The Yahoo board has approved a massive $1.1 billion all-cash deal to buy Tumblr.

It’s not clear when the official vote was taken, but sources close to the board said the acquisition was a foregone conclusion and was unanimously approved by the directors of Silicon Valley Internet giant.

The deal will likely be announced Monday morning, said numerous sources.

AllThingsD.com initially broke the story of the acquisition efforts and later followed up with details of the exact price and the board meeting to approve the transaction.

There were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based social blogging service. That said, Tumblr had held some very preliminary discussions about various deals with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and also Twitter earlier this year.

As part of the Yahoo deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who will get a windfall of cash from the acquisition — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain a lot of control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure, said sources.

Yahoo had been mulling some kind of deal with Tumblr, from a strategic investment to an outright acquisition, for about six weeks. Sources said that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had decided that buying the company was going to be “the stake in the ground of what her strategy is going forward for Yahoo.”

And that is to attract younger audiences with just the kind of user-generated content Tumblr has pioneered to impressive growth.

According to numerous sources, Mayer determined quickly in her research that the site was just the kind of property that Yahoo needed to make it both “cool” and relevant to new consumers.

Yahoo is looking to bolster its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different demographic and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

Tumblr’s mobile usage has also been strong, which also interested Mayer. While Tumblr started as a desktop-based service, its mobile offering has ramped up quickly in the last few years. ComScore says that a quarter of the service’s U.S. visitors now come from mobile devices.

At this price, it will be Mayer’s biggest acquisition so far. Since she became CEO last summer, Mayer has made only a series of small acquisitions of mobile startups at a low cost.

According to sources, the Tumblr brand will continue.

The deal, if consummated, will be a big win for investors. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far and is now at a reported valuation of $800 million. Investors include Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners and the Chernin Group.

While Tumblr’s Karp has resisted various offers for the company over the years, Mayer spent a lot of time with him reassuring him that Yahoo could turbocharge his business. He has also been searching for a COO to help him build out the infrastructure of its business, especially its advertising one.

And as Peter Kafka and I previously wrote, Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocketship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards,” which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year and sources said it could get up to $100 million this year.

Tumblr has been represented by Qatalyst Partners’ Frank Quattrone, while Yahoo’s Mayer, as well as M&A head Jackie Reses and CFO Ken Goldman, have been on the company’s side.

Interestingly, what got me first focused on Tumblr last week were Goldman’s comments at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference last week, where he underscored the need for the aging Yahoo to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

Tumblr, apparently, fits the very expensive bill.

Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

According to sources close to the situation, that could mean a strategic alliance and investment in or outright buy of perhaps the coolest Internet company of late: Tumblr.

Sources said the talks were serious, but any kind of deal — of course — could come to naught.

But it’s not the first time Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been interested in the New York-based hipster blogging service. As an executive at Google, she had closely watched its fast growth, along with that of Foursquare. Since she took over at Yahoo, several sources said that she has met with its top execs, including founder and CEO David Karp.

But sources said that interest has gotten stronger more recently, coming at the same time as Tumblr has been stepping up its efforts to raise a large funding round that could value the New York company at $1 billion. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far, at a reported valuation of $800 million.

In the latest round, one source close to the situation said Tumblr was considering “strategic” investments, which would presumably be of the kind that Yahoo had tried and failed to do recently with France’s Dailymotion video service. Since then, Mayer and her team have looked at the ongoing deal to purchase Hulu that has many possible other bidders.

Tumblr is different from Dailymotion or Hulu, of course, in that it focuses heavily on user-generated content, largely text and photos, although there is an increasing use of video on the site.

But this puts it directly in Yahoo’s main wheelhouse, especially recent efforts to undergird its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different audience and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

“If you could pick a company that fits in with what Marissa Mayer has demonstrated in her career — aesthetics software technology and fast-growing — you could not land on a better choice,” said another source.

That said, Yahoo has been sticking to smaller acquisitions under Mayer’s regime, spending very little on a clutch of small mobile startups to up its game in the important sector. And at the same investment conference, Goldman also said additional M&A would continue to be smaller for Yahoo.

Still, any kind of deal with Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that audience is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocket ship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn and/or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards.” That’s the equivalent of running ads in a Facebook user’s News Feed or a Twitter user’s main feed.

Initial signs are promising. Tumblr told Forbes that it generated $13 million in revenue last year, and suggested it could do as much as $100 million this year; people close to the company say its momentum has continued this year.

In addition to figuring out its top-line business, Tumblr and its backers have also been spending a long time trying to figure out a managment structure. Even Karp’s strongest backers say that the 26-year-old needs help running the company, and for months they have been looking for a “Sheryl Sandberg”-style COO candidate.

“David is very charming, and clearly very very bright, and understands the product,” said an executive who talked to Tumblr about the role. But, “he’s incredibly confrontation averse, and there’s almost a ‘Game of Thrones’ palace feeling to the management team.”

Possibility of death by wildfire aside, sources said that the search has yielded two or three candidates that Tumblr is considering. It is a key hire since the company needs to build out an extensive infrastructure quickly, given its sharp consumer growth, including fielding a more robust advertising team. Tumblr hired an experienced exec, Lee Brown, from Groupon last fall, who has been busy hiring more sales execs. Interesting aside: Brown was a longtime Yahoo ad exec.

But building out the needed structure at the company is a long slog, and Tumblr might be seeking more help one way or another.

Yahoo declined comment and Tumblr has not gotten back to us as yet.

Airware, a startup that is creating a software platform for commercial drones, said it had raised $10.7 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Google Ventures also participated. As part of the deal, Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon will join Airware’s board.

The Newport Beach, Calif., company said it would use the money to expand staff for its universal development platform as the market for non-military drones expands.

