This week I did something that I hadn’t done for five months and 12 days: I went to Flickr on my laptop, accessed some photos on my hard drive, uploaded them, named them, tagged them, and organized them in a set.

The magic of the Internet happened before my eyes, and they joined the other rectangular images on the venerable photo-sharing site. And finally, for the first time in almost half a year, I had something beside square pics on my Flickr photostream.

Yahoo announced its massive revamp of the Flickr service with three missing Es, calling the updated site Biggr, Spectaculr, and Wherevr. But really, the update boils down to two massive changes: Dropping freemium and making an old and tired user interface awesome.

Since I was just wondering about reupping my Pro account, the first is really significant.

Yahoo’s giving each Flickr user a full terabyte of space for images for free, which essentially means you don’t need to be a Pro user anymore. You still can, for an ad-free account, or to add even more space … but I don’t mind a few ads, and I’m only using 0.8 percent of my freely available terabyte anyways.

But the best and most important is the incredible new look.

There’s varied response to the new look, to say the least, and the official forum thread on the new layout has a staggering 241 pages of user comments: 24,102 in total so far. The vast majority of them are negative, and most of those appear to be from long-time users who liked the site the way it was and are asking Flickr to change it back.

Good luck.

Flickr as it was was turning into a byway, a leftover, and an also-ran. Which is why most of the pics on my photostream and home page were square: They were exports, shares from Instagram photos. In other words, Flickr was changing from the place where you went to share photos from, to the place where you shared photos to. That may be a small change in the English language, but it’s a massive change in user engagement.

And it had huge effects on Flickr’s traffic, which dropped about 40 percent in the last year alone:

The new look is gorgeous and photo-centric, giving photos — the raison d’etre of Flickr — center stage.

Sure, it’s Pinterest-ic and Tumblr-y. But if you love images and imagery, the new Flickr displays photos immeasurably better that the previous iteration. In a funny modern way, your digital photostream now resembles an old-fashioned photography album, without any cheesy in-your-face design elements attempting to highlight the fact.

In addition, the new layout options gave Yahoo the option of displaying images with much more creativity while honoring the photographer’s shot selection — such as Flickr displaying panorama shots across the entire page:

I’m sold. Flickr, I’m back.

“I think Flickr is awesome again with these new announcements,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said. “Photos make the world go around. Flickr was awesome once. It languished. But now it’s awesome again.”

I agree. And so does one of the more famous photographers on Flickr, Thomas Hawk:

despite all of the naysayers about the new @flickr, my page has never had more engagement than it has there in the last 3 days.

— Thomas Hawk (@thomashawk) May 23, 2013

Image credits: John Koetsier

Days after finalizing a $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, and coming hot on the heels of a massive image-buffing retrofit of the photo-sharing community Flickr, Yahoo has bought yet another company.

Finally, after years of virtual irrelevance at the search/media company, Mayer has Yahoo doing huge and interesting things again.

PlayerScale, a cross-platform game infrastructure startup that provides tools for games played by 150 million users on platforms such as iOS and Android, announced the acquisition on its site today. And — unlike recent Yahoo acquisitions like Astrid – CEO Jesper Jensen said the company would continue to operate as it has, supporting over 2,600 developers and 4,000 games.

In fact, he added, PlayerScale is adding 400,000 users a day.

“With Yahoo’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before,” Jensen said.

Source: Sean Ludwig

Marissa Mayer

That would be a major change from recent Yahoo acquisitions such as Stamped, OnTheAir, Snip.it, Alike, Summly, Jybe, and Astrid, all of which have been shuttered or put on notice. But it makes sense, given PlayerScale’s volume of business and growth rates.

And the move seems to make sense given Yahoo has now signaled a move into casual gaming on iOS, Android, Facebook, the web, and even Xbox.

PlayerScale’s platform helps game developers with pretty much everything they need to make their game platform work, except the game itself. It includes payments, chat, analytics, virtual currencies, distributed caching, authentication, social sign-on, leaderboards, localization, and more.

Here’s CEO Jesper Jensen’s announcement in full:

Today is a great day — both in our journey with PlayerScale and for users of our Player.IO product. We are happy to announce the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform: we have been acquired by Yahoo!. And don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. Our platform will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today … and in fact, it will only get better from here!

Our goal has always been to help developers build the best possible games, without having to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure required to operate today’s biggest successes. In working with the folks at Yahoo!, it has become clear that we share this passion.

We have spent the past four years growing a three-person startup into a product that powers games played by over 150 million people worldwide and we are adding over 400,000 new users every day. In the last four months alone, we have increased our daily user growth rate by almost sixty percent. With Yahoo!’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before. We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming — whether it’s casual, social or mobile.

Today marks a milestone for PlayerScale and I want to sincerely thank the team, our developers and millions of users for the adventure so far and can promise there will be more to come.

- Jesper Jensen

Image credit: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

The popular and fast-growing blog service is mulling a $1.1 billion acquisition offer from Yahoo. But while the massive blogging powerhouse only pulled in $13 million in revenue in 2012, and raised $125 million at a lower $800 million valuation, Tumblr CEO David Karp feels $1.1 billion is too little.

I guess it depends what yardstick you use.

If you look at an Instagram-style deal, which was originally around a billion dollars but eventually, due to Facebook’s stock market woes, came in a little lower, he might be right. But that deal had one thing going for it that Tumblr does not.

Instagram chief executive and co-founder Kevin Systrom had multiple suitors, while Tumblr only has one.

That’s because, as Forbes reveals, Yahoo is currently negotiating under a lockup. So even though Facebook, Microsoft, and potentially other acquirers are interested, Yahoo has at least a period of time in which it is the only one on the dance card.

In addition Tumblr, which famously hates advertising and only started trying to make money after five years in existence, is in a bit of a pickle, as its $125 million in funding is running out, giving the service only a few-month window in which to raise a new round or find a sugar daddy.

That’s likely a strategic error on Karp’s part, who has said that advertising “really turns our stomachs.”

Tumblr only started to get serious about ad revenue in mid-2012, and is only planning to roll out its third major ad product — pay per view, in which you pay to get others to view — sometime later this year. Being more aggressive on monetization would have given Tumblr more runway to make a leisurely decision about an acquisition, or made the company more attractive to investors if it tried to raise another funding round.

There’s no question, however, that Tumblr is a traffic powerhouse. It ranks ninth on the list of most-popular U.S sites, and with 217 million global monthly unique visitors and 74 million million posts each and every day, the site is both huge and fast-growing. Few companies could monetize its 108 million blogs, 51 billion posts, and 16 billion monthly pageviews as well as Yahoo.

So while Yahoo is likely to come up a little, Karp could pick worse partners. And he might do well to finalize a deal sooner rather than later.

By Dr. Michal Tsur, a serial tech entrepreneur, and 

We live in a world where young, ambitious women will now contend with a new, and sadly pressured life question – are you “leaning in”?

While Sheryl Sandberg, the second in command at Facebook and author of recent bestseller Lean In, and her ambitious following of female professionals have a nuanced understanding of the concept, in common speak, the words “lean in” convey something too simple, intense, and aggressive.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” writes Sandberg in the book.

Sandberg, who is trying to launch a social movement to empower women, is admirable and certainly has wisdom to offer. However, the intensity and pressure conjured by her phrase is not the right message we should be sending to female youth. In fact, remember old high school basketball coaches barking at us to lean in? Sandberg’s message is reminiscent. “Lean in ladies! Be aggressive. Run faster. The quarter is almost over. No taking a rest now!”

