Hearst will be using a platform built for big media publishers by Group Commerce, a New York-based company founded by former Google and DoubleClick executives David Rosenblatt, Jonty Kelt and Andrew Glenn.

The offers, which will start rolling out later this summer, will primarily target the male-dominated audiences of the two magazine brands. Later, Hearst will expand it to other demographics through such well-known magazine properties as Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and Esquire.

So far, Group Commerce has launched with other major media outlets, such as DailyCandy, Thrillist and the New York Times. It has raised $18.5 million in capital and grown to 75 employees since officially launching in March. In all, its network of publishers is already reaching 15 million subscribers who have signed up to receive deals.

Rob Houghlin, the publisher and chief revenue officer of Car and Driver and Road & Track, said they’ve been looking at doing something in the social commerce space over the past four or five years.

“It’s a brand new way to connect some of our advertisers with our most trusted asset — our users,” he said. “Advertisers are looking for new ways to talk to current and potential customers. They don’t want to move distressed products, but they want to offer special products to consumers who want it. It’s a platform of credibility first and value second.”

The deals will be promoted through the magazines and through other online experiences, such as newsletters, blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and mobile applications.

Some of the initial offerings include a custom product bundle from Gladiator Garage, which sells workbenches and storage units for garages, and an exclusive Corvette driving school package at Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch in Nevada.

Kelt, who is the CEO of Group Commerce, said the company will be working with Hearst to get all of its magazines up and running with deals by the end of the year. He said the magazines serve perfect niches that can be catered to.

“The whole premise of our business is that relevance is really important,” he said. “The media companies have strong vertical titles and know who their reader is.”

Kelt said there are two distinct advantages to partnering with publishers: The cost of acquiring customers is much lower because they already have the readers and combining offers alongside content can be particularly powerful.

If you think about it, newspapers have always had content and advertising — from classifieds to display ads — that people have been interested in. That will likely be the company’s only hope if it wants to contend with the massive marketing machines already assembled by Groupon and LivingSocial.

“Great content is really powerful, but great content with great commerce is even more powerful,” Kelt said. “You’ll be more engaged and more valuable than if you just had content from that brand.”

Here’s a mock-up of how the deals will look on Road & Track. This is not a final version, obviously:

The company, founded by former Google and DoubleClick executives David Rosenblatt, Jonty Kelt, and Andrew Glenn, has now raised a total of $18.5 million.

Group Commerce’s CEO Kelt confirmed the ink was still drying on the check. “We only recently came out of stealth mode. The topline is that things are going really well. We wanted to accelerate what we were doing.”

The round was funded by the company’s current investors: Spark Capital, Carmel Ventures, Lerer Media Ventures, and Bob Pittman, the founder of MTV Networks and now chairman of media and entertainment platforms at Clear Channel. This publication also reported on the funding.

Kelt said there was a lot of investor interest and they could have raised more but they decided to stick with insiders.

Unlike Groupon and the hundreds of clones sprouting up all around it, Group Commerce is building a white-label platform that can be used by publishers and media companies that have traditionally been in the local commerce business, but have been left out of the Groupon phenomenon. Some of its early customers include: DailyCandy, Meredith Corporation, Thrillist and the New York Times.

Seattle-based Tippr is a direct competitor. Having been in the market for longer, Tippr has about 70 partners, including Fox and NBC affiliates in some local markets. Tippr has raised about $9 million, and has 120 employees.

Kelt said the money will go toward supporting its current customer base as well as additional media partners in the pipeline. Two months ago, they had 35 employees. Today, they have 50 with sales members in six cities; they want to be at 100 employees by the end of the year and in 15 markets.

Group Commerce gives its partners the choice of using its own sales force to sell the daily deals, or relying on Group Commerce’s sales force. Additionally, it tries to match relevant deals to the readers of the different publications. “As a general comment, I’d say we are getting better at it, and therefore our partners want us to be more aggressive.”

The funding market for daily deals is hot right now. Gilt Groupe, which also has a daily deals business called Gilt City, just raised $138 million, and Groupon is eager to file for an initial public offering. Last month, LivingSocial raised $400 million.

Margo Georgiadis (pictured here), VP of Global Sales Operations at Google, will be COO of Groupon, Google confirmed.

She is currently located in Chicago, where the social buying site is headquartered.

A Google spokesman confirmed the move by Georgiadis, while Groupon–which specifically denied a query about her appointment that BoomTown made Tuesday–dithered.

In a statement, her boss, SVP and Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora said:

“I’m grateful for all that Margo has done for our team over the past two years. We will miss her, but we’re also very excited that she’s joining a terrific company and a great partner for Google.”

Besides COO, I will officially bestow the title of “Chief Cat Wrangler” on Georgiadis, for the massive organizational job ahead for her at the notoriously chaotic start-up. (As evidenced by Google being the company confirming a major Groupon hire.)

Still, Groupon’s growth had been stunning. It now has thousands of employees and has already washed out one COO, former Yahoo exec Rob Solomon, whose departure was reported here.

It has also turned down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google, raised a badillion dollars in venture funding from tech’s top investors and also is prepping an IPO valuing the company at upwards of $15 billion.

Phew!

Georgiadis must bring calm to this perfect storm.

