On Tuesday, the company announced it had hired John Browett as its new retail SVP, poaching him from his current role as CEO of the UK-based consumer electronics retailer Dixons.

Its former head of retail, Ron Johnson, left the company last year to become the CEO of mid-market department store JC Penney; retail responsibilities have been overseen in the interim by CFO Peter Oppenheimer. Browett, who officially leaves Dixons in April, will report directly to Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook.

Browett background

The move has come of something of a surprise to those who already know Dixons. Currently trying to figure out how to operate 13 different retail brands across bricks-and-mortar and web, Dixons couldn’t be more different from the singular, global tight-ship vision that is the Apple machine.

And, although it may be unfair to compare any company to Apple at the moment, we’ll just state the following for the record: Dixons has not exactly weathered the European economic climate particularly well recently.

In its last trading update, from earlier this month, Dixons noted that its sales across the group for the previous 12 weeks, taking in the traditionally key holiday sales period, were down by three percent compared to the year before; gross margins were flat.

On the other hand, Apple is, at the end of the day, just another major brand and consumer electronics giant looking for the best way of leveraging physical retail with online sales, working with its own properties and in reselling partnerships with others.

In that sense, it’s not exactly above any of the others.

Mass-market push?

Putting Browett’s recent Dixons past together with prior experience as CEO of Tesco.com, the very successful online operation of the big supermarket chain, you could also argue that Apple itself is making some careful moves into figuring out how best to tackle the next stage of its growth as a massive company, from being perceived as high-end and expensive as a luxury that everyone can afford.

That’s something the company has also been exploring through the products themselves—from less expensive, older models of the iPhone, to competitive tablet pricing, iPod nanos and smaller MacBook Air laptops.

Dixons’ replacement

Dixons, meanwhile, announced that Browett will step down from his position on the board on February 20, and will be leaving the role of CEO on April 20 after a transition period. He is being replaced by Sebastian James, who has been with Dixons since 2008 running operations.

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Rubinstein, a former Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) executive who played a key role in the development of the iPod and the iPhone, had been working in a fuzzy role within HP’s Personal Systems Group after ceding day-to-day control of the WebOS business unit to Stephen DeWitt in July. Of course, by August the WebOS business itself was put out to pasture following then-CEO Leo Apotheker’s decision to halt development of the Touchpad.

His next destination, however, will be quite interesting. AllThingsD, which first reported the news, said that the timing of his departure was related to a commitment made to HP following the Palm deal in 2010 to stay on for 12 to 24 months.

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The news, first reported by 9to5Mac, appeared to be confirmed as much by what looks like Teixeira’s own LinkedIn profile. We have contacted Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) to confirm the appointment.

If accurate, this would be the first time that Apple has hired a regional manager for Latin America in recent times, according to AppleInsider. And indeed, Apple, whose mobile devices and computers are priced at the higher end of market, has entered Latin America perhaps more slowly than it has other emerging economies like China.

Because Apple puts Latin America into the same category as the U.S. and Canada in its results, we don’t know exactly how much revenue the company generates there, but it’s clear that the figure is going up and represents a bit opportunity for the company. In October, during Apple’s Q3 conference call, CEO Tim Cook noted that revenues in Latin America’s biggest economy, Brazil, were up 118 percent over the year before.

But he also acknowledged that Apple has not been as aggressive in some developing markets as it has been in China—where it has several retail stores and counts Asia overall as its second-biggest market after the Americas. (China alone accounts or 16 percent of revenues.)

With Apple reporting its Q4 results later today, the company might reveal another update on how Latin America is progressing. The past quarter has seen a few events that might merit mention later today:

It was only in December 2011 that Apple launched its first local iTunes store for Brazil and the rest of Latin America, the same month that the iPhone 4S began to ship in Brazil and Chile, among a list of other emerging markets.

And Foxconn, a key iPhone and iPad manufacturer for Apple, reportedly started to produce devices in a factory in Brazil—although, again, these reports have never been confirmed by either company.

