Today's Most popular News

Source:CenterNetworks

NY-based IAC is shaking up management across some of their divisions today. Let’s see if I can give you the nitty gritty on the changes.

• Jim Safka has been named CEO of Ask.com. He will also continue in his role as CEO of Primal Ventures, a new-venture entity that identifies seeds and incubates business opportunities for IAC.
• Jim Lanzone??is out??as CEO of Ask.com to serve as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Venture Capital firm, Redpoint Ventures.
• Scott Garell has been named President of Ask.com, where he will report to Mr. Safka noted above.
• John Park will replace Mr. Garell and is named President of IAC Consumer Applications and Portals, which includes Smiley Central, Webfetti, Zwinky, My Fun Cards, CursorMania, Popular Screensavers, Excite.com, iWon, and My Way. Can you imagine telling people you are the President of Zwinky?
• Peter Horan, CEO of IAC Media and Advertising since January 2007, will continue to oversee IAC Advertising Solutions as well as Evite, Pronto, IAC Mobile and Ask Sponsored Listings.

Most of the changes revolve around search engine Ask. Yesterday at the Citibank conference, IAC head Barry Diller said, "We certainly have not bitten an inch out of the hide of Google…I’ve been daunted by the progress of that."??

I said this as part of my review of the Wikia Search engine and have said it before regarding Mahalo. The switching costs for search engines are very high currently. Google is the Kleenex of search and so there’s really no reason to switch. And advertisements like the ones Ask ran earlier this year don’t help matters. Barry/Jim, I’ve got plenty of ideas on how to turn things around. Give me a call sometime. In addition, I wrote a lengthy piece in April with ways to fix Ask.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 6:32 pm and is filed under IAC, Quick News, Ask.com, NYC, nextNY. 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.