The latest board shakeup comes on the heels of founder Jerry Yang?s resignation from the board and ex-PayPal/eBay executive Scott Thompson?s hiring as CEO in January. On Twitter, Dealbook?s Evelyn Rusli reported that a source, pointing to Thompson and Webb?s shared history at eBay, called Yahoo?s overhaul ?a soft eBay takeover.?

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The latest board shakeup comes on the heels of founder Jerry Yang?s resignation from the board and ex-PayPal/eBay executive Scott Thompson?s hiring as CEO in January. On Twitter, Dealbook?s Evelyn Rusli reported that a source, pointing to Thompson and Webb?s shared history at eBay, called Yahoo?s overhaul ?a soft eBay takeover.?

Wired Top Stories

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang

Yahoo on Tuesday announced that co-founder Jerry Yang has resigned from Yahoo’s board of directors and all his other positions with the company. The resignation is effective today.

Jerry Yang co-founded Yahoo back in 1995 along with David Filo. Since then, Yang has been very active with the company, serving for a short time as CEO and otherwise maintaining a spot on the board of directors and the cheeky title of “Chief Yahoo.”

It’s been a tumultuous time in Yahoo’s top ranks in recent months: In September, Carol Bartz was abruptly ousted from the CEO spot, and Yahoo was without a chief executive for nearly four months as M&A rumors swirled around the company. Former eBay executive Scott Thompson took the company’s helm in early January, but many industry watchers say he has a tough road ahead to get Yahoo back on track as competition in the tech and new media spaces is tougher than ever.

For some, Yang’s departure may come as a bit of a surprise, as his loyalty to Yahoo has seemed unwavering throughout all the drama — just a few months ago, he was even rumored to be in talks to lead a deal to take the company private. But this also means that now Yahoo can be fully prepared to make a clean start as it works to reestablish itself as an industry leader. Either way, it’s official: Jerry Yang is now on the list of tech founders who have left the companies they helped start.

According to Yahoo’s press release, Yang’s resignation letter to Yahoo board chairman Roy Bostock reads:

“My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user YodelAnecdotal

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Those diminutive Raspberry Pi computers are finally set to launch later this month — if you absolutely can’t wait to get your grubby paws on one, however, good news: you can pick one up early at auction, if you’re willing to pay a little extra. The foundation behind the ultra-budget educational computers is giving buyers a head start, listing beta boards up on eBay. At present, the top spot belongs to beta board number 10, which is currently cruising at around £2,100.00, with about two days left at auction. If you’re lucky, however, the low-end number five, which is currently priced at around £620, shouldn’t increase too much in the next four days or so. And look on the bright side, all the money is going to charity here, so you can’t feel too bad about yourself. Right?

Beta Raspberry Pi computers fetching exorbitant sums (for charity) on eBay originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Everywhere I go in Silicon Valley, people are talking about social media and big data, but rarely do I hear real-world success stories about social media data in a business-to-business context. We all know about the innovations of the consumer Web over the past ten years, including the amazing experiences that companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo and others have created by crunching massive amounts of consumer data for personalization. But how are companies in other industries leveraging the big data that’s erupting from social media services?

Social media presents an opportunity to make customer service organizations more responsive and proactive. It gives product development organizations an immediate feedback loop regarding product issues or key features that customers want. With 74 percent of consumers relying on social networks to guide purchase decisions (according to Gartner), marketers drool over the chance to target influencers in social media channels, and to gain a more holistic 360-degree view of each customer. Finally, analyzing social media conversations can be a powerful tool for corporate strategists to uncover market opportunities and other new types of competitive and business intelligence.

While much has been said about these opportunities, few have acknowledged that for this data to be most valuable, it must be integrated with relevant enterprise data from companies’ sales, financial, marketing, customer support, or e-commerce systems (just to name a few).  Say a company correlated social media data with e-commerce sales records, for example.  Looking at this information together, it could learn which social media conversations or reviews correlated most to increases in product sales, and start triggering marketing offers to further capitalize on these types of social media activities as they’re happening.

The roadblocks

Few companies have successfully integrated social media data into their business applications or analysis like this because it’s just not easy.  I’ve been in the integration space for nearly 20 years, and the roadblocks to an effective enterprise data ecosystem have never been greater. As I see it, the five most prominent hurdles to integrating social media data into your business are:

• Current systems are overwhelmed by constant streams
  The majority of applications in enterprises still run in batch mode, quite different from the real-time stream of the Twitter fire hose.  Even companies that are used to processing frequent batches of data aren’t necessarily prepared for the performance hit they might get to their corporate networks from merging those waves of information with rip tides of data from the ocean of social media.
• Social media data requires more structure
  Most IT organizations are great at managing structured, relational data in SQL or Oracle databases. However, even the largest consumer Web players are still mastering the semi-structured, non-relational data that exists in the wild Web.  Social media data may not have a well defined data model or schema that defines field names or field types, so it typically requires extra steps when being integrated with traditional relational data.
• New access methods can be difficult to grasp
  Many companies are using Web APIs for the first time as they reach outside the walls of their enterprise to grab social data.  This requires a whole different knowledge set than the expertise gained from work with on-premise databases – to be successful, all IT departments must have some understanding of Web standards like REST and HTTPS.
• Data quality is imperative
  With more diverse data ecosystems comes more work in cleansing and parsing “messy” data, which often exists in social media.  These efforts include data matching, de-duplication, standardization, enrichment, etc.  It’s more crucial than ever for companies to address data quality right at the earliest point of entry into the enterprise, and prevent bad data from polluting downstream business applications.
• Big data crunching is no easy task
  It’s no secret that all the social media sources out there generate massive volumes of data.  For companies to crunch this information, they need to know which data to pull in and which to ignore.  But even after filtering out the noise, we’re talking about data volumes that would have been unimaginable in the 90s.  Now businesses need the power of complex solutions like Hadoop – which are not easy for your average IT person to use.

