27-year-old Danielle Morrill is co-founder and CEO of the new start-up Referly.

Referly aims to introduce incentives into discussions by regular people about regular things, by embedding affiliate links in their conversations. At launch today, it is a link shortener that appends an affiliate tracking code.

Many other companies, including MyLikes and Klout, try to reward people for their social media participation, but Morrill said she thinks they end up rewarding self-promoters and scammers rather than average people.

Referly has already raised seed funding and been accepted into the next Y Combinator round, and since then Morrill convinced her husband, Kevin Morrill, to join as co-founder and CTO from an engineering role at HelloFax, she said. Designer Al Abut, formerly of AOL, is also a co-founder.

Twilio recently hired former Jive exec Lynda Smith as chief marketing officer.

Assuming Yahoo gives its interim CEO real power — either by making him its actual CEO, or at least letting him behave as if he has the job — then he’ll finally have full control of a giant media company. That’s something he’s been working toward for a long time, despite his rep as a guy who enjoys buying companies more than running them.

Just like his predecessors, Levinsohn will have to untie Yahoo’s knotty Asian problem. He’ll also have to spend time repairing relationships with Facebook and figuring out what to do with a Microsoft search deal that hasn’t been a huge success.

But if Levinsohn gets to run Yahoo the way he wants to run Yahoo, he’ll focus on getting the most out of its media business, because that’s his strength.

Bear in mind that this is still a huge business — the portal attracts some 700 million visitors a month, which helped it generate nearly $1 billion in ad sales last quarter. But that business is listing and under attack from Google, Facebook, and a swarm of nimble start-ups pulling eyeballs and dollars away.

If you want to get a sense of what Levinsohn may try to do next, it’s good to review what he did last year, when he had control of the company’s U.S. operations — and what he tried to do but couldn’t get done.

• Ads: Yahoo used to have one of the Web’s best sales operations, but those days are long gone. Levisonsohn spent much of 2011 trying to fix that. Part of that involved restaffing his team, and part of it was a strategy that was supposed to cut out some of the ad tech middlemen and allow the company to increase its yield on the ads it sold. Those moves, which included a would-be alliance between Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, all went into a holding pattern when Scott Thompson took over in January. Levinsohn will try restarting that again now.
• M&A: Levinsohn has a reputation as a dealmaker because he’s made some pretty big deals. Most notably, he brought Myspace to News Corp. in 2005, then helped the company secure a $900 million ad deal with Google (News Corp. also owns this Web site). Last year, he tried to land another big fish, when he pushed to pursue Hulu. But Levinsohn couldn’t get buy-in from then-CEO Carol Bartz, and Hulu’s owners decided not to sell after all. I think Levinsohn would still be interested in the site under certain conditions, but he’d need more cash than he has on hand to do it. Selling off his Asian assets might make that possible. If he can’t land Hulu, I don’t see him chasing after Instagram-like companies with big price tags and no near-term revenue plans. I do see him making some plays on cheaper start-ups, as well as some technology plays, to shore up/replace the company’s very old infrastructure/platforms.

Google’s U.S. market share rose 0.1 percentage point to 66.5 percent in April from the prior month. Microsoft’s share also edged up 0.1 percentage point to 15.4 percent last month. Yahoo Inc.’s sites remained in the No. 3 spot, slipping 0.2 percentage points to 13.5 percent. IAC/InterActiveCorp.’s Ask.com’s share and AOL Inc.’s shares were unchanged at 3 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively.

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The earnings beat is nice for AOL. Not nice: Domestic display sales, a key metric, shrank 1 percent after climbing for several quarters. That’s going to be fresh meat for AOL critics like Starboard Value.

So what happened to domestic? “Domestic display advertising revenue declined primarily reflecting a decline in reserved impressions sold, partially offset by growth in reserved inventory pricing and Patch revenue,” AOL’s release says.

Later on in the release, we get a better sense of what may have happened: AOL’s audience is melting away. Traffic to AOL’s own properties is down 4 percent over the last year.

