Toshiba’s new Excite line, which the Japanese electronics maker is officially announcing today, will include 7.7-inch, 10-inch and 13-inch models. All three Wi-Fi-only tablets are running Google’s Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system; they are aluminum-encased, have Gorilla Glass displays, come with a five-megapixel rear camera and a two-megapixel front-facing camera, and include new Nvidia TegraTM 3 processors.

The Excite 7.7 also has an AMOLED display, a micro-USB port and a micro-SD card slot; while the Excite 10 has an LED-backlit display, micro-USB and micro-HDMI ports, and a full-sized SD card slot. At 1.32 pounds, the new 10-inch weighs just slightly less than Toshiba’s last tablet.

Most interesting might be Toshiba’s 13-inch entrant into the tablet market. The device has a 13.3-inch diagonal LED-backlit display and weighs 2.2 pounds. At first glance, it looks gigantic, but it isn’t really meant to be a take-it-with-you tablet. Toshiba’s aiming this one at tablet users who rarely, if ever, use their devices out of the home; the computer maker has said it envisions the Excite 13 as a kitchen-counter or coffee-table device.

The Excite 10 will hit the market on May 6, priced at $450 for a 16 gigabyte model — still $50 less than the starting price of the new LTE iPad — while the Exite 7.7 and Excite 13 tablets will go on sale June 10. Those base models will cost $500 and $650, respectively.

And at that point, Toshiba’s Thrive tablets will go away.

Toshiba first introduced its Thrive tablet in July of last year, and attempted to set its product apart from the iPad by incorporating some features one might expect on a PC. As AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg pointed out in his review of the Thrive, the 10-inch Android tablet came with a full-sized USB port and HDMI port, a removable battery and a full-sized SD slot for flash-memory cards. Its base model originally cost $430 at launch, though Toshiba later lowered the price.

In September, Toshiba introduced the 7-inch version of the Thrive, again with easy connectivity through other devices, though with micro-versions of the USB, HDMI and SD card ports. That product just came to market in late 2011.

In addition to the new tablets, Toshiba is also introducing a redesigned HD All-in-One desktop computer, two new Qosmio gaming laptops, and a stable of upgraded laptops from the Satellite P and Satellite S series, as well as new, slightly lower-priced Satellite L and Satellite C Series laptops.

Talking to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong earlier this week about its investors day tomorrow, he used the word “execution” a lot.

No, not the kind evoking a firing squad if he did not succeed at turning around the New York-based Internet giant soon as he has long promised.

Instead, Armstrong was referring to reassuring big shareholders and Wall Street analysts that AOL was now in a mode of making sure all its many moves to turn around the company will finally begin to pay off.

“Basically, our point is going to be about fully operating around the strategy we’ve built,” said Armstrong in a wide-ranging interview. “It seems right for investors to ask about executing on what we have been doing for the last year and a half.”

It’s certainly the right message for the charismatic executive to be delivering, as he and other top AOL execs present their plans moving forward, especially after what has turned out to be a very hyperactive year.

After deep layoffs, a massive rejiggering of its management ranks and a number of shifts of its business focus, without much advertising increase to show for it yet, Armstrong has also pushed through a series of acquisitions.

It culminated in the high-profile and decidedly dramatic purchase of the Huffington Post in January for $350 million in cash.

Now, said Armstrong, deals will be taking a back seat to products.

“We are diligently staying on strategy and really focusing on products and services,” said Armstrong. “We have laid out the path we are on and now investors want proof of the concept.”

To Armstrong, that means the push of “branded content” and a continued focus on significant properties in key topic areas.

Tomorrow, in news that could worry investors, AOL will be noting that traffic is flat year over year, but explaining that it is due to the outsourcing of its sports and health sites.

“If you added that back in, we would have had a phenomenal year of growth,” said Armstrong. “Our main point will be that this is the right path for AOL.”

In fact, in an unusual wording, he said AOL was betting on the “urbanization” of the Web around big branded sites, which is, in many ways, exactly where the Web was a decade ago with Yahoo, Excite and others.