Airware founder and CEO Jonathan Downey said that uses of drones will be increasing for a wide range of purposes, from checking infrastructure to monitoring mining operations to preventing poaching.

In an interview, Downey said that he expects to compete with a range of ex-military efforts, but that the most successful companies will be those that provide a platform to allow for the widest range of innovations.

“This is going to be about a lot more than we know or can guess,” he said. “The industry is at its very beginnings.”

Dixon agrees. “Hardware is the new software,” he said about the investment in Airware, which he said he discovered after attending conferences about the fast-moving drones business, noting that the overall field of robotics has “overpromised and underdelivered.”

Airware came out of both the Lemnos Labs and Y Combinator incubators and had raised seed financing from First Round Capital, Firelake Capital, RRE Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Promus Ventures and several Y Combinator partners.

Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant that is also a major investor in Pinterest, is upping its bet on the Grommet.

The Grommet, which rebranded from the Daily Grommet, declined to say how much the investment is this time, but Rakuten will become the majority stakeholder in the Lexington, Mass.-based online marketplace. Before the two Rakuten investments, the startup had raised about $6 million since its launch in 2008.

Last year, Rakuten was the lead investor in a Series B round for the Grommet, whose motto is “fresh finds, true stories.” The site highlights an unusual new daily product by featuring it with a story about its origin, using video and creative text, calling its effort “Citizen Commerce.”

Both the Grommet and Rakuten have focused on linking small- and medium-sized retailers directly with consumers, using discovery and social tools and large marketplaces.

“If I had to pick one element of the Grommet which best represents our platform, it’s our investment in ‘Citizen Commerce,’ a term we created in order to describe a new level of responsibility and ingenuity both for product development and purchasing power,” said Jules Pieri, co-founder and CEO of the Grommet, which she has often compared to a Kickstarter for products, in a statement. “We are proud of what this philosophy stands for and we know it will impact and restructure the consumer landscape in the coming years.”

“I’ve often spoken about omotenashi, the Japanese term that refers to the Japanese service mindset — something that’s rare to find outside Japan and hard to attain online anywhere,” added Rakuten CEO and founder Hiroshi Mikitani. “The Grommet brings a similar spirit to their business by discovering and launching products that delight the consumer in a warm and friendly online environment that promotes communication, creativity and purpose.”

Forbes magazine put out its much-watched Midas List today, which is kind of the Oscars for venture capitalists in tech. (Caveat: Think more khakis and dudes than glitz and glamour.)

On the Top 10 list of 100 of the best-performing and most influential tech investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz led the list at No. 1 and No. 2, as they did last year. And several others in last year’s list remained on it: Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners’ Reid Hoffman, and also David Sze, Peter Thiel and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine.

Accel scored well on the rest of the list with nine partners named; Sequoia Capital had six VCs on the list; Benchmark, Greylock and New Enterprise Associates got five slots; Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins and Meritech Capital Partners had four; and Andreessen Horowitz, Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock each had three.

As usual, there were few women on the list — only three — reflecting the lack of gender equality in the top tier of the VC business, which solidly remains a boy’s club, despite a lot of noise about changing it (see the pictures here and become depressed once again). Those women who did manage to get on the Midas List were Jenny Lee at GGV Capital, who jumped from No. 94 to No. 36; Kleiner Perkins’s Mary Meeker, who dropped from No. 42 to No. 47; and Theresia Gouw of Accel at No. 82, up from No. 92.

One notable part of the massive Forbes package of VCs on parade was the intense and multipart focus on the travails of Kleiner Perkins and its longtime leader and legendary VC John Doerr. Doerr clocks in at No. 26 on the list, dropping from No. 12 last year, a significant fall.

He does address the nagging issues at the storied firm, including ill-conceived investments in clean tech, a late-to-the-game move into social media, and even its big stake in stock-declining online gaming giant Zynga, in a video (below) and in several pieces, one of which is titled ““John Doerr’s Plan To Reclaim the Venture Capital Throne.”

More like “Game of Thrones” from reading it; there is another, more critical article in the New York Times that appeared yesterday. That piece focused on Kleiner’s investment in the troubled green-car startup, Fisker Automotive, and also the firm’s ongoing sex-discrimination lawsuit with former partner Ellen Pao.

“It was a challenging year, one of my more challenging years in the venture business,” said Doerr to Forbes.

Indeed, although Forbes does hand Kleiner a hey-we-have-some-sharpie-young-folks-here-too! gimme with its focus on “new generation” partners Megan Quinn and Mike Abbott in an interesting Q&A, as well as yet another piece on Kleiner supporters — such as Google’s Eric Schmidt — touting the firm as perhaps down but definitely not out in the “mojo” department.

“John always wins eventually, and the reason he always wins eventually is because he has the processing power and human energy,” Schmidt told Forbes. “Whatever the set of challenges, he will drive the change in the firm. They’ll have a crisis meeting and another crisis meeting, but he will do it. It may be messy but he will get them there.”

Presumably, if Doerr and team can get some mileage out of its Twitter investment next year and somehow turn around Zynga’s moribund stock. (Kleiner has held on to a pile of it, which is why Doerr recently joined the board that already had Kleiner’s Bing Gordon on it.)

On problem for Kleiner, and boon to others like Accel and Greylock, was that the firm was not early in Facebook, whose IPO — as rocky as it was — gave many VCs making the top of the Midas List the needed turbocharge in terms of performance. Other key companies to help VCs look good this year, according to the Forbes report: Workday, LinkedIn and Skype.

