On the intended front, CEO Dan Hesse told investors that the company would launch its first high-speed LTE service before the middle of the year in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.

Perhaps less intended was the announcement of the company’s first LTE smartphone. However, as spotted by The Verge, Sprint is advertising on CNET’s CES page that the Samsung Galaxy Nexus will be the company’s first LTE phone. Clicking on the phone in the ad does nothing, while a link in the bottom of the ad for more info about Sprint’s LTE plans led to an error page as of Thursday afternoon.

After being early to the game with its WiMax-based 4G network, Sprint is now racing to catch up as it adopts LTE. Verizon already has coverage in a good chunk of the nation, while AT&T announced on Thursday that it is offering service in 11 more cities, including Los Angeles, the New York City Metro area and the San Francisco Bay Area.

I’ve asked the company for more details on its plans for the Galaxy Nexus and whether the ad was meant to go live on Thursday.

Update, 5:50 p.m. PT: In a story on its own site, CNET said the ad was published accidentally.

I was on San Francisco’s public radio station today, talking about this past year in tech with “Forum” host Michael Krasny and fellow panelists, former TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy and CNET’s Molly Wood.

2011 was a big year, as it turned out, with good and bad news for companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix and others.

We also looked forward to 2012, which will include new online TV efforts and, of course, the much-anticipated Facebook IPO.

Here’s the chat:

I motored on up north to lovely Petaluma, Calif., on Sunday, to be on Leo Laporte’s most excellent “This Week in Tech” show.

My fellow panelists included Milk’s Kevin Rose, CNET’s Rafe Needleman and all-around good guy Mike Elgan, talking about a wide range of topics, from Google’s music efforts to Rose’s distaste for Amazon’s Kindle Fire to the tech in the latest “Twilight” movie.

Here’s the whole show for your viewing pleasure:

Spotify song sharing is like the new FarmVille, and its auto-sharing turned out to be an unpleasant surprise for folks who didn’t quite understand just how frictionless Open Graph sharing would be.

CNET’s Molly Wood, from a much-discussed Friday article entitled “How Facebook is ruining sharing”

Tonight at 1 am PT, techies who have nothing else to do — that would be me! — can click onto a brand new tech site called The Verge.

Well, kind of — it’s the result of many months of work by the gang that defected from AOL’s popular Engadget tech powerhouse, set up temporary shop under the Web site name This Is My Next and busied themselves with creating The Verge.

I have another screenshot below of the new site that will be focused on news, reviews and features about tech, and which has been getting a final tweaking all today.

From my quick perusal, it has a vibrant and slick design, with a lot of packed boxes, swooshy movement and plenty of content.

Along with the launch, The Verge’s parent company — formerly doing business as SB Nation, focused on sports — will also transform into Vox Media.

In a chit-chat with Vox’s CEO Jim Bankoff, top exec Marty Moe and Josh Topolsky, The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief, the trio of former AOLers all said they were going to for the big time.

“We want to build the platform for talented native Web voices, in sports and tech for now, and then we plan to grow more verticals,” said Bankoff.

“We want to create more than a news site or blog about tech — the frustration at AOL was that we did not get the resources or manpower to realize that bigger vision,” said Topolsky.

(You’re speaking to the choir, brother!)

Said Moe: “We think this category has not had a large enough vision…not enough has been innovated over the years and we think it is a big opportunity.”

Topolsky said the site, along with a mass of original content from 30 writers, will also be helped by a strong database of information about all its topics and gadgets and also focus a lot on community input.

“What we want to do was graduate beyond the blog,” he said.

(Hmm…and here I just got the hang of this blog thing.)

Bankoff, who would not say how much Vox spent on launching The Verge — my back-of-the-envelope guess, several million dollars — said that costs were spread out between the tech and sports sites with centralized sales and product teams.

Initial launch sponsors are BMW, Sony and Samsung, said Moe, who is aiming to sell “major brand advertisers on the idea that we will be the premiere destination of consumer tech coverage.”

It has to grow past big sites like Engadget to do so, but Topolsky said that This Is My Next had three million unique visitors in the last month and more than 10 million page views.

“We have done that with a lot of editorials and in-depth reviews,” he said. “I think people are really hungry for great content and stories.”

