Who wants to pay for paidContent? We’ll find out soon, it seems, because the sales process for the pioneering blog and its parent company ContentNext appears to be wrapping up.

But if you were making a bet, you’d get good odds that the most likely buyer will be GigaOM, another pioneering tech/media business.

People familiar with paidContent believe GigaOM is in the last stages of a deal to purchase the site and its related businesses from Guardian Media Group, which bought the company in 2008 and then put it on the block last fall.

I asked the Guardian about the sale on Friday, and a PR rep told me that “the sale process is ongoing. Beyond that we would not comment.” Last night, I corresponded with GigaOM founder Om Malik, via text message, but he didn’t respond to my question about a potential acquisition.

That’s certainly not the same as a confirmation. But there’s some pleasing logic to a GigaOM/paidContent rollup. Both businesses started as influential one-man blogging operations, then added staff and moved into related operations such as conferences. (Full disclosure: AllThingsD competes with both companies.)

PaidContent founder Rafat Ali left his company a couple years after selling to the Guardian. Malik has sold off chunks of his business to venture capitalists such as True Ventures (where he is now a venture partner) and Reed Elsevier Ventures, who have invested a total of $15 million.

Depending on the price, you could find other strategic buyers that could be interested in paidContent. But I’m told that two of the most logical buyers — WebMediaBrands, which has been stocking up on tech industry publications including Inside Networks, and SAY Media, which recently bought tech blog ReadWriteWeb in December – aren’t in the running.

Other possibles not in the bidding, according to sources: Jim Bankoff’s Vox Media, which owns The Verge tech site; and Dow Jones (which owns this site).

The only other big bidder to consider would be AOL, which owns Engadget and bought TechCrunch in 2010. Sources there said a bid was unlikely, too.

GigaOm, referencing a UBS research note, points out that $900 million will go into Apple’s retail outlets. The company says it will open another 40 stores in the next year.

Apple is vague, of course, about where the rest of the $7.1 billion will go, but references “product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software and enhancements.”

So: Lots of places.

It’s tempting to assume that the bulk of the money goes into more iCloud projects, like its North Carolina data center. And we do know, for instance, that Apple is now building a giant solar farm to help power that data center.

But Apple really isn’t in the habit of hand-tipping, and all we really know is that $7.1 billion is a lot more than $4 billion, which is what Apple spent on non-retail capex last year.

Alternate reading: Aysmco’s Horace Dediu.

On Sunday, I motored up to Petaluma to be on This Week in Tech, or TWiT, at its new offices. Hosted by Leo Laporte, it’s a roundtable on the news of the week in the digital sector.

The other panelists included GigaOm’s Om Malik, CNET’s Rafe Needleman and Revision3′s Patrick Norton, talking about everything from the 30th anniversary of the IBM PC to electronic tattoos to the patent issues foiling Google (who knew?) to delicious cupcakes not eaten by Om.

Enjoy:

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier tonight that Microsoft–in what would be its most aggressive acquisition in the digital space–was zeroing in on buying Skype for $8.5 billion all in with an assumption of the Luxembourg-based company’s debt.

Sources told BoomTown tonight that the deal for the online telephony and video communications giant is actually done and will be announced early tomorrow morning.

The purchase–which has been spearheaded in closely held negotiations by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with an assist from Business Division CFO Amy Hood and top dealmaker Charles Songhurst–is a bold move for the software giant and its biggest acquisition in more than three decades.

The big price will give Microsoft–which has struggled in its online efforts and has lost billions of dollars for its work–a big brand name on the Web.

With Skype, which has been aggressively expanding, Microsoft will continue to lose money in its Internet efforts. Skype lost $7 million on revenue of $860 million. Operating profits, which Skype preferred to highlight, were $264 million.

And–let us not forget–Skype’s debt is $686 million. Silver lining: That’s slightly less than Microsoft’s Online Services division losses in its most recent quarter!

But, sources said, the concept is bigger than just money, including getting access to Skype’s 663 million registered users.

Skype, which had been headed bumpily toward an IPO until now, will apparently be integrated into Microsoft’s Windows Live and other online communications efforts in both the consumer and enterprise arenas, sources said.

Think Kinect connecting.

Skype has had a big-company owner before–eBay Inc. paid $2.6 billion in cash and stock for it in 2005, as a way for the auction site’s buyers and sellers to communicate.

