In his latest companywide memo, copied below, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang wants to "make sure you all realize how essential you are to yahoo!s success." And by "you all" he means all but the 1,000 or so he planned to "reallocate" in the next few months. But maybe it would have been awkward to take those slotted for firing off the email list?
Jerry Yang is slowly but surely acquiring a clue: Rather than waiting for his "confidential" memos to leak onto the blogs, he's just filing them directly with the SEC, lack of capitalization and all. One wonders why he bothered to mark it "confidential" in the first place, though. One sure way to know it's authentic: "We want to emphasize that absolutely no decisions have been made," Yang writes. Yep, that's Yang all right.
Yahoo employees must be sick of hearing from Jerry Yang. Not two days after an all-hands meeting, Yang is asking employees to dial in to a conference call this morning at 9:30 a.m. to discuss the buyout offer from Microsoft. (Anyone care to supply us with the passcode, or report on what was said after the call? Drop us a line.) Update: The call was apparently for managers only — rank and file just got a Web video from Yang posted on Backyard, Yahoo's internal employee website.
Yahoo is launching a new video service called Yahoo Live. Initially available for Yahoo employees only, the service allows users to create their own "social broadcasting experience." Translation: Yahoo is the first major company to get into the lifecasting space currently occupied by startups like Ustream.tv and Justin.tv. Last week, we reported that Yahoo was looking to launch some splashy products to distract from its financial problems and layoff rumors. Yahoo Live seems to fit the bill. Catch the notice posted on Yahoo's intranet, Backyard, after the jump.
Before the holidays, AOL products chief Kevin Conroy urged employees to send a form letter to their friends, family members, and business contacts talking up AOL's new products. "Team, excitement about the work we are doing ... starts with each one of us," Conroy emailed. His topdown directive did not spark any bottom-up fervor, it seems, as he had to forward the message again on Friday, asking employees for examples of get-out-the-users emails they'd sent. The full memo:
Left in the wake of Barry Diller's acquisitive empire: a flotsam of discarded executives. Doug Lebda, IAC's president and COO since 2003, now joins them. According to an internal memo obtained by Valleywag, Lebda has been appointed CEO of IAC's mortgage and finance businesses, which are soon to be spun off. This can hardly be welcome news to Lebda, who's essentially returning to LendingTree, a business he founded in 1996 and sold to Diller in 2003. Here's the memo.
Remember WhatsOpen.com, the stealth search startup that piqued Google cofounder Sergey Brin's interest last month? Brin was so intrigued he told the founders to keep the company hush-hush. Now, however, a source has leaked screenshots of WhatsOpen's secret project. The company has a Web application which shows users nearby stores and their operating hours — "what's open." Click to viewBut I'm told by a source that WhatsOpen has also written the first wireless app for Google's new Android operating system. (You may know Android better as the software behind the still-mythical Googlephone.) Demo screenshots after the jump.
Philip Kaplan once ran the website InternalMemos.com, a compendium of leaked company missives. Now Valleywag has obtained one from AdBrite, the online-ad network Kaplan founded. AdBrite is now run by CEO Iggy Fanlo, who earns our Silicon Valley Tool award for railing at his employees about their work hours: "I continue to see too few folks here at 9 AM; and too few folks here at 6 PM." Let's leave aside the issue of whether Fanlo is violating California overtime laws; long hours are part of the startup culture. We just want to know if Fanlo has considered that employees might be avoiding the office in order to minimize contact with the company's erratic founder. The full memo, as Kaplan himself would have run it:
Our charts may show that aggregated traffic of Google's OpenSocial gang might not quite stack up to Facebook's, but that doesn't mean the open platform isn't huge news for the smaller players Google rounded up. Here are screen shots detailing how one such partner, LinkedIn, plans to incorporate apps developed for the new platform.
Last week, Josh Gerstein explained how the information control freaks at the National Security Agency conducted secret "seminars" for reporters—basically, little classes on how and when the government would like them to keep their mouths shut about top-secret and not-so-secret information. What's funny is that no one seems to remember the sessions, which went down at NSA headquarters between 2002 and 2004. Maureen Baginski, who was listed as a presenter at the seminars, said she had no recollection of being present. Why would she? She was only the FBI's "intelligence czar" back in 2004, before she left to work for SPARTA, an employee-owned defense contractor of utmost secret-government-like creepiness. Likewise? Not a single reporter has yet come forward to claim attendance.
Apparently immune to self-inflicted irony, BusinessWeek's online division has launched an Orwellian campaign to catch an internal leaker, while publishing a Halloween-themed article entitled "Scary Co-Workers." After all, "who hasn't indulged in the guilty pleasure of office scuttlebutt with a Gossip, or been marginally entertained by The Pessimist's conspiracy theories?" BW management has done neither, apparently. The personhunt has been launched to track down who leaked internal emails relating to speculation about the identity of a commenter ("Martin Smithers") who habitually and suspiciously praises the mag to the heavens. We hear that a "forensic audit" of emails has been ordered to figure out whence the leak sprung, and all IMs will now be surveilled. An even stranger rumor has boss Kathy Rebello hiring some sort of prose expert to compare the writing of employees versus that of the leaker, thus snaring the perpetrator in some kind of Da Vinci Code literary trap. Perhaps now is the time to report to the public square for a voluntary self-criticism session, before it becomes mandatory.
Wynn-Picasso leak update: After favorite suspect Jacob Bernstein came forward to say it was actually his poker- and punk-playing brother Max (pictured) that their mother Nora Ephron had told about Steve Wynn poking his Picasso, we added Max to the suspect poll. This cleverly spread out the Bernstein suspicion among the two brothers, leading to Barbara Walters taking the lead. Now Max writes in to defend himself as well, and he brings a new character into the scenario — Arianna Huffington:
Yesterday, we expressed curiosity as to who might have leaked the story about Vegas casino boss Steve Wynn damaging his $139 million Picasso right before selling it. Witness to the event Nora Ephron claimed it was "very clear" who talked to Page Six, but she did not ID the leaker by name. We have our suspicions, and we admit to throwing out another Ephron quote a little disingenuously — the one where she told one of her sons about it, but that it wasn't a violation of the secrecy pact because her son is "completely trustworthy."
This is a big story about a small moment, but it comes with a big price tag, and a small question about that big story. When Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn poked his elbow through Picasso's "Le R ve," he accidentally scotched a $139 million deal he'd just clinched to sell the painting to hedge funder Steven Cohen. Wynn, who has little to no peripheral vision due to an eye condition called retinitis pigmentosa, was gesturing while explaining the painting's history to his guests. After living through the bizarre experience, Wynn asked his guests not to tell anyone about the accident until he had time to deal with it himself. However, ten days later, the news was leaked to the New York Post. Nora Ephron, who was one of those present, wrote about it for the Huffington Post, feeling she was liberated from the vow of silence after the New Yorker also wrote about the incident. So who broke the silence first? Ephron says, "It was very clear who had given Page Six the item, and it wasn't me." Would you cross a billionaire who laughs like the photo above? Suspects after the jump.
The Journal's lovely, talented, and very pregnant Katie Rosman today reports on a hot new trend: Leak Chic. Rosman explains:
