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Facebook hires new director of product from Google

AllThingsD

Longtime Googler Tom Stocky is Facebook's newest director of product, AllThingsD has learned.

Stocky posted about the move on his online profiles and Facebook confirmed he'd been hired.

Facebook and Google's hiring wars are vicious, but seem to always end well for the employees in question, with considerable signing or retention agreements.

Stocky, who has multiple degrees from MIT, had helped start Google's developer products team and had recently been Google director of product management for search, client, and infrastructure products based in Zurich. He joined Google in January 2005, according to his LinkedIn profile, and … Read more

HP shuffles top-ranking executives

Hewlett-Packard just announced some big changes to its executive team.

Ann Livermore is stepping down from running HP's Enterprise Business unit, and will join the company's board of directors, the company said in a statement. Her new seat will be added to the board and will not replace any current member's.

Until HP names a replacement, Livermore will serve as interim head of Enterprise Services.

HP also said it is eliminating the position of chief administrative officer. The man who currently holds that position, Pete Bocian, is leaving immediately, reportedly for a job in investment banking.

Chief … Read more

Shoot video like a pro

The hardware and HD capabilities behind the iPhone's video camera are impressive, but its built-in controls for shooting video are frustratingly primitive for more-experienced filmmakers, and the iPhone isn't always smart about handling factors like exposure and white balance. Filmic Pro gives your camera a new front-end for shooting higher-quality video, with professional tools for controlling exposure, focal point, and more.

Filmic Pro offers an interface that is clean and simple, and all of its controls run along the bottom of screen, making it perfect for keeping a steady thumb grip on your camera. On the left, you … Read more

Silent Film Director: Old-school clip manipulation

With all the hype over the quality of smartphone cameras, one app doesn't mind a little dust and scratches. Silent Film Director, from Macphun, gives people the ability to drop old-school effects on their video clips, add old-time music, and cut together a perfect silent film.

Formally Vintage Video Maker, this app has undergone a major upgrade for version 2.0, including a number of performance and stability upgrades, user interface enhancements, faster rendering, and new video effects.

Video clip effects include black and white, '20s movie, '60s home video, sepia, sepia vintage, and '70s home video. These are … Read more

HP called out for director selection improprieties

A week before Hewlett-Packard's annual meeting, a shareholder advisory firm is urging clients not to endorse the company's newly nominated board members.

International Shareholder Services sent a report to clients that accuses HP and its new CEO Leo Apotheker of not following the board's own guidelines for director appointments, in particular saying Apotheker should have had no role in the process. ISS says HP board members are to be nominated by independent directors only, which would rule out Apotheker.

Bloomberg got its hands on the report and published excerpts today. According to the report, ISS writes: "… Read more

Reporters' Roundtable: When tech CEOs leave

Today we are talking about the lines of succession at big and influential technology companies. There are two big news hooks for this show: First, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will be stepping out of his day-to-day role for a time for health reasons, leaving operation of the company with Tim Cook. Also, just yesterday Google announced that CEO Eric Schmidt is moving into an evangelist role and handing the CEO title over to co-founder Larry Page.

Reading the tea leaves of CEO moves and succession is like reading a good sports story. We've had other great tales in tech history: Bill Gates leaving Microsoft to his polar opposite Steve Ballmer; and the charismatic Carly Fiorina getting bounced out of HP to be replaced by the disciplined Mark Hurd in 2005, who was himself forced out last year. There are many other stories like this.

How much of a tech company rides on the CEO, and what can a company do to ensure it maintains a working strategy when the CEO leaves -- for whatever reason? Today we're going to talk about CEO succession, with two experts:

First up, Beverly Behan of Board Advisor LLC. She's a board fixer. She's worked with more than 100 boards of directors over the past decade on issues including CEO succession planning, board engagement, board and director evaluation, and other board topics. Bev is author of "Great Companies Deserve Great Boards," which will be out in June, and has a BusinessWeek column called, The Boardroom.

Also joining us is professor Charles Elson, the director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. Charles is a former law professor, a writer for both corporate and popular media, a frequently quoted expert in publications like The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and The Washington Post, and a board member himself, at the heath care company HealthSouth.

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Some of our discussion points… Read more

HP replaces four board members

Just a few months removed from the Mark Hurd scandal, Hewlett-Packard's board of directors is getting a makeover.

HP said today that it is replacing four board members and adding an additional seat. Out are Joel Hyatt, John Joyce, Robert Ryan, and Lucille Salhany.

In are newcomers Shumeet Banerji, CEO of Booz & Company; Gary Reiner, former CIO at GE; Patricia Russo, former CEO of Alcatel-Lucent; Dominique Senequier, CEO of AXA Private Equity; and Meg Whitman, former president and CEO of eBay and recent California gubernatorial candidate. That brings the HP board seat count to 13, up from 12. … Read more

Ex-Northrop Grumman CEO joins Apple board

More than a year since Google CEO Eric Schmidt's departure from Apple's board, the company has elected a replacement.

Going in a completely different direction than Schmidt's expertise in online search and advertising, Apple today announced the appointment of Ronald Sugar, former chairman and CEO of aerospace and defense giant Northrop Grumman. Sugar will head the board's Audit and Finance Committee.

CEO Steve Jobs emphasized Sugar's engineering background in a statement announcing the appointment.

"Ron is an engineer at heart, who then became a very successful business leader. We are very excited to welcome … Read more

NCSA director: GPU is future of supercomputing

The director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications has seen the future of supercomputing and it can be summed up in three letters: GPU.

Thom Dunning, who directs the NCSA and the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies at the famed supercomputing facilities on the campus of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says high-performance computing will begin to move toward graphics processing units or GPUs. Not coincidentally, this is exactly what China has done to achieve the world's fastest speeds with its "Tianhe-1A" supercomputer. That computer combines about 7,000 Nvidia GPUs with 14,000 Intel CPUs: the only hybrid CPU-GPU system in the world of that scale.

"What we're really seeing in the efforts in China as well as the ones we have in the U.S. is that GPUs are what the future will look like," said Dunning in a phone interview Thursday. "What we're seeing is the beginning of something that's going to be happening all over the world."

NCSA already has a small CPU-GPU hybrid system. "It's something we have been working on for a number of years. We have a CPU-GPU cluster for the NCSA academic community. Made up of Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. A 50 teraflop machine," he said. (Note that Oak Ridge National Laboratories is also installing a hybrid system now.)

But it's not going to be a snap to tap into the processing potential of GPUs. "Programming these machines to do [GPU] calculations is still a very substantial effort. There will be some applications that will be rewritten to use GPUs [but] a lot of times it will be only part of an application that will use it so you won't get nearly the power and computing advantage of running it all on the GPU," he said.

The catalyst to move programmers en masse toward GPUs will be when chips appear that combine both high-performance CPU and high-level GPU functions on the same piece of silicon, Dunning said. "If they start to solve some of these other problems like… Read more