Groupon Names a New Chief and Logs a Loss of $7.6 Million

Mr. Lefkofsky had been chairman and interim co-chief executive, with Ted Leonsis, the vice chairman, since Mr. Mason’s ouster. Mr. Leonsis will now be chairman.

Groupon, an online deals site, also reported second-quarter results on Wednesday. It posted a loss of $7.6 million, or 1 cent a share. That is down from earnings of $28.4 million, or 4 cents a share, in the second quarter of 2012.

Adjusted earnings, which exclude stock compensation expenses, were 2 cents a share in the latest period. That matched analysts’ average expectations, according to FactSet.

Revenue rose 7 percent to $608.7 million from $568.3 a year earlier. Analysts had expected $606.2 million, according to FactSet.

For the current quarter, Groupon, which is based in Chicago, predicted adjusted earnings in the range of a loss of 1 cent to a profit of 1 cent a share on revenue of $585 million to $635 million. Analysts had forecast earnings of 5 cents a share, on revenue of $621.5 million.

The company announced plans to repurchase $300 million of stock in the next two years.

Groupon built its business on e-mailing daily discount deals for restaurants, spas and nail salons to users and taking a cut of the money businesses make from them. To diversify, the company has expanded into product sales, payments services and other areas. Last month, it started Groupon Reserve, which lets people make restaurant reservations at a discount.

Groupon’s stock jumped $1.67, or 19 percent, to $10.39 in after-hours trading on Wednesday. It had closed regular trading at $8.72, up 79 percent since the start of the year.

Bits Blog: Zynga Names Xbox Executive as New Chief

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Bits Blog: Microsoft Names First Female Finance Chief

Microsoft Amy Hood, Microsoft’s new chief financial officer.

Microsoft named Amy Hood, an executive at the company, as its chief financial officer, the first woman to hold the top finance job at Microsoft.

Ms. Hood, 41, joined Microsoft in late 2002 and was most recently the chief financial officer of Microsoft’s business division, the unit that oversees its lucrative Office suite of applications. She replaces Peter Klein, Microsoft’s chief financial officer who announced recently that he was resigning to spend more time with his family.

A number of women have risen to Microsoft’s top ranks, but like most technology companies, its senior leadership is still dominated by men. One exception is Lisa Brummel, who, as chief people officer, runs the company’s human resources department. Late last year, Microsoft appointed two women, Julie Larson-Green and Tami Reller, to run the engineering and finance operations of the company’s Windows division, one of its most important units.

As chief financial officer, Ms. Hood will play a bigger role in helping Microsoft adapt to major changes in its business, most notably the shift to mobile devices from PCs and the transformation of traditional software into cloud services. In a sign of these changes, for the last six months, Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer, has begun talking about Microsoft as a devices and services company.

Ms. Hood will also serve as Microsoft’s ambassador to Wall Street, which has for years looked skeptically at the company’s efforts to enter new businesses like Internet search. After a recent solid earnings report from Microsoft, investors have become more bullish on the company’s prospects. Its shares now trade near their 52-week high.

In an e-mail to Microsoft employees on Wednesday, Mr. Ballmer said Ms. Hood had helped lead the change of Microsoft Office into a cloud service. He said that he worked closely with her on two big acquisitions, that of Skype and Yammer, and that her critical thinking would be an important skill in her new job.

“Amy is a great collaborator with a history of successful cross-group projects, and I am looking forward to having her as a member of my leadership team,” Mr. Ballmer wrote.

Intel Names New Chief

The company also announced on Thursday that software honcho Renée James, 48, had been elevated to the post of president. Her appointment signaled to some that Intel, while likely intending to stick with its formula of intense investment to keep it ahead in the microchip technology game, is willing to explore new growth areas.

The company said last November that it might go external for its next CEO, raising hopes that it might find someone to shake it out of recent doldrums.

Seen as a frontrunner for the job since November, Krzanich inherits a company with margins of almost 60 percent that has all but extinguished rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc in the past few years, and is now the dominant maker of microprocessors for computers and servers.

