Canadian-born James Richardson has been given a major promotion at Cisco with his appointment as senior vice-president of commercial business (a newly-created position), which focuses on the fast-growing small and medium-size businesses - a market which Cisco sees as its most significant growth opportunity over the next three to five years. Richardson had been Cisco's chief marketing officer for the past four years. The 16-year Cisco veteran will be succeeded as CMO by Susan Bostrom.
Update: Light Reading takes a look at the tenuous nature of being a CMO for a telecom equipment maker.

Andy Abramson has a post that Vonage has backed out of VON Canada because its PR firm doesn't believe there is enough of a consumer play. This would be a big blow to the show given Vonage was likely a major sponsor of the show, which was plagued last year by an overly-large venue and a lack of "star" keynotes. Andy suggests Vonage's decision suggests it is not doing well in Canada - a claim that seems plausible given you hear much more about VoIP service from the big cablecos, Rogers, Videotron and Shaw. A quick check of the exhibitor list for VON Canada does not include Vonage.

Update: Andy has another post on speculation Vonage is closing to filing its S-1 with SEC as part of its IPO plans. He speculates maybe that's why Vonage isn't going to VON Canada given there will likely be a blackout period to do pre-IPO marketing.

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There's yet another search engine looking to capture a market foothold. Prefound.com has just come out of beta with a service using tagging and community participation to differentiate itself. When you do a search with Prefound, rather than seeing a list of Web sites, you are - theoretically - presented with a group of sites that have been organized and uploaded by a Prefound member. Prefound CEO Steve Mansfield said this approach lets users easily access search results that offer links to Web sites, video and podcasts. Mansfield believes there's fertile ground for human-based search Web indexing as a complement to the powerful algorithms being used by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.  In some sense, the Prefound approach harkens back to what Jerry Yang and David Filo did when they first launched Yahoo! To help build the database, Prefound is leaning heavily on work done by the Open Directory Project. Design Technica has a mini-review on Prefound. Like most Web 2.0 start-ups, Prefound is relying on paid-search links from ePilot to generate revenue.