The Yahoo board has approved a massive $1.1 billion all-cash deal to buy Tumblr.

It’s not clear when the official vote was taken, but sources close to the board said the acquisition was a foregone conclusion and was unanimously approved by the directors of Silicon Valley Internet giant.

The deal will likely be announced Monday morning, said numerous sources.

AllThingsD.com initially broke the story of the acquisition efforts and later followed up with details of the exact price and the board meeting to approve the transaction.

There were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based social blogging service. That said, Tumblr had held some very preliminary discussions about various deals with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and also Twitter earlier this year.

As part of the Yahoo deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who will get a windfall of cash from the acquisition — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain a lot of control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure, said sources.

Yahoo had been mulling some kind of deal with Tumblr, from a strategic investment to an outright acquisition, for about six weeks. Sources said that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had decided that buying the company was going to be “the stake in the ground of what her strategy is going forward for Yahoo.”

And that is to attract younger audiences with just the kind of user-generated content Tumblr has pioneered to impressive growth.

According to numerous sources, Mayer determined quickly in her research that the site was just the kind of property that Yahoo needed to make it both “cool” and relevant to new consumers.

Yahoo is looking to bolster its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different demographic and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

Tumblr’s mobile usage has also been strong, which also interested Mayer. While Tumblr started as a desktop-based service, its mobile offering has ramped up quickly in the last few years. ComScore says that a quarter of the service’s U.S. visitors now come from mobile devices.

At this price, it will be Mayer’s biggest acquisition so far. Since she became CEO last summer, Mayer has made only a series of small acquisitions of mobile startups at a low cost.

According to sources, the Tumblr brand will continue.

The deal, if consummated, will be a big win for investors. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far and is now at a reported valuation of $800 million. Investors include Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners and the Chernin Group.

While Tumblr’s Karp has resisted various offers for the company over the years, Mayer spent a lot of time with him reassuring him that Yahoo could turbocharge his business. He has also been searching for a COO to help him build out the infrastructure of its business, especially its advertising one.

And as Peter Kafka and I previously wrote, Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocketship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards,” which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year and sources said it could get up to $100 million this year.

Tumblr has been represented by Qatalyst Partners’ Frank Quattrone, while Yahoo’s Mayer, as well as M&A head Jackie Reses and CFO Ken Goldman, have been on the company’s side.

Interestingly, what got me first focused on Tumblr last week were Goldman’s comments at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference last week, where he underscored the need for the aging Yahoo to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

Tumblr, apparently, fits the very expensive bill.

Wheelz had raised more than $15 million from investors including Zipcar, while RelayRides has raised more than $13 million from investors including General Motors Ventures.

However, RelayRides has a car-sharing user base that is “several times larger” than Wheelz’s membership, said RelayRides CEO Andre Haddad.

The appeal of the acquisition was Wheelz’s hardware technology, Haddad said, which integrates into participating owners’ cars to allow renters to access them from a smartphone app.

RelayRides had previously tried to integrate similar technology that was originally for fleet managers with cars that are constantly being borrowed, and it had the side effect of running car batteries down while not in use. Needless to say, RelayRides car owners didn’t like that much.

The Wheelz “DriveBox” doesn’t have that problem, Haddad said. Incorporating DriveBox into RelayRides will help regular participants avoid the hassle of in-person key exchanges, which are the current alternative.

Plus, Wheelz had built its own distinct user base, starting at college campuses and extending to California cities, which will be incorporated into RelayRides.

Haddad said 10 of the 20 Wheelz employees will join RelayRides in San Francisco, primarily those with hardware and mobile app experience. One of those departing will be Wheelz co-founder and CEO Jeff Miller.

Explaining the difference between the two companies, Haddad said, “Their expertise was very automotive, and they were not as much at ease with building online consumer products.”

One interesting aspect of RelayRides is that it has moved much more into daily and weekly rentals than hourly rentals. That means it perhaps competes more with mainstream car rental companies than the Zipcars of the world. Hourly rentals are now down to 10 percent of revenue.

Haddad, who would not quantify nearly any aspect of the deal or of his business with exact numbers, said that RelayRides’ revenue was up 500 percent year over year.

Because I get bored on Sunday nights, I opened up Yahoo’s recent regulatory filings for some light reading and, as usual, found some tasty information that the company had kindly dropped in for my erudition, but declined to call my attention to.

Namely, that the Silicon Valley Internet giant is paying not so very much for its mobile acquisitions, according to several documents the company has filed.

In fact, Yahoo’s average price paid for each of five of the 10 startups it has purchased since last fall is a tiny $3.2 million in cash.

