Ceo

Yahoo has laid off part of its search team as part of a new restructuring move, we’ve learned. Yahoo declined to comment on the number of people who were affected, but did confirm that there were layoffs in its Search group and gave us the following statement:

“Yahoo! remains focused on innovating the overall Search experience over the long-term, and the Yahoo! Search group is hard at work on some new experiences that we believe will convert Yahoo! users to Yahoo! searchers. To accomplish our new product objectives, we have decided that we need a different combination of talent and are making changes within the search group in order to more deeply invest in other areas of the group. “

Yahoo is, of course, outsourcing its search engine to Bing as part of a deal that was forged between Yahoo and Microsoft last year. It’s unclear if the layoffs are directly related to the deal, but it seems likely. Soon after the search deal was announced, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz alluded to future layoffs as a result of the integration.

Yahoo previously held a major round of layoffs last spring, when it cut 5% of its staff, or around 700 people.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says iPhone app coming this summer —

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference today, Netflix CEO Reed Hasting hit the stage to officially announce that a Netflix iPhone application is coming this summer.

Hastings also mentioned that the Netflix iPad application is the No. 1 most downloaded in entertainment apps. Details were sparse on what the iPhone app will feature, but we can expect the usual: You can search Netflix titles, and manage your queue. Hastings made it clear that users would be able to continue watching video from their last position — which will include the iPad and likely other Netflix viewing devices as well. The app will be free when its released, just like the iPad version.

He also mentioned that the iPhone app will take advantage of Apple’s adaptive bitrate technology to allow it to seamlessly switch between networks — which tells us that it will also work over AT&T’s 3G network. While that’s certainly a nice feature, now that AT&T has moved towards limited bandwidth data plans, many new iPhone owners likely won’t spend too much time enjoying Netflix over 3G.

[Image via Engadget]

Tags: iPhone, WWDC

Companies: Apple, Netflix

People: Reed Hastings

Zynga Picks Up Challenge —

Casual gaming powerhouse Zynga has bought Challenge Games. Challenge is well-known for games offering strong "virtual goods" elements.

Zynga has built up its estimated $5 billion in worth and with 200 million users, largely on games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, popular on Facebook. But it has been going to town in an effort to extend its popular franchises. Challenge may provide it with a means of turbocharging its in-game economies.

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Recently, Zynga has announced a "five year strategic relationship" with Yahoo, which seeds Zynga's games throughout Yahoo properties. It has also announced that it will stay with Facebook, despite plenty of rancor with the social media site on which it thrived, but which also kept taking bites out of the company's profits.

Virtual goods and virtual currency provide a major avenue for online gaming revenue. Challenge being folded into Zynga may help shore up that aspect of its business model. Staying on Facebook, Zynga must use that company's "Facebook Credits." Outside, there may be additional opportunities.

Backed by Sequoia Capital and Globespan, the Austin-based Challenge Games launched in 2007 to focus on immersive, virtual goods Web games. The company has already been renamed Zynga Austin. Challenge CEO and Co-Founder, Andrew Busey, has been named general manager and vice president of the Austin studio and Zynga said its 35 employees will be retained.

Zynga's SEC filing indicates a "total offering amount" of $20,571,454.

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Yesterday during my talk at the Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, California, one of the questions I brought up was whether or not QR codes continue to be used because of their association with AR. Should we prolong the use of these large black and white codes in order to help users and customers identify augmented reality experiences? This morning, during his keynote before the second day of the event, Bruno Uzzan, CEO of AR titan Total Immersion, announced the creation of a logo the company hopes will become a standard for identifying AR applications.

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Dubbed, AR Plus (or AR+), the logo is designed to be a beacon that will signify when an interactive augmented experience has been implemented into an application. In the same way standardized USB or DVD devices brand the same logo on their devices and products, Total Immersion hopes AR developers will place the AR+ logo on their products.

Uzzan's keynote this morning focused on the creation of standards within the AR community - a popular topic at the conference so far. Uzzan says the time is now for standardization for augmented reality because major technology players are considering AR experiences, and a lack of standards may temporarily keep them from adopting the technology. He believes standards are what the community needs to breakthrough into the mainstream.