I imagine that Tim Armstrong will tell analysts that the decline isn’t wholly unexpected, because AOL’s dial-up unit, which still powers the whole operation, continues to shrink — that archaic business lost 14 percent of its subscribers in the last year.

On the other hand, this is a full year since AOL paid $315 million for the Huffington Post (and another $30+ million for TechCrunch, a few months before). I guess Armstrong could argue that things would be worse if he hadn’t bought the new sites, but that’s not very inspiring.

Update: A quick skim through the archives reminds me that shrinkage has been a recurring problem for AOL. The company also posted a 4 percent traffic drop in Q4 2011. And in Q3, traffic was flat. When I asked Armstrong about the issue then, he did indeed argue that the new sites were fighting off the decrease from dial-up users, and also argued that the company was still integrating Arianna and company (work in progress, apparently). He also predicted that traffic would tick up over time, and it has, just a bit — AOL is up to 108 million uniques versus 107 million six months ago. Key question: Does he expect more progress? Should shareholders?

AOL’s call starts at 8 am ET. We’ll see what Armstrong has to say then.

Update: AOL blames the Q1 drop on a number of things, including a specific but unnamed advertiser that stopped spending during the quarter. But Armstrong also tells analysts that his sales team’s pitch wasn’t resonating with advertisers. “A lot of it was because we have had a display strategy that was probably off-tune,” he says, adding “I was not happy with the domestic display.”

AOL says its display problems won’t be fixed this quarter, either, and predicts another drop. But it says domestic display will start moving up again in the second half of the year.

Meanwhile, AOL defends its much-maligned Patch unit, by noting that revenues are up and expenses are down at the local-news play this year. Armstrong tells investors that Patch will hit “run rate profitability” by the end of 2013. If they give him that much time.

The Washington Post reported this morning that its online ad revenue dropped 7 percent in the first three months of 2012. That follows a New York Times earnings release which saw that publisher’s Web ad business drop 2 percent.

(We should get some color on the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, when parent company News Corp. reports its earnings next week; News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

The Times said that digital sales were “under pressure” in the first quarter of the year, while the Post didn’t bother to add any color to its results. But it did note that online display ads were down 11 percent, while classifieds were down 1 percent.

Unlike the Times, the Post is essentially a regional newspaper, so it is harder to argue that its travails reflect a larger trend. And it’s also worth noting that the Post faces fierce competition for its core political coverage from Politico, an online/offline competitor that basically sprouted overnight.

But for the record: The rest of the Web publishing business — including not only Google but laggards like Yahoo — has been posting Q1 revenue increases.  [An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that AOL's ad revenues were up for Q1; the company won't post its numbers until next week.]

After buying the Huffington Post for $315 million, AOL gave Ms. Huffington editorial oversight of all its properties, including tech-news site TechCrunch, the patch.com network of local news sites, MovieFone and MapQuest. In addition, more than 30 AOL properties, such as Politics Daily, were absorbed by the Huffington Post.

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That brings Simulmedia’s total raise to some $27 million over three years. That money is going into Morgan’s take on “targeted” TV advertising, which promises to merge Web-style targeting with traditional TV ads.

There are lots of people chasing targeted TV ads, and to date none of them have gotten very far. Canoe Ventures, a consortium led by Comcast, Time Warner Cable and the rest of the cable industry, just imploded earlier this year.

The TV guys will probably get there, someday. But in the meantime, Morgan is trying a slightly less ambitious version that he says can work now.

Rather than trying to deliver customized ads to every TV viewer based on their individual set-top-box data, Simulmedia uses some set-top-box data (which it gets from providers like DirecTV, TiVo and AT&T) to try to find undervalued ad inventory. So, in theory, it can help an advertiser find a cheaper way to get in front of a specific audience it wants to reach.

If that sounds a bit like Web advertising, that makes sense. Morgan built two pioneering Internet ad companies — 24/7 Real Media and Tacoda, which were acquired by WPP and AOL — before tackling TV.