Because of her solid resume (see below) and quiet demeanor, I had included her in a list of candidates several weeks ago and had queried the social buying company about her specifically this week.

In fact, when I asked for a comment if Georgiadis was hired on Tuesday, a Groupon spokeswoman said: “This would be news to me. Nothing to announce yet.”

At the time, Google had the class to simply say “no comment.”

(Lesson learned!)

Crain’s Chicago Business’ John Pletz first posted on Georgiadis’ hiring earlier today.

In any case, Georgiadis is just the kind of candidate that Groupon has been looking for–a competent and experienced sales and operations exec who would not overshadow its quirky CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason.

As I wrote two weeks ago:

Lastly, and perhaps most important, the Groupon COO candidate is going to have to accept that the role will not be a CEO-in-waiting, either before or after its inevitable IPO in the next year.

While I have received several tips that co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason might not stay its principal exec, extensive checking with sources inside and outside the company indicate that such a move is highly unlikely.

“Andrew is beloved to the board, by investors and, most of all, by employees,” said one source. “He’s not going anywhere.”

Indeed, Mason has a close working relationship with co-founder Brad Keywell, as well as Groupon co-founder and Chairman Eric Lefkofsky.

In fact, despite other business interests, Lefkofsky has been very involved in all key decisions with Mason.

That job, presumably, would fall to the new COO, which Groupon should be hiring sooner rather than later.

“Groupon needs a world-class COO, who can manage hyper-growth, but also who knows that a No. 2 stays in the background while doing it,” said another source. “That’s a tall order.”

Groupon has looked at a number of top execs, most specificially at former DoubleClick and Google exec David Rosenblatt. Sources said the high-profile exec did not want to play second fiddle to Mason or move to Chicago.

That’s moot now. Here is Georgiadis’ bio at the Silicon Valley search giant, which shows why Groupon picked her:

Georgiadis is responsible for driving Google’s sales operations and strategies across regions, channels and products as well as leading the sales technology teams which enable the successful commercialization of Google’s products (e.g., AdWords, AdSense, display and mobile ads) with advertisers and publishers.

She also leads the company’s local and commerce businesses, working to extend services like Checkout, Google Places and commerce search to small and large businesses alike.

Before joining Google, Margo was a principal in Synetro Capital LLC, a private investment firm based in Chicago. She also spent five years as the executive vice president of card products and chief marketing officer of Discover Financial Services where she led a radical turnaround of business performance and revitalized its rewards leadership with award-winning new products, customer experience and marketing. Prior to Discover, Margo was a partner at McKinsey and Company for 15 years in London and Chicago. She was a leader in the firm’s marketing and retail practices, and also co-founded and led the customer acquisition and management and retail marketing practices.

She has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

That’s not a formal estimate of Google’s performance, of course. But since Google dominates search, it’s certainly a good directional indicator.

Meanwhile, Google nemesis Facebook (remember when Microsoft and Yahoo used to vie for that title?) is also growing: Efficient Frontier says pricing on the social network’s ads has moved up more than 40 percent since the end of last year. It predicts ad spending on Facebook will grow more than 200 percent this year.

The company also says that ad buyers and sellers are indeed using display ad exchanges like Google’s DoubleClick/AdX, and that there is 300 percent more inventory in that system than there was a year ago. But more inventory equals lower prices, which are down 30 percent.

Of all the many job openings in tech, perhaps the most interesting to watch will be who Groupon selects as its next COO.

The search has been on for a while for the critical hire for the Chicago-based social buying company, well before the recent announcement that it was parting ways with President and COO Rob Solomon.

Among those approached, said sources close to Groupon: Former Doubleclick and Google exec David Rosenblatt.

He’s not taking the job for a variety of reasons, sources said, but
finding someone to step up for the job will be tough, since it is likely to be one that will require a wide range of talents.

That includes: epic cat-wrangling of thousands of employees in far-flung locations; deep marketing and advertising prowess; high-level technology, product, mobile and e-commerce chops; and international experience.

The last is perhaps the most critical of all, since global growth–especially in Europe and Asia–is increasingly becoming Groupon’s main revenue driver, and the COO will have to pull together a crack team across the world.

That will become even more important after Groupon’s top international managers–Germany’s entrepreneurial Samwer brothers–move out of active management by the end of this year.

While company sources said this has been long planned, the Samwers (pictured here) have been fully involved in Groupon’s fast trajectory in Europe and elsewhere, since it bought their Citydeal discounting clone last May.

Thus, sources said, Groupon is looking at a range of candidates with experience abroad, as well as talent in scaling businesses quickly and to huge size.

And that means looking to companies such as Google and Amazon for an exec, where there are quite a few choices.

While BoomTown could not confirm whether Groupon has spoken to any of them, possible COO types are obvious.

At Amazon, some qualified execs include: Sebastian J. Gunningham, SVP of Seller Services; Diego Piacentini, SVP of International Retail; H. Brian Valentine, SVP of Ecommerce Platform; and Jeffrey A. Wilke, SVP of North America Retail.

At Google, there are tons of good candidates that Facebook has not yet raided, including: Stephanie Tilenius, VP of eCommerce; Henrique de Castro, VP of Media and Global Platforms; Dennis Woodside, VP of Americas Operations; and Margo Georgiadis, VP of Global Sales Operations (plus a Chicagoan!).

