COO Jim Buckle, who has run both Lovefilm’s commercial and financial operations since 2006, will take over from Calver in the “coming months”, the company says (Calver’s blog).

The change happens at an interesting time. Whilst its likely Calver simply wanted a new challenge, Lovefilm may also be at a cross-roads…

In its looming fight with Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), should it remain a standalone brand or should it be re-badged under Amazon, which has its own U.S. movie and TV service but which is lacking a full such content line-up in the UK?

Lovefilm has over two million customers across Europe (ie. mainly UK and Germany), was formed out of amalgam of several DVD rental businesses and recently introduced an online-only tariff that, at least in the short term, undercuts Netflix’s own in the UK.

The rival pair are busy trying to acquire content rights.

—Telegraph Media Group: Amid up to 30 job losses geared at digital re-investment, digital editor Ed Roussel becomes digital executive editor; Sky News’ James Weeks becomes head of video and Conrad Quilty-Harper becomes interactive news editor.

—We R Interactive: The social games producer is adding former C4 business development head Paul Whitehead as global commercial director.

—Briefing Media: Now that it has taken on private equity to buy out two UBM divisions, the B2B upstart is hiring PoliticsHome publisher Dods’ CFO Rupert Levy as its own finance controller. Release.

—Turner Broadcasting System: The CNN International and Cartoon Network operator is adding RTL CEO Gerhard Zeiler as its international president, with 3,800 staff across Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

Fenwick has been at Bloomberg for the past 25 years, most recently as founder and CEO of VC fund and startup incubator Bloomberg Ventures. Before that, he was CEO of Bloomberg LP. His new position is effective February 13. He will report to Chase Carey, President and COO of News Corp.

The Financial Times reported last week that Fenwick was in the running for the Dow Jones CEO position, noting “the talks with Mr Fenwick surprised some media executives, who noted his limited experience with advertising, one of the biggest sources of revenue for the Wall Street Journal, and with editorial operations. Bloomberg News was under the command of Matt Winkler while Mr. Fenwick was chief executive.”

In a statement, News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said, “We have clearly established WSJ as the premium consumer newspaper and we are thrilled that Lex will be driving our plans to grow all our Dow Jones franchises into true innovative market leaders for today’s digital world. We believe our enterprise business has the potential to follow the brand’s success in the consumer space, and be the premier product in providing the kind of hard-to-find, premium content that the financial customer demands. We are committed to making it happen and we think Lex is the executive to get us there.”

release

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—Warner Bros.: Alex Lewis has been appointed VP and director of marketing for Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX) Pictures International, UK, effective March 2012. Lewis comes from News Corp. (NSDQ: NWS), where she currently is director of strategy and marketing initiatives for Europe and Asia. At Warner Bros., she’ll be responsible for consumer and trade marketing for the studio’s international film releases in the UK. She will report to Polly Cochrane, SVP and group marketing director, Warner Bros. UK.

—Future Publishing: Keith Walker will take up the position of head of audience development for Future Publishing’s entertainment division, effective April 2012. Focusing on games and film online properties, he will report to Simon Maxwell, group publishing director. Currently, Walker is editor of IPC Media’s nuts.co.uk and mousebreaker.com.

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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Ayers will examine ways to unlock the BFI’s own archive of classic movies, TV shows and related historical materials, as well as to leverage a large amount of data the BFI keeps about the sectors.

Avenues could include mobile apps for genre aficionados or connected TV apps for examining film information from the sofa.

Ayers will work with existing BFI digital director Paula Le Dieu.

Despite handing over the Manchester City digital reins to Russell Stopford after a year, Ayers remains a part-time digital “playmaker” at the club, where he will advise on innovation on a part-time basis.

The BFI took over the UK Film Council’s functions and funding in 2011.

It publishes the Sight & Sound magazine and FindanyFilm.com, a data-rich web service for locating movies and comparing prices across DVD and digital retailers.

