Joe Kraus–the longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur who sold his most recent start-up, JotSpot, to Google in 2006 and has been a director of product management since–has moved to its Google Ventures unit as a partner, said several sources.
Sources added that Kraus is likely to be the first of several well-known appointments at the relatively new venture arm of the search giant.
While Nicki Dugan (pictured here) was not one of the top execs at Yahoo, she certainly is typical of many at the company who stuck with it through many ups and downs.
No longer, according to a memo BoomTown obtained, since the longtime PR staffer–who has been at Yahoo for almost a decade and who was previously with an outside public relations firm that worked for Yahoo–will leave the company Monday.
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.
It’s finally official: Marc Andreessen has crossed over to what he once called “the dark side” and is now a venture capitalist.
Several weeks ago, BoomTown broke the news that the Silicon Valley legend and serial entrepreneur and his longtime investing partner, Ben Horowitz, had completed the raising of $300 million for a new venture fund.
And, indeed, the new firm–which is made up of just the two–is now launched and called Andreessen Horowitz.
Of course, I had done a video interview with Andreessen with my Flip.
Adding the final leg of its new strategy to reinvigorate AOL, the Time Warner online unit said it was buying two small local start-ups, Patch Media and Going.
Each acquisition–which focus on hyperlocal community news (Patch) and events (Going)–is small, about $10 million.
Ironically, local has previously been a big arena for AOL, which launched its Digital City unit with great fanfare more than a decade ago. AOL still runs Digital City, as well as its CityGuide listing offering.
But, in a move that will surely be scrutinized, Patch is a company whose principal investor has been AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong. AOL declined to say how much he had invested in the company, but sources said it was less than $5 million.
Oh, Scooby-Don’t…
You could not be more wrong in your post last week–titled, “Why Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are wrong about naming Web 3.0 ‘Web 3.0′”–about Walt and I being wrong about naming Web 3.0 “Web 3.0″ in an essay we posted at the start of our D: All Things Digital conference, which took place last week.
I know writing “Kara Swisher,” “Walt Mossberg” and “Wrong” is well-nigh irresistible, but your solution of calling the digital era we are in the “2010 Web” is equally confusing and incorrect.
Last week, Walt Mossberg and I interviewed entrepreneur, high-definition television fanboy, dancing fool and reliable gadfly Mark Cuban at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.
After our onstage interview, BoomTown also got him to be more specific about his thoughts on a variety of things he discussed, including Google’s underwriting of its YouTube video subsidiary, the problems with broadband and the Internet as a “utility.”
Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.
We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”
Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.
Well, we’re still going–making the same long-term bet that the digital revolution will keep rolling as we did at D1. Here’s our lineup for D7.
In Web years, BoomTown is now officially 143 years old.
Why? Well, I was the one who got to write the big Page One piece in The Wall Street Journal after GeoCities was sold to Yahoo in January of 1999 for $5 billion in stock.
GeoCities was, in its way, the Facebook of its time. But, instead of “friends,” its users were “homesteaders.”
As Cher so eloquently sings: Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end.
Except they did. Yahoo announced yesterday that it was closing the GeoCities unit down, part of new CEO Carol Bartz’s war against useless assets at the troubled company.
But let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?
First came the go-go hello email, and now new AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong will address all the troops tomorrow at 11 am EST and has chosen to do so from, of all places, AOL’s old center of power in Dulles, Virginia.
Many at AOL hope that Armstrong will quickly and transparently lay out plans for a spin-out of the Time Warner online unit from the media conglomerate, where it has languished for years.
And sources said Armstrong could further up the ante and help raise the layoff-weary morale by having some former AOL execs from its glory days as the top online player in person at the event.
Recently, BoomTown had a lovely lunch with PBS new media blogger Mark Glaser.
Glaser is a longtime free-lance journalist whom I first noticed when he wrote a weekly column for the USC Annenberg School of Communication’s Online Journalism Review, post-Web 1.0 bubble, as well as for the most excellent “Media Grok” daily email newsletter for the now-defunct Industry Standard back in the midst of the froth.
He was always able to cut through that with a clear-headed tone–while maintaining a respect for what was good about traditional journalism, as well as an excitement about the possibilities of new media. Here’s a video interview I did with Glaser about where new media is today.
Many years ago in the midst of the Web 1.0 boom, when working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, BoomTown redubbed an annual dinner that book agent John Brockman threw at the TED conference.
It was jokingly called the “Millionaires’ Dinner,” but I renamed it the “Billionaires’ Dinner.”
That was due to the frothy fortunes that had been made at the time by the Internet pioneers, from Amazon to AOL to eBay. Get it?!?
Well, despite the economic meltdown, there were still a lot of billionaires in attendance at Brockman’s most recent dinner last Thursday in Long Beach. But he recounted to me that the proceedings were a lot more focused on the serious times we are in, as was the whole digerati-packed conference held last week.
It looks like Carol Bartz will be taking on the thankless role as new Yahoo CEO.
Sources close to the situation told BoomTown–which had first named the former Autodesk CEO the top pick for the top job at the troubled Internet company last week–that Bartz has been approved for the job by the Yahoo board and has accepted it.
The Wall Street Journal is also reporting the move.
But can the experienced tech exec turn Yahoo around?
How did BoomTown forget former Autodesk exec Carol Bartz for Yahoo CEO?
Yahoo certainly hasn’t. According to several sources familiar with Yahoo’s search for a new leader to replace Co-founder Jerry Yang, the company is looking hard at the longtime and high-profile Silicon Valley executive.
Bartz is certainly an experienced tech exec and was chairman, president and CEO for 14 years of a company that makes design software. She also serves on the board of Cisco with Yang and on the board of Intel with Yahoo President Sue Decker.
Yesterday, the one-man-band of a tech blogger, Michael Arrington, let loose with yet another outrageously indignant diatribe–this time that he and his TechCrunch site would forthwith break all news embargoes. Not content with the traffic generated last week by his obviously faked Wrestlemania bout with French entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur about the lazy-lunching Europeans, he moved on to a riff on PR people versus journalists. (What next for the Geraldo Rivera of investigative tech blogging? A withering prosecution of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang in the HOV lane on Highway 101 in Sunnyvale without a hybrid? Quelle scandale!)
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 »
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