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Source:CenterNetworks -

VentureBeat is reporting that Salman Ullah, Google’s director of corporate development, has left the company to found a venture firm called Copper River Partners. This comes after the Kevin Scott, VP Engineering moved to AdMob earlier this month. VentureBeat also adds a few other departures:

There’s former Google Health head Adam Bosworth, who left to work on his own startup, the guys behind FriendFeed (who were the first to flirt with the VC dark side), and more big guns going to Facebook: all-star engineer Benjamin Ling recently joined finance/dealmaking wizard Gideon Yu.

In my post about Mr. Scott’s departure I noted, "As we see more Google/Yahoo/Microsoft employees heading for startups, it wouldn’t surprise me to see trade secret claims popping up over time. This was a major issue in my past roles and if trade secret clauses are not in the employment contracts at the big co’s, they soon will be."

One must also wonder about turnover rates creating growth and morale issues. Training new employees takes time and effort. Also as more executives leave for greener pastures (is that possible?!?), will that scare Wall St? Perhaps a topic for the boys at SAI to take a look at. I have seen mass departures during my agency days and morale dropped like a rock for those of us who remained questioning vision and the future of the company. Of course the public departures are few and far between as of now.

Source:CenterNetworks -

NY-based marketing technology company Linkstorm has made three key announcements today: new round of funding, a new board advisor and new NYC headquarters.

The series C funding round, which was oversubscribed by former and new investors, will allow Linkstorm to expand its staff and begin an aggressive push into advertising and related market segments targeting large brands and leading advertising agencies. Over 60 new investors participated and more than 25 previous investors re-upped in the current round. Investors include Esther Dyson and Jim Rutt.

Jeff Ballowe, who retired from Ziff-Davis in 1998 having served as president of its interactive media division and also serving as publisher of PC Magazine has become an Advisor to Linkstorm’s Board.

Lastly, the company is announcing their new NYC headquarters at 34 W. 22nd Street in the Flatiron section of Manhattan.

Linkstorm creates Portable Universal Profile’s which are basically "people popups" where you can learn more about a person through their popup - think Snap previews for people. Interesting note - the company name is "Linkstorm" but the site is "Linkstorms.com" - I wonder how many users and potential customers they lose because of this domain name issue.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 6:05 pm and is filed under advertising, venture capital, Quick News, NYC, nextNY, Linkstorm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.