For example, here’s last week’s 10-Q referring to three of CEO Marissa Mayer’s first acquisitions — content curation app Snip.it, which Yahoo bought in January (funding amount unknown, but the $10 million acquisition price reported by some sites is clearly wrong, as you will see from the filing); recommendation app Alike (funding amount unknown), which was on February’s menu; and recommendation app Jybe (funding amount unknown), which the company picked up in mid-March:

The Company did not make any acquisitions during the three months ended March 31, 2012. However, during the three months ended March 31, 2013, the Company acquired three companies, all of which were accounted for as business combinations. The total purchase price for these acquisitions was $10 million and consisted entirely of cash consideration, primarily allocated to goodwill. Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price over the fair value of the net tangible and intangible assets acquired and is not deductible for tax purposes.

The Company’s business combinations completed during the three months ended March 31, 2013 did not have a material impact on the Company’s condensed consolidated financial statements.

Going back further, Yahoo’s purchase of recommendation app Stamped last October (it had $3 million in funding) and video-chat app OnTheAir ($880,000 in funding) in December were also on the cheap — a bargain at $6 million total — according to its 10-K filed a few months ago:

During the year ended December 31, 2012, the Company acquired two companies, which were accounted for as business combinations. The total purchase price for these acquisitions was $7 million. The total cash consideration of $7 million less cash acquired of $1 million resulted in a net cash outlay of $6 million. Of the total purchase price, $6 million was allocated to goodwill and $1 million to cash acquired. Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price over the fair value of the net tangible and intangible assets acquired and is not deductible for tax purposes.

The Company’s business combinations completed in 2012 did not have a material impact on the Company’s consolidated financial statements, and therefore pro forma disclosures have not been presented.

It will be interesting to see what Yahoo reveals as to the price, and how it will account for the late March acquisition of Britain’s news reader Summly, which AllThingsD reported was a loftier $30 million.

The Summly deal did not appear to have closed by the end of the quarter, so no purchase information has been released, although it will be soon enough, along with that of the more recent string of mobile buys by Yahoo: To-do app Astrid, social polling app GoPollGo, travel rewards app MileWise and mobile gaming studio Loki.

For those four tiny companies, which were doubtlessly also bought for very little, Yahoo did tout what it’s really after in a festive tweet on Friday.

Warm entrepreneurial bodies:

We recently added 22 entrepreneurs to our growing mobile team. Welcome to Yahoo! @astrid @gopollgo @milewise @lokistudios!

— Yahoo! Inc.(@YahooInc) May 10, 2013

The deal was worth between $10 million and $20 million, according to a closely involved source.

Clipboard had raised about $2.5 million in seed funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, CrunchFund, SV Angel and Betaworks.

So while the deal was a successful outcome, it could also be attributed to today’s “Series A Crunch,” where raising additional money is a challenge, said the source.

All but one of Clipboard’s five-person team will join Salesforce’s Seattle office, but they will be shutting down their own tools in favor of integrating similar functionality into Salesforce products.

Clipboard CEO Gary Flake is a respected tech research executive with history at Microsoft, Yahoo and Overture.

Clipboard told users about the shutdown today, saying the service would end on June 30 but users could download their data.

Calling the news “bittersweet,” the company disclosed it had 140,000 users over the past two years.

As has been widely reported and according to sources we have confirmed it with, Facebook is indeed in serious talks to buy Waze for $1 billion, the social traffic application that helps drivers navigate the road with crowdsourced traffic information.

While no deal has been struck as yet, these sources said, the discussions are advanced and closely resemble the social networking giant’s lightning-fast purchase of Instagram a year ago.

The similarities do not stop there. The price is the same and is a mix of cash and stock, said sources. In addition, as Facebook has done with Instagram, Waze will be allowed to operate relatively independently within the company if the deal is struck.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently praised the purchase of Instagram, which has grown to more than 100 million active users in a short time span. More importantly, it has been a critical perceptual part of Facebook’s effort to distinguish itself in the mobile space and has added a highly engaged audience to its audience.

The news of the Waze acquisition interest by Facebook was first reported by Israel’s Calcalist. The Israeli-based company has been the subject of numerous rumors of acquisition, including by Apple and Google, neither of which seems to have panned out.

Not so here and the main question now: Why would Facebook buy a mapping company?

It’s not that much of a surprise, actually. The digital industry has moved its focus to mobile over the past few years, as users are increasingly accessing sites through their smartphones instead of desktop sites. As of Facebook’s last earnings, more than 750 million people visit Facebook via mobile device on a monthly basis.

