The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘chief-executive’

Steve Riggio has signed off as CEO of bookseller Barnes & Noble to become the company’s Vice Chairman. Replacing him at the helm will be William Lynch, who has heaps of experience in e-commerce under his belt and was previously President of B&N’s main website (bn.com).

The company also announced the promotion of COO Mitchell Klipper to chief executive of the company’s retail group, which encompasses the Barnes & Noble retail business and the Barnes & Noble College Booksellers business.

William Lynch joined Barnes & Noble in February 2009 as President of Barnes & Noble.com and has been responsible for the company’s core online business since then. Lynch launched the company’s digital commerce platform as well as the nook, Barnes & Nobles’ eBook Reader.

Prior to Barnes & Noble, Lynch was xecutive Vice President of Marketing and General Manager of HSN.com. From 2004 to 2008, he was CEO of IAC subsidiary Gifts.com, which he co-founded. From 2000 to 2004, he was VP and General Manager, E-Commerce, for Palm., where he oversaw all of the company’s Web properties, including Palm.com, the Palm Online Store, the Palm Software Connection and the Palm.Net wireless ISP.

Stealth startup Trada launched to the public today as an online marketplace allowing small and medium businesses and agencies to essentially crowdsource search engine optimization services. The startup has raised $2.2 million from the Foundry Group and angel investors Alan Warms, Carlos Cashman, Dan Murray, James Crouthamel, Stuart Larkins and Robert Wolfe.

As we all know, search advertising is necessary for businesses but SEO can be a time consuming, perplexing and tedious task. Many businesses overpay for common keywords or don’t use the right keywords to drive traffic. Trada comes into play here by crowdsourcing SEO experts to build and manage and advertiser or business’ paid search campaign across search engines. The service currently supports Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing.

Essentially, Trada ends up being a middleman for coordinating SEO service. Advertisers use Trada to enter information about a campaign and experts, who must be AdWords or SEMPO certified and pass Trada certification, use the site to find interesting campaigns and submit keywords, ad copy and bid prices across the search engines and to track and optimize campaigns across the ad networks. Trada coordinates the payments and takes a small cut of each transaction between advertisers and SEO experts.

The benefit for the SEO experts is that they don’t have to deal with the administrative and management issues with clients. Experts earn money when they generate clicks or other actions for less than the advertiser’s target price. Advertisers get 25 qualified experts to work on their campaigns and according to Trada, those businesses who participated in the private beta of the service are seeing successful results.

Trada entered private beta in January 2009 and currently has 70 advertisers and 280 experts to date. Founded by entrepreneur Niel Robertson, Trada was born after Robertson grew frustrated managing his own $8,000-a-month paid search campaign. Realizing that paid search campaigns are best left to experts, he thought an online marketplace for PPC experts and businesses would be the best way to maximize SEO. The startup faces competition from Kenshoo, Conductor and many others.

French media conglomerate Vivendi this morning reported financial results, posting a decline in full-year profit but beating estimates because the net loss was much narrower than expected. You can read more analysis of the media and entertainment giant’s performance elsewhere, but there was a particular passage in the press release regarding Vivendi’s music subsidiary, Universal Music Group, that caught my eye.

UMG, the world’s largest music company with artists like U2, Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Black Eyed Peas, Rihanna, Eminem, Lil Wayne under contract, as expected finds its revenue from physical product sales (CDs) in a seemingly unstoppable decline. Last year, the company’s revenues were €4,363 million, a 6.2% decrease compared to 2008.

Still, Universal Music Group’s digital sales grew 8.4% in 2009, which the company attributed to strong growth in online sales yet “tempered by softening demand for mobile products in the United States and Japan”.

UMG says it will “continue to encourage and support innovation”, citing Spotify’s iPhone application and MusicStation’s presence on the Android Market as examples. Universal is also a major shareholder of VEVO, a service launched in December, 2009 that quickly rose to become the number 1 music property in the United States.

We should note that UMG is also largely responsible for the demise of video sharing site Veoh, and has sued or threatened to sue companies like YouTube, MySpace, Bolt, Grouper and many more to date.

Universal Music Group recently appointed Lucian Grainge as Chief Executive Officer of the company, succeeding Doug Morris who remained as Chairman. When the promotion was announced, Jean-Bernard Levy, chairman of the Vivendi Management Board, said:

“I am delighted that Lucian Grainge has agreed to move to New York to take on the Chief Executive role. His track record speaks for itself, finding stars, growing revenues and building new business models. He has the right combination of experience and innovation to take UMG forward as the migration into the digital era accelerates.”

Do you think Universal Music Group can offset the decline in revenue from physical product sales with a continued increase in digital sales revenue in the foreseeable future?

Nokia and education company Pearson have formed a joint venture in China dubbed Beijing Mobiledu Technologies to grow MobilEdu, the wireless education service that the Finnish mobile giant launched in China back in 2007.

Mobiledu is a mobile service that essentially provides English-language learning materials and other educational content, from a variety of content providers, directly to mobile phones.

Customers can access the content through an application preloaded on new Nokia handsets, or by visiting the service’s mobile website and most other WAP portals in China.

According to Nokia, Mobiledu has attracted 20 million subscribers in China so far, with 1.5 million people actively using the service each month. According to the press release and by mouth of John Fallon, Chief Executive of Pearson’s International Education business, China is the world’s largest mobile phone market and the country with the largest number of people learning English.

UK-based Pearson owns the world’s largest education publishing business as well as the Financial Times and Penguin books. In april 2009, it acquired Wall Street English for $145 million in cash, giving it a leading position in China’s English-language teaching market.

The new joint venture company aims to deliver a wide range of services to meet the demand for digital education in China. It will begin operations immediately and will be managed by Angela Long, formerly head of Mobiledu at Nokia.