Teixeira helping to oversee a local manufacturing operation might prove to be useful for supplying Apple-hungry consumers north of the border, but it could also be used to feed demand closer to the plant as well.

That might mean cheaper prices for those devices, too: that iPhone 4S that launched in mid-December did so at a crazy price: almost $2,000, a premium of nearly $1,200 on the U.S. retail price.

Apple is not the only media company eyeing up Latin America for growth: Netflix also used it as the springboard for its first international launch, and just last week Telefonica beefed up its online video offerings in the region in a deal with Sony.

Teixeira is a Brazil native who had been with Sony Ericsson since the formation of the JV in 2001, overseeing first Latin America (which had been a big market for the JV); then Western Europe and finally North America. According to LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD), he will be based around Miami and Ft Lauderdale in Florida.

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Barbara Stymiest, the new chairwoman of RIM’s board—who replaced Balsille and Lazaridis in that role—kicked off the call with a lot of praise for the outgoing CEOs. She also noted that the board “unanimously” voted Heins into the position.

In some brief remarks before analysts lodged into their questions, Heins—who has been with RIM since 2007 and most recently had been COO of its product engineering group overseeing the smartphone portfolio—said that the company is in the process of recruiting a new Chief Marketing Officer, among others, to get the company back on track. The CMO he said, is a role they hope to fill “as soon as possible.”

But it’s not just about image management: Heins seems to have an inclination to shake things up a bit, too: he noted the company will start to take more “appropriate risks,” with his support, to get back on track. Although later in the call he also noted that he didn’t see the need for any major changes, so it’s not clear how far, exactly, any shake-ups would go.

First question is about next steps: Market communications are a priority, said Heins, pointing again to the company’s search for a new CMO. Although the U.S. remains the company’s single biggest market, it has taken a hammering in the last several years from Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and its iPhone, as well as an onslaught of device makers building on Google’s Android platform.

It’s not too surprising, then, that Heins chose to highlight growth outside the U.S. in the call. But in doing so, he also touched on a significant challenge for RIM: in the U.S., he said, the view is still skewed to RIM being an enterprise company. A lot of RIM’s growth is coming from consumers outside of the U.S., he noted—but that implies, in another way, that this is fundamentally not the demographic where RIM is picking up new business in its core market. As smartphones continue to become more and more mainstream, that’s becoming a more urgent issue for the company.

Heins also acknowledged that RIM has not been good at managing the process of launching new products, sending them into the market before they were ready—an issue that the previous CEOs also admitted was one of the big failings of the PlayBook tablet. These initially shipped without direct e-mail and other BlackBerry service support:

“RIM has gone through a tremendous growth phase, but we innovated while we were developing the product, and that needs to stop,” he said.

On the low end of the market, and low price points in developing markets where RIM is growing: will there be more cheap devices up ahead to take advantage that?

No, is the short answer: “We are not going into feature phones or further [drive] down the capacities of the phone,” he said, but he did seem to imply that there was a place for perhaps making lower-end smartphones. “It’s important to understand there are still a lot of feature phones out there…[there’s] a huge potential to move from feature to smartphones…[but] users don’t jump straight from feature phones to smartphones, they need a good landing experience. Part of our intention is to be very strong in on-boarding.”

A question on QNX (the platform on which RIM’s PlayBook tablet is built): Is it a “me-too” platform, trying to follow what others have already achieved? “QNX is not in the catch-up race,” he countered. “We worked with the team from QNX [which it acquired], and I have all confidence in it” being a core of BlackBerry 10 and powering the devices of tomorrow.

On vertical businesses: This is an area where RIM plans to continue to exist—that is, no plans for selling off divisions for now. That’s the Apple model coming through again.

“I have been in device-only businesses before [he comes from Siemens] and I know what it means to be in that segment. It is cut-throat,” he said. “We are strong because we have an integrated solution.” He mentions the enterprise business, the OS, the devices, the consumers: “I will not split this or separate this into [individual] businesses.”