As to competitors, Topolsky said that “this not to necessarily I win if you lose,” although his clear aim is to unseat sites like CBS-owned CNET, Engadget and Gawker Media’s Gizmodo and perhaps even newsier sites such as TechCrunch and AllThingsD (as if!).

“We are going to do the nuts and bolts stuff,” he said. “Somewhere between Engadget and Wired.”

Topolsky compared The Verge to a “boutique hotel — we have the same stuff everyone else has, but it is a much more elegant experience.”

Later, that will change, he promised, noting that “this is only version 1.0.”

Of course — but what else would you expect from a gadget site?

(Good luck and congrats to the entire The Verge team from AllThingsD!)

And here is another lovely screenshot, as promised:

Why not? No mystery at all: The band has decided that it wants to sell albums and tracks, not streams.

Billboard’s Glenn Peoples walks through this one quite effectively. It’s not that Coldplay doesn’t want to promote its new music on the Internet. It’s offering plenty of free samples through outlets like iTunes and YouTube, including a free concert that Google streamed this week.

It’s just that the band thinks that offering unlimited listens via Spotify and other streamers will cut into sales.

Spotify and the other services do pay the music labels and publishers to use their music, and eventually that money is supposed to make its way down to the musicians.

But for the few big acts like Coldplay that can still move millions of albums — their last one, which got a big push from Apple, sold 2.8 million copies — there’s no way that Spotify royalties will ever come close to the money they’ll make selling downloads and CDs (yes, CDs — the music industry still sells more discs than digital copies).

The list of Coldplay-size artists gets smaller and smaller every year, which is one big reason that the music labels finally acquiesced and let Spotify offer free music. Some money > none. But if they believe Spotify-style streaming ends up accelerating the decline of their remaining music sales, you might see more pullbacks down the line.

Meanwhile, speaking of absences: Note that the Beatles still aren’t legally available on any other outlet beyond iTunes.

According to sources close to the situation, longtime Yahoo front page chief Liz Lufkin has parted ways with the company.

The departure last week appears to be related to a reorg by newish editor-in-chief Jai Singh, who used to run the editorial efforts for the Huffington Post, at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Singh appears to be setting up his own team and, thus, Lufkin was out.

Lufkin has been at Yahoo for many years, most recently as VP of front page programming. In that job, according to one bio, she supervised “editors in Sunnyvale, Santa Monica, New York and Dallas and consult[ed] to various international Yahoo! sites. Liz’s group contributed to the successful development of Yahoo’s pioneering content optimization personalization system, improving the relevancy of Front Page for users and providing new insights on audience behavior.”

Previous to Yahoo, she had been deputy managing editor at Gannett’s USATODAY.com and USA Today. She had a similar job at the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle.

Lufkin’s job at Yahoo is a critical one, given how powerful the front page of the site is, with 600 million unique visitors and billions of page views.

While the portal system has been under siege in recent years, it is still a massive driver of traffic to Yahoo’s own Web properties and elsewhere on the Internet.

Yahoo declined to comment (but I am right!).

UPDATE: Yahoo said that it had hired CNET editor-in-chief Scott Ard to take Lufkin’s place. Ard, who worked for the CBS-owned tech news property for 12 years, will report directly to Jai Singh, editor-in-chief of the Yahoo Media Network.

We had fun bantering on a range of issues from Apple’s iPhone OS update to the Sony PlayStation Network woes and more.

For those who missed it, the episode is embedded below and also reachable here. I’m told if you look closely, one or both of my cats make a cameo.

Just when you don’t think there could be any more, another emerging category is now targeting small-to-medium-size businesses by offering companies discounts on a range of products from a Lenovo laptop to office furniture or employee perks.

RapidBuyr and marketsharing are two companies competing in the space.

Yesterday, RapidBuyr launched a partnership with American City Business Journals, which will eventually be able to tap into its 10 million subscribers via 42 web sites and 64 publications. It’s live today in about seven of its markets, and was offering 42 percent off three sets of 1,000 business cards for $100.

Through the partnership, RapidBuyr will have access to the business journal’s regional sales staff to get access to local deals in addition to signing up national deals. The American City Business Journals represents just one partnership in addition to making its deals accessible directly from the its web site or through emails.

The company was founded by twin brothers, Tom and Darr Aley, who sold their last company, Generate, which created enterprise-focused social networking tools, to Dow Jones in 2008.