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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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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———————————————————
NEW YORK, Jan. 20, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE)—The Wall Street Journal has named Raju Narisetti as Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, which includes WSJ.com, SmartMoney.com, MarketWatch and the Chinese, Japanese and German-language editions of WSJ.com. Mr. Narisetti will also become a Deputy Managing Editor of the Journal, and he will report to Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor and Executive Editor, Online.

Mr. Narisetti currently serves as Managing Editor for The Washington Post (NYSE: WPO), where he oversees the company’s digital content products, staff and strategy. Today’s appointment marks a return to the Journal for Mr. Narisetti, who first joined the paper in 1994 as a reporter in Pittsburgh and most recently served as Editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe in 2006.

“Raju has done remarkable work as the digital czar at the Washington Post, integrating print and online businesses, building a successful web site, and developing key relationships with the digerati,” said Robert Thomson, Editor-in-Chief of Dow Jones and Managing Editor of the Journal. “His experience in creating Mint, a national web site and newspaper in India, also brings important relationships and unique expertise that will assist us as we expand our global digital network. Raju is wired, and we are jazzed.”

“Raju knows the world, knows digital journalism, and knows the Journal,” said Mr. Murray. “He is the perfect person to lead us into a new era of global growth.”

Mr. Narisetti’s appointment follows the recent departure of WSJ.com Managing Editor Kevin Delaney.

Strong Digital Growth from New Content, Product Offerings and Global Expansion

The Wall Street Journal Digital Network has seen tremendous growth in recent years with the introduction of expanded news coverage, content and new products as well as increased usage across its Web sites, mobile applications and tablet editions. The network has more than 1.3 million paid digital subscribers across multiple platforms and devices, and averages more than 50 million visitors per month online.

WSJ.com’s success has been buoyed by an expansion in politics, national and world news, sports and lifestyle coverage, as well as live and on-demand video, real-time blogs and the launch of premium verticals. WSJ.com generated a 42% year-over-year increase in traffic in 2011, averaging more than 36 million visitors per month worldwide. The new WSJ Live interactive video application is already available to millions of users via the iPad and multiple Internet-connected televisions and set-top boxes.

Globally, more than 30% of the total digital audience comes from outside the North American market, including Asia, which generates more than 11 million visitors per month, and nearly six million from Europe, Middle East and Africa. In 2011, traffic to the Journal’s Chinese- and Japanese-language Web sites increased 38% and 150%, respectively.

To further serve its expanding global audience, the Journal and Dow Jones have launched a series of regionally focused digital initiatives – the most recent of which, a German-language news site (WSJ.de), launched earlier this month. Other regional offerings are available, including China, Japan, Korea, India, Southeast Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe.

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—Wiggin: The media law firm is taking on BBC Worldwide’s digital media and technology business and legal affairs head David Deakin to its broadcast and digital content team, starting April. Clients he will advise on digital include Virgin Media and ITV.

—Qriously: The London mobile response advertising firm is adding former Dynamic Logic exec Joe Zahtila as North America GM and creditor insurance specialist Julian Kenny as finance and operations EVP as it sets upon a U.S. expansion.

—Shine 360°: BBC Worldwide’s consumer products creative director Frances Adams is joining Shine Group’s non-broadcast rights division as its first creative director from April.

—Guardian: GNM digital marketing head Steve Wing is now becoming mobile business director, overseeing the mobile, tablet and e-reader products’ commercial, under commercial executive director Adam Freeman.

—Digitas: Online advertising veteran Simon Calvert has signed on at Digitas as worldwide head of strategic planning, based in London and reporting to Mark Beeching, worldwide chief creative and strategy officer. Previously, Calvert was global chief planning officer and executive strategy director at Draftfcb.

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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He is replacing former Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) and Tiscali director Richard Ayers, who is leaving as planned after a year in the interim post.

“I’ve got a family in London and we thought it was important to have someone Manchester-based, so I happily filled the role till we could find the right person,” Ayers writes. “And now we have. Russell has an excellent pedigree.”

The pair previously worked at TV producer Magic Lantern, where Stopford was creative director. Stopford remains chairman of online production house Glow Labs.

