According to Youssef Squali, an analyst at Jefferies Yahoo! could save about $1-$1.3 billion per year if they outsource their search infrastructure to Microsoft. Not only that, but if the search company makes a 50-50 revenue sharing deal to sell display ads on Microsoft’s websites, they could bring in an additional $600-$800 million per year.

All things considered, Yahoo!’s combined savings/revenue could be about $1.6-$2.1 billion per year if they partnered with Microsoft. Yahoo! itself makes about $5 billion.

[via BusinessInsider]

Kevin Krim is one of the latest executives to step down from Yahoo! He is leaving the search engine company to join Bloomberg where he will be responsible for the redesign of Bloomberg.com.

One Yahoo! employee claims that Krim was rising star and was going to get a chance at Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! News. But another employee says the exact opposite: Krim wasn’t a rising star and wasn’t any closer at running Yahoo! Finance.

Before working at Yahoo!, Krim worked for Noe Ventures LLC as a Principal, Livejournal.com as a General Manager, and LookSmart as Vice President.

[via AlleyInsider]

Satish Dharmaraj is the founder of corporate e-mail software company Zimbra.  Yahoo! acquired the company for $350 million in 2007.  With that kind of money it does not come to any surprise that Dharmaraj would join a VC firm.  Redpoint Ventures has announced that they have hired Dharmaraj as a partner of the company.

After many executives leave a company, they move on to a new venture or become an entrepreneur-in-residence at a VC firm, but Dharmaraj decided to become a direct employee.  Satish left Yahoo! this past January. Some other Yahoo! alumni executives that joined VC firms include David Goldberg, Jeff Weiner, and Andrew Braccia.  Weiner now is the President of LinkedIn.

Currently Zimbra has over 20 million paid users.  Comcast helped Zimbra’s user base grow tremendously.

Some of the companies that Redpoint invested in includes Scribd, SocialVibe, Adap.tv, Entertonement, and Oodle.

[via BoomTown]

Dan Rosensweig is the former COO of Yahoo! Inc. and former President of CNET.  Now Rosensweig is getting into gaming by joining Activision Blizzard Inc. to head up the Guitar Hero franchise.  Rosensweig quit Yahoo! in 2006 after working there for five years in product development and marketing.  Rosensweig left around the same time Terry Semel did.

Coincidentally Activision’s current CEO Bobby Kotick served on the Yahoo! board of directors up until last year.  When Rosensweig left Yahoo!, he worked at Quadrangle Group.  Quadrangle is a private equity firm based out of New York. Rosensweig was the Silicon Valley representation of the firm.

Rosensweig’s responsibilities at Activision will be to maintain the whole Guitar Hero franchise.  The franchise was put together by Activision’s Red Octane unit and Neversoft studios.  Guitar Hero has had three blockbuster games in the franchise, but some analysts believe that the growth for music games may be slowing down.  Rosenweig needs to make sure Guitar Hero does not become obsolete.

“With a platform and content that universally engages a wide range of audiences, Guitar Hero has incredible growth potential,” stated Rosensweig. “I look forward to continuing to develop Guitar Hero into an even more successful enterprise.”

[via LAT]

Last year Yahoo! paid about $79 million to outside financial advisors when they needed help with the Microsoft deal.  The advisors were also paid for “other strategic alternatives, including the Google agreement.”  As all of you know the Microsoft and Google deal both did not work in Yahoo!’s favor whatsoever.

Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers were the advisers at the time.  Lehman’s investment arm is now a part of Barclays capital Plc.  This was revealed in a report with the SEC.  About 5 separate lawsuits were made against Yahoo! last year that were related to Microsoft’s bid offer.

[via Reuters]

Say what? Yesterday I published an article about how the Yahoo! CFO believes that the search engine company is still open to a search deal with Microsoft and today he is no longer CFO.  As a matter of fact, he is no longer part of Yahoo!  Blake Jorgensen was CFO of Yahoo! since May 2007.

Jorgensen spoke very highly of Yahoo! at yesterday’s Goldman Sachs event.  He spoke about how Bartz is taking a very decisive approach with the company.

“Maybe he said something he shouldn’t have said at the conference. Maybe Bartz didn’t care for what he said about her. Maybe this is all part of her big reorganization plan, which was supposed to be announced this week. Maybe he just got another sweet job offer after calling it a day at the conference yesterday. The filing didn’t have those sort of details,” wrote Sam Diaz of ZDNet.

On Saturday, I wrote about how Yahoo! may have a major executive shuffle according to a memo that Bartz sent out.  “Get well-rested, because next week’s a biggie,” stated Bartz in the memo.  Some analysts believe that it was foolish to have Blake speak at the event because it led investors to believe that the CFO has big plans in helping the company get back on its feet.

What are your thoughts about Blake?  Do you think it was okay for him to speak at an event the day before he quit?

John Linwood quit Yahoo! last year.  He was Senior VP of International Engineering for about 5 years.  Before that he was with the MSN team at Microsoft for 10 years.  Looks like all that technology experience paid off because he was offered a position at BBC as the Chief Technology Officer.  Linwood will be joining on April 1.

Linwood will be responsible for maintaining the company’s technical infrastructure.  The CTO position was created recently as a direct result of a restructuring of the future media and technology department made by Director Erik Huggers.

“As the BBC moves into the digital age, more of our content is being produced and distributed using digital platforms, placing a greater emphasis on software engineering,” stated Huggers. “With 28 years’ experience as a software executive, John’s appointment adds critical expertise to our proud broadcast engineering heritage.”

Another result of the restructuring last year was Anthony Rose becoming controller of vision and online media.  Richard Titus took the controller position of audio, music, and mobile.