How to get around those roadblocks

So now that I’ve laid out the roadblocks, let me just say that I still believe there’s a huge untapped potential in connecting social media data with enterprise applications, and it can be done – even if you’re an emerging company without big brain data scientists on staff.  Here are three simple steps I recommend for any business getting started with social media integration:

•  Prioritize the social media sites
  Consider the popular or up-and-coming social media sites, and think about where your customers and competitors are most likely to be hanging out – Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp?  Sit down with your marketing team to sort through the characteristics of social media influencers in your ecosystem of customers, partners, suppliers, etc., and compile a list of keywords or phrases you want to track across social media conversations.
•  Choose your connections
  Identify opportunities for connecting these data sources with other valuable information in your enterprise. Will social media activity be most valuable in the context of your CRM or marketing solutions, when it’s combined with your sales or Web analytics tools, within your business intelligence or master data management systems – or all of the above?
  
•  Pick a connection strategy
  Carefully weigh the pros and cons of various connection approaches. You could allocate IT resources to laboriously hand-code each connection in your IT portfolio, you could retrofit a traditional data integration or enterprise application integration tool to accommodate your changing integration needs, or you could evaluate new cloud-based connection technologies that were built with today’s data environment in mind.

Has your company taken any steps to integrate social media into your business operations and systems yet?  If so, how are you tackling this challenge, and do you feel you are achieving the full value of social media data in the enterprise?

An early investor in SnapLogic, Gaurav Dhillon joined as CEO in 2009 when he saw the tremendous potential for the company’s cloud and on-premise integration products, strategy, and unique business model. Gaurav has spearheaded the rapid growth of the company and manages its financing, products, strategic relationships, and operations.

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TripAdvisor, the leading hotel and travel reviews site, will be spun out from its parent Expedia this month, and shareholders are giddy. With 50 million reviews and counting, the site is shaking the travel industry to its core.

Underlying TripAdvisor’s success is a powerful long-term trend: ratings websites threaten to make many brands irrelevant.

Historically, brands were built on the assumption of limited information. As mass production made it possible to sell soap and soup nationwide, companies developed brands to represent quality and cultivate product loyalty. Brands were a natural fit for radio and TV advertising, and brands thrived with the proliferation of cable channels, which kept advertising costs down while offering unprecedented demographic targeting.

With the rise of user-generated content, however, brands have faced challenges. People are talking about brands on social media sites in ways that brand managers can’t control and often can’t even detect. Facebook and Twitter get most of the attention for brand disruption, but the biggest problems for brands are in search and e-commerce.

Take this Google search for Super 8 Motels, for example. On the front page, you’ll see ratings that hotel guests have written about particular Super 8s on TripAdvisor, Yahoo Travel and Yelp. Importantly, the reviews vary widely. When I checked, a New Mexico location was rated 4.5 stars, while a Los Angeles location was at 3.5 stars and one in British Columbia had only 2 stars. Such location-specific information undermines brands’ ability to affect consumers’ purchasing decisions with 30-second TV spots and gives TripAdvisor a powerful position.

TripAdvisor is ahead of other travel sites thanks in part to their use of Facebook-connected recommendations, which help websites make sales by establishing instant trust with visitors. As a potential hotel guest, I am interested in the consensus among previous guests, but I am especially interested in what my friends have said. Reviews can be intensely personal — for example, here’s my TripAdvisor review of a beach resort in Mexico — and if you know the author, it makes a huge difference in how reliable you consider the review.

For the Super 8 brand, the end game could be scary: as TripAdvisor accumulates more and more trusted reviews, the best-performing Super 8s, all of which are independent franchises, may eventually realize that their business is suffering from their association with lesser motels. At that point, we might see a “brand run,” wherein the best locations leave the chain, lowering the brand’s value and ultimately leading to its collapse.

For brand managers, it’s going to get tougher before it gets easier, but our advice is simple:

• Recognize that you’ve lost “control” of your brand and can’t get it back — the Mad Men era is history and the micro-reputation era is upon us.
• Start working with your customer service department to find and fix the worst-reviewed locations or people in your company.
• Start building your own online recommendation and review content so that you have a say in the broader conversation.  Identify happy customers and ask them to review the specific location (or professional) that pleased them.  You can direct them to your own internal review site, or to an aggregator like TripAdvisor, but make sure you give them a direct link and emphasize that recommendations help the individual people that the customer interacted with.  At Stik.com, we’ve found that satisfied customers are happy to spend two minutes to help someone who did a good job, but are generally less motivated to help a faceless company.

For everyone else, sit back and enjoy the ride. The loss of some familiar brands is a small price to pay for more informed purchasing decisions and fewer unpleasant surprises.

Nathan Labenz is a co-founder of Stik.com, a startup that helps people do business with professionals that their friends recommend.

Image courtesy of Flickr user sushiesque.

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