Here’s Doerr, who is indeed a legend, even if more bruised and battered this year, talking about it all to Forbes’s Connie Guglielmo, in the video interview:

Speaking of media attention, here’s a more provocative video interview by Forbes with Sequoia’s Doug Leone (No. 4, up from No. 18 last year), in which he takes aim at VC firms that do too much self-promotion — three guesses which pioneering browser inventor he is referring to here, and the first two don’t count. He called it an “embarrassment,” although Sequoia did hire an excellent PR person from Google this year — nonetheless making the point that the focus should be on entrepreneurs and not investors.

Except, of course, when it comes to scoring high on the Midas List.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently met with top execs at Hulu, the premium video service whose big media company owners have been considering selling it for some months.

Sources said Yahoo is “in the process,” although the Silicon Valley Internet giant has not made any kind of formal bid. Other players whom sources said are considering purchasing all or parts of Hulu include: Former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, who now has a successful and well-funded multimedia and investment company called the Chernin Group; Guggenheim Partners digital arm, which is led by former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn; and Amazon.

Sources said Mayer also had an extensive getting-to-know-you meeting, which was apparently not held at Hulu’s offices in Santa Monica, Calif., along with COO Henrique De Castro. The discussion is taking place in the wake of Yahoo’s failed bid — largely engineered by De Castro — to purchase a majority stake in France Télécom’s Dailymotion video service, after a top French government official said Yahoo could not own 75 percent of the company.

Had the deal — which was reportedly valued at $300 million — gone through, it would have been the most significant by Mayer since she took over at the company last July. Thus far, she has limited her purchases to small mobile startup.

While the meetings with Hulu are only preliminary, Yahoo has been to this video rodeo before, having seriously considering buying Hulu when it was previously being shopped by its owners, News Corp., Disney and Comcast. (News Corp. also owns this site.)

Of course, if Yahoo’s interest becomes more serious, Mayer will have to make important visits to top execs at those media giants, since they control the rights to critical content, and thus Hulu’s value.

As Peter Kafka noted in a previous post about Hulu’s possible sale, “much hinges on the licensing rights News Corp., Disney and Comcast would provide for the money-losing site, as well as what happens to the $300 million debt its owners have taken on in the last year.”

Without those rights, Hulu by itself is a very pretty Web site and video platform, but not worth the billions it would be with very long-term television rights, content that attracts users. Currently, sources said its media owners are offering two to three years of rights, with a lot of flexibility over removing content from the site, which is not quite as attractive a deal (to say the least).

But video is a key component of Yahoo’s strategy going forward. Along with mobile efforts, Mayer has explicitly told investors that video was a key to company under her tenure.

Coincidentally, today in an onstage interview at a Wired conference in New York, Mayer broadly addressed the video issue when asked a question about the topic, noting it was important across all of Yahoo’s properties.

“I think video is really important … video is something that we’re all innately designed and born to experience, everyone is born being able to watch and to hear,” she said. “Video is just this amazing format.”

Mayer would know that well, having been at Google when the search giant bought YouTube, ironically snatching it at the last minute from a competing bid by Yahoo, which was then led by Terry Semel. Since then, YouTube has become the most important and powerful player in the space by far.

Yahoo, despite being one of the largest video players on the Web, has mostly been a lackluster competitor in the arena, pinging over the years from creating original content to doing branded deals with media companies, but never establishing a major beachhead with consumers as Hulu did from scratch.

Short of a full acquisition, there may be a way for Yahoo to partner and invest in Hulu, instead of buying it outright that works for all sides — owners get a new owner to foot part of the bill and also increase distribution, and Yahoo can claim that it’s providing users with exponentially more content that would help Yahoo’s long-declining engagement problem.

Sources said News Corp. and Disney have mulled scenarios where one or both companies hang on to the site, while Comcast has no control over Hulu’s fate, having given up its management rights to the site as a concession to federal regulators.

But the strength of the Hulu brand is clear and it has had some success in building a more significant business. While a lot of its video offerings are free, about four million people are paying for a Hulu Plus subscription.

Still, Hulu’s strength might be lagging, especially given after talented founding leader Jason Kilar recently left. Last year, Hulu was a top 10 video site, according to comScore. No longer — in a report in March, it had dropped out of the top 10.

While this likely has more to do with methodology than real decline in Hulu ratings, it does show that while it’s the biggest thing Yahoo could buy or invest in, Yahoo itself has plenty of video views, many more than Hulu.

The question for Mayer then is how much of Yahoo’s multi-billon-dollar cash kitty she wants to bet on a big video play. She might also be considering buying several smaller ones, said sources, with Yahoo having also looked at some smaller video sites, including Blip and Grab Media.

A spokeswoman for Hulu declined to comment and Yahoo PR has not responded to a query for comment (if ever).

According to sources close to the situation, well-known tech exec Jon Rubinstein will be joining the board of Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chipmaker that has gotten a big boost of late for its role in the explosion of mobile devices.

Rubinstein is an interesting and logical choice for Qualcomm, having been a high-profile player for a long time in the mobile space, beginning with his work on the iPod while at Apple. After he left his last job at Hewlett-Packard last year, though, he has been very low-key.

(Update: Qualcomm confirmed the appointment in a press release.)

For Qualcomm, the selection of Rubinstein to join the board is something to watch, as he is the second exec from Silicon Valley to be tapped by the company recently. In March, Qualcomm hired tech investor Laurie Yoler as SVP of business development, making her “responsible for augmenting existing business relationships in Silicon Valley, as well as developing new strategic business opportunities for Qualcomm in the region.”

Rubinstein has even more experience here and is also familiar with a range of mobile efforts over the years, some of which were successful and others not so much, from his work at Apple, Palm and then HP. He is also a board member of Amazon.

Aside from CEO and Chairman Paul Jacobs, Rubinstein — who has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science — will be the most technically experienced director on the 11-person board.

Qualcomm declined to comment.

