Embarrassingly, MySpace unveiled its plans for MySpace Music without a CEO in place. The store's set to open later this month, but who will mind it? The Los Angeles Times suggests the shortlist is down to two names: Owen Van Natta, Facebook's former COO (left), and Andy Schuon, a longtime Universal Music executive (right). TechCrunch says Van Natta is a "top contender." Insiders say MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe is wooing him even more aggressively than Paris Hilton.Van Natta is well qualified, and the job involves partnerships and business development, two areas where he's especially skilled. And he's long said he wants a CEO job at a consumer Internet company, but I'm skeptical he'll take the gig. He strikes me as too independent to answer to meddling MySpacers and hidebound music-industry executives. He also likes to be involved in the product, and it sounds like MySpace Music is mostly developed already. Schuon seems a more likely candidate. His main qualification: He previously ran Pressplay, an online music-industry joint venture. That's also the main strike against him, since Pressplay was a huge flop.

Google's the undisputed king of Silicon Valley — but it's been wooing New York ad agencies nonstop, trying to break into the traditional part of the business, with mixed success. It's almost cute how all of its online rivals are following it. Amazon.com has hired a Microsoft ad sales exec, Lisa Utzschneider, as SVP of national ad sales. What, you thought Amazon sold books, not ads? Exactly the problem Utzschneider's being asked to solve: Amazon has been trying to sell ads for a long time, but they remain a small fraction of the retailer's revenue. A Madison Avenue agency executive tells us her hire is just the latest part in a methodical campaign by Jeff Bezos & Co. to beef up of its New York ad sales staff over the last four months.At Microsoft, Utzschneider managed search sales. The Peace Corps veteran also did a lot of charity work — a description which seems to fit Amazon's advertising efforts at present. Amazon already has products to sell: Clickriver, a self-service sales system like Google's AdWords, and Amazon Product Ads, an ad network like Google's AdSense. It's also trying to sell more ads directly on Amazon.com and IMDB.com. "Amazon has a huge audience that is undermonetized," Greg Smith, COO of interactive agency NeoAtOgilvy, tells us. A second source says, "This move isn't surprising, based on those efforts, because they have a long way to go if they want to evolve into a media company." Memo to Utzschneider: Bring more than just candy.

After just over a year on the job, deeply unqualified top Yahoo ad-sales executive Dave Karnstedt is leaving the company — to "pursue other opportunities," specifically as an yes-man executive-in-waiting at Redpoint Ventures. Replacing him at Yahoo will be Joanne Bradford, who only quit her ad sales post at Microsoft to become an EVP at at Los Angeles-based ad network Spot Runner in March. Tellingly, she'd been commuting to the job from the Bay Area, and employees at Spot Runner tell us Bradford didn't spend much time in the office.Bradford will report to Yahoo EVP Hilary Schneider, according to Kara Swisher. During her short tenure at Spot Runner, the company abandoned its original plan to help small businesses buy customized TV ads and laid off 50 in the process. That tumultuous experience should help prepare Bradford for Yahoo, according to a tipster who tells us "most of [Karnstedt's] lieutenants will be leaving with him shortly," and adds: "Taking bets on the next layoff announcement? 4 days before Q3 earnings. Jerry steps down too."

Bob Dykes, the founder and chairman at ad targeting company NebuAd, has left his position as CEO and signed up as the new CFO at Verifone. NebuAd has raised the ire of privacy advocates by offering a service which monitors an individual's Web surfing habits by looking at the content of individual packets of data to better target advertising — a practice which is currently under congressional investigation. Verifone, which provides automated payment technology, recently let go of its old CFO, Barry Zwarenstein, after the publicly traded company wiped out $70 million in profits in restated financials. No rest for the wickedly wealthy, I guess. (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

It took Oracle two years, but they've finally hired a CFO to replace Greg Maffei, who left the company after less than a year on the job in 2005. Maffei himself replaced Harry You, who also lasted less than a year. Before You, Jeff Henley held the position for ten years. Oracle co-president Safra Catz handled CFO duties since 2005. A source told the Wall Street Journal nobody wanted the job because unlike at most company's, Oracle's CFO has to report to Larry Ellison's No. 2, Catz, instead of the CEO himself. Come on — anyone who passed up the job for that reason is a moron!Reporting to Ellison would mean having to spend evenings calculating the tax writeoffs on Larry's Love Helicopter and haggling with San Mateo County over the assessed value of his so-Japanese-it's-crazy Woodside estate. Catz may be imperious, but at least she's boring. And she pays well. Epstein will earn a $700,000 salary, though bonuses could push his compensation to $1.2 million.

AppleInsider spotted a job posting from Microsoft looking for a product manager. The gig: Bring to market a widget directory for Windows Mobile similar to the iTunes App Store for the iPhone, which Apple CEO Steve Jobs said earned $30 million in revenues during its first month in business.Microsoft called the store "Skymarket" in the now-removed job posting, an unfortunate name which reminds us of 2004 flop Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), and said the store will open sometime in 2009. There were few more details, mostly because it would be the new hire's responsibility to define "the product offering, pricing, business model and policies that will make the Windows Mobile marketplace 'the place to be' for developers wishing to distribute and monetize their Windows Mobile applications."