The words themselves were designed to motivate us to work harder and faster; to win.

Yet, unlike basketball games, careers are not broken into quarters. They are more of an evolving marathon filled with twists and turns. The opposite of a sprint. And while muscling forward may help one win a basketball game, it’s not clear that more energy, effort, and aggressiveness is what will get women into the boardroom.

What we’ve realized in debating the message of “lean in” while looking at the careers of people like Sandberg and Mayer, is that something big is lost in the colloquial phrase that Sandberg is championing. We must redefine the phrase to convey a vision that is as big in spirit and excitement as it is in raw ambition.

As Sandberg herself states, success depends on a fair bit of luck. Both Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Sandberg had the good fortune to jump on the Google train in the early days. And Sandberg’s COO role at Facebook has catapulted her into tech godliness that was largely unpredictable.

Yes, smart negotiation, ambition, and sponsors were important. But, what distinguishes Sandberg, and what we’ve learned from our own careers is that success is also about creating, recognizing, and seizing opportunities.  It’s about putting oneself in a position that maximizes luck.

Let’s look at Sandberg. She had the confidence to jump between jobs with the government, the World Bank, and tech companies, following a varied and non-linear path. Mayer grabbed the CEO opportunity at Yahoo despite being pregnant, and knowing that she’d be following a long series of executive failures.

In our own careers, it’s been the opportunities that came from new connections made in school or at a conference, or from invitations to write, speak, or create, that pushed us forward.

And at Kaltura, we look at examples like Becky, one of our key project managers, who, after being told that she didn’t have enough technical experience or background, decided to take a leap, jump into a technical job and learn engineering basics on the side in order to make a career transition.

Or Charly, who, with no degree or any technical background whatsoever, led customer support at one of our competitors and later joined Kaltura as a key account manager.  Yes, these women fought hard to get ahead, but what really sets them apart is that they identified a passion, took risks, and seized new opportunities.

What we see in these examples are ambitious women that “leaned in” to advance their careers and families simultaneously. The message of “lean in” should not be to push harder, as Sandberg argues, “put your foot on the gas pedal and keep it there.”

The key, rather, is to be mindful, intentional and clear-eyed about possibilities that emerge in life and work. It is about not being guided by fear, but rather knowing your passions, being bold, and taking risks. And for women who are nearer to the top, leaning in is about being conscious of setting precedent and shaping institutions in ways that will also create paths for younger women.

So, to women (or men) who feel compelled and inspired by Sandberg but also scared about the implied added pressure to constantly push higher and farther – take a breath.  There is a way to lean in and achieve success with levity and spirit. Lean in to life. Opportunities will emerge.

The key is to be confident and aware enough to see them.

Dr. Michal Tsur is a serial tech entrepreneur, having co-founded online security firm Cyota and open-source video platform Kaltura, where she is currently president. Leah Belsky is a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where she contributes on online collaboration and technology policy, and is currently SVP Operations at Kaltura.

photo credit: Victor1558 via photopin cc

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has acquired seven companies since taking the helm of the once-foundering search/media company. Each of the first six has been shut down.

Now, it looks like it’s time for Yahoo’s latest acquisition, Astrid.

In October, it was Stamped that Yahoo shut down, and in December it was OnTheAir. In January it was Snip.it. In February it was Alike, and in March it was Summly and Jybe. At least some of those were acqui-hires, bringing in skilled teams that Yahoo wanted. But in all cases, the startups were closed, and users were left hanging.

“Six for six … all shut down,” says Omar Al-Hajjar, the VP of marketing for online task manager Sandglaz. “I think Astrid is headed for a similar fate once the 90 days ends.”

Al-Hajjar is taking about former Astrid CEO Jon Paris’ 90-day promise, which he made when Yahoo acquired Astrid:

Over the next 90 days, Astrid will continue to work as-is, and we will no longer be accepting new premium subscriptions. To make future changes as easy as possible, we’ll be in touch with users shortly to share how to download data.

That’s about as clear as it gets in corporate announcements, and it seems to be confirmation that Astrid will go the way of all recent Yahoo acquisitions: into the deadpool. At least, in terms of its existing service and existing users. And four million users will need to find a new way to manage their tasks.

So Sandglaz is making some hay while the sun shines and offering simple data import straight from Astrid into Sandglaz. All existing Astrid users have to do is sign into Sandglaz, export their data from Astrid, and import it into Sandglaz.

It’s fairly simple and quite useful if you’re now looking for an Astrid-like service. And Sandglaz engineers built it in just two days, apparently.

“This isn’t really a knock on Astrid,” Al-Hajjar said in an email. “Just pointing out that there might be a larger trend where users of services that get shut down turn into refugees that look for competing services.”

Specifically, Al-Hajjar references the big kahuna of recently announced shutdowns: Google Reader, which resulted in Feedly picking up 500,000 new users in two days, and other RSS services like NewsBlur seeing massive growth as well.

This means, most likely, that task-management acquisition Astrid will be shut down as well and that its four million users will need to find another place to manage their time.

Which, if it proceeds as currently indicated, means that Marissa Mayer will be 7-for-7 on acquisition shutdowns.

For users, Sandglaz has made it clear that it’s open for business. One other option is Wunderlist, which has also built a “Farewell Astrid rescue.”

Image credit: ShutterStock/Sorry we’re closed

Notable this year is Apple, with its whopping $156 billion in 2012 sales, jumping into the top 10 for the first time in its 37-year history. And Google, with its big $50 billion year, bulled its way up almost 20 spots to hit No. 55. Perhaps most impressive, however, is Facebook, which with the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500 made the list for the very first time at 487.

Ranking companies by income is a fairly arbitrary measure, since it reveals little about how much companies actually earn, but it does show scope and scale. A grain of salt is definitely indicated, however, as Google’s profits, for instance, are many multiples of Dell’s despite that Dell is ranked No. 51 and Google is No. 55.

Here are the 41 technology companies that Fortune included on its list.

• 6: Apple
• 15: HP
• 20: IBM
• 35: Microsoft
• 49: Amazon
• 51: Dell
• 54: Intel
• 55: Google
• 60: Cisco Systems
• 80: Oracle
• 131: Xerox
• 133: EMC
• 176: Computer Sciences
• 163: Jabil Circuit
• 194: Qualcomm
• 196: eBay
• 218: Texas Instruments
• 222: Western Digital
• 240: SAIC
• 267: CDW
• 270: Liberty Interactive
• 302: Applied Materials
• 304: Motorola Solutions
• 318: Micron Technology
• 326: Corning
• 327: Broadcom
• 352: Congnizant Technology Solutions
• 379: Symantec
• 408: NetApp
• 420: Sanmina
• 429: Harris
• 436: Booz Allen Hamilton Holding
• 441: NCR
• 473: Priceline.com
• 464: AMD
• 477: Avaya
• 482: Facebook
• 487: SanDisk
• 489: Pitney Bowes
• 494: Yahoo
• 499: CA Technologies

A couple of caveats:

I have not included telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, although a good argument can be made that they are now, primarily, technology companies, simply because Fortune did not classify them in any recognizable technology category. And I have included retailers like CDW and companies like Pitney Bowes, which Fortune classifies in categories like Computers, Office Equipment, and Information Technology Services.

