North America

Yahoo Inc will allot duties for its North American sales operations among four internal executives instead of replacing the sales manager who left the company about 5 months ago. The new arrangement is believed to help the sales team to be closer to Yahoo’s senior management, says Hilary Schneider, the head of Americas business.

In March this year Joanne Bradford left her position of Yahoo’s head of North American revenue and market development for privately held Demand Media.

30% of the global web access is now handled by Mozilla Firefox, according to the company estimates. This week the open source company provided its first ever quarterly analyst report titled The State of the Internet. On the basis of the statistics given by the four separate online research houses - StatCounter, Quantcast, Net Applications, and Gemius – Mozilla claims that its influence is the strongest in Europe where it owns 39.2% of the market.

Sounds surprisingly but owing to the global financial crisis employees became more loyal. Thus, crisis has made more than 40% employees feel totally committed to their employer, according to a global survey from Kelly Services conducted in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

The annual Kelly Global Workforce Index polled about 134,000 people in 29 countries from October to January.

 Tuesday, UBS announced it hired a Morgan Stanley investment banker, Michael Ostow, 41, who will lead its insurance practice in North America as a managing director. That is months after the bank lost two senior insurance bankers to Greenhill & Co.

Michael Ostow will join UBS as a managing director and report to Americas co-heads of the financial institutions group, Gary Howe and Halle Benett.

 As eCommLink announced Monday, its investors, led by Syntek Capital, have injected $10 million in additional funding aiming to uphold eCommLink’s domestic and international growth plans. 

Survey of 67 institutional investors, representing $130 billion worth of emerging-market investments, revealed that specific environmental, social and corporate governance issues was seen as the major challenge facing socially conscious investors in emerging-market companies. 

The survey, sponsored by the International Working Group of the Social investment Forum in Washington as well as the International Financial Corp. in Washington and The Calvert Group Ltd. in Bethesda, Md. was conducted in April and May.