Ayers retains a relationship with City as “digital playmaker”, working on digital business development, new products and innovation.

Under Ayers, City, whose owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan has spent an estimated £1 billion on the club since acquiring it in 2008, has turned previously paid digital content free and built out new video, mobile and location initiatives to ensure the business can build up fan relationships.

“It genuinely feels to me like a startup. We’re running as fast as we can, but under the umbrella of a very sensible ‘VC’,” Ayers told paidContent when I interviewed him in August 2011.

The announcement was made today by Twitter’s UK head, Tony Wang—fittingly enough, on Twitter—who described it as part of a team-building strategy at the social networking site.

Wiltshire will be starting his new job in March and, according to him (via Twitter), will “certainly be focusing on sport in the UK.”

Other details have yet to be made public, but the hire is coming just in time for London’s hosting of the Olympics this year. That is something that Wiltshire has already been focusing on from a social media standpoint for the BBC, so if any kind of Olympics strategy falls into his remit, he will have a head start on that.

We will be speaking with Tony Wang later today, to ask more questions. We will hopefully have more to add after that on the details of what Twitter plans to do around the Olympics and sports; and how/if this represents a new chapter in how the company plans to do more curation of information that passes through its network every day. That, at least, is certainly where an opportunity lies in hiring someone like this.

Meanwhile it is unclear right now who will be replacing Wiltshire at the BBC in his double-role of sports social media and Olympics platform coverage. We have reached out to the company and will update the post as we learn more.

Update: Wang had no comment on the 2012 Olympics but did tell me that Wiltshire’s hire is the first in an expansion of the company’s partner program in the UK; up to now hiring, he said, was focused not on this division but on ramping up sales and marketing people working in the company’s Sponsored Tweet service.

While Sponsored Tweets work more like ads, the partner group gets Twitter people to work with external businesses to get more out of Twitter—and for Twitter to subsequently have a stronger and more committed user base. “It’s all about helping partners in areas where we see a lot of twitter engagement already,” he said. Broadcastis one of those—when a popular show is on TV it trends on the social network. “So we work with our broadcast partners with creative integration and using twitter to drive viewership.”

Hiring someone with sports expertise is an obvious move for Twitter; sports is one of the most popular categories on the site, with several sporting events ranking among some of the most-trafficked of all events. Last week’s milestone effort from Tim Tebow for the Denver Broncos set a record for the most tweets per second: 9,420.

—Condé Nast: The magazine publisher is promoting its international deputy planning director Albert Read to be deputy managing director for Britain. Read was also Asia-Pacific business directly.

—Microsoft: BBC marketing operations head Donna Hindson is returning to Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) UK as trade marketing director for its advertising and online division. Via NMA.

—Boxwood: The management consulting firm has added Candover Investments CEO Malcolm Fallen as a non-executive board director, to add telecoms and private equity know-how.

The new startup—a “social platform” called Rebel Mouse—is currently still under wraps, although Berry tells us that more details will be emerging in the next few weeks.

What we do know already is that it will be based in New York and have quite a few other things in common with the Huffington Post: it will be focused around social media have a big emphasis on viral growth using “methodologies” he honed at HuffPost (more on that below); it will be mainly consumer-facing; and it will be built out by several former key executives from Huffington Post: in addition to Berry, he says he is also working with former CEO Eric Hippeau, former chief revenue officer Greg Coleman, and co-founders Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Perretti—all of whom left the company before Berry.

Despite these similarities and connections, Berry insists it will be quite a different product from the online news goliath that he helped create. “The intention is not to compete with HuffPost or big media companies,” was his flat answer to that question. “We intend to have a huge audience and a lot of users but not in a way that competes with HuffPost.”

The company has been funded with some money from Berry and some from Ken Lerer’s Lerer Ventures.

Berry describes his time with HuffPost as being with the company since “day two” of its life, and when you speak to him about the growth of the company, and how it mastered viral techniques to drive that growth, you really get the sense that HuffPost has been as much a technical phenomenon as it has been a news/media one.