Marketsharing, too, is offering specials on small-to-medium business needs, but says it is differentiating itself by also offering discounts on employee perks, like hand massages, bowling parties and gym memberships.

The New York-based company has raised $1 million in seed funding from Kevin Wendle, the co-founder of CNET, and Daniel Klaus, who was behind Music Nation and Original Signal. Marketsharing’s founder John Amato previously was the president and co-founder of Show Media, one of the providers of taxi advertising in New York City.

The media conglomerate plans to spin out its IGN.com dudes-and-games site, and is bulking up in advance by acquiring Hearst’s dudes-and-games-centric UGO.com.

People familiar with the companies’ operations tell me News Corp. and Hearst have been finalizing plans over the weekend, and will likely announce the merger within the next few days.

Plans to cleave off IGN.com will take longer, perhaps months. Roy Bahat, who has been running IGN for News Corp. since 2007, will run the new company.

The goal is to create a standalone Web business that will focus primarily on videogame news, reviews, and culture. News Corp. is weighing taking on outside investors for IGN in advance of the split; IGN may also acquire other properties before the move.

News Corp. officials declined to comment. I haven’t heard back from Hearst. News Corp. also owns this Web site.

Unlike other Web moves News Corp. has been making, the plan to move IGN outside of News Corp.’s corporate walls isn’t a disposal of an impaired asset. People familiar with IGN’s operations say it is growing and profitable.

I’m told the company expects to earn more than $10 million this year on revenues of around $100 million. The idea is that IGN will be able to grow much faster if it isn’t operating inside Rupert Murdoch’s company.

Assuming that News Corp. ends up getting a buyer or partner for MySpace, the IGN move means that the company will have found new homes for all three of the big Web properties it bought during the Web 2.0 boom.

News Corp. kicked off the boom itself by buying MySpace for $580 million in the summer of 2005; a few months later it paid $650 million for IGN. In 2007, it paid about $250 million for photo-sharing site Photobucket, which it handed over to Ontela in December 2009.

Both in and outside of News Corp., IGN has always garnered much less attention than MySpace. Just a few years ago, MySpace was the world’s biggest social network, and the reason Google had signed on for a $900 million ad deal; IGN was simply a collection of dude-oriented sites that News Corp. had overpaid for. More recently, MySpace has been a black hole for money and talent, while IGN has found its focus as a competitor to CBS’ Gamespot.

Hearst, meanwhile, has been trying to figure out what to do with UGO for a while. It paid $100 million for the site in 2007, but its original management team left within two years. Hearst Interactive head Ken Bronfin has been overseeing the site since then, and last year the company hired former Montogmery & Co. banker Kevin Covert to find a partner.

I don’t know how the two sites are valued in the merger, except that IGN is worth more. News Corp. will have a controlling stake in the combined company. Comscore says IGN has an audience of 19.7 million U.S. visitors; it pegs UGO at 13.1 million.

The appointment comes on the heels of LivingSocial’s latest fundraising efforts, of which details started to leak out today. The Washington, D.C.-based daily deals company has reportedly attracted around $500 million in additional funding at a $3 billion valuation.

According to sources, those figures are accurate and that an announcement from LivingSocial should come soon.

What’s more, sources said the company is now on track to book more than $1 billion in revenues this year, which is double the conservative figure the company reported only four months ago.

As to Ashe, he is an interesting choice for LivingSocial’s board.

Most recently, Ashe (pictured here) was the president of CBS Interactive. He stepped down in December, but it was unclear at the time where the executive was headed.

Ashe joined CBS through the acquisition of CNET, where he was CEO. Sources said his role at LivingSocial is strictly as a board member; he will not be taking a managerial role.

Other LivingSocial board members include: Tim O’Shaughnessy, co-founder and CEO; Eddie Frederick, president and co-founder; Tige Savage of Revolution; Ted Maidenberg of USVP; Don Rainey of Grotech Ventures and Peter Krawiec of Amazon. Krawiec joined after Amazon invested $175 million, as part of the company’s round announced in December.

Ashe’s appointment to the board will add additional expertise as the company bulks up to go against market-leading Groupon. It must also fend off other entrants, ranging from such giants as Facebook and Google to more scrappy one-off niche sites focused on categories, such as families, pets or religions.