A 70 percent stake in Skype was sold in 2009 to investors such as Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. It then valued Skype at $2.75 billion.

So, obviously, the deal is a big win for them. In addition, at the time they made their investments, Skype was a huge legal mess with lawsuits flying.

Skype has since gotten cleaned up enough to attract Microsoft.

Other suitors have looked at Skype, including Google, although acquisition interest by Facebook was very much overblown, said several sources.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s new smartphone partner Nokia also held meetings with Skype’s CEO Tony Bates, a former Cisco exec who arrived at the company last fall.

Interest in Skype by Microsoft was first reported by GigaOm’s Om Malik on Sunday.

Tune in at 5 am PT for the official press release, apparently, and lots and lots and lots of analysis of whether Microsoft paid too much for Skype.

Now it looks as if News.me is just about ready for public consumption. I’m basing that observation on a new Web site that spells out, in great detail, how the app is supposed to work, and which instructs users to head to iTunes to download the app.

As I’m typing this, News.me still isn’t available in the app store. So it’s possible that the new web page is simply a new web page. Perhaps it’s just an exercise in positive thinking–maybe this will force Apple into approving our app!

[UPDATE: "Our understanding is that News.me is launching tomorrow", says New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy; the Times is aware of News.me's plans because it helped develop the project in its early stages (see below). I've asked Bit.ly for comment but haven't heard back yet.]

At a minimum, though, we can learn a lot about what Bit.ly has planned when News.me does launch.

The basics:

• News.me will cost $0.99 a week, or $34.99 a year. It will be available as an iPad app, using Apple’s subscription service, or as an e-mail newsletter.
• News.me will provide users with curated Twitter streams that highlight “the most popular or interesting news stories” that appear in their own Twitter feeds, and from the feeds of other Twitter users they select. The notion is that users can “read over the shoulder” of people they find interesting.
• Bit.ly does the curating, using the data it culls as it shortens billions of shared links on the Web. Since News.me relies on Bit.ly data, it has a natural bias toward publishers that use the service.
• News.me lets users read those stories in a “streamlined reading view,” which will be familiar to anyone who has used apps like Instapaper: easy-to-read black text on a white background–without the ads users see when they read the same stuff on a publisher’s Web page.
• News.me will share some of its revenue with publishers who license their content to the service. But publishers who don’t have News.me deals but do appear on the Web will still see their stuff show up on the service. It just won’t look as nice, and they won’t get paid. And they won’t get the chance to run “additional promotion for publisher products that might be of special interest to News.me users (such as iPad applications).”

You can get a pretty good sense of how the app works by reading TechCrunch’s “exclusive” from February. Or you could just ask many of the people whose work often appears on Techmeme. A whole lot of writers and bloggers–including me–have had a chance to play with News.me for a while.

When News.me finally does go live, potential users will have to debate whether they want to pay a fee to read stuff they can get for free on the Web.

But to me, the most interesting thing about News.me is that it’s an aggregator blessed by some publishers that haven’t always been hospitable to aggregators.

There’s the New York Times, for starters, which handed over the beginnings of the service to Bit.ly in exchange for cash and equity. And the Associated Press, which often butts heads with the Web, has signed on, too.

So have Forbes, and AOL and many of its sub-brands, and a good chunk of the blogosphere–Gawker Media, Business Insider, Gigaom, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc. (I believe–but haven’t confirmed–that neither All Things Digital nor News Corp., which owns the site, have a deal with News.me.)

The Times and the Associated Press also work with Ongo, another aggregation subscription service. But Ongo only uses content from publishers it has deals with.

News.me, though, charges money for a service built using other people’s work–even if those people haven’t signed on.

Which is what the Times has complained about in the past–like last summer, when it forced Apple to pull the Pulse newsreader out of its app store. The AP has engaged in similar fist-shaking aimed at Google and the Internet at large.

Here’s News.me’s defense of its model:

Because News.me generally provides a small subset of a publisher’s content, filtered by user actions and News.me algorithms, it is not a substitute for publishers’ own web sites or iPad applications. And, since it exposes users to content they likely wouldn’t otherwise see, it can broaden the audience and, through related-content links, drive new unique users to publisher web sites.

