Category: Archive

The personnel push-and-pull between tech companies is always interesting to watch; who goes where can be a sign of how insiders are placing their bets.  And more than bragging rights appear to be at stake as Josh Elman, who used to work for Facebook, has joined Twitter.

AOL has named eight members to serve on its Board of Directors, once the company’s separation from Time Warner is Complete. The members have experience in Internet media, entertainment, marketing, and finance.

1. Former Amazon Senior Vice President and CIO Richard Dalzell holds a B.S. in engineering from the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. He has also worked as Vice President of the Information Systems Division at Wal-Mart.

An average of 74 million people visited newspaper websites in the third quarter of 2009, representing 38 percent of all Internet users, according to a custom analysis by Nielsen for the Newspaper Association of America (NAA).
Newspaper website visitors generated more than 3.5 billion page views during the quarter, spending 2.7 billion minutes browsing the sites over more than 596 million sessions.

Another noteworthy event in the long, strange tale of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal has occurred: about 15 months after securing his seat on Yahoo’s board of directors, Carl Icahn has resigned the position.
It’s important to note that the move isn’t supposed to be interpreted as the first step in starting another fight.  Or even as a sign of disapproval.  In fact, in a letter announcing his resignation, Icahn made it sound more like a case of "mission accomplished" and "time to move on."

On Friday Ask.com announced that it has promoted Doug Leeds to President of Ask.com U.S. In addition, Tony Gentile has joined the company as Senior Vice President, Product Management.

Leeds has been with Ask Networks since early 2006, where he has held several different positions. Most recently, he has been President of the company’s Dictionary.com and Chief Operating officer of Ask Networks. Now as President, he will oversee the US business for Ask.com and lead the development, launch, and execution of Ask’s strategy in the U.S.

Adobe and Salesforce.com have partnered to launch the Adobe Flash Builder for force.com, which Adobe says increases developer productivity for creating rich Internet applications in the cloud. The product can be used to enhance existing Salesforce CRM implementations and custom-built Force.com apps, or build new apps altogether.

Facebook appears to have won at least part of yet another legal fight.  Yesterday, United States District Judge Jeremy Fogel dismissed a complaint that Power.com brought against the social networking company in early July.
Facebook actually sued Power.com way back in January, alleging that Power.com had collected data about its users, and, in the course of doing so, violated the CAN-SPAM act and a couple of other regulations.  Facebook raised the issues of copyright and trademark infringement, too.

Not all big brands are using social media tools to the potential they could be. For this reason, it really sticks out when they do. There are plenty of small businesses you can learn a lot about ways to use social media from, but it is the big brands that have the truly wide reach. These are the ones that are easier to find, just because they’re brands that you know.

Microsoft reported its quarterly earnings today with a 14% decline in revenue from the same period a year ago. The company reported revenue of $12.92 billion for the quarter.

Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $4.48 billion, $3.57 billion and $0.40 per share, which represented declines of 25%, 18% and 17%, respectively, when compared with the same period last year.

The amount of time phishing websites remain online has dropped 25 percent over the last year, according to a new survey by the Anti-Phishing Work Group (APWG).