While Groupon grabs a lot of the spotlight, LivingSocial is growing rapidly too.

It has 1,200 employees and has expanded into a dozen international markets. It is adding about one million users a week to its email list, and has roughly 25 million in total.

While he won’t officially take over as CEO of Google until April, the recent full-frontal slapfest on Microsoft’s Bing search engine for shoplifting results from the search giant was so Larry Page in tone and temperament that it brought back memories from many years ago when I covered Google more closely.

Like the time in 2004 when he railed on the investment banking system as Google considered its IPO. Or, a meeting in 2005 when Page aggressively argued minutiae about the size of Google’s index size after Yahoo claimed its data trove was bigger.

And my ears are still ringing from a Googleplex lunch we had in the midst of his ire over a 2005 story on CNET that chronicled a lot of personal information about CEO Eric Schmidt, trying to show how much data was easily available on Google.

Page thought it best to be on the offensive and attack the report as a privacy violation, while I took the position that it was accurate and fair game and you don’t argue with the press and win.

It’s unlikely Page remembers any of this, but I do because I kept notes as part of my ongoing assessment of his characteristics as an Internet leader.

In fact, after our first interview in 2001, my notes on the encounter had this one line underlined and in all caps:

LARRY PAGE=BILL GATES.

It was not meant as an insult, but I can tell you I never wrote such a note about Page’s co-founder, the jokey and affable Sergey Brin.

Even then, Gates had a fearsome reputation as a manically competitive exec, a cutting manner to those not as smart as he clearly is and a reputation as a very tough and often eviscerating boss. (And all that was also my experience whenever I was interviewing him.)

While much wonkier, friendlier and more of a sensitive new-aged male, Page, it seemed to me, had the exact same obvious drive and aggression as Gates.

I stopped covering Google as closely years later–for personal reasons (see disclosure above)–and, thus, largely fell out of regular touch with Page.

But in reading the tough quotes and later blog post by Amit Singhal–quite possibly the sweetest dude at Google–accusing Bing of cheating, it felt like he was channeling Page’s very clear and nerdily indignant voice again.

In a nutshell: We have data to prove Microsoft’s stealing. Look at our detailed proof from our complex sting. We are outraged by this violation of geek code. Don’t you lay people get it?!?

I would wager that we’re about to see a lot more of this pugnacious, in-your-face tone from Google under Page’s leadership, which could have far-reaching implications for the company.

While I have no idea if it was his decision to let loose the dogs of algo-war on Microsoft, many with knowledge of how Google manages its public persona observed to me this week that this was just the kind of popping off that the outgoing Schmidt often tried to mitigate and soften.

But such bravado will play well with Google’s elite and pampered engineering corps in Silicon Valley.

And, in any case, PR considerations have never really been the point for Page, who cares not for how it might come off in the media (which he largely disdains anyway).

Which is to say like a temper tantrum of a very smart and very gifted child, who is probably largely right, but should not be quite so exercised given the level of violation.

No matter, since Page likely still lives and breathes data and algorithms and the Spock-like application of information.

It’s the rest of us who are illogical.

Neil Ashe (pictured here), president of CBS Interactive, is stepping down from his post.

CBS confirmed the move after BoomTown made inquiries recently, after hearing of various executives who had been contacted by the media giant about the position.

“Neil has helped make CBSi into the successful and profitable business it is today. Looking out into 2011, we are working on a relaxed timeframe to name a successor to his post, as he embarks on his next great thing,” said a spokesman.

It is not clear where Ashe is headed, nor who his replacement will be.

But an exec close to the situation said that Zander Lurie, who has worked closely with Ashe at CNET and CBS, will take on a bigger role.

Lurie is currently SVP of strategic development at CBS.

Several years ago, CBS bought CNET, where Ashe was CEO.

He had been at CNET since 2002, and replaced Quincy Smith as the interactive division’s head.

According to sources close to the situation, well-known Silicon Valley power player Peter Currie is joining the board of directors of Twitter.

It’s an interesting choice to bring the well-regarded moneyman to the microblogging start-up, and could indicate an intent to push to an IPO eventually.

As first reported by NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes earlier this week, Twitter is now considering funding offers from big venture funds, specifically Russia’s DST Global and Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins, as well as fielding incoming acquisition interest from Google and Facebook.