But the company is in danger of finding itself sidelined as mobile devices such as tablets and ever more powerful smartphones accelerate a contraction of the personal computer market. The majority of gadgets today run processors based on rival ARM Holdings Plc's power-saving chip architecture.

"An external candidate might have been a better choice - with no negative reflection on Brian - simply because of the juncture Intel is at with what's happening in the PC market and the need to take major action outside of PCs," said Cody Acree, an analyst at Williams Financial Group.

"Brian may very well come in and make those same very difficult dramatic choices, but it's less likely."

He will take on the top job at the company's annual shareholder meeting on May 16, replacing Paul Otellini.

A relative unknown outside the tight-knit semiconductor industry, Krzanich has worked at Intel since 1982, rising to chief operating officer just over a year ago.

The 52-year-old has earned a reputation for being a decisive leader who liked to keep a low profile. Intel on Thursday stressed that he will have a strong partner in James, who in 2011 spearheaded Intel's $7.7 billion acquisition of No. 2 security software firm McAfee Inc.

She ran software product and service sales as well as a team of engineers focused on improving the performance of Microsoft Corp's Windows 8 and Google Inc's Android software when run on the company's microchips.

Her elevation "puts emphasis on the many businesses Intel is in beyond just chips. This is an important promotion, and it clearly signals the board wants to make Intel a much broader company," said Jack Gold, who runs research outfit Jack Gold Associates.

Intel shares closed 0.5 percent higher at $24.11 on the Nasdaq on Thursday.

CRUCIAL TIME

Intel's board took six months to deliberate on who could best helm a company with deep roots in Silicon Valley and computing history. The company today rakes in more than $50 billion in annual sales and runs manufacturing facilities across the globe.

Over the past few months, media reports have mentioned several possible external candidates including Sanjay Jha, former head of Motorola's mobile device division.

Intel Chairman Andy Bryant said Krzanich is capable of effecting a transformational move. But he also said Krzanich and James made for an "extremely powerful" partnership, and that the pair had co-developed a long-term strategic vision for the company that won the board over.

"They formed a partnership through the last few months that has blossomed into an extremely powerful pair," he said.

"You'll see a fairly dramatic change over a period of time," Bryant told Reuters in an interview. "If you look at Intel's past, with every CEO we've had that."

Intel Names Brian Krzanich as Chief Executive

The company that became a household name through its “Intel inside” stickers on personal computers is still the king of PC chips. But that is a shrinking business, and Intel is a laggard in making chips for hot products like smartphones and tablets.

That has put Intel in a bind, as semiconductor competitors long under the thumb of the Silicon Valley giant have gained traction through relationships with mobile device leaders like Apple and Samsung.

But Mr. Krzanich (pronounced KREZ-nick), a 52-year-old company veteran who started with Intel as an engineer when he was 22, says he is cleareyed about the challenges and has a plan to stop his company’s slide.

“I look at this world and see all kinds of devices connected to computers, and people connected to it all the time,” Mr. Krzanich said in an interview. “We can bring things to companies that others haven’t dreamed of.”

He even has a broader picture of Intel’s future, like imagining moving beyond today’s popular mobile devices and into other gadgets in people’s homes and even into so-called wearable computing devices. “If you’re just talking phones, you’re shooting behind the duck,” he added.

Last year, almost two-thirds of Intel’s $53 billion in revenue came from making chips for PCs, a market Mr. Krzanich acknowledges is “not growing, let’s be honest.”

Last month, researchers at the information technology firm IDC said PC demand declined more than 13 percent annually in the first quarter, as buyers turned to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. In the same period, IDC said worldwide tablet shipments were up 142.4 percent, while smartphone shipments were up 41.6 percent. The bulk of Intel’s remaining revenue came from chips for computer servers, a business Intel still dominates.

Mr. Krzanich, who is the company’s chief operating officer and is an expert in running big chip factories, will become Intel’s sixth chief executive on May 16, succeeding Paul S. Otellini, who unexpectedly announced his retirement last November. Intel also promoted Renee James, the 48-year-old chief of the company’s software division, to president on Thursday.

