In a bipartisan vote reached on Thursday evening, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that aims to radically overhaul much of current U.S. immigration policy, which could ultimately increase the number of highly skilled tech industry workers allowed visas to work inside of the U.S.

The bill, which passed through the committee by a vote of 13 to five, is now headed to the floor for debate, where it is expected to be deliberated upon through the summer.

It is, in particular, the first small victory for FWD.us, the political action group formed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and supported by a cadre of such tech industry luminaries as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and famed venture capitalist John Doerr.

To be sure, Zuckerberg’s group is far from the only lobbyist group aiming for immigration policy reform in Washington. But in Silicon Valley it is perhaps the most prominent.

“With its 13-5 vote to support comprehensive immigration reform, the Senate Judiciary Committee has taken another crucial step forward to growing a knowledge economy,” Joe Green, FWD.us founder and president, said in a statement to AllThingsD. “This comprehensive bipartisan legislation contains the key principles we support, and its passage is another important step in the right direction.”

“It’s clear that the momentum continues to build in favor of commonsense immigration legislation — and FWD.us will continue to advocate for comprehensive, bipartisan reform that will attract innovators, build prosperous neighborhoods with strong families and good jobs, and ensure the U.S. continues to lead the world in the growth of the knowledge economy,” Green said.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

In a grand mission statement published on the editorial page of the Washington Post when FWD.us launched, Zuckerberg reasoned that the need for his group was to create change in areas like education, long-term economic issues and, most of all, immigration issues.

“We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants,” Zuckerberg wrote in the Post article. “And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.”

Since launching the group in April, FWD.us has spent its money lobbying aggressively for immigration reform in particular, backing lawmakers who have expressed support for changes in the current legislation.

Though not all of of the FWD.us’s supporters were comfortable with the group’s lobbying tactics. After it came out earlier this month that FWD.us had bankrolled ads for immigration-reform-friendly legislators who also supported controversial environmental policies like Arctic oil drilling and the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, FWD.us lost two high-profile supporters; Tesla CEO and green energy proponent Elon Musk withdrew support, along with Yammer founder David Sacks.

The immigration policy changes FWD.us is pushing for in particular would ultimately benefit many high-tech companies who want better access to recruiting foreign engineering talent, much of which is currently restricted by the number of H1-B Visas granted to foreign workers on an annual basis.

“This is about jobs. Period,” Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of the Internet Association, told AllThingsD in a statement. “A high skilled workforce helps Internet companies grow here at home and hire more Americans. For each worker an Internet company hires under an H1-B visa program, they are able to bring on as many as 12 American workers. … This is a win for the knowledge economy and we look forward to this process moving forward.”

The legislation was held up in the Senate Judiciary Committee until Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) agreed with dissenting members of the committee to hold off on adding an amendment to the bill which would have allowed certain provisions for gay couples.

Sen. Leahy told the New York Times that he withheld his amendment “with a heavy heart.”

The efforts of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Uah) in particular were instrumental in including a last-minute amendment that would benefit the tech industry. His amendment, which The times said was agreed upon late in the deliberations, would increase the minimum number of high-tech H1-B visas allowed annually.

The office of Sen. Hatch did not immediately respond to a telephone request for comment.

“Thanks to the leadership of Chairman Leahy and a bipartisan group of eight Senators, the legislation that passed the Judiciary Committee with a strong bipartisan vote is largely consistent with the principles of commonsense reform I have proposed and meets the challenge of fixing our broken immigration system,” President Barack Obama said in a statement issued on Tuesday evening.

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.

We can at least agree on this, though: HBO and Netflix are both very interested in figuring out the best way to deliver TV-quality video over the Internet, and both have around 30 million subscribers in the U.S.

Which gives this personnel move a little bit of zing: Rob Caruso, an HBO engineer who had been working on the cable channel’s HBO Go service, has taken a job at Netflix.

No word on what Caruso’s new title or job description will be; his LinkedIn profile describes his HBO post as “Vice President, Digital Products.”