After intense investor worry over its lack of mobile strategy caused a huge drop in its stock, Facebook quickly shifted to the idea that it needed to own the mobile experience. First, as has been reported by AllThingsD.com previously, that was going to be a proper phone. Then, abandoning that effort, the company mulled creating its own operating system. Finally, it settled on Home, essentially a Facebook-ified version of the Google Android mobile operating system that can be downloaded to run on many Android-enabled phones.

Clearly, Facebook has wanted to own the mobile experience without doing the intense work and uphill fighting of creating its own hardware or building an operating system from the ground up, both of which would struggle for marketshare, just like RIM’s BlackBerry or Microsoft’s Windows Phone.

But as we’ve seen with Google and, most recently, with Apple’s iPhone, if you want to truly own a mobile operating system, you’ve got to own the maps.

Why? Well, it’s an endless treasure trove of continuously updated data directly from your users, including their locations, their habits, their preferred businesses and their travel destinations. It’s why Apple snipped off Google Maps and switched its users over to its own mapping product, despite some problems with its software. And it’s why Google spent the past decade building up its maps to lead the industry.

To avoid getting left out, Waze, in particular, makes a certain amount of sense for a Facebook buy. For years, Facebook has yammered on and on about “social from the ground up” — you can’t just build apps and services and then slap a social layer on top and then just call them social. The network, Facebook argues, doesn’t work like that.

Waze is a perfect example of social from the ground up. From the beginning, the app has relied on not only the passive input of traffic and location data from its users, but the active contribution of data like accidents, police traps and more.

In other words, Waze is based on social contributions for the greater good of others using the app. Talk about something Facebook would be into, even at the high cost of one billion dollars.

But that’s something the company is used to pulling the trigger on. It outbid Twitter for Instagram almost one year ago, in a deal that was closed over the course of a weekend. While Zuckerberg had spent a lot of time creating a relationship with its co-founder Kevin Systrom, in that instance he showed the inclination and the power to grab for what he wants and very quickly.

Facebook declined to comment, with a spokesperson saying: “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation.”

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently met with top execs at Hulu, the premium video service whose big media company owners have been considering selling it for some months.

Sources said Yahoo is “in the process,” although the Silicon Valley Internet giant has not made any kind of formal bid. Other players whom sources said are considering purchasing all or parts of Hulu include: Former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, who now has a successful and well-funded multimedia and investment company called the Chernin Group; Guggenheim Partners digital arm, which is led by former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn; and Amazon.

Sources said Mayer also had an extensive getting-to-know-you meeting, which was apparently not held at Hulu’s offices in Santa Monica, Calif., along with COO Henrique De Castro. The discussion is taking place in the wake of Yahoo’s failed bid — largely engineered by De Castro — to purchase a majority stake in France Télécom’s Dailymotion video service, after a top French government official said Yahoo could not own 75 percent of the company.

Had the deal — which was reportedly valued at $300 million — gone through, it would have been the most significant by Mayer since she took over at the company last July. Thus far, she has limited her purchases to small mobile startup.

While the meetings with Hulu are only preliminary, Yahoo has been to this video rodeo before, having seriously considering buying Hulu when it was previously being shopped by its owners, News Corp., Disney and Comcast. (News Corp. also owns this site.)

Of course, if Yahoo’s interest becomes more serious, Mayer will have to make important visits to top execs at those media giants, since they control the rights to critical content, and thus Hulu’s value.

As Peter Kafka noted in a previous post about Hulu’s possible sale, “much hinges on the licensing rights News Corp., Disney and Comcast would provide for the money-losing site, as well as what happens to the $300 million debt its owners have taken on in the last year.”

Without those rights, Hulu by itself is a very pretty Web site and video platform, but not worth the billions it would be with very long-term television rights, content that attracts users. Currently, sources said its media owners are offering two to three years of rights, with a lot of flexibility over removing content from the site, which is not quite as attractive a deal (to say the least).

But video is a key component of Yahoo’s strategy going forward. Along with mobile efforts, Mayer has explicitly told investors that video was a key to company under her tenure.

Coincidentally, today in an onstage interview at a Wired conference in New York, Mayer broadly addressed the video issue when asked a question about the topic, noting it was important across all of Yahoo’s properties.

“I think video is really important … video is something that we’re all innately designed and born to experience, everyone is born being able to watch and to hear,” she said. “Video is just this amazing format.”

Mayer would know that well, having been at Google when the search giant bought YouTube, ironically snatching it at the last minute from a competing bid by Yahoo, which was then led by Terry Semel. Since then, YouTube has become the most important and powerful player in the space by far.