Here’s a nice primer on Rubinstein by Arik Hesseldahl, in a report on his leaving HP early last year:

Best known for his work on Apple’s iconic iPod music player, Rubinstein left Apple in 2006 and joined Roger McNamee as a partner in the private equity firm Elevation Partners, following its 2007 investments in Palm.

In 2009 he replaced longtime Palm executive Ed Colligan as its CEO, and oversaw a dramatic restructuring of the company’s products, including a significant rebuild of its smartphone operating system. Gone was the legacy PalmOS that had been used in so many popular devices like the Treo that for a time competed seriously against Research In Motion’s BlackBerry.

PalmOS was replaced by WebOS, which first appeared on the Pre smartphone, then later on the Pixi and Veer devices. After HP acquired Palm, WebOS was also used on the abandoned TouchPad tablet, and is now an open-source operating system overseen by HP.

Rubinstein’s departure is no big surprise. Sources said he hadn’t been seen at HP’s offices following the decision by former CEO Léo Apotheker to get out of the business of making WebOS-based hardware. His future plans have been the subject of speculation for some time.

After HP decided to exit the WebOS hardware business, Rubinstein was assigned to a vaguely described “product innovation role” within HP’s Personal Systems Group during a management shakeup last July. It was an unusual move and one made with little explanation at the time. But sources say it was a preface to Rubinstein’s departure, one intended to lessen its PR impact when he finally left. “That ‘innovation’ gig he was given in July was his first step toward the exit,” said one source, a former Palm exec with close ties to Rubinstein.

The good news is the stock is once again an attractive investment — especially after plunging from September’s $705 peak all the way down to $417. The bad news is that many of its most loyal fans might be holding it for the wrong reasons.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

SoftBank Capital and Yahoo Japan said they had created an unusual $20 million fund to help U.S. startups break into the Japanese market, while also upping a presence in the U.S.

The partnership between Japan’s largest Internet company — which is also a joint venture with Yahoo — and the venture arm of the giant SoftBank Corp. will invest in companies from early-stage funding to later-stage expansion and focus on mobile applications, social media, e-commerce, online advertising, gaming and cloud computing.

The new funds for that are being put into SoftBank Capital’s $100 million Technology Fund ’10. As part of the deal, Toshiaki Chiku will become head of U.S. operations in Manhattan. SoftBank Capital also recently announced a $250 million PrinceVille Fund, aimed at growth-stage startups in Asia.

Among the firm’s recent exits: Bluefin Labs went to Twitter, Buddy Media to Salesforce.com, Huffington Post to AOL, Hyperpublic to Groupon and OMGPOP to Zynga.

Now, it will be focusing even more on helping U.S. startups in Asia.

“Japan can be challenging for many U.S. companies, and given our scale and affiliation with SoftBank Corp., we’re in a great position to help them grow and succeed,” said Chiku in a statement.

SoftBank Capital and Yahoo Japan used performance display advertising company Criteo as an example of a successful investment, in which it also helped the company enter the Asian market (although, technically, Criteo is HQed in France).

Earlier today, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates discussed technological innovations for vaccines, ahead of a Global Vaccine Summit being held next week in Abu Dhabi.

Set during World Immunization Week, 300 people — including Gates, who is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and who will be delivering a keynote address — will gather on April 24 and 25 to talk about what the world community needs to do move forward the effort to vaccinate children, including a plan to eradicate polio by 2018.

It’s an important effort since, according to the Gates Foundation, every 20 seconds one child dies from a disease that could have been prevented by an existing vaccine.

“The key thing to understand is that vaccines are miraculous,” said Gates in a roundtable telephone interview with several reporters, noting that they are low-cost in relation to the huge benefit they provide.

Two key next steps, he said, have to do with a variety of technologies that are being explored to help in the delivery of vaccines, and also finding ways to make them cheaper.

“There is an under-investment in general, particularly in doing things for the poorest,” he said, requiring his private organization and others to pay for the research or to work with big pharmaceutical companies to create technologies that can also be deployed in more lucrative ways in rich countries. “Usually, there is a missing market incentive.”

Still, there is innovation in the sector, even if it is slow.

Gates referenced a “super-thermos” approach that is being field-tested in Senegal that keeps vaccines cold without needing more energy. Another effort is under way to formulate vaccines so that they do not need to be kept cold in the first place. A third is to combine several vaccines together to get the prices down.

Also important are improvements in satellite mapping technology, which allows field workers who deliver the vaccines to better assess where the need is. That’s especially important since a lot of the work is still on the ground, such as the push to eradicate polio in much the same way as smallpox has been. Currently, noted Gates, it is still an issue in just three countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

And since reaching near total coverage is critical — “The difference between 85 percent and 90 percent [coverage] can be the difference between success and failure,” said Gates — making sure health workers find the people they are trying to vaccinate is paramount.

“It’s kind of a high-tech thing compared to how it was being done,” said Gates.

But, although there have been great hopes around the use of mobile devices in the field to access and record accurate data on patient visits, immunizations and other health information, it’s still an uphill battle against easier paper solutions.

“The paper-based systems are preferable,” said Gates, because of lack of reliable connectivity and ease of use. “It’s a high threshold to get rid of that and use cellphones.”

Or, as Gates noted in a blog post from a recent visit to Ghana, where cellphone data-keeping is being tested: “Many of us are looking at potential digital strategies for record-keeping, but paper is pretty good.”

(Photo courtesy of the Gates Foundation)

Yahoo has bought Summly, the mobile news reader app founded by a young British entrepreneur.

In a statement, the London-based company said it had bought the tiny outfit, which will close its app. The price was not disclosed (although I will try to find out soon enough). But the company had been seeking additional funding recently at a big valuation, in stark contrast to its small size (less than one million downloads), staff (five) and business model (zero revenue).

