Steve Jobs announced today that he has been losing weight throughout the past year because of a hormone imbalance that has been robbing his body of proteins. He said sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis and the remedy is a relatively simple treatment.
The bloodletting in the c-suite started in 2007. It still hasn't stopped.Another year goes by and more chief executives get the ax — probably more than in any previous year. People shook their heads when Charles Prince III at Citigroup and Stanley O'Neal at Merrill Lynch got the boot in 2007. Now it look like they were lucky. They got out just in time.
ICICI Bank, India's second-largest lender, said on Friday Joint Managing Director Chanda Kochhar would succeed Chief Executive K.V. Kamath who retires in April 2009.
It hasn't exactly been a good year for Yahoo!. Earlier this year, the company rejected Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo! for $33 a share. This week, Yahoo! stock is selling for about $10 a share. Silicon Alley Insider estimates that the search company is out $2 billion dollars because of this misstep.
The Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban has been charged today by the SEC with insider trading. Apparently Mark Cuban dumped his shares in Mamma.com right after he confidentially learned about a stock offering from the CEO of Mamma.com. This was back in 2004.
The layoffs at Spot Runner are a lot worse than we expected. Instead of 50 to 75 people, Spot Runner is cutting much deeper—eliminating 115 jobs. Co-founder and CEO Nick Grouf characterizes this as “under 30 percent” of the company’s total headcount (which he declines to specify, but must be at least 384 people). The majority of these cuts, he tells me, will come from the company’s local-search advertising business, which came out of the acquisition of Weblistic back in March.
We have grown used to all-you-can-eat Internet. It wasn't always that way. Back when CompuServe (good grief, they're still around--who knew?) and The Source ruled connected computer communications we paid by the minute! The enlightenment came as competition ramped up. As a result the Internet economy thrived.
Two weeks after laying off 30 percent of his employees, Jaxtr CEO Konstantin Guericke finds himself out of a job. He is being replaced by vice president of engineering Bahman Koohestani (former CTO at Cyworld and Orbitz), who will be acting as “interim” CEO.
Jaxtr offers VoIP calls to both your regular and mobile phone. Its last round was a $10 million Series B in June. Investors include Lehman Brothers Venture Capital (yup, they are still around), August Capital, Mangrove, Mayfield, DFJ, and angels Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman. (Guericke was part of the founding team at LinkedIn).
Project Playlist sure is on our radar lately. The service, which lets users search for music on the web and build embeddable playlists, has 9.3 million unique monthly visitors and a whopping 822 million monthly page views according to Comscore.
But the company has been acting very strangely. First, the service has been down since at least Monday along with the message “We are doing some upgrades. We will be back online shortly.” Not a good sign for a company that’s generating roughly 30 million daily page views when its live.
In one fell swoop, David Yovanno has become the king of Internet widgets. Formerly chief operating officer of ValueClick, he will become the chief executive of the top widget company, Gigya, effective Tuesday.
