Research In Motion, makers of BlackBerry, have announced that Thorsten Heins has been appointed the company’s new President and CEO. Heins replaces Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, who have served as co-chairs and co-CEOs for several years now. According to …

Yahoo’s search for a new CEO appears to be over this morning, as the company has announced that they have tapped PayPal president Scott Thompson for the job. The appointment, which was first rumored late yesterday, was confirmed this morning …

If you’re a new CEO and are looking to put your own stamp on a company upon starting, look to HP’s Leo Apotheker for inspiration. On Monday, Apotheker outlined his vision for the company and many came away impressed with …

This week, I was speaking with a client who wanted to be able to go on vacation with the knowledge that his business was still moving in the right direction. He wanted to be able to go away and be away without checking in (and stressing out) throughout the day. That conversation inspired this post.

Twitter is really trying to become the company that everyone has it pegged to be, or at least it seems that way by their hiring tactics as of late. While the media daily predicts the emergence / unfettered growth / imminent doom of the micro-blogging service daily (are you sick of it yet?) Twitter goes about its merry way showing signs of brilliance (rapid growth) and signs of “WTF?!” (outages).

As a culture, we love to try to determine how successful someone will be in a huge job based on the first 100 days. We do it regularly with the President of the US and now there is the same examination occurring with Tim Armstrong, the recently minted CEO of AOL. Much like our struggling economy AOL needs some real help and Armstrong was brought in to get the once high-flying Internet giant back among the ranks of the heavyweights.

"…simplifying and unifying our site is fundamental to our success going forward. MySpace should feel like one platform – not 15 sites loosely stitched together. We consider our diverse content offering a strength but too many logos and disorganized verticals makes the site difficult to navigate and creates confusion about our brand identity.

Well, looks like some folks over at LinkedIn are going to be busy updating their profiles. Reid Hoffman’s will now include Founder and CEO of LinkedIn followed by Chairman of the Board of LinkedIn followed by interim CEO of LinkedIn and now landing at Executive Chairman of LinkedIn. Good thing Reid has stuck around to fill in the gaps.

Forbes and Google have released a new report called The Rise of the Digital C-Suite: How Executives Locate and Filter Business Information.

It’s a fascinating read–mostly because it highlights the difference in internet habits of C-level executives,  based on their age. Why is this important? Because those executives that are under 40 will likely, in the next 5-10 years, be the ones taking over the CEO role.

How would you define "boatloads?"

One dictionary suggests "an indefinite quantity that is above the average in size or magnitude."

Well, thanks to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, we now have another definition of "boatloads"–its the precise amount of money it would take for her to sell Yahoo to Microsoft. Not a penny more, not a penny less!

As part of the shakeup that ousted co-founder Chris DeWolfe and ushered in former Project Playlist and Facebook’s Owen Van Natta as the new CEO, MySpace has expanded its management team with two key hires. Michael Jones who comes from Userplane and AOL has been named Chief Operating Officer and Jason Hirschhorn joins as Chief Product Officer after a stints at Sling Media and MTV Networks.

From the press release:

Despite once being Rupert Murdoch’s golden boy, it appears MySpace founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe has fallen out of favor. News Corp has announced that DeWolfe will be stepping down "in the near future" and will be left with a role on the board of MySpace China and perhaps some other adviser role.

New research from Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross and the Weber Shandwick team suggests company executives are well aware of the importance of a spotless reputation–and just how easily they can personally screw it up!

Let me walk you through my two reactions to learning about the compensation package for newly appointed Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz.

First:

What type of CEO do you think Yahoo needs? Calm and steady, or someone with more flair and willing to take risks?

According to the WSJ, Yahoo could be close to choosing a CEO that’s a safe bet, rather than a gamble.

Tom Curley said the news organization will come after anyone using its content without paying for that privilege.

For the first time in over a year, there’s a serious enough issue with Facebook that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was compelled to write on the company blog (normally handled by lesser underlings developers and directors).

Mark Zuckerberg’s foray into being the top executive at a company with a $15 billion valuation has been dismaying to Facebook users and advertisers.

A little while back I got the chance to speak with Robert Bergquist, CEO of widemile (specializing in multivariate testing and optimization – based in Seattle).

Jonathan Miller has reappeared on the Internet scene, this time as a member of the board of directors for online search ad management startup, Clickable.

Longjump recently won a DemoGod award so I wanted to see what caught Chris Shipley’s eye (she’s the one who organizes the excellent Demo Conference). Here Longjump’s CEO, Pankaj Malviya shows me Longjump, which is aimed at small businesses.