Yahoo has bought Summly, the mobile news reader app founded by a young British entrepreneur.

In a statement, the London-based company said it had bought the tiny outfit, which will close its app. The price was not disclosed (although I will try to find out soon enough). But the company had been seeking additional funding recently at a big valuation, in stark contrast to its small size (less than one million downloads), staff (five) and business model (zero revenue).

(Update: Sources tell me Yahoo paid just about $30 million for Summly, mostly in cash, with 10 percent in stock, for three employees.)

AllThingsD.com reported in December that Yahoo was looking closely at the startup, with CEO Marissa Mayer meeting with its founder Nick D’Aloisio. As we noted then, Yahoo was aiming at trendy mobile “acq-hires” to give the sleepy Silicon Valley Internet giant some sizzle and improve its moribund mobile offerings.

Mayer has been buying up a range of similar small mobile startups, largely for their teams of talented and innovative engineers. And, at a recent employee meeting, its M&A head Jackie Reses said the Silicon Valley company was looking at two significant purchases and a half-dozen smaller ones.

Said Yahoo: “Founder Nick D’Aloisio and the Summly team are joining Yahoo! in the coming weeks. While the Summly app will close, we will acquire the technology and you’ll see it come to life throughout Yahoo!’s mobile experiences soon. We’re not disclosing purchase price or other terms of the deal.”

Yahoo mobile head Adam Cahan wrote a blog post about the deal, as did D’Aloisio, who also tweeted news of it:

@summly has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo!! Excited for the next chapter of Summly! Thanks to all who have supported me.

— Nick D’Aloisio (@nickdaloisio) March 25, 2013

News readers have been getting snapped up of late. CNN acquired Zite for $20 million in 2011, while we reported that LinkedIn was in the midst of buying Pulse for upwards of $50 million.

The 17-year-old D’Aloisio created the high-profile news reading app, which garnered much attention in the last year in the mobile space, which is probably what attracted Yahoo to it.

As I wrote:

D’Aloisio — who looks like he could easily be a member of One Direction if this tech thing did not work out — is perhaps a perfect storm for Yahoo, which is seeking to show that it can attract innovative, young entrepreneurs to the company, while also looking to strengthen its nearly bare mobile cupboard.

Summly is all that and a bag of (fish and) chips, with a very slick app for the Apple iPhone that has become one of the more popular in the App Store since it was re-launched last month. The company has said it has been downloaded 500,000 times.

It deserves the attention, as it is a pleasure to use — think an even hipper version of Flipboard with some more sass. The handsomely designed app summarizes news stories — all using a natural language processing algorithm — in only a few sentences and in under 400 characters. Users can then swipe through topics and stories quickly and click in to be directed to the full story on the original news site.

Summly originally started as a prototype app called Trimit, which soon garnered attention and seed funding from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing’s investment firm. In no time, it had a range of other investors, ponying up about $1.5 million, including trendy ones like Ashton Kutcher and tech types like Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

Since then, it has been striking content deals, including with News Corp. (which owns this site) and others, which seem to be attracted by its investor pedigree, its solid technology and — perhaps most of all — its media-darling founder.

To get an idea of the adorable hip factor involved, here’s a really clever video D’Aloisio did with actor Stephen Fry, who is also an investor in the startup:

Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo.

And one of the top director candidates is well-regarded Hollywood exec Peter Chernin, said several sources.

He is an obvious choice, having been a top exec at News Corp. for many years. Since he left in mid-2009, Chernin has forged a successful film and television career, producing such hits as “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “New Girl.”

But, unlike many media execs, he has also focused on garnering much deeper digital experience.

Chernin was key to the formation of the Hulu premium online service, for example, and is also a board member of the Pandora streaming music service. He has also been making digital and media investments in Asia.

(And, interestingly, although apropos of nothing, Chernin’s former boss, Rupert Murdoch, has become an avid tweeter, too.)

Sources said Chernin has not decided if he even wants such a board seat, and Twitter management is still only in the early stages of its board effort, presumably to replace Flipboard’s Mike McCue.

The entrepreneur left the board earlier this year, after it was clear that his social media app and Twitter were on a collision course (or an acquisition one, depending how you looked at it).

But the addition of a media-savvy director — or even two — also makes sense in the context of the past year of Twitter’s evolution.

The brainchild of Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, Twitter first began as a microblogging social network.

While it did attract a lot of attention due to its celebrity tweeters — such as actor Ashton Kutcher and famebot Kim Kardashian — the management and board of Twitter is largely tech-centric in experience.

But, more recently, the service has taken its shape as a consumption-based media company, where some 40 percent of its user base read and consume content rather than create it. That is to say, they watch, but they don’t tweet.

Such a strategic direction is a natural extension for bringing in more advertising spending from outside partners, especially big media companies that have both the eyeballs and dollars that the company is hoping to attract.

Twitter is now commonly used throughout the media space in a variety of roles, from branding to audience-gauging, and also sometimes even as a plot device.

(That said, you won’t catch CEO Dick Costolo outright admitting Twitter’s media-company status; he still wants the Silicon Valley cred of being valued as a technology giant first.)

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment on any effort to bring in new directors; Chernin has not yet responded to a query for comment.

The space is already stiff with competition. Viddy, Socialcam, Klip, Mobli — all are fighting for dominance in the space. And now, yet another competitor is throwing its hat into the ring.

Vyclone, the mobile application brainchild of David King Lassman and Joe Sumner, made its debut on Apple’s App Store on Thursday morning as a social video application that aims to disrupt the already-crowded space. How, you ask? By incorporating another social layer into the app with multiple cameras.

It works like so: Imagine you’re at a concert. You begin filming the band using Vyclone while a friend of yours on the opposite side of the mosh pit decides to do the same. And perhaps yet another two friends in the balcony film their own 60-second clips.

After all three finish shooting and uploading their footage to Vyclone’s servers, the app algorithmically cuts and edits a video using the four (or fewer) different video streams, creating one supercut out of all the footage. The app figures out who was shooting at that moment using GPS location data, and automatically includes those streams of footage into the cut.

After all that is said and done, you’ve ended up shooting and editing a live music video from multiple angles over the span of a few minutes. And if you don’t like the clip it creates, you can go back in and edit it yourself, applying an array of filters and choosing your own angles.

The idea first came to Sumner when he was on tour with his band in Lithuania two years ago. The band had sold little in the way of records, yet many in the audience were singing along to his songs.

“Everyone was filming,” Sumner told me in an interview. “At the end of the tour, there were already hundreds of videos on YouTube. I thought that surely there had to be some way we could connect all of these videos together.”

Thus, with the help of tech vet Lassman and a team of about 13 engineers based in Los Angeles, Vyclone was pieced together over the course of the next two years. The app obviously isn’t exclusive to concerts — the two tell me it’s great for storytelling in general, be it at a well-attended event or among a few friends on their own — it just happened to come to Sumner after a show.