Other names being raised include Hulu’s Jason Kilar (unlikely, but I’d like it), various Microsoft execs and a spate of others.

(I say, let’s bring in Zynga’s Owen Van Natta, who was once COO of Facebook, since he’s missing a big pile of Groupon stock to add to his enviable collection of hot Web 2.0 company shares.)

While there are probably qualified execs outside the tech industry at retail and media outfits, sources said it is likely Groupon will select within the digital ranks.

Lastly, and perhaps most important, the Groupon COO candidate is going to have to accept that the role will not be a CEO-in-waiting, either before or after its inevitable IPO in the next year.

While I have received several tips that Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason (pictured here) might not stay its principal exec, extensive checking with sources inside and outside the company indicate that such a move is highly unlikely.

“Andrew is beloved to the board, by investors and, most of all, by employees,” said one source. “He’s not going anywhere.”

Indeed, Mason has a close working relationship with Co-founder Brad Keywell, as well as Groupon Co-founder and Chairman Eric Lefkofsky.

In fact, despite other business interests, Lefkofsky has been very involved in all key decisions with Mason.

That job, presumably, would fall to the new COO, which Groupon should be hiring sooner rather than later.

“Groupon needs a world-class COO, who can manage hyper-growth, but also who knows that a No. 2 stays in the background while doing it,” said another source. “That’s a tall order.”

As we await the decision of which uneasy head gets the COO crown at Groupon, here is the opening from the Swisher boys fave Animal Planet cable television show, “Must Love Cats,” to get you in the mood:

You can’t say that AppNexus poached Ari Paparo from Google, because his last job was at Nielsen, where he spent the last nine months. But prior to that, he put in a total of five years as a product head at DoubleClick, the display ad giant, and Google, which bought DoubleClick in 2008.

At DoubleClick/Google, Paparo headed the teams for “buy-side” products–the ones aimed at advertisers and agencies. At AppNexus, he’ll join former colleague Michael Rubenstein, now president at AppNexus.

Google and AppNexus are now both commercial partners and competitors, because, among other things, AppNexus is trying to help Microsoft build a business to compete with Google’s AdExchange.

This morning the company confirmed it had hired Satya Patel, a former AdSense product manager who was for the last four years focused on software and Internet investments as a partner at Battery Ventures, to be a director of product management.

Patel (pictured at right) is to start April 4, Twitter said. His hire was first reported by Fortune.

Patel will be a product leader, but not the product leader.

That top spot is still unfilled, and has been since Jason Goldman left the company at the end of last year.

Twitter is actively trying to persuade co-founder and Chairman Jack Dorsey to take a more active product role, as was reported yesterday by Business Insider. Dorsey, however, has a day job as CEO at Square, the payments company he co-founded in 2009.

Other than Dorsey, Twitter seems to have a fixation on hiring Google people.

Neal Mohan (pictured at left), a VP of product management at Google who runs DoubleClick, had also recently been in late-stage discussions to join Twitter, but he was persuaded to stay at Google, according to multiple sources. Mohan is a very significant player at Google and would have been a big catch for Twitter. However, having a monetization person lead Twitter’s product would have likely been a source of internal friction, those sources noted.

(Related: Late last year Twitter added former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt to its board.)

Before Mohan, Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of product management in charge of Chrome and Chrome OS, made a similar choice after being recruited for Twitter’s top product spot. Pichai decided to stay at Google in January after Google made him a large competitive counteroffer.

For Patel (and Dorsey, if that develops), Twitter product management would not be their only job. If Dorsey were to return to Twitter, he could potentially cede Square leadership to COO Keith Rabois, an experienced leader from stints at PayPal and Square and one of Silicon Valley’s leading angel investors. Meanwhile, Patel will maintain some of his board seats and remain a venture partner at Battery, as reported by Fortune.

The big allure of Dorsey is not only that the idea for Twitter sprang from his brain, but that he has been involved with the company all along, especially since last fall when Dick Costolo replaced Evan Williams as CEO. That would make him a lot easier to integrate than an outsider, sources noted.

Twitter’s employees and investors alike speak with admiration of Dorsey and express wistfulness that the company’s true product visionary was forced out in 2008 when Williams took over. Dorsey’s homecoming would be kind of messianic.

Meanwhile, Williams is much less involved in Twitter these days, having spent much of the winter in Tahoe, though he did come by the office yesterday to interview Lady Gaga.

However, Twitter hasn’t just been waiting in a holding pattern for a product head honcho to show up; others at the company have been working on various interesting features and products that will soon launch, said multiple Twitter sources. And importantly, the company recently migrated and stabilized its infrastructure, a necessary and overdue upgrade that is probably a good thing to do before any major product launch.

Think again.

New York-based Group Commerce, which is coming out of stealth today, has the funding and the pedigree to be a viable contender.

Founded by former Google and DoubleClick executives David Rosenblatt, Jonty Kelt, and Andrew Glenn, has raised $8 million in capital.

Investors include: Spark Capital, Carmel Ventures, Lerer Media Ventures, and Bob Pittman, the founder of MTV Networks and now chairman of media and entertainment platforms at Clear Channel.