One interesting note: While Facebook has the Fortune 500′s youngest CEO, Dole Food’s David Murdock, at 90 years old, is the Fortune 500′s oldest CEO.

photo credit: mikesolita via photopin cc

Astrid announced the acquisition itself on its blog, saying that “we are thrilled to announce” that the company has been bought by Yahoo.

Users of Astrid might possibly be less than thrilled, however, as the service will only be maintained as it currently exists for 90 days, after which changes might be made. Users, however, will be able to download any data they have input into the service, if they wish.

CEO Jon Paris thanked Google Ventures and Startup Lab as well as investors Nexus Venture Partners and TMT Investments, but said that Astrid will no longer be accepting premium subscriptions. Users who have paid for annual subscriptions that overlap that period will be getting refunds.

With the purchase, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer continues to deliver on her promise of more mobile and more acquisitions. Yahoo has also recently acquired mobile video platform OnTheAir, social curation site Snip.it, location discovery app Alike, and mobile recommendations site Jybe.

Paris’ entire statement:

Friends of Astrid,

We are thrilled to announce that we have been acquired by Yahoo!. When we set out to build Astrid, we sought to help as many people as possible become happier, healthier and more productive. We’re really excited to join the mobile team and continue this work with Yahoo!’s goal of “making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining.”

Over the next 90 days, Astrid will continue to work as is, and we will no longer be accepting new premium subscriptions. To make future changes as easy as possible, we’ll be in touch with users shortly to share how to download data.

We are grateful to the more than 4 million of you who have downloaded our apps, to those who have shared Astrid with friends, family and co-workers, and to all who encouraged us with your kind words along the way. You honored us in so many ways, and we won’t forget you.

We are also grateful to our many mentors and investors:

• Thomas Korte and AngelPad for your sage advice and assembling a tremendous community of entrepreneurs.
• Google Ventures and the team at the Startup Lab for teaching us so much.
• Nexus Venture Partners, TMT Investments, and the amazing angel investors who provided the resource and support we needed to build our products and company.
• Jump Associates and LUXr for helping us understand our users and build products people love.

To all of you, in both big and small ways you have helped us achieve the success we enjoy today. It is our sincere hope that our work will help you come closer to your own dreams.

Warmly,

Jon Paris & the Astrid Team

*Note: Yahoo! will be administering refunds to eligible users who have paid for annual subscriptions, Power-Pack and Locale Plugins.

Hat tip: The Next Web

More details:

Dynamic Yield yields $2 million for personalized web experiences

Dynamic Yield has secured $2 million in its first round of institutional funding. The Israeli-startup offers software solutions that help publishers and e-commerce sites increase their revenue by personalizing content in real time. By customizing the experience to each individual user, Dynamic Yield seeks to increase user engagement, ad clicks, product purchases, social sharing, and page views. The system currently powers nearly a billion monthly pageviews. Bessemer Venture Partners led this round, with participation from The New York Times Company and Innovation Endeavors.

GE invests $105 million in Pivotal

Pivotal is building the “next generation Enterprise Platform-as-a-service,” which is an as-yet-undefined entity that brings together big data, application programming, and cloud architecture. Apparently, that $105 million gives GE only a 10 percent stake in the six-month-old spinoff of VMware and EMC.

Yahoo Japan invests $20 million in Softbank fund

Yahoo Japan invested $20 into Softbank’s early-stage Technology Fund, which will be used accelerate U.S. startups at varying levels of maturity. Through the investments, Softbank and Yahoo Japan hope to learn more about the U.S. and also provide avenues into Japan for American startups.

Marketing automation biz Silverpop scores $25M from Escalate & Silicon Valley Bank

Marketing automation business Silverpop has raised $25 million in fresh funding to help it reach out to new customers and build new automation tools that generate revenue and improve ROI. The company says it has more than 1,800 customers representing 5,000 brands.

3scale bags $4.2 million for API management

API company 3scale has just announced a new round of funding: $4.2 million from Javelin Venture Partners and Costanoa Venture Capital. 3scale makes products for API management, both from a technical and a business perspective. Current customers include Skype, Wine.com, FlightStats, PagesJaunes.fr (French YellowPages), and Yummly.

photo credit: lpettinati via photopin cc

According to a new uSamp survey of 1,000 Americans, 65 percent of companies allow remote work, and an even higher percentage of big companies take advantage of home and virtual offices. But what does that do to productivity?

If you ask workers, there’s no question about the answer: 67 percent feel more productive when working remotely, and a slightly higher percentage says they feel “liberated” when working from home. But there are some who prefer to go into the office. Some of us — 23 percent — prefer to have face-to-face meetings. And a similar percentage report being more productive in their offices than at home.

And some combine the benefits of both.

David Kaminsky, the chief financial officer of video-conferencing software maker Vidyo, told me this week he prefers meeting by video — even when both participants are actually in the same office.

“My CEO sits right next door, and many times we’ll meet just via video,” he said with a laugh.

That’s something that might not be for everyone. And even in the 69 percent of large companies that allow employees to work remotely, only slightly less than a third of workers actually take advantage of the possibility. A big chunk of us, 47 percent, just go into the office every day because that’s what’s expected of us … even if the company officially allows home office and other working arrangements.

But the advantages of working remotely are too visible to ignore, uSamp CEO Matt Dusig says:

“With the advances in technology, it is easier than ever for employees to perform their jobs at a high level while working remotely.”

Which isn’t to say there aren’t advantages and benefits of both, as Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, who famously banned working from home, recently said.

“People are more productive when they’re alone,” she said at the conference, “But they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.”

Which, I suppose, means there’s a place and a time for everything.

More data on virtual offices in visual form, here:

photo credit: Paul Mayne via photopin cc

What will that Google user do now?

According to some testing code that Google Operating System caught in the wild, Google is testing a Google Now experience for its home page. Google Now, of course, is the home screen on the latest versions of Android, which brings together relevant and contextual information like weather, traffic conditions, how your favorite stocks are doing, whether your sports teams won, and so on.

“Just the right information at just the right time,” Google said. Now it’s testing that mobile experience on the web.

Sounds almost … Yahoo-ish?

The code on the page in testing shows functionality that will allow Google users to set and edit their home and work locations, as well as their current location, and “Discover Google Now.” Presumably, those location settings — as well as other preferences entered — would create a customized page with news, events, personal information, and perhaps even Google offers or deals close to you.

Google has long had iGoogle, a personalized homepage with your latest mail, calendar events, weather, tweets, bookmarks, and more. It’s — frankly — an ugly, almost awkward widget-ized implementation of what Google Now has become on Android phones, and nowhere near Google’s current level of user interface sophistication.

It has also conveniently been scheduled for “retirement.” In an announcement dated April 8, just a couple of weeks ago, Google said it will retire iGoogle on November 1, 2013. The reason? A Google Now-like experience on mobile:

We originally launched iGoogle in 2005 before anyone could fully imagine the ways that today’s web and mobile apps would put personalized, real-time information at your fingertips. With modern apps that run on platforms like Chrome and Android, the need for something like iGoogle has eroded over time …

Almost certainly, a Google Now for the web would include integration with Google+, the social glue between each of Google’s services. And in fact, this might be seen as a way to drive more of the social features of that network to the average user of Google’s search engine who does not currently use that social network.

If Google is planning to release a Google Now product for the web, presumably it would do so some time before iGoogle is fully retired.

I’ve asked Google for comment and will update this post with the company’s response.

