Linda Avey, co-founder of 23andMe, the personal genetics start-up, will be leaving to start a foundation related to Alzheimer’s disease.

With Anne Wojcicki, she founded the high-profile company–whose Series A investors include Genentech, Google, and New Enterprise Associates, as well as Wojcicki’s husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin–in 2006.

Avey noted in an email to staff, which is posted in its entirety below: “I also recognize that the company has reached a critical point in its growth where new leadership can take it to the successful heights we all think it can achieve.”

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It did not start out too well for AOL CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong, with a poll on the screen showing most of the attendees in the ballroom at Fortune Brainstorm Tech voting that the Time Warner online unit was either out of juice or irrelevant.

Armstrong did not break any news in the interview with Fortune’s lively interviewer, David Kirkpatrick, relying more on projecting an I’m-in-charge-here attitude and saying confident things like “a challenge is also an opportunity.”

In general, Armstrong tried to be upbeat about the prospects for AOL, which has for too long been the Web’s sad sack of an Internet company.

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Tomorrow, Yahoo will officially unveil the latest redesign of its homepage, an almost complete rejiggering of the look and feel of one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet.

The latest launch comes after about a half-dozen redesigns of the homepage since Yahoo was founded, the last one in 2006.

BoomTown thought it might be instructive to take a look at what has come before it, seeing how the Yahoo front page has evolved since 1994.

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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.

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Here is the latest video from the fine folks at JibJab Media, whose online political satires were among the first viral ones on the Web.

Titled “He’s Barack Obama,” it premiered tonight in front of the President at the 65th Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C.

The two-minute Obama video is being launched in conjunction with JibJab’s Facebook Connect integration, so all comments on the video will run through Facebook’s platform.

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A few weeks ago, I dropped in on Hans Peter Brøndmo, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur, to talk about Plum, one of the many different kinds of social networks that are not Facebook.

Brøndmo is CEO and founder of Plum, which was founded several years ago, and is trying to make a business in the places big social networks ignore.

Sites like Plum are what many like to call microsocial networking, used by people or Web sites who want less the overwhelming experience that the large social networks have become and more an ability to create with a smaller group.

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BoomTown is now right next to a canal–no falling cows in sight!–in Amsterdam, here for an unusual digital conference called PICNIC, which starts Wednesday and runs through Friday.

With sessions like “We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity,” “The Emerging Real-Time Social Web” and “The Future of Business Creation,” it seems to be a place for big, messy Web ideas.

But I am a little worried about keeping my head intact.

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Finally, Google Co-Founder Larry Page takes the microphone and thanks the Chrome browser team and compliments them for their efforts.

This is, as anyone on the receiving end of Page’s sometimes pointed manner knows (and BoomTown has been), a big deal.

Page also starts to talk about how browser choice and innovation could make the planet a better place.

Of course! World peace through better browsing!

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Later this morning, the media circus has been summoned to the Googleplex in Mountain View for a look-see at Google’s new Chrome browser and a chitchat with Google about the meaning of it all.

(Also, a 100 percent chance of both free comics and tasty organic snacks too!)

And Chrome, the shiny code name of the project, which stuck as the brand name, will also be going out to the world at large right after that.

BoomTown will be doing a video report, of course. But, until then, I have decided to forgo writing the expected long, long, long, long what-the-new-Google-browser-represents-for-geekkind thumbsucker for a much shorter version.

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As was reported earlier today by BoomTown, Google confirmed on its blog that it will launch its new Chrome browser tomorrow.

Google said it would be launching Chrome in 100 countries, but but will only be available in beta in Windows (Google said Mac and Linux versions were coming soon).

The move by the search giant, although the blog does not say so, is clearly a direct shot over the bow of Microsoft, which dominates the browser market with 74 percent share.

Here is the full blog post by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management at Google, and Linus Upson, Engineering Director.

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When I was in Manhattan recently, I made a lovely visit to the world HQ of Andy Plesser’s Beet.TV, where we discussed where online video is going. This is a big topic for BoomTown this year because the Web is clearly becoming a video-heavy medium. And the ever-affable Plesser does a solid job covering it. This past week, for example, he looked into everything from the Web sites of the Presidential candidates to Reuters’s video reporting of the escalating fighting in the South Ossetian town of Megvrekisi to a Canadian-video sharing site.

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BoomTown was all busy trying to think of execs to replace Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, as pressure mounts on him to right the troubled Internet company.

But now, Yang’s position feels safer than ever and it’s his nemesis–Microsoft–that needs a new leader for its long-stumbling online services business.

Microsoft is already been cracking, according to sources, with a wish list of internal and external candidates that CEO Steve Ballmer is now considering.

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You would have to have been under a rock not to have heard about the controversial piece in Vanity Fair magazine this month about the troubling personal and professional escapades of former President Bill Clinton since he left office.

And the reason for these disturbing developments, besides Clinton himself? The piece actually placed a good bit of the blame on Clinton’s close friend, grocery magnate and billionaire Ron Burkle, who also has been one of the key directors at Yahoo in its takeover fight with Microsoft.

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The blogosphere immediately jumped all over the inevitable meme that after the Yahoo deal fell apart, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s job was at risk.

What with the problems with the new Vista operating system and the general feeling that Microsoft’s Internet strategy is in shambles, the argument that Ballmer would be shown the door by an impatient board and replaced by former CEO and Founder Bill Gates was clear.

Actually, not so such much at all, but that has not stopped all the noise.

Maybe Ballmer should go and maybe not, but I would like some proof that’s not in evidence as yet.

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I ran into Richter Scales’ Tom Shields at a conference this morning in Mountain View, Calif., and he told me about the video takedown by YouTube of the popular “Here Comes Another Bubble.”
The music video parody by the San Francisco singing group has wowed the Web.
I posted about the removal here.
Shields defends the use of [...]

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