However he also says that there may be licensing to come:

“If there are requests coming in to license our platform I will entertain those requests if it makes sense to follow that path, I will make that decision with the board,” he said. “There are not that many companies out there that have what we have. [RIM] is a strong asset.”

Heins is German and he rounded off the call with a little joke related to this: Being the German that I am, he said, “I like process-driven businesses.” Perhaps a little laughter now, but Heins still has some serious work ahead to turn RIM’s fortunes around and make the company a bit more nimble to changes before shareholders and others lose more patience.

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The Wall Street Journal reported that the two CEOs would step down Monday morning and be replaced by Thorston Heins, who has been RIM’s chief operating officer. They will both stay on RIM’s board, but will no longer have executive roles at the company founded by Lazaridis and overseen by the duo for nearly two decades.

The company confirmed the move in a press release following the published report, and Balsillie and Lazardis granted interviews to the WSJ in conjunction with release of the report, interestingly timed for the middle of the San Francisco 49ers-New York Giants championship game in San Francisco. In the report, they said they were not pushed from their roles but it’s hard to take that at face value, given that RIM was under serious pressure from investors to release a plan for management changes by the end of January following a deal cut just before its annual meeting last July.

Lazaridis will become vice chair of RIM’s board and will chair something called the Innovation Committee. RIM said he will provide “strategic counsel” to Heins and will apparently be much more active than Balsillie, who will remain on the board but with no new public role. Barbara Stymiest, a current RIM board member, will become Board Chair.

The former CEOs, as well as Heins, also spoke to their hometown paper, the Globe and Mail, in advance of actually announcing the move. Heims has been chief operating officer of product engineering for RIM following a reorganization last year in which RIM laid off employees and attempted to streamline its operation. But that wasn’t enough to prevent the company from making several more product and strategic mistakes during the latter half of 2012.

RIM is in deep trouble for taking far too long to react to the launch of the iPhone, a seminal moment in the modern mobile computing industry that was initially dismissed by RIM’s management has having been faked by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). Changing consumer tastes for smartphones led to a precipitous drop in RIM’s U.S. market share in 2010 and throughout 2011, and the company has fumbled several attempts to catch up. New BlackBerry 7 handsets were delayed in 2011 after RIM miscalculated the processing power that would be required, and a similar mistake led to the delay of its first QNX-based smartphones, which were supposed to appear in early 2012 but now aren’t expected until the end of the year.

Heins promised the Globe and Mail that “what you will see with me is rigour and flawless execution.” That’s something RIM could surely use following all the product delays, but the company also needs to articulate a clearer vision for how it intends to transition between the staid BlackBerry OS and the newer QNX operating system, which RIM has renamed BlackBerry 10 yet struggled to get anyone to notice the software following the failed launch of its Playbook tablet.

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From Yang’s letter to the board:

“My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future.”

It is a surprising move but only in its timing and its thoroughness. Activist shareholders—most notably Third Point’s Daniel Loeb—have called for his resignation, concerned in part that Yang was on the board while he was exploring ways to take the company private.

Yang also has stepped back before, resigning as CEO—but always keeing a connection. This time, Yang—aka the “Chief Yahoo”—is severing all ties with the company he and David Filo founded in 1995 for the navigational guide they developed as students at Stanford in 1994.  He has been on the board since 1995, was CEO from 2007-2009, and at this writing, still anchors the management page.

That page is headed now by Scott Thompson, the PayPal president who joined Yahoo as CEO just two weeks ago, replacing Carol Bartz, who was fired on Labor Day. Yang’s departure letter includes a shout out for Thompson, who in press-release speak thanked Yang for “the warm welcome and support Jerry provided me during my early days here.”  Thompson’s first earnings call in next Tuesday.

But Yang can’t get completely away: he’s still one of the company’s largest individual shareholders. And resigning won’t really help him escape the blame for Yahoo’s failure to thrive as an investment or to set a strong course, no matter how many highlights the company’s been able to string together. It also doesn’t blot out the memory of failing to sell to Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) when the price was right.

