executives

AOL, MTV alums join MySpace's revamped exec team

Two new members have been added to the fresh lineup of MySpace's executive ranks, following the appointment of CEO Owen Van Natta last week.

Jason Hirschhorn, most recently president of Sling Media Entertainment and before that MTV Networks' chief digital officer, joins MySpace as its chief product officer. He's the second prominent MTV veteran to take on a role at the News Corp.-owned MySpace in the past year, following MySpace Music president Courtney Holt.

Hirschhorn is firmly on the digital-media and entertainment side of things, something that will invariably come into play as MySpace (ideally) restructures itself … Read more

Apple: Shareholders did approve 'say on pay'

Apple said Monday that its shareholders have approved a so-called "say on pay" proposal, contrary to the results it had reported earlier.

The company informed the Securities and Exchange Commission that a filing last week "incorrectly reported the voting percentages for shareholder-submitted proposals because abstentions were counted as 'No' votes." At Apple's February 25 shareholders meeting, shareholders had seemingly rejected a "say on pay" resolution that would have let them weigh in on policies regarding executive pay and compensation.

After a recount, Apple told the SEC on Monday, it turned out that a … Read more

Van Natta as MySpace CEO: 'Effective immediately'

It's official: News Corp. has named former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta as MySpace's CEO, following reports on Thursday that an announcement was imminent. Van Natta's appointment is "effective immediately," a release from MySpace said.

Van Natta succeeds Chris DeWolfe, who stepped down from the post earlier this week, reportedly at the request of newly appointed News Corp. digital czar Jonathan Miller. DeWolfe will remain on the company's board.

"I'm thrilled to have the privilege to pilot MySpace in what is sure to be an incredibly exciting and rewarding next chapter for … Read more

Report: Van Natta to become MySpace CEO

We can expect an announcement very soon that Owen Van Natta will be replacing Chris DeWolfe as CEO of MySpace, All Things Digital reported on Thursday afternoon.

Considering that AllThingsD's Kara Swisher has a very good track record of knowing Van Natta's whereabouts, we're going to take this one as solid. The announcement could come as early as Friday, Swisher wrote, and though there's no word on timing, we're guessing that it'll either be after the market closes or possibly held off until Monday.

Van Natta rose to the tech world's upper ranks … Read more

Facebook CFO Gideon Yu is out

This post was updated several times as the news unfolded. The last update was at 1:01 p.m. PDT.

Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu is leaving the company, representatives from the social network confirmed Tuesday.

"Facebook confirms that CFO Gideon Yu will be leaving the company," a statement from Facebook read. "Gideon has played an important role in helping us achieve our financial success, building a strong finance team and establishing the core financial operations of our company. We are grateful to Gideon for his contributions to Facebook and what we are trying to accomplish.&… Read more

Intel chip flaw--but what of it?

Some researchers claim that Intel has a serious chip bug on its hands. But that all depends.

Security experts who are into the arcana of chip security may find "CPU cache poisoning" riveting and serious stuff. Others, however, may simply scratch their heads and move on.

But let's not move on too quickly. First, a quote from an abstract of the paper (PDF) that has some of the chip world abuzz. "In this paper we have described practical exploitation of the CPU cache poisoning...This is the third attack on SMM (system management mode) memory our … Read more

Three MySpace execs depart for new venture

Three executives from social network MySpace, including Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur, are departing the News Corp.-owned company to create a new venture.

The two execs leaving with Kapur are Jim Benedetto, senior vice president of engineering, and Steve Pearman, senior vice president of product strategy.

"We're incredibly excited to see what this team creates together and wish them the best of luck as they transition from helping run a company to building a new one," a statement from MySpace read. "Amit, Jim, and Steve depart as great friends of MySpace and of our executive … Read more

Google doles out $6.3 million in exec bonuses

For Google's executive management team, the $6.3 million in bonuses they received for last year's performance can buy a lot of Android phones.

Google, in a filing Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, noted its new chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, received a $1.24 million bonus for his five months of work on the new job. For Pichette, he did not have to wait a full 12 months to become a Google millionaire.

Outgoing CFO George Reyes, meanwhile, received a bonus of $675,000. Over the past year, Google's stock has outperformed the Nasdaq. … Read more

Misspellings tarnish app

Even though we encountered a glitch and came across several misspellings on the user interface, this encryption tool ultimately secured executable files. We just weren't persuaded that it was the best possible option.

Immediately after clicking EXE Password Lock's executable file to get started, we received an error message. Luckily, we were able to bypass it and move on to the main user interface. The designers should have used some kind of spellchecker, because we found several misspellings that would have (and should have) been caught. Still, the program was very easy to navigate, and involved simply browsing … Read more