Some analysts saw the appointment of Mr. Krzanich as a signal that the company would increase investment in its manufacturing while chasing new customers with chips meant for mobile products.

“The PC and server markets are so big, so important, that you can’t take your eye off the ball,” said Doug Freedman, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. Mr. Krzanich, he noted, “is very much about the results. He comes from a world of schedules and manufacturing.”

But Mr. Freedman also said, “There’s a part of the investment community that would have preferred an outsider” to shake up the company. This was never likely at Intel, he noted, where employment shorter than a decade marks one as a newcomer. Intel said it considered both inside and outside candidates.

Mr. Krzanich was one of several internal candidates who made their final pitches to Intel’s board last weekend. Ms. James was also vying for the job, and Mr. Krzanich said the two had privately discussed working together, no matter who became chief executive.

“She was a very viable candidate,” he said. “Our vision of a mobile, connected computing environment was so close, we saw together we could drive things faster.”

Though he would not detail his entire strategy in the interview, Mr. Krzanich said he saw no reason to reduce Intel’s spending on cutting-edge chip technology and manufacturing. “I fought for this job for a reason,” he said. “The assets that made us great in PCs and servers are even stronger in the mobile and cloud world.”

In part, Mr. Krzanich says he believes he is carrying through on a plan that’s already under way.

On Monday, for example, Intel will introduce a new version of its low-power Atom chip designed for communications products, where its market is negligible.

If successful, Mr. Krzanich will create an Intel markedly different from the past.

Under Andrew S. Grove, the executive who coined the unofficial company slogan, “Only the paranoid survive” and led Intel to dominance in providing chips for PCs and servers, the company honed a business known for a few close relationships with partners like Microsoft, and then PC manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Those relationships and the fortunes of those companies have declined in recent years.

Today, Intel faces competition from Qualcomm and Nvidia in the manufacturing of chips for mobile devices. H.P. is showing off servers that use parts from five or more competitors.

Even Microsoft, once the other half of a relationship so close that pundits called the two companies Wintel, is working with other chip makers for its video game consoles and tablets.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 4, 2013

An article on Friday about the challenges facing Intel’s new chief executive, Brian M. Krzanick, misspelled the surname of the company’s departing chief executive. He is Paul S. Otellini, not Ottellni.

Media Decoder Blog: Hulu Names an Acting Chief Executive

The online video Web site Hulu, in a state of flux as its owners decide what to do with it, said Thursday that the person in charge of content for the site, Andy Forssell, would become its acting chief executive.

Mr. Forssell will succeed Jason Kilar, at least temporarily. Mr. Kilar, the founding chief executive of Hulu, said in January that he would step down by the end of March. He reaffirmed that plan in a message to Hulu employees on Thursday. Mr. Kilar hasn’t said whether he is taking a new job elsewhere.

The message to employees, subsequently published on the Hulu Web site, tacitly confirmed that the active owners of Hulu, the Walt Disney Company and News Corporation, are contemplating a change to the ownership structure of the company.

“Disney and News Corporation are currently finalizing their forward-looking plans with Hulu, and the senior team has been working closely with them in that process,” Mr. Kilar wrote. “Once the plans are finalized, a permanent decision will be made regarding the C.E.O. position.”

Comcast also owns part of Hulu, through its 2011 acquisition of NBC, but it gave up NBC’s management role of the site at that time. So it’s up to Disney and News Corporation to decide what to do. One of the companies may opt to buy out the other owners’ shares. Or Disney and News Corporation may choose to sell Hulu to a different company. Mr. Kilar did not indicate when a change could take place.

But until it does, Mr. Forssell will be in charge. He has been at Hulu since the beginning, and he is currently the senior vice president of content, meaning that he oversees relationships with networks like ABC and Fox and manages the acquisition of original video for the site.

