The hypothetical wormhole to this absurdly ambitious goal? The wish list.

Wish co-founders Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhang

The startup is called ContextLogic, and it’s got some of tech’s most smartypants investors behind it, as well as 10 million people already signed up for its wish-list service, called Wish.com.

“We want to be Google AdWords for the retailer,” explained co-founder and CEO Peter Szulczewski, an engineer who previously worked on ad algorithms and search at Google for five years.

Users sign up for Wish to make wish lists. They save, tag and recommend products to each other (and, by default, it’s social-spammy, with automatic posts to your Facebook profile and rewards for inviting friends). Then the company matches participating merchants with potential customers, and sends out discounts for specific products.

So, basically, it’s like personalized coupons.

The target retailer for Wish is an Amazon Marketplace merchant who wants to get more distribution without paying Amazon a significant portion of each transaction. To that end, Wish plans to launch self-serve tools for retailers next month, Szulczewski said. Eventually, it wants to get more closely involved with transactions by offering checkout tools.

The 20-person, San Francisco-based ContextLogic has raised $8 million in funding, led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s Formation 8, with former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Factual’s Gil Elbaz, Sling co-founder Blake Krikorian, Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter, Steve Chen of YouTube and Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures and others participating.

Because the Wish experience is all about tastemaking and discovery, “We’re creating hundreds of Fab.coms in different verticals,” said co-founder Danny Zhang, who previously worked on the Overture team at Yahoo.

Wish users have saved 100 million products, and recommend 100,000 of them per day, according to internal data.

There are many other wish-list products out there; for instance, Amazon and Pinterest. Zhang and Szulczewski say Wish’s advantage is that the wish list is pretty, it’s tightly and smartly integrated with an advertising platform and, most of all, it’s constantly being optimized.

Plus, Wish is especially sticky on mobile. Via iPhone, Android and iPad apps, engagement and sales are double what they are on the Web, the company said.

The company, id8 Group R2 Studios Inc., was created by entrepreneur Blake Krikorian in May 2011. Mr. Krikorian will be joining the Redmond, Wash., software giant with a small team. As part of the deal, Microsoft also acquired some patents owned by the startup related to controlling electronic devices.

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So which big company did well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur Blake Krikorian sell his latest start-up to: Apple or Google?

Or maybe Microsoft?

According to several sources, the deal is not completed.

That did not stop Amazon — the fourth player in this digital roundelay — from publicly saying it was earlier today after the company said Krikorian had suddenly resigned from the board of Amazon. He became a director at the online retail giant only last fall.

And, indeed, the move was directly related to acquisition discussions that his id8 Group R2 Studios has been having with a number of large companies, including Apple and Google, as well as Microsoft. All are now major competitors to Amazon which is now deep into video distribution via its Kindle devices.

But grabbing Krikorian would be a coup for any of these players, since he is considered one of tech’s most savvy execs with regard to video and media distribution. He co-founded Sling Media, the maker of the innovative video device Slingbox, in 2004.

(Krikorian demoed it at the second D: All Things Digital conference in 2004.)

His latest effort is focused on home automation, which has been a personal interest of his for some time, including wiring (or, more precisely, wireless-ing) up his own house in a variety of ever more complex digital experiments.

He once told me he began to outfit his home using Apple devices and then switched to Google’s Android operating system since the software was easier and more extensible to develop on.

The Wall Street Journal had reported last week that Apple, Google and Microsoft were considering buying R2 Studios. It noted that id8 Group R2 Studios had released an “app that turns Android phones into touch panels for controlling heating and lighting systems wirelessly” and also has a number of other patents in the arena.

In addition, Amazon told the Journal today that Krikorian “opted to resign because he has sold his current firm ‘and is taking a position at the acquiring company.’”

Amazon was unspecific about the acquiring company. But other sources noted the statement was not exactly right, noting a deal was “close but not done.”

(A mystery! Which I will attempt to solve over the holiday weekend! )

But the list of candidates is likely to be large, since using popular automation devices to turbocharge the home has been a big area of investment of late, since tablets and smartphones can be turned into souped-up remote control to monitor and control a wide range of things.

Krikorian has been noodling around in the arena since he sold Sling Media in 2007 to EchoStar Communications for $380 million. After a short (and unhappy) stint there, he left and has since been working on a variety of projects and making various investments.

Those include some promising start-ups, such as Lytro, Kno, Clipboard, Chirply and Tasty Labs. Another company Krikorian invested in, Clicker, was sold to CBS earlier this year.

After he sold Sling Media, Google made an aggressive effort to hire the entrepreneur, but he initially rebuffed the search giant to work on his own projects.

I have calls into Krikorian, but he has not yet responded. Apple, Google and Microsoft declined to comment.

The start-up, id8 Group R2 Studios Inc., was created in May 2011 by entrepreneur Blake Krikorian. He founded Sling Media Inc., maker of the Slingbox for watching TV on computers, and sold it to EchoStar in 2007.

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Well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Amazon board member Blake Krikorian is joining the board of directors of FreeWheel, the video tech start-up that helps entertainment companies manage content across digital platforms.

FreeWheel’s customers include NBC Universal, Vevo, Fox, Turner and ABC. It has raised close to $29 million in funding from a number of venture firms, such as Battery Ventures and Foundation Capital.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company said Krikorian will help with corporate strategy and partnerships.

Krikorian was founder and CEO of Sling Media, the device maker which was acquired by EchoStar in 2007. He’s been an angel investor since then, and became an Amazon director last fall.

In an interview, Krikorian said that monetization and rights management have held back innovation in online video, but that content owners have recently released some promising products, such as Disney’s new Apple iOS apps for watching linear television programming.