What it does do is remove him as an impediment, imagined or real, to Yahoo’s future and leaves Roy Bostock, chairman of the board, as the lead voodoo doll for outside investors and critics to stick pins in until he, too, goes away. (Kara Swisher’s sources say Bostock and three others will be leaving soon: board vets Arthur Kern, Vyomesh Joshi, and Gary Wilson.)

Unless, of course, resigning from the boards of Yahoo, Yahoo Japan and and Alibaba Group is a palette cleanser for an effort to work outside the company to take it private.

I hope not. I hope Yang is sincere when he says it’s time to pursue interests outside of Yahoo! (I’ll give him the exclamation point this once).

It’s bittersweet to watch someone who has given his all, sometimes with stunning results and sometimes with outcomes far less than desired, decide what’s best for him—and the company—is to move on.

The sweet bit comes from knowing Jerry Yang has a lot more left to accomplish.

Yahoo! Stock Chart by YCharts

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Dan Hesse, Sprint’s CEO, wrote a memo to employees Friday outlining the changes, which was obtained by Reuters. Four executives—Bob Johnson, president of the Consumer Services Group; Danny Bowman, president of integrated solutions; John Carney, senior vice president, consumer marketing; and Chris Rogers, senior vice president for corporate development and spectrum—will be leaving the company as Sprint’s sales and marketing groups contract.

“Because of the enormous investments we’re making this year in Network Vision and in the iPhone, we need to consistently be looking for ways to be more efficient,” Hesse wrote. Sprint has been forced to build a new 4G LTE network after betting its 4G strategy on WiMax and Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR), and also had to pay dearly in order to carry the iPhone 4S on its network for the first time in October. It also spent a significant amount of company resources successfully trying to kill AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile.

There’s definitely some logic behind the reorganization, and Sprint’s welcome page for its Web site (pictured below) shows why. An awful lot of smartphone buyers are making personal purchases of smartphones that they also want to use for work, and businesses simply don’t provision mobile devices the way they used to before the “bring-your-own-device” policy became the standard (especially as the BlackBerry has waned).

But Sprint has been steadily losing money for years, and that needs to stop one way or another. The company has yet to comment further beyond the memo (conveniently posted by Reuters (NYSE: TRI) just as the stock market closed) so we don’t yet know how other employees will be affected.

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Nikkei reported (a rough Google (NSDQ: GOOG) translation is here) that Hirai, famous for his oversight of Sony’s Playstation business, will take on a much broader role as Sony struggles to develop a more coordinated approach across its sprawling number of businesses. Stringer was given the title of president back in 2009 in hopes he could pull off that feat, but Sony remains a complicated place of fiefdoms and power struggles.

This succession plan has seemed pretty likely ever since Hirai was given a new title earlier this year overseeing both Sony’s consumer electronics division as well as his longtime association with the Playstation group. Stringer has been expected by many Sony watchers to step down at some point in 2012, and as we noted in our CEO roundup from 2011, he’s definitely been under quite a bit of pressure to turn Sony into something along the lines of Apple.

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Risto Siilasmaa (pictured), a Nokia board member and the founder and largest individual shareholder of computer security company F-Secure Corporation, is reportedly being lined up for the job currently held by Jorma Ollila.

Olilla’s successor will be voted in on January 26, at the next shareholders’ meeting, according to the Finnish financial publication Helsingen Sanomat (translation here), which cites independent sources for the information.

The news comes on the same day that outspoken and influential Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin—who has put out a mixture of accurate and inaccurate speculation about Nokia in the past—released a stream of predictions on his Twitter stream about what will happen to Nokia.

On the back of Siilasmaa getting appointed (he seems to take this as a certainty), he says Elop will resign this year, and that Microsoft will buy Nokia to better compete against Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in offering integrated smartphones. The ball is in the U.S. company’s court on how and when that deal will happen, and depends on how many assets Microsoft decides to take on board, he claims. Nokia’s brand will be used for lower end devices, while Microsoft will brand the higher-end devices as its own.