The newly remixed clip, of course, is socially sharable. You can choose to share it with only the few friends you’ve shot it with (the “crew”), with everyone in your immediate vicinity (the “crowd”) or with everyone. If you choose the latter, that clip is pinned to the location from then on, so that other Vyclone users who visit your location in the future can see that video — day and date — pinned to the map view inside Vyclone. You can also save the clip to your iPhone locally, which means you can upload the video to YouTube and share the link out via the Web.

A few caveats: The friends must be within 120 feet of one another, as that’s the limit Vyclone currently puts on its GPS sensors. Also, you’re limited at the moment to a max of four different video streams.

These aren’t, however, the largest limiting factors. First, there’s the problem of audio. Instead of cutting between audio inputs depending on what angle you’re viewing from, Vyclone clips use only the audio from the camera that began recording first. When that ends, it switches over to the track that plays until the end. That means even if you’re watching someone talk in one part of the video, you may not hear their voice.

Second, there’s bandwidth, a problem which is fairly obvious in nature. Lots of video data transfer on 3G networks isn’t going to move fast, and can stutter up the video feed at times. Even if Vyclone sticks around long enough to the age where we’re all using 4G devices with great LTE reception, there’s still the matter of exceeding your data plan. Sticking to Wi-Fi when using Vyclone is probably best.

Finally, there’s the user problem, one that any would-be social network faces. The app doesn’t succeed unless it has a base of users to collaborate on clips. So if it doesn’t catch on with crowds — or at the very least, with your immediate circle of friends — it’ll just be a lot of single-frame videos like we’re already seeing from other social video apps.

These issues notwithstanding, Vyclone is fun as heck to use. And the technology is super exciting to think of its uses in other, larger networks. Imagine a company like Google, pouring its all into social right now, buying Vyclone and incorporating it into Google+. It’s directly in line with Hangouts, Google+’s popular group video chat application.

Or perhaps Vyclone makes it a media play, selling to a company like Livenation. The music giant could easily market the social video sharing aspect to its customer base to attract them to more concerts.

But acquisition isn’t at the top of their minds today (so they say). Backed by an initial funding round of $2.7 million led by the likes of A Grade Investments (Ashton Kutcher’s venture outfit), with contributions from Livenation and Dreamworks, the team is pushing ahead to truly win in the social video space. “Our focus right now,” Lassman says, “is getting this product out and into the hands of as many people as possible, making them aware that they no longer have to record videos in isolation anymore.”

Will Vyclone “win” social video apps? I don’t know. After all, Socialcam did just sell to Autodesk for $60 million. Still, Instagram set the bar for winning. We’ll see how well Vyclone does.

Here are Sumner, Lassman and I shooting our own video during our interview last week. Pardon my excessive use of the word “dude.”

The site will now feature glossy “wish lists” of properties, some of them picked by its staff, some picked by famous and tasteful users like actor/investor Ashton Kutcher and designer Yves Behar, and others picked by each users’ friends.

The wish list feature takes advantage of the one million professional photos Airbnb has paid to have taken of its users’ rentals. You can think of it sort of like a social magazine of Airbnb properties, with each user seeing a personalized feed of friends’ wish lists, as well as popular and featured wish lists.

The idea is to encourage browsing and serendipitous discovery of interesting properties, said Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky yesterday. Chesky, who is a RISD-trained designer himself and prides his company on its design, hosted a mini press conference to introduce the wish lists.

Chesky said the feature is an effort to move beyond Airbnb as a utility for searching by location and price. He deadpanned that while in testing internally, productivity among Airbnb employees declined massively.

I do wonder if featured locations are will be endlessly booked, making this whole discovery process frustrating for users, but Chesky said Airbnb will make an effort to program the wish lists to include an array of available proporties.

For those who still just want to book places to stay without distraction, the search box on the home page as well as the rental pages remain unchanged.

According to sources close to the situation, Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue has approached Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and co-founder Jack Dorsey about moving off the board of Twitter.

It is not clear when McCue — who became a director of the San Francisco social communications company in late 2010 — will step down, but it could come soon.

The reason, sources said, is McCue’s growing feeling that the companies are on a product collision course, with a possible troubled or perhaps more attractive result.

In other words, Flipboard will either face increasing rivalry from Twitter or will end up as a possible acquisition target for it or other companies.

“How users consume and use Twitter is a key part of its future, and that is what Flipboard does well already,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “There is going to be an inevitable crossroads for the two companies.”

Indeed, Twitter has bought several companies that help users read and discover, such as Summify.

The goal has been to better make sense of the massive amount of data that the service produces daily; to that end, Twitter has pushed to improve its user interface design on a number of devices.

And Twitter is a big part of Flipboard’s app, which is very dependent on the tweet feed and accounts for 70 percent of its links, sources said.

Flipboard is also more of a “mobile first” company, which is where Twitter is also headed even more aggressively.

Already popular on the Apple iPad, Flipboard launched its iPhone app late last year and it is prepping a version for Google Android soon.

That’s why, in addition to being a rival, it is also an obvious acquisition target for Twitter, as well as others such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

In fact, Google already tried to buy it last year, before Flipboard did a massive $50 million fundraising round that valued it at $200 million.

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

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll, Flipboard launched to much attention in mid 2010.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate personalized format.

Google has mounted a competitor, called Currents, as has Yahoo with its Livestand offering, neither of which have gotten much traction. In fact, sources said, Yahoo is likely to shut Livestand down completely.

There have also been a spate of other similar readers, such as Pulse and Zite.

Spokespersons for both Flipboard and Twitter politely declined comment.

I break down a product the same way I break down a character I’m going to play. I try to get inside the mind of that person — the user, the consumer — and figure out why they’re doing something and what they want from it.

– Ashton Kutcher‘s investing philosophy

Okay, okay, we get it: Morgan Stanley got the coveted left-hand lead position on Facebook’s blockbuster IPO filing. Goldman Sachs is there, too, but in the third-place, always-a-bridesmaid spo,t and is crying big salty tears about the injustice of it all.

It’s hard to feel badly for overpaid investment bankers, and focusing on them is kind of like endlessly discussing the lawyers who processed your mortgage, when the focus should be on the house you’re buying.

Does anyone except a few Richie Rich ZIP Codes in Manhattan care about this one deet of the initial public offering of the social networking giant?

Nope, but there is so little real news ahead of the IPO filing expected today that this is what we are chomping on this morning, as everyone awaits the big doc drop at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Sources said it is likely to come this afternoon rather than this morning, though. And, perish the thought, all that dotting of I’s and crossing of T’s could delay it to tomorrow, even (unlikely, but mebbe!).

Sigh.

