Consolidation comes to the UWB chip world as Staccato, down in San Diego, buys Artimi, up here in Mountain View.  Nobody says what they paid for Artimi in this "merger" but I'm guessing it was less than the $20 million they concurrently raised.  Interestingly, Artimi is being led by Andrew Vought, who is oddly enough going to be COO in the combined firm.  I say oddly because Andrew was brought in as CEO only 8 months ago.  He came in from the board, on which he'd been since 2004, to replace Colin Macnab, and to do a better job of raising the new funding with which to commercialize Artimi's products.  I guess not so much. And I'd love to hear Colin's take on this development.

On another note, I don't know what staffing plans look like but even with Mark Moore gone from Artimi a month ago, they've still got a VP Engineering and a CTO.  When you add these two to the existing three people at the top of the engineering organization at Staccato, that gives you five chiefs.  Good luck with that. 

I see from my daily GMSV reading that Jerry Yang is leaving the CEO role at Yahoo.  After saying yesterday that any big public company doing a CEO search was already behind the eight ball, I have to take note of this development.  Saying Yahoo has hit a few bumps is certainly not news so I don't feel bad for pointing to yet another sign of disarray.  Especially not as Jerry Yang taking the reins in the first place was also a sign of disarray when it happened. 

All Things Digital has a great list of possibilities for the top spot at Yahoo, wIth a perfect description of how internal candidate Sue Decker is being considered.

The current President of Yahoo is certainly being “considered” for the job, which is a polite term for not really being considered at all.

Who'd be best obviously depends on what you think Yahoo needs to do next.  Selling the company is not a complex job, but turning it around would require some real fire in the belly.  I'm not sure most of the people mentioned would have the hunger to complete the job.  And I have to say that AOL would be the last place I'd look unless you have a time machine in your pocket.  Also Microsoft is no TimeWarner. 

Symantec has annonuced that CEO John Thompson is stepping down and COO Enrique Salem will be stepping up.  This is how you do a CEO transition.  Salem has been in the company since 2004, plenty of time to both understand the workings and develop his own vision for it.  With the COO title he took in January, he's already getting into the driver's seat.  (Incedentally this is the only good use of the COO role.*)    If you are a big public company and you're doing a CEO serach, you have already screwed up somewhere.  Of course, sometimes companies do screw up and an outside CEO can be part of the solution, but it is never a good sign for a big public company.  The startup world is naturally different, without division to run or sizable pieces of the company in which to groom people, looking outside is far more profitable. 

Also congratulations to Enrique Salem for having his plans work out and taking the reins here.  He must have passed on the CEO slot at every single security startup to have been funded since 2004 in favor of keeping on at Symantec and now his patience pays off. 

* This parenthetical got too long so I moved most of it down here.   Absolutley no company should ever have a COO who is not going to be taking the CEO job within a year.  Transitioning to the top job is the only time to have a COO, or to take a COO title yourself.  If it is not for a transition, than either the CEO is not up to his or her job, or you're just practicing title inflation and confusing people.  Now if it is just title inflation, that could be good for your resume, but be careful; responsibility without authority is a recipe for a something you'd rather not have on that resume after all.

I see from VentureBeat that Cfares, here in Redwood City, has closed their A round and anounced a new CEO.  An interesting choince in Tom Kalinske, the man responsible for the rise of Barbie at Matel in the 80s, the rise and fall of Sega Genesis in America, and then more meteoric rises at Leapfrog and Knowledge Universe. 

The story at VentureBeat suggest that he's especially tasked with building the brand, and he's certainly been successful at that in the past.  I could note that the entire $7.6 million A-round they just closed is roughly a tenth of just the advertising budget at Leapfrog.  But I did read that they were just at $11 million in revenue when he came aboard there back in the day.  At any rate, good luck to them and I look forward to seeing how their model is transformed.  None of Tom's previous projects have ended up looking much like what they started as, but they have (aside from the divergence of opinions between him and the Sega Japan mothership) ended up looking good. 

Let me direct your attention to yesterday's PE Week Wire which is now online.  Dan Primack revisits the carried interest question to note that with a President Obama, the change in tax treatment of such income seems inevitable.  He concludes that is it about time. Obviously anybody whose income includes carried interest would like to keep as much of it as possible, but the case for treating it as Capital Gains has never made any logical sense.  If it went to the owner of the capital, then it would be a capital gain.  Because it comes not to the owner of the capital but to reward the labor of those who choose wisely where to invest the capital of others, it is a labor gain.  Maybe the resolution of the cognitive dissonance required to believe the illogical opposite will give people more energy to put into keeping that top bracket rate down.