There’s something going on over at Baidu, the leading search engine provider in China. A mere ten days after the company’s chief operating officer Peng Ye bailed for ‘personal reasons’, Baidu this morning announced that chief technology officer Yinan Li is also calling it quits.

For personal reasons.

Li was with the company only for 14 months, and his departure was announced in a two-sentence statement earlier this morning. The man’s biography page on the Baidu website still shows up when you do a search, but his picture and bio have been wiped off the site.

Prior to joining Baidu in October 2008, Li served as chief telecommunications scientist and VP at telecom solutions provider Huawei Technologies.

Li joined Huawei from Harbour Networks, a developer of intelligent security systems, where he served as chief executive officer. His work at Harbour Networks was preceded by various positions at Huawei Technologies, including product manager, director of research and development and president of research and development where he led a staff of over 5,000.

It’s unclear what is going on at Baidu, but two senior managers resigning in ten days is undeniably a sign of trouble. It’s hard not to see this move in relation to the whole Google / China ordeal, but we should note Baidu’s COO Peng Ye quit the company before Google posted its bombshell blog post about the ‘Operation Aurora’ cyberattacks and its decision to stop censoring search results on its Chinese portal.

In the wake of Google’s threat to exit China, Baidu is in an excellent position to capture even more share in a fast-growing market it already dominates.

Also worth pointing out: Baidu was recently hacked by the ‘Iranian cyber army’, the same group that had previously targeted Twitter. There’s no telling if this event has anything to do with the management changes, but we’ve asked the company for more information and will update if and when we hear back.

Mad Catz isn’t actually known for being subtle, but this is a bit much even for them.

View post:
Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. is the ugliest mouse known to man

Digital video tech provider KIT digital spent about $21 million this year acquiring companies like The Feedroom (which previous investors had put over $60 million into) and Germany’s Nunet. The publicly listed company now says it will be “retiring” both brands next week after successful consolidation and integration of their IP and resources, and concentrate all marketing efforts on the KIT digital brand.

The company has also shared 2009 expectations and milestones, as well as its strategic objectives for next year.

KIT digital expects 2009 revenue of approximately $46 million with an operating EBITDA margin in excess of 10% for this year. According to Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, chairman and chief executive officer of KIT digital, all operational targets have been achieved, including reaching free cash flow-positive status and listing on the NASDAQ Global Market (KITD).

The company board and management team have defined four strategic priorities for 2010: complete the integration of Nunet and The FeedRoom, roll out its new VX2 platform on a global scale, work on improving its corporate marketing and visibility and expand in the BRIC markets (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). KIT digital suggests it might be making some strategic acquisitions in the regions for reaching the latter objective.

Formerly called Roo TV, KIT digital raised $20 million in 2008 and went public this year to little fanfare, although it is clearly positioned right in the center of a growth market (see this Seeking Alpha profile for more). The company has made 5 acquisitions to date (The Feedroom, Narrowstep, Visual Connection, Nunet, Morpheum and Kamera).

Frankly, it’s quietly turning into a very attractive acquisition target of its own.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

MySpace continues to flesh out its executive team after the shakeup earlier this year that saw the departure of much of the site’s old guard. Today the company has named Mark Rosenbaum as Chief Financial Officer — a position that didn’t previously exist at MySpace. Rosenbaum will be charged with running finance and accounting for the company, and will work under CEO Owen Van Natta.

Here’s the bio MySpace is sending out about Rosenbaum:

Prior to joining MySpace, Rosenbaum served as a consultant to MGM, advising on business intelligence and financial management system implementation. Prior to MGM, Rosenbaum held the Senior Vice President, Corporate Finance position at Gemstar-TV Guide (formerly a News Corporation Company), and served as CFO of the tvguide.com and TV Guide Mobile units. Previously, Rosenbaum had served as Chief Executive Officer at SmartJog S.A., a VC-backed French startup specializing in worldwide digital asset delivery. Prior to that, Rosenbaum served as Senior Vice President of International Free/Basic TV Distribution and U.S. Networks for Twentieth Century Fox, and has also held senior management and finance positions at the Walt Disney Company.

Other recent MySpace hires include Alex Maghen as CTO (he was formerly CTO of MySpace Music), former AOL and Tsavo exec Mike Macadaan as VP Product, and former Facebook Director Katie Geminder as SVP of User Experience and Design.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. According to Larry Ellison, it’s nonsense and water vapor.

The chief executive of Oracle last week at the Churchill Club sat down with former Motorola CEO Ed Zander for a fireside chat about the future of the company he co-founded, the pending acquisition of Sun and the implications thereof, and the state of the economy in general.

Most amusing however, was his ranting on cloud computing, captured on video by TechPulse360. Of course, we’ve heard his refreshingly critical take of the buzzword du jour before, but he continues to make it a valid point. (after the jump)

Mårten Gustaf Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, is Benchmark Capital’s newest Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR).

Mickos served as chief executive officer for the open source database company from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for $1 billion. Benchmark was a relatively early investor in the company; they participated in the $20 million Series B round together with Index Ventures back in 2003.

Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology and is also a board member of Mozilla Messaging and RightScale.

In the tweets announcing the move, Mickos says he likes Benchmark because they care about the needs of entrepreneurs and because they can ‘think big’. He will be joining Keith Krach, Mike Cassidy, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Dan Finnegan, Sarah Leary and Nirav Tolia as EIR at the Silicon Valley VC firm, which is behind a number of high-profile investments in web startups like Twitter, Gigya, Prosper, OpenTable, Mint.com and FriendFeed.

Anyone care to venture a guess as to when Mickos’ next Benchmark-backed startup will see the light of day?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0