HBO confirmed Caruso’s move but didn’t offer any other comment; no comment from Netflix.

Earlier this year, HBO began re-orging its technical team, and longtime strategy and development exec Hans Deutmeyer headed out. In a memo announcing the changes, new tech head Otto Berkes also announced that Caruso would be moving around:

“Rob’s new charter is to build software engineering capabilities to optimize digital asset creation, management, and security, and to create technologies that unlock the full potential of software in the digital content area. Rob and his team will collaborate closely with Digital Products to ensure that our digital content technologies and our consumer-facing products inform each other to enable unique and innovative content-driven user experiences. This new role and group will be critical to achieving end-to-end software technology excellence.”

Last month, in his own memo laying out his vision for video’s future, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said his company was spending $350 million a year improving its core service and app, not counting content spending.

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.

But traders didn’t like everything they saw. LinkedIn lowered its second-quarter guidance below analyst’ consensus, expecting revenue of $342 million to $347 million and adjusted EBITDA of $77 million to $79 million versus a consensus of $360 million and $85.5 million, respectively. As a result, shares plunged more than 10 percent in the aftermarket on Thursday to about $180, around where it remains as of day trading on Friday.

Here’s the thing: LinkedIn has always provided fairly lowered expectations for its coming quarters, and has always seemed to well exceed those expectations upon reporting earnings. Some analysts who have followed the stock closely know this, and aren’t wavering.

“We think management tends to be conservative and believe there is meaningful upside to guidance,” Stern Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said in a research note on Friday. “Our revenue/EBITDA estimates remain above guidance.”

It’s not crazy optimism. All of LinkedIn’s key metrics were up significantly year-on-year; LinkedIn’s three revenue streams — talent solutions, marketing and subscriptions — were up 80 percent, 56 percent and 73 percent, respectively, compared to the year-ago quarter.

As are page views, which are beefing up big-time as LinkedIn shifts from being a static site to upload your resume and perhaps visit only when you’re looking for a new job, into a site where content is front and center, where users actually want to return to the site on a daily basis to see something new. That’s why the team under executive editor Dan Roth has introduced items like LinkedIn influencers who pen posts for the network, and more consumer-friendly status and commenting areas inside the stream. Not to mention redesigns galore.

Here’s a thought: LinkedIn could be trying to temper analysts’ wild expectations because of the company’s consistent ability to outperform. No company beats the Street every single time. And remember, LinkedIn made a few ad deals last year that boosted its marketing solutions revenue for a time, but won’t be re-upped for Q2, and therefore won’t buoy the numbers in the same way. So perhaps a bit of temperance will be a good thing for those frothing at the mouth at the company’s crazy price-to-earnings ratio.

We’ll see, though. Right now, analysts seem to think that LinkedIn is just being cautious, as always.

“I think the takeaway from yesterday is that they guide pretty conservatively,” Wedbush Securities’ Michael Pachter told Bloomberg West on Thursday. “The stock is actually off in the aftermarket because they keep doing the same thing — setting the bar super low.”

“They just keep telling us ‘We’re gonna strike out next time,” Pachter said. “But they just keep performing and hitting everything out of the park.”

But shares dropped after hours by 8.6 percent to $184.25, despite LinkedIn’s beating estimates, as the company issued downbeat revenue expectations for the second quarter. As of Thursday’s close, the stock was up 76 percent so far this year.

The company raised its full-year revenue guidance by $20 million, now expecting $1.43 billion to $1.46 billion. However, it forecast $342 million to $347 million in second-quarter revenue, below market estimates of $359 million, according to a poll conducted by Thomson Reuters.

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After a massive breach of its computer systems yesterday, LivingSocial has sent out emails to all of the 50 million customers impacted, a company spokesman said, and is now working with law enforcement in an investigation to help find the perpetrators.

The company declined to give more information about how the hackers might have entered the Washington, D.C., daily deals company’s system to get access to names, emails, birthdates and encrypted passwords. But it did note that it was taking extra measures to restrict access to all of its systems and consumer data and has been doing heavy monitoring of consumer accounts.