What’s more, it is coming out of the gate running with four major publishers added to its platform: DailyCandy, Meredith Corporation, Thrillist and The New York Times.

In an exclusive interview with eMoney, Rosenblatt and Kelt explain that unlike Groupon or LivingSocial, Group Commerce is not building its own consumer brand, and won’t be targeting deals directly at consumers. Rather, it’s banking on building a platform that other media companies can leverage.

Rosenblatt, who was the former CEO of DoubleClick, is the company’s chairman, Kelt is CEO, and Glenn is the company’s CTO. All three were at DoubleClick when it was acquired by Google for $3.1 billion

Ironically, they are now building a business that Google desperately wants to get into, but failed after an unsuccessful $6 billion bid to acquire Groupon.

Rosenblatt said:

“Of course, this is going to be a very big market, and there will be many more players than just two. Each participant will have a different approach. Google clearly has one, but we believe collectively that publishers have the strongest advantage. They have the audience and the brand loyalty, but they are missing the mechanics and industry expertise.”

The daily deals space is getting exceedingly crowded.

The market is expected to soar to as much as $3.9 billion in the next four years, and there’s roughly 200 players in the space, according to estimates by BIA/Kelsey.

Rosenblatt compared the market to the early days of online advertising when AOL and Yahoo dominated.

“In the early days of the display market, a big share of the market was dominated by two players, but overtime advertising was redistributed to where the audience was. Groupon and LivingSocial have done a great job creating a market, and they will continue to be very large, but there will be a similar redistribution in favor of publishers,” he said.

Beyond Groupon and LivingSocial, which are considered the market leaders, there’s other companies attacking several niches, ranging from furniture to baby apparel, travel and families. There’s also companies that say they offer exactly what Group Commerce is describing–a white label solution for publishers–including Seattle-based Tippr and ReachLocal, which recently acquired DealOn.

“There’s a huge number of Groupon clones,” Rosenblatt said. “The insight here is that none of those clones have established publishers, they don’t have brands or trusted relationships, or customer lists….We don’t have a b2c business, but that is the case with most of the other white label providers. They also don’t have teams and our breadth of services.”

He says the three components that you must have in order to be successful in the space are: A loyal audience; great content and deals; and a technology platform.

“The publishers we’ve worked with for many years [at DoubleClick] are in the process of transitioning to a new digital economy,” Rosenblatt said. “They have an audience and the ability to match the audience to deals that are contextually relevant. Our role is to offer the third part.”

Group Commerce is not just offering a technology platform, but also is sourcing the deals for its media partners, and finding a large audience and wide range of demographics for the merchants across publications.

Daily deals typically offer discounts at restaurants or other services for as much as 50 to 70 percent off. The customer pays for the voucher up front and then redeems it later. Typically, the merchant only gets half of that cash, while the other half goes to Groupon or another provider. For the merchant it’s a new form of advertising, replacing traditional methods, like Yellow Pages or newspaper ads.

Group Commerce would not disclose its revenue splits, but said it is paid with a portion of gross revenue of each deal, and that it’s a shared risk model. “If the deals don’t work, we don’t get paid,” Kelt said.

Kelt added that they believe their model will work because it combines the publisher’s knowledge of the audience with the merchants. For instance, DailyCandy’s audience is young and female, and a reader may be interested in an offer for a ladies night out at an upscale restaurant.

Although a potential customer does not have necessarily have to be a publisher, Kelt notes. It can be anyone with an audience, including a celebrity with a large following on Twitter.

Today, Group Commerce has 35 employees in New York, Chicago, Florida, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s planning to grow to 100 employees by the end of the year with the majority being sales people.

Facebook is not necessarily targeting Google specifically, but it’s an obvious omission. The social networking giant said ad providers can join the list if they agree to certain restrictions on advertising, which include a commitment to never utilize Facebook user data.

Facebook and Google have warred over transmitting user data in the past, with a back-and-forth over exporting user email addresses turning nasty in public last fall.

Facebook will start enforcing the whitelist ad provider policy starting Feb. 28. At that point, app developers who run Google ads–which seems a natural thing to do, given so many publishers use Google ads on other platforms–will have to shut them off and find another provider.

A spokesperson for Facebook said, “We are continuing to work with various ad providers and will add them to the list as they sign the terms. Note that the policy doesn’t go into effect for a few more weeks.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Google declined to comment.

The CEO of an approved ad provider commented that Facebook’s efforts to “restore control and authority of how third-party companies work within its platform” make sense and are generally good for users. (And also good for him, with Google out of the hunt!)

Image via Flickr user bulliver.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

That’s the premise behind Narrative Science, a start-up that sells technology that “generates news stories, industry reports, headlines and more–at scale and without human authoring or editing.”

And the pitch seems to be effective: It’s allowed the company to raise $6 million in a round led by Battery Ventures that closed this week.

The Evanston, Ill.-based company, which started up last year, is led by former DoubleClick executive Stuart Frankel, with Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, two Northwestern University computer science professors. Other investors include Frankel’s former boss David Rosenblatt, who stuck around Google for a bit after it bought the online ad company, and who now advises companies like Twitter, where he sits on the board.