Simulmedia says it has run 200 campaigns for 24 brands since it pivoted to its current model (it had originally tried using the same technology to target TV advertising for TV programming), and Morgan says he is “very close to profitability.” This is the second time Morgan has funded the company with an inside round: The same group of investors put in about $9 million a year ago.

According to sources close to the situation, Demand Media was deep into discussions with a private equity firm to complete a deal that would have taken the online content company private, nearing a price that was double its current value.

But Demand abandoned the effort this past week — which was born from an aggressive attempt by Boston-based Thomas H. Lee Partners to purchase the company for a price of up to $1.2 billion. That was due to a number of challenges, including complications related to its financing and the ability to retain executives in its aftermath.

The move on Demand by private investors is perhaps no surprise, and is part of a wider trend related to some Internet companies whose stocks have a depressed value relative to the worth of their assets.

Among companies having been and also being evaluated by private equity firms, whose business it is to turned the undervalued into a goldmine: Yahoo and AOL.

And also Demand, which is now worth only $605 million, a market cap that is off 65 percent since it went public in February 2011. Shares now trade at $7.25 each.

That depressed share price has been due to a number of issues, most especially changes to Google’s search algorithm to improve results. Called Panda, the changes at the search giant — a critical partner of Demand’s — has cut traffic to its major content sites and also called into question its ability to monetize its scaled editorial efforts.

Such a situation is nearly irresistible to PE firms — in this case, Lee, which approached Demand.

Several sources said that the board threw out a hefty number that it assumed would shut down any interest and the pair began talking with an initial offer to take the company private at $11.28 a share.

That equals close to $1 billion for Demand, which also has more than $100 million in cash. But sources said Lee and Demand also discussed the addition of a large loan as part of the ongoing discussions, for possible acquisitions related to a content roll-up strategy it had, which would bring the total up to $1.2 billion.

One source underscored that the board of the Santa Monica, Calif., company had no interest or intention to sell the business, but that the premium was large enough that it engaged.

The deal from Lee, which also included a strategy of splitting up the content arm from Demand’s lucrative domain-registar business.

There were also large cash-out provisions for major shareholders, as well as for CEO and co-founder Richard Rosenblatt.

Thus, the two sides engaged intensely in the last several weeks in crafting an agreement, although the devil would prove to be in the details.

One big issue is that taking Demand private was still a big financial commitment for Lee — which tried to engage some of its limited partners in the transaction — as well as other investors, including Silicon Valley’s Marc Andreessen.

That proved harder than Lee thought, said sources, with some balking at the firm’s ability to make a big enough score on the possible turnaround.

“It was hoped it would be a Skype situation, but there were worries,” said one source, referring to the blockbuster sale of the Internet telephony company by private investors to Microsoft for $8.5 billion last year. That deal was widely considered a PE home run, given the excessive premium paid for it.

Demand’s challenges increasingly worried the firm as it moved forward, sources said, causing it to reevaluate its earlier bid several times.

Also a worry: Retaining major talent, including Rosenblatt and others, after they sold large chunks of their equity.

After Lee asked for more time to complete the financing, Demand ended the talks last week.

Another source, as is typical in these endings, said it was the Lee that walked away (who knows and, really, who cares — both sides were engaged seriously).

One thing was true: “Demand was definitely at the altar, but it did not get to the vows,” said one source.

Another source noted that the board also determined that Demand’s situation was improving, and that new trends are showing that the bottom might be been reached. The company reports its first-quarter earnings on May 8, which is expected to show some traction related to its many challenges.

“There is nothing Lee could do that Demand could not do for itself,” said one person. “So throwing in the towel seemed premature for now.”

Lee declined to comment, as did Demand.

The investor disclosed in a filing Friday that as recently as Wednesday its chief executive, Jeffrey Smith, had discussions with a member of AOL’s board, Fred Reynolds, about “a potential resolution to the proxy contest.” The filing added that “to date, the parties have not been able to reach an amicable resolution.”