Image credit: Google

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In six months at Yahoo, Marissa Mayer has killed telecommuting, focused Yahoo’s products, made Yahoo.com just a smidge more Googlish, given employees swish new iPhone 5s, cleaned executive house, hired a new chief marketing officer, and announced plans to chop about 80 percent of Yahoo’s mobile apps.

For that, she’s getting a $1 million bonus from the board.

There is one more little detail, however. In that six months under Mayer, Yahoo’s stock price has jumped from $15 to $23, adding over $17 billion in market value to the still-slumbering purple giant, which remains a top-five traffic destination on the web.

As veteran Yahoo follower Kara Swisher notes, most of that may be due to the rocket-like growth of China’s Alibaba group, which Yahoo owns a significant chunk of. But some of it is due to the hope that Mayer has brought to the company — and the markets — that Yahoo will not remain largely irrelevant and will actually become a technology force again.

Here are the details from Yahoo’s SEC filing:

The Compensation Committee approved 2012 annual cash bonuses for Marissa A. Mayer, the Company’s Chief Executive Officer, and Ken Goldman, the Company’s Chief Financial Officer. Ms. Mayer received an annual cash bonus of $1,120,000 for 2012, under the Company’s 2012 annual cash bonus plan for senior executives (the “2012 Executive Incentive Plan”). As provided in the 2012 Executive Incentive Plan, Ms. Mayer’s bonus was determined based on the Company’s performance relative to goals established by the Committee in early 2012 for ex-TAC operating margin and revenue [and] ex-TAC growth rate for 2012 (in each case as defined in, and subject to certain adjustments as set forth in, the 2012 Executive Incentive Plan). Ms. Mayer’s 2012 bonus was pro-rated based on her mid-year date of hire.

The $1 million bonus is just a drop in the bucket, however, as Mayer’s total overall compensation for her first year as Yahoo CEO could top $60 million. Much of that is compensation for lost stock options due to leaving Google, and much of the rest is in performance bonuses and a retention bonus if she stays at least five years.

My guess is that most of us would stick around five years for the kind of massive $30 million retention award that forms a big chunk of the total potential first-year compensation of $60 million.

Unfortunately, most of us couldn’t do the job that Mayer seems, at least right now, to be handling with aplomb.

By Jaleh Bisharat, VP of Marketing, oDesk (the world’s largest online workplace)

Just one week after Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer issued her ‘work-in-the-office-only’ policy, Best Buy is dominating a new wave of headlines by following in her footsteps — delivering a one-two punch to the flexible work movement.

Best Buy, which was considered a trailblazer of flexible work through its popular Results-Only-Work-Environment (or “ROWE”) program, has revoked telecommuting privileges for some 4,000 non-store employees. Now, remote work will happen by exception and with managerial approval.

At Yahoo reportedly nobody is exempt, not even those who were hired with the understanding that they could work from home, a coffee shop, a co-working space, or wherever else they could find a productive environment to contribute from afar.

In the age of Skype, Google Docs, Dropbox and oDesk (where I work) these are pretty stunning pronouncements from one of the industry’s most progressive companies, and from Marissa Mayer, one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched working Moms.

Where did it come from?

It seems that a practice presumably designed to attract talent is arousing suspicion. Are remote employees working from home, taking their children to the park or doing a bit of both?

It’s certainly true that working near crying babies is neither productive for the company, nor good for their harried professional moms.

But must we throw out the baby with the bathwater by ordering everyone back into the office? Must we go back to limiting ourselves to the talent that happens to reside within 25 miles of the office and the people who sit in a cubicle during traditional business hours?

Or is it time to reflect on how we can best harness talent, regardless of where it happens to be?

I know what it is like to be a working Mom, with small children blooming at home while I was tucked away in an office across town (in fact I blogged about it here). I also know what it is like to manage a team that is sometimes remote, because here at oDesk we have 120 employees in-house and 250 contractors around the world.

Some of my favorite tips for work-anywhere teams are as follows:

1. Expect a professional environment, wherever it is
If you wouldn’t have a baby in your office, then think twice about allowing a situation in which the employee is simultaneously babysitting. In most cases, this is not a recipe for producing exceptional work.

Workers don’t have to be in a cubicle, but they do need a space in which they can conduct professional business without distractions.

2. Clarify the boundaries
Develop a crisp understanding of the employee’s limits. One exceptionally talented working Mom I hired in the past, for example, had to pick up her young daughter at 3 pm. We accommodated the shorter but clearly stated in-office hours. In return, she made a tremendous impact on our business. I suspect she was so extraordinarily productive because she was free of guilt and worry, as well as grateful for the opportunity. She is now a well-respected leader in Silicon Valley.

3. Communicate relentlessly
Make sure everyone on your team, remote or local, understands what s/he need to accomplish, when it is due and how s/he will be measured. Put it in writing; it forces you to be crisp and removes any doubt as to what is expected. Conduct frequent status check-ins to review accomplishments, upcoming goals and any milestones or red flags.

4. Measure people by the quality of their results
Agree on measurable goals. This might be increased sales, higher levels of customer satisfaction, a well-designed product or whatever else moves the needle for your business.

If the goal is met, what matters least is where the work happened, or when it happened — as long as it was completed on time.

Some of the very best employees have a meaningful impact on the business because they deliver quality results in record time. They know how to push past “90% finished” and cross the finish line. They use ruthless prioritization to focus on what makes a difference to the business.

These people are not usually the ones who spend the most time in their cubicles. They may be working in their bunny slippers, after their children are in bed.

5. Embrace an integrated culture
At oDesk, we are avid users of collaboration technologies including Skype, Dropbox and Google Docs. Each conference room is equipped with large monitors so we can integrate remote remote participates into meetings via Skype or Google Hangouts.

We have developed an etiquette for how we work as virtual teams. Each meeting begins with an inquiry as to who is remote that day so we can bring them in via Skype or Google Hangouts. Supporting documents are distributed in advance. We greet team members who enter the meeting on a screen as warmly as we greet people in the room. A remote person wishing to speak is given priority.

Most companies invest sizable resources to find and attract the people who are most brilliant in their contributions. Should we turn our backs on exceptional flex workers who make up a large portion of our population? Or should we put our energy into designing ways to make them — and ultimately our businesses — more successful?

What do you think?

photo credit: ekai via photopin cc

In 2007, 7 percent of U.S. workers spent at least one of their working days in a home office. In 2010, the most recent data that the Census Bureau released, 9.4 percent were telecommuting at least one day a week.

That’s 13.4 million people across the country, and these aren’t low-level employees that we’re talking about.

In fact, the Census Bureau says that they’re more likely to be in management and business, saying that “advances in communication and information technologies have allowed for a more mobile workforce.” And a growing segment of them are programmers, developers, and engineers.

The number of computing, engineering, and science professionals who work at home grew 69 percent from 2000 to 2010.

“The matter of how people work is as it has always been: What does it take to get the job done in a way that affords an equitable balance — a quid pro quo — between the organization and the individual?” said Joseph M. Pastore, a professor emeritus at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “For most companies, the issue is pretty clear: Do what works.”

What wasn’t working at Yahoo was home workers who were certainly home, but — alas — not workers. They were not logging into corporate systems like Yahoo’s VPN to get their work done.

But as someone who just had a child might realize, you don’t necessarily need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. As companies like Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, Cisco, Microsoft, AirBnB, Foursquare, and IBM realize.