But Armstrong will be making the point that this retro idea is perfect for today, as marketers look for quality content that attracts big audiences, which has seen its most energetic application in the Huffington Post.

Thus, his linchpin remains the flashy news site’s even flashier co-founder Arianna Huffington, who has cut a very wide swath through AOL’s content efforts since Amstrong made her media czar of the company.

As Armstrong did, she also stressed the focus on unique visitors and ad growth, more video and a laser focus on local.

This includes shoving editorial into every AOL property, including unlikely ones such as Moviefone and MapQuest, and integrating it all to point back to the Huffington Post mothership.

“Much better editorial integration is a centerpiece of what we are doing, surfacing content in new places it was not before,” said Huffington, who used examples of local stories via its Patch unit that have gone global with a special push.

And by global, that also means the creation of new content sites in Europe and elsewhere, in order to build this unusual dream of a fully aggregating world.

“It is a big test of the HuffPo platform aggregation to do this,” said Huffington, who has clearly longed for the kind of money and staff to do this for a very long time. “It has moved a lot faster than I thought it would … but it feels good to be moving on so many fronts at once.”

Many fronts indeed, which might make investors pause. So far, those shareholders have had a continued wait-and-see attitude toward AOL, which has seen its stock decline almost 13 percent from its late 2009 IPO debut.

That’s mostly due to worries about whether the continued and expected fall-off of its lucrative access business can be met by similar increases in its ad business.

That share drop has been especially steep since the beginning of the year, but it has also not been drastic, indicating an interest in continuing to believe Armstrong’s confident — well, confidently delivered, at least — narrative.

As Citi’s Mark Mahaney wrote in a one-hand-other-hand note yesterday about the investor day:

Positives: 1) AOL still remains a top 5 U.S. Internet property; 2) In the latest quarter, AOL’s Display segment grew Y/Y for the first time in ~3 years, and this improvement seems sustainable; 3) At 4x ’11 EV/EBITDA, AOL’s valuation is among the lowest of any ’Net Stock. Negatives: 1) Deteriorating fundamentals; 2) Significant market share losses — ’Net usage, Display Advertising revenue & Search queries; 3) A significant profit hole from the structural decline of its Subs biz; 4) Substantial competitive risk; and 5) An unproven (@ AOL) management team.

“We all like Tim and what he says makes a lot of sense,” added one big investor, who is also attending and has many questions about the efficacy of what AOL is doing, in a common sentiment among its large shareholders. “But we also need to see real results soon.”

Joe Kraus–the longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur who sold his most recent start-up, JotSpot, to Google in 2006 and has been a director of product management since–has moved to its Google Ventures unit as a partner, said several sources.

Sources added that Kraus (pictured above) is likely to be the first of several well-known appointments at the relatively new venture arm of the search giant.

Google (GOOG) announced its VC play in March and said the fund will invest $100 million in “exceptional” start-ups over the next year.

“We’ll be focusing on early stage investments across a diverse range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and, no doubt, other areas we haven’t thought of yet,” Managing Partners Rich Miner and Bill Maris explained in a blog post when Google Ventures debuted. “Central to our effort will be our fellow Googlers, whom we view as a critically important resource to help educate us about potential investments areas and evaluate specific companies.”

Well, that now apparently means Kraus, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded the Web 1.0-era Excite portal and, in Web 2.0, JotSpot, which made wiki-style software for online collaboration.

Currently, only Miner and Maris are listed on the bios page of Google Venture’s online site.

Since the acquisition, Kraus has been leading Google’s OpenSocial efforts to develop standards for social networking platforms.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Adding the final leg of its new strategy to reinvigorate AOL, the Time Warner online unit said it was buying two small local start-ups, Patch Media and Going.

Each acquisition–which focuses on hyperlocal community news (Patch) and events (Going)–is small, about $10 million.

Ironically, local has previously been a big arena for AOL, which launched its Digital City unit with great fanfare more than a decade ago. AOL still runs Digital City, as well as its CityGuide listing offering.