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Although intellectual property law exists to encourage innovation and invention, patents have become the one legal way private companies can exercise a monopoly over the market. Oversized patent portfolios and prolonged patent lawsuits translate into less consumer choice and higher prices. Effectively, patents become the end in and of themselves, and no longer a means for supporting innovation.

These lawsuits have caused real concern at the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, where the patent wars have raised the prospect of anti-competitive activities. The DOJ is charged with viewing the market as a whole. For that reason, the Department of Justice has invoked a little-known form of consumer protection in ensuring the Patent Wars don’t put new technologies out of the consumer’s reach.

It has been well publicized that the battles between tech powerhouses like Google, Apple and Microsoft go far beyond the features of their latest devices. As many of these companies continue to focus large amounts of time and treasure in the courtroom, there is a concern that innovation will take a backseat to genuine competition on tech. Since Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility last year, things have especially heated up among the three major players — a situation that can only worsen with Microsoft’s acquisition of AOL’s patent portfolio, which is a symptom of a patent “arms race.”

No longer obtained to protect a new technology or a particular state of art, patents are now used in the smartphone arena to block other players from entrance into the arena, or to stop one company from achieving a dominant position.

A patent-centric strategy works extremely well in the software industry because sets of international standards allow our mass communications devices to work together seamlessly. If a company obtains a patent governing one of these standards, or for technology that is widely relied upon (even if not directed to a specific standard), that company can put a chokehold on the market.

Specifically, rival companies have attempted to block Google’s Android operating system and handsets, which Google licenses to other companies for free, while Apple and Samsung have been engaged in a number of lawsuits over handset technology. One such lawsuit resulted in a suspension of iPad and iPhone sales in Germany.

In fact, when so many patents protect vital, standardized technologies with such broad language, lawsuits are certain to follow. And a glut of patent lawsuits can mean licensing deals, which in turn mean higher prices as the costs of production come to include those licensing deals. In a worst case scenario, a licensing deal can’t be reached and the technology is unavailable to the consumer.

And while the lawsuits have played out largely amid corporate attorneys and IP specialists, the consumer isn’t without an advocate as the patent wars rage. As leverage to avoid antitrust lawsuits, the Department of Justice has emphasized a little-known tool to regulate the cost of patent licenses. It can exert pressure to require that crucial patents be licensed under a set of terms known as FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) terms.

These terms set strict guidelines regarding the costs of licensing and prevent companies holding vital patents from setting exorbitant, unfair prices. For example, the DOJ recently pressured a consortium led by Apple to commit to FRAND licensing when it bought various Nortel and Novell patents. The government tacitly hinted that it would block the acquisition if the consortium didn’t agree to FRAND terms. If the DOJ hadn’t stepped in, the consortium would have been able to exert enormous leverage on the consumer electronics market.

Google is being required to maintain FRAND terms with the patents that it received upon purchasing Motorola Mobility. Google also bought patents from IBM under those terms.

In fact, companies holding patents which are considered to be crucial to a particular standard may be required to license those patents by the relevant governing standards body under FRAND terms.

Some companies do choose to license their patents widely, even without explicit FRAND requirements. Microsoft, for example, has chosen to license its patents widely, having reached licensing agreements with makers of more than 70 percent of the Android-based smartphones sold in the U.S. On the other hand, Steve Jobs famously threatened to do whatever was necessary to force Google to significantly change Android to remove features that Jobs felt were proprietary to Apple, refusing to even consider payment from Google to license Apple’s patents.

It’s likely the smartphone war will end in a variety of licensing agreements and cross-licensing agreements. Whether those agreements result in competitive prices for the consumer depends on how effectively the DOJ wields its “FRAND” sword.

D’vorah Graeser, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Graeser Associates International (GAI), an international intellectual property firm specializing in the preparation, filing and prosecution of medical device, biotechnology, pharmaceutical, bioinformatics and software patents. Dr. Graeser is a U.S. Patent Agent and is not an attorney at law; none of the above should be construed as legal advice.

