chair

Another high-level Yahoo employee has left the building: Valeh Vakili, director of U.S. sales operations, will join News Corp.'s MySpace as senior vice president of sales strategy and operations.

At Yahoo, Vakili was in charge of integrating the sales teams from acquired properties like Right Media into Yahoo's own; at MySpace she will be in charge of the social network's account management team. Vakili will remain based in New York. (MySpace's headquarters are in Los Angeles.)

Yahoo's "executive exodus" has been well-documented, with dwindling search share and a disastrous takeover bid from … Read more

Update: Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed Moskovitz's departure from the company, saying "Dustin has always had Facebook's best interests at heart and will always be someone I turn to for advice."

Dustin Moskowitz, one of Mark Zuckerberg's co-founders at Facebook and one of the young CEO's longtime confidants, has left the company according to Valleywag. He's leaving to found an undisclosed new company with Justin Rosenstein, another departing Facebook engineer, the blog said.

Moskowitz, who served as a head engineer at the social network, was one of Facebook's earliest … Read more

Buzznet, that upstart social-network-slash-pop-culture-content-hub based in Los Angeles, has made headlines for acquiring blog properties in a Rodeo Drive-worthy spree. But on Wednesday, the company announced the hire of an editor in chief--and it's straight from "old media."

The new head editor at Buzznet will be Jeff Leeds, who comes from a job as a music writer for The New York Times since 2004, and before that, the Los Angeles Times.

"It's hard not to be thrilled by the possibilities that arise when you blend the best practices of traditional reporting and criticism with the … Read more

Benjamin Ling, the former Googler who was hired by Facebook last year and sparked a barrage of blog speculation about Google employees moving on to the next cool company, may be going back to Mountain View. Earlier this week, Facebook confirmed that he was indeed leaving the company.

Valleywag reported on Thursday that Ling had been spotted at the Googleplex, and the Gossip Girl-ish nature of that post was backed up by a report from Kara Swisher that she'd heard he'd be returning to Google to work on YouTube. More specifically, he was re-hired to help monetize the … Read more

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, who left the Yahoo-acquired company in June, has a new gig. She posted on her blog on Wednesday that she'll be joining a stealthy New York-based start-up, Hunch, as "Chief Product Officer, board member, and resident Facebook app skeptic."

So what is Hunch? That's under the radar, but we're hearing from a well-placed source that it's a recommendation engine that uses "collective crowd intelligence." That doesn't sound too original, but our source hinted that the technology behind it is pretty top-notch. It's still under development, but … Read more

MySpace, the social network owned by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, announced Wednesday that it has hired five new members for its executive team--three senior vice presidents and two vice president--in fields ranging from engineering to customer service. They're coming from a mixed background of media and tech.

Manu Thapar, former vice president of engineering at Yahoo, has been hired as MySpace's senior vice president of engineering, a role that involves architecture and security management as well as the creation of an offshore development team. Another Yahoo veteran, Tish Whitcraft, has joined MySpace as senior vice president … Read more

As part of its annual "Wikimania" conference in Alexandria, Egypt, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation--parent company of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and a number of others--announced two new members to its board of trustees. The announcement went out on Friday and is effective immediately.

Taking over from current chair Florence Devouard will be Michael Snow, who has been on the board since February and has been an active member of the Wikipedia community since 2003. A lawyer based in Seattle, Wash., Snow created the "Wikipedia Signpost" community news resource in 2006.

Another Wikimedia Foundation board member has been announced, … Read more

As has been repeatedly rumored, Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen will be taking a seat on Facebook's board of directors. In a press release issued Monday afternoon, the veteran entrepreneur--co-founder of Netscape, former CTO of AOL, and now co-founder of social site Ning--was announced as the board's fourth member. He'll join Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as well as two of the company's early investors, Accel Partners' Jim Breyer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, now of the Founders Fund and Clarium Capital.

"Marc is an industry leader, and we're fortunate to have him join … Read more

Now here's a trend we can definitely get behind--or in front of, as the case may be: Robo-devices that follow you around. We thought the "Shadow Caddy" was a nice idea but just an isolated novelty when it surfaced last month, but maybe there's more to it after all.

The general idea has been expanded to, of all places, the library with the "Take a Seat Chair." This agreeable robo-concept would theoretically follow whomever activated it with a swipe of the library card across its sensors. It's the brainchild of Dutch designer Jelte … Read more