LivingSocial also underscored that credit card information of its users has not been hacked. “We store credit card data through a financial processing network, so the full number literally does not exist anywhere in our system,” the spokesman said.

Still, the hack is a huge blow for LivingSocial, which is owned in part by Amazon, impacting 50 million customers, who will now be required to reset their passwords. All of LivingSocial’s countries across the world appear to have been affected, except in Thailand, Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines, as LivingSocial units Ticketmonster and Ensogo there were on separate systems.

This is the latest big data breach in the consumer Internet space, which has seen troublesome incursions into some high-profile companies recently, including Zappos, LinkedIn and Evernote.

The attack comes at a tough time for the company, since it has been trying to turn itself around after a downturn across the daily deals landspace. LivingSocial got a large cash infusion recently from investors to help stanch its losses. Amazon owns 29 percent of the company.

LivingSocial, the daily deals site owned in part by Amazon, has suffered a massive cyber attack on its computer systems, which an email from CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy — just sent to employees and obtained by AllThingsD.com — said resulted in “unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers.”

The hack includes customer names, emails, birthdates and encrypted passwords.

The breach has impacted 50 million customers of the Washington, D.C.-based company, who will now be required to reset their passwords. All of LivingSocial’s countries across the world appear to have been affected, except in Thailand, Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines, as LivingSocial units Ticketmonster and Ensogo there were on separate systems.

One positive note in a not-so-positive situation: The email sent to employees and customers noted that neither customer credit card nor merchant financial information was accessed in the cyber attack.

This is the latest big data breach in the consumer Internet space, which has seen troublesome incursions into some high-profile companies recently, including Zappos, LinkedIn and Evernote.

When asked for comment on the email, a LivingSocial PR spokesman confirmed the attack and that 50 million customers were impacted.

The attack comes at a tough time for the company, since it has been trying to turn itself around after a downturn across the daily deals landspace. LivingSocial got a large cash infusion recently from investors to help staunch its losses. Amazon owns 29 percent of the company.

More to come, but here’s the email sent to employees, including one that will be sent to customers soon:

Re: Security Incident

LivingSocialites –

This e-mail is important, so please read it to the end.

We recently experienced a cyber-attack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers. We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue.

The information accessed includes names, email addresses, date of birth for some users, and encrypted passwords — technically ‘hashed’ and ‘salted’ passwords. We never store passwords in plain text.

Two things you should know:

1. * The database that stores customer credit card information was not affected or accessed.

2. * The database that stores merchants’ financial and banking information was not affected or accessed.

The security of our customer and merchant information is our priority. We always strive to ensure the security of our customer information, and we are redoubling efforts to prevent any issues in the future.

To ensure our customers and merchants are fully informed and protected, we are notifying those who may have been impacted via email explaining what happened, expiring their passwords, and requesting that they create new passwords. A copy of the note is included below this email.

If you have any questions or concerns, please visit Pulse –https://pulse.livingsocial.com/intranet/Home/more_updates.html — for a list of frequently asked questions. If you have additional questions that aren’t answered in the FAQs, please submit them via email to XXX@livingsocial.com.

Because we anticipate a high call volume and may not be able to answer or return all calls in a responsible fashion, we are likely to temporarily suspend consumer phone-based servicing. We will be devoting all available resources to our web-based servicing.

I apologize for the formality of this note, which the circumstances demand. We need to do the right thing for our customers who place their trust in us, and that is why we’re taking the steps described and going above and beyond what’s required. We’ll all need to work incredibly hard over the coming days and weeks to validate that faith and trust.

– Tim

Subject: An important update on your LivingSocial.com account

LivingSocial recently experienced a cyber-attack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers. We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue.

The information accessed includes names, email addresses, date of birth for some users, and encrypted passwords — technically ‘hashed’ and ‘salted’ passwords. We never store passwords in plain text.

The database that stores customer credit card information was not affected or accessed.

Although your LivingSocial password would be difficult to decode, we want to take every precaution to ensure that your account is secure, so we are expiring your old password and requesting that you create a new one.