Tidbit: Facebook was actually founded the first Wednesday in February of 2004 in an undergraduate dorm room at Harvard University, like today but eight years later.

Thus, here’s a boring Facebook history timeline chart to look at:

Okay, that was really dull.

What up? The board met, the spinmeisters are at the ready and, most of all, Silicon Valley is stoked to make some more arrogant badillionaires.

Now, hopefully, we’ll get the real news about Facebook.

Namely, who’s getting the big dough in this much-anticipated Web 2.0 gambit? Co-founder and CEO and Hoodie Commander Mark Zuckerberg fer sure, but who else?

Plus all the juicy financials from Facebook, along with stats in usage, growth and just how much the company sticks it to its gaming serf — oops, partner — Zynga and others for the privilege of being on its all-powerful platform.

Me? I pay nada, like other Facebook users, for being able to show off pictures of my vacations and decline friendships from PR people I like, but still … well, you know.

Here is another Facebook financial chart that will not knock your socks off unless you are an accountant:

I am now so comatose waiting for the show to begin that I briefly began a liveblog of my activities this morning.

It went like this:

4:45 am PT: Done with AOL Q4 earnings, which were meh, but better meh than expected. AOL, if you recall, used to be Facebook and now is, um, not.

Note to Zuckerberg: Be nice to people on your way up, since you’ll meet them again on the way down.

4:46 am PT: I check the SEC site and get zip. Click, click, clickety-click over to find out the latest on Demi Moore and her fake-pot debacle.

Who knew there was synthetic cannabis and it is called K2 or Spice? Not me! According to Wikipedia: “It seems likely that synthetic cannabis can precipitate psychosis and in some cases it is prolonged.”

I decide to blame Ashton Kutcher and then wonder if he is an investor in Facebook via BFF-to-errant-celebrities-who-like-tech Ron Conway, also a Facebook investor.

Note to self: Call Ashton! That dude plays village idiots all the time, but I am not fooled by Mr. Pretty Face.

4:47 am PT: I consider email bombing Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, who is probably not so busy right now, and asking him what he thinks about the Demi Moore crisis and also Facebook’s IPO.

Remember when Yahoo was king of Silicon Valley and Yang posed in that purple VW on the cover of that magazine? Better still, remember when Yahoo was going to buy Facebook for just over $1 billion and then borked it?

Just sayin’, Mark — so, keep it reals!

4:48 am PT: I consider going out for doughnuts — and not because of any real weed need. I just would like me some glazed and sprinkled sugar treats right about now. Then, I could post the pictures of them on my Facebook page.

Sweet.

But you-know-who would file right when I left the house on the munchie run. Click, click, clickety-click over to the SEC site and I come up peanuts.

Time to check in on the Kardashians.

You get the idea — so, Facebook IPO, take me away!

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A collection of over 8 million followers is not to be taken for granted. I feel responsible to deliver informed opinions and not spread gossip or rumors through my twitter feed. While I feel that running this feed myself gives me a closer relationship to my friends and fans I’ve come to realize that it has grown into more than a fun tool to communicate with people.

— Ashton Kutcher, posting on his blog about turning over administration of his Twitter account to his staff after making an uninformed tweet about Joe Paterno’s firing from Penn State

But instead of moving movies and TV shows to the world’s biggest Web site, they’re trying something different: Google is handing out more than $100 million to dozens of partners to create new “channels.”

The idea is to make “professional” content that advertisers will pay a premium to be near, instead of the grab bag of videos that dominate the site and that often sell at very low prices.

This isn’t news, of course: YouTube reps have been holding meetings and auditions for most of the year, led by former Netflix executive Robert Kyncl. And we’ve known about the deal terms, and many of the partners, for some time.

But now the site is finally talking about them publicly and promising that it will start unveiling some of the new programming next month. Some of the channels — each of which will have a couple hours of original programming per week — will feature people you’ve heard of, like Madonna, Jay-Z,  Ashton Kutcher and “Modern Family” star Sofia Vergara.

But the channels aren’t all premised around the idea of celebrities and Hollywood per se — just the idea that someone with some idea of how to make good stuff will start making stuff specifically for the site.

For instance, BedRocket Properties, the video start-up backed by the Huffington Post’s Ken Lerer and run by cable TV veteran Brian Bedol, will do four channels, including a soccer-themed channel in conjunction with Major League Soccer, and an action sports channel produced along with Wasserman Media Group.

Another example: IGN, the videogame Web site being spun off by News Corp., will produce a game-themed channel along with the Shine Group, the TV production house recently purchased by News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

It’s worth noting that some of the channels will be run by people who are well-versed in creating Web video — and video for YouTube in particular. Machinima, for instance, which also specializes in game-themed stuff, is already one of YouTube’s most prolific partners, and essentially runs a network within YouTube’s network.

Maker Studios, which is producing three channels, is another outfit that already specializes in YouTube. And Demand Media went public this year, in part because it had figured out the art of cranking out Web videos very, very, quickly, at very, very low prices.

YouTube may not be releasing all of the channels and partners today, perhaps because it doesn’t actually have all of its deals signed yet. And at least one partner told me that some of the mechanics of the deals, like control of ad sales, had yet to be worked out.

That’s hard to imagine, given the amount of time that YouTube has been at this. But it’s also hard to imagine why you’d announce a big consumer-focused deal at the end of a Friday. So, who knows.

We do know the general outlines of the deals, though: Google will advance most of the creators up to $5 million, and in return will get commitments to produce a couple hours of programming a week for the channel. Once the programmers have earned back their advance from YouTube, they’ll split ad revenue with the site. The programming will be exclusive to YouTube for at least the first year of the three-year deals.

What we don’t know is how this stuff will actually work: $5 million won’t go very far if the partners use traditional TV and film budgets, so many of the partners are going to have to supplement that money with investments of their own — and they’re going to have to work on a tighter budget. And just because there’s a bit of Hollywood shine associated with this stuff doesn’t mean that people will actually watch — or, most crucially, that advertisers will pay up.

Google may also try other methods to get high-end video stuff. The company made a stab at Hulu when that video site was on the block. And it has indicated that it’s interested in licensing some content in international markets, where it thinks it can get more bang for its buck.

The six-month-old San Francisco start-up says the funding will go toward developing a local marketplace that helps people find goods and services that people nearby are willing to sell.

Zaarly Co-Founders Ian Hunter, Bo Fishback and Eric Koester (from left to right).

For example, someone might post that they are willing to pay $100 for someone to fix their light switch; or $50 for someone to take them to the airport; or $20 for cowboy boots for a Halloween costume.

Consumers can look online or download an iPhone or Android app to alert them of new listings based on their location.

“It’s the opposite of every other marketplace,” said Bo Fishback, Zaarly’s CEO and co-founder.

