“The reorganization we have announced today is part of a comprehensive plan to accelerate our growth,” said Daniel Starks, chairman, president, and CEO of St. Jude Medical. “We are focused on reducing costs, leveraging economies of scale, maintaining the highest level of quality, and funding our entire portfolio of new growth drivers.”

Though the reorganization includes layoffs, the company has also named three new executive officers. Donald Zurbay will serve as vice president of finance and CFO, Rachel Ellingson will serve as vice president of corporate relations, and Kathleen Chester will serve as nice president of global regulatory.

St. Jude Medical estimated that the reorganization will result in a reduction of its pre-tax expenses by around $50-$60 million, starting next year.

The two new product division units will be the Implantable Electronic Systems Division (IESD) and the Cardiovascular and Ablation Technologies Division (CATD). The IESD will combine the Cardiac Rhythm Management Division and the Neuromodulation Division. The CATD will be made up of the Atrial Fibrillation Division and the Cardiovascular Division.

While their BlackBerry line was once considered an enterprise communication standard, they are now struggling just to stay in business.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, that RIM has already been proactive in cutting their workforce in order to reduce costs and make way for a much need reorganization of operations.

The cuts are being made in the quality controls department, parts, and operations. According to inside sources, the layoffs have been taking place in batches of up to ten employees at a time. RIM also saw the resignation of many top executives in early April, just after they announced a less than stellar quarterly earnings report.

The latest job cuts come after reducing their workforce by over 2000 people just before the beginning of 2012. In March, they still employed over 16,000 people, but it is unclear where that number stands after this last round of layoffs.

Despite the challenges the company faces, they insist they are not abandoning the consumer market, and they plan to introduce a newly redesigned BlackBerry by the end of this year.

So, while the fate of BlackBerry and RIM hangs in the balance, they continue to struggle and lose employees left and right. Hopefully we’ll see something come out of these job cuts and RIM will emerge as a leaner, meaner business machine.

There’s definitely room for more competition on the smartphone and device marketplace, but the question is, does RIM have what it takes to deliver where others can’t? We’ll keep you updated as RIM struggles to reorganize and reduce their overhead.

Today they announced a reduced earnings forecast for the remainder of 2012, and they really don’t expect to turn a profit in 2013 either.

Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop has been struggling with plans to reorganize operations and regain some of the company’s market value. He also introduced plans to cut over 10,000 jobs in research and manufacturing. Along with the job cuts, sites in Finland, Germany and Canada will be closed. Also top executives Niklas Savander, Mary McDowell and Jerri DeVard will part ways with the company.

Nokia’s Chief Executive Stephen Elop commented on the cutbacks in a statement:

“These planned reductions are a difficult consequence of the intended actions we believe we must take to ensure Nokia’s long-term competitive strength,”

“We have very challenging business conditions and its very important that we move forward aggressively and urgently,”

“We need to ensure that we have the capital requirements in place to help us through our transition.”

“We must re-shape our operating model and ensure that we create a structure that can support our competitive ambitions,”

Take a look at Bloomberg’s coverage of the events at Nokia:

Currently, Nokia has a market value of $9.3 billion which has declined over 48% in the last twelve months. The current job cuts come in addition to 14,000 cuts they announced last year. All of the reductions should be complete by the end of 2013.

Naturally, the instability of the company leaves them open to a takeover by competitors. Hopefully they can regain a foothold in the market after the restructuring.

The move has been coming for awhile, but the building was under construction. In December, Twitter held a press meeting in their soon to be headquarters, and Business Insider captured some candid photos of the site. You can check it out by following these links to their page on Twitter’s future headquarters.

You might also recall that Twitter just underwent a huge restructuring coupled with a sizable increase in new hires. At the root of the changes seems to be an initiative to increase global reach and international advertising efforts. In fact, Twitter is still actively recruiting for multiple positions in London, Tokyo, and Dublin.

Since Twitter amped up its advertising strategy earlier this year, and added Promoted Tweets to its news stream, things have really taken off and they reached their 140 million active users milestone early last month.