Operating-system monopolist Microsoft maintains a campus and a number of satellite offices here in the Valley, and competes voraciously with other local companies for talent from around the world. So what, exactly, do they pay foreign workers? One of the ways the company makes good on regulatory promises is by posting job listings internally. It's part of the government's PERM process to certify immigrants for H-1B and permanent-residency eligibility; companies must first show that they tried and failed to find local workers for the job. The listings provide a peek into the current going rate for different positions, from technical writer to program manager.

Movie download service Vudu, which seems to be having trouble convincing customers to first buy a $299 set-top box, is laying off 16 to 18 of the company's 100 employees, and has hired a new CFO, Chris Watts, according to PaidContent. Seems to be a clear case of trying to reduce the company's burn rate as the $21 million from venture investors begins to dry up. And it's another indication that the startup's desperate descent is accelerating.Months ago, the company slashed the price on its hardware. More recently, it began offering porn and shortly thereafter introduced a sale on 99 movie titles for only $0.99 each. All of which makes it sound more and more like Akimbo.(Photo by Juha-Matti Herrala)

How badly did Yahoo's departing SVP Todd Teresi want out of the company? AdAge reports the former head of Yahoo's ad-network business took an offer to become chief revenue officer for startup Web metrics firm Quantcast, which doesn't sell any product yet and faces entrenched competition from Nielsen, ComScore and Hitwise, among others. To hear it from Teresi, it doesn't sound like the company has any clear idea on what its eventual product will be."We're not going into the ad-network business, so to speak," Mr. Teresi told AdAge. "We look at how we enable the existing players to have a better digital-advertising opportunity." We're sure Teresi's telling family and friends that its the thrill and flexibility of startup life that prompted the move. And yes, probably startup life is better than working for the doomed to depart in disgrace Sue Decker these days. But we're still betting that when Teresi saw top management's new favorite exec former Right Media CEO Mike Walrath was moving to the Bay Area, Teresi went back and listened to a few old saved messages from a headhunter or two.

Last month, Alan Citron silently disappeared from TMZ.com, the gossip megasite he helped launch. He has suddenly reappeared at Buzznet, a music-blog startup that's dabbling in celebrity news. "It goes to my reputation of being quiet," he told me. I felt bad for Citron when, as the general manager of TMZ.com, he sat next to me on a panel on gossip at the South by Southwest conference in Austin this spring. Julia Allison, the notorious nobody with a nonstartup, stole the show, literally leaping from the audience onto the moderator's lap.It was utterly unfair: Citron had built TMZ.com, out of nowhere, into the Web's undisputed champ of 24/7 celebrity chatter, with some 10 million visitors a month. Allison had done exactly nothing, except for, unbelievably, further trivializing the very notion of fame. And yet Allison dominated the conversation. How was it that, in a newsroom full of gossips, no one thought to mention the departure of a top executive? Did he not make enough of an impression around the office? Citron's discretion is to his credit. But it's possible there's such a thing as being too quiet.

In retrospect, advising Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg was not Valleywag's finest moment. All we can say is she had us fooled, too — though not for very long.The reality, which took us too long to grasp: Sheryl Sandberg ran Google's customer service operation, the grunts who reviewed the text of AdWords ads for policy violations and fielded angry calls from Google advertisers with big enough budgets to be granted telephone support. Apocryphally, her boss at Google, Shona Brown, is said to have referred to Sandberg's operation as "a toilet." Sales reported elsewhere, as did the engineers who wrote the code for Google's money-minting ad machine. Hers was a thankless job, for sure, and one that needed doing; Brown's comment may have been unfair. But it was not an experience that qualified Sandberg to run much more than customer support — okay, perhaps HR, too — at Facebook. We're also hearing that Facebook's board, charmed by Sandberg's polished demeanor and wowed by her Valley connections, didn't do enough reference-checking at Google. If they had done a proper job, we're told, they would have turned up stories of Sandberg's mismanagement and deceptions — stories that would ring very true with Facebookers' experiences. So, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Sandberg took us in, too. But only a foolish consistency would have us still singing her praises. We've already gotten hints that Sandberg's work at Google was overrated, but our sense is there's much, much more out there. The tips line is open.

Carl Icahn's proxy battle is officially over, with Icahn adding former Nextel CEO John Chapple and former Universal Studios chairman and CEO Frank Biondi to his minority position on Yahoo's board according to an announcement from the company. "We are pleased to add people of Frank’s and John’s caliber to our board," chairman Roy Bostock said in a prepared statement. Chin up, Roy — at least you still have your seat. [New York Times]

Where's Ben Ling headed next? We hear he might be headed back to Google — not a startup. Ling, a talented product manager, is closely watched as a talent barometer. His defection from Google to Facebook last year kicked off a series of trend stories about people leaving Google. Less than a year on the job, he's leaving Facebook, which has kicked off another series of trend stories about people leaving Facebook. Ling was recently spotted having lunch in Mountain View. You know what this means: A series of trend stories about ex-Googlers returning to the Googleplex. Update: Kara Swisher confirms Ling is returning to Google, tasked with figuring out how to make money off YouTube.