But, in a move that will surely be scrutinized, Patch is a company whose principal investor has been AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong. AOL declined to say how much he had invested in the company, but sources said it was less than $5 million.

Armstrong addressed the issue in an internal memo to staff about the deal, noting he would forgo any profits from the AOL transaction for Patch and get back the seed money he put into the start-up in the form of AOL shares:

“On a personal note, I was an early investor in Patch and committed significant dollars to the vision of improving local communities with deeper online information, accountability through journalism, and a platform for communicating. In discussing our local strategy, AOL and Time Warner looked at Patch as a possible acquisition and I recused myself from that process. At the Time Warner negotiated acquisition price, I was in a position to earn a return on my investment in Patch. However, I have decided to forgo any profit from my seed investment in Patch and I have asked to receive just my seed capital in AOL shares once we separate from Time Warner.”

The New York-based Patch is a platform that does deeply localized coverage of communities about a range of topics, from announcements to news to events to obituaries. It is aimed at competing with local newspapers and other media.

In another interesting twist and blast from the past, Boston-based Going was funded–its last investment was $5 million in mid-2007–by two Web 1.0 portal execs, George Bell of Excite and Bob Davis of Lycos.

Both are now venture capitalists–Bell at General Catalyst Partners and Davis an Highand Capital Partners.

Going, which was originally called HeyLetsGo.com, connects its users with events and each other in a variety of big cities, such as San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and New York.

The focus on local will round out Armstrong’s new push for innovation at AOL, the final piece of his ongoing 100-day evaluation of the much-beleaguered company.

Armstrong has been busy in that time in making massive changes to the structure of AOL, sweeping aside its current set-up almost completely as it prepares for a spinoff from Time Warner (TWX).

That spinoff was announced recently and will result in AOL becoming a standalone company.

AOL’s new business strategy under Armstrong includes keeping its longtime access business, which many thought would be sold off, and putting many of the companies it has recently acquired–including its pricey Bebo social-networking site–in a separate ventures unit, which will try to attract outside investment.

The strategy will focus AOL on several key areas, including access, media/content, “scaled” advertising and communications, and now, local.

Local is also a big focus for players like Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) again. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz specifically mentioned adding more community news, especially about local sports, to its offerings, in an onstage interview two weeks ago with me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.

Here’s the internal memo and press release about Patch and Going below:

AOLers –

Our strategy to win in the five areas we’ve discussed starts with innovation and passion. Of the five areas, Local remains the largest white space and offers us an ability to improve the lives of many consumers. It’s a space that’s prime for innovation and an area where we already have strength with a local network that reaches more than 54 million UVs a month and a valuable brand in mapping services, MapQuest.

Our vision isn’t just about optimizing what we have–it’s about overhauling how we approach this space, drawing on our legacy of connecting communities and our long history of organization through DMOZ. It’s about taking one of the most disaggregated experiences on the Web today and making it truly quick and easy for consumers to find the local information they need.

Today, we’re announcing two acquisitions that will enable us to better serve audiences by providing experiences that are highly focused on users’ own neighborhoods–Patch and Going.

Patch.com was built to provide local towns with a robust and interactive platform to publish news and information, with full-time journalists for each town covering government affairs, education issues, and community events. One of the AOLers in our All Hands meeting on May 29 asked what our plan is to help towns, like his, where the local newspaper has gone out of business. Patch is an acquisition that may eventually help that town. Under the leadership of co-founder and CEO Jon Brod, Patch has been able to launch five initial town sites since February and has just announced four additional communities. Moreover, Patch has already received over 230 user requests for “Patches” spanning 39 states and 12 countries.

The second acquisition is a small company located in Boston–Going. Going has developed a local events platform to discover and share information about things to do in a number of leading cities across the country. Under the leadership of CEO Evan Schumacher, Going has launched sites in 30 cities–including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami–and provides users with RSVP tools and advertisers with self-service event advertising.

