In This Update:
• Cisco CTO Being Considered for U.S. CTO Gig
• Can Apple Fill the Void?
• Twitter and the iPhone on the Scene of the US Airways Hudson River Crash
• Los Angeles Radio Station Goes Web-Only
• Sharpcast Raises $10 Million for Sync Service SugarSync
• Departing Yahoo President Has History of Missteps
• House Wants $6 Billion for Broadband Initiative
• Online Marketing-Intelligence Firm InsideView Raises $6.5 Million
• How Search Marketers are Reaching Local Customers on Facebook
• Sundance Opens Film Festival by Breaking the Mold
• TweetDeck Secures Angel Funding
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Cisco CTO Being Considered for U.S. CTO Gig
GIGAOM
Cisco Systems chief technology officer, Padmasree Warrior, is on a very short list of candidates being considered for the job of U.S. CTO. She is on a short list that also includes Vivek Kundra, CTO of the government in Washington, D.C., according to BusinessWeek. Warrior, who was CTO of Motorola before switching to Cisco, was a keynote speaker at our Mobilize 08 Conference. She lived in Chicago during her tenure at Motorola; a graduate of Indian Institute of Technology and Cornell University, she has spent her entire working life in technology. Kundra is also a well regarded, but has spent considerable time in the government.
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Can Apple Fill the Void?
NEW YORK TIMES
By all accounts, Mr. Jobs’s perfectionism, autocratic managerial style and disregard for conventional wisdom are at the heart of Apple’s remarkable streak of success. Since he returned to Apple in 1996, the company has set a new standard for design in personal computers, built a chain of sleek and always-crowded stores, jump-started the sale of digital music and turned the mobile phone into a fun, flexible computer. This is clearly the stuff of business legend. But now the company faces the real possibility that its inspirational leader may fade from the scene. Mr. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and chief executive, said on Wednesday that he was taking a leave of absence from Apple until June because his health issues – he is a survivor of pancreatic cancer – are “more complicated” than he first thought.
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Twitter and the iPhone on the Scene of the US Airways Hudson River Crash
VENTUREBEAT
A US Airways plane crashed into the Hudson River this afternoon shortly after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport. As of right now a rescue mission is underway, but early reports indicate that everyone on the plane might be okay. While the mainstream media was quick to jump on the story, so too, as is the case these days, was Twitter. Even more amazing though may be the picture that Janis Krums, a man on one of the first rescue boats on the scene took. The picture (right) was taken with his iPhone and sent via TwitPic, a third-party service which a lot of Twitter users use to send pictures to their contacts, to Twitter.
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Los Angeles Radio Station Goes Web-Only
PAIDCONTENT
The magazine and newspaper trend of going web-only has now come to radio, as Indie 103.1 , a Los Angeles FM station, is no longer on the dial. The five-year-old radio station stopped broadcasting over-the-air on Thursday, saying that it couldn’t continue surviving playing a mix of alternative and punk on terrestrial radio. It was either go web-only or “play the corporate game,” a statement on the station’s site says, pinning the problems radio faces on the way audiences are measured. Billboard says that’s an allusion to Arbitron’s new radio audience measurement system PPM, which based reports on listeners wearing monitors as opposed to listing radio usage in Arbitron diaries.
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Sharpcast Raises $10 Million for Sync Service SugarSync
VENTUREBEAT
Sharpcast, the maker of the SugarSync service for synchronizing your files across multiple devices, has raised a $10 million addition to its first round of funding. SugarSync is one of the simplest and most usable sync services. One selects the folders one wants synchronized, and SugarSync takes care of the rest. But the product doesn’t make as big a splash as expected, due in part to complaints about the pricing. (The San Mateo, Calif. company has cut its prices since then.)
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Departing Yahoo President Has History of Missteps
WALL STREET JOURNAL
On Monday night, outgoing Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Jerry Yang delivered some tough news to Yahoo President Susan Decker: The Yahoo board had picked someone else as its new CEO. On Tuesday, Ms. Decker announced her plans to resign from the company whose ranks she scaled rapidly during her nearly nine-year tenure. Her exit caps more than a year of stumbles, during which Ms. Decker — a well-regarded finance whiz and strategist — failed to execute her plans. Among other things, she planned multiple reorganizations and growth strategies to get Yahoo back on track, only to see few of the initiatives bear fruit. She also played a significant role in advising Yahoo’s board to reject Microsoft Corp.’s offer to acquire it last year, a move that incited Wall Street’s ire.
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House Wants $6 Billion for Broadband Initiative
WEBPRONEWS
The House Appropriations Committee wants to put $6 billion towards expanding broadband to rural areas of America. “For every dollar invested in broadband the economy sees a ten-fold return on that investment,” the committee said in a report. The plan is part of an $825 billion stimulus package to be voted on by Congress. Broadband advocates support the proposal but want measures in place to ensure transparency and accountability. “While $6 billion is not as much as we had hoped for, it is a substantial investment that represents an important public commitment to broadband,” said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press. “This money must be tied to a single agency that can uphold clear principles of public service and enforce concrete administrative accountability.”
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Online Marketing-Intelligence Firm InsideView Raises $6.5 Million
PAIDCONTENT
InsideView has raised $6.5 million worth of second-round financing. Emergence Capital Partners and Rembrandt Venture Partners led the round, bringing the total raised by the company to $14 million. The company will use the new funding for sales, marketing and product development.
Launched in 2005, SF-based InsideView’s products crawl social networks, news sites and online databases for relevant data about a target demo or company, and packages it so that users can jump on the leads. Its CRM offering is similar to Salesforce’s services, but scaled-down and more targeted to companies in the new media/technology space.
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How Search Marketers are Reaching Local Customers on Facebook
INSIDE FACEBOOK
As Facebook’s audience continues to grow, more marketing agencies that have traditionally focused on search are beginning to experiment with Facebook. Devin Davis, the Director of Marketing at G5 Search Marketing, a search agency that focuses primarily on the local market in the US discusses his experience on Facebook by comparing his experience on Facebook to SEM and shares examples of campaign tactics that have performed well on Facebook.
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Sundance Opens Film Festival by Breaking the Mold
CNET
Robert Redford’s annual opening night speech, which preceded the screening, was the perfect prelude to the Australian-made film. After assuring the packed auditorium that “even when times are bad (economically and politically)…it can be good for artists,” Redford assured the audience that Sundance would continue to be a showcase for work that’s diverse, unique, and often full of “surprise.” And when it came to Mary and Max, all three applied. Directed by Adam Elliot and produced by Melanie Coombs, Mary and Max is the tale of two unlikely pen pals: Mary, played by Toni Collette, is a lonely, chubby, 8-year-old girl living in the Melbourne suburbs, and Max, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a 44-year-old severely obese New Yorker with Asperger’s syndrome.
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TweetDeck Secures Angel Funding
TECHCRUNCH
TweetDeck , an increasingly popular tool for accessing the Twitter service from your desktop, is close to securing a round of angel funding to the tune of nearly $500,000 from seed funding house Betaworks , reports MediaMemo .TweetDeck is the work of one man, British programmer Iain Dodsworth , who says the TweetDeck Adobe AIR-powered and hence cross-platform desktop application has been downloaded 250,000 times since he launched it over last Summer, and that users are pushing 120,000 messages a day to their Twitter followers using the software. For BetaWorks, this would be the fourth Twitter-related seed investment, after Summize (acquired by Twitter in July 2008), TipJoy and StockTwits .
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