The numbers speak to that, too. When Berry first started, the company had three million uniques per month. At the time of the AOL (NYSE: AOL) acquisition, it had 55 million uniques. As of today, the site has 120 million uniques per month and 1.7 billion page views—numbers that continue to grow, not least because the site is building out internationally.

“What I developed at HuffPost was a lean development methodology,” says Berry, who relies in part on a network of developers in Eastern Europe for some of the work. “I had done it before but had a chance to prove it on a wider scale. The basis of what we did at HuffPost was to learn how things go viral and how to make them go even more viral.

“A huge part of HuffPost was how we made the product and technology together, and how we innovated with Facebook, Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and Twitter to do that.” He says these methodologies, style, and (significantly) contacts to those huge traffic funnels, will all be a part of Rebel Mouse, too.

Berry will be leaving AOL on February 15, and he says his departure is not connected to any earnout connected to the acquisition of HuffPost by AOL, which it bought a year ago, in February 2011, for $315 million. The news of Berry’s and Pitney’s departures was first reported earlier today by Forbes.

“The acquisition was very good for me,” he admits, “but it was more about taking the time to do this professionally. It’s possibly a misplaced paternal sense, but it matters to me leave HuffPost in a good place and I’ve taken the time to do that well.” He notes that he’s hired people from top media properties like the BBC and New York Times (NYSE: NYT) to oversee areas like design, user interface and technical development, and all those people have stayed on “and are staying on.”

“I’m not leaving because I don’t believe in the mission anymore,” he says. “I’m leaving for the thrill of building something from nothing. It’s the startup bug.”

The other project that Berry will be devoting some time to will be in the running of a technology start-up incubator. This, too, will be drawing on HuffingtonPost experience. He says this will focus on a smaller number of companies—“this isn’t 500 startups or anything”—and it will apply “social approaches that we’ve learned to different vericals and areas.”

It sounds a little vague at the moment but the idea is to “help develop prototypes, demos and then help those startups seek funding as they gain traction.” This will be based in the original HuffingtonPost HQ.

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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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—FT Alphaville: Paul Murphy (pictured) is returning to edit the blog he pioneered, after his Tilt project was shut down. Current Alphaville editor Neil Hume becomes Australia and Pacific correspondent.

—Ofcom: Ofcom’s Wales director Rhodri Williams is becoming the regulator’s director of government and regulatory affairs director at its London HQ for six to 12 months, covered in his absence in Cardiff by Wales regulatory affairs manager Elinor Williams.

—IPC Advertising: Telegraph Media Group’s creative solutions head Jon Tickner joins as the magazine publisher’s creative development director to develop creative campaigns across all platforms and brands.

—Archant: The local news publisher’s London MD Enzo Testa has left and been replaced by Bauer Media motorcycling division MD Will Hattam. Via Press Gazette.

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.

Related

• Report: Yahoo To Name PayPal Head As CEO. Sign Of A More Commercial Push?

Matt Anderson is on Booz & Co’s consumer media and digital practice in Houston.

He was senior adviser on the Booz team that helped the local classifieds publisher develop a new strategy for emerging from the days of Yellow Pages and improving Yell.com to compete with rivals.

Now he is becoming Yell’s chief strategy and business development officer.

The plan, announced last summer, charges Yell with building out “the first local emarketplace platform for consumers and small and medium enterprises to connect and transact locally”, including loyalty programmes, payment services and business operations.

Yell aims to flip its revenue make-up (75 percent print, 25 percent digital) around by 2015, with digital product development all funded from cash.

It also sets out to simplify Yell.com on a self-service ad sales model, and to cut £100 million in costs over 2012 and 2013.

MSN executive producer Scott Moore became Yell Group’s chief digital officer in October, with the group opening new offices in Seattle, a month after Yell announced a new partnership with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Advertising.

“Partnership” is the watchword for Anderson, too, according to Yell.

Before Booz, Anderson was part of Enron’s commodities trading team.