On a personal note, I was an early investor in Patch and committed significant dollars to the vision of improving local communities with deeper online information, accountability through journalism, and a platform for communicating. In discussing our local strategy, AOL and Time Warner looked at Patch as a possible acquisition and I recused myself from that process. At the Time Warner negotiated acquisition price, I was in a position to earn a return on my investment in Patch. However, I have decided to forgo any profit from my seed investment in Patch and I have asked to receive just my seed capital in AOL shares once we separate from Time Warner.

Overall, I believe both Patch and Going will add strength and talent to our local efforts and give us an ability to have a unique and defendable local offering that helps people improve their lives. I’m excited that we’ve reached the stage where we can begin implementing in our five key strategy areas, and with today’s announcements we’re off to a great start in Local.

Please join me in welcoming the employees of Patch and Going to AOL and the future of AOL Local. –TA

AOL Acquires Two Local Services, Patch and Going

Acquisitions Add to AOL’s Leading Network of Local Services with a Community-Specific News and Information Platform and a Local Event Platform

NEW YORK, NY–June 11, 2009–AOL today announced two acquisitions in the local space: Patch Media Corporation, http://www.patch.com, a local news and information platform aimed at serving local towns and communities and Going, Inc., http://www.going.com, a local platform for people to discover and share information about things to do in a number of leading cities across the country. Both Patch and Going offer local experiences, content and self-service applications for consumers and advertisers.

“Local remains one of the most disaggregated experiences on the Web today–there’s a lot of information out there but simply no way for consumers to find it quickly and easily,” said Tim Armstrong, AOL’s Chairman and CEO. “It’s a space that’s prime for innovation and an area where AOL has a significant audience and a valuable mapping service in MapQuest. Going forward, local will be a core area of focus and investment for AOL. The acquisitions of Patch and Going will help us build out our local network further with excellent local services that enable people to stay better informed about what’s going on in their neighborhood.”

The acquisitions extend AOL’s network of local services, the largest online local network,* reaching more than 54 million total unique visitors per month.** Both acquisitions also leverage a consumer and marketplace trend toward greater consumption of news and information online.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that more people now say they get most of their news from online sources than from traditional newspapers (40% vs. 35%).***

In addition, local searches grew 58% in 2008 year over year, while overall searches climbed just 21%, according to research conducted by the Yellow Pages Association in March 2009.

Local advertising (online and offline) represents an approximately $103 billion market (approximately 39% of total U.S. ad spending), according to Borrell Associates in 2009.

Founded in December 2007 and headquartered in New York, Patch combines localized, professional journalism with community contribution and a platform that puts all town assets online – in effect, digitizing the community. Patch, which expects to be available in a dozen communities by the end of the year, currently has “Patches” in five communities with four more in development.

“We are excited to join the AOL family,” said Jon Brod, CEO of Patch. “AOL’s substantial network will help us extend the reach of Patch into more and more communities. And Patch, as part of AOL’s local strategy, will create new opportunities for AOL to delight consumers and provide marketers access to highly targeted and deeply engaged audiences.”

Launched in September 2006 and headquartered in Boston, Going is one of the leading local communities for 20-somethings looking for things to do in cities across the country. Going is available in 30 leading U.S. cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Boston, with several more planned this year. Going also provides local promoters, event organizers and venues a fully automated, self-service RSVP, ticketing and advertising engine to maximize the attendance and value of their events.

“Going allows young people in leading cities to discover upcoming events, parties and new hot spots – and most importantly connect with others who share a similar lifestyle. By joining with AOL, we have the opportunity to greatly expand the reach of our platform to more cities both in the U.S. and around the world,” said Evan Schumacher, Going’s CEO.

“AOL has a legacy of connecting people to the content, community and services they care most about,” said Armstrong. “Patch and Going, combined with our existing network, will enable the company that got America online, to connect consumers around the globe to their communities online.”

* April 2009 U.S. comScore Media Metrix; Local Networks category is a custom built category by AOL.
** Custom AOL-defined Local Networks report, based on comScore U.S. Media Metrix Audience Duplication report (April 2009).
*** Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Outlet,” December 2008.