Nokia has been pegged for a while as an acquisition target—it’s still the world’s biggest handset maker but its share has been falling—and it does feel like a make or break moment for the company. Regardless of how accurate Murtazin’s predictions are, there is still the matter of a new chairman to appoint now:

The search for a successor to Ollila, once CEO himself during Nokia’s possibly most triumphant phase as a mobile handset maker, has been going on for almost a year now. No other names have come up so far for who else might get put forward for the job. Other board members, in addition to Siilasmaa and Ollila, include MIT economics professor Bengt Holmstrom; the forestry company Stora Enso’s CEO, Jouko Karvinen; and Kari Stadigh, CEO of Sampo.

In addition to already being on Nokia’s board since 2008, Siilasmaa has an interesting background in his own right: he has worked at Finnish operator Elisa, and is the founder of the antivirus and IT security company F-Secure, and, according to the blog Arctic Startup, has served as the head of Vigo, an accelerator program for Finnish tech companies. Both of those give him some insight into local innovation that Nokia could and should tap into as it looks for the next phase of growth in mobile.

On the minus side, Helsingen Sanomat points out that he has virtually no international business nor investor relations experience—although as an investor himself, and a current board member already, that could be something shareholders are willing to let slide.

Nokia had one hell of a year in 2011 and is very much geared up for a fightback in 2012 based around a new line of smartphones running on Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS, in place of Nokia’s old Symbian platform, now outsourced and no longer at the center of the company’s device strategy.

While a lot of Nokia’s strategic moves in the past year have appeared to be geared to improving the company’s dire fortunes in the key market of the U.S., as well as helping retain market share in other places where it is slipping from its dominant position, the company’s foundations and roots in Finland run deep, and keeping a Finn as chairman could be a good way of making sure those stay strong.

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There aren’t many companies in technology who have had a better record than Apple over the last five years, but iAd, an Apple-designed technology for inserting compelling advertisements within mobile apps, is not among its hits. There’s a general interest among big brands for a better type of in-app advertisement than the banner, but those brands have balked at the up-front costs of participating in iAd campaigns as well as Apple’s trademark preference for control of those campaigns.

Teresi’s job, according to a Bloomberg report, will be to convince more brands and advertising agencies to bet on iAd, which Digitas North America president Colin Kinsella told our audience at paidContent Advertising 2011 could lead to a “creative renaissance” in the mobile ad industry. iAd allows advertisers to create ads with richer graphics and interactive elements that simply aren’t possible with the usual mobile ad formats, since iAd is built directly into iOS itself.

But it hasn’t been compelling enough, and so Apple has been chopping the price of entry into the program. Last we heard, the company required brands to spend a minimum of $400,000 just to participate, down from $1 million when it was first launched. It also made changes to the way it charges advertisers for ad clicks. Andy Miller, who led the iAd program after Apple acquired his startup Quattro Wireless, left Apple last year.

Teresi is a veteran of Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE), where he is currently vice president and general manager, media solutions. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was in charge of Adobe’s efforts to sell analytic tools to digital publishers and video providers, with an emphasis on mobile technology.

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Thompson will take up the reigns officially on January 9. Tim Morse, who had been standing in as interim CEO, will return to his previous role as CFO. Thompson will also join Yahoo’s board of directors.

Yahoo announced the appointment officially just moments ago.

As we pointed out earlier today when we wrote about the possibility of the appointment, Thompson’s background is in e-commerce, both at PayPal and before that Visa, so this appointment could signal something of a strategic change—or at least an attempt at one—at Yahoo.

PayPal under Thompson was one of the bright growth areas at eBay (NSDQ: EBAY). It currently brings in over $4 billion in revenue and supports eight million merchants and 104 million active users in 190 countries. More recently it has been focusing on mobile payments. All areas where Yahoo could potentially also expand as it looks for new revenue streams amid increasing competition in its older businesses based around advertising.

