GigaOM

A little bird from down in Silicon Valley tells me that Plaxo might be getting a new top dog. The man tapped for the top job is said to be Benjamin Golub, senior vice president at Verisign, who is in charge of marketing and stuff. I could not reach anyone at Plaxo, what with holidays and all. So this is not 100% but will confirm when the new year rolls around. The whispers are led modicum of credence by the fact that Golub has been selling off his Verisign holdings at a pretty decent clip over past couple of months. (Yahoo Insider Page has all the details!) The Sequoia backed company was started in 2001 and has raised nearly $20 million in funding. (Nice profile of the company here!) Other backers include Cisco Systems, and angel investors Ram Shriram and Tim Koogle. The company has been without a CEO for a while, and apparently is in need for some real marketing help. It is an online address-book update service, which has a love-it-or-hate-it relationship with users. Plaxo is a tiny software you download and it plugs right into your Outlook or Outlook Express. The address book information is kept up to date by sending and requesting updates from those in your database. Its a little bit of P2P mixed with social networking.