(Update: Sources tell me Yahoo paid just about $30 million for Summly, mostly in cash, with 10 percent in stock, for three employees.)

AllThingsD.com reported in December that Yahoo was looking closely at the startup, with CEO Marissa Mayer meeting with its founder Nick D’Aloisio. As we noted then, Yahoo was aiming at trendy mobile “acq-hires” to give the sleepy Silicon Valley Internet giant some sizzle and improve its moribund mobile offerings.

Mayer has been buying up a range of similar small mobile startups, largely for their teams of talented and innovative engineers. And, at a recent employee meeting, its M&A head Jackie Reses said the Silicon Valley company was looking at two significant purchases and a half-dozen smaller ones.

Said Yahoo: “Founder Nick D’Aloisio and the Summly team are joining Yahoo! in the coming weeks. While the Summly app will close, we will acquire the technology and you’ll see it come to life throughout Yahoo!’s mobile experiences soon. We’re not disclosing purchase price or other terms of the deal.”

Yahoo mobile head Adam Cahan wrote a blog post about the deal, as did D’Aloisio, who also tweeted news of it:

@summly has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo!! Excited for the next chapter of Summly! Thanks to all who have supported me.

— Nick D’Aloisio (@nickdaloisio) March 25, 2013

News readers have been getting snapped up of late. CNN acquired Zite for $20 million in 2011, while we reported that LinkedIn was in the midst of buying Pulse for upwards of $50 million.

The 17-year-old D’Aloisio created the high-profile news reading app, which garnered much attention in the last year in the mobile space, which is probably what attracted Yahoo to it.

As I wrote:

D’Aloisio — who looks like he could easily be a member of One Direction if this tech thing did not work out — is perhaps a perfect storm for Yahoo, which is seeking to show that it can attract innovative, young entrepreneurs to the company, while also looking to strengthen its nearly bare mobile cupboard.

Summly is all that and a bag of (fish and) chips, with a very slick app for the Apple iPhone that has become one of the more popular in the App Store since it was re-launched last month. The company has said it has been downloaded 500,000 times.

It deserves the attention, as it is a pleasure to use — think an even hipper version of Flipboard with some more sass. The handsomely designed app summarizes news stories — all using a natural language processing algorithm — in only a few sentences and in under 400 characters. Users can then swipe through topics and stories quickly and click in to be directed to the full story on the original news site.

Summly originally started as a prototype app called Trimit, which soon garnered attention and seed funding from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing’s investment firm. In no time, it had a range of other investors, ponying up about $1.5 million, including trendy ones like Ashton Kutcher and tech types like Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

Since then, it has been striking content deals, including with News Corp. (which owns this site) and others, which seem to be attracted by its investor pedigree, its solid technology and — perhaps most of all — its media-darling founder.

To get an idea of the adorable hip factor involved, here’s a really clever video D’Aloisio did with actor Stephen Fry, who is also an investor in the startup:

Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo.

If truth be told, Jerry Yang never really disappeared from the Silicon Valley scene, even though he did leave Yahoo rather suddenly just over a year ago — resigning from the board and all other positions at the iconic company he co-founded with David Filo in 1995, and then going very quiet.

When I met him last week at the airy and newish office space of Ame Cloud Ventures, off Camino Real, he politely declined to talk about that Yahoo tenure and departure, although Yahoo and he are inextricably linked in the history of tech.

That’s because the former Chief Yahoo has moved onto the next stage of his career, which perhaps could be called Jerry 2.0 — a term he’d hate (and give me a hard time for using).

Still, in many ways, Yang has launched a new digital life by focusing on what made him interested in tech in the first place: Entrepreneurs.

“I feel like the thing I missed the most is what really early entrepreneurs were doing,” he said of his latest efforts, which have been well known among techies, even if Yang has never been one to toot his own horn much in general. “I’m not sure at all that I’m any good at this mentoring/investing business — that’s why I’m using my own money, and that’s why it’s not a career.”

Yet. Yang is calling his nascent investment business — he’s more than an angel, but not quite a VC — a “work in progress” that might morph into something more.

“There are no LPs — just me, myself and I,” said Yang. “I invest in things for the long term and have a long horizon and the flexibility.”

That said, via Ame — which means rain (雨) in Japanese and happens to be the acronym of the names of his wife and kids — Yang has already invested in about two dozen startups in which he has typically puts in $100,000 to $500,000.

Explaining the name, Yang said: “Without rain, there is no life.”

And it’s clear that Yang has been very busy dousing the startup sector with a wide range of interesting investments, including:

• dotCloud, an application platform for developers
• AeroFS, a private file syncing and sharing service
• Impermium, an Internet security offering
• Jetpac, a travel app for the Apple iPad
• Lex Machina, IP litigation data and analytics
• Tomfoolery, which is aimed at improving mobile enterprise apps

Yang said what informs his investment choices centers on the activity around mobility, sensors, cloud and big data that is enabling the next generation of computing.

“The main investing premise is the idea that devices are more and more network connected,” said Yang, who noted that data that is being collected is now at another order of magnitude than ever before. “The cloud has become the next-generation supercomputer, and the smartphone has provided the revolution to spur its use.”

To select from the companies he sees, Yang has only one young associate, Nick Adams, who codes, helps on deal mechanics, interacts with entrepreneurs and also has had extensive experience in Asia.

That has been important, since Adams also leads business development for China’s Cloud Valley, which is run by Edward Tian, one of Yang’s strategic partners there. It was with Cloud Valley that Evernote, the hot productivity app in which Yang is also an investor, partnered to create a business there.