Frankel and Hammond worked on an earlier incarnation of the idea at Northwestern, where they helped produce Stats Monkey, a program that could automatically create passable sports stories based solely on game data. And StatSheet, a North Carolina start-up, wants to use the same premise to fuel a network of sports sites.

But Narrative Science has ambitions bigger than box scores. The company wants to use structured data sets to produce a wide range of stories. Many of which you probably wouldn’t identify as stories (“narrative” is an intentionally broad term), and many of which you’ll never see anyway, because they’re behind a paywall of some sort. Think of financial reports, real estate write-ups, etc.

I suppose some people might get queasy about the idea of robot writers, but I think it makes perfect sense. There’s lots of content-making that machines can and should do much faster than humans, and at least as effectively.

Meanwhile, the push to produce more copy for less has been underway for a long time, even for publishers that don’t get labeled “content farms“–Reuters moved some of its financial-reporting resources to India years ago, and you never hear a peep about that.

The trick for content makers like myself is to find work that only content makers like myself can do–work where human qualities like experience, judgment and creativity get rewarded. And if we can’t do that, we ought to be doing something else, anyway.

In one memorable episode of the famous old short films “The Little Rascals,” after not getting invited to a party, the Our Gang little dudes decided to form their own group, comically called “The He-Man Woman-Haters Club.”

In other words: No girls allowed!

While it was wink-wink cute when Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat huffed and puffed about keeping out Darla–which they never ever could do–back in the last century, it’s not quite as adorkable when it comes to the boards of all the major Web 2.0 hotshots these days.

That would be Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare, none of which have any women as directors.

As in zero.

What’s most remarkable is that most of these start-ups are run by what I consider enlightened and open-minded entrepreneurs, mostly young enough to be part of a generation more inclined to value equality and diversity in the workplace.

In addition, each of these companies has a massive base of women consumers, in some cases well over 50 percent of its audience.

Thus, it would seem logical that in casting about for those to help guide these companies, one or two women leaders might slip in.

To be fair, it’s not for lack of trying, but of completion, as was the case with Twitter’s recent addition of three new board members.

They were longtime Silicon Valley exec Peter Currie, Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue and former DoubleClick leader David Rosenblatt.

All are deeply qualified for the Twitter board, which is obviously prepping for its next stage of growth and maturity.

But in its search, the San Francisco microblogging site did not manage to cast the net quite wide enough.

While sources said at least one prominent online woman exec was considered, there were some legitimate issues with her appointment, and it was not completed.

Still, one might imagine Twitter could have tried harder to find other workable choices.

Currently, the Twitter board is made up of the new trio, as well as Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey.

Things are not any better over at Facebook, which has several prominent women execs running the show, most especially its high-profile COO Sheryl Sandberg.

But, inexplicably, though she does attend board meetings, she is not yet a director of Facebook, nor is any other woman.

In fact, here is Sandberg on topic at a recent TED event for women, in an eloquent speech titled “Why We Have So Few Women Leaders”:

Instead, the Facebook board is all men, all the time, composed of CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, prominent techie and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, investor Peter Thiel, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and Washington Post head Don Graham.

It is no better at three of the most prominent recent Web 2.0 start-ups, which one source attributes to the lack of woman VCs, who are often the first board members after major investment rounds.

At Zynga, the hot social gaming company in San Francisco, it continues, with an all-male board, despite a very heavily female audience for its casual social games.

That would be co-founder and CEO Mark Pincus, COO Owen Van Natta, investor Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, investor Reid Hoffman and Brad Feld of the Foundry Group.

The same is true at woman-targeted–spas, spas and more spas–social buying site Groupon, which has an unusually large board for a start-up and made up of–as per usual–all men.

The list: Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason, Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy, former AT&T President and COO John Walter, New Enterprise Associates’ Harry Weller and Peter Barris, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis, 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried and early investors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

And, much smaller, is Foursquare’s board, which is the trio of co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger.

New investors–Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures’ Bryce Roberts–have observer status and both are, needless to say, dudes.

There is no question it is tough to make sure there is a good balance of qualified women leaders to men in tech–it is an issue we wrestle with every single year for the program of speakers at our own All Things Digital conference, although we are most excellent on this issue on our Web site and conference staff.

But it can be done, especially at public tech companies. Google has two women on its board of nine directors; Yahoo has three of 10; even Oracle has two of a dozen.

But a grand total of zero at the leading companies of Web 2.0 is not just a coincidence.

It’s a shame.

Tomorrow, BoomTown will post a list of great women who would be superb directors for any of these companies, but until then, let’s not follow in Spanky’s steps:

The two companies aren’t handing out details on the new pact, but have made it clear that it’s not going to be anything like the old one, which provided Myspace and the rest of News Corp.’s Web properties with massive guaranteed payments.

But we’ve known that for a long time: The first deal got done when Myspace was white-hot, and Google was competing fiercely with Microsoft to lock up prime real estate.

Now, of course, Myspace is well into a protracted decline, despite News Corp.’s efforts to turn it around (News Corp. also owns this Web site). And Microsoft isn’t nearly as aggressive as it used to be on these kinds of deals.

The real question for Myspace is what happens now. News Corp. has been quite clear that it’s not happy with the site’s performance, and if anyone were willing to pay anything for it, I’m sure Rupert Murdoch would be happy to part with it.