Yahoo, despite being one of the largest video players on the Web, has mostly been a lackluster competitor in the arena, pinging over the years from creating original content to doing branded deals with media companies, but never establishing a major beachhead with consumers as Hulu did from scratch.

Short of a full acquisition, there may be a way for Yahoo to partner and invest in Hulu, instead of buying it outright that works for all sides — owners get a new owner to foot part of the bill and also increase distribution, and Yahoo can claim that it’s providing users with exponentially more content that would help Yahoo’s long-declining engagement problem.

Sources said News Corp. and Disney have mulled scenarios where one or both companies hang on to the site, while Comcast has no control over Hulu’s fate, having given up its management rights to the site as a concession to federal regulators.

But the strength of the Hulu brand is clear and it has had some success in building a more significant business. While a lot of its video offerings are free, about four million people are paying for a Hulu Plus subscription.

Still, Hulu’s strength might be lagging, especially given after talented founding leader Jason Kilar recently left. Last year, Hulu was a top 10 video site, according to comScore. No longer — in a report in March, it had dropped out of the top 10.

While this likely has more to do with methodology than real decline in Hulu ratings, it does show that while it’s the biggest thing Yahoo could buy or invest in, Yahoo itself has plenty of video views, many more than Hulu.

The question for Mayer then is how much of Yahoo’s multi-billon-dollar cash kitty she wants to bet on a big video play. She might also be considering buying several smaller ones, said sources, with Yahoo having also looked at some smaller video sites, including Blip and Grab Media.

A spokeswoman for Hulu declined to comment and Yahoo PR has not responded to a query for comment (if ever).

The Bay Area-based private company has acquired BodyMedia, Inc., a 14-year-old Pittsburgh-based company that makes health-monitoring armbands.

The move comes just a couple months after Jawbone, which makes the wearable Up fitness band in addition to popular audio devices, acquired data and digital-design companies Massive Health and Visere.

Jawbone acquired BodyMedia for more than $100 million, according to people familiar with the deal, although both companies declined to give more specifics about the financials of the deal.

So what’s the appeal of BodyMedia for Jawbone? Unlike the Massive Health and Visere buys, which were mainly for talent acquisition, BodyMedia’s value lies in both the team and the company’s patents. BodyMedia has had more than 80 patents issued over the years, many in the area of multi-sensor technology. As a combined entity, BodyMedia and Jawbone will have over 300 patents issued and filed.

While the $130 Jawbone Up wristband does many things — it tracks activity levels and sleep patterns, and works with a compatible mobile app for Android and iOS to log food consumption — it lacks some of the high-tech sensors that BodyMedia’s products have.

“I think the first phase of this market has been about accelerometers and what those can do,” Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman said in an interview. “Now it’s about getting even more granular, and also, how we can get all that tech into an efficient form factor.”

To that point, BodyMedia’s armbands, which will continue to be sold for the time being, contain four different types of sensors, which measure your skin temperature, heat flux, galvanic skin response (GSR) and overall movement.

But compared with the wristband form factor of the Jawbone Up, the BodyMedia bands are bigger, bulkier products. Earlier this year, BodyMedia introduced a slimmed-down version of its health-tracking band, called the Core 2, to compete in the growing category of barely noticeable, 24/7 wearable fitness devices.

So can we expect to see a Jawbone wristband with GSR sensors anytime soon? “We’re working on lots of things,” was all Rahman would say, adding, “We’re exploring where we would see sensors working, and how we can put more and more on top of the body.”

The BodyMedia team will stay in Pittsburgh and will remain intact, both companies say. BodyMedia’s Chris Robins will no longer serve as CEO of the company, and will instead become the general manager of BodyMedia and a vice president of business development at Jawbone.

Jawbone also said today that it’s opening up its Up mobile software to ten different fitness-app makers, including RunKeeper, MyFitnessPal, LoseIt, Withings, Sleepio and IFTTT (for workout prompts). Jawbone Up users with iOS devices will now be able to share data to and from these partner apps with the Up app.

Accel Partners has added longtime tech exec Rob Solomon — who was most recently president and CEO of Groupon — as a venture partner. The high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm said Solomon will focus on early stage and growth equity opportunities and focus on “operational issues like product management, scaling infrastructure, business operations, and mergers and acquisitions.”

Said Accel Partner Andrew Braccia in a statement: “[Solomon] has been at the helm of some of the most high profile consumer internet brands and has demonstrated a unique ability to inspire and lead teams through both rapid growth and challenging times.”