Unless, that is, you want to do a stealth layoff.

photo credit: Travis Isaacs via photopin cc

These are two of the biggest stats in Alibaba’s newest visual overview of the Chinese e-commerce market. Alibaba is China’s online shopping giant — the company sold over $175 billion worth of products in 2012, and it owns TMall, which manages online sales for thousands of Chinese companies, as well as Taobao, which is, roughly, the Chinese version of eBay.

Alibaba, which Yahoo partially owns, made history in 2012 by racking up $3 billion in sales in a single day.

Sixty percent of those 242 million Chinese have incomes of less than $320 a month, but the average Chinese user spends almost as much online as U.S consumers: $1,054 — mostly because online prices are cheaper than in a store.

Alibaba reports that 54 percent of Chinese shop online at TMall — its own online shopping mall — with only 3 percent shopping at Joyo Amazon, which is Amazon’s Chinese division. Interestingly, 68 percent of what they buy is clothing and accessories, with much lower rates for digital goods, consumer electronics, and media.

Alibaba predicts that 2013 will be the year that Chinese e-commerce surpasses U.S e-commerce, with $265 billion in sales compared to a projected $230 billion for America, and that total Chinese online sales will reach $445 billion in 2015.

All the details in visual form:

photo credit: Sprengben [why not get a friend] via photopin cc

Marissa Mayer has been Yahoo’s CEO for less than a year, but the former Google exec is already leaving her mark on the Yahoo homepage, which is launching anew today.

The most immediately noticeable thing about the new page is its layout: It’s clean, simple, and deliberate — just like the current Google homepage that Mayer helped design.

But while the new page is clearly fueled by subtraction, it comes with a few major additions as well. Yahoo has added an “infinite news feed” to the page, giving users an unending, customized look at the information they actually care about.

The customization goes further. The new Yahoo homepage allows users to turn off certain homepage items, which means that, if you don’t like “horoscopes” or “Dating” on your Yahoo, you don’t have to see them. Mayer says the new Yahoo homepage is “all about your interests and preferences.” Thank goodness for that.

In all, the new page is a clear and much-needed improvement over the cluttered Yahoo homepage that for so long acted as an metaphor for how far Yahoo had fallen. Mayer may be the best thing that’s ever happened to Yahoo — and its visitors. 

Dulski started her career by founding a nonprofit — an academic program to help poor kids in urban Pittsburgh go to college and break the cycle of poverty in their lives. She left and went to business school when a tech-savvy woman on her board told her about a new company just starting out called Yahoo.

“I fell in love with the internet in the early 90s,” she told me in a telephone interview. “So I went to b-school, got my degree, and started at Yahoo when only 400 people were working at the company.”

After 10 years in various roles at Yahoo including VP and general manager of local commerce and VP of Yahoo Autos, Dulski left for another startup: DealMap, which built a local deals aggregation service. While it had its ups and downs, DealMap grew very quickly. Quickly enough that Google snapped up the company in 2011 —  with Dulski – after luckily failing to acquire Groupon.

Source: LinkedIn

Jennifer Dulski

“I spent a year and half at Google leading product teams for the shopping and ads group,” Dulski said. “It was a big and exciting year as Google Shopping transitioned to a commercial model, and I grew that business substantially for Google.”

Dulski first heard of Change.org in April of 2012 when the parents of Trayvon Martin posted a petition to prosecute their son’s killer, whom police initially failed to charge. Almost 2.3 million people signed that petition, and Dulski was one of them.

“I worked with kids very much like Trayvon in Pittsburgh,” she told me. “I felt very passionate about kids in those situations … what they face every day. And as soon as I saw the Change.org petition I went to sign it.”

When she became a Change.org user, Dulski started seeing many more petitions and was inspired by them, and by the site that made collective action on social justice and other issues possible — and effective. One of the petitions that also influenced her was initiated by three high-school girls in New Jersey who successfully convinced 122,344 supporters — and the powers that be behind the presidential debates — to end a “20-year drought” on women moderators of presidential debates.

“I was inspired by the company long before I got the call from the recruiter,” Dulski told me.

Now that she’s at Change.org, Dulski is planning to continue to grow the company … and continue to “pay it forward” for other women leaders. She already mentors women in executive roles in various Bay-area technology companies, and is part of a program with Young President’s Organization in which all the chapters have started an “Albright Angels,” cohort, focusing on developing women angel investors who are working with companies with female CEOs. Change.org has set up a women’s mentorship program as well.

For the site and services that Change.org offers, Dulski’s planning to expand its international expansion and drive the company to be able to continue to support rapid growth and scaling.

“We have 25 million users around the world,” she said. “Today when I walked in, our traffic is exploding as we’re hosting a big petition in Spain in which people are asking for presidential pardons. My role will be to help us really scale so we can continue to make the site fast and useful.”

And, she said, to listen to the site’s users and make the site “universally useful” to drive change at all levels … including for women leaders.

Image credit: Cornell

We’ve seen the clash of titans in mobile as Apple, Google, and Microsoft have released new phones, tablets, and mobile operating systems. We’ve seen a single network connect over a billion people worldwide. We’ve seen the once-great mobile company of the far European north forced to hawk its headquarters to raise cash. And we’ve seen social media move from cutting-edge to mainstream as the Obama campaign celebrated four more years.

In every year, we see winners and losers: companies, devices, or operating systems. Here’s our look at some of the biggest successes and failures of 2012.

The winners

	Android What more can you say about Android? With 75 percent market share in the third quarter of 2012, the free mobile operating system from Google looks poised to take over the world.
	Samsung  Not many companies sell 55 million smartphones in a quarter. Samsung did, and it will probably do it again.
	Galaxy S III Samsung is hot in large part due to its top smartphone, the Galaxy S III. With over 18 million units shipped in the third quarter, and 30 million shipped in five months, it’s easy to see why.
	iPhone 5 Sure, it was Time’s gadget of the year. But more importantly, iPhone 5 catapulted Apple back into the smartphone leadership position, at least in the U.S.
	iPad Mini We called it immediately: light, portable, awesome, and expensive. And it even looked better up close and person in our review. But we had no clue it would become one of Apple’s best-selling iPads. And now that it’s probably going Retina in April/May, it’s just getting better.
	YouTube YouTube continues to be the online leader, by far, in online video with 800 million visitors and billion-view channels created by individuals and brands. Despite getting the boot from iOS6, YouTube just continues to grow, with 25 times the video streams of its nearest competitor.
	Twitter 2012 is the year that Twitter went mainstream, reaching 500 million users mid-summer and just recently announcing 200 million monthly active users. And despite major new API restrictions that soured its relationship with developers, a very public spat with Instagram, and an evolving shift from social utility to media company, the company continues to grow and solidify its space in fast-breaking news.
	Instagram With a sale initially priced at almost $1.3 billion and an exploding user count, not even a tone-deaf terms-of-service change that spurred a class action lawsuit and a possible exodus of some users can keep Instagram off our winner list.
	Google Android is hot — 75 percent market-share hot. Search is still a massive strength for the iconic company that runs an ad 30 billion times each and every day. And so Google makes over $100 million a day – and hits our list of hot companies in 2012.
	ARM With the vast majority of the chips in smartphones running ARM processors, ARM has people wondering whether the mobile juggernaut will challenge Intel for CPU dominance. That’s still a stretch, but not nearly what it was just a few years ago.
	Reddit With 3.8 billion page views and 46 million unique visitors in October — double the previous year’s numbers — Reddit is continuing its torrid growth. And it doesn’t hurt when the POTUS himself chooses your site to do an informal meet-the-people session — which required 60 dedicated servers.