The company’s first round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sands Capital Ventures with CMEA, Venture51, CrunchFund, Marc Ecko and Artists & Instigators also participating. The company had previously raised angel financing in March from Ashton Kutcher, Ron Conway and other prominent investors.

While the model is different from Craigslist and eBay, it shares similarities with such start-ups as Uber or Airbnb. Uber connects people looking for a ride with a private car service within five to 10 minutes, tapping into the glut of town cars at any given time during the day. Airbnb connects travelers with locals who are willing to rent out rooms in their homes.

Fishback said Zaarly’s goal is to host all kinds of deals, and that he could envision someday partnering with specialists such as Uber or Airbnb.

The company has 30 employees and plans to ramp up to 50 fairly quickly.

Fishback doesn’t have a clear sense of how the company will make money in the future; instead, the company is focused on signing up as many customers as possible. Right now, it’s free if you conduct the transaction in person by cash or check. If you opt to pay by credit card, Zaarly charges a convenience fee.

Of course I have something to say about the news yesterday that AOL would be a key investor in a new early-stage venture fund being started by TechCrunch’s perpetually petulant editor Michael Arrington — with a big, fat and decidedly greasy assist from a panoply of Silicon Valley’s most powerful VC firms and angel investors.

Arrington has previously called me “chief whiner” — oooh, buuuurn, although fair enough, since I have compared him to an egomaniac turtle named Yertle in the past — about my nagging him over the importance of upholding standards of fairness and ethics in journalism.

So as not to let him down, let me begin the whining.

First, my initial reaction when I first heard about the deal: Ugh. Sigh. Hopelessly corrupt. Now 100 percent more icky! A giant, greedy, Silicon Valley pig pile.

I was upset.

By early evening, after my kids told me to chillax, my dark mood had changed to accept that the transaction — however profoundly distasteful to me — was part and parcel of the insidious log-rolling, back-scratching ecosystem that has happened in every other center of power in the universe since the beginning of time.

And so it goes in Silicon Valley.

In fact, the creation of a $20 million investment kitty that Arrington has dubbed CrunchFund is simply the formalization of a long-standing arrangement that has already been going on since he founded his popular tech blog.

That is to say, in which the basic standards of journalism are first warped by calling it newfangled truth-telling and then endlessly corroded by using a wily and unusually aggressive combination of favors and threats to extract, from start-ups and VCs in need of press, both exclusive access and information.

And now, inevitably, money.

This could have been a lot cleaner, of course, by Arrington simply resigning from TechCrunch, becoming a VC and perhaps starting a new blog where his agenda is much clearer, from which he could huff and puff away as he does with much entertaining gusto at real and (mostly) imagined slights.

There is certainly precedent for VCs blogging, including Fred Wilson, Brad Feld and Ben Horowitz. And, despite my criticisms about ethics, it is clear that Arrington is a talented writer whose unique voice would be even stronger if it was truly seen as separate from what has become a news organization.

But because of his obvious need to be the center of attention — requiring the ermine kingmaker mantle and foisting his patented I’m-here-to-tell-it-like-it-is attitude on us all — that appears to be impossible.

(By the way, I await Arrington’s usual inane rant about the fictional conflicts of interest related to my gay Google marriage anytime now in 3 … 2 … 1, always and purposefully leaving out the pertinent facts that I can only wed one person, get no financial benefit and am also a prominent critic of the scary search behemoth, while he can make a badillion questionable and grossly tangled investments.)

Personal annoyances aside, what’s most interesting here is the group of Silicon Valley power players who lined up to bow and scrape and then hand over a small pile of dough to the blogger who would be king.

They include: Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners, Austin Ventures and Accel Partners, as well as individual investments from partners at Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, entrepreneur Kevin Rose and DST Global’s Yuri Milner. And, of course, the inevitable Arrington BFF Ron Conway.

Holy googa mooga, that would be, well, everyone, except Ashton Kutcher and Justin Timberlake (who will surely appear soon enough).

As one person also pointed out to me, I don’t recall this many competing VCs investing in one company, let alone another venture fund.

It goes without saying that the reasons they all decided to jump in this fetid pool with abandon are quite varied, if all entirely compromised.

One investor told me — off the record, naturally — that he thought it would be an interesting experiment to see what happened and so he wanted in, especially since everyone else was doing it.

Another well-known VC said that there is no downside to being financially affiliated, especially in attracting talent to its start-ups, with Arrington and, by extension, TechCrunch.

The well-respected Reid Hoffman of Greylock was the only one brave enough to talk on the record, explaining the reasoning pretty clearly:

“Techcrunch will get some real deal flow from entrepreneurs that we would otherwise not see, because they have established a prominent position as the SV/Tech industry information feed. As many tech entrepreneurs read it — both within Silicon Valley and globally — and view the information news feed to be their target for announcing themselves to the world, Crunchfund will have access to deal flow to these diverse and early stage companies. Some of these companies will be the kind of early stage companies with billion-dollar potential that Greylock invests in.”

There you have it: No one can afford to be out of the deal flow in these times, even if it means cutting corners.

While TechCrunch’s owner, AOL, said Arrington will no longer be managing editor, with only writing duties at the site he dominates and with no editorial control, Hoffman’s use of TechCrunch for CrunchFund was accurate, because in the eyes of many they are interchangeable.

That’s due to the fact that Arrington still breaks or is clearly the source for important stories on the site and, more importantly, is the big swinging dude who attracts all the eager entrepreneurs to the party. He is the fulcrum of that site, even as it has grown.

And so it will remain, I am guessing, no matter how much AOL insists it will not be so, because the easy questions pile up quickly:

Will Arrington keep doing what are clearly news stories, for example, even though he protesteth too much — as he did in the New York Times yesterday — that he is not a journalist?

And, if so, is it right for him to do so given his insider status, creating a nonparity of sourcing and crystal clear conflicts of interest?

Most of all, can he resist his palpable love of news-breaking and scoops, even if he gets them in ever more unseemly ways?

As if to make it all pretty, Arrington told reporters yesterday that he has put a clause in his limited partnership agreement so he can report on anything he likes, and in any way, about his investors and their companies, however confidential, except those he invests in.

O joyous day! Freedom of the press is preserved and our sacred First Amendment can breathe a sigh of relief, now that it is enshrined in an unholy blogger-VC LP agreement.

After pausing for a moment so that Thomas Jefferson and Edward R. Murrow can stop spinning in their graves, you can go down this road for many increasingly bumpy miles, which only becomes more twisted and confusing as it continues.

I finally talked to one investor in CrunchFund, who said simply and honestly: “It’s not that much money, so who cares?”

Indeed, who does care anymore about crossing what had long been very bright lines in journalism and, if you want to get all cosmic, in life?

Obviously, most of all, not AOL, or its CEO Tim Armstrong, or its head of content, Arianna Huffington. The pair, for whatever reason, decided to make a startling exception for Arrington from a rule that explicitly bars reporters at its media units from investing in the companies they cover.