For your security, please create a new password for your *email_address* account by following the instructions below.

1. Visit LivingSocial.com

2. Click on the “Create a New Password” button (top right corner of the homepage)

3. Follow the steps to finish

We also encourage you, for your own personal data security, to consider changing password(s) on any other sites on which you use the same or similar password(s).

The security of your information is our priority. We always strive to ensure the security of our customer information, and we are redoubling efforts to prevent any issues in the future.

Please note that LivingSocial will never ask you directly for personal or account information in an email. We will always direct you to the LivingSocial website — and require you to login — before making any changes to your account. Please disregard any emails claiming to be from LivingSocial that request such information or direct you to a different website that asks for such information.

If you have additional questions about this process, the “Create a New Password” button on LivingSocial.com will direct you to a page that has instructions on creating a new password and answers to frequently asked questions.

We are sorry this incident occurred, and we look forward to continuing to introduce you to new and exciting things to do in your community.

Tim O’Shaughnessy

CEO, LivingSocial

Most notable was Apple’s hit, dropping the company’s share price under $400 for a brief moment — the lowest point since December of 2011 — before rising and hovering just above the $400 mark. Apple’s dive came after multiple negative reports for the company, including a Digitimes report claiming iPad mini shipments could tumble in the June quarter due to lack of demand.

Apple is expected to miss its estimates in its upcoming quarterly earnings report, come April 23.

Cirrus Logic, one of Apple’s components suppliers, noted on Wednesday that it will record a net inventory reserve of $23.3 million for the fourth quarter, citing lower volume of one of the company’s top product shipments as an unnamed customer transitions from one component to another in its products. Investors pounded its stock, sending shares down almost 14 percent.

Apple wasn’t alone in its dip downward on Wednesday afternoon. Shares of Facebook were trading off almost 1.5 percent at around $26.50, while the usually well-performing LinkedIn was down as much as four points at $178, a 2.5 percent drop, before regaining some ground.

Google was also trading down around 1.5 percent this afternoon, following recent news that software giant Microsoft had reached a licensing agreement with Foxconn parent company Hon Hai, which from now on will pay royalties on every Android and Chrome device manufactured by one of its companies.

The Dow was off about 1 percent overall on Wednesday afternoon.

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s leading PC manufacturer, fell by more than 2 percent in the wake of a disappointing earnings report from chipmaker Intel. Cisco Systems fell nearly 2 percent. Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices fell by more than 1.6 percent. Salesforce.com fell by more than 1 percent.

1. Apple’s Ouster of AppGratis Is Just the Start of an App Store Crackdown
2. Confirmed: Apple Kicks AppGratis Out of the Store for Being Too Pushy
3. Yep, LinkedIn Acquires Newsreader Startup Pulse for $90 Million
4. WhatsApp: We’re Not Selling to Google
5. Twitter’s New Music App Launches Friday
6. BlackBerry Tops iPhone and Android … In a “Don’t Want” Poll
7. Salesforce Just Made Another Quiet Acquisition

[note: this article is from February, but resurfaced this week]

8. PC Sales Show Biggest Q1 Decline Ever
9. California Court: Even Checking Maps on Phone While Driving Not Okay
10. News Corp. Threatens to Pull Fox off the Airwaves if Aereo Wins

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

The tradition I remember was that at 5:59 pm all was quiet around the office, and then at 6 pm all hell broke loose in most of the cubicles as we worked our way through Wolfenstein 3D and then DOOM and Duke Nukem.

– Joel Jewitt of Palm, describing early company culture to Hunter Walk

It’s a big buy for LinkedIn, costing a cool $90 million, according to the company.

The app, which collects news articles from a range of topics chosen by users and presents them in a clean, stylish format, rose to the top of Apple’s App Store ranks just a few years ago, quickly becoming a favorite among the many newsreaders currently available. Pulse currently claims more than 30 million users globally who read more than ten million stories daily using the app.