Next page: The losers

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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has spelled out that the beleaguered media company would be buying its way to mobile dominance — not through big product purchases but with smart, mobile talent pickups. Mayer made good on that promise by snatching up the ex-Googlers and former Apple staffers behind video platform OnTheAir.

OnTheAir ceremoniously announced on its website Tuesday that it was joining Yahoo. The deal, VentureBeat has confirmed, is a talent grab designed to bring more mobile expertise to Yahoo. Yahoo is currently in the process of trying to figure out how to better distribute its content to mobile audiences.

“Hiring the most talented mobile product thinkers and engineers is a big priority for us moving forward. Abel, Dan, Erik, Josh, and Mike are a great addition to Yahoo!, and we can’t wait to work with them to create the best possible mobile experience for our users,” Yahoo’s Adam Cahan, senior vice president of emerging products & technology, said in a statement.

OnTheAir made a 9-month-old online video site for people who wanted to stream to large audiences and incorporate viewers in their live broadcasts. It was kind of like a less intimate version Google+ Hangouts, except Google+ also now offers a Hangouts On Air feature for people who want to broadcast to bigger groups. The OnTheAir team admitted in a post today that the product never reached the “widespread daily use” that they had hoped. Yahoo said that it will no longer offer the product.

“When we first met with the team at Yahoo!, it was clear that everybody there is committed to making mobile products the backbone for the world’s daily habits,” the five guys behind the product wrote in a post-mortem note.

The guys moving to Yahoo are Abel Allison, Daniel Hopkins, Erik Goldman, Josh Schwarzapel, and Mike Kerzhner. According to their bios, Goldman and Kerzhner previously worked at Apple, Hopkins helped build the infrastructure to support Gmail and Google+, and Allison and Szhwarzapel (OnTheAIr’s CEO) came from startups Meebo and Cooliris, respectfully.

Yahoo did not disclose the exact terms of the deal. OnTheAir appears to have raised less than $1 million in seed funding.

Photo credit: acme/Flickr

Just call her coach.

In her first public interview as Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer channeled Vince Lombardi, the legendary former coach of the Green Bay Packers, to explain how she prioritizes her demanding life. Mayer co-opted one of Lombardi’s famous sayings to highlight that, for her, life is about God, family, and Yahoo — in that order.

At the invite-only, media-excluded event hosted by Fortune, Mayer spoke like a seasoned pro and demonstrated that she is everything Yahoo is not: pretty, seemingly perfect, and focused. Yet the fresh-faced CEO of the downtrodden Internet company told interviewer Pattie Sellers that her new job, which is to quickly fix Yahoo’s many flaws, has been surprisingly “fun.”

Marissa Mayer talks priorities at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women event in Palo Alto.

Fun. Imagine that.

It is hard to imagine considering that Yahoo, once an Internet titan, has been left in the dust by more agile, more mobile-attuned competitors such as Google and Facebook which have stepped in to give consumers what they really want from the web.

But Mayer insisted that Yahoo is everything that people want, they just don’t know it yet. What do people want? Mail, weather, stock quotes, sports scores, photos, videos, and news, she said.

“We have the content. We have all of the information that people want on their phones,” she said. “Now it’s about making it easy and relevant to use on mobile.”

How does Yahoo do that without its own mobile operating system, hardware, social network, or browser, all missing pieces Mayer was quick to point out? Easy. Partnerships. Mayer said that Yahoo plans to partner with the best folks in each of those areas to get the distribution it needs.

As Yahoo executes on the mobile and partnership pieces, the company will also go after low-priced, under-performing startups with great talent, Mayer said. This means that you can expect to see Yahoo make multiple acqui-hires, just as it did it when it purchased the talent behind Stamped.

For what’s it worth, Mayer also plans to go back into hiding and stop talking publicly, because, as she said, the key to her success has been to “ruthlessly prioritize.” Perhaps that explains why the wife of handsome investor Zachary Bogue and the mother to two-month-old Macallister doesn’t really tweet, except when it benefits her interests.

Some other things to note: Yahoo won’t be getting into the maps business under Mayer’s tutelage, Flickr sounds like a renewed area of focus for the company, and all employees have specific goals that are published to an internal website to keep them accountable.

Oh and that Lombardi reference seems intentional. Lombardi was brought on as the coach of the Green Bay Packers after an ambismal 1958 season that the franchise closed with a 1-10-1 record. In Lombardi’s first year, he lead the 1959 Packers to a 7-5 finish and was named the National Football League’s Coach of the Year.

Mayer, by the way, happens to be a current candidate for Time’s Person of the Year honor. She’s asking for your vote in more ways than one.

Football play image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Last week Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba shocked the web with news that its subsidiaries Taobao (like a Chinese eBay) and T-mall (like Amazon) sold a massive $3.06 billion in product in a single 24-hour period.

Three billion dollars is almost triple the entire 2011 Black Friday sales of e-commerce sites in the United States, and this is a testament to both the growing maturity of the Chinese online market and the central position Alibaba holds in China.

So how do you do $3 billion in sales in a single day? I interviewed an Alibaba spokesperson, who preferred to remain unnamed, to find out.

Almost as many users as Twitter

First of all, it helps to have users — lots of them.

The two sites, Taobao.com and Tmall.com, share a combined user base of half a billion registered users. That’s only about 30 percent of the total Chinese population, which means that Alibaba has a long runway for continued growth as the Chinese middle class continues to grow — and suggesting that a $10 billion day is not out of the realm of possibility in years to come.

Some of the goods for sale on Taobao.

(It also means, by the way, that it might be crazy for Yahoo to sell its stake in Alibaba now. Yahoo still owns 23 percent of the Chinese e-commerce giant after pocketing $7.6 billion U.S from selling almost half its original stake. Down the road, however, it might be like owning a 23 percent of Google, or Facebook … times 10.)

Both Taobao.com and Tmall process payments via Alipay, Alibaba’s payments processor. Alipay has over 700 million user accounts, presumably all with credit card payment information, as of mid-2012.

A cultural sea change

When you’re looking to scale quickly, it helps to be a high-growth company in a high-growth industry in a high-growth country.

But while a huge number of users is necessary, it’s insufficient to generate such massive cash flow. Just as important is a change in Chinese consumer behavior toward e-commerce “increasingly becoming a primary shopping channel,” according to Alibaba. The entire industry has had double-digit growth year-over-year — since 2010 e-commerce in China has enjoyed an average 10 percent quarter to quarter growth rate — and Alibaba is outpacing the industry.

In addition to a general acceptance of e-commerce as perhaps the first option for shopping, Chinese consumers have been increasingly prone to spend big on “double sticks day,” 11/11. Also referred to as “singles’ day,” Nov. 11 has taken on a rough similarity to our Valentine’s Day. Singles try hard to not be single, couples celebrate that they are couples, and probably many more people are simply happy to dogpile any opportunity to shop big and save big, much like Black Friday in the U.S.

Stores galore

Users and demand are great, but you need supply. That is not a problem for Alibaba, as the representative said that Tmall hosts e-commerce operations for 50,000 companies, while Taobao manages online sales and payments and “several million,” most of whom are likely individuals buying and selling much as we see on eBay here.

Of those stores, 10,000 took part in the 11/11 festivities with special sales and promotions. That’s five times the number that participated just last year, which gave Chinese shoppers “access to an even wider range of products.”

Promotion helped too, Alibaba says:

“We also offered new functions, activities and games via the event landing page beginning mid-October and noticed that many online shoppers were visiting the site and browsing through participating stores and available products as well as adding products to their shopping carts.”