That happened after he recently did a complete 180 from a previous decision to stop investing and jumped right back in, leaving Armstrong and Huffington to clean up the ethical mess.

They only made it worse, with their decision to throw journalism under the bus by letting Arrington do as he pleased, while touting how important it was for other content sites at AOL to remain more pure.

In the spirit of full disclosure, these kinds of ethical lapses are endemic these days in journalism. Case in point: The appalling phone-hacking controversy taking place at News Corp.’s News International unit in Britain.

While I cannot speak for Dow Jones, I can say that the behavior in another News Corp. property certainly takes its toll on those who adhere to higher standards at the company, especially when it comes to morale.

Thus, I can imagine how others feel at AOL — including those you-know-who-you-are silent ones at TechCrunch — who can’t and, more to the point, wouldn’t make the deals Arrington has been allowed to get away with.

It is not a good feeling, I can assure you.

And, while I have not spoken to her about it, I’d imagine that Huffington cannot be thrilled to be pushing for better journalism at AOL and trying to burnish her cred by hiring some top reporters, while also having to deal with this.

That’s okay, because Armstrong was perfectly willing to do the awkward pretzel-twist needed to explain away the controversial situation, also in an interview with the Times:

“TechCrunch is a different property and they have different standards. We have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch, which is different but is transparent about it.”

In this case, Tim, I am sorry to inform you that transparency is a complete canard and is more likely to end up covering up a lot more transgressions than it ever will reveal.

And, essentially and lazily sloughing it off by saying, “That’s just Mike being Mike,” is not going to cut it, at least not with me.

Not that any amount of tsk-tsking about it matters, I suppose, as Arrington finally gets his fervent Pinocchio-on-a-star wish to be a real-boy VC, can add yet another tainted buck to the pile of billions his venture pals already have, and just call it another typical day in Silicon Valley.

Still, when you are the designated whiner-in-chief, it is pretty much all one can do.

Vanity Fair magazine put out its high-profile “New Establishment” list of the top 50 people, who are “an innovative new breed of buccaneering visionaries, engineering prodigies, and entrepreneurs, who quite often sport hoodies, floppy hair, and backpacks.”

The hoodie part would be referring to Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who topped the list — which is in the just-released October issue — for the second year in a row.

The Vanity Fair list was packed with Silicon Valley luminaries.

The No. 2 spot went to the hopelessly conjoined twins at Google, CEO Larry Page and his co-founder Sergey Brin. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos was No. 3, followed by newly born CEO Tim Cook and top product guy Jonathan Ive of Apple at No. 4, with Twitter creator and Square founder Jack Dorsey at No. 5.

Interestingly, super-VCs Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz clocked in this year at No. 6.

The digitally fast-forward Lady Gaga was the top woman on the list at No. 9, in front of “Harry Potter” author J. K. Rowling at No. 16.

And, clocking in at No. 40? Why, me and my partner-in-crime at AllThingsD, Walt Mossberg. He is apparently a “kingmaker” of tech and I do “juicy exclusives.”

That actually is pretty accurate. More importantly, we were ranked higher than Justin Timberlake and Ashton Kutcher. In other words: Mission accomplished!

We also beat the Angry Birds dudes at No. 49, whom my two kids would nonetheless have voted tops over their mom any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

In addition, Vanity Fair broke off a list of 25 “Powers That Be,” which is made up of a lot of longtime “New Establishment” folks, as well as another list called the “Hall of Fame.”

“These are the people who have shaped the world we live in today — and continue to wield enormous influence,” said Vanity Fair, which translates into dustier moguls.

Topping the powers-that-be, of course, is Apple’s co-founder and Chairman Steve Jobs. And outgone Google CEO and now Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is now enshrined in the hall of fame.

As Walt and I head to a good table at the Minetta Tavern to meet the cool peeps for a celebratory drink, here is the official press releases from Vanity Fair:

FACEBOOK FOUNDER MARK ZUCKERBERG TOPS VANITY FAIR’S NEW ESTABLISHMENT LIST FOR THE SECOND YEAR IN A ROW

Sergey Brin and Larry Page Take No. 2 Spot, Lady Gaga Jumps to the Top 10 of Tech-Dominant List

NEW YORK, N.Y. — “The Age of Information gives way to a burgeoning Age of Technology,” announces Graydon Carter, remarking on the “seismic shift in interest and influence” that has occurred in the 17 years that Vanity Fair has been ranking America’s power players. The magazine’s 2011 New Establishment list identifies the top 50 of an innovative new breed of buccaneering visionaries, engineering prodigies, and entrepreneurs, who quite often sport hoodies, floppy hair, and backpacks.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the inescapable social-networking site Facebook, maintains his perch at the top of Vanity Fair’s 17th annual New Establishment List ranking for the second year in a row. With a possible I.P.O. on the horizon by 2012, which could value the company anywhere between $50 and $100 billion, Facebook has enough clout to worry even the unshakable Google. Zuckerberg is still the youngest person ever to top the list.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google, are in the No. 2 spot this year, closing in on Zuckerberg as they jump up one spot, from No. 3 in 2010. Eric Schmidt, who appeared on the list last year with the duo, has since been pushed out of the C.E.O’s office, replaced by Page. Despite reports of an anti-trust investigation, Google has been setting its sites on Facebook by concentrating on strategic initiatives, such as engineering social-networking features.

Rounding out the top five are Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, at No. 3, Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive, of Apple, at No. 4, and Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey, at No. 5.

Lady Gaga makes an appearance for the second year in a row. Coming in at No. 9, she is the highest-ranking woman on the list, in front of J. K. Rowling at No. 16, Sheryl Sandberg, of Facebook, at No. 26, Angela Ahrendts with Christopher Bailey, of Burberry, at No. 30, Natalie Massenet at No. 32, and Kara Swisher with Walt Mossberg at No. 40. At 25 years old, Gaga is also the youngest person on the list — not a surprise for someone whose fans managed to crash Amazon’s servers in their desperation to download her third album.

Youthful energy is spread throughout this year’s list with 15 members under the age of 40, including Zuckerberg, Brin and Page, Dorsey, Lady Gaga, Andrew Mason, Sean Parker, Ryan Kavanaugh, Jeremy Stoppelman, Ashton Kutcher, Dennis Crowley, Daniel Ek, Mikael Hed and Niklas Hed, and Justin Timberlake.

There are 14 billionaires on the list: Zuckerberg, Brin and Page, Bezos, Mark Pincus, Michael Moritz, J. K. Rowling, Jim Breyer, Reid Hoffman, Herbert Allen III, Yuri Milner, Robin Li, Parker, and Peter Thiel.