“We never felt it was necessary or even important for us to own all the patents,” Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said in an interview.

As first reported by AllThingsD, Facebook is paying Microsoft $550 million for access to a big chunk of the patents that the company acquired earlier this month from AOL.

The rules of the AOL auction required parties to bid for the entirety of the patent portfolio up for sale, and prevented companies from teaming up to bid. However, Smith said, Microsoft’s plan all along was to sell off a chunk of the patents in order to recoup some of its costs.

“That was our plan from the day we went into the auction,” he said.

Microsoft and Facebook began working on a deal the day after Redmond emerged as the winner of the AOL patents.

With the deal, Microsoft got a license to all of AOL’s patents, including those AOL was not selling and those now being resold to Facebook. Microsoft is also holding on to about 275 of the former AOL patents.

Microsoft is in a bit of a tricky situation, however, as it now can appear to be taking sides in a dispute between two major partners: Facebook and Yahoo.

It’s a delicate balance for Microsoft, which would prefer to keep both companies happy.

“We have a very high regard for the value of the Yahoo patent portfolio,” Smith said. “It’s an important portfolio that reflects all of the tremendous value Yahoo brought to this space, and we are very sensitive to the importance of our relationship with Yahoo and our relationship with Facebook.”

The deal comes as the social network prepares for its initial stock offering and looks to protect itself in an increasingly litigious intellectual property environment. Yahoo sued Facebook last month, alleging infringement of 10 patents.

Update: Microsoft has issued a press release on the deal, which covers a portion of the patents that Microsoft paid $1 billion earlier this month to acquire from AOL.

In that auction, Microsoft got the ability to own or assign some 925 patents from AOL, plus a license to AOL’s remaining patents, including 300 patents not for sale. Facebook had also been interested in the AOL patents, according to Bloomberg.

Microsoft is hanging on to about 265 of the patents it bought from AOL.

REDMOND, Wash. and MENLO PARK, Calif. — April 23, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. and Facebook announced today a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will assign to Facebook the right to purchase a portion of the patent portfolio it recently agreed to acquire from AOL Inc. Facebook has agreed to purchase this portion for $550 million in cash.

In the initial AOL auction, Microsoft secured the ability to own or assign approximately 925 U.S. patents and patent applications plus a license to AOL’s remaining patent portfolio, which contains approximately 300 additional patents that were not for sale.As a result of today’s agreement, Facebook will obtain ownership of approximately 650 AOL patents and patent applications, plus a license to the AOL patents and applications that Microsoft will purchase and own.

Upon closing of this transaction with Facebook, Microsoft will retain ownership of approximately 275 AOL patents and applications; a license to the approximately 650 AOL patents and applications that will now be owned by Facebook; and a license to approximately 300 patents that AOL did not sell in its auction.

“Today’s agreement with Facebook enables us to recoup over half of our costs while achieving our goals from the AOL auction,” said Brad Smith, executive vice president and general counsel, Microsoft. “As we said earlier this month, we had submitted the winning AOL bid in order to obtain a durable license to the full AOL portfolio and ownership of certain patents that complement our existing portfolio.”

“Today’s agreement with Microsoft represents an important acquisition for Facebook,” said Ted Ullyot, general counsel, Facebook. “This is another significant step in our ongoing process of building an intellectual property portfolio to protect Facebook’s interests over the long term.”The parties are evaluating the accounting treatment for these transactions. These transactions are also subject to customary closing conditions, including clearance under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended.

AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher contributed to this report.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Or, at least, that was the undertone of eBay’s conference call yesterday.

The company reported strong first-quarter results, beating both top- and bottom-line projections. It also raised guidance for the year, and said its business is stronger than it has been in five years.

“Our marketplaces business has turned the corner, shifting from defense to offense, and is delivering accelerating results,” said eBay’s CEO John Donahoe in the call.

