Moshe Koyfman has left IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) to join Boston, Mass.-based Spark Capital. Koyfman will stay back in New York after transferring to Spark.

Koyfman was formerly on the Board for Connected Ventures, subsidiary of IAC. Connected Ventures, LLC is the parent company of CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, Big Shocker, Defunker, Vimeo, and TodaysBigThing. Koyfman was the COO of Connected Ventures.

Spark Capital is also an investor in 5min, 8D World, Buzzwire, Covestor, EQAL, KickApps, Me.dium, Veoh, and Twitter.

Related Link:
1. AlleyInsider

Photo Credit:
1. VentureBeat

Steve Berkowitz announced in Feb. 2008 that he plans to leave Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT).  Berkowitz was the SVP of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, responsible for marketing & sales for MSN.com and Windows Live.  Before Berkowitz worked at Microsoft, he was the former CEO of Ask.com.

According to CNET, Berkowitz has joined TheLadders.com, a job search engine with a focus on $100K salaries.

“Steve is an experienced and visionary leader whose proven record of success leading online services makes him an ideal person to join our board,” stated TheLadders.com CEO Marc Cenedella.

Before Berkowitz was the CEO of Ask.com, he was COO and President of IDG Books.  Berkowitz oversaw the expansion of the “Dummies” series books and IDG’s acquisition of CliffNotes, Frommer’s, Betty Crocker Cookbooks, and Lasser’s Tax Guides.  Berkowitz attended State University of New York in Albany.

Related Links:
1. Microsoft PressPass
2. CNET via Yahoo!

IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) has five units that make the company what it is today.  IAC CEO Barry Diller is now planning on taking these 5 separate units public, thus giving them independence from working as one entity.  The five units are IAC’s internet businesses, Ticketmaster, HSN.com, Tree.com, and Interval Leisure Group.

Starting tomorrow, these five units will start trading on a “when-issued” basis according to RedHerring.com.  The temporary symbols for the properties are IACIV, TKTMV, HSNIV, TREEV, IILGV.  The properties is expected to be fully public by August 21.  The V’s will be then dropped off from the stock ticker symbols.  For about 20 days after the spin-offs enter the market, IAC will trade as IACID.

The list of all 5 business units and their subsidiaries are available at: http://www.iac.com/businesses.html.

IAC/InterActiveCorp  (NASDAQ:IACI) has launched a How-To site that competes directly with Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) Knol, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Answers, and About.com.  The new site is called Life123.  The original name of the company was Life333.com.  Primary categories on Life123 include Beauty & Style, Celebrations, Food & Drink, Health & Wellness, Money, Home & Garden, Parenting & Family, Relationships, Technology, Travel & Leisure, and Work.

I can already tell you that the market for How-To sites is extremely saturated.  What makes Life123 distinguishable?  It’s just another alternative to other sites.  A lot of the content is provided by third party information providers, including other IAC subsidiaries.  IAC properties: Match.com, Shoebuy.com, LendingTree.com, RealEstate.com, ServiceMagic, Ask, Pronto and Reserve America are all providing content on Life 123 [paidContent].  5min.com is providing Life123 with How-TO videos. 

Life123 is launching today with 10,000 articles across 1,000 topics.  Life123 is currently looking for good writers.  The site is currently in Alpha mode.

High quality video streaming service and IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) subsidiary, Vimeo will no longer allow the uploading of video game samples.  Users will no longer will be able to do walk-throughs, game strategies, player vs. player battles, raids, fraps, etc.  Videos that already have this type of content on them will start being deleted on September 1st and new videos with this type of content will be removed immediately.

Why is Vimeo doing this?  First, It’s not creative expression.  And second, video game demos have a tendency to be longer in length, thus being the single biggest reason for transcode wait times.  If this is the case, then we should see an increase in speed for playing and uploading videos on Vimeo.

Will other video upload sites block this from happening?  I doubt it.  Learning how to beat certain parts of a video game is a huge market.  There are video game magazines published that solely teach gamers how to beat certain levels.  Vimeo is just having a hard time learning how to scale.  They need to take some lessons from YouTube.

Related Links:
Vimeo.com
Vimeo Blog

Ask.com, the search engine company that is owned by InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) has picked up a dictionary, literally. Ask.com bought the properties of Lexico Publishing Group. Lexico owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com. With these, Ask.com’s traffic will now be 145 million unique visitors per month.

Answers.com attempted to buy Lexico properties last year, but the deal did not work out. The deal between Lexico/Answers.com was roughly worth $100 million, but Ask.com left the price of this deal undisclosed. The second most search term on Ask.com was dictionary.

