Om Malik has the scoop but this is something I have been keeping under my hat for several weeks. Heather Harde, former Fox Interactive Media executive, responsible for Mergers and Acquisitions, is to be the new CEO of TechCrunch.

UPDATE

Mike has now confirmed the news here.

Heather was a key figure in Fox’s strategy to acquire the key assets needed to turn itself into a major Internet presence. She is accomplished, charming and as sharp as a razor. It’s a major coup for Mike and TechCrunch to recruit her. I believe it augurs well for TechCrunch that Mike has decided that the continued growth of his amazing venture requires the services of a hands on senior operational executive.

Until now I was the only other shareholder in TechCrunch besides Mike (a fact that dates back to our 2005 collaboration in Archimedes Ventures and edgeio). I can’t say how thrilled I am to welcome Heather into the company. I got to know her in my role at edgeio and have found her to be a straightforward, highly observant, passionate and focused person. I don’t know anybody with a bad word to say about her. The potential of TechCrunch is being realised every day. RSS subscribers, unique visitors, advertising revenues, job listings (edgeio hosts CrunchBoard) and every other measure shows this. But the potential is far greater still. Heather and Mike will be the team to realize the vision and take it to a new level. Congratulations to both.

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TechCrunch reports that Salim Ismail is to head the Yahoo Brickhouse project. Yahoo’s intention is to create an internal incubator – think Google Labs – and so encourage innovation and productizing akin to forming lots of internal startups.

Salim is a great choice for this role. Currently heading up Confabb (to be replaced by David Dell) Salim is a serial startup guy. His most recent stint was at PubSub where he served as co-founder and latterly CEO.

I have known Salim for quite a few years now. He has been a great thought partner during the gestation of edgeio and will do a great job in this new role. Yahoo are lucky (and smart) to get him.

My edgeio co-founder Mike Arrington has chosen the edgeio classified boards product to power his Crunchboard listings marketplace.

Crunchboard is focused on job listings and charged $200 per month for a listing. previously it was a home grown solution that was expensive to build and to run. Now Mike gets the service for free and we handle running it. His cost is a 20% share of revenue.

The phenomenon of sites launching listings boards is interesting. It is kinda strange that content owners in the print world have made significant revenues from listings ($17bn in 2006) yet online listings are typically separated from content in vertically focussed listings silos like Monster, Cars.com or CareerBuilder. edgeio’s bet is that it makes sense for listings to be a source of revenue for a publisher alongside subscriptions (where appropriate) and ads. Indeed, if you look at crunchboard’s listings based revenue and compare it to its AdSense revenue, there is reason to believe that listings can be a bigger than AdSense opportunity for many publishers.

Mike’s post is here

Of course Mike and I may be biased but by addressing the need for a self-service classifieds board platform, enabling any publisher to make revenue from listings, we have made the world a better place .

Om Malik reports that Google Finance has had a makeover. it doesn’t seem like a lot but I think the direction is great.

Video and Audio are a big part of investor relations these days. For example the entire Morgan Stanley Technology conference is being WebCast.

Expect Google to increasingly “organize the finance worlds information”. That will certainly include these company snapshots presented to investors by CEOs and CFOs.

Earningscast is one of my projects, and we recently started posting company earnings or announcements as slides and audio synchronized in mp4 files. It wouldn’t surprise me to see these show up on Google Finance in future.

My good friend Saul Klein has bullied and cajoled me into hosting an opencoffee meetup in Palo Alto. They will be on Tuesday mornings at 8.30am. We will meet in Deuce France (my favorite coffee and pastries place). It has great coffee and awesome pan au raison or pan au chocolat.

The goal is to provide a place to meet and greet entreprenuers from outside the US who are in the Valley looking for help/guidance/conversation or just great coffee and pastries.

It kicks off next Tuesday.

Deuce France is in Town and Country Village, on the corner of El Camino Real and Embarcadero in Palo Alto.

Map below.