In Web years, BoomTown is now officially 143 years old.

Why? Well, I was the one who got to write the big Page One piece in The Wall Street Journal after GeoCities was sold to Yahoo in January of 1999 for $5 billion in stock.

GeoCities was, in its way, the Facebook of its time.

But instead of “friends,” its users were “homesteaders,” since the Web then was a place to be pioneered and settled.

As Cher so eloquently sings: Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end.

Except they did. Yahoo (YHOO) announced yesterday that it was closing the GeoCities unit down, part of new CEO Carol Bartz’s war against useless assets at the troubled company.

But a full decade ago, the Yahoo-GeoCities transaction was a big, big deal, struck at the peak of the Web 1.0 bubble.

The move shook up the then-Internet landscape, in which Yahoo was the undisputed king.

The sector then had begun to rapidly consolidate, as stronger players snapped up weaker ones in a race for market share.

The Yahoo-GeoCities deal closely followed another deal in which At Home, a high-speed Internet access service, bought search and directory service Excite for stock valued at $6.7 billion. In another key deal at the time, then-independent America Online agreed to buy Netscape Communications for stock then worth $4.2 billion.

Of those then-dominant Web companies, only Yahoo and AOL–now a troubled unit of Time Warner (TWX)–survive relatively intact.

And, what exactly did Yahoo get for its giant payment back then? A money-losing, low-revenue company with a whole lot of users.

At the time of the purchase, the publicly-traded Marina Del Rey, Calif., company had reported that fourth-quarter sales increased to $7.5 million from $1.7 million a year earlier. But the company’s loss had also swelled, to $8.4 million from $3 million, in the year-earlier period.

Sound familiar to some current Web 2.0 stories? I thought so.

Another weird irony: One of GeoCities major investors was a venture firm called Flatiron Partners, whose principal, Jerry Colonna, was on the board.

And who was Colonna’s parter? Well, Fred Wilson, who has a different firm now called Union Square Ventures and is–wait for it–one the the major investors in the 2009 hotsy-totsy start-up, Twitter.

(You can read Wilson’s terrific take from the VC perspective of the GeoCities experience here.)

In other words, the more things change… Well, actually, they don’t change.

So, if you want to take an instructive trip down memory lane, here is my piece below, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 29, 1999:

Those Who Tied Fortune to GeoCities Yell Yahoo! All the Way to the Bank

By KARA SWISHER | Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Last spring, Thomas R. Evans was nervous about leaving his longtime job at the top of a powerful Manhattan media company for an Internet start-up near the beaches of Southern California. So he talked to his boss, real-estate and publishing tycoon Mort Zuckerman.

“I was wondering if this whole Internet thing was real and sustainable,” says Mr. Evans, then publisher of the Atlantic Monthly and U.S. News & World Report. “I wanted his blessing in a way.”

Virtual Payoff

Mr. Evans got Mr. Zuckerman’s nod–and a lot more. You know the drill by now (though it may not be getting any easier to hear). He became chief executive officer of GeoCities , an electronic casbah of about 3.5 million Web sites, and helped lead its initial public offering last summer. Then Thursday, Yahoo! Inc. agreed to buy the young company for about $5 billion in stock. It means the value of Mr. Evans’s stock options soared by 65% Thursday to a dizzying $200 million.

Yahoo! Agrees to Buy GeoCities in $5 Billion Stock Transaction

That’s some kind of money for nine months’ work. After you’re done banging your head on a wall, consider that members of the new financial elite in Silicon Valley are being created in less time than it takes for a kid to finish his first-grade year. That puts oil, real estate and finance magnates to shame. Mr. Zuckerman, for example, spent a lifetime building his $1 billion financial empire.

Asked how he was doing Thursday, Mr. Zuckerman says: “Not as good as Tom Evans.”

Mr. Evans, who commutes between GeoCities’ Marina Del Rey, Calif., headquarters and his home in New Canaan, Conn., is quick to point out the ephemeral nature of his wealth. He must wait six years for his options to be fully vested. And his net worth could evaporate if Yahoo’s highflying stock sinks.