Let’s get technical

While I generally like to ask companies for technical details about their server setup, Alibaba was anxious not

to share too much information that might be construed as proprietary, saying only that Alibaba Cloud Computing manages all Taobao and Tmall’s infrastructure from three data centers in Beijing, Hangzhou and California.

It also preferred not to disclose what kind of servers it runs, including operating system and webserver details, but a quick search reveals that Alibaba uses Tengine for webserving, which is a 100 percent compatible fork from the increasingly popular Nginx server, and that Alibaba runs, as expected, on Linux.

Mobile buyers figured prominently in Alibaba’s monster day, with one in four Taobao users accessing the site from a smartphone or a tablet. That compares to one in six last year.

Summing up

A $3 billion day doesn’t happen all the time, even in the world’s most populous country. And it’s a huge proportion of Alibaba’s annual goal for Taobao and Tmall, which was one trillion RMB in 2012. That’s closing in on $15 billion U.S., which is serious money.

Given Alibaba’s trajectory and China’s growth, it would seem that a $4 billion or $5 billion day would not be out of the question in 2013.

photo credit: dcmaster via photopin cc, Autorun！ via photopin cc

Newly minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has purchased Stamped, a mobile recommendations-focused startup with a team of talented ex-Googlers, to help the company catch up to competitors far ahead in the all-important race for mobile mindshare.

Mayer confirmed the acquisition on Twitter with an Instagram capture of her and the Stamped team, as pictured above. Yahoo also announced the deal on its corporate blog.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the purchase appears to be more for Stamped’s team than for the startup’s application, which encourages users to give their stamp of approval to their favorite bars, restaurants, songs, apps, and so forth.

The New York-based company originally launched one year ago with backing from Google Ventures. Earlier this year, Stamped released a remodeled version of the application and added a number of high-profile seed investors, including celebrities Justin Bieber, Ellen Degeneres, and Ryan Seacrest, to its investor list.

“Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve acquired a very talented team based in New York City to help us create a new center of mobile product development for Yahoo,” Adam Cahan, senior vice president of emerging products and technology, wrote in a blog post. Cahan is also the creator of IntoNow, the second-screen TV-tagging application Yahoo picked up before Mayer landed at the company.

“Mobile is at the center of how we connect with people, consume information, and pass the time, and we’re focused on making Yahoo the most inspiring and entertaining way to do just that,” Cahan said.

The Stamped app will be discontinued by the end of year. Co-founders Robby Stein, Bart Stein, and Kevin Palms said, in a letter posted to the company’s website, that the team will be “creating a brand new product and engineering office for Yahoo in NYC’s Bryant Park.”

Marissa Mayer’s been busy. Just a few weeks ago she had a baby, and impressively she’s finding time to shuffle around her executive team and fill the ranks with big names.

Hot on the heels of nabbing Google’s Henrique De Castro to be its new COO, it looks like Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett will soon exit the company in preparation for a new CRO, AdAge reports.

Interestingly enough, Barrett left Google to work for Yahoo in June. Barrett and new COO de Castro briefly worked together at Google after the search giant bought Admeld.

Yahoo did not immediately get back to us about Barrett leaving.

Michael Barrett photo: AllThingsD

Henrique De Castro, Google’s former president of Global Media, Mobile, and Platforms, is joining Yahoo as chief operating officer for a total compensation package valued at $56 million. He’ll have wide oversight of Yahoo’s business categories: sales, operations, media, and business development.

Source: LinkedIn

Henrique De Castro

“Henrique is an incredibly accomplished and rigorous business leader, and I’m personally excited to have him join Yahoo!’s strong leadership team,” Marissa Mayer former Googler herself and chief executive of Yahoo said in a statement. “His operational experience in internet advertising and his proven success in structuring and scaling global organizations make him the perfect fit for Yahoo! as we propel the business to its next phase of growth.”

De Castro’s just-previous role at Google was VP of Google’s worldwide Partner Business Solutions group, although his LinkedIn profile says that he is still “Google President Global Media, Mobile & Platforms.” Prior to that, he worked at Dell in sales and business development and McKinsey, the consulting company.

According to the announcement, he has more than 20 years in strategic and operational experience, including “structuring and scaling multi-billion-dollar global businesses.”

De Castro seems excited by the opportunity, saying that the site’s “high quality content, its renewed focus on outstanding user experience and its massive reach bring tremendous value to users, advertisers and partners.” He added that he “can’t wait to join Marissa and the team and get started.”

That is not shocking when you consider his compensation. According to Yahoo expert Kara Swisher at All Things D, De Castro is the “56 million dollar man.” He’ll be getting $36 million in stock options, plus $1 million to make up for Google options he’ll be forgoing, and $20 million in stock to replace his Google shares.

Yahoo has been searching for a new COO since August, and since the company is still down one CTO, perhaps Google better review the golden handcuffs on the rest of its senior staff.

Yahoo’s chief technical officer Ash Munshi has left the company, according to a Business Insider report.

Still-new CEO Marrissa Mayer, who just had a baby boy, may be cleaning house and clearing the decks at Yahoo in preparation for executing her just-unveiled strategy for turning the company around. Mayer has already hired a new chief marketing officer (reportedly while the old CMO was on vacation), and has been courting other talent, including Twitter VP Katie Stanton.

Source: LinkedIn

Ash Munshi, former Yahoo CTO

It’s also possible that Munshi, who is also the founder and CEO of a real estate startup Terabitz, decided that now was a good time to step away from Yahoo and focus on his own ventures. He joined the company only about a year ago, after previously working at Level 5 Networks and MSC Software.

I called Terabitz and spoke to a staff member, who simply said, “I’m not going to discuss that with you.”

A Yahoo spokesperson, however, disputed that Munshi has recently left:

“I can confirm that he was no longer with Yahoo! before Marissa joined.”

That would mean that Munshi has not updated his LinkedIn profile for about three months, which seems at least somewhat unlikely for a well-connected (over 500 LinkedIn connections) professional.

Mayer’s new strategy for Yahoo is big on personalization, mobile, and acquisitions. And, of course, a much more Google-oriented focus on products.

Munshi, obviously, won’t be a part of that.

VentureBeat has reached out to both Yahoo and Munshi for comment and will update this story as we hear back.

Image credit: Lyao / Shutterstock.com

But all those crazy hours take their toll, despite the perks, and that stress has to come out somewhere. Lucky for us, Googlers find an outlet in sarcastic humor, which BuzzFeed captured just a few days ago. Google’s intranet has a meme generator that employees put to good use, poking fun at both competitors and the company itself.

One highlights former Googler Marrisa Mayer, now chief executive of Yahoo, as “Accomplished tech leader … finally leading a non-profit.” (Mayer, by the way, just unveiled her plan to save Yahoo.)

Another shows a Facebook stock quote at $19.99, down four percent on the day, with a “Gonna party like it’s” title.

But the internal memesters are not above poking fun at their own company and keeping themselves honest. One shows Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster with a caption: “Please report all cookies for an immediate and thorough review!” Besides being funny, it’s a clear reference to Google’s privacy breaches with Safari and Internet Explorer.

Another, perhaps by a Googler unimpressed with the company’s own thin-client Chomebooks, shows a roomful of men doubled-over and laughing at the prospect of making interns use the machines full-time.

This is perhaps somewhat unfair, given that Chromebooks have recently been updated, and are now available at fairly low prices.