"With the new AR+ logo, the industry can give consumers, developers, brands, and others a consistent framework for encountering and understanding augmented reality solutions," said Uzzan in a press release Thursday. "There's a sense that the AR industry has grown up too fast, that it has at times felt like the 'Wild West.' Today, the industry consists of multiple players, multiple platforms and easier access to AR. The new AR+ logo affirms that we're working with a new human interface, now going mainstream."

The benefits of standardization, Uzzan said, include stability and compatibility across platforms for AR experiences. Large downloads and poor quality have deterred users from using augmented reality in the past, and standardization will streamline development, providing higher quality to the user experience. The AR+ logo, he says, is a suggestion open for discussion, and a first step toward standards for AR.

AR developers can download the AR+ logo by visiting Total Immersion's site where they can also find guidelines for the logo's use.

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Yelp, hot off the news of their Open Table integration, also has some interesting user information that they say they’ll officially announce tomorrow. We’ve got the details.

Yelp says their website had over 32 million unique visitors in May from all sources (Comscore says 11.2 million in April, the most recent month they track, but they do tend to undercount).

Yelp’s iPhone app has had 1.4 million uniques in the last thirty days, they say. That’s a small percentage of total traffic to the service, but the amount of activity and interaction from those users is significantly more than on the normal website:

• A whopping 27% of all Yelp searches come from that iPhone application.
• Over half a million calls were made to local businesses directly from the iPhone App, or one in every five seconds.
• Nearly a million people generated point-to-point directions to a local business from their Yelp iPhone App last month.

Yelp will also be releasing a new version of the iPhone app shortly, their fifth iteration. Users will be able to earn badges to help show off where they are checking in. Says CEO Jeremy Stoppelman: “For example, if a yelper loves to get their nigiri on at sushi restaurants, they can earn the “Sushi Sensei” badge. The Sensei badge is only one of many badges you can unlock — it’s up to our users to figure out how. Once earned, badges can be shared with friends both via the Yelp iPhone app, as well as on Twitter and Facebook.”

So get ready, all you competitive types. It’s no longer enough to just be the mayor of your local cafe on Foursquare. The real men and women want to be the King or Queen of San Francisco on Yelp. Or wherever.

Mobile Me, Apple’s wonderful suite of tools and applications that Jobs dubbed ‘Exchange for the rest of us,” might be moving in the free direction it now seems.

Current pricing for Mobile Me is between $99 and $149 a year, depending on whether the subscriber is an individual or a family. A move from such high price points to a pricing scheme that includes a long-term free option would dramatically shake up the product. Apple currently offers a free trial of the service.

The core points behind the rumor are changing account names of current Mobile Me subscribers. Before, accounts were listed under the subscriber’s account information as ‘Individual’ or ‘Family Pack.’ Recently, and with some back and forth switching, many accounts are now labeled ‘Full Member.’

This is not a single case scenario. Across Mac forums, many users are finding the same occurrence, a change to the new ‘Full Member’ status. What this seems to point to is a new free version of Mobile Me to be launched at WWDC, and a paid version on top of it to attract the most hard core users. In short, Mobile Me could be going freemium.

This mirrors well recent calls by technology luminaries for Apple to change Mobile Me in order to compete with other market product offerings. The CEO of Posterous wrote an article entitled “To compete with Google, Apple has to make Mobile Me free,” which makes the case that Apple will fall behind the search giant if it does not up its game.

If you use Mobile Me, would you settle for a lower powered free version?

AT&T warns customer that emailing the CEO will result in a cease and desist letter —

Shared by Bwana
This picture makes him look like Thad the overlord of Doom...whoever that is. EVIL?

Sure, Steve Jobs might be a one-man email PR machine, but his pal Randall Stephenson at AT&T doesn't appear to be quite as gregarious -- as reader Giorgio Galante found out today, sending AT&T's CEO two emails in two weeks results in a phone call from AT&T Executive Response Team and a warning that further emails will result in a cease and desist letter. What did Giorgio's emails say? The first was a request to bump up his iPhone eligibility date and a request for a tethering option, and today's outlined his displeasure with AT&T's new data rates and ultimate decision to switch to Sprint and the EVO 4G. That prompted Brent to call Giorgio back and thank him for the feedback, but also politely warn him that further emails would be met with legal action. Ouch. As you'd expect, AT&T just lost itself a customer. We've followed up with Ma Bell to find out exactly why they went the lawyer route instead of oh, say, filtering Randall's email -- we'll let you know what they say.