Still, Yang is not completely alone. He has weekly meetings with another former Yahoo, Ash Patel — who started the $10 million micro-venture fund Morado Ventures, which means “purple” in Spanish, and has a lot of ex-Yahoos as investors — as well as individual angel and former Yahoo CTO Farzad Nazem.

The trio trade ideas and deal flow, sometimes making bets together and sometimes not. Most of all, they leverage their time in the tech sector, both good and bad.

“I might not have better ideas, but I think my experience is unique and helpful [to entrepreneurs] and there is a value to my network,” said Yang. “I think what I have to contribute, besides money and a network, is that I am very candid about the experience I have had.”

That is indeed the case, because it is clear that Yang has a lot of wisdom to impart from his long and eventful history at Yahoo, as well as his stature as one of the Internet’s most important pioneers.

And, having covered the often circumspect Yang for much of that time, I would have to say that these days he looks about as energized, excited and enthusiastic as I have ever seen him.

“I’m truly humbled by the talent that’s out there, and at the same time recognize it’s a very crowded space,” said Yang. “It is not a career yet, but I’m having a lot of fun, and we’ll see.”

There were, of course, the questions on his famously huge Facebook investment many years ago, and why he’s put money in Y Combinator to spur startup innovation.

But it’s clear from his mainstage interview at the SXSW interactive festival in Austin this morning that high-profile Russian investor Yuri Milner of DST Global has been striving to think much bigger thoughts of late.

While he’s gotten a lot of attention for his big bets in the social networking site, as well as with Twitter, Spotify, Airbnb and many others, he’s slowed his investing in the U.S. considerably to focus more on what he and many others in Silicon Valley are calling “moon shot” ideas.

“Somehow, we have lost interest in big ideas,” said Milner, in an onstage interview with Vanity Fair contributing editor Bethany McLean about shifting away from thinking — which he has funded, in part — that has gotten more short-term and pragmatic. “I think we still have a destiny as human beings.”

That has included starting up his Fundamental Physics Prize, which has now become the priciest academic award, last year. And, more recently — with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Genentech mogul and Apple Chairman Art Levinson, among others — the launch of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation.

As Mike Isaac wrote when that initiative was announced less than a month ago:

“The first round of prize recipients includes 11 scientists from a range of research disciplines, including studies in genetics, cancer research and neural behavior. Each of the 11 prize winners will receive a $3 million award for their work, and Brin, Zuckerberg, Milner and the rest of the sponsors have agreed to a five-year commitment to awarding prizes.”

Milner, who was a physicist in his early career, said onstage that he has been disheartened to see that not enough younger people choose to go into fundamental science anymore. Thus he is aming to make it more attractive via his prizes.

“We don’t have enough heroes who are admired by a large portion of the population due to their scientific achievements,” he said, noting that it will require rewarding individuals in a “disproportionate manner.”

Still, in the Q&A session, the crowd in the Austin Convention Center wanted to know mostly about more earthbound questions, such as what tech company would last 100 years, as IBM has.

According to Milner: Google, Facebook and Wikipedia, due to network effects.

Another attendee wanted to know what he thought it takes to be an entrepreneur these days.

“It’s almost a heroic effort, and kind of goes against set ways of doing things,” answered Milner.

Then someone wanted to know how the political arena could be similarly transformed.

“That, I don’t know,” said Milner.

Moon shot, indeed.

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At a Morgan Stanley investment conference today, the affable Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman put in an appearance to talk about life at Yahoo since he got there last fall.

Unfortunately, he said almost nothing new in an onstage interview and, more importantly, did not address the hot-button controversy around the work-from-home ban that CEO Marissa Mayer instituted last week.

To be fair, that’s because Goldman was not asked by anyone about the issue, which is perhaps not a surprise at these hand-holding investor events. But he did make a veiled reference when touting its “strong leadership” now.

“What gives people confidence is that we’re making decisions,” he said. “The worst thing to do in a company is to waffle.” But Goldman then added obliquely that some people like those decisions and “some people don’t.”

No, they don’t! Woo-hee, has this one blown up!

The work-from-home debate has certainly exploded across the landscape this week, after an edict to eliminate the long-time employee policy at Yahoo, especially since most other Internet companies tout flexible work arrangements.

But, apparently, Mayer thinks Yahoos have abused the privilege — she noted at an employee meeting last week that VPN logs showed work-at-home staff did not sign on enough — and a Yahoo internal memo said that working “physically together” was the way to reenergize the lagging fortunes at the company.

Opinions inside Yahoo about the topic have been mixed but heated, essentially pitting employees against each other in an awkward way. But the reaction from outside the company has been decidedly negative.

At the Morgan event in San Francisco, Goldman instead focused on the sunnier side of the street at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, noting the Mayer regime was focused on increasing user engagement, international presence and broadening its demographics.

“The thing that just struck me over and over is how much has been done by this company that is really new,” said Goldman, pointing inevitably to the new free food policy — which has long been common across Silicon Valley — as well as a quarterly goal system, employee reviews, weekly FYI meetings and more.

Referring to internal polls showing increased confidence among staff, he added: “What really strikes me is how much has been done to really improve the quality of life at Yahoo.”

Goldman also touched on the need to increase revenue, spur innovation and also some upgrades of core products such as Yahoo Mail and its famous homepage, although leaving out that this had been in the works before the new leadership team was in place.

He also talked, as Mayer has a lot, about the importance of mobile to the future there, noting that the mobile revenue was still “modest.” (Goldman declined to say just how modest, but I posted that depressing number here.)

“We just got into this is a major way,” he said, asking investors for patience to get up to mobile speed at Yahoo. “I think we have been clear it will take us some time, but we have taken some positive steps.”

Longtime Yahoo techie Laurence “Laurie” Mann, who has recently been SVP of engineering operations at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, has been given the new job of heading its search efforts, according to sources inside the company.