“It does not seem real, because it is not real, because this is based on the long term and is dependent on where this whole industry is going,” says Mr. Evans, 44 years old. “Anyone coming into this industry assumes a certain amount of risk because no one really knows how it is all going to turn out.”

Litany of Lucre

It has turned out well so far for the new moguls at GeoCities. According to public filings the company made last summer, the biggest individual winner is co-founder and Chairman David Bohnett, 42, who owns about three million shares outright, now worth $367 million, based on Yahoo’s closing price Thursday. Mr. Bohnett insists he is overlooking that bit of extra money. “I do not see this as a financial event,” he says. “And we did not start this company with money in mind.”

Chief Technical Officer John Rezner, 35, who worked nine years for aerospace company McDonnell Douglas Corp. before co-founding GeoCities, holds 827,000 shares worth $103 million.

The management team that came in with Mr. Evans last year–taking over from Mr. Bohnett to help with the IPO–is also well-situated. Chief Financial Officer Stephen Hansen, 42, who formerly held the same position at Universal Studios Hollywood, has options for about 600,000 shares of stock, which would be worth $74.7 million at current prices. Michael Barrett, 36, advertising vice president and former online executive with Walt Disney Co., has options for 280,000 shares, worth about $34.9 million.

There are, of course, all kinds of gnashing of teeth over whether the Internet entrepreneurs deserve such riches. But obtaining great wealth through luck or artful maneuvering is nothing new in American business history. Take the stock manipulators of the 1890s and the leveraged-buyout artists of the 1980s. It may be some consolation that GeoCities’ founders can claim that they developed something that is used by many people. In its December Web-traffic report, research firm Media Metrix says the “GeoCities.com” Web site ranked third, behind America Online Inc. and Yahoo, with nearly 19 million different visitors.

Mr. Bohnett says the company was born from a “passion for giving people a chance to speak up.” Founded in 1994, GeoCities was one of the first Web-based communities, where users post individualized sites to express themselves.

Dubbed “homesteaders,” these customers create the bulk of the content on GeoCities. Their Web pages are organized into “neighborhoods” of personal interests and hobbies, such as personal finance or motorcycles, and monitored by a network of volunteers.

“My goal was to stake out a broader territory and create a community of interests, just in the same way Yahoo was helping people find their way around the Web,” says Mr. Bohnett, who led the company in a variety of top jobs, including chief financial officer, CEO and president. “Then we were going to monetize that base of users as the business model emerged.”

That model for profitability hasn’t yet arrived, in part because the company spends heavily to increase its market share. Thursday, it announced a net loss for last year of $18.2 million on revenue of $18.4 million.

Mr. Evans, a dark-haired man with a preppy demeanor and razor wit, has plenty of experience building businesses. He worked his way up in Mr. Zuckerman’s organization from sales and advertising jobs, and eventually served as president and publisher of several magazines.

After being approached several times about new-media positions, Mr. Evans says he decided to jump to GeoCities when the importance of the Internet became clear to him. “I think that by the time I really took a look at it, the whole sector had matured and gotten really interesting for those of us in the traditional media companies,” he says.

While Mr. Evans is loath to discuss the valuations of Internet companies, his former boss Mr. Zuckerman doesn’t dodge the opportunity to be philosophical about Web mania.

“It’s like they said in high school: ‘Boys will be boys and girls will be girls,’” Mr. Zuckerman says. “I don’t want to change anything, I just want to get in on it.”

Specifically, in how to make bank from Yahoo’s desperation.

That would be entrepreneur and all-around bon vivant Mark Cuban (he is pictured here at our first D: All Things Digital conference in 2003), who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo in the heady days of 1999 for $5.7 billion in Yahoo stock.

It was a huge deal at the time, with Yahoo engaged in an arms war with other Internet companies like Excite (remember them?), AOL (TWX) and others.

In an acquisitions frenzy, it grabbed Broadcast.com, which was started in 1992 as AudioNet, with Cuban and others in charge.