P.S.- Amusingly, Giorgio says he emailed both Randall Stephenson and Steve Jobs last year about offering tethering and actually got a response from Steve -- maybe these two CEOs need to talk about more than data rates and service quality the next time they meet up.

AT&T warns customer that emailing the CEO will result in a cease and desist letter originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Judiciary Committee Still Has Questions for Facebook —

Despite the rollback on some of Facebook's heavily-debated privacy changes, the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary still has questions for Facebook's CEO. On Friday, Representative John Conyers (D-MI) sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter requesting additional information on Facebook's privacy activities.

"(W)e would appreciate a detailed explanation of the information about Facebook users that your company has provided to third parties without the knowledge of the account holders -- particularly in circumstances in which the user did not expressly opt for this type of information sharing."

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Conyers goes on to say:

"Please explain your prior policies with respect to user consent for information sharing, and with whom any information was shared. Also, please detail how the new policies Facebook is adopting differ from past practices, including whether the burden is on the user to opt in or opt out of the relevant privacy settings."

The blog Inside Facebook interprets the Judiciary Committee's interest like this.

"The first sentence of the excerpt, above, appears to be about the nature of how Instant Personalization works, along with an allusion to the more general changes that Facebook made to General Information in recent months.

The second sentence appears to be about those general changes.

The final sentence appears to ask if the new changes impact Instant Personalization's opt-out setting."

Because of its popularity and its sweeping changes to a default public status for all users, Facebook has definitely assumed center focus in the discussion on online privacy. But other issues, like use of private information in online advertising, has also assumed importance enough to attract the attention of the Congress.

If nothing else, the continued interest in Facebook by the U.S. government indicates that regardless of users' feelings, Congress isn't done with it yet.

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Five Free Tickets to the Real-Time Web Summit, New York City, June 11 —

What if Chris Dixon and John Borthwick were sitting at the same table as you, ready to have a real conversation about what's next for the real-time Web? Would you like to sit across from Marshall Kirkpatrick and Richard MacManus and have a straight-shooting conversation about real-time online media? If so, then the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit is for you. And thanks to its unconference format, the day will be like participating in a think tank - you and a group of tech luminaries collaborating on the future of the Web.

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That's the nature of ReadWriteWeb summits - straight talking, collegial settings where individuals who are striving to move an industry forward, sit down and create the future. Everyone learns. Everyone advances. You leave feeling energized and full of "next'.

The ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit - will take place on June 11 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City. Register here.

If you're a student and would like to participate, please email us at students@readwriteweb.com.

What's an Unconference?

It's simple: With the help of a professional facilitator, Kaliya Hamlin, you and everyone attending the conference create an agenda in real-time on the day of the event. This ensures that what's covered is important, timely, and exactly what you want to talk about. To see the power of the unconference format in action, check out this video of session pitching at the recentReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit:

Watch live video from ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 on Justin.tv

The rest of the day is spent debating and discussing the issues. Notetakers record the sessions throughout, and we record video when possible.

We can assure that by the end of the day, you'll have made new contacts, participated in some ground-breaking discussions, and, if you were brave enough, worked side-by-side with people you admire.

We hope to see you there.

Today we're giving away five free tickets to our readers who have the most interesting thoughts about the real-time Web. Let us know your comments, concerns, predictions and premonitions in the comments below!

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Apple is selling one million iPads every month. On Friday, April 30 (28 days after the device’s release) Apple sold its one millionth iPad; exactly one month later it announced it sold two million iPads.

“Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, warning about the possible shortages of the much-coveted device. “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone,” he said.

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Tags: apple, ipad

From Monday Note: You know the business lore joke. The departing CEO meets his successor and hands him three envelopes to be opened in the prescribed order when trouble strikes. First crisis, the message in envelope #1 says: Blame your predecessor. Easy enough. Another storm, the the CEO opens the second envelope: Reorganize. Good idea. And when calamity strikes yet again, he reaches for the third: Get three envelopes…

Continue reading on Monday Note >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Watch Steve Ballmer Sign A Student's MacBook
• CHART OF THE DAY: Microsoft's Flat Decade Under Steve Ballmer
• Turns Out Bing's Share Gains May All Be From Toolbar Distribution Deals

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. As far as organizational structures are concerned, I'm a man with a hammer. That hammer is none other than #1 on Charlie Munger's list of causes of human misjudgment : Under-recognition of the power of incentives.