Indeed, Solomon has had a long Silicon Valley career, including as an top exec at Yahoo, running its e-commerce efforts. He was also CEO of SideStep, a real-time vertical search engine in the travel sector that was later sold to Kayak and is also on several boards, including HomeAway.

But Solomon is best known for his stint as the No. 2 exec at the Chicago-based Groupon, the once high-flying daily deals site. But, for a variety of reasons, including wanting to be located in California, he left the company two years ago.

Solomon emailed me last night to explain why he decided to take a job as a VC at Accel and here’s what he wrote:

“I love the tactics and strategies associated with scaling up Internet companies. Nothing is more exciting then digging deep into a space and then figuring out which companies stand the best chance to create new markets and become iconic category defining companies. I was lucky enough to work with some of the world’s best founders, technologists and executives at Yahoo and that experience taught me what is possible in a very short span of time. I’ve joined Accel because they have an incredible global platform to find, nurture, fund and grow the next generation of global iconic Internet companies and nothing could be more exciting to me for my next career adventure.”

News of the impending deal and its price (“more than $30 million”) had already been widely discussed following Business Insider and TechCrunch reports, so what’s interesting here is what happens to Wavii.

And the answer? It’s being shut down.

“While we won’t continue to offer [our] particular service, we’ll be using our natural language research at Google in ways that may be useful to millions of people around the world,” CEO Adrian Aoun wrote in a post that replaced the Wavii website this morning.

The Seattle-based company had launched about a year ago, and had refocused on mobile a few months back. Given that it had raised $2 million in seed funding in 2010, and had a large staff, this is one of those try-to-raise-more-money-or-try-to-be-bought scenarios. Correction: The company had raised millions more over the past couple years, also in seed money, from investors including Battery Ventures and Madrona Venture Group. However, it had not raised a Series A round.

Wavii has been compared to Summly, the news condenser than Yahoo just bought, but the company was even more atomic than that, as it used semantic analysis to break down long-form news into structured data, and gave users personalized feeds after they specified their interests.

On Monday, Yahoo rolled out a new version of its flagship mobile app for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. Its marquee feature: Quick news-story summaries delivered via Summly’s natural-language algorithms.

There are other improvements onboard as well, including better video and image search, and enhanced personalization. But the Summly integration is the big deal here, and not only for its inclusion, but just how quickly Yahoo pulled it off. Obviously, development of the new app was well under way before the Summly acquisition, but the speed with which Yahoo was able to integrate the startup’s technology into the app is impressive indeed, and suggests that Yahoo has become a bit more nimble under new CEO Marissa Mayer.

It’s a big buy for LinkedIn, costing a cool $90 million, according to the company.

The app, which collects news articles from a range of topics chosen by users and presents them in a clean, stylish format, rose to the top of Apple’s App Store ranks just a few years ago, quickly becoming a favorite among the many newsreaders currently available. Pulse currently claims more than 30 million users globally who read more than ten million stories daily using the app.

But more than that, it’s yet another move by LinkedIn to expand beyond being just a static resume service for recruiters and professionals. Spearheaded by executive editor (and former Fortune and Wired journalist) Dan Roth, LinkedIn has made major strides in pushing original and partner content through the site, aiming to keep users returning and engaged on a regular basis.

“We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform — where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content,” LinkedIn SVP of product and user experience Deep Nishar said in a company blog post. “Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision.”

In that vein, the company launched its “Influencer” program late last year, essentially asking big names in business, entertainment and politics to write original think pieces that users can read on the site. And, in Twitter-esque fashion, users are able to “follow” those influencers across the site, so that only the content users want will appear inside their respective feeds. (Not surprisingly, the move came only months after Twitter cut off LinkedIn tweet syndication, which provided LinkedIn with most of the content flowing through the system up until that point.)

And of course, let’s not forget LinkedIn Today, the company’s news aggregation service which also brings users tons of fresh stories on the regular.

Engagement, after all, is pretty much LinkedIn’s key theme for 2013. As the site undergoes multiple design revamps across user pages and the company’s massively profitable recruiting products, LinkedIn is trying to escape its image as a one-off, sparingly used online resume service. It wants to be the home page for professionals, including the place where those pros go to catch up on the biz news they care about.

So a service like Pulse, which lets a company know exactly what sort of stuff its users want to read and care about, is likely pretty valuable to what LinkedIn is trying to do.

Yes, engagement is good for the overall health of the site, and for keeping recruiters abreast of the latest movements and activity for the 200 million people who use LinkedIn. But it has another side effect: The more page views and user activity coming in, the more potential to bolster LinkedIn’s ad business, one of the company’s three revenue streams.