Broadcast.com was one of the nascent efforts to broadcast online, focusing on radio-like content on the Web, largely using sports and other live events.

It had one of those typical Web 1.0 faux-blockbuster IPOs in 1998 and then, as the stock began to decline, sold quickly to Yahoo a year later.

Right before, as it turned out, the whole bubble burst.

But Cuban and his cohorts made their scratch and were soon gone from Yahoo.

Cuban, sensing the end was nigh, also dumped his Yahoo shares before the decline. And, armed with a fortune, he began his fun foray into a range of businesses, from sports teams to movie theaters to his HDNet, a high-definition cable network.

And, of course, the private jets and entertaining courtside antics and working at the Dairy Queen!

And, also of course, most of Broadcast.com’s assets are useless to Yahoo today.

Now, Cuban is back knocking at Yahoo’s door as an invader, the only major Internet figure apparently willing to turn on the iconic Yahoo CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang.

Calling Benedict Arnold!

I don’t blame Cuban, actually, although Yang surely will be angry over his presence on the Icahn board.

There was always a level of rancor within Yahoo about Cuban, because he sold Broadcast.com at the top, traded out of Yahoo shares at the top and then simply sat back and watched it all as a billionaire gadfly.

BoomTown used to even tease Yang about how Cuban was richer than he was and got to have all the fun. It would always get a glare out of him.

So too could Cuban, as in this post from his smart Blog Maverick (of course, it is named that!) blog, right after Microsoft’s (MSFT) unsolicited bid for Yahoo,.

In it, Cuban urged Yang to sell to the Internet giant, largely due to the pressure of competing with Google (GOOG).

Cuban wrote:

Building a world class Yahoo to be the best company it possibly can be using the management skills that Jerry and company have is a far different challenge than optimizing the stock price. Particularly when Google is your stock comp…

Which is exactly why Jerry and David should sell to MSFT…

So the question isn’t whether Yahoo should sell. It should. The only question is what the structure of the deal should look like so that Jerry and David can achieve many of the goals they set out to accomplish on the net under the MSFT umbrella. Jerry definitely is about customers first. This is his chance to show it…

So Yahoo should say yes. It’s less about the money than about finally achieving the corporate goals set out more than a decade ago. One time Jerry told me that Yahoo stood for You Always Have Other Options. This time Yahoo doesn’t, but their customers options could improve exponentially if Yahoo says yes.”

Given the Yahoo acquisition of Broadcast.com gave the clever Cuban the billions he has used so entertainingly, it’s all kind of ironic, no?

I have known Davis for a long time from his previous life as Co-Founder and CEO of Lycos, the then-third-placed portal and one of the shooting stars from Web 1.0.

And I would have to say he cracked me up more than most, for his relentlessly cheery promotion of Lycos, which always dwelled in the shadow of Yahoo (YHOO) and Excite, despite Davis’s best efforts.

In this video, Davis talks about the upcoming boom in mobile apps and the hype over Facebook by making a salient comparison to Lycos’s acquisitions like Tripod and Angelfire (remember when those were the Web’s big hotties?!?), as well as the need for more focus on sustainability among start-ups.

Best of all, Davis reveals what happened to Lycos, the dog mascot!

Here’s the video:

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year, Sony Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Nobuyuki Idei pondered the future of the world’s largest consumer-electronics company caught in the maelstrom of the heady Internet age.

What technology or online company, he wondered, would be the ideal partner that would allow Sony to take full advantage of its many assets in the digital arena? And how should Sony use its famed brand name, rich content, high-quality hardware and strong consumer relationships to become a key Internet player?

He tossed out some partner possibilities: Yahoo, AOL Time Warner and Microsoft. He didn’t let on what he considered best for Sony.

Last week, at the giant Comdex show in Las Vegas, Sony’s thinking became clearer. Sony announced a series of deals, including an ambitious, if vague, plan to work with AOL on developing easy-to-use high-speed home networks, innovative online content and devices, and even a new Internet browser. It also announced new initiatives related to cellphones and unveiled several new Net-enabled electronic products.