But who wants to buy a shrinking, money-losing Web site? News Corp. may not be able to do that much about the audience decline, and the money-losing part is tougher to fix than it seems from the outside.

That’s because Myspace is still stuck amortizing fees it picked up in the go-go years, like the big settlement/licensing deal it struck with Universal Music Group, which allowed it to start up MySpace Music in 2008.

Those aren’t operating costs, but they’re still real, and they don’t go away. “You start off every year $70 million in the hole,” says a person familiar with the company.

So how else can you cut costs? There are some obvious ways to go, and they won’t be pleasant for Myspace’s remaining staff.

UPDATE: Nature of news on the Web–this story was a scoop for all of about three minutes. Here’s the release–note the news about the Myspace inventory being offered via Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

MYSPACE AND GOOGLE RENEW AND EXPAND SEARCH
AND ADVERTISING AGREEMENT

LOS ANGELES and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., December 16, 2010 – Myspace and Google, Inc. today announced a multi-year agreement to renew and expand their long-standing search and advertising relationship. Under the terms of the new agreement, Google will continue to power Myspace search and search advertising and will also provide additional display advertising services to enhance the rich
entertainment content experience inherent on Myspace.

This agreement brings together Google’s expertise in search and advertising with Myspace’s strength in social entertainment. Specifically, the agreement provides Myspace with:

Web search and search advertising
Full display ad solutions (including participating in the Google Display Network and DoubleClick Ad Exchange)

“We’re thrilled about renewing our partnership with Google. Their best-in class technology will continue to provide our consumers with a robust search experience,” said Nada Stirratt, Chief Revenue Officer of Myspace. “We look forward to participating in the Google Display Network and DoubleClick Ad Exchange to increase yield across our display ad inventory.”

“We’re excited to deepen our partnership with one of the largest social Web properties in the world, Myspace,” said Henrique de Castro, Vice President of Global Media and Platforms at Google. “We’re pleased that our technology will benefit Myspace’s users on its newly redesigned site, and that Myspace has chosen our display advertising solution to increase its returns.

Yesterday, star venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins forked over $150 million in funding to Twitter.

At at $3.7 billion valuation, that got him a big chunk of the San Francisco microblogging site.

But what it didn’t get him was a seat on the board of Twitter, which many figured he would be given for after handing over so much moolah.

According to sources familiar with the situation, that’s due to Doerr’s being a director on another board: Google.

Several sources who BoomTown spoke to, after breaking news of the massive funding, said that his being on the board of the search giant was seen as too much of a conflict of interest.

A conflict because Google has plans to wade deeply into the social space. And also, of course, because it is the No. 1 potential acquirer of Twitter, as the Silicon Valley company seeks to gather more tools to fight its latest rival, Facebook.

Doerr has very deep ties at Google, having been on its board since mid-1999.

He got that seat, along with Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz, after he ponied up a critical $25 million equity round for Google in June of that year.

Interestingly, no other Kleiner partner was named to a Twitter board seat either.

But, some speculate, it might make sense for Mary Meeker–who just joined Kleiner to head up digital investing efforts, after a long-time stint as a Wall Street analyst for Morgan Stanley–to eventually become a Twitter director.

Meeker has, of course, deep IPO and M&A experience.

And, frankly, after adding Flipboard’s Mike McCue and former DoubleClick exec David Rosenblatt yesterday and former Netscape exec Peter Currie recently to its all-boy board band, a woman director might be a good idea to consider.

Other directors at Twitter include Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, Co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo.

I reached out to Doerr for a comment, but he has not yet replied; Twitter declined to comment.

Even more interesting to consider is what Kleiner will invest in next after this mega-funding, given how aggressively many sources said Doerr had pushed to lead the Twitter round.

And, in fact, sources said that Kleiner is looking closely at new funding rounds for both the Spotify music streaming service and Groupon, the social buying start-up that recently decided to turn down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and an earlier $3 billion one from Yahoo.

Groupon is now seeking more funds to remain independent and hold onto its lead in the fast-growing local discounting market, sources said.

(Bloomberg also reported on Groupon’s new fundraising efforts, although it was written about after it turned down the Google offer.)

And Spotify, which is hugely popular outside the U.S., is trying to enter this market, but needs more funding to expand and perhaps strike better deals with music labels.

Both are the just the kind of companies Doerr has targeted in what looks like a serious effort to compete with other firms–especially Andreessen Horowitz and Russia’s DST Global.

They have garnered the heat Kleiner used to have, largely by backing more of the top entrepreneurs recently.

Doerr has already put money into social gaming phenom Zynga and also started an sFund for social-focused investments.

Add Twitter to the pile and you can see where this is headed: Except for the board seat, John Doerr will no longer be denied.

Twitter has completed its latest round of funding–$200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation–with Kleiner Perkins as the lead investor, according to sources familiar with the situation.

Sources said the San Francisco microblogging service is also adding two new board members: Flipboard’s Mike McCue and David Rosenblatt, who ran DoubleClick until a bit after it sold to Google.

Twitter recently added former Netscape exec Peter Currie to the board, as BoomTown previously reported.

A Twitter spokesman confirmed the funding and the board appointments, but declined further comment.

