• Yahoo! announced that Carol Bartz, who most recently was executive chair of Autodesk, was named CEO, effective immediately. Prior to becoming executive chair of Autodesk in 2006, Bartz, 60, led Autodesk as CEO for 14 years. Yahoo! also announced that President Sue Decker has informed the board that she will resign after remaining with the company for a transitional period. 

• Fixed WiMAX service provider Towerstream announced that it has reached EBITDA profitability in its San Francisco market. It’s the fifth market of nine to generate market cash flow, following New York, Boston, Providence and Chicago.

• Fujitsu Network Communications announced an expansion of existing laboratory facilities at its Richardson, Texas, headquarters to support next-generation wireless technologies, including LTE. The R&D center will serve as the focal point for LTE trials in the United States, in addition to performing interoperability and verification activities to support North American operators.

• Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) says it will manage the mobile backhaul of T-Mobile Austria’s network. Under the contract, which runs through 2013, NSN will assume full responsibility for the optimization and operation of the mobile backhaul network. The control and responsibility for the network and the supervision of its quality remains with T-Mobile Austria.

• Nokia says that its Qt cross-platform User Interface (UI) and application framework for desktop and embedded platforms will be available under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 license from the release of Qt 4.5, scheduled for March 2009. Previously, Qt has been made available to the open source community under the General Public License (GPL) license. In addition, Qt will now be available from the new domain, www.qtsoftware.com Qt Software, formerly Trolltech, was acquired by Nokia in June 2008.

• MFormation Technologies announced that more than 40 major mobile device vendors are supporting standards-based initiatives to ensure that their devices can be managed seamlessly by the Mformation Service Manager platform. Vendors participating in the Mformation device programs include HTC, Huawei, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Samsung. Siemens, Sony Ericsson and ZTE.

• Social entertainment community Meez is merging with Pulse Entertainment, provider of avatar messaging services for mobile phones and Websites. In addition, Los Angeles-based venture capital firm Anthem Venture Partners led a new financing round for Meez. Meez plans to integrate the Pulse messaging services into its portal to offer its 8 million registered users advanced Web and mobile messaging capabilities.