Tech’s recent movers & shakers
March issue
AetherPal, the leading provider of connected device care products, has appointed Tammy Murphy as VP Enterprise Sales. Tammy joins from Good Technology where she ran enterprise sales and was a serial Presidents Club winner.
Apple hires former Viacom PR exec, Bernadette Simpao, for Apple TV content relations. Simpao was with Viacom for 10 years before jumping to AMC in 2014 and carrying the role of VP of corporate communications.
Blippar has hired the former regional vice president for Northern Europe at Yahoo, Glen Drury, as its new chief commercial officer as the visual search and augmented reality company repositions as a digital media platform. Drury will be responsible for driving Blippar’s repositioning and growing the monetisation of its visual search proposition for the EMEA market.
CBS’s 92-year-old media mogul Sumner M. Redstone, has resigned as executive chairman. The company’s board announced on Wednesday that it had appointed Leslie Moonves, the CBS chief executive, as his successor.
Citrix has appointed former Microsoft exec Kirill Tatarinov President and chief executive officer. Tatarinov spent over eight years as President, Executive Vice President, Corporate Vice President Microsoft Business Solutions Division, overseeing Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM and ERP businesses.
Google parent Alphabet Inc said Amit Singhal, the longtime chief of its Internet search business, will leave the company and be replaced by the head of the technology giant’s artificial intelligence business. John Giannandrea, currently a vice president of engineering, will replace Singhal, a 15-year Google veteran. Giannandrea led Google’s machine learning efforts, applying the technology to products such as image recognition for Google Photos search and the smart reply for Google Inbox.
Instagram hires Twitter’s former product head Kevin Weil. He departed Twitter in January and has since scored a job running product for Instagram. Weil was one of a handful of executives who left Twitter in January; others include engineering head Alex Roetter and also Katie Jacobs Stanton, who oversaw media. Jason Toff, general manager at Vine, announced that he was headed to Google’s virtual reality team. Twitter has been a revolving door for several years now, particularly on its product team. Weil had been at the company since 2009, but just oversaw the product team for about a year.
Mind Candy has appointed Ian Chambers as its new CEO, with immediate effect. Chambers, who previously held senior positions at EA, Ubisoft, IGN and the Game Group, is the company’s first CEO since founder Michael Acton-Smith stood down in July, 2014. Executive Divina Knowles took a leadership role as CFO and President in May, 2015, but also stood down in September.
Nike names Adam Sussman as its first chief digital officer. Sussman’s experience includes two years with Nike, as well as stints with EA Sports, Zynga, and the Walt Disney Company.
PayPal’s chief technology officer, James Barrese, resigns and his position will be taken over by two people. Sri Shivananda, PayPal’s vice president of global platform and infrastructure, will take over as chief technology officer, while William Ready, its global head of product and engineering, will head the payment services functions that Barrese currently oversees. In a statement, PayPal says Barrese decided to step down to take time off and will remain with the company for a few months to ease the transition between CTOs. Barrese joined PayPal in 2011 after a decade as eBay and was appointed its chief technology officer in 2012.
Qubit, the digital customer experience delivery platform for marketing and e-commerce professionals, has appointed Paul Rodwick to the position of VP Product. Paul joins from Oracle where he led product management for all business analytics, business intelligence technology and prebuilt applications.
Rant & Rave, a company specialising in SaaS based customer experience management solutions, appoints their new COO, Andrew Keen. Andrew has previously worked in Huddle, Mimecast and PowerOasis, where he has consistently supported VC backed growth companies in their ambitions to scale far beyond the UK.
Salesforce.com executive vice president Tod Nielsen, who oversees the Heroku and Force.com app-building platforms, is leaving the company at the end of March, he confirmed. His departure could be a sign that Salesforce is rethinking its strategy towards Heroku and Force.com
Secret Escapes, a members-only British travel company, selling discounted luxury hotel stays and trips through its website and mobile app, appoints Sean McDonald as a new CSO.
Sky appoints James Murdoch as a chairman, four years after he stepped down from the role. The pay-television giant, Europe’s biggest pay-TV operator by customer numbers, said it hired Mr. Murdoch to replace Nicholas Ferguson, who is stepping down at the end of April after four years in the role. It also appointed Martin Gilbert as deputy chairman. Mr. Murdoch is chief executive of 21st Century Fox, which holds a 39% stake in Sky and until June 2013 was part of the same company as The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Murdoch previously served as CEO of Sky between 2003 and 2007 and then served as its chairman until 2012. He has remained on the board as a nonexecutive director.
Slack, the well-funded collaboration software company, helmed by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, has just hired Foursquare’s Senior Vice President. Noah Weiss will now head a new Slack business group in New York focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning projects.
Telefónica, a company known as a global leader and innovator in both corporate and consumer digital communication, appoints of Oliver Harrison as CEO of their Digital Health Division. Dr Harrison is a C-level innovator with an exceptional track record and recognised expertise in mobile health and health data technologies.
Zaloni, a leading provider of Hadoop enterprise data lake management solutions, continues to expand its leadership team with the appointment of Scott Gidley as Vice President, Product Management.