But more than that, it’s yet another move by LinkedIn to expand beyond being just a static resume service for recruiters and professionals. Spearheaded by executive editor (and former Fortune and Wired journalist) Dan Roth, LinkedIn has made major strides in pushing original and partner content through the site, aiming to keep users returning and engaged on a regular basis.

“We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform — where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content,” LinkedIn SVP of product and user experience Deep Nishar said in a company blog post. “Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision.”

In that vein, the company launched its “Influencer” program late last year, essentially asking big names in business, entertainment and politics to write original think pieces that users can read on the site. And, in Twitter-esque fashion, users are able to “follow” those influencers across the site, so that only the content users want will appear inside their respective feeds. (Not surprisingly, the move came only months after Twitter cut off LinkedIn tweet syndication, which provided LinkedIn with most of the content flowing through the system up until that point.)

And of course, let’s not forget LinkedIn Today, the company’s news aggregation service which also brings users tons of fresh stories on the regular.

Engagement, after all, is pretty much LinkedIn’s key theme for 2013. As the site undergoes multiple design revamps across user pages and the company’s massively profitable recruiting products, LinkedIn is trying to escape its image as a one-off, sparingly used online resume service. It wants to be the home page for professionals, including the place where those pros go to catch up on the biz news they care about.

So a service like Pulse, which lets a company know exactly what sort of stuff its users want to read and care about, is likely pretty valuable to what LinkedIn is trying to do.

Yes, engagement is good for the overall health of the site, and for keeping recruiters abreast of the latest movements and activity for the 200 million people who use LinkedIn. But it has another side effect: The more page views and user activity coming in, the more potential to bolster LinkedIn’s ad business, one of the company’s three revenue streams.

LinkedIn wasn’t the only one who saw Pulse’s value. As we reported previously, sources said Pulse was in discussions with Yahoo, Microsoft, Gannett and even Amazon at points.

Ultimately, LinkedIn emerged the victor. Now we get to wait and see just exactly how the company wants to make Pulse work for it.

LinkedIn gave at least one answer to this on Wednesday morning: Juice up your largest revenue-driving product.

The company debuted a redesigned version of its Recruiter product, an update solidly in line with the company’s revamped consumer-facing profile pages introduced late last year.

It’s pretty much a de-uglifying of the company’s previous version of Recruiter, which, while obviously heavily used by talent recruiters, was just plain unattractive to look at.

But yes, it’s also more than that. Aside from making the old page look quite similar to users’ profile pages, LinkedIn has placed heavy emphasis on the search bar, located at the top-left-hand corner of the page. Scroll down the page, and the search box follows you persistently. Hover over the box, and a history of your saved searches and some auto-suggested options will drop down in the menu below.

It’s pretty clear from the update this morning that strengthening search is a priority. Part of LinkedIn’s power is much akin to Google’s: People who go to the sites have a clear intent, whether it be to find a potential new job recruit, or in Google’s case, to find the price of a fine French Camembert (or whatever it is people search for).

At the same time, LinkedIn — like Google — must remain “sticky.” Instead of having its users visit the page and then immediately leave after finding a result, adding features like suggested searches, the suggested “people you may want to hire” section and an increased focus on messaging give the company a better chance at increasing engagement in the long term.

The aesthetic revamp of Recruiter is long overdue. As I noted previously, out of LinkedIn’s three revenue streams — subscriptions, ads and “talent solutions” — the talent solutions product is the company’s largest revenue driver, responsible for $161 million in revenue during Q4 of 2012. That was a massive 90 percent year-on-year jump, but I questioned at the time how the company could sustain that rate of growth in the long term. This redesign is the first step in that direction.

The redesign seems to have worked for the consumer-facing products. After the profile redesign last year, “All the metrics we care most about are way, way up,” said Parker Barrile, senior director of talent solutions products.

Eager headhunters should expect the new version of Recruiter to roll out next week.

Earlier this week, I went for a visit to the San Francisco HQ of Circa, the startup that always seems to get lumped into the mobile news reader aggregation category with others such as Pulse, Zite and Flipboard. While it shares some obvious similarities — there is no original news gathering going on here with all of them — the approach that it has taken is different and a bit more nifty.

Built currently for the Apple iPhone, the mobile-designed app is aimed at rejiggering how readers consume breaking news. To do this, a team of writers crunches and munches small bits of information about a range of current news events from a variety of sources and forms them into separable flashcard lists to make up a story.

Circa is using the odd phrase — “atomic units” — to describe the end product, which users can swipe through quickly to get the key elements of a story, along with adds of art, photos, maps or graphs. While some disparagingly call it a Cliff Notes for breaking news, it is much more like a television report or a just-the-facts feed from wires services. If you want to get even more digital, it reminds me of a smart and collated version of Twitter.

While it could use more sourcing — I like to know from whence my atomic units are born — it’s a still a good way to consume news on the fly on a smartphone. Users can also follow favorites stories, which are updated and which increases engagement.

I talked about it all with CEO Matt Galligan, one of Circa’s several founders, as well where the next version of the product is going (expect an Google Android and perhaps an tablet version, for example)

How Circa is going to make money is a good question — it has only a few million in seed funding — since it does require people to create the stories, rather than some algorithm. But the market is hot in the acquisition arena for this category. Both Pulse and Zite have been bought (LinkedIn and CNN), as well as the decidedly less substantive Summly (Yahoo picked it up for the excessive price of $30 million), so one could see Circa also getting snapped up at some point.

Until then or whatever news breaks on it, here’s my video interview with Galligan:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130409/circas-matt-galligan-on-building-a-different-kind-of-news-reader-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130325/linkedin-beefs-up-sitewide-search/ http://allthingsd.com/20130325/linkedin-beefs-up-sitewide-search/#comments Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:45:57 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=306397 LinkedIn announced an update to its search function on Monday, tweaking some smaller qualities to the site’s people-browsing capabilities. Among the improvements are a “smart query intent algorithm” — which learns and gets better with each search you perform — as well as suggested searches and automated alerts.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130325/linkedin-beefs-up-sitewide-search/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130325/social-startup-firstjob-aims-at-entry-level-career-seekers/ http://allthingsd.com/20130325/social-startup-firstjob-aims-at-entry-level-career-seekers/#comments Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:00:24 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=306244 I remember my first job after college. I made a little more than nine dollars an hour, pouring nonfat lattes and cleaning up spills.

For me, that was fine. But for Eyal Grayevsky, a business adminstration graduate of CU Boulder, along with others coming out of school with tens of thousands in debt, that may not be the case.

Like so many other graduates, Grayevsky had a tough time finding relevant work after school, despite his professional degree. And most of the positions he kept finding after visiting resources like Monster.com and CareerBuilder were for positions far out of reach, tailored for people much further along in their careers. There were occasional gems — entry-level positions he’d go for — but surfacing them amid all the rest was annoying and time-consuming.

“I didn’t know where to start,” Grayevsky said. “For people like me, there’s no one central place to go.” So, instead of searching until he found the perfect job site, he created it.

It’s called FirstJob, a fairly simple portal for twentysomethings looking for entry-level work that’s actually relevant to their chosen career path. The site is something of an amalgam of familiar social destinations: FirstJob connects to LinkedIn and Facebook and pulls your data from those sites, automatically creating a profile for first-time users. From there, you’re able to ask for things similar to what LinkedIn offers — asking a friend to “vouch” for one of your skills is tantamount to a LinkedIn “endorsement,” or more generally a Facebook “Like.”

What Grayevsky and his small team of engineers pride themselves on, however, is their data. FirstJob crawls the Web in search of open APIs from other job portals, collecting all of the relevant postings and filtering out other types, like high-experience positions or service-level and retail jobs. The result, in theory, is a finer-tuned database of pertinent postings for first-time seekers.

The connections to social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn matter. Job searches carried out on FirstJob take into account your existing network of connections, and give more visibility to job openings where you may already know two or three people working at the company. So, if I type in “designer” into the search field, I may see some open slots over at Microsoft first, where I know four or five Facebook friends who happen to work there. Ideally, you leverage your personal connections for a better chance at scoring the job.