The appointment by CEO Marissa Mayer, also announced in an internal memo last week, puts Mann in a key position at Yahoo, given the need to fix its troubled search partnership with Microsoft, which was struck in 2010.

That is likely to come under great pressure in the days ahead, given that its performance has not been as expected, although that did improve in Yahoo’s most recent quarter.

Still, despite the improvement, Mayer called attention to the overall problem at a recent appearance at an investment conference.

“One of the points of the alliance is that we collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other,” she said. “We need to see monetization working better, because we know that it can, and we’ve seen other competitors in the space illustrate how well it can work.”

By competitors, Mayer meant Google, whose share of the search market is close to 67 percent. Microsoft has just above 16 percent now, and Yahoo above 12 percent, a near flipping of share from two years ago.

Mann, who came to Yahoo in 2002, had been one of the execs at Yahoo who worked on the original deal under former CEO Carol Bartz, vetting the terms of the agreement for the company. While he has a degree from Canada’s University of Regina in business administration and computer science operations research, he is better known at the company for his deal-making and negotiating skills than as a techie or product exec.

That will be important, given that the end of the performance guarantee that Microsoft has had to pay to Yahoo since the partnership began comes in April.

Sources at Microsoft said the company is likely to extend the agreement without major concessions, but that any efforts to end the overall deal will be difficult for Yahoo.

“There is what [Yahoo] wants, and what’s possible,” said one person close to the situation.

In his new job, Mann will be in charge of improving the situation, which he has had some experience with. Mann, said one source, “used to spends hours at night on the phone with Microsoft trying to get concessions from their lack of RPS achievement,” referring to revenue per search.

Whether that means he can fix the situation — either by extricating Yahoo from the deal or improving Yahoo’s search experience to boost revenue and market share — is unclear. Mayer herself has a lot of search product chops from her time at Google, so she is expected to play a dominant role in the arena.

Another important effort for her, obviously, is still recruitment, given that a number of her choices for top product and tech jobs at Yahoo have been longtime veterans who were in place when the company was experiencing its continuing downward slide.

Among her options is buying a small search company, trying to end the Microsoft deal and perhaps strike another one with Google, or even reenter the search business with innovative engineers.

That is a big job. When Mayer was hired last summer, it was thought that she would bring in talent to reinvigorate Yahoo’s top echelons from outside the company.

But, for the most part, that has not happened, and she has appointed a lot of Yahoo’s longtime veterans to important roles in the turnaround.

For example, Mayer brought back Jay Rossiter to run platforms, appointed Scott Burke to head advertising tech, and now has put Mann into a top job in search — all of whom report directly to her on her executive staff.

Hearst Ventures, the investment arm of media giant Hearst Corporation, said it was making a minority equity investment in Science, the Los Angeles area tech “studio.”

Privately held Hearst is the sole investor in the new funding, although the company declined to reveal financial terms of the investment.

But sources with awareness of the deal said it was close to $30 million for a stake above 20 percent.

Somewhat akin to a startup accelerator, Science is attempting to quickly create and scale a number of promising companies in a variety of areas, and has launched 13 so far.

Among the Santa Monica, Calif., tech studio’s recent efforts: Dollar Shave Club, a subscription-based products company aimed at men; Ellie, which sells high-end activewear for women; and Wittlebee, a clothes club for kids.

Hearst Ventures is operated by Hearst’s Entertainment and Syndication unit, which is run by Scott Sassa and George Kliavkoff. Kliavkoff will join Science’s board of directors.

“It’s clear to us that, while we have these brands that resonate with consumers, we think there are some learnings we can get from these guys that are hard to get in a big company,” said Sassa. “Being able to be nimble with insight and guidance is important for us.”

Kliavkoff also noted that this was a way to get immediate ownership in a range of promising companies. “We are writing one check and will have an immediate stake in more than a dozen great startups,” he said. “[Science] has been very thoughtful in starting companies in smart areas.”

In a statement, Hearst CEO Frank Bennack said: “Hearst is continually looking for smart investments that bring value and intelligence to the company — our investment in Science does both. We’re excited to partner with Science to continue its trajectory of success, gain meaningful industry knowledge and utilize Science’s platforms for current and future Hearst investments.”

Though quieter than most, Hearst Ventures have made many successful investments over 15 years, including in Netscape and Broadcast.com. More recently, it has funded such companies as Brightcove and Pandora, as well as HootSuite and BuzzFeed.

Science was founded in late 2011 — with $10 million funding from big-name investors including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners and White Star Capital. Its CEO is well-regarded entrepreneur Mike Jones, who was most recently CEO of Myspace. Prior to Myspace, he had started and sold Userplane to AOL in 2006. In addition, well-known entrepreneur Peter Pham is chief business officer at Science.

“I am very proud of work that the Science team has accomplished since launching,” said Jones, in a quick interview tonight (short enough so that his wife would not get angry at me for ruining Valentine’s Day). “I am extremely excited about opportunities for Science companies going forward.”

More to come, but here is the very clever viral video that Dollar Shave Club did on its launch:

Well-known Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar of Menlo Ventures and Goldman Sachs tech banker Scott Stanford are starting a new company that will focus on formulating a new model of how startups are created.

Pishevar confirmed his move, but Stanford did not respond to a query about the new effort.

That said, sources said he is poised to leave the investment bank and partner with Pishevar in a new venture called Sherpa, which has two parts.

One is called The Foundry, which is being funded by a number of major strategic corporations, who are presumably looking to gain a digital edge. It will also include well-known entrepreneur partners, but no investors or venture capital firms.

There will also be a fund related to invest in the new companies created, which will also include assets added in from the larger companies.

