Media giant Hearst has hired two senior execs — Demand Media’s Joanne Bradford and former Los Angeles Times CEO Jeffrey Johnson — in a significant move to digitally turbocharge and jumpstart its flagship but long-suffering newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle and its SFGate.com website.

“They have deep publishing and new media experience and believe in the power of great content with a valued brand,” said Heart CEO Frank Bennack in a statement. “We are excited to work with them to redefine the choices for how and where readers can experience the trusted Chronicle content they depend on.”

In the new leadership, Johnson will be the publisher of the Chronicle, while Bradford will be its president. Both will report to Hearst Newspapers President Mark Aldam. Current publisher Frank Vega — an old-style publisher who has had a controversial tenure at the Chronicle — will retire, though Hearst said he will continue as chairman through the transition.

“The San Francisco Chronicle should be a shining star and use case of how to build a community and cover local news,” said Bradford in a text to me today.

Indeed. While the Chronicle and its website is the largest for local news in the Bay area, it has lagged a lot in aggressively covering key trends — such as tech — and the fast growth of the region. While the area has blossomed, the Chronicle, like many big-city newspapers, has suffered, as digital businesses of all kinds have made incursions on its business.

Its daily print circulation is now 265,000, and combined with its website it reaches close to two million people.

Getting all that a whole lot higher — and, perhaps more importantly, a lot more relevant — will be a tough job and will likely require a major reinvention of the Chronicle brand.

That is especially true since the San Francisco area, including Silicon Valley, is the world’s key digital hub, as well as a leader in a number of areas — from top-notch sports teams to having one of the most innovative food and indie cultures. After a few years of rough economic times, the city is on a bit of a roll, including being the location of some upcoming major events such as the Super Bowl and America’s Cup.

Bradford has a lot of experience in both old and new media and is well known in the online media advertising space, having had top sales and media jobs at BusinessWeek magazine, Microsoft, Yahoo and, now, Demand.

She has been at that content site, where she has been its chief revenue and marketing officer, since 2010. At Yahoo, previous to Demand, she was an SVP in charge of North American revenue and also worked on branded entertainment partnerships. At Microsoft, she was a corporate VP and chief media officer of MSN Media Network.

And, although I have known her well over many years — full disclosure: We are very good friends — I had no idea she had an undergraduate degree in journalism from San Diego State University.

Johnson is also a longtime media exec. He has recently been an operating partner at the Yucaipa Companies — owned by kingpin Ron Burkle — focusing on media investments since 2007. Previous to that, he was president, publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times for just a year, but had been its SVP and GM since 2000. At the Times, he was responsible for the newspaper’s digital and print operations including editorial, advertising, circulation, consumer sales and marketing, finance and technology. Johnson has also worked at the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel and has an undergraduate degree in accounting from the University of Illinois and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

The Chronicle is the largest newspaper in Northern California, founded in 1865 by Charles and Michael de Young. Its owner, the privately-held Hearst, is one of the nation’s largest media companies, with dozens of daily and weekly newspapers; has a huge group of television stations and cable network stakes, such as Lifetime, A&E and ESPN; hundreds of magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Elle; and many other varied holdings.

Bradford will be replaced at Demand Media by Jeff Dossett.

Ben Ling, a longtime Silicon Valley angel investor and Internet exec, has joined Khosla Ventures as a venture partner.

Ling is the second hire of high-profile operating execs by Khosla. Former Square, Slide and PayPal exec Keith Rabois — who is a close friend of Ling’s — joined the firm in February.

In an interview today, Ling said he has been contemplating his next move, and the idea of becoming a VC after years of operations was appealing.

“I thought a lot about the ability to have impact across a broad set of companies, and was attracted to Khosla’s model of venture assistance,” said Ling, who added that he will focus a lot on the mobile ecosystem. “When I was younger, I thought it would be fascinating to be an investor, and here I can help a lot of companies grow and scale.”

Ling is a former Google and Facebook product exec, as well as an active investor in 80 startups, including such high-profile ones as Fab.com, Square and Quora. He was most recently COO at Badoo, but left the company last fall.

At Google, he worked on search, YouTube and local products, and was closely linked with former Googler Marissa Mayer, whom he followed internally when her responsibilities shifted there. Many thought he might next pop up at Yahoo, where she is now CEO.

Not so, but also not a surprise; Mayer provided Khosla with a lovely statement about Ling: “Ben is an amazing entrepreneurial leader and has a great eye as an investor for both talent and ideas. I’m excited to see him join Khosla Ventures to find and foster the next set of entrepreneurs who will define the technology world.”

Nextdoor, the private social network aimed at connecting people in neighborhoods, has a different take. The company unveiled its first mobile app on Thursday, essentially a way for residents of communities to stay in close, constant communication on issues specific to their homes, directly from their smartphones.

If you haven’t heard of it, yes, it’s another social network. And yes, it’s about strengthening ties to those you consider close, something like the original vision of the social app Path.