Mr. Kilar said in his message that Hulu’s focus “remains on delivering a fantastic 2013 for customers and shareholders” and indicated that records for revenue and subscriber additions would be set in the first quarter of the year, despite the owner uncertainty.

Alcatel-Lucent Names Chief to Lead a Major Downsizing

BERLIN — Alcatel-Lucent, the struggling French telecommunications equipment maker, on Friday hired a former Vodafone and France Télécom executive, Michel Combes, to lead the company through what might be a major downsizing.

Mr. Combes, 51, will take over for Ben Verwaayen, who had failed in four years to bring the equipment maker, created by the 2006 merger of Alcatel of France and Lucent Technologies of New Jersey, to sustained profit.

Mr. Combes left Vodafone last summer after agreeing to take over as chief executive of SFR, a French mobile operator owned by Vivendi. But he withdrew from the job after the sudden departure of Jean-Bernard Lévy as Vivendi’s chief executive.

In brief remarks to senior executives this morning in Paris, Mr. Combes said he planned to conduct a “listening tour” of employees, shareholders and other stakeholders before formulating a strategy for Alcatel-Lucent, which lost 1.4 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in 2012.

The company is in the midst of cutting 7 percent of its global work force, 5,500 of 76,000 jobs, by the end of this year.

In a statement, Mr. Combes said he would work to return Alcatel-Lucent to lasting profitability, something that has eluded it since the trans-Atlantic merger.

“This is a company I know well,” he said in a statement, “and I look forward to succeeding Ben, working with the key international customers and driving the business into sustained profitability for its customers, employees and shareholders.”

Alcatel-Lucent’s shares fell 1.8 percent, to 1.12 euros, in Paris trading after the announcement. Alexander Peterc, an analyst at Exane BNP Paribas in London, said investors had hoped for an executive with more of a track record as a cost-cutter. He said that Mr. Combes should quickly identify which businesses were for sale.

The company has indicated that its optical submarine cable business and its enterprise business of selling equipment to large companies and organizations are on the block, Mr. Peterc said.

“Alcatel-Lucent is in a crisis situation, and even just identifying which businesses it intends to sell would be a step forward that could save thousands of jobs,” Mr. Peterc said. “They have tried for six years since the merger and have spent 4 billion euros on restructuring to turn this company around, and it hasn’t worked yet.”

Mr. Verwaayen, the former chief of the British telecom operator BT, integrated the Alcatel and Lucent product lines and organizations under a unified brand. When he announced on Feb. 7 that he would step down, he said in a call with analysts that the company was reviewing its entire business portfolio with an eye to possible asset sales.

In December, the company secured 1.62 billion euros in emergency financing from Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs to buy more time. As a condition of the loans, the company pledged a percentage of revenue derived from future asset sales.

Martin Nilsson, an analyst at Handelsbanken in Stockholm, said Mr. Combes would most likely be forced to take major steps to expedite the resizing of Alcatel-Lucent, including selling some businesses. Only 12 percent of the company’s work force, roughly 9,000 people, is in France. The rest are spread around the world, mostly in the United States, China, India, the Netherlands, Japan and South Korea.

“I think irrespective of the C.E.O. they had chosen, this is the main challenge for Alcatel-Lucent at this time,” Mr. Nilsson said. “It has been seemingly very difficult for this company to reach sustained profitability.”

In another potential signal that Alcatel-Lucent may be entering a phase of greater reorganization, the company announced that it had appointed Jean C. Monty, the former president and chief executive of Nortel Networks and Bell Canada, vice chairman of the board, a new position.

Philippe Camus, the Alcatel-Lucent chairman, said in a statement that Mr. Monty would be working closely with Mr. Combes to sort out the company’s future.

“We are fortunate to have such an experienced colleague to support Michel Combes in his new role,” Mr. Camus said. “I’m looking forward to working more closely with Jean, and I’m convinced Alcatel-Lucent will benefit from his incredible knowledge of our business.”

Mr. Nilsson said that Alcatel-Lucent’s turnaround would not be easy. Selling money-losing businesses and cutting research and development spending to increase profit will decrease Alcatel-Lucent’s base of sales and could limit its future growth potential by slowing the development of new products.