LinkedIn wasn’t the only one who saw Pulse’s value. As we reported previously, sources said Pulse was in discussions with Yahoo, Microsoft, Gannett and even Amazon at points.

Ultimately, LinkedIn emerged the victor. Now we get to wait and see just exactly how the company wants to make Pulse work for it.

Earlier this week, I went for a visit to the San Francisco HQ of Circa, the startup that always seems to get lumped into the mobile news reader aggregation category with others such as Pulse, Zite and Flipboard. While it shares some obvious similarities — there is no original news gathering going on here with all of them — the approach that it has taken is different and a bit more nifty.

Built currently for the Apple iPhone, the mobile-designed app is aimed at rejiggering how readers consume breaking news. To do this, a team of writers crunches and munches small bits of information about a range of current news events from a variety of sources and forms them into separable flashcard lists to make up a story.

Circa is using the odd phrase — “atomic units” — to describe the end product, which users can swipe through quickly to get the key elements of a story, along with adds of art, photos, maps or graphs. While some disparagingly call it a Cliff Notes for breaking news, it is much more like a television report or a just-the-facts feed from wires services. If you want to get even more digital, it reminds me of a smart and collated version of Twitter.

While it could use more sourcing — I like to know from whence my atomic units are born — it’s a still a good way to consume news on the fly on a smartphone. Users can also follow favorites stories, which are updated and which increases engagement.

I talked about it all with CEO Matt Galligan, one of Circa’s several founders, as well where the next version of the product is going (expect an Google Android and perhaps an tablet version, for example)

How Circa is going to make money is a good question — it has only a few million in seed funding — since it does require people to create the stories, rather than some algorithm. But the market is hot in the acquisition arena for this category. Both Pulse and Zite have been bought (LinkedIn and CNN), as well as the decidedly less substantive Summly (Yahoo picked it up for the excessive price of $30 million), so one could see Circa also getting snapped up at some point.

Until then or whatever news breaks on it, here’s my video interview with Galligan:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130409/circas-matt-galligan-on-building-a-different-kind-of-news-reader-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130408/whatsapp-were-not-selling-to-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20130408/whatsapp-were-not-selling-to-google/#comments Tue, 09 Apr 2013 04:03:11 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=310182 Popular messaging app WhatsApp says it is not in discussions to sell the company to Google.

Neeraj Arora, WhatsApp’s business development head, told AllThingsD today that the company is not holding sales talks with Google.

Earlier this week, a single-source report from Digital Trends said that the company was contemplating a $1 billion sale to the search giant.

Arora declined to comment further.

WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum speaks at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York next week (this is one of the sessions that’s being livestreamed; more details on that soon).

WhatsApp has been the subject of similar rumors before, but with Facebook as the rumored buyer in December. At the time, the company said the reports were “not factually accurate.”

WhatsApp is one of the most popular mobile apps in the world, with a very simple formula of cross-platform messaging (mostly text, but also photo, video, audio and location sharing). The app costs 99 cents on iOS and, in some countries, the service costs 99 cents per year on Android.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130408/whatsapp-were-not-selling-to-google/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130328/amazon-buys-book-recommendation-site-goodreads/ http://allthingsd.com/20130328/amazon-buys-book-recommendation-site-goodreads/#comments Thu, 28 Mar 2013 20:39:15 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=307595 Seeing natural synergies with its bookselling business, Amazon on Thursday said it was buying recommendation site Goodreads.

“Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world,” Amazon VP Russ Grandinetti said in a statement. “Together we intend to build many new ways to delight readers and authors alike.”

Amazon didn’t disclose the terms of the deal, but said it should close in the second quarter. Goodreads will keep its San Francisco offices, Amazon said.

It’s not the first time Amazon has bought a social book site. Back in 2008, the company acquired Shelfari.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130328/amazon-buys-book-recommendation-site-goodreads/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130326/everybodys-a-curator-flipboards-mike-mccue-talks-about-new-version-of-social-magazine-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130326/everybodys-a-curator-flipboards-mike-mccue-talks-about-new-version-of-social-magazine-video/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2013 01:01:36 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=306686

There’s no doubt that the highly-valued Flipboard has been at the forefront of social publishing.

With its popular app for the Apple iPhone and iPads, the Silicon Valley startup now has 50 million readers, who use it to elegantly consume content from Facebook, Twitter and a myriad of sources from all over the Web.

Now, in its new second version, the company is moving from a show-me paradigm to a make-something one, allowing users to “create magazines,” according to Flipboard.