The moves are big ones for Twitter, which is moving fast to upgrade its management and business model under CEO Dick Costolo, who just posted a blog (see below) on the new funding and directors, titled “Meaningful Growth (although it was first curiously called, “Stocking Stuffers,” and was much funnier).

But, indeed, a big slug of cash will surely help the start-up’s expansion efforts and essentially declares it is not for sale to bigger companies such as Google (quite yet, that is).

As I reported last week, Kleiner partner John Doerr has been pushing hard to fund Twitter, beating out Russia’s DST Global.

Kleiner is the only new investor in the latest round, which brings its funding total to $360 million since it was founded about five years ago.

The storied Silicon Valley venture firm, which has been aggressively moving into the Web 2.0 space of late, put in $150 million, with the remaining $50 million coming from existing investors.

Past investors include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and several other venture firms and angel investors.

Adding Currie, McCue and Rosenblatt are very strong choices for the board. Currie has deep financial and IPO experience, McCue is a well-connected and innovative entrepreneur and Rosenblatt brings much-needed online advertising heft.

As it happens, Costolo will appear at our D@CES event in January, where I am interviewing him and we can talk about all the changes.

(Thank goodness the funding is done, since I was worried about all those awkward pauses.)

Here is new version of Costolo’s blog post on McCue and Rosenblatt (the old one is below it for you to compare and contrast):

Meaningful Growth

In the past 12 months, Twitter users sent an astonishing 25 billion Tweets and we added more than 100 million new registered accounts. In that time, our team has grown from 130 people to more than 350 today. We’re thankful for every Tweet, every account, and every talented employee who has decided to join the Twitter team. This week, we’ve got some big news to share.

As part of a significant new round of funding with investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and existing investors, we’ve added two new members to Twitter’s board of directors. Please join us in welcoming Mike McCue and David Rosenblatt. The experience these new directors bring to Twitter, along with this renewed investment, will help us continue to grow as a company and business.

2010 was one of the most meaningful years since Twitter, Inc. was founded in 2007. We operate on a principle that people are basically good–when you give them a simple way to express this trait, they prove it to you every day. We’re proud of what Twitter users have accomplished, we’re proud of our work, and we’re very proud of our team. Thanks for being a part of this work; it means a lot to us.

Stocking Stuffer

Growth is fun. In the past 12 months, Twitter users sent an astonishing 25 billion Tweets and we added more than 100 million new registered accounts. In that time, our team has grown from 130 people to more than 350 today.

This week, we added two new members to Twitter’s board of directors who have strong experience running technology companies: Mike McCue and David Rosenblatt. Mike was the CEO of Tellme Networks, is currently CEO at Flipboard and also worked for Netscape and Microsoft (which acquired Tellme in 2007). David is the former CEO of DoubleClick and an ex-Google executive.

We also closed a significant new round of funding, with new investor Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers leading the round. KPCB brings to Twitter a track record of helping build great companies, ranging from Amazon to Zynga (get it? A to Z? See how we did that?), and a team with expertise in Internet, mobile and social platforms. The additional resources and expertise will be extremely helpful as Twitter continues to grow as a company and business.

Thank you to Twitter users everywhere for making 2010 such a good year.

You’d have to search a long time to find someone who’s been closer to the evolution of Google than Susan Wojcicki. It was in her rented garage that Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched the company, which she joined in 1999.

Today, while much of the attention on Google focuses on Android or Chrome, Gmail or YouTube, Wojcicki oversees the operations from which Google generates the bulk of its revenue and profits: AdWords, AdSense and DoubleClick among them. And in October she was made one of Google’s eight senior vice presidents.

She’s lately been quoting research from Forrester, which found that while 42 percent of people do research online before buying something, only 7 percent of those purchases happen online. Mobile advertising, she has argued recently, can help bridge that gap. Expect lots of discussion around that stemming from last year’s $750 million acquisition of mobile advertising firm AdMob.

Meanwhile, let’s be honest: Everyone wants to know what really happened between Google and Groupon.

Liveblog

8:36 am: Everyone is seated in the ballroom, and the session with Wojcicki is about to start.

8:39 am: Walt and Kara have come out onto the stage, thanking the audience for their support at big D and this week at D: Dive Into Mobile.

Before Wojcicki comes to the stage, they are introducing the new writers at All Things Digital:

• Liz Gannes, NetworkEffect
• Ina Fried, Mobilized
• Tricia Duryee, eMoney
• Arik Hesseldahl, NewEnterprise
• Drake Martinet

8:43 am: Walt and Kara hand the stage off to Peter Kafka, who will be conducting the interview with Susan Wojcicki.

8:44 am: We’re getting started. Peter Kafka is interviewing Susan. She says when she first rented to Larry and Sergey, they weren’t allowed to come in the front door.

8:45 am: Susan: I charged them $1,700 a month in rent.

8:45 am: Peter: Let’s start with mobile. It’s a big business but small for Google at $1 billion. Break out that billion dollars.

Susan: We don’t break it out. But they are all growing. To give you an idea of the growth, we saw a 4x increase year over year in the number of searches. AdMob has doubled, and is doing more than a billion ad requests per day.

8:48 am: Mobile brings an opportunity not just to bring people to a Web site but to a store. We just did something with Google Ad Goggles, with Buick, where you can see a magazine ad, scan and that takes you to an ad site.