At an investors conference, Yahoo! CFO said today that the search engine company is not opposed to a search deal.  BI spotted him making this statement on Bloomberg today.  “The deal would have to maximize the unit’s value, Jorgensen said during a presentation today at an investor conference,” stated Jorgensen.

The talks about a search deal with Microsoft reignited when Steve Ballmer stated yesterday that Microsoft was still interested in a deal, but the new Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz ignored discussion requests.  I think that the companies should move on and go their separate ways.  Each company has their own strategy and business plan, combining them will not take away a lot of Google’s market share for search.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer indicated that he is interested in working with Yahoo! in a search deal when talking to analysts today.  Ballmer had a hard time working with Jerry Yang, who kept demanding more money from Microsoft to be acquired.  But now he’ll have an even harder time working out a deal with new CEO Carol Bartz.  Bartz said even at one point that she did not join Yahoo! to have it be sold.

Ballmer said he was willing to engage in a discussion with Yahoo! again, but he has been “rebuffed and ignored” by Bartz according to a CNBC reporter.  Yahoo! is currently running without an M&A executive since Gerald Horkan departed.  Horkan spent most of last year working on the failed bid for Microsoft to buy out the search engine company.  Horkan left several weeks ago and has not yet been replaced.

Bartz joined Yahoo! last month.

[via CNET]

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) is currently on their third CEO in two years.  Her name is Carol Bartz and she has loads of experience with a CAD company, but little experience with a digital media company.  Bartz may announce a major executive reorganization next week.

Kara Swisher of AllThingsD reported that Bartz sent out a memo to employees saying to “Get well-rested, because next week’s a biggie.”  Yahoo! is currently under pressure for turning down a $44 billion offer from Microsoft, a failed partnership with Google, and is rumored to take some sort of action with AOL.

The reorganization is expected to revolve around the COO, CTO, and the a new chief marketing officer all report to Bartz.  AllThingsD also believes that Bartz may abandon a recent restructuring that splits Yahoo! into four operating regions.  One executive would oversee the U.S. and another executive would handle all international regions.

The poaching continues!  Microsoft Corporation has just hired Larry Heck from Yahoo!  Heck was a VP of Search & Advertising Sciences at Yahoo! Labs.  Now Heck will be reporting to Satya Nadella, SVP of the online services division at Microsoft.

Before Yahoo!, Heck received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and worked at Stanford’s Research Institute.  Heck also was VP of R&D at Nuance Communications.  “We look forward to welcoming him to the team,” wrote Microsoft in a statement.  Other executives that Microsoft recently poached from Yahoo! recently include Qi Lu, Sean Suchter, and Scot Moore.

Yahoo! was sued by Nuance after Heck quit.  Nuance claimed that Heck poached a dozen workers from their company to join Yahoo!  It’ll be interesting to see if any of those workers leave Yahoo! for Microsoft now.

[via Bloomberg]

Lynda Clarizio will be stepping down as the head of AOL’s Platform-A advertising unit and will be replace by Greg Coleman, an advertising executive from Yahoo!  Last week Scott Moore left Yahoo! and took a similar job at Microsoft.  Jeff Dossett of Microsoft left the position open for Moore when he stepped down from Yahoo!

Clarizio was running Advertising.com in Baltimore.  Clarizio wasn’t the type of sales person that they were looking for in terms of making advertising deals.  AOL is having a hard time making the advertising revenue that they were succeeding with in the past.

Coleman was friends with AOL CEO Randy Falco for quite some time.  The hiring was rumored to be requiring the approval of new Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes due to competitive agreements.  Coleman worked at Yahoo! for seven years.

Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has decided to shut down Publisher Network RSS ads recently.  The Publisher Network RSS program allowed a select group of publishers to place relevant ads in their RSS feeds.  Below is the full e-mail that Yahoo! sent to those publishers.

Yahoo! is closing its Ads in RSS effective February 2, 2009. The beta program, which enabled publishers to place contextually relevant ads on their own site, was available to a targeted group of small online publishers. We have ended this beta program to focus on other more broadly used ad products for our publishing partners such as Sponsored Search and Content Match.

[via SAI]

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) plans to be discontinuing their Briefcase service.  Briefcase is a Yahoo! service allows people to store files online.  Yahoo! Briefcase will be shut down on March 30.  Yahoo! told users to retrieve or delete their documents before shutting down the service.  Yahoo! Briefcase offered users 30MB of free online storage.  The service was launched about 10 years ago.  The service “usage has been significantly declining over the years, as users outgrew the need for Yahoo Briefcase and turned to offerings with much more storage and enhanced sharing capabilities.”

The news of Yahoo! Briefcase shutting down this service arrives on the same day that Google was revealed to be working on GDrive, a file storage service.  Microsoft SkyDrive offers 25GB of free storage online too.  Other services that Yahoo! shut down recently includes Mash, Content Match in Europe, and their unlimited music service.

Digg cut about 10% of their workforce last week and announced that they wanted to expand upon their sales team in order to lean towards profitability.  This is why Digg has hired Tom Shin as their new head of sales.  Shin comes from Yahoo! where he was one of the top salesman in the Northwest region.  Shin’s job will be to manage the relationship with Microsoft and find leads for direct advertising.

While Shin was at Yahoo! he helped Yahoo! Mail grow from $20 million in revenue to $300 during the 7 years that he was Director of Product Marketing for the division.

I believe that with Shin on board, Digg will be able to achieve profitability based on Shin’s track record.  Given Digg has 35 million users and many are tech-savvy, this gives Shin a lot to work with in terms of pitching advertising campaigns to Fortune 500 companies.  Now hopefully we’ll stop seeing ads like these: