BoomTown is voting officially voting for the JaneDear Girls, after seeing the hot country duo’s effective use of Keenan Cahill, aka the weird little lip-sync dude on YouTube.
While the pair–Susie Brown and Danelle Leverett–been rocketing up the country charts with their self-titled debut album, they delivered a rap-style offering, called “Need Ya Vote,” using the odd Cahill’s talents.
Apparently, it’s not only in Google’s pond where Facebook fishes for talent–the social networking giant has recruited Microsoft’s global advertising head Carolyn Everson as one of its top sales execs.
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the hiring, after a query by BoomTown.
The move will surely cause some tensions with the software giant, which is both a prominent partner of and investor in Facebook, especially since Everson was only hired at Microsoft last June after a long search.
Although there have already been several big-deal books on Google already–including Ken Auletta’s “Googled,” which was bought by Hollywood for a movie–a new pair is about to debut in coming months.
One is penned by prominent Silicon Valley journalist Steven Levy, who had a lot of access to the Google and its denizens, and the other is what appears to be an insiderish tell-all by a former employee.
BoomTown is still cracking up over this video, another in the faux television talk show series on Funny or Die called “Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis.”
His genius of an unlikely pairing this outing: Reality star Tila Tequila and Jennifer Aniston.
Posted at 12:15 PM PT 
Here is a video of a segment I did on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” yesterday morning–in the wee hours in San Francisco, hence the bags under my eyes–about last week’s $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post by AOL.
“Someone has to be the Condé Nast of the Internet,” I noted in answer to a question from host Howard Kurtz, since it has not been that famous magazine company which has become the big publishing dog online.
UberMedia, which just bought TweetDeck for $30 million in equity last week, has raised $17.5 million in a round led by Accel Partners.
The valuation for the Pasadena, Calif., start-up founded by well-known entrepreneur Bill Gross–which was actually struck some month ago–is $40 million.
Guess what movie BoomTown is being force-marched to this weekend by the Swisher boys?
Not just “Gnomeo & Juliet,” but the debut of the Justin Bieber movie hagiography “Never Say Never” in 3-D is much on the list I was presented without any ability to negotiate terms.
Now I’m a BeLieber.
Everyone knows Myspace is for sale and that its owner, News Corp. very much wants to unload the troubled social networking site. That said, it’s not negotiating a deal via press releases either.
Facebook is exploring permitting a tender offer up to $1 billion of its employee shares, after being approached by a number of big institutional investors about investing in the company, according to sources close to the situation.
The new approximate valuation? An eye-popping $60 billion, sources said, which is a significant increase to a recent $1.5 billion investment round led by Goldman Sachs that had pegged the social networking behemoth at a $50 billion valuation.
After he was appointed the new president of Microsoft’s important Server and Tools Division from his top engineering post at its come-from-behind Bing search unit, Satya Nadella now finds himself a leader of a business that also needs to keep catching up too.
In a wide-ranging interview with BoomTown yesterday, Nadella talked about both his four-year stint at Bing and how he looked forward the challenges of his new job.
Sonos–the maker of innovative wireless music systems that has been boosted by its Apple iPhone and iPad Controller app–is set to roll out one for Google’s Android mobile operating system.
The Sonos Controller for Android will officially introduce the app at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week, although the Santa Barbara, Calif., company is announcing it today.
While BoomTown usually does a video here, this photo that was just released of actress Meryl Streep in the guise of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is freaky.
As in freaky accurate.
Andreessen Horowitz has invested more than $80 million in Twitter via purchasing stock in secondary markets.
When called about it by BoomTown, a spokeswoman at the high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm confirmed the purchase.
The move is an interesting one, since Andreessen Horowitz was not part of the recent $200 million round on venture funding at the San Francisco microblogging company, led by Kleiner Perkins and which valued it at $3.75 billion.
Satya Nadella, the Microsoft exec who has been in charge of its Bing search effort, has been promoted to president of its Server and Tools Business.
He replaces Bob Muglia, a longtime exec who was ousted recently in CEO Steve Ballmer’s effort to shake things up at the company and stress the company’s technical expertise.
Posted at 6:15 AM PT
Memo to tech CEOs everywhere: Now that’s how to write an internal memo.
That would be the 1,300-word one that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop apparently penned for employees at the Finnish telecom giant, which inevitably leaked to the media.
In it, he uses the harsh but cogent metaphor of a burning oil platform to take a bracing opening shot at turning around Nokia.
... Is Google evil? It doesn’t matter. They’ve reached the point of corporate ambition and changing corporate culture that means they’re going to be perceived as if they are.”
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