“It is very easy for tech companies to get into a downward spiral,” Mr. Nilsson said.

Alcatel-Lucent has declined to say which businesses it might sell. In 2012, sales fell more than 20 percent in its optical networking business and 17 percent in wireless networking. It blamed the lower sales on the rapid transition by United States operators to faster network gear based on Long Term Evolution technology, which reduced demand for Alcatel-Lucent’s second- and third-generation products.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 22, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled, in one reference, the last name of the departing Alcatel-Lucent chief executive. He is Ben Verwaayen, not Verwaaven. It also misspelled the given name of an Exane BNP Paribas analyst. He is Alexander Peterc, not Aleksander. Additionally, an earlier summary for the article misstated the size of Alcatel-Lucent’s loss in 2012. It was 1.4 billion euros, not 1.4 euros.

Michael Cronan, Who Gave TiVo and Kindle Their Names, Dies at 61

The cause was colon cancer, said his wife, Karin Hibma, with whom he founded the marketing firm Cronan in the early 1980s.

Mr. Cronan, who studied art in college, had many corporations and cultural institutions as clients, but he was most remembered for the pair of brand names he came up with a decade apart.

In the spring of 1997, he was asked to forge a name and an identity for a new device, a digital video recorder developed by a company called Teleworld that offered more sophisticated television recording choices than the videocassette recorder.

“We reviewed probably 1,600-plus name alternatives, seriously considered over 800 names and presented over 100 strong candidates to the team,” Mr. Cronan told Matt Haughey for his blog PVR (the letters stand for personal video recorder) in 2005.

“We spent the early meetings trying to place a cultural context on the product,” he said. Among the possibilities were Bongo and Lasso, which never got far.

Believing that “we were naming the next TV,” Mr. Cronan recalled, “I thought it should be as close as possible to what people would find familiar, so it must contain T and V.”

“I started looking at letter combinations,” he added, “and pretty quickly settled on TiVo.” (The “Vo” portion, he said, had a connection to the Latin and Italian words for vocal sound and voice.) Then came the search for a mascot that Mr. Cronan hoped “would become as recognizable as the mouse ears are to Disney.” He created a TV-shaped smiley character with the name TiVo inscribed on its face, rabbit ears suggesting an early TV set and large, splayed feet. Teleworld changed its name to TiVo Inc.

When Amazon prepared to introduce its first electronic reader in 2007, it turned to Mr. Cronan, who envisioned imagery reflecting the reading experience as an embryonic but rising technology.

Ms. Hibma said in an interview on Friday that in pondering a brand name, Mr. Cronan “wanted to create something small, humble, with no braggadocio,” while choosing an image that “was about starting something, giving birth to something.” He found the name, she said, by likening use of the new e-reader to “starting a fire.”

Michael Patrick Cronan was born on June 9, 1951, in San Francisco. He studied painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), where he later taught, and received a degree in art from California State University, Sacramento. He was a founder and past president of the San Francisco branch of AIGA, the professional association for design.

Mr. Cronan and his wife expanded their focus in 1992 to create the Walking Man clothing collection, featuring loose-knit tops and pants. Mr. Cronan also designed a pair of 1999 postage stamps, one commemorating the 50th anniversary of NATO and the other promoting prostate cancer awareness, and painted portraits and watercolors.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Cronan is survived by his sons, Shawn HibmaCronan and Nick Cronan; a brother, Christopher; a sister, Patricia Cronan; and a granddaughter.

For all his devotion to marketing and branding, Mr. Cronan felt that sometimes the demands of commerce went too far, as in the often-changing corporate names attached to sports stadiums and concert halls.

“There was a time in American life where going to a sporting event or a concert was sort of magical, because a lot of these places had these fun names,” he told The Denver Post in 2010. “But these days, with the amount of people craving advertising exposure, the sponsors have found a way to sell everything. They’re selling our nostalgia, and it’s sad.”