You’ll note that that whole scenario is imperfect. I, like many others, have accepted Facebook and LinkedIn requests from scores of people whom I consider relatively “weak ties,” folks I may have come across in my professional or personal life at some point. They’re certainly not all people who would vouch for me were I to apply for a job, or even folks I’d necessarily feel comfortable asking about a possible job opening.

But Grayevsky’s point remains: If you can find those basic connections in the first place, it’s a better lead than you’d have on, say, a Monster or Craigslist.

It’s worrisome to think that at some point Facebook or LinkedIn could cut FirstJob off from API access. After all, helping people find jobs is part of LinkedIn’s very purpose, and Facebook has signaled in the past that it, too, intends to dabble in the job-hunting space. And neither company is afraid of snipping access to potential competitors.

Grayevsky doesn’t seem concerned. “I don’t foresee us getting cut off, but it’s not a major feature we’re relying on, and it’s not the end of the world if we do get cut off,” he said.

The team hopes to add additional social features, like Q&A sections for specific career-related topics. But for now they’re focused on expanding the company’s presence by hiring paid “ambassadors” to represent FirstJob at career fairs on college campuses around the country. The site opens widely on Monday, with updates in the weeks to come.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130325/social-startup-firstjob-aims-at-entry-level-career-seekers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130325/yahoo-acquires-hipster-mobile-news-reader-summly-like-we-said-it-might/ http://allthingsd.com/20130325/yahoo-acquires-hipster-mobile-news-reader-summly-like-we-said-it-might/#comments Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:13:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=306305

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130325/yahoo-acquires-hipster-mobile-news-reader-summly-like-we-said-it-might/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130318/small-business-web-ad-dollars-still-way-too-small/ http://allthingsd.com/20130318/small-business-web-ad-dollars-still-way-too-small/#comments Tue, 19 Mar 2013 04:01:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=304680 Hey, Google! And Yahoo, and Yelp, and Twitter and Facebook and every other Web company that says it wants to sell ads to mom-and-pop shops: Try harder.

So says Boston Consulting Group, out with a new report that shows only 3 percent of small-business ad dollars going online.

The numbers come from a survey conducted last fall of 550 small companies, and shouldn’t come as a complete surprise to anyone who has watched the Web guys try to break into the market for many, many years.

With the notable exception of Groupon and other daily deal companies, most of the Internet guys like to advertise their advertising on the Internet. And their platonic ideal for a transaction is the self-serve model, where humans never have to talk to each other. Meanwhile, lots of traditional business still gets done in analog form, via phone calls and feet on the street.

When small businesses do spend their money, Google still gets the most, says BCG, which ranks the popularity of other outlets this way: “Other search engines, Yelp, Facebook, Yahoo! Local, YP.com (formerly yellowpages.com), Twitter, LinkedIn, and Superpages.com.”

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Artens)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130318/small-business-web-ad-dollars-still-way-too-small/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130316/samsungs-galaxy-s4-ciscos-gender-mea-culpa-and-yamtraders-sxsw-troll-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-31013-31613/ http://allthingsd.com/20130316/samsungs-galaxy-s4-ciscos-gender-mea-culpa-and-yamtraders-sxsw-troll-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-31013-31613/#comments Sat, 16 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=304066 In case you haven’t been hammering the “refresh” button on AllThingsD this week, here’s a sampling of what you may have missed — our Top 10 stories from the week of Mar. 11:

1.) Samsung Galaxy S4: Bigger Display and Bolder Software — But Is It Better Enough?