While Facebook may be struggling in light of their recent public offering fiasco, Twitter is taking off like a rocket ship. But, it doesn’t sound like Twitter will be going public anytime soon. In fact, some even speculated Google might have a significant interest in acquiring them. We’ll see what happens.

According to Business Insider, Twitter is on a hiring spree which, so far, has been populated by a lot of ex-Google employees. Also, the company has just went through a massive reorganization that caused some to leave and others to be promoted. Lets look at some new hires first.

The first of those Google hires was Richard Alfonsi, a former senior sales executive. He will now serve as vice president of global online sales at Twitter. Another addition to the team is Don O’Leary, who left Google in May to join the ranks of Twitter.

Shailesh Rao, also of Google fame, left back in February to run the Asian-Pacific sales division for Twitter. So it appears Twitter is growing heavily populated with folks who used to work at Google. I wonder what the connection is there?

In any event, Twitter is still hiring, andif you believe you possess any of the skill sets they are looking for, you should apply (even if you don’t currently work for Google). I guess the catch is most of the jobs are in London, Dublin, and Tokyo. All fine places to live, I am sure. It might be worth relocating. There are over 40 positions still available.

As far as the reorganizations goes, the change in ranks didn’t sit well with some, and product chief Satya Patel decided to leave the company.

Here’s a look at what the reorganization looks like:

* Othman Laraki was promoted to VP of growth and international product.

* Michael Sippey, formerly a top executive at Say Media, runs consumer product.

* The company doesn’t have a head of ad product right now. Sippey and Laraki are splitting those responsibilities. Google seems like an obvious place for Twitter to hunt for a new ad-products chief, though.

* Twitter has added a lot of people to sales—now more than 200 of its 1,000-plus employees work on monetization. As we reported, a lot of that expansion is now happening in international sales.

All Things D has coverage of the event which features an in depth look at the entire Twitter reorganization. Follow these links to their article to learn more.

Heath Clarke, the CEO of Local.com, explained how it makes sense for one search engine to help another.  “Yahoo’s considerable base of high quality local advertisers complements Local.com’s highly relevant search results,” he said in a statement.  “The result is even more relevant content that helps visitors to Local.com and our network of local publishers find the businesses and services they are looking for.”

Yahoo’s Hilary Schneider covered the reverse outlook by adding, “As we continue to grow our advertising marketplace, we’re excited to renew our relationship with Local.com as one of our trusted partners within the Yahoo! Publisher Network.  Local.com’s relevant audience effectively extends our advertisers’ reach, providing them with increased local and vertical targeting opportunities across a wide range of categories.”

Schneider, in case you don’t remember, greatly benefited from last week’s reorganization at Yahoo.  Her new title is Executive Vice President of the Global Partnership Solutions Division – pretty snazzy, huh?  This type of situation is not new to Schneider, however; she gave a similar comment just last month when Philly.com joined Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium.

Indeed, it’s a bit of business as usual for both companies.  “This is too small to have any impact on Yahoo! shares,” wrote 24/7 Wall St.’s Jon C. Ogg, “but Local.Com shares are up 14% to $6.77 in pre-market trading.  As a reminder, this is one of the microcap web stocks that often sees large price swings on days when it has news.”

Let’s face it, even the news of Yahoo’s latest reorganization just isn’t that compelling. They won’t be real interesting until the next earnings announcement.

So instead of searching for search, let’s search for something a lot more interesting to those of us enjoying the last days of a sizzling hot August in the United States. Football, the gridiron variety, not the version where Chelsea goes out and buys all the good players.

We’ll give Yahoo a hat tip for building out a search shortcut for NFL players. Here’s a joke for you: what does Yahoo’s Greg Coleman have in common with a lot of NFL players this week? He’s just been cut, too.

Our friends at Resource Shelf must be ready for the NFL too. Their latest post cherry-picks some nice links from the NFL’s official site for online reading.

The link to the Record & Fact Book shows good organization of information for a league with a lot of data people want to find. As a Giants fan, I can remind myself that Tiki Barber isn’t going to add to any of his rushing records now that he’s retired.

