Industry Moves: CEO of Netvibes Steps Down; COO Steps Up
This story was written by Rafat Ali.
Netvibes, the much-hyped personalized homepage and widget company, has a new CEO: the charismatic founder Tariq Krim has stepped down, and the COO Freddy Mini has been appointed as the new CEO. Krim will remain on the board and will focus more on other projects, though he will still be involved with the company. The company, founded in 2005, was among the first ones to start widgets into people's personalized pages, and at one point, Economist wrote a long story about Krim as the future face of European digital media startups. But with compeition from the likes of bigger players like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), and then Facebook and MySpace, the going has been tough since then. Some would argue that the company had a window of opportunity, from a strategic perspective, to sell around early last year, but didn't. More details here.
By Rafat Ali