Five member of the New Establishment are actively involved in space exploration, including Brin, Elon Musk, Bezos, Thiel, and Dennis Crowley. Eight of the New Establishment nominees can count themselves members of the ever growing Stanford Mafia; they include Brin, Page, Reed Hastings, Jim Breyer, Hoffman, Musk, Thiel, and John Hennessy.

The New Establishment, Vanity Fair’s annual ranking of the top leaders of our time, is made up of owners, creators, buyers, thinkers, and innovators — the movers and shakers in the worlds of technology, media, business, politics, entertainment, and fashion. These men and women are the taste-makers and trendsetters, opinion formers and agenda creators, not to mention empire builders. Entry into the ranks of Vanity Fair’s list is based on a number of factors: wealth, influence, and philanthropy, as well as such intangibles as vision and the x factor.

The October issue of Vanity Fair will be on newsstands in New York and L.A. on September 1, and nationally and on the iPad September 6.

THE VANITY FAIR NEW ESTABLISHMENT

1. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
2. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google
3. Jeff Bezos, Amazon
4. Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive, Apple
5. Jack Dorsey, Square, Twitter
6. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz
7. Reed Hastings, Netflix
8. John Lasseter, Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios
9. Lady Gaga, singer
10. Dan Doctoroff, Bloomberg L.P.
11. Dick Costolo, Twitter
12. Mark Pincus, Zynga
13. Jim Breyer, Accel Partners
14. Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and Graham King, Movies
15. Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital
16. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter
17. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park
18. Reid Hoffman, Greylock Partners, LinkedIn
19. Herb Allen III, Allen & Co.
20. Judd Apatow, Apatow Productions
21. Jay-Z, Roc Nation
22. Todd Phillips, Green Hat Films
23. Yuri Milner, DST Global
24. J. J. Abrams, writer, director, producer
25. Robin Li, Baidu
26. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook
27. Andrew Mason, Groupon
28. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, television
29. Mark Wahlberg and Stephen Levinson, Leverage
30. Angela Ahrendts and Christopher Bailey, Burberry
31. Elon Musk, Tesla Motors, Space X
32. Natalie Massenet, Net-a-Porter Group
33. Paul Graham, Y Combinator
34. Sean Parker, entrepreneur
35. Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, Flatiron Partners
36. Peter Thiel, Founders Fund, Clarium Capital Management
37. Peter Jackson, Wingnut Films
38. Ryan Kavanaugh, Relativity Media
39. Mike Allen, Politico
40. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, All Things D
41. John Hennessy, Stanford University
42. Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp
43. Ashton Kutcher, actor, investor
44. Tyler Perry, director, producer, writer, actor
45. Dennis Crowley, Foursquare
46. Kevin Ryan, Gilt Groupe
47. Daniel Ek, Spotify
48. Henry Blodget, Business Insider
49. Mikael Hed, Niklas Hed, and Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio
50. Justin Timberlake, singer, actor

STEVE JOBS HOLDS THE TOP SPOT ON VANITY FAIR’S LIST OF THE POWERS THAT BE

Embattled News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch in the Top 5

NEW YORK, N.Y. — This year Vanity Fair inaugurates a list of the Powers That Be. These are the people who have shaped the world we live in today — and continue to wield enormous influence. Many are longtime New Establishment members, and their destinies are intertwined with the members of this year’s New Establishment.

Steve Jobs, of Apple, holds the top spot on the list of the Powers That Be. Since Jobs took control of the company 14 years ago, the stock’s share price has risen more than 6,500 percent. At the height of the debt crisis in late July, Apple had more cash on hand than the U.S. government.

Bernard Arnault, of luxury-goods company LVMH, ranks in the No. 2 spot. As an overseer of countless enduring luxury brands, Arnault has left his mark on the industry. Last year he spent $2 billion to accumulate a 20 percent stake in family-controlled but publicly traded Hermès.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is No.3 on this year’s list while News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch comes in at No. 4. The tumultuous News of the World scandals this year have shaken the media baron, but also shown his staying power in the face of just about anything. Brian Roberts and Steve Burke, of Comcast, NBCUniversal, who recently acquired the U.S. media rights to the Olympic Games through 2020, are No. 5.

Jill Abramson is the highest-ranking woman out of six on the list, at No. 9. She is followed by Angelina Jolie with Brad Pitt at No. 11, Sue Naegle with Richard Plepler and Michael Lombardo at No. 15, Anne Sweeney with George Bodenheimer at No. 22, Bonnie Hammer at No. 24, and Arianna Huffington with Tim Armstrong at No. 25.

Because some power is permanent, Vanity Fair nominates a number of regulars to the Hall of Fame this year. Warren Buffett, of Berkshire Hathaway, joins Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, Tom Ford, actor Tom Hanks, and designer Karl Lagerfeld. Network impresario Oprah Winfrey, Jeffrey Katzenberg, of DreamWorks Animation, and talk-show host Charlie Rose all make the ranks as well.

The October issue of Vanity Fair will be on newsstands in New York and L.A. on September 1, and nationally and on the iPad September 6.

THE POWERS THAT BE

1. Steve Jobs, Apple
2. Bernard Arnault, LVMH
3. Michael Bloomberg, mayor, New York City
4. Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation
5. Brian Roberts and Steve Burke, Comcast, NBCUniversal
6. François-Henri Pinault, PPR
7. Bob Iger, Walt Disney Company
8. Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner
9. Jill Abramson, The New York Times
10. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft
11. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, movies, philanthropy
12. Diego Della Valle, Tod’s
13. Roman Abramovich, investments
14. Mickey Drexler, J. Crew
15. Richard Plepler, Sue Naegle, and Michael Lombardo, HBO
16. Larry Gagosian, Gagosian Gallery
17. Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the Weinstein Company
18. Marc Jacobs, designer
19. Lorne Michaels, Saturday Night Live
20. David Zaslav, Discovery Communications
21. Jean Pigozzi, investments, art
22. George Bodenheimer and Anne Sweeney, Disney Media Networks
23. Vivi Nevo, NV Investments
24. Bonnie Hammer, NBCU Cable Entertainment and Cable Studios
25. Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington, AOL Huffington Post Media Group

HALL OF FAME

Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music Group
Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway
Ron Conway, angel investor
Philippe Dauman, Viacom
Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, IAC, DVF
John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Larry Ellison, Oracle Corporation
Tom Ford, designer/filmmaker
Ted Forstmann, IMG Worldwide
Tom Freston, Firefly3
Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, Imagine Entertainment
Tom Hanks, actor
Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation
Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures
Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel
Ralph Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren
John Malone, Liberty Media
Ron Meyer, Universal Studios
Leslie Moonves, CBS
Ronald Perelman, MacAndrews and Forbes
Miuccia Prada, Prada
Charlie Rose, talk-show host
Eric Schmidt, Google
Terry Semel, investor
Oprah Winfrey, OWN

(Full disclosure: Readers who look closely at the list will notice that all things ATD senior editor Peter Kafka is listed as a contributor. This is true! Also true: Peter wrote biographical entries for several people on the list, but has zero input on its composition. He tells us he had no idea that we were being considered for inclusion, and we believe him. He also says that had he been asked for his opinion, he would have voted for us, his bosses, to be included. We also believe that.)

