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…

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…

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…

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…

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]

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…

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,…

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…

As Yahoo tries to catch up to Google in automated advertising, it continues to lose the human capital now-departed managers like Wenda Harris Millard so carefully built. The latest defection: Valeh Vakili, an eight-year veteran of the portal's salesforce, who has joined MySpace as a senior vice president in charge of…

As they say in fashion: One day you are in, and the next day, you are out. And the same is true even for podcasting startups long after podcasting went out of style. Ron Bloom, cofounder of then Podshow, now Mevio, just touted the rollout of a site redesign on Monday. Now a tipster tells us that Bloom has been…

New York Times music reporter Jeff Leeds, who had reported on stories such as Apple's behind-the-scenes fight with Universal last year, was given the newspaper's version of a layoff — a "buyout" — earlier this year. Leeds is now editor-in-chief of Buzznet, the music community site that also bought Idolator from…

Marc Andreessen has been invited to join the board at eBay. The online auction company has been struggling of late, never mind CEO John Donahoe's assertion that what's bad for the American economy is good for eBay. Andreessen, probably smelling the stink blowing in from the rising tide, stockpiled enough venture…

Yusuf Mehdi, a longtime Microsoft dealmaker (read: geek who looks good in a tie), is now running marketing and product management for MSN and search. But there's still no one in charge of Microsoft's entire portfolio of Web businesses. [BoomTown]

Click to viewAccused of permitting unwarranted spying on citizens, torture, helping to blow a CIA agent's cover and firing non-political appointees for political reasons, former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales left the White House shrouded in ignominy. Facebook just hired his former right-hand man, Ted Ullyot,…

The 2.0 crowd's favorite social media academic, Danah Boyd — she types it as "danah boyd" because it looks prettier — is going over to Microsoft's newest research team in Boston (read: Harvard and MIT.) She's already done research at both Yahoo and Google, so the move makes sense. Even though Boyd once likened…

Earlier this year, MSN exec Jeff Dossett climbed to the summit of Mount Everest in order to bring attention to the problem of AIDS and HIV in Africa. But now he's doing something really crazy. Dossett quit Microsoft last week and likely plans to join Yahoo, BoomTown reports. BoomTown's Kara Swisher notes that…

David Hirsch, a former Googler who has just joined a venture-capital firm as a partner after an eight-month-long job search, has one provable talent: Excellent timing. Hirsch joined Google in 2000, and spent eight years at the company. But a former colleague tells us Hirsch was "useless." Google's touchy-feely…

Does Henry Blodget, the disgraced former Wall Street stock analyst, have a Forbes fetish? We ask because his latest hire, Caroline Waxler, has the business fortnightly on her resume — as does soon-to-depart Blodget employee Peter Kafka. Blodget, best known for his Silicon Alley Insider site, seems to fancy himself a…

If you can't hire a star, why not one of her best girlfriends? We hear Microsoft has poached BusinessWeek reporter Catherine Holahan for a new online-video project — MSN's answer to Yahoo Finance's Tech Ticker stocks show, which features Sarah Lacy, Holahan's former colleague at BusinessWeek and a close friend. (The…

Gilt Groupe, the invite-only high-end group-spelled-with-an-e-at-at-the-end e-commerce site you're not supposed to have heard of, got a new CEO today, former Martha Stewart CEO Susan Lyne. Cofounder Alexis Maybank, pictured here, will become chief strategist. Through AlleyCorp, DoubleClick cofounder Kevin Ryan owns…