Currie should know about this kind of noisy swirl around a hot start-up.

Back in the heyday of Web 1.0, as the CFO of Netscape Communications, he led the iconic browser software company into history, as the first great Internet rocket ship, when it went public on August 9, 1995.

While the Netscape experience ended in tears, Currie’s career has not, and he has become a kind of go-to elder statesman in the Web 2.0 era.

A year ago, for example, he joined Facebook as its temporary CFO.

That move came after the social networking site, in a bit of turmoil, parted ways with its then CFO, Gideon Yu, following mutual disagreements.

Indeed, Currie plays the calm, collected wise man well.

Unusually tall, aggressively avuncular and laid-back, he loves Elvis and enjoys pranking reporters like BoomTown.

(Case in point: Back in the day, he spread the rumor around Silicon Valley that I was short due to a medical condition.)

Now the president of Currie Capital, a private investment firm, he had previously worked at General Atlantic in private equity.

After Netscape, he was a partner and co-founder of the Barksdale Group, an early-stage (and ill-fated) venture capital firm.

Before Netscape, he was CFO of McCaw Cellular Communications and also worked at Morgan Stanley.

Currie is also board-happy, serving as a director of a variety of tech firms, private and public, which have had varying degrees of success.

They have included CNET, Critical Path, Clearwire, Safeco, Ofoto, Tellme Networks and Zantaz, as well as Sun Microsystems.

He has an MBA from Stanford University and went to Williams College.

In other words, just the kind of pedigree needed to give some additional burnish to the Twitter board, which now includes Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet, Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams, co-founder Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo.

Apparently, it’s time to toss another dude in there!

Welcome to Mobilized, the latest All Things Digital blog devoted to all things mobile. Mobilized will cover the wireless world from cell phones to tablets, as well as the networks they run on (or drop calls on).

In other words, all the issues raised by having the tiny little machines with us at all times.

If you are reading this on your Apple iPhone, Amazon Kindle, BlackBerry from Research in Motion, Google Android or other non-PC device: Congratulations, you are already Mobilized.

But, if you are sitting in front of a laptop or desktop as you are reading this–you might be a little behind the times, although on the plus side, you don’t have to squint nearly as much.

And, even if you printed this article out, I am happy you took the time to read it (Hi, Dad!).

In any case, I am hoping to cut through the jargon and the hype, so that this will be a spot that both the early adopters and the merely curious will be able to find items of interest.

And whether you are a mobile geek or not, mobile technology is poised to reshape your life. Cell phones aren’t just mini-computers and tablets aren’t just notebooks with their keyboards cut off. These products are reshaping not just how we consume media, but also the ways we interact with each
other.

Let me take a moment to introduce myself.

For those that don’t know me, I spent the last decade at CNET, covering everything from Apple and Microsoft to ill-fated products from the Audrey to the Foleo.

While mobile hasn’t been my full-time beat, I have always been a device junkie. I owned a Windows CE 1.0 device and several of the first attempts to marry a phone with a Palm Pilot. Most recently, I have spent the past several years covering Microsoft full-time and recently did a three-part series on the birth of Windows Phone 7.

I am passionate about technology and telling the stories about the people making the products that are changing the way we live. I hope to find room to tell all kinds of different stories in these pages.

I plan to start things off with an interview I did last week in New York with Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci. I also had a chance to catch up there with multitouch pioneer Jeff Han, who is beginning to shift some of his work from giant touchscreens to mobile devices.

Meanwhile, next week is the inaugural D: Dive into Mobile conference. I’ll be providing lots of coverage, of course, including backstage interviews with many of the speakers.

So, that’s my spiel. Be sure to sound off in the forums, whether you think I am right on track or completely off base. You can also drop me a note at the easy-to-remember email: Ina@AllThingsD.com.

A few days ago, All Things Digital announced CNET senior writer Ina Fried was joining the staff to cover mobile for the site.

Today, we complete a one-two punch with the hiring of Liz Gannes, who will be covering the critical social beat.

She comes to us after an impressive stint as a senior writer from the terrific GigaOm Network.

Anyone who follows the development of Web 2.0 and the growing power of social networking–from powerhouse Facebook to the innovative stylings of Twitter to the explosive growth of Zynga–understands the importance of the social arena to the future of the Web.

