• Queen Carl Aproxymately
    In a blog post in July, investor-pirate Carl Icahn dishes about how he was able to secure seats on Yahoo's board of directors for himself and two of his buddies. In the post, "How I Spent My Weekend" (and you thought yours was noticeably lacking sex appeal), Icahn wrote, "Unlike political elections, where change is often seen, it is unfortunately extremely difficult to take control of a company."
  • Tweakers
    All the little birdies sing ... spam, spam, spam. If only the creativity of spammers could be harnessed for good. The latest plague, Twitter spam (Twam? Spwitt?), shows no signs of abating. As marketers and brand managers mull how to listen in on consumer tweets about them, the truly scummy spammers, the affiliates and purveyors of drugs and bargains, prey on our vanity.
  • The E-mail Overnights
    E-mail customer database segments delivered in minutes, based on everything customers did for the past year up to midnight last night. Is this a dream? No, it's the pitch of iPost, a start-up with technology that analyzes data feeds from both the e-mail behavior stream and purchase data from sources that can include online and offline sales channels.
  • RoboCop
    Misplaced contextual ads are hilarious, right? Not when they're your ads. Microsoft researchers are developing technology that scans the words in online articles to detect positive or negative connotations related to contextual ads placed nearby.
  • Sporty Spice
    Gaining the rights to post "premium" content from the National Basketball Association, the Professional Golfers' Association, and the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (all managed by Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting) on Yahoo Sports wasn't easy. Now that it's a done deal, Yahoo Publishing Channel senior vice president, Todd Teresi, says life is good. Yahoo's agreement with Turner, which was announced in July, gives Yahoo access to exclusive interviews with athletes and live streams from games and events, rather than just sports scores and basic news.
  • Good Help is Hard to Find
    Interactive ad sales veteran Bill Jennings got tired of job sites that didn't meet his hiring needs. Sites like Monster are too broad, and industry sites like mediarecruiter.com, he says, aren't specific enough. Jennings called on Joe Szala, brand manager at branding and interactive agency Vigor, and together they developed a recruiting site specifically for interactive ad sales reps. Vigor designed and created adteams.com, with Jennings as advisor and investor.
  • Guerrillas in the Mist
    With credits that include writing for and appearing on Comedy Central's politically incorrect programs Crank Yankers and The Man Show and creating the even more politically incorrect Minoriteam, Adam de la Peña may not seem like an obvious choice to create branded entertainment. But Sierra Mist is betting that his irreverent sensibility will set just the right tone for its animated Web series, On the Bubble.
  • Going Out West
    New York interactive agency R/GA is sick and tired of losing talent to the San Francisco lifestyle, so it's opening an office in Frisco's South of Market neighborhood, right in the back yard of rival AKQA. Both shops handle Nike, which is just a short flight away.
  • Hold the Phone
    For all the things it was supposed to be, there was one thing the iPhone 3G was not (for a day, at least): operational. It was buggy and prone to crash, right out of the box. AT&T's supposedly higher-speed network failed to deliver, offering spotty coverage and "speed" that was anything but. Almost every first-day U.S. buyer suffered activation problems while using the overtaxed servers. But experts aren't worried for the Teflon brand.
  • 5 Questions for Ryan Magnussen
    If you happened to be on YouTube for any duration recently, you might have seen a spotlighted video called "Yoga 4 Dudes 6" on its home page. Its description queried YouTube visitors thusly: "You're a dude, right? You like stuff that's made for dudes like you, right? You're gonna love this all-new episode of Yoga 4 Dudes."
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