“FreeWheel has built a trusted technology platform to manage the money flow for video content providers and distributors as their content is delivered across the Web and on mobile,” said Krikorian. “With these business and technology foundations in place, I can finally see the day coming when every media company will deliver all their programming online, in all of its forms including live linear TV.”

Well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur Blake Krikorian has joined the board of Amazon, according to several sources close to the situation.

Krikorian — who is considered one of tech’s most savvy execs with regard to video and media distribution — co-founded Sling Media, the maker of the innovative video device Slingbox, in 2004.

(He demoed it at the second D: All Things Digital conference in 2004.)

It was sold in 2007 to EchoStar Communications for $380 million. After a short stint there, Krikorian left and has since been working on a variety of projects and making various investments.

Those include some promising start-ups, such as Lytro, Kno, Clipboard, Chirply and Tasty Labs. Another company he invested in, Clicker, was sold to CBS earlier this year.

He has also been a sought-after exec — sources said he had offers over the last year from Google and also Zynga.

Amazon certainly could use a director such as Krikorian as it seeks to enter the media distribution space more aggressively. It is about to launch a Kindle tablet, for example, and also is a major bidder for the Hulu premium video service.

It has been rumored that Amazon will soon offer an interactive television device, too.

Krikorian certainly has much experience in the arena. One of his first jobs was at the fabled General Magic, which pioneered the creation of one of the first interactive mobile products before the Internet.

He also started a mobile computing unit for Philips Electronics, as well as working in adjacent arenas at other firms.

The University of California at Los Angeles graduate has a degree in mechanical engineering.

Other directors on Amazon’s eight-person board, besides CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, include Kleiner Perkins’s Bing Gordon and Hewlett-Packard’s Jon Rubinstein.

Krikorian, who declined to comment, will be its ninth member.

I also have an email in to Amazon PR, and will update if I get a response.

UPDATE: No need, as here is the 8-K regulatory filing by Amazon announcing the appointment:

AMZN-20110908-8K-20110908

Speaking on the sidelines of the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Mr. Krikorian said television manufacturers like Sony (SNE) and Samsung have an opportunity to band together to compete with companies that are developing ways to blend traditional cable programming with Internet content.

Mr. Krikorian expressed deep skepticism that Google, in particular, could dominate the market of piping digital television and other Internet content into consumers’ living rooms. It is also an open question, he said, whether Apple, whose Apple TV software he praised, can take a lead in the space, or whether cable companies or even TV manufacturers have an opportunity to step in.

Mr. Kirkorian was a central player in the first wave of attempts to connect the Internet and television, founding Sling Media, which makes it possible for users to watch content from their home TVs on mobile phones and computers. He sold Sling Media to EchoStar in 2007 but has continued to advise a number of small and large companies in the digital-media industry.

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Brothers Blake and Jason Krikorian, CEO and SVP-business development, are out, effective immediately. Jason Hirschhorn, who runs the company’s Sling Media Entertainment unit, plans on staying through the end of February; Ben White, chief creative officer at the entertainment group, will stay on through Feb. 1.

Some background from paidContent’s Staci Kramer, who had the story first:

Also leaving: Greg Wilkes, VP-sales. I’ve been told COO John Gilmore will take the reins for now but that may not be official. While no one is talking about any differences, there certainly is a big cultural gap between the tech-creative side and the traditional cable team at EchoStar.”

To tease that out: The Sling team can rightly point to a string of successes–the company racked up a number of awards at both the Consumer Electronics Show and MacWorld last week–but if things were humming smoothly at Echostar, you’d think the company would find a way to make them stick around.

The Slingbox is a potentially disruptive technology, but it’s still nascent, and Sling.com just launched late last year and will need a motivated team to help it gain traction in a crowded field. All those involved say they’ll be taking time off; everyone who knows the team involved finds that hard to believe.

EchoStar grabbed ownership of the start-up that makes devices and software that allow a user to move media to a variety of other locations. Hence, the Sling name.

I have always thought the concept of being able to take content and send it to any device at any time was a critically important one. As it turns out, it turned out to be the precursor to a lot of the moves toward the more distributed, widgetized Web model developing now.

In fact, Walt and I demoed Sling at D2 in 2004, pictured above, right after the device launched. Since then, Sling has morphed into much more than simply a hardware play to encompass software services related to media delivery in a number of ways.

But the basic concept remained the same: Media Must Move.

I hope the deal putting Sling into the hands of one particular part of that raging river of information and content does not hinder this important mission for Sling and Krikorian, its chairman and CEO.

That’s especially important in this critical time, when big media companies finally seem to be coming around to the notion that ubiquitous distribution is the only way to go.

That was not always the case. At the time Sling was launched, I got a call from a major network exec who asked me all about the company, which I had written about several times.

At first, I was pleased he had some savvy about a cutting-edge technology, but then realized he was only interested because the media giant was considering suing Sling out of existence.

Apparently, increasing the number of screens its content could be seen on exponentially took a backseat to unfounded fears of copyright infringement.

In this interview on the PaidContent site with Staci Kramer, Krikorian promised the company would remain operator-agnostic, noting, “We expect very little change to our business except that we have even deeper pockets, and access to other core technologies.”

The company struck the deal as it was looking for a new round of funding. It had already raised a pile of cash–introducing a new hardware concept does not come cheap–totaling almost $57 million.

That came from traditional VCs like Mobius Venture Capital (in a deal born at D2, in fact), as well as other power players like Liberty Media and Hearst Media. EchoStar has also been an investor.