This morning, the San Jose company’s stock was up nearly 16 percent, soaring to $41.58 a share. The rally easily pushes the company’s stock past its previous 52-week high of $38.18.

A number of years ago, eBay had hit rock bottom, sort of like Yahoo or AOL today.

Since then, Donahoe has been working hard to reinvent the entire eBay.com experience. He says the first quarter results are the first indication that the work is starting to pay off.

“It’s a significantly improved experience, and it’s not just current users, but it’s new users, who are coming to eBay and saying they really like it — maybe they haven’t been here in 10 years, but they are saying ‘Wow, this is different,’” Donahoe said in an interview. ”The pace of innovation is accelerating.”

The revival was fueled by a new TV advertising campaign around the holidays that had the tagline “Get it new, get it now,” which highlighted the company’s fixed price business. During the quarter, the company’s fixed priced business grew 18 percent. The company said the number of new buyers on the site also was up 9.5 percent in the quarter.

The company’s first quarter revenues totaled $3.3 billion, an increase of 29 percent year over year. For the same period, net income totaled $570 million, increasing 20 percent.

The strong results were attributable to the turnaround in its marketplaces business, but also PayPal and the recently acquired GSI Commerce division.

During the quarter, PayPal revenue increased 32 percent year over year to $1.3 billion, and GSI generated $715 million in merchandise sales, up 26 percent over the same period a year earlier.

In addition to conducting a turnaround, eBay is also aggressively pushing into new markets.

With PayPal, it’s rolling out new payments services, like mobile payments and in-store payments at check-out. With the help of GSI and a new division called X.commerce, the company is also concentrating on building tools that third-party offline and online retailers can use to more effectively compete against Amazon.

It is both of those businesses that Donahoe is tremendously excited about.

Yesterday, I reported that Square, which is a start-up in the mobile payments space, was attempting to raise capital at a $4 billion valuation — providing some validation to a similar PayPal product called Here.

“What I’m enormously excited about is I think PayPal Here has real capabilities that are even better than Square’s,” he said. “I think there’s enormous growth in that sector.”

It goes back to March 2006, when BlackBerry phone maker RIM agreed to pay a whopping $612.5 million to settle a mobile email patent infringement case with patent-holding company NTP. This comes to $6 for each BlackBerry ever sold. So-called patent trolls, those that own patents but don’t sell products or services, are a pain in the side of those that do.

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I’ve never worked for a company that has been as scrutinized, criticized, and coal-raked as this one. … We have critics on Wall Street, critics in the media, local critics, national critics, the business press, the journalism reviews, bloggers, etc. There are so many that I’ve come to think of them as a single large, screechy, off-key band called BI and the Haters. It’s music to kill yourself by.

– Patch editor in chief Brian Farnham bids farewell to AOL’s network of hyperlocal sites and its critics

That’s a side component of the $1 billion patent sale that AOL and Microsoft announced this morning. As part of the transaction, AOL announced that it was selling off “stock of an AOL subsidiary” at a loss, in a move that’s supposed to reduce its overall tax bill.

AOL didn’t disclose the name of that subsidiary in its press release, but a person familiar with the transaction has clued me in: It’s Netscape.

Microsoft will buy the underlying patents for the old browser, but AOL will hang on to the brand and the related Netscape businesses, which make up a grab bag of stuff these days: An ISP, a URL, a brand name, etc.

All of which probably makes sense on someone’s ledger books. But the transaction may still make a few heads spin, at least for people who remember Internet history and/or have access to Wikipedia.

So there’s no such thing as work-life balance. There’s work, and there’s life, and there’s no balance.

– Sheryl Sandberg, in an interview for the PBS/AOL digital and broadcast series “Makers: Women Who Make America”

Mr. Case, an AOL Inc. co-founder and venture capitalist, was among the biggest behind-the-scenes supporters of so-called JOBS Act, personally appealing to top-ranking officials of both parties in the House and the Senate to pass it, according to several lobbyists and lawmakers.

