Google Shakes Up Management

Any book written since 2005 on VC startups or funded dot com ventures or even enterprise angel funded corporations with bricks and mortar realities behind a new Internet presence has a different story today.The next page has been turned for Google (Earth), with a juggle king, veteran Page again newly crowned at the top of the biggest new media empire since, well , Microsoft, Ebay or Apple. Sergey Brin will turn to other projects.

Larry Page, coming back from semiretirement at thirty seven, will take up the reins as Google Czar at the company he helped found in 2000. Just as Google and many other flexible flyers in the new Internet race a decade ago flashed ahead of the huge titan companies still trying to grasp what the Web could mean, it now will muster new (old) leadership when products are most at stake. Google’s online apps, email and evolving omnimedia in Internet life needs a courageous hand at the tiller.

As Silicon Valley has ebbed and flowed in the last decade and then gone back out with the tide, dynamics like those posed with respect to FaceBook in the Social Network and other dotcom stories have never touched the giant that is Google. Ebay, IBM, Microsoft, Apple Computers, Yahoo, and other online behemoths have settled into their respective territories. Google is generally regarded as valuable rather than on the cutting edge among anaysts.

But this was the year FaceBook roared, in 2010 and probably louder in 2011 as well. Google, whose footprint currently is stamped in SEO, Android and online apps, will cement a possible social networking presence online soon. They’ll have to, with so many age rank and indexing players getting into the game (Yahoo, Bing). And if Google sees which way the wind is blowing, it might want to get into the domain business. Before Facebook does.

Beckstrom to head ICANN

World internet domain name sultanate ICANN  has formally chosen IT security guru Rod Beckstrom as its new chief executive to replace the retiring Paul Twomey. Many analysts wonder what kind of regulation a security czar will bring.

Rod Beckstrom, previously US National Cybersecurity Centre director, immediately put the spotlight on the Internet’s role in troubled Iran. The selection of Mr Beckstrom, whose appointment was first reported in The Australian, was finalised in Sydney this week where Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) officials are meeting.

Beckstrom said his first goal would be to meet with the many working groups and stakeholder tribes within ICANN. He also said that he planned to take a closer look at ICANN’s organisational plan to see what was “on track and what wasn’t on track.”

ICANN’s chairman Peter Thrush said Mr Beckstrom has “the strong personal and technical background that ICANN needs as we enter a period of unprecedented growth and change for the internet”. But it is not clear how security overrides tribe concers, a international names and country codes have emerged as new hotbeds of auction heat in the domain world.