8:51 am: Peter: In-app advertising is a small opportunity, but Google owns it.

Susan: We’d like to have everyone be an advertiser. We think about having very mobile-specific campaigns.

Our barriers to entry are a lot lower than those at Apple. We offer all the formats like video. We want it to be easy to advertise, we have a lot of systems that measure quality.

8:52 am: Peter: Who’s running AdMob day to day? Original management has left.

Susan: We’ve taken different parts of it and integrated it into our advertising and sales organizations. [Former AdMob CEO] Omar [Hamoui] has left for personal reasons, but pretty much most of the staff who joined with AdMob have stayed. The goal is how do we continue to innovate on that platform.

Peter: Do you view the phone differently from a privacy standpoint than on the PC?

Susan: I think the phone is a really personal device in a lot of ways. If you drop your phone or lose it there’s a moment of panic. On the other hand there’s a lot of control that users have.

8:57 am: Peter: You guys and the rest of the ad industry are telling Washington that they will self-regulate around privacy. FTC says that’s not going to fly, and they want something like an opt-out browser.

Susan: Google is a consumer brand and people need to be comfortable. If we were just an advertising brand we wouldn’t have the same concerns. We’ve always tried to promote transparency and choice among our users. We didn’t have a cookie on the AdSense network until about a year ago. There were a lot of things we couldn’t do.

8:58 am: Susan: We’re always interested in what’s being proposed. We’ll always participate in any discussion around proposals to improve privacy for users.

8:59 am: Peter: Do you think users really care about this? They’ll say they care if you ask them. Practically, do they really care?

Susan: People care. They also want to have good content. And they want the advertising to be relevant. We see advertising as information, and as long as we can make that information useful, the better it is.

9:01 am: Susan: We’ve had ads in Gmail since Gmail first launched. Ads get a bad reputation sometimes because theyr’e not useful. They’re not relevant, or slow. If you’re planning a trip to Hawaii, and see ads that are related to that, that’s useful information.

9:02 am: Susan: The moment that our products are not as good, people will go somewhere else.

Peter: So you were employee No. 18; now there are 23,000 employees at Google. Talk about how the culture has changed over time.

Susan: Google is a much bigger company obviously. We’ve tried to have a lot of different divisions and groups and have given them autonomy. Our display group is run like a separate group within Google.

The secret is to break into groups that are manageable, and give them as much autonomy as possible.

9:05 am: Peter: What are we to read into the fact that you’re offering employees bonuses to stay at the company?

Susan: Our employees are really valuable to us. They are basically our business. Google has been doing well. As much as possible we’re trying to share back with the employees. They will continue to create a lot of value.

9:06 am: Peter: If you’re coming to Google as a hot young engineer out of Stanford, what’s the most compelling thing you can say to bring them on board?

Susan: Google’s scale and platform. If you have a passion, and want to get things done. [Cites Andy Rubin, and the scale he's working at now vs. when Android was a start-up.] When you do something, it matters.

9:07 am: Peter: You guys were talking to Groupon. That deal has now gone away. [Asks about integrating companies into the Google culture.]

Susan: Each deal is different and you have to consider how best to integrate them.

9:09 am: Peter: What’s the product you’re most excited about?

Susan: Mobile ads. How can we enable you, when you’re walking around, to find out the best local offers around? As an advertiser, how can I find out if someone saw my ad and went to a store?

The local market is a huge market, we’ve always wanted to be in it.

9:09 am: Now going into Q&A from the audience.

9:13 am: Q: What do you view as being so hard about local?

Susan: The reason local is hard is because it needs to be simple. For small businesses, they don’t have a lot of time. You need to create a model that works for them. And it needs to be easy for them to sign up. On the back end, everything needs to just work for them.

9:15 am: And we’re done!

With the phone giants scooping up many of the big-name mobile ad firms, MoPub CEO Jim Payne said there is an opportunity for another strong independent player.

“If I have a mobile app and a bunch of ad inventory and I assign it all to AdMob or iAd, I don’t have a lot of control over what happens,” Payne said in an interview. “This is really about putting control back in the hands of the publishers.”

The field used to be dominated by mobile-specific start-ups, but Google’s purchase of AdMob and Apple’s launch of iAd (and purchase of Quattro Wireless) have changed that landscape significantly.

The service, which MoPub likens to a DoubleClick for mobile publishers, is still in private beta testing. MoPub itself is still tiny though, with basically just the founders and their vision. Payne said the company hopes to staff up to about 10 using the new funding, the size of which he declined to disclose.

But it seems a reach to say FTB is “social”–the company primarily relies on paid researchers to compile information tables on specific topics like GPS navigation systems or fast-food nutrition. Regular users are welcome to suggest topics and edits, but actual edits are only made by company staff and freelancers. (It’s kind of like Demand Media in chart form.)

A spokesperson for FTB said this morning that the company is planning to add more social stuff, but didn’t get more specific than that.

FTB is particularly notable because of its founder and CEO Kevin O’Connor, who also co-founded the ad network DoubleClick, and had been on a sort of 10-year break since then. To date he had funded the company himself out of Santa Barbara, Calif.

The Kleiner investment was led by partner Randy Komisar and is of an undisclosed amount.