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At the time, the Lerers’ pitch was that they were different because they were primarily focused on New York-area companies, and that’s still true.

But now they’re starting to carve out a new niche for themselves by actually building some homegrown companies, too.

These come in two flavors. Some are full-blown start-ups where they are taking on a hands-on role, like YouTube channel programmer Bedrocket Media, or the new video news start-up they aren’t saying much about yet.

The other ones are “service” companies they are helping launch, with the notion that they’ll help their other portfolio companies with functions like PR and marketing.

One thread connecting a lot of these ventures: People who have spent time at the Huffington Post.

The PR company, for instance, is run by Mario Ruiz, who until recently was HuffPo’s head flack. Former Huffington Post social media editor Rob Fishman is running Kingfish Labs with the Lerers’s backing. Former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry is running both Soho Tech Labs, a sandbox for super-early-stage start-ups, and Rebel Mouse, his own mysterious social media thingamabob that will launch in the next month or so. Etc.

All of which makes perfect sense, since Ken Lerer was a Huffington Post co-founder, and his partner, Eric Hippeau, was HuffPo’s CEO until AOL acquired the site a year ago.

Still, you wonder if AOL CEO Tim Armstrong considered the fact that some of the $315 million he spent on HuffPo last year would end up reinvested in start-ups populated by HuffPo employees — in the building that used that used to house HuffPo itself.

In any case, now that Lerer Ventures is a couple of years into this — they’ve raised $33 million so far, and have invested in 100 start-ups — it seems like a good time to check in on them.

Here’s a video interview with Hippeau and Ben Lerer, where they talk about their philosophy, portfolio and the possibility of raising yet another fund. (Extra features, free of charge: Something off-camera that seemed to occupy Lerer’s attention, as well as some bona fide New York City audio interference at the end.)

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/irin-k)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120405/two-years-and-33-million-later-startup-investor-lerer-ventures-starts-building-its-own-companies/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120404/tablet-reading-apps-zite-pulse-strike-publisher-deals/ http://allthingsd.com/20120404/tablet-reading-apps-zite-pulse-strike-publisher-deals/#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:00:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=193077 More tablet experimentation from publishers, this time via reading apps Pulse and Zite. Pulse, which already offered readers excerpts from Bonnier’s Popular Science magazine, will now be doing that with 20 other Bonnier titles. And Zite will be bringing content from eight publishers — including VentureBeat, CNN and AOL’s Huffington Post — to its apps.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120404/tablet-reading-apps-zite-pulse-strike-publisher-deals/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120330/unpaid-huffington-post-bloggers-remain-unpaid/ http://allthingsd.com/20120330/unpaid-huffington-post-bloggers-remain-unpaid/#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2012 20:43:32 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=191755 Turns out you can’t give away your work, then demand to get paid after the fact.

What? You already knew this? Then you were ahead of the U.S. judicial system, which had to spend the last year on a silly class-action suit brought by a former Huffington Post contributor.

Jonathan Tasini, who compared himself and other unpaid HuffPo writers to “modern-day slaves,” was demanding a third of the $315 million Arianna Huffington and her backers got when they sold the company to AOL last year. The logic: He helped build the site up, and, well …

Not really any more logic than that, really. Tasini and other contributors agreed to write for free from the get-go.

U.S. District Judge John Koeltl has a 24-page decision dismissing Tasini’s complaint with prejudice, and I’ve embedded it at the bottom of this post. But I’m not suggesting you read it. Here’s the common-sense essence:

No one forced the plaintiffs to give their work to The Huffington Post for publication and the plantiffs candidly admit that they did not expect compensation … Quite simply, the plaintiffs offered a service and the defendants offered exposure in return, and the transaction occurred exactly as advertised.

Any questions? Right. So here’s the Red Hot Chili Peppers:

huffington post blogging case

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120330/unpaid-huffington-post-bloggers-remain-unpaid/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120330/retrosift-scans-your-emails-for-every-cringeworthy-photo-youve-ever-sent/ http://allthingsd.com/20120330/retrosift-scans-your-emails-for-every-cringeworthy-photo-youve-ever-sent/#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:29:01 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=191615 Some photos are better left buried. Retrosift is a good reminder of that.

