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.

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.

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.IBM is suing Papermaster and Apple over the terms of his noncompete agreement. Apple and IBM hardly compete, which makes IBM's lawsuit a bit puzzling. California law is unfriendly, in general, to noncompete agreements; if anything comes of the lawsuit, it will likely be some kind of settlement. Here's why I think IBM is suing Apple and Papermaster: It just wants to get some idea of what Apple's up to.

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.

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 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.

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:Williams is the guy who sold Blogger to Google. Everyone wants to hear from him, not some software engineer he hired. Dorsey is now "chairman," which is Valleyspeak for "founder we don't know what to do with."

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)

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 sales strategy, based in New York, the heart of the ad business. The Valley's algorithmists scoff at MySpace's naive "hypertargeting" ad strategy, which lumps users into broad groups (sports fans, for example). And yet those very simple labels are very easy to explain to the very simple people who buy large amounts of advertising. True, MySpace has struggled to meet its revenue targets. But for anyone who believes that people still have a role in the buying and selling of ads, it's a better place to be than Yahoo.

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 replaced as chief executive by Jeff Karp, the SVP of marketing at video game publisher Electronic Arts. The company received $15 million more in funding in July for a total of $23.5 million. The new site has rolled out "channels" of entertainment and other programming, but one look at the trend on Compete shows you all you need to know about the startup's prospects even after the name change.

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 Valleywag publisher Gawker Media. What we'll find out in the next few weeks: Can Leeds get the same kind of well-placed sources to talk to him now that he doesn't have the Times backing him up? Here's the full press release:

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 capital to last Ning through a "nuclear winter." Proving his acumen at swindling investors if nothing else — and he does know how to keep employees overworked between stints at eager, young startups like Netscape and Ning and layoff-happy AOL. [San Jose Mercury News]

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, as its general counsel. The privacy advocates who plagued Facebook during its Beacon controversy might not be pleased, but Washington insider and top Facebook flack Elliot Schrage is giddy. "He has an extraordinary combination of private legal practice and public sector experience. So many of the legal issues we face touch on both of those arenas," Schrage told the Los Angeles Times. "Ted's arrival really demonstrates we're a little more grown-up." Ullyot's impressive resume:

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 Microsoft to Germany:

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 Dossett might be going because he's an old friend of fellow ex-Microsoft exec and new Yahoo exec Joanne Bradford. It's unclear what Dossett will do at Yahoo. At MSN, Dossett's job description labeled him as "the lead for audience, content and programming strategy and execution in the U.S," but apparently that was just his latest gig in a long line of online sales and strategy positions.Update: Dossett is not actually leaving Microsoft at all, Valleywag has now learned. That'd be crazy.

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 management were too confrontation-averse to actually fire him; instead, Hirsch was demoted twice and eventually moved to a recruiting job in HR, where he worked for the last two and a half years of his so-called career at Google, accourding to our source. Unqualified even for a sales job? Sounds like most venture capitalists we know.

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 business-blog mogul, running two other sites — Clusterstock and the Business Sheet. Waxler will edit the latter which, in a refreshing piece of honesty, explains, "We’re still in beta, which means we still suck."At present, the Business Sheet's headlines read like Rupert Murdoch had reassigned the editors of the New York Post to man the Wall Street Journal's copydesk. I trust Waxler, with whom I worked at a now-forgotten business magazine, will liven things up. Most recently, she attempted to bring a dash of celebrity to an overserious TheStreet.com. And besides working at VH1 on shows like Best Week Ever, she has comedy running in her veins: Joan Rivers is her aunt. If anyone can find the funny in a market meltdown, she can.

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 two were rarely apart when they attended the SXSW conference where Lacy infamously interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.) Lacy's known for her va-va-voom Diane Von Furstenberg wardrobe on Tech Ticker. But from the looks of some of her BusinessWeek videos, Holahan prefers a more informal look. Honestly, Catherine: Was a tank top the best look to go for, even when talking about as light a subject as Web widgets?

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 both Gilt Groupe and Silicon Alley Insider, the tech blog which reported the news, citing "a source familiar with the situation," which we think is journalismspeak for "Kevin Ryan." Synergy! [Silicon Alley Insider]