The league’s History page also gives a lesson on providing timely information. A site’s content won’t feel out of date if something current is on a page. "This Date in NFL History" features a timely mention about the league; today they note Kentucky product Shaun Alexander celebrates his 30th birthday.

Just as in many things in life, there are little things to learn just about everywhere you go. Organization and timeliness of content provide value to the multi-billion dollar NFL empire. If the NFL thinks that much of their web efforts, web entrepreneurs in other fields should always pay such attention to the little things on their sites.

Yahoo Pulls On The Reorg Boots

Rumors of a Yahoo shakeup proved true, and much broader than just company president Sue Decker’s pal, Hilary Schneider, gaining at the expense of another executive’s job again. Greg Coleman had been the executive in charge of global sales, which included the search and display ad business.

Coleman was also the guy who gave Wenda Harris Millard a not-so-fond farewell in June 2007. “The industry has shifted and requires a different set of skills to take the business forward,” Coleman said of Millard at the time.

Now it’s Coleman who’s being shoved out the door, as more changes take place at Yahoo. Rafat Ali at PaidContent managed to score a copy of the internal Yahoo email about the shuffling of Yahoo’s sales deck.

Yahoo has created a new division called Global Partner Solutions (GPS). Schneider has been minted the new head of this group, which will develop international business while overseeing all of Yahoo’s US sales, marketing, and business development when it comes to advertising.

“Therefore, with the decision to create this new Global Partner Solutions unit under Hilary

Analyst’s reactions to the management shake-up have been mixed. They are somewhat cautious because of the internal distraction this will most likely cause at Yahoo no matter how the spin is applied. One analyst noted that even with the change the remaining management team does not have a solid enough technology background to turn the company around.

There are also worries about the reorganization because of the upcoming launch of Panama, Yahoo’s new platform. Some are also questioning Sue Decker’s new role in sales as she has a background in strategy and finance.

Others see Yahoo’s latest move as an honest acknowledgement of the company’s organizational and operational problems over the past year. The view seems to be that the reorganization will make the company more efficient in the long term.

There were some interesting comments about the changes at Yahoo on Techcrunch. One post from Christian said,” First and foremost Braun is out. That guy is the biggest turd and was just a dead weight sucking up everything in his sight and spitting out crap.” While another post from John K said,” It’s not gonna work. Yahoo needs Semel gone because he’s not technical enough to deal with the search monetization screwups.”

These latest changes at Yahoo may help the company to move in the right direction. After floundering for the past year the only possible direction they can go is up.

Tag: Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Bookmark WebProNews:

Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

"He's dead, Jim!"
-- Dr. McCoy, Star Trek, far too many episodes to list here.

It appeared for a while that Microsoft was in the process of doing what some have expected it to do since its corporate reorganization took place last month: shutting down MSN in favor of Windows Live.

Back in March, Microsoft said of the reorg that it was focused on lining up “Windows and MSN assets with Microsoft’s overall Live strategy.” During yesterday’s outage, MSN Search had this to say to visitors:

Or to paraphrase Edgar Allen Poe, ‘quoth the raven, 404′.

But the service returned after its hiatus. As to where it was during the downtime, no one knows. The MSN Search blog has not been updated since its Search Macros post of March 28th.

The King County Journal reported on an email received from a Microsoft spokesperson that the company was trying to figure out what had happened.

Other than an assortment of chuckles posted at Threadwatch (“They can’t figure out how to restart IIS correctly”; “shouldn’t that screen be blue?”), there hasn’t been much notice of the outage.

Since Windows Live was available during that period, users could still search there. It is strange that Microsoft didn’t place a link on the outage page to Live to try and keep some of that traffic from just punching out and heading to Google or Yahoo instead.

And then MSN Search returned, as quietly as it had departed. New features? None apparent. Back-end upgrade? Unknown.

One guess would be some kind of issue with the contest Microsoft has been running since February. Based on user searches, the contest can make a winner out of someone who queries certain keywords at MSN Search. Prizes range from gift cards to plasma HDTVs, so perhaps the temptation to win something led to an attempted compromise of the service by a third party.

—
Tag:

Add to | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web | PreFound.com

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.