Take for instance, Jean Louis Gassee's criticism of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Setting aside that Gassee failed to sell to Apple at a good price, and BeOS never did very well in the market, it's not clear that any of his the things Gassee would have Ballmer do was really actionable.

Microsoft is a 60,000 person company. There's a very strict limit to how much one man, even a CEO can do to move a 60,000 person company. The reality is, when you're at the stratosphere at such a company, the only thing you can do is to really set up incentives so that people do what's good for the company by doing what's good for them.

Take Vista, for example. Vista broke one of the most important rules of Microsoft Windows development: it broke backwards compatibility. Now you can rationalize that Windows' code base is better as a result. But the whole rationale behind Windows was that you can buy any $25 piece of hardware at Fry's and it would work. Windows XP, for instance did that marvelously, and I still have Windows XP boxes attached to various pieces of hardware that won't work on any other operating system. The minute Vista broke that compatibility, a customer would have to buy all new hardware for his new computer. At which point, Apple could (and did!) come along and say, "Hey, why don't you buy my shiny machine? It looks cool, it scores points with members of the opposite sex, and while it can also run Windows if you have to."

But presumably Microsoft knew all that! Why despite knowing that Vista's lack of compatibility would screw with Microsoft's revenue and dominance, did it do so? I asked a current Googler who was an ex-Microsoftie this question in 2006. His response was: "The new driver model? The one that broke all your devices? Well, you don't get your promotion to Staff Engineer for being someone who keeps it compatible with the old cruft. You get your promotion for designing a whole new piece of infrastructure that has huge impact on the world. Well, whoever did that got his promotion, and who cares if it tanked the company!" Ouch. People have argued that the new model is indeed more stable, but other techniques such as MicroReboots were also available. There really was no reason for Microsoft to take the risk of defection of customers to other operating systems.

One would think that such perverse incentive systems that can cause companies billions would be fixed, but my guess is that these incentive systems lie deep in the heart of the corporate culture: inventing new things will always be better rewarded than either making existing things run faster, or keeping things compatible, despite the latter two jobs usually being far harder than inventing a new subsystem out of whole cloth. And executives, even C level executives frequently still under-estimate the power of such incentive systems. As an example in late 2008, I had a conversation with a top executive at a well-known Silicon Valley company about what these perverse incentives were doing to his company. His response? "I don't believe it all comes down to incentives. After all, if you do good work and do good things, when you leave and work for other companies or when your friends leave and work for other companies, they'll remember you and bring you new opportunities, so you always have an incentive to do good work." When I heard that response I did not know what to say.

Months later, the company unveiled a "good citizenship award" internally. It was driven by the same popularity-contest-based incentive system that had already failed to promote good behavior. Not surprisingly, things have not changed as a result. When you see repeated examples of such behavior, it becomes much less of a surprise that startups without an incentive system other than handing out stock to everyone will continue to outperform the large organizations. Which again begs the question: Why the rush to get big?

Steve Jobs Wants to Be Your Mommy, Your Daddy and Your Personal Savior —
It's now become painfully apparent that Apple is exercising control over what it allows in its app store not only to assert its economic dominance over subservient app developers, but to impose the idiosyncratic morality of its CEO, Steve Jobs, on Apple consumers.

Motorola was recently rumored to be looking to produce its own smartphone OS, thus bringing into question the company’s commitment to the Android platform. But CEO Dr. Sanjay Jha addressed those concerns this week by saying that currently, “nearly all of my focus is on Android.” He also committed Motorola to bringing Android 2.2 to all of its phones as quickly as possible, as it’s necessary in order to enable full Flash support. Motorola introduced its first Android phone, the Cliq, at our Mobilize conference last year; it also makes the top-selling Droid for Verizon.

Next Friday, Sprint will launch the Android-based EVO 4G, complete with a 4.3-inch screen and integrated 4G. I received a test handset from Sprint this week to review, so have shot a photo tour of it and compared it to two other hot Android phones — the Droid Incredible and the Nexus One.

The EVO is also one of the first phones with a front-facing camera for video chatting, which made the release of Fring’s Android app this week perfectly timed. Fring is a cross-platform chat app that handles IM, VoIP, text chatting and now for the first time on Android — video chatting.

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What Will Peter Pham Do Next? —

Peter Pham was the 5th employee hired at photo sharing site Photobucket. 18 months later the then giant site was acquired by Fox Interactive Media for a reported $300 million. Then Pham joined the Boards of Advisors of a number of high-profile startups, including live video streaming service UStream.tv and document sharing service Docstoc. After just less than a year at Fox, Pham left to become the CEO of an innovative consumer expense optimization startup called BillShrink.

Today Pham announced that he's leaving BillShink to become Entreprenuer in Residence at Trinity Ventures. He's got new ideas and a great track record; now he'll have all the more financial backing and connections to put those ideas into play in a very big way.

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Trinity Ventures has backed a wide variety of companies that readers may be familiar with, including curation tool Posterous, crowd-sourced labor platform CrowdFlower, mobile browser SkyFire and many more. The firm makes 8 to 10 deals a year, according to a February profile by Stacey Higginbotham at Gigaom. That write-up focused on Trinity Ventures General Partner Fred Wang's argument that though Trinity was doing fine, he believes the VC industry in general has too many players raising too much money.

Pham was trained as a biologist and enjoys skydiving, donut eating contests and taking photos of rainbows, according to publicly available information on Facebook. His next startup is likely to be something interesting.

Photo by Dave Sifry.

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Digg Wants to Be the Twitter of News —

Digg founder Kevin Rose is close to his first major launch since taking over as CEO and instituting layoffs. He published a video today on his personal YouTube account laying out the site’s upcoming version 4 release, due “very soon” (found via TechCrunch).

The new Digg — which has been in the works for at least a year now — will extend the site’s current social features (which are pretty minimal) to allow for both friending and following other users and publishers. So if you friend a user, you see what they Digg and comment on; if you follow a publisher, you see everything they publish. The result is a personalized news page that seems like a combination of Google Reader, the Facebook news feed and Twitter. These features aren’t surprising; they’d been discussed publicly by previous CEO Jay Adelson and others at the company.

Here’s the key quote from the video, from Rose describing Digg’s new value proposition:

“Because we’re only links and news we cut out all the miscellaneous status updates like you see on other sites.”

This sounds like a good approach. The problem, though, will be standing out from those other sites that people already use to get their news and updates together, since much of that information will end up being duplicated and redundant for people who use more than one of the services.

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Does the Mobile Web Need a Yahoo-Style Directory? —

Do you remember the days when Yahoo was a yellow pages-like directory of websites? Back in the early days of the Internet, a number of companies created vast, human-edited databases that aimed to catalog all the Web - and some even sold these as printed books. According to mobile search engine Taptu, the mobile Internet is at a similar point today, where a directory is simply the easiest way to discover content. While Taptu's main focus is still on its crawler-based mobile search engine for mobile sites, the company also just launched a Yahoo-like directory of touch-friendly websites.

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The Mobile Web is Going Through Its "Yahoo Phase"

Earlier this year, AdMob's CEO and founder Omar Hamoui argued that the mobile web is going through its "Yahoo phase," as it is still possible to find mobile apps using directory-like app stores instead of having to rely on more advanced search engines. While Hamoui was mostly talking about apps, the same could be said about the mobile web in general. The number of touch-friendly mobile sites is still relatively small when compared the the Web as a whole, and services like Taptu new directory still make sense at this point.

Taptu's Directory

To help its users find the best touch-friendly sites for mobile phones, Taptu decided to create a directory of touch-friendly sites. Taptu notes that phones with touchscreens are quickly becoming mass-market devices, but a lot of these devices don't feature app stores. For Taptu, the top five traffic-generating phones include the Samsung Caliber, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Samsung Finesse.

Thanks to Taptu's focus on touch-friendly sites, the directory turns out to be a fun way to find interesting sites on the go, without the hassle of having to deal with sites that don't work well on small screens. To access Taptu's directory, just head over to the company's mobile site and look for the Categories icon at the top of the page.

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By Brian X. Chen, Writer, Gadget Lab, Wired.com

Most Fortune 500 CEOs are about as accessible as Kim Jong Il, but Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs has been breaking the mold. He’s sent terse e-mail replies to more than a dozen customer inquiries — and one journalist — in the past few months.

It’s not that he’s become unusually friendly.

Read the rest of this post on the original site