The company currently says it has some 700 million users across its different properties, but it has also weathered some hard knocks in the last year. Yahoo’s board will have also been looking for someone who could re-energize existing staff, which have seen not only a high-profile, colorful CEO departure but many other management and strategic changes.

The company is currently undergoing a strategic review process, and is reportedly also in negotiations with both Softbank and Alibaba over the ownership of their JV assets, respectively in Japan and China. Some believe that Alibaba may even try out buy Yahoo altogether, hiring U.S. lobbyists to facilitate the process.

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The news was first put out into the ether by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, who got the original tip from an anonymous source, which means that the information has not been confirmed by either eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) or Yahoo, but Swisher has been on top of (and accurate about) much of the executive-upheaval news at the internet portal.

Swisher describes Thompson as a bona-fide “Internet geek,” but he is actually something a little more specific: his background is in commerce and payments (prior to PayPal he worked for Visa). And most recently, his big emphasis has been in mobile commerce, an area where PayPal has grown and is growing its presence a lot.

That raises tantalizing questions about what could be Yahoo’s next strategic step. More effective ways of monetizing the traffic that passes through its advertising, search and portal networks? Possibly even looking at a new direction in transactions? That’s an area where companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) have established a strong base, largely through their mobile businesses.

Of course, a cynic might argue that a leopard cannot change its spots, and that Yahoo’s organizational issues may prove to challenge any new ideas. Once a leader in search, advertising and online information portals, Yahoo has in more recent years seen those businesses hit hard, particularly by competition from Google and increasingly Facebook (both now make more than Yahoo from display ads, an area where it was once king).

That has led to the company to try many different things over the past several years to turns things around—some meanderings in mobile, many executive changes, new products and services, and more recently an ad partnership with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and AOL (NYSE: AOL), two former arch competitors also hit by the Facebook/Google-naut. It actually beat analyst forecasts during its last quarterly earnings—but that seemed to be more due to lowered expectations.

After Bartz left the company in September 2011, Yahoo began to explore various options for itself, including the possible sale of part or all of the company. That has involved protracted negotiations with private equity firms, and also Softbank and Alibaba, who are shareholders and have respective JVs with Yahoo in Japan and China. These are still ongoing and could either result in the sale of those JVs, or, if you believe some reports, the outright sale of Yahoo to Alibaba.

The appointment of a CEO like Thompson, who could offer a new direction for Yahoo, could prove to be useful regardless of what the outcome is of those other negotiations.

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Pearce’s current job is overseeing developer relations at Sencha, a software house that has most notably created frameworks to build web apps that look like native apps on mobile devices. His last day is today before embarking on a six-week “bootcamp” at Facebook, according to blog post from Pearce himself.

Facebook has put a strong emphasis on HTML5 development, alongside its work in native apps, so hiring someone with expertise in that area—and crucially working with developers focussed on it—makes quite a lot of sense.

Pearce will be joining Doug Purdy, who joined Facebook from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) a year ago to run developer relations for the Facebook platform overall. It looks like Pearce might be taking up a newly-created role by focusing on mobile developers.

Facebook’s move to ramp up its presence with mobile developers points to how the company will be expanding its mobile presence in the year ahead. It follows on from unconfirmed reports of a Facebook phone in development with HTC—codenamed “Buffy”—a device that takes existing Facebook integration one step further and makes it the main platform for all device activity, including calls, applications and content browsing.

Some have suggested that the interface for the phone will look a lot like Facebook’s app for the iPhone.

Regardless of whether or not that device actually materializes, Facebook already has a substantial presence on mobile devices, with hundreds of millions of users across smartphones, feature phones, and tablets and is expanding the functionality of those services on it every day, now allowing users to play games and use other services as well as the mainstay of photo uploads and status updates.

Meanwhile, there are a host of new apps that are coming along that integrate with Facebook but also potentially could be competitors: Their existence raises questions of whether there are social networks besides Facebook that make better use of mobile devices as a way of sharing one’s ‘life graph’ with others. (The new version of Path, for example, created by ex-Facebooker Dave Morin, among others, could be one contender; the re-vamped Color app could be another.)