More important, in his keynote speech at the show, Sony’s president and chief operating officer Kunitake Ando made the company’s firmest declaration yet that it intends to become a “ubiquitous value network,” providing a range of consumer-friendly interactive services to any device anywhere.

It’s about time.

Despite its enviable digital assets, Sony has been the Hamlet of the interactive stage — unable to decide “to be” — largely due to an internal culture that kept its many independent fiefdoms from working together as a powerful whole.

The company has promised to fix the problem before. Last year, after the merger of AOL and Time Warner was announced, Sony said it was reorganizing management to better take advantage of the rapid convergence that was going on. “If they ever accomplish this, Sony could really make a big difference in the power dynamics of the industry,” said one Silicon Valley player last week. “The problem is, we have all gotten tired of waiting for it to happen.”

Sony execs claim things are different now that Internet mania has calmed and the world is on the cusp of a broadband future perfectly suited for their company. “We have taken a lot of heat…but we seem to be getting beyond the issues of how to cooperate among ourselves,” said Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony’s U.S. holding company, in an interview last week. “There is no one at the company–in Toyko or here–who does not understand now how this all has to be interrelated.”

It certainly is a tough time for Sony to step up its profile. The weak economy world-wide is limiting. Sony itself has felt the impact, especially in its flagship consumer-electronics area, reporting a $107 million loss for its recent quarter and forecasting that profits for the full year will be cut in half from the year before.

Still, it may not be such a bad time to begin striking out. Since the Internet bust leaves huge opportunities for stable players, companies like Sony may be in the best position to benefit when the next chapter of the interactive revolution begins.

To its credit, the company never jumped heedlessly into the frothy period, as other large media conglomerates, like Walt Disney Co., did. Now Sony’s conservatism has turned out to look pretty smart.

“While we are not entirely blameless, we definitely didn’t go charging in,” said Mr. Stringer, who credits managers in Japan for Sony’s restraint. “They were rightly suspicious of the business plans and found the bubble to be a bubble.”

While it considered a range of moves, such as investing heavily in both the Excite and Yahoo portals in their heyday, it didn’t do most of them in the end. “I definitely was nervous since everyone was getting rich but us,” recalled Mr. Stringer. “But we held back and as a result did not get as burned.”

Now that the interactive space has been “whittled down to make sense,” Mr. Stringer thinks Sony has the right stuff to prevail. He may be right, given that Sony holds many impressive and wide-ranging interactive assets.

In hardware, it offers well-made digital cameras, music players, hand-helds, computers and the leading game-player unit, the PlayStation 2, that has many other interactive possibilities. It is developing potentially promising interactive subscription services in music, games and movies, and holds licenses for interactive television applications. And its media unit holds important parcels of entertainment content.

What it doesn’t have is distribution, an impetus behind its push into broadband with AOL, and the reason for an earlier marketing deal with Yahoo to hawk its products, content and services online.

Indeed, the AOL broadband alliance, if done correctly, holds a lot of potential, especially since it will help ward off challenges from Microsoft, which is battling both companies in a number of consumer and home entertainment markets. The software company is spending prodigiously to launch a game-player competitor to PS2, called Xbox. Both products have aspirations well beyond games, hoping to use such devices to deliver a range of online offerings over high-speed lines in the future.

That’s why Sony is developing technologies such as Feel, which aims to join all kinds of devices in a high-speed wireless home network. With open standards and the link with the popular AOL, Mr. Stringer thinks Sony is “traveling at the right pace with the right partners.” He doesn’t believe the company needs to make many major acquisitions to realize its goals.

Of course, Sony’s success here depends on the rapid roll-out of broadband and getting consumers to pay for more interactive subscription services — a dream still not realized. It would also help if the economy turned around, too.

When it does, Mr. Stringer thinks Sony will be ready. “After all this talk about the promises of synergy,” he said, “we hope to begin to see the advantages.”

Or, in more literary terms: To be or not to be, that is the question.