At least that’s what Fab.com has discovered after analyzing the performance of the company’s social channels in July. Three of the company’s top-performing sales that month had a common theme: Demi Moore tweeted about them.

Think of it as the next generation of the late-night infomercial — but instead of George Foreman selling grills, Demi Moore is selling accent pillows, aprons and wall decorations.

In one tweet, @mrskutcher writes to her nearly four million followers: “Another cool wall decoration. Love it! Surface Collective Limited quantity.” In another vague tweet, she writes: “Bought a bunch of these & earned credit! These are fun!”

The flash sales site launched in June, selling a wide range of items, from household objects to jewelry and gadgets. The New York start-up raised $8 million in a first round of capital, including from actor Ashton Kutcher, who is married to Moore.

In order to analyze the usefulness of email, Twitter and Facebook as revenue sources, Fab.com broke down its revenues resulting from social shares to find patterns among repeat buyers and the most popular categories, according to this blog post.

The results should be taken with a grain of salt, given that the company has been in business for only a couple of months (not to mention it is being propped up by Moore, the wife of one of its investors!). But it does provide a peek into how e-commerce companies are using social channels to drive more sales and sign up new members early on.

Some other findings:

• Fab.com added more than 130,000 members in July, bringing its total to more than 400,000 at the end of the month. Most members were added via old-fashioned email, but also by Twitter and Facebook shares and “likes.”
• Member-to-member email invitations resulted in four times the revenue of any of the other social sharing sources.
• Facebook and Twitter essentially tied as social revenue sources. While both paled in comparison to email invites, they both drove significant six-figure revenue for the company during the month.
• Some 40 percent of all Fab.com members who made at least one purchase in July ended up making two more purchases in the month. And the 33 percent who made two purchases ended up making three.
• Art was by far the top-grossing sales category, followed by jewelry, wearables, Bbags and fitness (primarily bikes).

Kutcher’s character on “Two and a Half Men” will be an Internet billionaire named Walden Schmidt, it was unveiled today.

Tech start-ups already actively covet name drops by Kutcher to his seven million Twitter followers. But the active investor in start-ups like Airbnb, Hipmunk and Blekko should have double that audience on TV. “Two and a Half Men” averaged 14.7 million viewers last season.

CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler shared the news about Kutcher’s character as part of a press tour today, though Kutcher himself hasn’t tweeted about it yet. Walden Schmidt is to be an “Internet billionaire with a broken heart,” she said.

Oh dear, oh my — with the first move that the new owners of Myspace have made, it’s pretty clear they are taking the worrisome look-at-the-shiny-celebrity approach.

The trio of Vanderhook brothers who run Specific Media, which paid $35 million to buy the News Corp.-owned music-focused social networking site, loudly added Justin Timberlake as an investor in the deal yesterday and then gave a lot of interviews around it.

In its press release, Specific Media said Timberlake would “play a major role in developing the creative direction and strategy for the company moving forward” and focus on being a premier original content destination.

“There’s a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect. Myspace has the potential to be that place,” Timberlake said in the release. “Art is inspired by people and vice versa, so there’s a natural social component to entertainment. I’m excited to help revitalize Myspace by using its social media platform to bring artists and fans together in one community.”

Sounds good, I suppose, but maybe they should focus on making products the star first.

Nope, the star is the star first, even though swanning around the appealing singer and actor’s name felt a lot like shilling him.

Justin has a vision! Justin will have a team of creatives around him! Justin is being ironic, having played a techie and now being one!

Justin will even be in the office! Um, sometimes!

Well, whatev, since I have been to these celebrity-meets-the-Internet rodeos before, and they have mostly ended in tears in terms of creating any kind of real Web property.

Remember Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and their LivePlanet fiasco back in Web 1.0? Wasn’t RuPaul around then helping WebEx? Didn’t the much-hyped MC Hammer dance site called DanceJam get sold off in 2009?

And I’m still waiting for several Web efforts by Ashton Kutcher, such as Internet fare for Katalyst Films, to make any ripple. In fact, the new “Two and a Half Men” television star has now seemed to focus more in investing in tech start-ups as a quieter partner.

In Hollywood terms, most of these high-profile marriages of glamour and nerd have been turkeys.

Of course, they will never stop, and I like to rub shoulders against a celeb, too, especially when it’s at the dull geekfests that take place in Silicon Valley.

But the only way Myspace is going to revive itself, even at the bargain basement price that Specific Media paid for it, is to focus relentlessly on figuring out a strategy, hire a team of crack engineers, and inspire them to build a killer product.

I don’t know what that will look like, but I do know the creation of such innovations requires a head-down approach of truly committed people, and not some all-night party of fabulous.

For a long time, Myspace’s creators were very interested in the latter and were not engaged in making the former happen.

And, by the time new managers did, it seemed to be too late and News Corp. was too sick and tired to tolerate it, writing Myspace off as a too-tarnished brand to make thrive again.

So it sold Myspace and who knows what tomorrow and Specific Media will bring.

All I can think of to say is what I wrote on Twitter yesterday when asked what lesson came from the Myspace debacle and what advice I would give to the new owners.

That would be: Don’t suck.

That’s a lot harder to do than it seems.

In any case, at least Timberlake makes really good music videos, as you will see below for his “SexyBack”:

Led by CEO Jason Goldberg, the site’s opening offers are on the sorts of things one might find at a design museum gift shop — fancy plastic chairs, fancy energy-saving light bulbs and fancy signed posters.

With future deals appearing to include personal electronics and apparel, Fab.com is entering a space currently dominated by Gilt Groupe, which offers deals on luxury goods in several categories through its Web site and apps.

In an email, Goldberg said the launch was made possible by a new round of seed funding that included the likes of Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade fund, SoftTechVC and First Round Capital, the Washington Post Company, and Baroda Ventures.

While the amount of the round was not disclosed, Goldberg added that Kutcher will advise the company.

But last week we were granted access to the Palo Alto “hacker house” where the recently seed-funded LAL team has set up shop to expand its early success into a larger vision. No, LAL is not turning its flirting site into a dating site, but rather becoming a way for people to interact with others who are nearby, as co-founder and CEO Evan Reas described in a video interview embedded here.

LAL, which started at Stanford University last fall and now is live at 450 different colleges, gets 250,000 page views per day for its message boards and Web chat service. Reas estimates 75 percent of Stanford students have used the site. But total user numbers are slightly hard to ascertain, he noted, because LAL allows people to post and chat anonymously.