Building up Facebook’s mobile developer ecosystem is one way of making sure people keep coming back to Facebook for more.

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Armstrong launched Longreads, a feed of long stories “best enjoyed away from your desk” (long-form journalism, short stories, interview transcripts, historical documents, etc.), in 2009 as a Twitter feed and hashtag; a year later, he launched Longreads.com. Users share stories by tweeting them with the hashtag #longreads, and publishers like The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and The Awl now tag their longer pieces that way. The website lists the best of the stories and also includes a raw feed with all the stories being tweeted.

Read It Later, founded in 2007 by Nate Weiner, is an app that lets users save web content to one list to read or watch later. As of July 2011, it has over 3.5 million users. As its editorial advisor, Armstrong will be “working with publishers, curators and creators to help them use the platform in new ways,” he says. “Time-shifting, obviously, has been great for the revival of in-depth storytelling. So it seemed what we were individually working on was complementary.”

Read It Later competitors include Instapaper and, as reported by the NYT’s Bits today, a new service from Evernote called Clearly. Read It Later has the chance to stand out by adding additional editorial features to its offerings.

On the Longreads Tumblr, Armstrong says his site “will continue as it always has, serving our growing community of readers, curators, authors and publishers, and continuing to improve our service. There’s obviously a lot that we’ll be able to build with the help of the Read It Later team, and their support means we can continue to grow.”

Apple announced the moves Monday after the close of the stock market. Levinson has been a co-lead director at Apple since 2005, the company said in a press release. But in the past, that often meant deferring to Jobs’ will for the company he ran with an iron fist. Now under CEO Tim Cook, Apple’s board could be poised to grow a little more assertive over certain aspects of the company’s strategy and direction.

Iger is no stranger to Apple, of course, having orchestrated the purchase of Jobs’ Pixar movie studio by Disney and partnering with the company on several product launches over the years. He’s also the chairman of Disney. Iger will become chairman of Disney next year when current chairman John Pepper is scheduled to step down at the company’s annual meeting in March.

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Jenkins is a relative newcomer to the mobile ad space but is a long-time veteran of the highs and lows of the tech industry in both the U.S. and Europe.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s actually already been with 4INFO as the COO for the last few months, but he joins company most recently from Solera Networks, a Utah-based network security firm, where he was the CFO. He has also held roles at Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), where he worked for the company in Europe running its education business (before Apple the days of the Apple Store when it relied on channel partnerships to sell through). Other past companies include KPMG and OnStor, a network storage company that sold to LSI during the economic downturn in 2009 for $25 million.

Speaking to paidContent, Jenkins says his main goal at the company going forward—and the reason for the executive change—was to bring more scale to the company. He says the company is using some of the funding round from last month to invest in expansion internationally, but the bulk of that, he says, will likely be achieved through partnerships rather than as a standalone company.

Jenkins says that the company is currently under NDA with two international partners—like 4INFO, both in the ad serving business and with “interesting relationships with carriers”. The idea will be to use their platform for cross-expansion purposes: “We will leverage our own SMS capabilities on their platforms in Europe, and they will have the ability to leverage our U.S. footprint,” he says. More on that could be revealed in future.

Jenkins would not give any up-to-date stats on traffic and business at 4INFO—citing the fact that his company has publicly-listed investors (the most high-profile perhaps being the publisher Gannett). But we do have some numbers in the archive: at the beginning of this year the company reported that traffic on its ad network had increased by 2,000 percent (yes, 2,000) in 2010. Last month, the company noted at the time of its funding round that its AdHaven “mobile audience” platform reaches 90 million uniques each month.

AdHaven brings together several of the technical, behind-the-scenes aspects of mobile advertising that will likely grow in importance as advertisers look for more specific and assured ways of getting their campaigns seen by the right people. The services offered by AdHaven include audience targeting and analytics, which are used in campaigns that can be delivered across a range of mobile screens and formats, including mobile web pages, apps and text messages—which to some might seem an an old-school format that is becoming less used in mature markets, but still represents significant business for 4INFO, which has been in operation since 2004.