It’s not exactly an incubator or accelerator, said Pishevar in an interview, given the mixed record of those efforts to create startups. He would not give any more details as yet.

Pishevar will remain as a venture advisor to Menlo, as part of the change, and has also been named a strategic advisor to Uber, the fast-growing car service.

Said Pishevar: “I’m incredibly excited to announce my new endeavor, Sherpa and The Foundry. This is the biggest idea I’ve ever pursued. I’m also so excited about my new role as strategic advisor to Uber and very honored to stay as a venture advisor at Menlo to continue the epic work we have done together.”

The parting with Menlo appears to be amicable. “Menlo is excited to see Shervin’s new model come to fruition while continuing to work together in his role as a venture advisor,” said Menlo’s Shawn Carolan. “As anyone who knows him can attest, his talents in spotting great ideas, connecting and evangelizing are exceptional and his venture advisor role allows us to continue to collaborate on finding and creating value together.”

Indeed more than many in the tech scene, the incessantly networking Pishevar is perhaps well suited to such an ambitious effort like Sherpa. He’s has worked closely with a lot of Web 2.0′s hottest startups, such as Uber, Fab and Warby Parker, while also leading Menlo’s investment in Tumblr.

An active angel investor, he has also started a number of companies, such as the Social Gaming Network, which was merged with Mindjolt.

And Stanford is equally well known in Silicon Valley, having shepherded a wide variety of high-profile deals for the banking giant, while heading its global Internet investment banking business from San Francisco as a managing director.

He’s been at Goldman for a dozen years and has been involved in investments in Facebook, Zappos and LinkedIn. Before banking, he worked at pioneering search company, LookSmart.

In mid-November, longtime entrepreneur, active angel investor, iconoclastic blogger and hardcore New Yorker Chris Dixon told the tech world something it least expected — that he had taken a job as a venture capitalist at one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful firms, Andreessen Horowitz.

Well, he’s arrived finally, and moved himself to San Francisco and his office to Sand Hill Road for real — even though he is still keeping his apartment back East.

It’s been a long and winding road to here for Dixon, who was CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, as well as recommendations engine Hunch, which was bought by eBay a year ago.

He is one of the founding members of Founder Collective, an East Coast-based seed-stage venture firm run by entrepreneurs, making a lot of investments in companies such as Skype, Invite Media and OMGPOP. Previously, he programmed financial algorithms at a high-speed options trading firm, and has also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners.

And, perhaps most intriguingly, Dixon has also blogged a lot about what needs fixing in the VC industry (a lot, according to him).

Yesterday, I motored the Mazda 5 down to Andreessen Horowitz’s office to talk about the move with the always clever Dixon, who is hoping to focus on a range of consumer-focused investments, and perhaps cast his freshly monied net more widely.

Here’s the video of the interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130125/go-west-young-geek-chris-dixon-on-why-he-became-a-silicon-valley-vc-at-andreessen-horowitz-and-more-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130123/greg-mcadoo-exits-sequoia-capital/ http://allthingsd.com/20130123/greg-mcadoo-exits-sequoia-capital/#comments Wed, 23 Jan 2013 20:00:39 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=287683 Longtime Sequoia Capital venture capitalist Greg McAdoo will be leaving the Silicon Valley firm. McAdoo, who will stay aboard for a few more months to smooth the transition, has made a number of significant investments as a VC over the years, including in Airbnb, DailyBooth and Y Combinator. Said Sequoia’s Doug Leone: “We’re grateful for Greg’s many contributions to Sequoia over the last 12 years. His wikipedic knowledge, quick wit, and uncanny ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas made him a joy to work with.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130123/greg-mcadoo-exits-sequoia-capital/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130117/two-years-after-dramatic-huffpost-buy-aols-armstrong-and-arianna-talk-about-the-sometimes-rocky-road-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130117/two-years-after-dramatic-huffpost-buy-aols-armstrong-and-arianna-talk-about-the-sometimes-rocky-road-video/#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2013 21:41:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=286405

Even though it seems like a dog’s age, it has been only two years since AOL bought the Huffington Post at the Super Bowl XLV in Dallas (yes, papers were actually signed there).

Back then — after AOL ponied up $315 million, mostly in cash, to buy one of the Web’s most prominent news and opinion sites, along with one of the most famous women on the Web as its leader — the pair called it: “One plus one equals 11.”

Looking back today, it’s more like one plus one equals fireworks — given all the dramatic narrative that has ensued since the deal was struck. While it started off with a series of splashy joint appearances — hey, world, it’s the Tim and Arianna show! — some bumps in the road later resulted in a fair amount of tension between Armstrong and Huffington, which the two now say has passed.

That has included a big, ugly (but still riveting) fight among and between Armstrong, Huffington and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, another AOL property. Without reliving the messy timeline and ethical traffic accident, Arrington left after a lot of Sturm und Drang, verbally trashing Huffington on his way out the door, even though he later returned to the fold as a columnist.

(Bygones? Whatever!)

More importantly, while her role was conceived much more broadly and horizontally at the time of the acquisition, as a kind of overall content ruler at AOL, that clearly did not work out as envisioned and — perhaps as it should have been from the start — it has since been made very vertical.

That has essentially meant Huffington gets to rule over her fast-expanding empire of global sites under her name, with Armstrong footing the investment and tending to fixing the other parts of the company.

Thus, for now at least, all’s well that ends well. AOL’s stock has soared this year, after a series of shrewd financial and organizational moves by Armstrong, and Huffington is ever busy opening yet another international Web outpost.

I checked in with both on how they are doing, in separate video interviews that I did last week in New York, where AOL is located. And to remember how this Web marriage started, I’ve also included the the one I did two years ago in Dallas at the dawn of the relationship.

Enjoy:

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