Reas promises that LAL’s grand vision will become more apparent in the coming weeks, but for now here’s why he’s been able to bend investors’ ears:

• A dynamic social graph determined by users’ locations seems like an alternative to the static real-name-based Facebook social graph.
• Flirting provides enticing content for both participants and voyeurs.
• When it comes to virality, densely populated college campuses seem to be a match waiting to be lit.

LAL participated in the most recent class of Y Combinator and raised a seed round led by Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, as was reported by TechCrunch.

Here’s the full list of investors, provided by LAL: Marc Andreessen, Paul Buchheit, Ron Conway, Scott Cook, Charles River Ventures led by Saar Gur, Matrix Partners led by Josh Hannah, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, David King, Yuri Milner, Shervin Pishevar, Brian Pokorny, Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant, David Sacks and Y Combinator.

Reas told us LikeALittle was probably the seventh or eighth idea he and his co-founders Prasanna Sankaranarayanan and Shubham Mittal prototyped under the header Hawthorne Labs. The quick viral success of LAL at Stanford indicated to the three that they might have found their elusive “billion-dollar idea,” so they stuck with it, Reas said. Prior to Hawthorne Labs, Reas had been a co-founder of ProFounder and received his MBA from Stanford.

Here’s our video chat with Reas, shot in the “hacker house” backyard.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110502/meet-evan-reas-of-lal-and-his-proximity-based-social-graph-for-colleges/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110414/exclusive-flipboard-confirms-50-million-funding-at-200-million-valuation/ http://allthingsd.com/20110414/exclusive-flipboard-confirms-50-million-funding-at-200-million-valuation/#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:23:12 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42652

Late last month, BoomTown posted about a huge venture funding effort by the high-profile and even more highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, Flipboard.

Today, its co-founder and CEO Mike McCue confirmed the $50 million round at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, in a wide-ranging interview at the start-up’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” he said. “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

The bulk of the new second round of funding–Flipboard had previously raised $10.5 million–came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

Insight’s Jerry Murdock said in an interview that he was excited about the idea of “social endorsement” that Flipboard was pioneering.

“We back great entrepreneurs and Flipboard is that and also in an obviously unique position to solve a problem of media consumption in the digital age,” he said. “The sky is the limit. Or more precisely it is the best environment to consume curated real-time content for Twitter and Facebook, because of the user experience and social endorsement integration with the content.”

Insight is also an investor in Twitter.

Also stepping up in the new Flipboard round is Comcast’s venture arm, as well as previous investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Twitter co-founder and product guru Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

“From a Comcast perspective, we’re intrigued with Mike and what he’s doing with content aggregation,” said Amy Banse, Comcast Interactive Capital’s new head. “We think we can learn from him and he from us.”

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

The elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In its current offering, there are pull-quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on a social networking or microblogging site.

McCue said the new giant pile of cash will be used to increase its 32-person staff to about 50, international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development on more platforms.

The next in the arena will be the iPhone version of Flipboard, said McCue, followed by one for the Google Android mobile operating system eventually.

Left unsaid, of course, was the need for funding to fight the likelihood of increased competition in the hot space for delivering both professional and social content to consumers on a wide range of devices.

Rivals are varied, such as Silicon Valley’s most adorable news reader start-up Pulse and also Zite, a news reader which was recently sued for copyright infringement by a group of major publishers.

There are bigger potential players, such as Google, which is trying to find various ways to move into the social space.

In fact, said several sources, Google and others have made acquisition approaches to Flipboard, which has instead opted for raising more funding and staying independent for now.

McCue declined to talk about that, but did note that he is not surprised by publisher interest, especially of the worried and wary kind, in the arena.

“Anyone not respectful of others’ content is going to get in that kind of trouble,” he said, noting Flipboard has struck deals with 17 big publishers so far, including this morning’s announcement about a partnership with Oprah Winfrey’s and Discovery’s OWN cable network. “There is not one half to this equation.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

McCue said advertising will be the key to Flipboard’s business plan in the future, although it’s not clear if the company will ever sell advertising itself.

Rather, it will partner with publishers seeking better distribution in the explosive tablet and smartphone market, where Flipboard has been gaining traction quickly.

But until that is sorted out, there is now $50 million more in the Flipboard kitty to figure it all out.

“With this funding, we can grow at the right pace and have a lot of flexibility to get the product right,” said McCue. “And, that’s the most important thing.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110414/exclusive-flipboard-confirms-50-million-funding-at-200-million-valuation/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110316/twitter-gets-the-ken-burns-treatment-from-funny-or-die/ http://allthingsd.com/20110316/twitter-gets-the-ken-burns-treatment-from-funny-or-die/#comments Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:43:53 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=30803 No matter what anyone tells you, there is no way to guarantee your video will go viral. But one way to dramatically increase the odds is to make your video about a big, popular social media company. The kind that might end up promoting your video itself.

Which makes it odd that this day-old clip from Funny or Die, which gives Twitter the Ken Burns documentary treatment in honor of its fifth anniversary, hasn’t exploded already. Because:

• It’s about Twitter.
• It’s got the Twitter seal of approval.
• It also has an endorsement from Perez Hilton, who also appears in the thing.*
• It’s actually quite funny, too.

I’m sure it will get there, though. Enough words. Watch!

(Oh. Not totally safe for work. There are some swears.)

Twitter Celebrates its 5th Anniversary – watch more funny videos

*Not my demo, either. But he’s very popular. Different strokes.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110316/twitter-gets-the-ken-burns-treatment-from-funny-or-die/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110311/justspotted-offers-celeb-tracker-for-sxsw-a-listers/ http://allthingsd.com/20110311/justspotted-offers-celeb-tracker-for-sxsw-a-listers/#comments Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:40:52 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4183 The thousands of people descending on Austin right now all dream of meeting the same people. The Ashton Kutcher of life is the Ashton Kutcher of tech, but there are many celebrities specific to this little world–such as Kevin Rose or Gary Vaynerchuk.

Thus, JustSpotted, the social media celebrity-tracking service, is launching a SXSW edition of its mobile Web app that helps users stalk tech A-listers by combining public records of what events they plan to attend (via sites like Plancast), live check-ins (from sites like Twitter) and user-contributed sightings (contributed directly to JustSpotted).

Tech A-listers might be a dubious distinction, but the site, which will be available starting later this afternoon, will be pre-loaded with them–the examples given are Guy Kawasaki, Mark Zuckerberg, Zappos’ Tony Hsieh, Vaynerchuk and SV Angel’s David Lee.

Users can also search for any name they choose, such as potential investors and super users they want using their new app.

SXSW has become more of a VIP experience, with secret parties and private back rooms. And though geek spring break is bigger than ever, the fact that all these people are crammed into one small downtown area gives hope for serendipity.

But when serendipity isn’t enough…

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