That was underscored today with the unveiling of a new $250 million sFund by Kleiner Perkins, Facebook, Amazon and others.

Liz will be covering all this and more for us, which we expect her to do with the same kind of professionalism and insight she displayed in spades at GigaOm.

Liz, interestingly enough, was raised in Silicon Valley, and has been wise beyond her years, even as a high school student.

In fact, in an article in the New York Times in 2000 about the corrosive effect of the Web 1.0 culture on young people in the area–called the “affluenza syndrome”–the then-senior at Palo Alto High School said:

“It’s hard to ground ourselves sometimes….The things we hear on the news are happening all around us. We’re living on top of this bubble and we’re not able to see below us.”

We think Liz’s unique perspective will allow readers to see a lot.

After high school and college at Dartmouth, where she got a degree in linguistics, the daughter of a tech-reporter-turned-start-up-CEO–the amazing Stuart Gannes–started her career as a reporter for Red Herring in 2004.

In 2006, Liz founded NewTeeVee, a GigaOM site that is now the pre-eminent source for news and analysis about the intersection of entertainment and technology.

We are thrilled to have her join ATD, especially so since she is coming from a site we admire so much and, more importantly, because of her work for tech’s top-notch blogging pioneer, Om Malik.

And we think once Liz starts chronicling the social arena for us, our readers will have even more to admire in her work.

There are more job announcements to come soon, as ATD expands our coverage, so stay tuned.

A few days ago, All Things Digital announced CNET senior writer Ina Fried was joining the staff to cover mobile for the site.

Today, we complete a one-two punch with the hiring of Liz Gannes, who will be covering the critical social beat.

She comes to us after an impressive stint as a senior writer from the terrific GigaOm Network.

Anyone who follows the development of Web 2.0 and the growing power of social networking–from powerhouse Facebook to the innovative stylings of Twitter to the explosive growth of Zynga–understands the importance of the social arena to the future of the Web.

That was underscored today with the unveiling of a new $250 million sFund by Kleiner Perkins, Facebook, Amazon and others.

Liz will be covering all this and more for us, which we expect her to do with the same kind of professionalism and insight she displayed in spades at GigaOm.

Liz, interestingly enough, was raised in Silicon Valley, and has been wise beyond her years, even as a high school student.

In fact, in an article in the New York Times in 2000 about the corrosive effect of the Web 1.0 culture on young people in the area–called the “affluenza syndrome”–the then-senior at Palo Alto High School said:

“It’s hard to ground ourselves sometimes….The things we hear on the news are happening all around us. We’re living on top of this bubble and we’re not able to see below us.”

We think Liz’s unique perspective will allow readers to see a lot.

After high school and college at Dartmouth, where she got a degree in linguistics, the daughter of a tech-reporter-turned-start-up-CEO–the amazing Stuart Gannes–started her career as a reporter for Red Herring in 2004.

In 2006, Liz founded NewTeeVee, a GigaOM site that is now the pre-eminent source for news and analysis about the intersection of entertainment and technology.

We are thrilled to have her join ATD, especially so since she is coming from a site we admire so much and, more importantly, because of her work for tech’s top-notch blogging pioneer, Om Malik.

And we think once Liz starts chronicling the social arena for us, our readers will have even more to admire in her work.

There are more job announcements to come soon, as ATD expands our coverage, so stay tuned.

Here at All Things Digital, we’ve always prided ourselves on our journalism efforts, while also fully embracing the fast-paced new world of blogging.

So, we could not be more thrilled to announce the hiring of Ina Fried as our new reporter and blogger, covering the critically important mobile beat. She is pictured here.

Her new beat will range from wireless carriers like AT&T; to handset makers, such as Nokia and Research in Motion; to the smartphone kingpins, Google and Apple.

And if Facebook ever does make a phone, Ina will surely have the scoop.

Mobile is a beat that reaches across companies and is at the dead center of Web 3.0.

Ina is one of several new journalists we will be announcing over the next week, part of an expansion of the ATD universe. That includes a recently announced new conference series, beginning with D: Dive Into Mobile.

There is much more to come, but let’s focus on the stylings of Ina first.

As most people know, she has been at CNET for the past 10 years, most recently covering Microsoft as a senior writer.