2.) How Apple Gets All the Good Apps

3.) Telling Employees He Hasn’t “Walked the Talk,” Cisco’s John Chambers Leans In on Women in the Workplace Issue

4.) LinkedIn to Buy Pulse Newsreader for More Than $50M (and here’s what they could do with Pulse)

5.) How One Boring Company Pulled Off the Perfect SXSW Troll

6.) Crowdfunding for a Cause: Nonprofits Can Now Hold Fundraisers on Crowdtilt

7.) IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack in the Cloud

8.) Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Gets a Million-Dollar Bonus After Six Months on the Job

9.) Nokia: A Microsoft Surface Phone Could Screw Us

10.) Outbox: Yahoo Mail Head Sharma Leaves Company (Update: And he has now joined Disney’s online parks division)

For more of the week in review, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130316/samsungs-galaxy-s4-ciscos-gender-mea-culpa-and-yamtraders-sxsw-troll-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-31013-31613/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20130313/linkedin-shares-reach-record-high/ http://allthingsd.com/20130313/linkedin-shares-reach-record-high/#comments Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:41:13 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=303330 Not two days after Kara Swisher reported that LinkedIn would soon acquire the Pulse news reader app for more than $50 million, shares of LinkedIn were trading at a record high on Wednesday morning, reaching $181.47 at their peak before settling back down around $179, a gain of about 2 percent for the day. The company also reported record earnings last quarter, outperforming analysts’ expectations.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130313/linkedin-shares-reach-record-high/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130312/crittercism-nabs-12-million-in-funding-to-expand-beyond-tracking-mobile-app-bugs/ http://allthingsd.com/20130312/crittercism-nabs-12-million-in-funding-to-expand-beyond-tracking-mobile-app-bugs/#comments Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:30:07 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=302510 Crittercism, a San Francisco-based company that helps mobile app developers track their performance, has raised a further $12 million from its existing investors.

The company’s technology lets mobile app creators such as Netflix and LinkedIn understand how and why their apps crash, although Crittercism plans to use the new funding to further expand into other areas of app performance monitoring.

While testing apps is important, Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy says that there is no way for app makers — even big ones — to foresee every possible issue.

“You just can’t test every possible hardware and software combination,” he said in an interview.

Levy recalls a recent issue one large customer had using its app in conjunction with certain Motorola phones. The company didn’t even have Motorola phones in its office, but Levy said his company’s product was able to gather enough information from real-world users to diagnose the issue.

The company, which consisted of just over a dozen people for much of last year, is now up to 23; Levy said he expects to have more than 60 by the end of the year, with most of the new hires going to beef up the company’s engineering ranks.

“We are looking to scale pretty rapidly,” he said. Even with a fairly small team, Crittercism’s technology is in use on more than 450 million iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8 devices. Among those using its technology in their apps, Levy said, are Netflix, Home Depot, LinkedIn and TripAdvisor.

The Series B round was led by Google Ventures, an existing investor in the company. Shasta Ventures and Opus Capital, also prior investors, provided additional funding.

Google has said it is looking to boost its presence in mobile funding deals.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130312/crittercism-nabs-12-million-in-funding-to-expand-beyond-tracking-mobile-app-bugs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130311/heres-what-linkedin-can-do-with-pulse/ http://allthingsd.com/20130311/heres-what-linkedin-can-do-with-pulse/#comments Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:53:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=302471 So what’s LinkedIn going to do with Pulse now that it is buying the news reader?

Maybe Jeff Weiner will keep heading down the path Pulse was headed: Trying to figure out how to create mobile magazines filled with other peoples’ content, and how to sell ads against the eyeballs that stuff collects.

And LinkedIn already has a small but growing advertising business — its “marketing solutions” group, which includes traditional ads, generated 27 percent of its revenue last quarter.

But my hunch is that Weiner thinks LinkedIn can do a lot with Pulse without spending much time on ads at all.  For instance, what would it look like if LinkedIn sold an iPhone app, or bundled an app with its premium subscriptions, that integrated LinkedIn’s database with other people’s content?

Well, it would look a lot like the one created by LinkedIn content boss Dan Roth — back when Roth ran Fortune Magazine’s digital editions.

Here, let Roth show you himself. It gets particularly interesting at the 50-second mark:

Back in 2011, Roth had to work very hard to find the resources at Time Inc. to produce a fairly rudimentary app. (Disclosure: I know Dan. He’s a good dude.) Imagine what he could do at a company with real digital resources.

Now we might find out.

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