone, which means he is directly responsible for the CrackBerry problem too. And it means he’s in the thick of the new handheld platform wars.
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.
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 »
Don't miss a post! Sign up for our Daily Email and get AllThingsD.com delivered each day.
Get columns, blogs and video from D and All Things Digital on your iPhone. Download now »
