The long-running telenovela that has been MySpace over the years took yet another dramatic turn late today when News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller fired MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, whom he had hired only nine months ago to turn around the troubled social networking site, according to several sources. While News Corp. tried to paint the departure as more mutual in its official statement, it was most definitely not, as problems among top execs finally came to a head today. Read More »

Owen Van Natta, the prominent Internet executive brought into overhaul MySpace, has left after less than a year. News Corp., which owns the social network, has replaced its old CEO with his former lieutenants, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who have been named co-presidents. Read More »

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has long been an evangelist for tablet PCs, but he’s not impressed by Apple’s new variation on the device, the iPad. In an interview with BNET, Gate–who evidently finds the iPad neither magical nor revolutionary–diplomatically dismissed it. Read More »

Twitter has finally found a chief financial officer. Ali Rowghani, currently CFO and senior VP of strategic planning at Pixar Animation Studios, will bring his financial acumen to the microblogging service come March. Read More »

The surprise announcement that Google is going to experiment with installing ultra fast optical fiber-based broadband Internet access to up to 500,000 people has some very real potential economic consequences. Read More »

QOTD

“Yahoo was in search, is in search and will be in search in the future. That is a stake we have put in the ground.”

– Yahoo Vice President of Search Sashi Seth

Explaining Google’s “new approach” to China in a Jan. 12 blog post, chief legal officer David Drummond wrote, “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn.” A dramatic announcement given that the Chinese government’s policy requires the company to remove certain sensitive information from its search results in order to have a presence in the country. Yet nearly a month after it was made, Google continues to censor search results in China. What’s taking so long? Read More »

Iran’s telecommunications agency announced what it described as a permanent suspension of Google Inc.’s email services, saying a national email service for Iranian citizens would soon be rolled out. Read More »

Apple should generate impressive margins on the iPad tablet, according to a “virtual teardown” analysis of the cost to build the iPad by research firm iSuppli. Read More »

Apple’s iPad may not currently feature a camera, but it’s likely to acquire one in the future if a recruitment ad spotted by Mac Rumors is a good indicator. The ad seeks a software Q/A engineer for Apple’s iPad Media team. Among the necessary qualifications: “a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks.” Read More »

No need to watch current coverage of today’s weather. Last month’s coverage of Britain’s weather will suffice. Read More »

China Mobile Ltd. has begun pushing the development of a new high-speed fourth-generation wireless network, but many Chinese venture investors who would finance the development of applications for the platform are skeptical of its prospects. Read More »

BoomTown will be hoofing it elsewhere today, so I am missing Yahoo’s search event at its Sunnyvale campus this morning. Thankfully, I was at the Silicon Valley Internet giant earlier this week, getting a grilling from CEO Carol Bartz, and was able to talk to both Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Yahoo Labs and Search Strategy, and new hire Shashi Seth, the company’s SVP of Search Products. Both talked about what the items on today’s agenda–a six-months’ look back at Yahoo search innovations, its upcoming Olympics shortcut on the search page and a new mobile search app that uses a kind of Etch-A-Sketch drawing technology–using fingers, not keywords–to help users find stuff. Read More »

For the past few years, we’ve been hearing rumblings about Google leasing hundreds of thousands of square feet of carrier hotel space, buying up dark fiber, mulling the purchase of hundreds of millions of dollars in DWDM and Ethernet-based telecom equipment and helping to build out a trans-Pacific multi-terabit undersea cable. Now we know why. Google is developing its own 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home Internet service. Read More »

The New York Times said things got better–or, if you like, no worse–during the last quarter of 2009. But investors are disappointed that the publisher isn’t more optimistic about 2010, and they’re pushing shares down this morning. Let’s see if the paper’s executives can turn that around during their earnings call. Read More »