Ask will use their technology to advance functionality on Lexico’s sites. Ask.com will be powering the search on these sites as well. Dictionary is a top key search on Google, Yahoo!, and Live too.

In related news, Barry Diller, CEO at InterActiveCorp has resolved his differences with Liberty Media Corporation. Liberty Media owns 30% of IAC and they wanted to spin off some of IAC’s businesses as single-tier businesses.

IAC/InterActiveCorp owns excite, MyWay, iWon, excite, Evite, Bloglines, Zwinky, insiderpages, CollegeHumor, GarageGames, Vimeo, Busted Tees, gifts.com, Entertainment.com, BagsBuy.com, Shoebuy.com, LendingTree, Match.com, Admission.com, and Ticketmaster.

Information Source:
[1] Associated Press:  Ask.com acquires Dictionary.com, other references by Michael Liedtke

“Everyone at Ask is excited about our clear focus and the trajectory-changing results it will deliver.”
-Jim Safka, CEO of Ask

Ask.com, the fifth largest search engine has given up chasing after Google, the Goliath of search.  Ask is planning on changing its search engine to make it easier to find answers to questions revolving around homework, entertainment, health, etc.  This goes back to the days when Ask was known as Ask Jeeves.

The consequence of shifting to this new strategy is that they need less of a workforce to do it.  Ask is laying off 40 employees out of 500.  Will these laid off employees Twitter the process like former Yahoo! employees?  Maybe.

InterActiveCorp acquired Ask in March 2005.  Ask was valued at $1.85 billion at the time.  Ask has about 4.5% market share for online search.  Google has 58.5% according to the Associated Press.

Fortune 500 American media company, InterActiveCorp operates 60 brands, employs 20,000 employees, and has its fair share of interesting headlines.  All of IAC’s web sites attract 680 million visitors.  IAC is also the largest buyer of online advertising.  IAC’s 60 brands keeps the company’s dazzling, spectacle headquarters glowing:

[image source: IAC press release]

Yesterday, Liberty Media Holding Corp. International bought 14 million shares of IAC/InterActiveCorp from a single holder.  And then IAC bought 6 million shares of its own stock from that same single holder.  This brings Liberty Media’s ownership of IAC to 30%.

IAC gave their Internet property, Ask.com a major marketing overhaul.  Jakob Lodwick, co-founder of Vimeo, parted ways with IAC after a disagreement with the company’s management recently.  And today I read that IAC may be close to acquiring Flixster.

Flixster is a social network centered around movies.  According to TechCrunch, either the deal is done or is “very close.”  The deal is rumored to be potentially around $150-$200 million.  One of Flixster’s primary traffic drivers is its Facebook Application.  Flixster raised around $2 million from Lightspeed Ventures and other angel investors.  The social networking company is based in San Francisco, Calif.

Google’s YouTube is ready to ramp up for more and higher quality content. Now users are encouraged to upload more files, with higher resolutions, and longer in length. Each video can now be 10 minutes long and 1GB in size. Originally, each movie file allowed on YouTube was limited to only 100MB.

YouTube is also building a YouTube Uploader tool for Mac. The YouTube Uploader tool for Windows PCs can be downloaded from Multi-Video Upload site. After multiple videos are done uploading, they will be automatically added to your My Videos page.

What makes this new feature even more interesting is that although YouTube is a Google property, I believe that the video-sharing website seems to be giving us unlimited storage for content. Whereas Google gives us limited storage for GMail, Picasa, and other services. Maybe this is Google’s way of paying for YouTube server and lawsuit bills.

As pointed out by ReadWriteWeb, InterActivCorp (IAC) is also involved in the video sharing market. IAC’s Vimeo introduced HD video uploading last month. YouTube videos often times face too much video compression.

[Update by Mo Kakwan]
It should be noted that both Vimeo and this recent move by YouTube to support higher quality video are ahead of the curve. The requirements of having to play HD video is more memory and faster processors.  Be sure to check out the comments on this HD Video (http://vimeo.com/342968/) and you’ll notice a number of people experiencing choppy play. My machine is fairly old (xp 2700+ with 1 gig of ram) and is bottlenecked not by processor speed or memory but by my slow DSL line (What’s going on Slowskys?). It’s going to take a little bit before the mainstream can catch up with the early adopters. I look forward to seeing these advancements drive down the price of HD Cameras as well which are currently rather pricey.

Information Source:
[1] The YouTube Blog: Multi-Video Upload Arrives