In fact, that’s a bit of a broad definition of create — Flipboard 2.0 is more about allowing regular people or professional publishers to curate any kind of magazine in any niche.

For example, in testing the app, I made a magazine about Pop-Tarts. (Does anyone have a problem with that?)

Using a new “plus” button and a pretty easy interface, it is meant to take self-expression to new levels using video, images, text and even music. To help grow audiences for these quasi-creators, as well as find stuff to use, Flipboard has also launched a new content search feature.

There should be some fun stuff created to keep users flipping on the service, but it’s clear the offering is also a lot about finding more revenue for the startup. Using specialized magazines, for example, publishers can instantly create one-offs of previously published content — from Vanity Fair’s “Royal Weddings” to Martha Stewart Living’s “Home How-Tos” — and presumably sell advertising against it.

Flipboard has also partnered with crafts retailer Etsy to make what is essentially a prettified catalog, complete with an integrated shopping cart, for which there are all kinds of lead fees.

Since it has remained independent so far despite some big acquisition interest, figuring out a solid business plan is important, especially since Flipboard did a massive $50 million fundraising round that valued it at $200 million two years ago.

Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, Comcast Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, Facebook co-founder and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, investor Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company run by former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

There are a lot of other new features in the latest Flipboard, but you can read Walt Mossberg’s review of it here, as well as watch my video interview below of Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue about it all, as well as its business outlook:

And here are some pretty screenshots to give you an idea of the magazine-mania possible:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130326/everybodys-a-curator-flipboards-mike-mccue-talks-about-new-version-of-social-magazine-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130325/yahoo-paid-30-million-in-cash-for-18-months-of-young-summly-entrepreneurs-time/ http://allthingsd.com/20130325/yahoo-paid-30-million-in-cash-for-18-months-of-young-summly-entrepreneurs-time/#comments Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:35:27 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=306362

Earlier today, Yahoo said it had acquired the trendy and decidedly stylish news reading app Summly, along with its telegenic and very young entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio.

Yahoo said it plans to close down the actual app and use the algorithmic summation technology that the 17-year-old D’Aloisio built with a small team of five, along with a major assist from Silicon Valley research institute SRI International, throughout its products.

While Yahoo did not disclose the price, several sources told me that the company paid $30 million — 90 percent in cash and 10 percent in stock — to buy the London-based Apple smartphone app.

And despite its elegant delivery, that’s a very high price, especially since Summly has been downloaded slightly less than one million times since launch — after a quick start amid much publicity over its founder — with about 90 million “summaries” read. Of course, like many such apps, it also had no monetization plan as yet.

What Yahoo is getting, though, is perhaps more valuable — the ability to put the fresh-faced D’Aloisio front and center of its noisy efforts to make consumers see Yahoo as a mobile-first company. That has been the goal of CEO Marissa Mayer, who has bought up a range of small mobile startups since she took over nine months ago and who has talked about the need for Yahoo to focus on the mobile arena above all.

Mayer met with D’Aloisio, said sources, although the deal was struck by voluble M&A head Jackie Reses.

Said one person close to the deal, about the founder: “Nick will be a great person to put in front of the media and consumers with Mayer to make Yahoo seem like it is a place that loves both entrepreneurs and mobile experiences, which in turn will presumably attract others like him.”

Having met the young man in question, who was in San Francisco in the fall on a fundraising trip, I can see the appeal. He’s both well-spoken and adorkable, as well as very adept at charming cranky media types like me by radiating with the kinetic energy of someone born in the mobile world (you can see that in full force in the video below with actor and Summly investor Stephen Fry).

Still, D’Aloisio is very young and presumably has a lot of other entrepreneurial goals and that’s why he agreed as part of the deal to only officially stay 18 months at Yahoo, multiple sources told me. In many cases, startup founders strike such short-term employment deals with big companies, agreeing to stay for a certain determined time period.

He will also remain in England, where he lives with his parents, said sources. In addition, only two of Summly’s employees will go to Yahoo with D’Aloisio.

That’s $10 million each, along with a nifty app Yahoo will not be using as is (too bad, as it would up the hip and fun factor of Yahoo’s apps by a factor of a gazillion if it were maintained).

“It works out on a lot of levels,” said another person close to the situation. “Nick is a founder that will make Mayer and Yahoo look cutting edge.”

Cue the parade of PR profiles of the young genius made millionaire, helping Yahoo become relevant again.

