Jerry Yang is a pretty smart dude, and while he may have a few more days of work before he can return to sitting back and counting his money he has been implementing some under the radar changes that are already beginning to make an impact.

Most importantly, even before Terry Semel’s ouster, Yahoo! has been hiring innovators in digital media and the entertainment industry to turn Yahoo! into the global entertainment property it has so long strived to be.

Some of the key hires we know about so far:

- Blake Jorgensen, Chief Financial Officer, (Co-founder of Thomas Wiesel Partners, known as a dealmaker)

- Alan Warms, Vice President and General Manager, Yahoo! News (Founder of Buzztracker, acquired by Yahoo! on Sept 14)

- Jamie Mottram, Senior Editor of Blogs & Community, Yahoo! Sports (Formerly of AOL Fanhouse, which he built from the ground up)

- David C. Farrell, Chief Compliance & Ethics Officer, (Formerly Chief Compliance Officer at Sun Microsystems)

- Kobe Parnell, Senior Project Manager, Yahoo! Platforms & Technology (Formerly a product manager at Microsoft)

- 100 engineers in Champaign, Yahoo! opened an engineering center in Illinois earlier this year, staffed primarily by laid-off Motorola engineers.

Yahoo! has hired many more smart people not publicly announced, and has brought in a number of executives through buyouts including Zimbra, Actionality and BlueLithium. These folks will make Yahoo! a global leader if Decker, Yang et all allow them to.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Deals, News, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.