And although she hasn’t been focused solely on mobile, Ina has been covering the area since 2000, when folks like Kyocera were trying to shove a Palm Pilot and a phone together, most recently doing a behind-the-scenes series for CNET on the birth of Windows Phone 7.

During her time at the tech news site, she also covered Apple for four years and led CNET’s coverage of the Hewlett-Packard-Compaq merger, as well as covering all manner of gadgets from the Palm Pilot to the Audrey (I have no idea what that is, but Walt Mossberg does).

Before that, she covered the chip industry for financial wire service Bridge News and also worked at the Orange Country Register and Orange County Business Journal.

She’s a graduate of Miami University (she reminds me that’s the one in Ohio not Florida, pointing out they are better at ice hockey than football.)

Beyond breaking all kinds of stories on the Microsoft beat, Ina has closely followed Bill Gates in his shift from software titan to global philanthropist, interviewing him frequently and tagging along on his college speaking tour earlier this year. (Last week she published separate interviews with Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the same day.)

Ina also traveled to Brazil and Colombia to explore the impact of computing in emerging markets.

She’s a former vice president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and has won a number of journalism awards, including some that she says would be seriously dangerous during an earthquake.

For example, she was named three times as one of the top 30 financial journalists under 30 by TJFR and has also been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists and Western Publishers Association, among others.

A huge softball fanatic, part of the reason she won’t start at ATD until late November is that her women’s softball team is headed to the gay softball World Series in Las Vegas (I wonder if Audrey is going).

In the meantime, you can keep up to date with Ina by following her on Twitter at Twitter.com/inafried.

Here at All Things Digital, we’ve always prided ourselves on our journalism efforts, while also fully embracing the fast-paced new world of blogging.

So, we could not be more thrilled to announce the hiring of Ina Fried as our new reporter and blogger, covering the critically important mobile beat. She is pictured here.

Her new beat will range from wireless carriers like AT&T; to handset makers, such as Nokia and Research in Motion; to the smartphone kingpins, Google and Apple.

And if Facebook ever does make a phone, Ina will surely have the scoop.

Mobile is a beat that reaches across companies and is at the dead center of Web 3.0.

Ina is one of several new journalists we will be announcing over the next week, part of an expansion of the ATD universe. That includes a recently announced new conference series, beginning with D: Dive Into Mobile.

There is much more to come, but let’s focus on the stylings of Ina first.

As most people know, she has been at CNET for the past 10 years, most recently covering Microsoft as a senior writer.

And although she hasn’t been focused solely on mobile, Ina has been covering the area since 2000, when folks like Kyocera were trying to shove a Palm Pilot and a phone together, most recently doing a behind-the-scenes series for CNET on the birth of Windows Phone 7.

During her time at the tech news site, she also covered Apple for four years and led CNET’s coverage of the Hewlett-Packard-Compaq merger, as well as covering all manner of gadgets from the Palm Pilot to the Audrey (I have no idea what that is, but Walt Mossberg does).

Before that, she covered the chip industry for financial wire service Bridge News and also worked at the Orange Country Register and Orange County Business Journal.

She’s a graduate of Miami University (she reminds me that’s the one in Ohio not Florida, pointing out they are better at ice hockey than football.)

Beyond breaking all kinds of stories on the Microsoft beat, Ina has closely followed Bill Gates in his shift from software titan to global philanthropist, interviewing him frequently and tagging along on his college speaking tour earlier this year. (Last week she published separate interviews with Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the same day.)

Ina also traveled to Brazil and Colombia to explore the impact of computing in emerging markets.

She’s a former vice president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and has won a number of journalism awards, including some that she says would be seriously dangerous during an earthquake.

For example, she was named three times as one of the top 30 financial journalists under 30 by TJFR and has also been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists and Western Publishers Association, among others.

A huge softball fanatic, part of the reason she won’t start at ATD until late November is that her women’s softball team is headed to the gay softball World Series in Las Vegas (I wonder if Audrey is going).

In the meantime, you can keep up to date with Ina by following her on Twitter at Twitter.com/inafried.

No confirmation from Google (GOOG) yet. But assuming this is a done deal, it’s a big one in the intellectual property world: Von Lohmann has been a prominent advocate for tech companies in legal fights and is best known for backing the likes of YouTube, LimeWire and Grokster in their battles with copyright owners.