Unlike existing networks, however, Nextdoor isn’t about sharing things like what new band you listened to, or what type of omelet you had for breakfast. It prioritizes utility over recreation. So, in a typical Nextdoor stream, you’ll likely see posts about local garage sales, want ads for babysitters or rooms for rent. And each node of shared information is relegated strictly to the confines of your specifically drawn neighborhood or surrounding neighborhoods, so, in theory, you’re only in contact with people that would actually find this information useful. (Read Katie Boehret’s recent review of Nextdoor here.)

The new app is largely a port of all the website’s features over to a plain, unobtrusive mobile interface (every mobile social stream looks the same these days). You can post updates, welcome new neighbors and the like.

The biggest pitch, which accounts for roughly one-fifth of the user activity on Nextdoor’s network, is for local safety. Users have convened on Nextdoor to report local burglaries, muggings or suspicious activity in their area. Until now, users could only access the site via desktop or the mobile Web. But with the new app, Nextdoor’s pitch is that it will be far easier to keep tabs on your local goings-on, especially in terms of safety issues.

Especially compelling: You’re able to send and receive urgent alerts to your phone. So, if something bad is going down in your neighborhood, a Nextdoor user can send out an alarm that pings everyone in their district, whether they’re at home or not.

And, perhaps most importantly, you’re able to use the app to post photos on the fly.

By now, we’re well aware that photos do quite well when circulating through social networks — see Instagram, Twitter’s filters, Pinterest, et al. Nextdoor’s appeal here, though, again trumps utility over recreation. Snap a camera-phone shot of a stray cat who may belong to someone, a set of keys lost on the ground or a shady-looking dude peering in someone’s window, and your network of neighbors will be able to see it quickly.

“Think about having hundreds of cameras available at any given moment,” Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia told AllThingsD. “Everyone has a smartphone.”

That’s a cool enough thought for any local safety enthusiast — if not a little “Big Brother”-ish — and seems much more feasible than relying on patrols or radios. I wondered, though, if something like Nextdoor’s service would encourage locals to pull a Charles Bronson vigilante move on troublemakers, eschewing calling in the actual police.

Anything is possible. But Tolia said Nextdoor members weren’t doing that sort of thing thus far.

Ideally for the company, the app becomes something more than just another icon in your mobile tray — less an app than a tool, and a connection to what’s happening back at your home when you’re out in the world.

Of course, the perennial question remains: Can a smart take on an age-old social function convince people to sign up for yet another social network?

The app is in Apple’s App Store now. I guess we’ll soon find out.

Changes at AOL’s local content site, Patch: CEO Jon Brod will step down and is being replaced by COO and President Steve Kalin, according to an internal memo the New York Internet company sent to the division’s employees today.

As part of the move, Brod will be going back to run AOL Ventures, in a job where he began at the company.

In addition, sources said a little less than three percent of the 1,400-employee Patch staff will be laid off. The memo notes that downsizing, without giving the numbers, which includes consolidation of several parts of Patch by streamlining its regional structure from 20 to nine teams.

According to the memo, the layoffs are to “make Patch profitable in 2013 and a commitment to continue to improve our business model.”

AOL confirmed the contents of the memo, saying in a statement, “Patch is streamlining its regional editorial structure across the country by moving from 20 to nine teams. We are implementing this team approach based on the success of our field tests earlier this year. The team approach allows for flexibility based on the unique needs of each community and the strengths of our editors. We are not reducing our number of sites or our coverage area as a result of this change. Making these important changes came with the difficult decision to eliminate some positions. We recognize these changes are painful for individuals and for our organization — and we are committed to handling the people impacted with care and sensitivity.”

Patch is growing, according to comScore. In April, traffic was up 26 percent since last year to 13 million unique monthly visitors, who are consuming about 1.3 million pieces of content that are now being served up per month.

Still, Patch has attracted a level of investor pressure and criticism, even as AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has stuck strongly with the hyperlocal content effort and invested heavily in growing out a network of sites across the country aimed at neighborhood news and events.

But Armstrong signaled changes when he was queried about Patch during AOL’s recent quarterly call: “What you’re going to see as we approach Q4 is us trying to get to the finish line of profitability, and we will use all means possible to get there.”

Apparently, Armstrong means what he says and says what he means.

Here’s the memo:

Patchers,

Since the day Jon, Warren, and I founded Patch, we have had one mission in mind — improve the lives of people in local communities by 25 percent. Patch has become an important brand in the hundreds of towns we serve, and it is a staple of our communities. With the average Patch just over two years old, we are well on the way toward our goal of improving peoples’ lives and building a sustainable business in the process.

Over the past year, Patch has made an enormous impact in our communities. The coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings, the lifeline that Patch provided residents during the Sandy Hook school shootings and Superstorm Sandy, and the exclusive Sanford-Colbert Busch debate in South Carolina stand out as powerful examples. The new Patch platform that is rolling out now will only increase Patch’s ability to instantly improve communities.