Thet, meanwhile, looks like he will be taking a less active role in the company going forward will work closely with Tim during the transition and will spend more time on philanthropy—he has his own non-profit called Palindrome Advisors, among other activities—something he has already been dedicating time to for the past several years.

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—InMobi: Microsoft’s UK mobile advertising lead has left to join mobile ad net InMobi as head of sales. InMobi is trying to grow its European business and recently bought Sprout.

—iProspect: The digital agency has hired Brett McKibbon (pictured) to be chief client and strategic officer from sister company Carat, where he headed direct marketing.

—Adaptly: The service for advertising on social networks is expanding out of the U.S. with a London office, hiring former Google (NSDQ: GOOG) exec Paul Turner away from Invite Media, where he headed European operations.

Yardeni was at Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI), where he was global head of product capabilities. Before that, he founded location-based instant messaging service radiusIM and earnings call transcription service CallStreet.

Yardeni replaces Main Street Connect founder and publisher Carll Tucker, who now becomes chairman of the company.

“I’m excited to take on the challenge of making Main Street Connect the dominant local news medium in the United States,” Yardeni said in a statement.

Main Street Connect now covers 52 communities in Fairfield County, Conn.; Westchester County, NY; and Central Massachusetts. It is a competitor with AOL’s Patch, which also operates sites in those areas.

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Kittlaus joined Apple in 2010 when Apple bought his company, which was basically providing the same service as Siri on the iPhone 4S, just in an iPhone application. But AllThingsD reported Monday that Kittlaus has decided to move on, in what was termed an “amicable” departure.

It’s kind of an old story for the serial entrepreneurs of the world: develop something cool, get bought, leave after a few years. According to his LinkedIn profile, Kittlaus is working on two projects: a consultancy called Palindrome Advisors, which is helping nonprofits use mobile and social technologies more effectively to get out their message, and the Cabrini Green Tutoring Program in his home in Chicago.

Several prominent Siri executives remain behind at Apple to oversee future development of the feature, which Apple is putting front and center in its marketing for the new iPhone.

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The move was reported by UK book publishing site The Bookseller. Redmayne called Pottermore “a hugely exciting project which will take one of the greatest brands in literature into a digital future.” Redmayne replaces Pottermore’s interim CEO Rod Henwood.

HarperCollins hired Redmayne in 2009, and he was the first person to hold the position of chief digital officer. He was responsible for leading digital strategy across all HarperCollins divisions, and split his time between London and New York. In his new role, he’ll live in London full-time. HarperCollins’ statement, which does not mention Pottermore, is below.

Redmayne’s hire should alleviate concerns about the delay of the Pottermore e-bookstore, and the choice of a former publishing executive as CEO stresses the site’s focus on e-books.

Here’s the statement from HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray:

October 10, 2011

TO:            All Employees

FROM:        Brian Murray

I regret to announce that Charlie Redmayne has decided to leave his role as Executive Vice President, Chief Digital Officer with HarperCollins to return to London full-time.

Charlie has been a tremendous leader in the digital space during one of the most challenging and interesting times in book publishing. HarperCollins is in a terrific position because of Charlie’s efforts and accomplishments across all divisions around the world. We were fortunate to have such a talented digital executive for the last three and a half years, and I understand that we couldn’t expect him to live on both sides of the Atlantic forever.

Of his departure, Charlie said, “I’m very sad to be leaving HarperCollins—it is a terrific company and I have loved my time within it. HarperCollins has made great strides in the digital world over the last few years—because it is well led and has great people. These efforts will continue at pace and I look forward to watching their future success.”

The search for a replacement is already underway. Larry Nevins, Executive Vice President, Operations and Technology, will oversee the group until a permanent replacement is found.

Charlie’s last day with HarperCollins will be November 4. Please join me in wishing him all the best on his future endeavors.

Correction: In my headline, I briefly misidentified the executive who is leaving. I regret the error.