I have an email for comment into the always friendly D’Aloisio. But I don’t expect a reply, since he has apparently been specifically instructed by the martinets of Yahoo PR not to talk to me any longer — well, for 18 months at least! (Don’t worry, Nick, I don’t blame you and will still listen to whatever you are pitching next, since you are so dang compelling and I enjoyed using Summly!)

Until then, here’s the faboo Summly video, with the best chairs ever:

Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130325/yahoo-paid-30-million-in-cash-for-18-months-of-young-summly-entrepreneurs-time/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130323/apple-acquires-indoor-location-company-wifislam/ http://allthingsd.com/20130323/apple-acquires-indoor-location-company-wifislam/#comments Sat, 23 Mar 2013 23:41:51 +0000 Jessica E. Lessin http://allthingsd.com/?p=306133 Apple has acquired indoor-GPS company WifiSLAM, a sign that the war over indoor mobile location services is heating up.

Apple paid around $20 million for the Silicon Valley-based company, according to a person familiar with the matter who said the deal closed recently.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130323/apple-acquires-indoor-location-company-wifislam/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20130320/pinterest-acquires-mobile-startup-livestar/ http://allthingsd.com/20130320/pinterest-acquires-mobile-startup-livestar/#comments Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:54:09 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=305463 Pinterest announced Wednesday it had acquired Livestar, the small mobile-focused recommendations startup. Livestar’s three-engineer team will join Pinterest, but CEO Fritz Lanman will not; he’ll move on to another yet-to-be-announced startup, while maintaining an advisory role at Pinterest. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and Livestar will shut down its services immediately.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130320/pinterest-acquires-mobile-startup-livestar/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130315/dropbox-acquires-e-mail-startup-mailbox/ http://allthingsd.com/20130315/dropbox-acquires-e-mail-startup-mailbox/#comments Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:09:34 +0000 Mike Isaac and Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=303999 Dropbox announced on Friday that it had acquired Mailbox, the startup focused on changing the way users handle email on the smartphone.

“After spending time with Gentry, Scott, and the team, it became clear that their calling was the same as ours at Dropbox — to solve life’s hidden problems and reimagine the things we do every day,” Dropbox said in a blog post. “We all quickly realized that together we could save millions of people a lot of pain.”

The 14-member Mailbox team will report to Dropbox headquarters in San Francisco next week.

The Mailbox app launched only a little less than a month ago, where it gained much attention for attempting a new take on the way users access email on their mobile devices. Beginning with the iPhone and Gmail, Mailbox allowed for different ways of accessing email, including resurfacing a message after a few days or hours, and color-coding organization. Users were also prompted to swipe in different ways to carry out different actions.

However, the company had trouble dealing with demand, with many would-be users downloading the iPhone app but unable to use it while they waited for their turn to be let off the list. Some 1.3 million people made “reservations” to sign up for the app. Even without letting all of those people in, Mailbox is already delivering 60 million emails per day, the company said.

Mailbox explained in its own blog post on the acquisition, “We can’t wait to put Mailbox in the hands of everyone who wants it.” And of Dropbox: “They’ve got a ton of experience scaling services and are experts at handling people’s data with care.”

As with any sort of startup like Mailbox, the business model immediately came into question: How was a small email app supposed to start generating revenue?

The answer, it seems, is clear — now it doesn’t have to.

(Image courtesy of Revenant/Shutterstock.com)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130315/dropbox-acquires-e-mail-startup-mailbox/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20130314/facebook-snags-talent-from-nyc-design-firm-hot-studio/ http://allthingsd.com/20130314/facebook-snags-talent-from-nyc-design-firm-hot-studio/#comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:30:52 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=303755 Facebook announced Thursday it has made a talent deal, bringing in a number of designers from the San Francisco-based design firm Hot Studio. The “acqhire” brings over an undisclosed number of the team, and Facebook did not share the financial terms of the deal. “The transition will be careful and deliberate, occurring over the next few months,” Facebook said in a blog post. “When it’s finished, many of the talented individuals from Hot Studio will be embedded into our product design, communication design, research, engineering, and content strategy teams.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130314/facebook-snags-talent-from-nyc-design-firm-hot-studio/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20130313/linkedin-shares-reach-record-high/ http://allthingsd.com/20130313/linkedin-shares-reach-record-high/#comments Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:41:13 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=303330 Not two days after Kara Swisher reported that LinkedIn would soon acquire the Pulse news reader app for more than $50 million, shares of LinkedIn were trading at a record high on Wednesday morning, reaching $181.47 at their peak before settling back down around $179, a gain of about 2 percent for the day. The company also reported record earnings last quarter, outperforming analysts’ expectations.

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