Which is reasonable enough. Everything on the Web gets shared and sampled; if you’re a publisher trying to build or keep an audience, trying to prevent that is counterproductive.

And News.me’s curated browsing conceit–there’s no search function, and you can’t subscribe to a publication-specific feed–makes it worthless for anyone trying to use it to game publishers. This won’t work as a permanent ad-blocker, or a paywall-jumping aid.

I still won’t be surprised to see some publishers who haven’t signed on rattling their sabers when News.me launches–just like the Times and the AP have in the past. Glad to see they’ve come around.

Yes, it is perverse, but I really want to come in dead last in Time magazine’s “140 Best Twitter Feeds.”

Why? Well, there’s no way I am getting near the top with the likes of Sarah Palin and Lady Gaga in the same list, so I felt the 140th–get it?–slot on a Twitter poll is the next best thing to aim for.

Here’s the deal, according to the magazine’s Web site:

“TIME picks the 140 Twitter feeds that are shaping the conversation. Take a look and vote on whether you think these top tweeters should be on our list.”

The list is split up into categories, such as authors (Neil Gaiman, who is #1, and Margaret Atwood), celebrities (Gaga and the inevitable Justin Bieber) and companies (Zappos and Whole Foods).

There is also a technology group, with luminaries such as New York VC Fred Wilson, man-about-Web Kevin Rose and, of course, the King of Tweets Robert Scoble.

I am in that group too, with the description: “When this woman reports a rumor, you can pretty much count on it to be true.”

Thanks…I think–although I prefer to call it reporting a fact.

In any case, early on, I was doing badly in the voting–as I had hoped and is entirely correct considering I am unknown to anyone but certain geeks–and was right near the bottom with some suspect deal sites.

But by last night, GigaOm’s Om Malik had dropped below me, along with Wilson. I was at the unacceptable 131 spot.

This will not stand! Thus, so I can shoot the moon, I urge everyone to vote for:

132 Mike Allen
133 Om Malik
134 Amazon Deals
135 Fred Wilson
136 DealDivine
137 Nieman Lab
138 Best Buy Deals
139 Coupons.com
140 Steven Johnson

A well-known writer and entrepreneur, Johnson has 1.4 million followers on Twitter and does not deserve this ignominious loss as much as me.

Tweet that.

Singly was founded by Jeremie Miller, who created the open-source instant messaging protocol XMPP. It won the O’Reilly Strata data conference‘s start-up competition this week, and has already raised some funding from individual investors. (I’d hoped to attend Strata in person, but got caught up in an endless stream of little news items this week.)

Giving users clearer ownership and better access to their data is a geeky topic but an increasingly relevant one, for privacy and other reasons.

Singly will reportedly offer a hosted version of the Locker Project, or just the code itself, for users to collect their participation on social media sites and even their click streams, financial records and heart-rate monitors. This concept is known as “exhaust data,” i.e., what users emit as they motor around the Web.

Then, Locker Project users can run yet-to-be-built apps to analyze their exhaust data in order to find patterns, make recommendations, set alerts and do whatever else they can imagine.

So many things we do these days can be recorded, and already are. Rather than just allowing behaviorally targeted advertisers, governments and credit card companies to stalk us, the thought behind projects like this is that we users can gain value out of stalking ourselves and analyzing our own data. I wrote a bit more about the justifications for this stuff during my old gig at GigaOM.

And to be sure, other companies and organizations are exploring the idea of personal archives too–for instance, the recent Y Combinator start-up Greplin is building a unified personal search tool that members can use on their email, calendar, storage and social Web accounts.

In a note published on his Facebook profile, Agarwal said:

I am extremely inspired by the changes that Facebook has affected throughout the Internet ecosystem and how it has changed user expectations about great products. Our Platform has created a unique set of opportunities for building products on the foundations of the social graph. It will be the cornerstone of many future disruptions, some of which I hope to accelerate.

Agarwal’s projects have included Facebook newsfeed, search, ads, user commerce and services infrastructure. He said his last day would be Dec. 3.

Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu said via email, “After nearly five-and-a-half years, Aditya Agarwal has decided to leave the company. Aditya has been a key contributor since Facebook’s early days and while he’ll be greatly missed, we wish him all the best as he considers his next adventure.”

Agarwal did not specify what his next project will be. His wife, Ruchi Sangvi, was Facebook’s first female engineer and left the company in August. (The two joined Facebook as a couple in mid-2005 after graduating from Carnegie Mellon.)

Agarwal is not Facebook’s only director of engineering; others with that title include Andrew “Boz” Bosworth and Robert Johnson.

Facebook has given employees the option to cash out some of their shares through secondary markets, and plus, early members of the team have at this point just been there a long time. Meanwhile Facebook has put new people, both hires and acqhires, in charge. As I wrote in a feature for GigaOM a few months ago:

Staying at a tech startup for more than four years–the default stock option vesting schedule–is a rare thing, but it seems notable that at 6-year-old Facebook, many early and influential employees have moved on, several of them recently. Facebook is an unusual employer, having been incredibly successful while steering clear of the public markets longer than expected. Employees who leave are often emboldened by their work on such an influential and widely used product, and want to start their own companies. Others are burned out. Still others feel stifled by the company’s management structure.

Although it’s obviously hard to see your comrades leave, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had an interesting and somewhat counterintuitive explanation for the stream of people leaving the company in an interview he gave about a year ago:

“We’re not pretending we’re building a company that hackers are going to want to work at forever,” Zuckerberg said, pointing to former employees like Steve Chen (who stayed at Facebook for only a short time before starting YouTube). Zuckerberg added his hope was to build a place where people could learn to build high-impact products–”a great hacker institution in the long term.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

You may know me from my writings at GigaOM, where I covered topics like the social Web and online video for the last four years. If this is your first time reading me, I hope you’ll find my writing, reporting and analysis worth sticking around for.

My beat at All Things Digital is All Things Social, and you’ll be able to find my stories under the heading NetworkEffect, named after the idea that a community of users makes a service valuable for everyone who joins.

On the social Web, network effects help us improve the lives of our friends, family and neighbors, when we sign up for the same Web services and share our lives and experiences; they also factor in the power of critical mass to create new businesses from scratch. In the six years I’ve been a tech reporter, companies I’ve watched being born–such as Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube–have come to be major parts of people’s lives around the world. And I think that’s pretty awesome.

Of course, not everyone agrees. Example du jour: In this month’s New York Review of Books, the author Zadie Smith (whose novels I like very much) applied her considerable forces of perception to Facebook and the implications of its creation myth. Smith’s credentials to analyze Facebook are: She was a fellow at Harvard University when it was founded, she spent only two months trying the service before leaving it, she’s a full nine years older than Mark Zuckerberg (ancient!), and she calls herself a “private person.”

In her piece, Smith charged that Facebook encourages highly superficial, low-effort communication that threatens to replace actual relationships and experiences. She cited Jaron Lanier to assert that computers cannot represent actual human relationships, and, further, that the limitations of a tool can shape what its users think is possible.

So, basically, Facebook is devaluing the way we relate to each other.

Smith thinks her problems with Facebook come back to the site being created by Zuckerberg as an immature college sophomore who desperately wanted to be liked. “If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out,” she wrote. “[T]o Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.”

If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.

Smith noted in the piece that she doesn’t actively use Facebook herself, but she looked up some of Zuckerberg’s recent public comments and keenly observes that the Facebook CEO “uses the word ‘connect’ as believers use the word ‘Jesus,’ as if it were sacred in and of itself.”

Personally, I see my relationships extended and improved on Facebook, whether it’s knowing what my extended family is up to on a daily basis, or the great conversations I’ve had in the past few days about Death Valley, after I posted an album of pictures from my between-jobs road trip to the desert last week.

Still, I don’t often find visiting Facebook to be deeply satisfying either. But, whereas Smith sees reasons to run away screaming, I see an opportunity to better address some of the parts she finds lacking.

The real story here?

It’s about the capability of the social Web to improve so it better serves and extends our real-world relationships. It’s about the fact that these sites and apps are created by people whose versions of the world are expressed in them. It’s about the potential to communicate with people you don’t know, to cultivate and reward passionate fans and to learn the dark art of self-promotion. It’s about the wide-open opportunity to improve on and compete with Facebook, which is still really far away from delivering on its potential to improve the lives of the half-billion people who already use it regularly and the many more who don’t. Simply put, there’s a lot more to be done.

And that’s what I want to write about.

(P.S. As detailed in my ethics statement, which I will keep updated, my husband is a part-time employee at Facebook. His work is not a part of my reporting, and I obviously find the company fascinating and will not shy away from writing about it–both the good parts and the bad ones. )

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.

“This move to HSPA+ is primarily a software upgrade for equipment across our network, very similar to the upgrade we made earlier this year to HSPA 7.2,” said AT&T CTO John Donovan.

“Also like HSPA 7.2,” Donovan added, “the full speed benefits of HSPA+ will be seen when the software upgrade is combined with enhanced Ethernet-powered fiber-optic backhaul connections, which carry traffic from the cell site to the network backbone. We’re deploying these backhaul connections to cell sites across the nation, a process that will continue through 2011, when we plan to begin deployment of LTE.”

So there has been no change to carrier’s LTE rollout plans. For AT&T (T), this HSPA+ upgrade is intended as a bridge to LTE, which in all likelihood will be an overlay network to 3G for the next few years.

As AT&T Operations CEO John Stankey told GigaOm yesterday, “[LTE] vendors are experiencing some challenges on certain features and software, and first implementations in 2011 will be…pretty vanilla.”

And according to a recent study by research house Maravedis, LTE won’t really hit maturity for another four to five years. Until that day arrives, mobile users will necessarily be falling back on 3G.

A wise move, then, for AT&T to enhance its entire 3G footprint, and at such little cost, particularly at a time when more and more data-hungry devices like Apple’s (AAPL) iPad are arriving at market.

Where rivals like Facebook have succeeded in capitalizing on social relationships and interactions online, Google has largely failed. While “big in Brazil,” the company’s social network, Orkut, doesn’t have much traction anywhere else–it certainly can’t be considered a rival to Facebook. And after its privacy-violating launch, Buzz–Google’s latest social networking service–doesn’t appear to be much of a play in the social space, either.

No surprise, then, to learn that Google (GOOG) is looking for someone to refine its social strategy and perhaps better leverage the social network that already exists in services like Gmail. From GigaOm comes word that the company is recruiting for a new “Head of Social” position, a senior post charged with:

1) building an innovative offering specifically in this area; or 2) developing the capability and integrating social into Google’s existing portfolio.

A wise move, I think, if it’s not too late–and I don’t think it is. After all, the company has some big social assets, Gmail and YouTube, for example. It just hasn’t yet been able to leverage them with the decentralized social network that it’s clearly angling for. Perhaps, some new blood will help Google do that.

Bloggers quickly began speculating as to which device is better, with many pro-Kindle reviewers calling the reader less distracting, while the Apple camp cites the iPad’s multi-purpose nature as a selling point.

An iPad “does so much more–games, photos, videos, email,” wrote Fred Vogelstein in Wired. “I might eventually ditch my laptop for it too.”

GigaOm also sees the Kindle as a defunct device. “The Amazon Kindle is dead thanks to the rich media capabilities of the iPad as well as the full software-based keyboard,” Stacey Higginbotham wrote.

But are those bells and whistles distracting to those who just want to curl up with an e-book? Brad Stone wrote on Bits that the Kindle “will continue to be the best device for lovers of long-form reading, period…when you read a book, you just don’t want to have email, Twitter and the ESPN Web site beckoning from the browser.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The atmosphere last Friday night at the Crunchies, an awards show hosted by three popular and often competing tech blogs–TechCrunch, VentureBeat and GigaOm–was downright buoyant, especially compared with last year, and had hints of IPOs in the air.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

If spinning is an intense political skill, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is doing her very best at trying to create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

As Om Malik reports on GigaOm, Whitman–who is trying to nab the Republican gubernatorial nomination in California–told a radio interviewer recently that “actually I think Skype will prove to be a good acquisition for eBay.”

Well, good if you mean the $2.6 billion purchase of the Internet telephony company that never worked as Whitman had effusively promised in 2005.

She noted then: “By combining the two leading e-commerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in Internet voice communications, we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the Net.”

That fabulous-sounding synergy did not happen, of course, eventually causing new eBay (EBAY) management to sell a huge chunk of Skype to an investor group.

Best of all, that sale included an ugly and expensive legal fight over software technology licensing issues with its co-founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, given that Whitman neglected in the competitive bidding to secure them properly.

That resulted in Zennström and Friis forcing eBay to include them just last week in the deal for a big chunk of Skype in exchange for those rights.

As the sick political joke goes: Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Nonetheless, Whitman has not let the facts get in the way of a good story!

She kind of had to, I guess, responding to an allegation by one of her rivals in the race, tech entrepreneur Steve Poizner, who has tried to chip away at her blue-chip business reputation by attacking the Skype deal.

Whitman was right to defend a lot of other great acquisitions she made as leader at eBay, such as PayPal; and she can be, as she said in the interview, “proud of my tenure at eBay.”

She should be, given that she was key to building a huge and profitable company that is a clear Silicon Valley Internet icon. While eBay did start to creak near the end of her decade-long stint there, many of Whitman’s accomplishments are nonetheless impressive.

But not all of them and definitely not the Skype buy, so she might want to stop making laughable declarations like this one in the interview:

“You probably read that the company just sold about two-thirds of the interest in Skype to an investor group, kept a portion, and got almost all the money back, and I think Skype will be very effective.”

Well, maybe so, but only because new management had to do clean-up and pay-up for her error, and new owners in charge of Skype could possibly better take advantage of what most consider a terrific property.

So, in the end, Whitman might be right.

And it might not even matter. In a recent poll, Whitman has pulled far ahead of ex-Congressman Tom Campbell, with 34 percent support from Republican primary voters compared to 13 percent for Campbell. Poizner clocks in third at six percent.

Tony Conrad, CEO and co-founder of Sphere–the contextually relevant content engine AOL bought in the spring of 2008 for upward of $25 million–left the Time Warner (TWX) online unit last month, several sources have told BoomTown in recent weeks.

But, in an effort by AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong to hold onto entrepreneurial talent, Conrad (pictured above) has agreed to become “Special Advisor” to its AOL Ventures Unit, headed by Jon Brod.

Conrad, who also works as a partner at San Francisco venture firm True Ventures, is also apparently looking to launch a new start-up.

These many moves have now been confirmed by a blog post–obtained by BoomTown–set to be published by Conrad at Sphere, which has recently changed its name to Surphace (a goofy moniker that still makes me weep, and not for joy).

Titled, “Next,” the post will also be appearing on the True Ventures site.

In it, Conrad outlined the changes and also gave big thanks all around.

You can read the whole thing below. In the post, Conrad noted that “I also find myself with a burning need to start another company…[and] I’ve decided that I need to move on from Sphere to figure it out.”

Sphere was founded in 2005 and raised about $4.25 million from many investors, some of which included Radar Partners, Trident Capital and well-known Web players Scott Kurnit and Will Hearst.

Conrad, who was involved with Webmail and RSS aggregator Oddpost (acquired by Yahoo in 2004), is also on the board of Automattic/WordPress, the blog publishing system this site uses.

This kind of history gives him a lot of Silicon Valley cred to help AOL, which also recently hired former Yahoo (YHOO) exec Brad Garlinghouse to run its communications arm and be its “CEO of Silicon Valley.”

Both will be working with Brod, who came to AOL via its acquisition of hyperlocal community news start-up Patch Media.

Brod has previously worked closely with Armstrong, who was a major Patch investor.

All these players will have their hands full trying to push AOL’s reputation among entrepreneurs, which is–how can I put it delicately?–pretty nonexistent.

But boosting innovation will be key to success as AOL prepares to spin off from Time Warner later in the year.

And that was not exactly helped by its recently released slate of board picks, who are a little light on fast-paced, Web 2.0 entrepreneurial skills.

So, keeping someone like Conrad in the AOL tent is a good move, especially since several similar execs at start-ups bought by the online giant have left.

They include Michael Jones of Userplane, who is now COO of News Corp. (NWS) social networking unit MySpace, as well as many others.

Here is a video interview I did with Conrad in mid-2007 (which also includes a visit with GigaOm’s Om Malik):

And here is Conrad’s blog post:

Next

It’s been almost five years since Martin Remy, Steve Neiker, Toni Schneider and I started working on Sphere. For me, it’s around 10% of a life. And it’s a time when I find myself thinking a lot about a particular question: What do I want to do next?

In 2005, I had the good fortune of being on the founding team of Sphere and joining True Ventures simultaneously. I always thought that I’d eventually focus all of my attention on one or the other, but both were too much fun and I guess I’m selfish in that way. As time passed, I went deeper into each role and I never got around to choosing one or the other. It worked out nicely. True is on its second fund and Sphere had a successful sale to AOL in 2008. Most importantly, Sphere’s business and team are both thriving within AOL. While I’m proud of my contributions to both, the heroes in this equation are Martin, Steve, Toni, Shea DiDonna, Braughm Ricke, Om Malik, Puneet Agarwal, John Burke, Phil Black, Jon Callaghan, Marty Moe, Bill Wilson and AOL–they trusted and empowered me to pursue both. I am extremely grateful.

As I’ve thought through the question of what’s next, I’ve realized that I love the complementary perspectives acquired from building a company as an entrepreneur and investor. They are symbiotic roles and it’s really hard to say which has influenced me more. While my role at True as a Venture Partner will continue to deepen (because there is nothing more rewarding than working with people you admire and trust), I also find myself with a burning need to start another company. I’ve discovered my formula and doing both makes me happiest.

As for my next company, I’m not sure what the answer to that question is, but I’ve decided that I need to move on from Sphere (now Surphace) to figure it out. This may feel like old news as I’ve been working to make myself obsolete as Josh Guttman transitioned into the CEO role. My decision is easy as I know that Surphace is in excellent hands. I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving if I didn’t believe that Josh was the right leader for the business today. He’s a natural leader and has a strategy for the future that I believe is going to accelerate growth for Surphace and AOL. I couldn’t be more pleased for Josh and excited for the Surphace team.

As for my thoughts about Surphace and AOL’s future, I’m more optimistic than ever. We joined AOL at an opportune time. AOL is doing what great, sustainable businesses do every so often – they’re reinventing themselves. As the business model of the oldest and one of the biggest Internet businesses evolves, Sphere/Surphace has become an important piece of their strategy to reach across and engage the web. In the past year, we’ve had an insiders’ view into how AOL’s new leadership team has moved aggressively to engage their audience (new vertical focused websites; a focus on engagement and not page-views for page-views sake; hiring leading journalistic talent when others downsized; acquisitions in the local content space; shorter development cycles with an emphasis on release, iterate and release). There is nothing like winning and the AOL publishing business is winning. As a result, I’m pleased to also announce that I’ve agreed to serve as a Special Advisor to AOL Ventures as they reinvent themselves. I am thrilled at this opportunity to evolve my relationship.

I want to give a huge thanks to the people who’ve made the last few years what they were: my family tops the list, an entrepreneur is only as good as their support system and this is my secret sauce. My co-founders, Martin and Steve, who trusted me to play a role in helping them get the tech they invented the exposure it deserved. Toni and Phil who taught me about generosity at a moment when I was able to learn. Matt Mullenweg who opened up my thinking of how a start-up operates. Marty and Bill who have been consistently supportive since Day One–I can’t underscore enough how much I appreciate the manner in which they’ve empowered us to thrive in an appropriately independent environment. They have treated me (and the Sphere team) with enormous respect for which I am both thankful and flattered. The original Sphere team, the current Surphace team who have embraced AOL. Our investors and advisors who supported and helped shape our vision. The True team and entrepreneurs who have taught me about sacrifice, vision, execution and the value of pursuing your dreams–and, of course, Lewis Dvorkin, Kevin Lockland and Bill who paid us the nicest compliment of all in offering to acquire our company and then doing so.

It’s been a thrilling, at times difficult, always rewarding and lucky ride I’ve been on. Thanks to all.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091104/sphere-leader-exiting-aol-but-staying-on-as-special-venture-advisor/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20091103/volpi-and-index-ventures-out-of-skype-deal-the-lawsuit-happy-founder-twins-in/ http://allthingsd.com/20091103/volpi-and-index-ventures-out-of-skype-deal-the-lawsuit-happy-founder-twins-in/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:58:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=20231

According to sources close to the situation, Index Ventures and Michelangelo Volpi are out of the deal to buy Skype–and their lawsuit-loving nemeses, the founders of the Internet telephony service, are in.

Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis had sued Index and partner Michelangelo Volpi via tech companies they control, Joltid and Joost.

The pair had already been in a legal battle over software licensing issues with eBay (EBAY), the company that had sold Skype to in 2005.

They then accused Index and Volpi, employing a reputation-bashing style, of using confidential information as part of a consortium bid to acquire a large chunk of Skype.

Volpi had been Joost’s CEO.

Volpi and Index fired back in court filings and both sides armed themselves with powerful PR guns.

Ironically, Index was only a small part of the group that won the deal to acquire Skype from eBay recently.

News of the serious settlement talks was reported earlier this week by GigaOm’s Om Malik.

The New York Times’s Brad Stone also added significantly to the story about the settlement today, noting the Skype founders would be getting a stake and that Index “is most likely withdrawing from the deal.”

Well, most likely now means certainly for Index, sources told me, and the London-based venture firm that bid for Skype has to bid that deal goodbye.

More details to come, but it’s sure proof that the legal system, such as it was used, works.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091103/volpi-and-index-ventures-out-of-skype-deal-the-lawsuit-happy-founder-twins-in/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090630/new-atd-features-topic-pages-and-finding-jobs-no-not-steve/ http://allthingsd.com/20090630/new-atd-features-topic-pages-and-finding-jobs-no-not-steve/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:57:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=15244 Here at All Things Digital, we are always fussing away on our site, making a variety of improvements regularly to deliver a better experience to our readers.

In that vein, we have recently added two new features over the last few weeks, both of which deserve a look-see: Topic pages and job listings.

The first is our attempt to offer a new and easier way for the ATD audience to navigate specific information, by gathering in one place a selection of blogs, columns, videos and photos on the site, all related to a single popular topic, all without requiring a user to search via keywords.

The variety of our topic pages will grow over time. But right now we have special pages for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone 3GS, the Palm (PALM) Pre, the new Bing search service from Microsoft (MSFT) and news from Apple’s recent Worldwide Developers Conference.

Secondly, we’ve partnered with Simply Hired to offer paid job listings on AllThingsD.com, right from the front page. Starting this week, you’ll find Simply Hired widgets with current job opportunities on pages across our site, including here.

Recruiters can post jobs directly to the ATD jobs page, and these listings are also distributed to more than 5,000 partner sites in Simply Hired’s network, including GigaOM, Mashable and WashingtonPost.com.

(Full disclosure: Simply Hired, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., has raised some of its funding from the News Corp. (NWS) digital unit, Fox Interactive Media. News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090630/new-atd-features-topic-pages-and-finding-jobs-no-not-steve/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090430/flickr-co-founder-butterfield-and-chief-architect-henderson-working-on-stealth-start-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20090430/flickr-co-founder-butterfield-and-chief-architect-henderson-working-on-stealth-start-up/#comments Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:48:49 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=13035

Yesterday, several Flickr engineers posted news of their layoffs from the Yahoo photo-sharing unit on Twitter, which caused GigaOm’s Om Malik to notice that Flickr architect Cal Henderson (pictured here) was also no longer on its About page.

According to several sources I spoke to, Henderson was actually not laid off at Yahoo (YHOO), but is leaving to start a new company–in the social-gaming arena, I am told–with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

He and several other of the original core development team for Flickr transitioned out or have been transitioning out for quite some time, sources said.

Henderson’s Web site, called iamcal.com, still says he is the head of engineering at Flickr.

Butterfield (pictured here), as well as another co-founder, Caterina Fake, left Yahoo last year. Yahoo had paid $35 million to acquire Flickr in 2005.

Fake joined another start-up, called Hunch, last summer as chief product officer. Hunch is an answers site and is now in beta testing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090430/flickr-co-founder-butterfield-and-chief-architect-henderson-working-on-stealth-start-up/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090420/oracle-sun-whither-mysql/ http://allthingsd.com/20090420/oracle-sun-whither-mysql/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:17:11 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=11010 As investors and analysts digest this morning’s Oracle-Sun news, some are wondering what will happen to Sun (JAVA)-owned MySQL, and whether combining the Oracle (ORCL) and MySQL database businesses would represent an antitrust concern.

While MySQL would be a small part of Oracle’s overall business, it’s a popular open-source database that competes with other Oracle offerings. The deal, writes Seeking Alpha’s Mike Butcher, “has massive implications for the future openness of Java and MySQL.”

“MySQL is clearly a big prize for Oracle,” writes Om Malik on GigaOm, who says that the acquisition takes out Oracle’s No. 1 threat.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

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