But perhaps the funniest — and the most cutting — is another that seems to be referring to Yahoo yet again, and the former web giant’s seeming inability to retain a chief executive for longer than a year or so.

That one is just ouch.

Check out the entire gallery at BuzzFeed.

Image credits: photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc, BuzzFeed

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Personalization, mobile, and acquisitions are the big themes in Marissa Mayer’s first announcement of her turnaround plan for Yahoo. That, and peanut butter.

Yahoo excels at personalization, Mayer told Yahooligans, according to Business Insider. And mobile is clearly where growth is happening lately. So neither of those are big surprises.

Turning back to acquisitions is a bit a of a surprise, but it’s very much in line with what Mayer told the board when she said that the $7 billion Yahoo realized in selling part of its Alibaba stake should stay in the company rather than be disbursed to shareholders. That $7 billion could bring in a lot of new acquisitions and new blood to Yahoo.

A least, if hot new startups can be persuaded they won’t be Flickr’d.

One danger to that strategy is the opposite of NIH (not invented here) syndrome. If Yahooligans start to feel that the only hot new projects and major company initiatives are centered around acquisitions and new hires, morale could take a blow.

But another part of Mayer’s strategy is reminiscent of former Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter Manifesto, in which he argued that Yahoo was spreading itself too thin over too many products. Similarly, Mayer told the troops she wanted to do more of what Yahoo is good at and less of what it’s not.

Mayer also unveiled four C’s of the new Yahoo: Culture, Company goals, Calibration, and Compensation. Yeah, that sounds hokey to us too.

At least, we can be happy she didn’t unveil a massive Yahoo reorganization, which, as many can attest, is a “wonderful method … for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”

But it is still very early days, and Mayer is not only unlikely to have unveiled her full strategy for returning Yahoo to its former status as a titan and leader in the tech industry, but also unlikely to have completely formulated her entire plan. It has, after all, been only two months. Most new CEOs get at least a year in the saddle before being expected to produce.

She still has plenty of time to fully form her plan.

photo credit: capn madd matt via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Marissa Mayer is all about the bennies in her first few weeks as Yahoo’s chief executive. From free food to new cooler, collaborative workspaces to … no more BlackBerrys?

Speaking as someone who has used almost every mobile platform, that’s a massive perk.

BlackBerry has been the official phone for Yahoo for years, a move that may have held the company back as much as CEO musical chairs, lack of executive focus, relinquishing of technological leadership, and total loss of company mission.

OK, that’s a bit of a joke, but the reality is that if you don’t know what a superlative modern mobile experience is, how can you deliver it? And there’s nothing that succeeds better in creating resentment than forcing employees to use tools that suck.

So Mayer has apparently told staffers that Yahoo employees can officially switch to the iPhone at company expense. Or, for those who prefer, Android devices.

It may seem to be part of a Google-fication of Yahoo that includes weekly all-hands-on-deck meetings, a new Q&A tool for helping to determine key corporate issues, and more. But it’s about something far more important than making Yahoo like Google.

One of Yahoo’s biggest problems is morale. Self-esteem. A belief that the company is a great company, that it can do amazing things, and that Yahooligans rock. Without this belief, a job is just a job. And worse, with the opposite belief, it’s pure drudgery and mental anguish.

Most of Mayer’s early moves may appear cosmetic, but they’re focused on making Yahoo believe in itself again.

Smart move.

photo credit: dhammza via photo pin cc

In May of this year, Yahoo agreed to sell half of its stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba for about $7 billion. At the time, Yahoo chief financial officer Tim Morse planned to return the cash to shareholders — a feel-good quick hit, perhaps, but hardly something that would revive the company.

But new CEO Marissa Mayer, who is already bringing a new product focus to the company, may have different plans.

In an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Business Insider noticed today, Yahoo states that it is reevaluating those plans as Mayer restructures the company and looks for acquisitions.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

Here are the relevant excerpts from the filing, “New Chief Executive Officer and Review of Business Strategy:”

Ms. Mayer is engaging in a review of the Company’s business strategy to enhance long-term shareholder value.

As part of that review, Ms. Mayer intends to review with the Board of Directors, among other things, the Company’s growth and acquisition strategy, the restructuring plan we began implementing in the second quarter of 2012, and the Company’s cash position and planned capital allocation strategy.

This review process may lead to a reevaluation of, or changes to, our current plans, including our restructuring plan, our share repurchase program, and our previously announced plans for returning to shareholders substantially all of the after tax cash proceeds of the initial share repurchase under the Share Repurchase and Preference Share Sale Agreement we entered into on May 20, 2012 with Alibaba Group Holding Limited.

Judiciously spent, $7 billion might be the ticket to help the once-proud Internet giant regain some of its former glory. That may only be seven Instagrams, but there are plenty of other startups available for significantly less money. Superangel Dave McClure has already suggested buying properties focusing on fashion, shopping, and women.

And while Pinterest might be a little pricy — it was already valued at $1.5 billion in May of this year, and traffic continues to grow — TheFancy has recently been in the acquisition rumor mill.

The only problem?

Yahoo is not great at creating lasting value from acquisitions. Talk to Flickr or Delicious. Or Broadcast.com.

One thing I will say: If anyone can figure it out, Mayer can.

Image credit: Gl0ck/ShutterStock

Yahoos have questions. And apparently three weeks into the job, newly minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has the answers.

To facilitate the question and answer process, Mayer employed a new electronic, Google-inspired Q&A tool at the company’s all-hands meeting on Friday, according to information gleaned by Kara Swisher at All Things D.

The tool, built by Yahoo engineers, is said to be modeled after Google Moderator and allows staffers to pose questions and put forth suggestions or ideas in a communal fashion. Submissions are voted up and down, with the questions getting the most up votes becoming discussion topics for Mayer to address with staff at company all-hands meetings, now called “Friday FYI.”

The system seems to be in place already and, just like free food at Yahoo’s eateries, is helping to build company morale. In Friday’s all-hands meeting, Mayer even fielded a question about her thoughts on the current executive team, reported Swisher. The woman-at-the-top apparently soft-balled her response and said that she was “pleasantly surprised” by top executives, but added that management would have to meet quarterly, publicized goals.

Sure, Mayer may be making the Google way the Yahoo way, as evidenced by the free food policy, the question-and-answer tool, and a strategic poach, but you know how the saying goes. If it ain’t broke ….

Yahoo declined to comment on this story.

Photo credit: Bart Heird/Flickr

Espiritu seems happy about the move, if we can take her most recent tweet seriously:

Someone please pinch me. Just to make sure I'm currently not in a state of dream. #overthemoon

—
Anne Espiritu (@Anne_Espiritu) July 29, 2012

Espiritu has not yet updated any of her social media accounts. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ still show her as employed by Google, where she has worked since 2005 on projects including “proactive consumer media outreach for Google’s new social platform, Google+.”

Source: LinkedIn

Anne Espiritu

Espiritu also worked with Google Maps and various local initiatives for Google, which probably accounts for at least part of the Mayer connection. Mayer was most recently VP for maps, local, and location services at Google.

The obvious question: Does Yahoo really need help in the PR department?

OK, that was a stupid question.

Let me re-phrase: Does Yahoo need help getting its message out more than it needs help actually creating something cool? That’s perhaps a better question.

But it’s one that Mayer will have some time — and more than one hire — to answer.

Image credit: Eric Broder Van Dyke / Shutterstock.com