The new online app sifts through all the photos you’ve ever sent via email — and if your habits were like mine before sharing through mobile apps became the norm, you attached a lot of photos to email — and organizes them in an album. Photos can be filtered by year or by the name of a person you exchanged photos with.

The app is pretty simple to use: You go to Retrosift.com, type in your email address and are asked to allow access to the app. Retrosift then begins sifting through your photos, and several minutes later presents them in a timeline. Fond memories and embarrassment ensue. If you’d like to save or share the pictures, you can send them to Dropbox or Facebook from the app. Retrosift works with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL mail accounts.

And since giving third-party apps access to email is cringeworthy in itself to some people, users can then disallow access to the app once their photos have been dug up. (For example, in Gmail, you can go to Authorizing Applications & Sites under the My Account area in Gmail, and revoke access.)

Retrosift does come at a small cost: The company is charging a one-time fee of five dollars for three months of access to the photo timeline. It’s not an auto-subscription, so once the three months are up, you lose access to the Retrosift timeline. Of course, the photos are all still there in your email inbox; you’ll just have to dig to find them yourself, assuming you actually want to do that.

Retrosift was created by three former Yelp employees, Bryan Byrne, Rhett Garber and Neil Kumar, who came up with the idea when Byrne’s mother was trying to find an email containing a photo of one of her granddaughters, born three years earlier. Byrne says the trio doesn’t know yet how they plan to build out their company — or if that’s even related to the Retrosift app — and for now, they’re just looking to build a fun app.

“Rather than just talk about vaporware and bigger visions, we said, let’s just build a utility that’s good, and then focus on the big picture,” Bryne says.

Photo-sharing site Flickr also has a tool that allows people to upload images from their email accounts. Pixable is a mobile and Web app that sorts through your Facebook photos for you, presenting them on a Pinterest-like board and emailing you the top photos of the day from your Facebook network. And lots of other mobile apps now aim to search and sort through the many apps on your mobile phone, including PhotoCal, Photo-Sort and Sortshots. Other apps aim to zap your duplicate photo files.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120330/retrosift-scans-your-emails-for-every-cringeworthy-photo-youve-ever-sent/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120328/inside-aols-1-billion-patent-portfolio/ http://allthingsd.com/20120328/inside-aols-1-billion-patent-portfolio/#comments Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:44:56 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=190871 Tim Armstrong has been pumping up AOL’s patents in public. Privately, he has reportedly hired bankers to shop the Web company’s portfolio.

But what does he have to sell? At an investor conference this month, Armstrong said that AOL has 700 to 800 “really important” patents, and that about half of them are “incredibly important” for Internet users.

Patent research shop Envision IP has gone through AOL’s portfolio — or at least some of it — and concludes that there’s something to Armstrong’s pitch.

It thinks there’s a lot of stuff there that is core to instant messaging and email, along with some core Web browser tech — which makes some sense, given AOL’s history and its acquisition of companies like Netscape and ICQ:

Many of these patents relate to fundamental online communication technologies, stemming from AOL’s early dominance in the instant messaging and email markets. In addition, AOL has a large number of early patents related to cache optimization, webpage rendering, search engine technologies, and multimedia compression and transmission.

While AOL does not seem to have any patents that could be deemed essential to wireless standards, it certainly owns many technologies that are fundamental to electronic and voice messaging, Internet user experience, multimedia sharing, and web-based data retrieval, technologies that have become common place in today’s online world.

The biggest chunk of this stuff, Envision thinks, relates to online messaging, which makes up more than 20 percent of the portfolio.

How much is that worth? Starboard Value, the fund that has started a proxy battle with Armstrong, thinks it could generate $1 billion in licensing value. We’ll see what AOL’s bankers are able to fetch.

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