Andy Page, Gilt’s President, is departing the luxury online retailer, we’ve learned.

Gilt promoted Page to the role of President from Chief Financial Officer in 2011, where he was responsible for the operations of Gilt’s various verticals, including Women’s, Gilt MAN, Gilt Children, Gilt Home, Gilt Taste, Park & Bond, and Gilt City.

He joined Gilt as CFO in 2010, leading the company through a number of fundraising rounds and acquisitions. Prior to joining the company, Page was Chief Operating and Financial Officer of mobile social gaming company PlayPhone. Page also served as Chief Financial Officer & SVP of Business Strategy at StubHub and helped lead the company’s sale to eBay in 2007.

Gilt has recently shuffled its leadership. Co-founder Kevin Ryan recently announced that he would leave the CEO position (but will remain as chairman of the board). Travelocity CEO, former Citigroup Exec, and Gilt Board member Michelle Peluso will be taking over the CEO this year.

Ryan explains that Page had been commuting to New York from San Francisco since 2010, and this taxing arrangement didn’t make sense for his personal life. He says that Page was integral in helping the company become EBITDA positive (the company turned profitable on EBITDA basis in Q4), and has helped turn Gilt from a company that was losing $60 million per year to one that is now approaching overall profitability. It’s unclear whether the company will hire someone to replace Page, says Ryan.

Page says that while he loves Gilt, and despite the company’s rapid growth; he couldn’t continue to do the commute while having a family on the West Coast. The leadership of the company has to be in New York, he explains.

Page is going to be at Gilt until March (when Peluso starts her role) and will then move onto other opportunities in the Bay Area.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It used to be that when you thought of BitTorrent-related lawsuits you’d think of the RIAA, or maybe the MPAA. It may be time to update that line of thinking. TorrentFreak notes that we’re now approaching 100,000 copyright infringement lawsuits filed here in the US of A in the past 12 months alone. The thing is, it turns out that pornography studios are now where the RIAA was several years ago, suing everybody under the sun in order to scare people into no longer illegally downloading their content. This should be fun for everyone.

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Article courtesy of TechCrunch

During regular trading hours today, Google’s stock was down a little over $2 a share, or about half a percent. Ho-hum, nothing big, probably just some investors worried they might mildly disappoint once again this quarter. Instead, Google blew away estimates for Q3 and as a result, the stock has now surged about $50 a share in after-hours trading.

While it ended the day around $540 a share, the stock is now approaching $600 a share after the nearly 10 percent jump in price. This surge means that Google has added over $15 billion to their market cap just now. While Google had fallen over $100 billion in market cap behind Apple, which continues to see their stock surge (it’s now past $300 a share for the first time ever), they’re now approaching a $200 billion market valuation themselves.

It’s also worth noting that Google, like Apple a few months ago, is now in striking range of Microsoft when it comes to market cap. Microsoft now stands at $218 billion — about $60 billion behind Apple at this point — and they don’t report earnings for another two weeks. Might Google rally to catch them as well?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

ZocDoc, a medical appointment scheduling startup that launched at TechCrunch 40, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Founders Fund with existing investor Khosla Ventures participating in the round. This brings the startup’s total funding to nearly $20 million. Marc Benioff and Jeff Bezos have previously invested in ZocDoc.

ZocDoc automates a task that can be incredibly frustrating and time-consuming for consumers. ZocDoc allows users to book their doctor appointments online, even for same-day appointments (around 40% of ZocDoc users schedule same-day appointments). Patients can see real-time availability of doctors in their area, confirm who accepts their insurance plan and read feedback and reviews of doctors from other patients.

The service currently offers patients more than 1 million available appointments across 20 specialties. The company has launched regional sites in New York, Washington DC, Chicago, and most recently San Francisco.

One of the biggest barriers to expansion is the challenge of signing up and indexing all of the doctors in a given city, says founder and CEO Cyrus Massoumi. But as the site’s notoriety has grown, Massoumi says that doctors are now approaching ZocDoc to be listed. And the new funding will be used to help ZocDoc expand its network of practitioners and accelerate its nationwide growth. ZocDoc plans to expand to a number of cities in the next year, including Dallas, LA, Boston and Houston.

Massoumi adds that with the recent passage of healthcare reform, an estimated 30 million new patients will have access to healthcare while the number of doctors will remain the same. ZocDoc can help doctors mitigate this increased traffic by putting doctor’s schedules online.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch