A round-up of the companies, deals, and trends that made headlines.
Every day, the Fortune staff spends hours poring over tech stories, posts, and reviews from all over the Web to keep tabs on the companies that matter. We’ve assembled the day’s most newsworthy bits below.
- HP (HPQ) selected ex-SAP executive Léo Apotheker to take the vacant CEO spot once held by Oracle’s Mark Hurd. “Leo is a strategic thinker with a passion for technology, wide-reaching global experience and proven operational discipline — exactly what we were looking for in a CEO,” said HP’s lead independent direct Robert Ryan in a statement. (Digits)
- As we mentioned yesterday, Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz confirmed that U.S. chief Hilary Schneider, Audience Head David Ko, and VP of Media Jimmy Pitaro are indeed leaving, “but each for different reasons that suit their life.” (BoomTown)
- Mashable founder Pete Cashmore explains why Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg should enjoy The Social Network. (“It paints Zuckerberg as a tireless visionary who stops at nothing to achieve his dream.”) (CNN)
- Several coworkers believe the reason Gordon McLeod, president of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, is leaving is because he insulted Steve Jobs in Rupert Murdoch’s presence at the annual News Corp. retreat. (Gawker)
- Looks like that net neutrality proposal going around the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee has hit a serious snag. Representative Joe Barton of Texas, the senior Republican committee member, officially said he will not support its passing. (The New York Times)
- comScore released the latest data on online video usage, and while YouTube remains the indisputable champ, Facebook jumped ahead of Yahoo to take second place. For the month of August, 58.6 Facebook viewers took in a total of 243 viewing sessions on the social network, compared to 53.9 Yahoo viewers. (TechCrunch)
- The new-and-improved Twitter redesign is about 50% rolled out, and much to everyone’s surprise, there’s been little-to-no user backlash. Twitter’s VP of Product Jason Goldman says that’s because they managed to take the core Twitter experience and “extend on top of it.” (TechCrunch)
- Sprint Nextel (S) CEO Dan Hesse and two other Sprint execs, Keith Cowan and Steven Elfman, are stepping down from their positions on Clearwire’s board of directors, presumably to allow room for other potential Clearwire investors. (Currently, the 4G startup is looking to expand and build a comprehensive nationwide network.) (cnet)
- Microsoft (MSFT) plans to officially unveil its Windows Phone 7 lineup of on October 11; AT&T (T) will start selling them a month later. (The Wall Street Journal)
- With user traffic down 26% after Digg unveiled its V4 redesign, the social news aggregator site plans to return several features from the previous iteration, including the upcoming section with pagination. (VentureBeat)
- Based on extremely positive media feedback at this year’s E3 convention — among several other unspecified reasons — Nintendo is pricing their 3D-enabled Game Boy, the 3DS, at an eye-popping $300 in Japan and $250 in the U.S. (Joystiq)
- Gamification, that growing trend we wrote about several weeks ago where game-like mechanics benefit non-game areas, is getting its own conference, the aptly-named Gamification Summit 2011. (VentureBeat)
- The Boston Globe will shift the online version of its newspaper from Boston.com to BostonGlobe.com and start charging for full access to content during the second half of next year. (Mashable)
- A proud day for Flickr fans: Facebook is finally rolling out high-resolution photo sharing. (Gizmodo)
