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It's center-left policy wonk musical chairs: New York magazine just poached columnist Jonathan Chait from The New Republic—which hired Tim Noah, recently laid off from Slate, to replace him. What will Chait's sex diary read like? Stay tuned! More »
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Just a month after George "GeoHot" Hotz was sued by Sony for hacking the PlayStation 3, he's got a new gig: He's working at Facebook. Think of what kind of example this sets for the kids. More »
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Hey guys! Can I have everyone's attention, please? Where's Heather? Does anyone know where Heather is? Well, can you go grab her? We've got a big announcement. Yes, that's right, we've decided to appoint an acting chief of Al Qaeda. More »
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Today, CNET social media blogger Caroline McCarthy announced she had been hired by Google to join its "Trends and Insights team." She's far from the first tech blogger to become a tech employee. More »
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Get ready for some truly horrible jokes from our nation's least funny people, political pundits: Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs may be joining Facebook in "a senior role in helping to manage the company's communications." More »
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Former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, who doesn't actually like the Democratic party, has joined Fox News as a contributor. He'll get to keep his new corporate lobbying job, too, since Washington has no professional standards. More »
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Recently retired Sen. Chris Dodd, who said last year that he wouldn't take a lobbying job after leaving Congress, has taken a massive lobbying job: Chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. Congratulations, Chris Dodd! More »
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The White House doesn't appoint nearly enough openly gay people for administration positions, it's been said, by someone, at some point. But now that's all over. They have appointed an openly gay man, Jeremy Bernard, to be secretary of defense. No just kidding; America isn't "there" yet. He'll be White House social secretary. More »
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The same morning the New York Times posts their monster magazine profile of Politico newsletter savant Mike Allen, Politico management announces a high-profile hiring! Crazy! Washington influentials, please enjoy Maggie Haberman. And a VandeHarris memo! More »
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CNN, America's Favorite Source of Dumb Guys Reading Twitter Out Loud, has signed conservative blogger Erick Erickson to their "Best Political Team." This is a wonderful hire, as it provides yet another excuse to avoid CNN entirely. More »
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Yahoo has started its latest round of layoffs, which hit its pixel-cute photo-sharing site Flickr, a formerly sacrosanct fiefdom. We hear Google has its eyes on some of the Flickr employees Yahoo let slip. More »
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Owen Van Natta, Facebook's former COO, is officially taking over MySpace, News Corp.'s social network. With its user numbers stagnant, MySpace desperately needs a restart. Is Van Natta the guy to do it? More »
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Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta is the frontrunner to replace Chris DeWolfe as MySpace CEO. Blog lordling Jason Calacanis has been jokingly nominated for the News Corp. gig. Here's who should get it. More »
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How do engineers decide which jobs to take in Silicon Valley? It's a complex algorithm involving money, friends, hype, and free food. Nowhere in the equation: slick videos. That's why Facebook's recruiting is failing. More »
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So much for Twitter being a source of real-time news! Nearly three weeks after Valleywag first reported the startup's poaching of top Google designer Doug Bowman, cofounder Biz Stone confirms the hire. More »
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Rupert Murdoch's media empire continues its turmoil after the announcement of COO Peter Chernin's departure. The newest player: Former AOL CEO Jon Miller, who's widely expected to take the top digital job there. More »
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Chris Hughes, the Facebook cofounder who helped Barack Obama win the election online, has landed a real job, he tells us via Twitter: He's working at General Catalyst Partners as an entrepreneur-in-residence. More »
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At last, AOL has done something right: The Time Warner Internet unit has hired Google's Tim Armstrong as its new CEO, booting the laughably incompetent duo of CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant. More »
