To help make up ground, Mr. Loeb is calling for Yahoo to focus on the search ad businesses and to develop a social community and a robust, video platform. In a presentation to Yahoo Mr. Loeb described his proposed candidates, highlighting one, Jeff Zucker, the former chief of NBCUniversal, for his role in buildingHulu, which the hedge fund manager sees as a potentially attractive partner or target for Yahoo.

Similarly, Mr. Loeb said he picked another candidate, Michael J. Wolf, the founder of Activate, a media consulting firm, because of his media and technology contacts and his reputation as a “talent spotter.”

The final board candidate, Harry Wilson, a turnaround specialist, was one of the architects of the restructuring plan for General Motors.

Link: Activist Investor Charts Plan to Revitalize Yahoo

The real discussion, however, is unplanned, with people you get together with or meet at private events. And it’s in that casual atmosphere — among a mix of people that range from government officials to company heads to private equity investors — where I get a small glimpse of what people in the media and technology world are thinking.

More generally, throughout the conversations I had this year, the common themes were: the economy, health and sustainability and overall optimism about how technology will impact all of these.

People in the media and technology businesses were upbeat and believe that the recovery underway will boost advertising sales. And, they’re excited about the opportunities from social media, tablets and cloud computing. All of which I would hope and expect.

What’s new and exciting is that they now realize that they’re going to need to gear-up to stay geared-up. They now understand that media and technology companies are never going to get back to a place where their businesses will be at “normal” state. Conversation after conversation, they’re coming to a point of view that they just can’t buy someone else’s innovation, that they need new ways of generating content (capturing professional and user-generated content) and that piracy is a reality they’re going to have to manage (versus just demanding governments enforce copyrights). They know that their organizations are going to need to keep moving and they’re not going to stop. That was my most exciting takeaway from this year’s Davos and a sentiment I think we’re going to see playing itself out in our industry.

At the same time that media and tech execs were excited about social media, every dialogue somehow turned to the condemnation of a government turning off the Internet. But there was also lot of debate about what’s going on in Egypt, and a possible Facebook-enabled rise of the Muslim Brotherhood.

One of the most curious things about Davos is how you get to meet and talk to people. Whether it’s at a dinner or a standing up at an event or just hanging around in one of the cafes in the congress center, there’s a consistent way people introduce themselves. My friend Kal Patel, who runs international and new ventures for Best Buy, aptly describes it as ‘physical tweeting.’ Essentially you tell your name, your company and what you do in less than 140 characters. Then you can jump into a discussion about a topic relevant to the ‘tweet.’ While it does feel a little bit like speed dating, for me it ends up as the best way to get insight from every conversation.

Yes, MySpace’s popularity and traffic have crashed. What nobody mentions is that the site has already created a huge amount of value for NewsCorp. This is a deal that has already been paid for. In bold strokes, the three-year $900M contextual search deal with Google and the hundreds of millions of dollars in display ads MySpace sold itself, far exceed the $580M deal price for Intermix (MySpace’s parent company.) As importantly, the acquisition served as a catalyst for NewsCorp to take the dive into digital across all of the company’s businesses.

For years, people will talk about why MySpace has declined while Facebook has ascended. To a large extent, the problem is similar to what anyone who creates media faces: the fleeting nature of cultural popularity. MySpace was more than a social network, it was really an outlet for people to connect with eachother around entertainment. Music was at its foundation but so much of what drove its later growth was the first large-scale way for people to share video (by embedding YouTube clips) and then a new way for its users to enjoy their own moments of fame.

As a side note, it’s been interesting to see how many people took notice of the article because it appeared on “A1″ of the Times. Despite the fact that so many of us are getting our newspapers without paper, the front page still carries so much prominence.

At midnight, Gourmet Live went live in the app store. We all stayed up staring at our screens until the familiar “G” icon came up in iTunes. We smiled and watched the first downloads and the first rewards postings on Facebook and Twitter. Whew!

By this afternoon, it was the number one lifestyle App and was featured by Apple in the iTunes Store.

We’ve been on a fast track or I should say fast fast track since April, when Activate collaborated with CondeNast to re-imagine Gourmet as a new digital experience. Our idea was to combine great content with game mechanics and social sharing: a Massively Multi-Player Magazine.

So food lovers — the app is free. Of course, we built on the legacy of Gourmet Magazine. And then we set out to create something entirely new: the aim was to make it native to the device, built on the features of today’s most popular applications, intuitive and intensely social. In addition to the over five million passionate Gourmet readers (including me), I think it will bring in a whole new set of food lovers who will enjoy the experience of reading and unlocking new content rewards. Your appetite will be satisfied; Gourmet Live will deliver a new “issue” or experience about twice weekly.

We started with admiration for Gourmet’s promise of good living through food culture: dining, travel, recipes, restaurant reviews, holidays, occasions, wine and the role food plays in our society. Is your mouth watering yet? Our strategy was to build the new Gourmet as if it were a new start-up (but with the Gourmet brand and 70 years of amazing content).

Activate created a “virtual start-up” — an A team of the best talent on both coasts: Paul Ford, Garrett Murray, and Andre Torrez took Gourmet Live from concept to reality in two months and then less than two more to launch.

Juliana Stock, Gourmet Live’s founding General Manager was both Creative Marketing Director at CondeNast and at the same time an integral member of team. So much for regular hours and a full night’s sleep.

Elizabeth Spiers and Kelly Senyei have started a new tradition of Gourmet content with Gourmet-quality writers and photographers.

And, overall, Chuck Townsend and Bob Sauerberg (Conde Nast’s CEO and President respectively) saw Gourmet Live, and the technology which powers it, as part of their strategy to create web-scale consumer audiences for CondeNast’s brands and content.

When my business partner Anil Dash and I formed Activate, we set out to create a strategy consulting firm re-invented based on the realization that media and entertainment companies are reinventing themselves. They have to! We all have to react to the reality of how people use media and technology now.

This new GourmetLive is a hot-spiced demonstration (ok, enough of the food analogies) of Activate’s unique approach to business innovation — in the speed that rapid change demands.

From this day on, breakfast, lunch, dinner and drinks are on us–on Gourmet Live.

• Gourmet on the App Store
• Gizmodo: Gourmet Live: The Delicious New Gourmet Magazine for the iPad