MySpace Music, the joint venture between the social network and three big record-label groups, is struggling to find a CEO, according to The Deal. There's a long list of prospects who have turned the News Corp.-owned social network down: Ian Rogers, the former head of Yahoo Music; Jim Bankoff, formerly of AOL; Eric Garland, the highly quotable head of file-sharing research firm BigChampagne; and former Launch CEO Dave Goldberg, who now works at Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence and is married to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, which makes the L.A. job geographically undesirable. But what's most amusing about MySpace's failed CEO search is the excuse MySpace is now giving for putting off a hire: The team is so close to delivering a product that hiring a boss now would just screw things up. Makes sense — but it raises the question, why hire a CEO at all?

Yahoo's botched shareholder vote doesn't just tell us that that investors are grumpy. In shareholders' eyes, some Yahoo board members are more equal than others. In the good camp, with disapproval ratings under 8 percent, even with the revised tallies: Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, who's leaving the board anyway; HP executive Vyomesh Joshi; and, intriguingly, Frontier CEO Maggie Wilderotter. We think it's time for Yahoo to take a hint, and bow to shareholder democracy: Fire Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, and replace them with Wilderotter.Wilderotter has several pluses: She's actually been a Silicon Valley CEO, unlike Yang, previous to his current run in the position, and Decker, who's long aspired to a top job somewhere, but now looks farther than ever from getting it. Wilderotter only joined the board last summer, which means she can't be held responsible for the sluggish performance and bad strategic decisions which made Yahoo vulnerable to a Microsoft bid in the first place. With media, advertising, computing, and telecommunications merging into a single business, it strikes me that most of Yahoo's board and management are ill-equipped for the transition. Not Wilderotter, who's worked for Microsoft and AT&T and run Wink Communications, an interactive-TV company which she took from startup to IPO, through boom and bust. One small hitch: Wilderotter's current job running Frontier. But we think it's high time for her to step away from that position, which she took on four years ago. Four years is a long time in the tenure of a CEO. Frontier, a phone company mostly serving rural area spread across 24 states, is doing well — but it's not going to set the world on fire anytime soon. So tell us, Maggie: Do you Yahoo? Enough to leave the cushy phone-company gig for a real challenge? The shareholders have spoken: You're one of Wall Street's favorites. A Yahoo turnaround could be the capstone of your career. Are you in it to win it — or are you just on the board to collect a $500,000-a-year check?

Former Yahoo engineering director Adam Hyder, who left the company last month, will join job-listings startup Jobvite. At Yahoo, Hyder was best known for leading the Hotjobs engineering team "and is credited for turning around that division," a source tells us. After that feat, Yahoo put Hyder in charge of the application group for the AMP! platform, a dashboard for brand advertisers that's supposed to save Yahoo this fall — if it can find a new name. Our Hyder-friendly source claims he's "bullish" on AMP. That's the politic thing for Hyder to say, of course, but actions speak louder than words. If he's so bullish, why would he leave AMP, unfinished, to a struggling, understaffed team?

Richard Kimber, managing director of Southeast Asian operations at Google, won't be moving into the search giant's new Sydney offices. Instead, he'll serve as the new CEO of Friendster — probably enticed by a healthy share of the early social network's latest $20 million in venture capital. While it remains to be seen if Kimber can help the company's investors limp to liquidity (read: trolling for cash with Friendster's social network patents), he can probably introduce Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams to all sorts of Vietnamese hotties.

Right as former AOL CEO Jon Miller gets a glowing profile in the Los Angeles Times, his former boss strikes back at him in the most callow way possible, by blocking his appointment to the Yahoo board. Was it not enough for Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes to ignominiously sack Miller two years ago, replacing him with the hated and ineffective Randy Falco, who instantly sent AOL's recovering business into a tailspin? Of course not! The media boss is enforcing Miller's noncompete agreement, blocking him from even working at Yahoo as a director — after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who championed Miller's cause, had already announced he would join the board.

How much does one get for bungling an acquisition of Yahoo and leading a huge investment in Facebook at a questionable valuation? For former Microsoft VP and new Juniper Networks CEO Kevin Johnson, it's at least $8.2 million in salary and signing bonus, plus 1.6 million stock options and a shot at 350,000 shares in performance-tied stock grants over the course of four years.Not to mention thousands more in relocation assistance such as covering the closing costs and paying mortgage interest on a new home near the company's Sunnyvale headquarters. No longer having to report to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer? Priceless. (Photo by AP/Elaine Thompson)

Strunk and White would not be pleased: