Rosenthal will focus on mobile and social opportunities at Greylock, though it’s not yet decided whether she’ll ultimately develop one of her own ideas as a start-up, join a company, or get more involved in investing, she told AllThingsD.

Since leaving Facebook in January, Rosenthal has been advising start-ups and exploring her own investing projects, she said. Her angel investments include Small Demons, Katango (bought by Google), Copious and Pulse. She also joined the board of the public company AutoNation.

Greylock has recently been staffing up in the consumer Web space, though not all of its hires are doing the same thing, said partner David Sze. Adam Nash (formerly at LinkedIn) is an executive-in-residence like Rosenthal and DJ Patil (LinkedIn, Color) is “data scientist in residence,” while on the investing team Josh Elman (Twitter) is a principal and Sanjay Raman (Google, Howcast) is an associate.

Rosenthal is an accomplished athlete in cycling, running and lacrosse, having raced for the TIBCO professional cycling team while she was also working at Facebook.

Last night, the New York Times dropped a juicy little tidbit into its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink daily update of the board mishegas at Yahoo around the deliberations yesterday over two competing private equity bids to buy a partial stake in the company.

No, not the one about Jeff Jordan — former eBay exec, OpenTable CEO and now VC at Andreessen Horowitz — possibly taking a big role at Yahoo if the firm’s bid with Silver Lake prevailed — which was mysteriously removed very soon after it posted (’cuz he will not, so good move, NYT!)

I mean the one about the venture firm’s big-kahuna partner, Marc Andreessen — who will indeed take a board seat and play a strong role in Yahoo’s future if his bid wins — getting a possible competitor in the Silicon Valley savior section of the ongoing show.

That would be in the form of Reid Hoffman, the well-known entrepreneur, VC and angel investor, who the Times said had talked with TPG Capital, Silver Lake’s rival in the Yahoo bidding, about becoming a possible partner.

Wrote the Times:

“TPG has held discussions with Greylock Partners, another venture capital firm, about a possible alignment, two people said. TPG is hoping to draw on the expertise of Reid Hoffman, one of Greylock’s partners and the founder of the professional social network LinkedIn, these people said.”

Translation: If Silver Lake has a tech icon of substance on its team to give uber-geek appeal to its offer — dagnabbit — then TPG was going to raise with another one, whom the very same Times reporter who wrote last night’s article recently nicknamed “The Start-Up Whisperer” in a recent glowing profile of Hoffman.

While I am still trying to grok what a start-up whisperer exactly means (and how someone as self-effacing as Hoffman would react to such a twee moniker without snickering), it’s a move that has likely already irritated Silver Lake.

After all, TPG aiming at nabbing Hoffman is akin to two crazy neighbors trying to one-up each other in holiday-lighting lawn decor. (You have a singing Santa, so I’ll have a singing Santa — and I might even add a Lady Gaga-themed crèche for good measure!)

But it’s not a bad instinct, either, to get your own live-action Silicon Valley legend, even if it is only half true in Hoffman’s case.

Because, according to sources who know such things, while Hoffman and TPG have had conversations, there have been no commitments, and nothing is close to being agreed on to link the pair.

That could certainly change, and quickly, but Hoffman or Greylock aren’t currently in TPG’s proposal to Yahoo.

That’s in contrast to Andreessen, who is all in (I am not even going to bother with “sources said” here, since everyone and my mother has seen the proposal) with Silver Lake on the deal to purchase 19.9 percent of Yahoo for about $16.50 a share.

As I reported earlier this week, for Silver Lake’s money and expertise in fixing broken things, the bid includes: Silver Lake getting three board seats; cash going to a buyback of stock or granting of a dividend to shareholders; the ability to select a CEO; approval of its strategic plan for Yahoo, and its solution to come to terms with Yahoo’s unhappy Asian partners; and all the purple wearables you could ever hope for (perhaps Yahoo’s best asset, IMHO, especially worn by such obviously cool dudes, as seen here).

Also, controversial Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang gets to stay around on the board (but only if he becomes very, very quiet, so as not to rile the activist shareholders).

TPG’s bid is less formed, although its price is slightly higher. And the PE firm has yet to check the “Big Geek Included” box.

Hence, the floating of Hoffman as a contender to take on Andreessen, who was once dubbed the “Golden Geek” by Time magazine.

I hope TPG does, soon, since what a matchup it would be!

But, for now at least, the pair — who share big investments in a range of Web companies, most especially Facebook (Andreessen is on the board of the social networking giant, and Hoffman was an early investor and adviser) — are at peace.

Dagnabbit.

A day after teaming up with the storage concern NetApp, Cloudera announced today that it has landed a $40 million series D round of venture capital funding from Ignition Partners, in a round led by its partner, Frank Artale. Previous investors include Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel. Cloudera says it will use the funds to expand its marketing and sales operations. By my count, the round brings Cloudera’s total capital raised so far to $76 million.

Cloudera has been on a roll — it’s the Hadoop outfit that many companies are turning to when they decide to tackle their big-data problems. Among its customers are eBay, AOL, Facebook and Groupon. While Hadoop itself is free for anyone to download and install from the Apache Software Foundation, Cloudera provides support and training, and an enterprise-ready version of Hadoop that has been tweaked for easier deployment in big companies.

And that’s not all the new money sloshing around the world of Hadoop, the open source project with the cute cartoon elephant as its mascot. (Hence the money-origami elephant pictured above.)

Accel Partners, which led Cloudera’s last round, is launching a $100 million “Big Data Fund,” with Cloudera as a partner. The point, Accel partner Ping Li told me, is to fund companies working in what he calls the “big data stack,” whether that’s in infrastructure like storage or security or management, or building applications that run on Hadoop. And the opportunities for that are multiplying, he told me.

“We’re seeing an undercurrent of picks-and-shovels kind of innovation around solving big data problems,” Li told me in an email. The volume of data is exploding at such a rate that it’s breaking traditional data-management technology like relational databases. It’s a problem that touches practically every industry. The fund will be overseen by several Accel partners based in the U.S., Europe, China and India.

Hadoop, whose mascot is a cute cartoon elephant, is open source software based in part on a technique called MapReduce. Initially developed at Google, it makes big jobs involving the processing of large sets of data manageable. And while anyone can go get the open source software for free and put it to use, the number of start-up companies trying to build a business around helping other companies use Hadoop effectively is multiplying. A team of Hadoop engineers recently spun out of Yahoo as a start-up called Hortonworks, and another Hadoop outfit called MapR landed $20 million in venture capital funding in August.

To me, the best-known among the Hadoop start-ups is Cloudera. Backed by $36 million in investments from Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel, Cloudera has probably got the biggest head start among the Hadoop companies. Its customers include eBay, Groupon and AOL.

Cloudera is also the company behind the Hadoop World conference that begins tomorrow in New York; as such, the eyes of the Hadoop — er, universe — will be paying attention to what goes on here.

The first bit of news is that Cloudera will be teaming up with the storage concern NetApp, which is announcing a turnkey product called the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop. (One of these days people will dispense with using the word “solution” in this way. Alas, not yet!) Basically, the idea is to make Hadoop and Cloudera’s subscription support service easy to deploy from within NetApp storage hardware. NetApp will become a Cloudera reseller.

One problem companies deploying Hadoop often run into is the need for more storage, says Jeff O’Neal, senior director for data center solutions at NetApp. “When you deploy Hadoop in the traditional way, the ratio between computing power and storage is locked, and here we’re opening that up.”

Why pick Cloudera, when NetApp could have just as easily slapped on a freebie Hadoop installation and sold it alongside its own hardware? Speed. Cloudera, O’Neal says, can help customers get their Hadoop installations up and running faster than they otherwise would. “We can take weeks or even months out of the cycle of getting the infrastructure up and running,” O’Neal says.

The deal will also get Cloudera exposed to some new high-rolling customers where NetApp has some strengths, says Kirk Dunn, Cloudera’s COO. NetApp, for one thing, does a lot of business with federal government customers in the areas of defense and intelligence, and their data needs aren’t getting smaller. “The workloads are big. The velocity of data coming at both the compute and storage racks are significant,” Dunn says. So is the size of the data. Consider, for example how the military and intelligence community are creating more satellite imagery than ever before; then consider that all that data has to be sorted and analyzed in an efficient way. Outside of government, banking and financial institutions want to sift through the increasing stream of information on people and companies to determine risk.

The amount of data that companies are generating is huge. Five or six years ago, the average large corporation had maybe 360 terabytes of data lying around, Dunn says. Cloudera has some customers that are generating about that much new data nearly every day, he says, and it’s not slowing down. “The problems only get more vexing as time goes on. They sure aren’t getting any simpler,” he says. After years of helping those companies and governments store all that data, NetApp is uniquely positioned, Dunn says, to go back to those organizations and sell them on the idea of mining that data for useful information. “For NetApp, this is as basic as motherhood and apple pie.”

The company, founded by Ren Ng in 2006, has built a whole new kind of camera capable of performing a number of tricks that standard digital cameras just can’t do. The technology works by capturing a whole scene and digitally recording all the light available, instead of bringing a specific element into focus.

Lytro calls the resulting images “living pictures,” because each one contains more data than the single visible frame can display. After taking the picture, users of the camera can choose what they want in focus, and even switch between 2D and a subtle 3D image.

“We’re capturing this multi-dimensional set of data and… we can create some really really different and amazing pictures,” Lytro Chairman Charles Chi said, while demonstrating the camera on stage at AsiaD.

In addition to its bag of tricks, Lytro is touting the speed of the camera. Because the camera doesn’t need to focus, the image capture is nearly instantaneous. The light field technology also improves picture-taking in dark places without a flash.

The technology is an outgrowth of Ng’s doctoral work at Stanford in what is called “light field” imaging.

Ng hopes Lytro can upset a digital camera industry that has been dominated by the Japanese giants of imaging, Canon and Nikon, for generations. Its first cameras will ship early next year, with models starting at $399.

As for the camera itself, it boasts an f/2 aperture even when using its 8x zoom. It only has two buttons, with a touch surface used for the zooming. The back of the camera is a small multitouch screen that can be used to compose and view pictures.

The technology behind Lytro is compelling enough to have attracted $50 million in venture investment to date, including sizable chunks from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, K9, and NEA.

All are hoping Lytro can take a serious chunk out of the traditional digital camera industry, which the company claimed was worth nearly $40 billion in 2010.

AllThingsD‘s Ina Fried contributed from Hong Kong.

In case you haven’t been following along, here’s a quick rundown of what’s expected today:

Lytro, founded by Ren Ng in 2006, is an outgrowth of his Stanford University PhD research into what is called “light field photography.”

Without getting too technical, a light field camera captures light all throughout the scene in front of the lens, as opposed to the cameras consumers are used to, which bring a particular thing into focus first.

The result is an image that can be focused after it is taken, and, Lytro claims, a camera that is faster from power-up to capture, and has exceptional performance in low light, even without a flash.

Lytro claims it has spent the last five years and nearly $50 million from several of Silicon Valley’s heaviest-weight VC firms working to pack all that technology into a camera small enough to compete with the myriad point-and-shoots currently available.

Join us as we see for the first time if Lytro has gotten the picture.

View the slideshow

Liveblog:

11:17 am: They’ve let us into the event. No action yet, just a bunch of tech reporters tweeting away.

11:32 am: We’re underway. CEO and founder of Lytro Ren Ng is coming up now.

11:33 am: Lytro grew out of Ng’s Stanford PhD work in light field imaging.

11:33 am: Ng starts with some stats on digital cameras.

He says that at the end of the day, both film and regular digital cameras record the same data — a flat image.

11:34 am: “The light field is all the light traveling in all directions at every point in space,” says Ng.

11:35 am: Still on the tech, Ng says his focus at Stanford was on miniaturizing the camera technology. At the time, the only light field cameras were huge arrays of cameras in labs.

11:37 am: We’re on the history of his research now — Ng says the first camera he built was a one-off medium format camera.

11:39 am: The important takeaway here is that this camera is as much about the computer science behind it as it is about the optics and the hardware.

11:41 am: Ng moves on to the features of this technology for the user.

11:42 am: 1. Shoot first, focus after. 2. Ability for third parties to interact with the picture after it is put online.

11:43 am: Ng shows what appears to be a screenshot of his Facebook page, with a Lytro interactive image embedded.

11:44 am: Ng says that all Lytro images can also be viewed in an “immersive 3-D.”

11:45 am: Now we get to see the camera. It’s called the “Lytro.”

11:45 am: 8x optical zoom, with an f 2.0 aperture.

11:47 am: It’s an 11 “megaray” camera — which means it captures 11 million rays of light, says Ng.

11:49 am: It’s a metal rectangular tube, maybe 4 inches long. The lens is at one end and the small touch screen at the other. It’s unlike any camera design I’ve ever seen.

11:50 am: Ng says another benefit of the camera is how fast it turns on.

11:51 am: The camera doesn’t need to focus before it shoots, so time from activation to capture seems pretty instant.

11:52 am: Now he’s going to take a picture of the room — we’re being posed, no joke.

11:52 am: They will come in 3 colors — redish, blueish and grayish.

11:53 am: Ng is plugging in the camera, showcasing the software that comes with it. The camera uses micro USB.

11:54 am: Liveblogging solo here, but there are a few pictures I’m putting up on twitter (@withdrake).

11:55 am: Software seems to be pretty snappy. All the pictures are square format.

11:56 am: Ng says you can refocus the image on the camera, in the computer software, or on the web, wherever you embed the image.

He says you can post to Facebook from inside the Lytro computer software.

11:58 am: Ng just posted something to Facebook from the software. Facebook friends can zoom and refocus the image right in Facebook.

11:59 am: The camera will come in 8GB and 16GB versions.

11:59 am: 8GB version can capture 350 light field images.

12:00 pm: Ng says that the camera will ship in early 2012.

12:01 pm: Now he’s dancing around price.

12:02 pm: It will be $399 for the 8GB version.

We’re wrapped up. Moving on to the demo station. … See gallery of pictures above.

The anecdote appears in a new profile of Dropbox in the latest issue of Forbes, which also disclosed that the service is on track to hit $240 million in sales this year, even though the vast majority of its users pay nothing to use it.

But the meat of the story comes further in: Dropbox just closed a massive $250 million Series B round of funding, at an implied valuation of $4 billion, from Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners and Valiant Capital Partners. Early investors Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Hadi and Ali Partovi also participated in the round, bringing Dropbox’s total funding to date to $257.2 million. Houston’s stake, Forbes says, amounts to 15 percent of the equity, which would be worth about $600 million.

Houston may yet live to regret turning Jobs down. The Apple CEO proposed another meeting that never happened, then managed to single out Dropbox for disparagement as part of his iCloud keynote in June. That got the attention of Houston, who quickly fired off a memo to his team that included a list of once-hot companies that later crashed: MySpace, Netscape, Palm and Yahoo. Apple — which once viewed Dropbox as the sort of “strategic asset” for which it keeps its $70 billion war chest stuffed — is now the competition.

Among the hot and hyped Web 2.0 scene, not many would pick out 13-year-old digital promotions site, Coupons.com.

But, on the heels of a recent $200 million funding — which valued the quiet Mountain View, Calif., company at $1 billion — and a surging online discounting market, it has nabbed another $30 million from Greylock Partners.

Greylock has already invested half that amount, via a secondary market transaction, and is Coupons.com’s first venture investor. Its previous funders have been institutional investors.

“Coupons.com have been quietly building all the key infrastructure in this area,” said Greylock’s Reid Hoffman. “We think they are poised for the massive shift that is coming.”

The new funds, said its CEO and co-founder Steven Boal, will be used for a variety of things, including an aggressive mobile and social push for the longtime site.

“We are now focusing on hypergrowth,” said Boal, who noted that coupon clipping is perhaps the original social media. “Saving is kind of hip these days, even if we have been around for a long time with this exact focus.”

Coupons.com had already moved in the mobile/social direction with the 2009 acquisition of Grocery iQ, a mobile app that lets users manage shopping lists and discounts on phones.

There will be more to come, said Boal, who said the growth of the category is inevitable as consumers use these devices to manage their spending habits.

Coupons.com will also use the funds to expand its staff from 288 employees now to more than 450 by the end of the year, operating in about 13 countries. While Coupons.com has been profitable on a cash-flow basis, all the new initiatives will be costly.

And, while that kind of expansion could remind you of the explosive daily deals sector — and it is easy to put Coupons.com in the same highly competitive arena as Groupon — the company operates more as a platform and a white-label provider of discounting services to manufacturers and retailers, especially supermarkets and chain stores.

In fact, Coupons.com provides a lot of such services for them, garnering $100 million in revenue this year, up from $60 million last year and $40 million the year before. Much of that money is made when a customer uses its site or sites it powers and downloads a coupon for redemption.

One area of promising growth, said Boal, is managing discounts on Facebook’s social networking site, which is increasingly being used by consumer goods companies to test promotions and increase loyalty.

“It’s a really interesting area as product companies can be really nimble in managing their promotions,” he said. “And the ability to really drill down on the response of a certain sector of consumer is very powerful.”

It goes without saying that newspapers that previously dominated this industry have been on the wane.

The massive funding also sets up Coupons.com for a possible 2012 IPO, especially given its dominance — it serves nine out of 10 big grocery chains, four out of four pharmacy giants and such — in the digital couponing sector.

Presumably, there would be no discounts for that stock.

Here’s the official press release:

COUPONS.COM ANNOUNCES GREYLOCK PARTNERS INVESTMENT

Company’s Rapid Growth Including Mobile and Social Couponing Solutions to Benefit from Greylock’s Expertise

Mountain View, Calif. — October 3, 2011 — Coupons.com Incorporated, the recognized leader in digital coupons, including online printable, social, mobile and loyalty card promotions, today announced an investment by Greylock Partners. Coupons.com, which recently raised $200 million from institutional investors, is transforming the multi-billion dollar coupon industry and accelerating the shift from the newspaper to digital. The investment, a secondary market transaction, will enable the company to tap into Greylock’s expertise as it continues to produce market-transforming couponing solutions, including its mobile- and social-based products and services.

“We are very excited to work with Reid Hoffman and James Slavet and the entire Greylock team,” said Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons.com. “Greylock’s expertise and relationships will prove invaluable as we continue connecting brands with consumers via money-saving offers at every touch-point across the digital landscape — including web, social and mobile — and along the consumer’s entire path to purchase.”

“We’re very pleased with our investment in Coupons.com and are excited about working with the team as they continue to build a substantial, market-defining company,” said Reid Hoffman, Partner at Greylock Partners. “Coupons.com is almost single handedly transforming the multi-billion dollar coupon industry by ushering the newspaper-dominated business to digital. The market opportunity the company faces is immense, and we look forward to contributing in any way to their continued success, particularly in the context of social and mobile solutions.”

Coupons.com powers the vast majority of coupons printed online via a network of tens of thousands of sites in addition to their flagship site, Coupons.com, which is the 39th most trafficked site in the country. Coupons.com Incorporated is also the go-to resource for manufacturers wanting to coupon-enable their digital marketing initiatives, and virtually every major consumer packaged goods manufacturer resides on the company’s client roster. The company is aggressively building its team, expanding its full time staff from 288 employees in June to more than 450 expected by the end of the year, a growth of over 50 percent during the six-month period.

In addition to capturing a growing share of the multi-billion dollar newspaper-dominated coupon industry, Coupons.com is also expanding the couponing market by lowering the barriers to entry for companies to offer coupons, enabling smaller manufacturers — which could not place offers in the newspaper insert because of budget requirements or category exclusivity restrictions — to utilize coupons to engage with consumers. In addition, Coupons.com attracts a new demographic of coupon users, who engage with new couponing methods like digital, social and mobile coupons, but typically would not engage with traditional paper coupons.

In an interview last week, Greylock partner David Sze said he thinks a celebrity content management system will be a big business. “It used to be when these platforms first started, the top users were always digital stars — the Kevin Rose and Robert Scoble types. If you look at it today, there’s an amazing shift going on — it’s all general celebrities and the scale is order-of-magnitude multiples of when the tech stars were dominating the system.”

As I’ve described it before, WhoSay is a social media tool for celebrities, aimed at “helping them manage their social media presence and making sure photos and videos are posted on a page the stars themselves can control and eventually monetize.”

For instance, here’s a picture of Tom Hanks’s refrigerator, via an embed code that allows the actor to maintain the rights to his image. Hanks also used WhoSay last week to bitch about how RSS feed readers of Gawker’s headline about his new movie might think he was actually dead. (Tom Hanks knows what RSS is?!)

Greylock has one of the most extensive venture capital portfolios of the leading social Web companies, among them general and open platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora, Airbnb and Tumblr. WhoSay, by contrast, is a much more specific publishing tool.

WhoSay — which was incubated by Creative Artists Agency but operates independently — had already raised $6 million from investors including Amazon and High Peaks Ventures. Greylock is adding an undisclosed amount into a previous Series B round.

Elman has been at many of the top consumer Internet shops in his career, with stints at Facebook and LinkedIn, along with Twitter.

Elman said today he’s looking to help Greylock invest in companies that address “how social is connecting people and how it’s changing businesses,” as well as related tools like analytics.

Greylock has a growing LinkedIn alumni presence, having invested in the now-public professional networking company; it hired co-founder and chairman Reid Hoffman as a partner and recently added former LinkedIn chief scientist DJ Patil as a data scientist in residence after he left the troubled start-up Color.

With the continuing negotiations between AOL and high-profile TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington likely to come to some conclusion soon, the big question remaining is whether he will appear at its flagship conference, TechCrunch Disrupt, which officially begins tomorrow.

Sources said that seems more likely than not, although the talks between AOL and Arrington are not resolved as yet and his appearance at the highly lucrative conference is part of a whole package.

But it seems unlikely that neither Arrington nor AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and content chief Arianna Huffington wants to damage TechCrunch Disrupt, which makes piles of moolah from sponsors and fees, attracts thousands of attendees, and where a plethora of promising start-ups compete with each other.

And, in fact, some of the slated speakers I have contacted have said that they have not been told of any changes in the program.

A hackathon of those entrepreneurs is now taking place before the main event, where well-known Silicon Valley players will be interviewed on stage by the staff of TechCrunch.

The conference is mostly run by TechCrunch exec Heather Harde, as well as the site’s leading editor Erick Schonfeld.

But, of course, TechCrunch Disrupt has starred Arrington, the larger-than-life blogger now turned venture capitalist.

That shift and how badly it was done is at the center of complex severance negotiations.

As I previously wrote, sources said the company has so far refused Arrington’s bold demand, posted on TechCrunch itself, to either give the popular tech news site “editorial independence” or sell it back to him.

As I wrote last week:

The situation between the popular tech blogger and top execs at the Internet company — which bought his site earlier this year — comes after a week of increasingly testy back and forth between them, after it was revealed that Arrington was starting his own $20 million venture fund called CrunchFund.

The move caused a media firestorm over the ethics and propriety of the move, which was followed by an ugly internal war at the company, with Arrington and TechCrunch staffers on one side and Armstrong and Huffington on the other.

(Full disclosure: Although no one cares what I think, I consider the deal appalling and wrote that it was a “giant, greedy Silicon Valley pig pile.” Now, it seems to be 56 percent piggier!)

After many confusing messages from AOL, Arrington was removed from his longtime job at TechCrunch and placed in its venture arm, after editorial objections from Huffington.

That had supposedly been the the plan until it all blew up, with reveleations about what the CrunchFund deal — which includes $10 million from AOL — meant to TechCrunch and its news gathering.

That seemed clear from a widely cited quote from CrunchFund investor and well-know Silicon Valley entrepreneur Reid Hoffman to me last week:

“TechCrunch will get some real deal flow from entrepreneurs that we would otherwise not see, because they have established a prominent position as the SV/Tech industry information feed. As many tech entrepreneurs read it — both within Silicon Valley and globally — and view the information news feed to be their target for announcing themselves to the world, CrunchFund will have access to deal flow to these diverse and early stage companies. Some of these companies will be the kind of early stage companies with billion-dollar potential that Greylock invests in.”

There you had it: No one can afford to be out of the deal flow in these competitive times, even if it means cutting corners and using a tech news site as fodder.

Arrington obviously has another view of the deal he struck with Armstrong and, sources said, wants his powerful tech news platform back. He has been talking to many Silicon Valley power players about the situation, said sources.

More to come soon from this Silicon Valley soap opera. And, hopefully, it will be a happy — well, happy-ish — ending.

(Full disclosure: AllThingsD also runs conferences that could be construed as competitive to TechCrunch Disrupt, although we both we seem to do just fine. In addition, Walt Mossberg and I are getting along like peas and carrots, although we vigorously disagree over the humongous talent of Barry Manilow.)

So here’s the latest (for those just tuning in, we’ll do backstory later — who said the inverted triangle was dead?):

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington is no longer working for AOL’s Huffington Post Media Group, but he remains employed by AOL. He’ll be running his new CrunchFund as part of the company’s AOL Ventures arm, says Maureen Sullivan, who runs AOL corporate communications.

That’s consistent with what the company said yesterday, but contradicts what AOL HuffingtonPost spokesman Mario Ruiz told the Business Insider this morning. But since Sullivan reports directly to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, we’ll take her word on this.

Sullivan also says that Arrington is no longer officially working for TechCrunch, the powerful tech Web site he built, then sold to AOL last year. That also syncs up with the official line from yesterday. AOL will hire a new managing editor, but Arrington will keep his “founding editor” title, and will continue to write for the site, but will need to disclose conflicts of interest when he does so, etc.

Again, no change. So really, the only question is: What kind of influence and input will Arrington have on TechCrunch when he’s not writing? Here this gets sticky, and it doesn’t look like it will ever be unsticky.

Sullivan says that Arrington’s relationship with TechCrunch is “still to be determined, and it’s important to make sure that Arianna [Huffington] is super comfortable with that relationship … I think that everyone is going to be very careful that there isn’t influence on coverage.”

Just to be clear about it, Sullivan called me back a while later to reiterate the same points. “Michael is now a professional investor working for AOL. He will have no editorial control.”

Hear that, CrunchFund investors? The guy you are handing $20 million to won’t be able to influence the way TechCrunch interacts with your companies, your investments and your potential investments. Is that what you signed on for?

Now, one last compare and contrast exercise. Here’s Greylock Partners Reid Hoffman’s rationale for investing in the CrunchFund, via Kara Swisher’s story this morning:

“Techcrunch will get some real deal flow from entrepreneurs that we would otherwise not see, because they have established a prominent position as the SV/Tech industry information feed. As many tech entrepreneurs read it — both within Silicon Valley and globally — and view the information news feed to be their target for announcing themselves to the world, Crunchfund will have access to deal flow to these diverse and early stage companies. Some of these companies will be the kind of early stage companies with billion-dollar potential that Greylock invests in.”

It’d be great to hear from the principals on this, so I’ve dutifully pinged Arrington, Huffington and Armstrong. But my hunch is that some of them, at least, will be mum for a bit. More later! I bet!