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Twitter, the twee San Francisco messing startup, is all hope, no revenues. That makes it irresistable to Silicon Valley's best and brightest — like Google's top designer, Doug Bowman, whom we hear Twitter just hired. More »
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Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz hates leaks, and we love Yahoo org charts, so the fact that we've received her announcement of the new Yahoo corporate structure is some kind of harmonic convergence. More »
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Megan Smith, a Google executive little known outside Silicon Valley, is taking a high-profile role running the search engine's in-house charity. She's part of a power couple whose louder half is AllThingsD blogger Kara Swisher. More »
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Sinking ship Portfolio has one less expensive contract to worry about. Matt Cooper, formerly the D.C. bureau chief of Time, has joined web outfit Talking Points Memo. More »
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Yahoo's new CEO, Carol Bartz, was at her career peak in 1992. Named CEO of design-software maker Autodesk, she'd beaten cancer, defeated a clique of ornery geeks, and hobnobbed with a president. Where'd she go? More »
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Yahoo's board will soon announce it has hired Carol Bartz, a software-industry veteran, to run the troubled Web-media business. The first question: How long before Bartz fires Sue Decker, Yahoo's president? (Update: not long!) More »
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No one wants to buy Yahoo. And the only person who wants to run Yahoo is an insider who helped sink it. Is there any hope left for the beleaguered Web giant? More »
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How sad that no one convincing has stepped up to run Yahoo! Pursued then spurned by Microsoft, the company is looking to replace founder Jerry Yang. Mike Murdock, a disabled Navy veteran, has raised his hand. The name sounded familiar. More »
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Be careful what you wish for. Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook COO who left the social network in February, has gotten the CEO job he said he wanted — as the new chief of Project Playlist, an online-music startup. (It's been widely reported that MySpace wooed him to run its MySpace Music spinoff. He also had conversations with social-news site Digg and shopping search engine Nextag, among others.) Van Natta's an investor in Project Playlist, and the company has just announced funding from former AOL CEO Bob Pittman's Pilot Group. But powerful backers won't change the toxic business environment all online-music startups face. More »
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Some days it seems like Steve Jobs will be CEO of Apple until he dies. But after a bout with pancreatic cancer and a health scare earlier this year, peope are starting the grieving process earlier. Part of that involves playing a guessing game about who will take his place. Fortune convincingly argues that Apple COO Tim Cook is the only real candidate. More »
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Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang publicly pines for another bid from Microsoft. On stage at the Web 2.0 Summit conference yesterday, he said, again, that he was open to talks. Microsoft has taken pains to say it's not interested. But really, besides corporate raider Carl Icahn, who cares? A new leadership team, all with lengthy Microsoft resumes, has taken over key parts of Yahoo. More »
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I feel sorry for Courtney Holt. Partly because the MTV executive is rumored to be taking a terrible job running MySpace Music, a feature of the social network masquerading as a separate company. But mostly because of his name. In a previous article, I was enough of a bonehead to refer to Holt as "she." Trying to do my part to promote the role of women in the tech industry, okay? More »
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Why is it that Courtney Holt, the MTV executive reportedly offered a job running MySpace Music, has yet to take the CEO position there? Because, like the other candidates, he figured out that running a feature of a website is not a real job. More »
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Heavy.com continues to get lighter; Eric Hadley, who only joined the funny-videos-for-guys startup a year ago as chief marketing officer, has joined Yahoo as its VP of advertiser and partner marketing. He'd previously worked for a decade at Microsoft. We see the hand of Joanne Bradford in this; she's the former MSN chief who now runs ad sales at Yahoo. The pattern here? More »
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Tony Fadell, the head of Apple's iPod division, is exiting Steve Jobs's reality distortion field. While Fake Steve Jobs likes to take credit for inventing the frigging iPod, its real mastermind is Tony Fadell, who took his plans for an MP3 player to Apple in 2001 as a consultant. His replacement: Former IBM chip expert Mark Papermaster, whose erstwhile employer is suing Apple to prevent him from taking a job there. That Papermaster is replacing Fadell makes its lawsuit even stranger; it is seeking to enforce a noncompete clause in his contract, but a job overseeing MP3 players and cell phones hardly seems a competitive threat to IBM. Fadell is planning to take some time off Pity. Since he joined Apple, Fadell's homepage has turned into a placeholder. We were looking forward to the return of the "jazzy, shameless self-promotion" it once offered. More »
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Mountaineer, philanthropist, and longtime Microsoftie Jeff Dossett has a new claim to fame: He's brave enough to join Yahoo — but it took a while to convince him. Two months ago, Dossett, who joined Microsoft in 1991, went through a curious back-and-forth: BoomTown's Kara Swisher reported he was leaving Microsoft to join Yahoo. A Microsoft rep promptly denied the report, claiming Dossett was leaving a job at the software giant's MSN Web business, but looking at other opportunities within Microsoft. We could speculate about how Microsoft and Yahoo were bidding for Dossett's services, but the real lesson here is: Never, ever believe a Microsoft flack. Dossett replaces Scott Moore, who's leaving Yahoo as reported. More »
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Who's Mark Papermaster, the chip guru Apple and IBM are scrapping over? Here's one clue: He's the kind of guy who has no photos online. There used to be a "Mark Papermaster" profile on Facebook, but it's gone. No wonder he wants to disappear: Apple hired Papermaster, formerly a VP at IBM, possibly to run its PA Semi chip-design subsidiary. Apple switched to Intel chips for its Macs years ago, but after it bought PA Semi, speculation grew that it might use some variation on IBM's Power chips for the iPhone and iPod. Papermaster could help with that. More »
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The latest we're-supposed-to-care chatter from the tipline: "It was just announced yesterday that Ziff-Davis Chief Technology Officer Robyn Peterson is leaving to go to NBC. Ouch!" Ouch? The real ouch is that Ziff-Davis Media, the considerably reduced tech-magazine publisher, was paying someone to be its CTO in the first place. More »
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Back when Jim Cramer was an active hedge-fund trader, rather than an on-air fit-thrower for CNBC, he kept his distance from TheStreet.com, lest the site be accused of advancing his portfolio. No such distance now: He's replacing Thomas Clarke as chairman. Clarke remains CEO. [Silicon Alley Insider] More »
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Why can't News Corp. find anyone to run MySpace Music, the spinoff from its social network which is part-owned by major labels? No one seems able to state the obvious: MySpace Music is a feature, not a company. The outside investment it garners is just an elaborate way of cutting in the labels on MySpace's music-related profits. No wonder former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta turned down the job; TechCrunch reports that he cleverly tried to get MySpace to buy Project Playlist, a music startup he'd invested in, as part of the deal. Van Natta picked the right test: If MySpace had been willing to fold Project Playlist into MySpace Music, it would have proven that the music venture really had some independence. Any other CEO candidate should ask the same questions Van Natta raised with his quid-pro-quo deal. More »
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Jack Dorsey, a programmer who's famous South of Market, is stepping down as Twitter's CEO. Why? Ev Williams, who's taking over, has a long, involved explanation about changing times and changing roles, and how Twitter was spun off from this loser podcasting startup he hated working on, and that's where he met Dorsey, who came up with the idea for Twitter as an in-house communications tool. Boring! What he really means: More »
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A quartet of Valley veterans has started Cloudera. They're pitching it as "Red Hat for Hadoop." Hadoop is an open-source implementation of Google's MapReduce infrastructure software, supposedly useful for Internet-computing projects. Cloudera plans to offer technical support for Hadoop. And yet here I thought the whole point of cloud computing was that someone else ran Hadoop so you didn't have to. Whatever! I'm confident that the founders of Cloudera will make tons of money, if only for this reason: Its data guru, Jeff Hammerbacher, worked on credit derivatives at Bear Stearns before he left and joined Facebook. He joined the social network in time for its notional value to soar to $15 billion. Cloudera's business looks questionable, but I trust Hammerbacher's ability to convince someone else that he's built something so vast and complicated that they buy it before they figure out what it's really worth. (Photo by jakob) More »
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