As we have made a commitment to improve our Patch towns and communities, we made a similar commitment to make Patch profitable in 2013 and a commitment to continue to improve our business model. Just as we have rolled out new products and services to Patch, we are announcing today the rollout of the recently tested town structures, which will help us serve communities in a more local way and move Patch meaningfully toward profitability.

The changes have two main goals:

1. Improve and increase our hyper-local programming and deepen our user engagement through the Patch 2.0 platform; and
2. Implement a structure that unlocks the path to profitability.

To accomplish these goals we are taking the following steps, effective immediately:

We are combining the East, Central and West editorial zones to create a simpler structure that will enable faster decision-making and a more coordinated editorial effort across Patch. Anthony Duignan-Cabrera has been promoted to VP, Editorial Director, overseeing day-to-day editorial field operations, and will continue to report into Rachel in her role as Chief Content Officer.

We are streamlining our regional editorial structure across the country by moving from 20 to nine teams. We are not reducing our number of sites or our coverage area as a result of this change.

We are promoting Katie O’Connor to Director of Editorial Operations and Content Strategy. In this role, she will work with our editorial teams to help create new content and programming.

We are implementing a “team approach” for our sites, based on the success of our field tests earlier this year. This approach allows for flexibility based on the unique needs of each community and the strengths of editors.

Jon and I have decided to elevate Steve Kalin to the CEO position at Patch. Steve has done a fantastic job since he began at Patch in December as President and COO. Jon and I hired Steve with the thought that his extensive background in scaled, local platforms would eventually allow him to run Patch on a day-to-day basis.

Jon has led Patch since it was just an idea and helped scale it into one of the most significant brands in local communities in the U.S. Under his guidance, Patch has gained tens of millions of users and more than ten thousand advertisers; and it has covered millions of local stories. Going forward, Jon will return to AOL Ventures full-time and lead our push into several areas we have identified as significant future growth opportunities for AOL.

The changes we are making at Patch, however, come with the difficult decision to eliminate some positions. These employees have contributed greatly to Patch’s business with passion and dedication. We sincerely thank them for all they have done to make Patch what it is today. Their impact will always be felt here. We wish all affected employees continued success. They are truly Patchers for life.

This is an important time for Patch. We have many great opportunities in front of us, and we continue to make decisions to ensure Patch’s success. AOL’s Board of Directors and I remain firmly supportive of Patch and our mission. Together we are building a company for the long term, one that can grow and thrive — now and far into the future.

We will be having team calls today and a Patch All-Company call this afternoon at 6pm ET, to discuss these changes in more detail. I encourage you to join these calls. Keep an eye out for invitations to follow.

I want to thank you for your continued commitment to Patch and to serving your communities, and for staying focused on our goals. Patch is one of the fastest growing sites and brands on the Internet. We have the right plan, we have a great team, and I’m confident we can win together.

Keep going — TA

Now Google is readying its next update to the Maps mobile app, which will be rolled out for both Android and iOS devices sometime this summer. The app will be optimized for iPad and Android tablets, as well.

Shown off today at Google I/O by Brian McClendon, Google’s vice president of Maps, the upcoming app seems to take small slices from both Foursquare Explore and Waze, improving local venue search as well as live rerouting recommendations during navigation.

McClendon showed how a smart search from Maps for “Burmese food” or “pizza” in San Francisco will turn up a bunch of local results that include friends’ ratings — the way Foursquare does — but also utilize Zagat data to show places worthy of a Zagat badge. This is all part of Google Maps’ new “unified five-point rating scale.” Huh. Well in either case, there’s a seemingly cool swipe feature for swiftly browsing through search results in Maps rather than reading them in list format.

And Google’s Offers service was tied into the mix by showing venues with deals or discounts in results. The first of these offers will come from Starbucks, but as Google incorporates Offers more into mobile, we can likely expect to see deals from other businesses.

I/O attendees also got a sneak peek at the app’s “dynamic rerouting” feature, meant to give better, faster, real-time navigation updates. (Waze might want to look up from its acquisition talks long enough to take note of this one.)

Early in the presentation, Google took a jab at Apple’s map mishaps, with McClendon saying that Google Maps in iPhone has been a “success” due to the fact that the app is “sleek, simple, beautiful, and let’s not forget, accurate.”

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Groupon said it had revenue of $601.4 million, up eight percent, in the first quarter, and earnings of three cents. Those profits were in line with Wall Street expectations, but sales were better than the expected $590 million at the daily deals site.

The stock was up nearly 12 percent in after-hours trading to $6.21. Shares have risen 42.6 percent in the last six months, although that’s down 43.9 percent from a year ago.

There was no news of the search for a new leader for Groupon, which fired its CEO, co-founder Andrew Mason, in the quarter.

On a conference call later, co-CEO Ted Leonsis said that Groupon’s board had formed a search committee, but that it was “not in a hurry” to find a new company head.

But, in a statement, co-CEO Eric Lefkofsky said: “We are encouraged by our results, as our local revenues accelerated and our margins improved over the prior quarter.”

Anything up is good news for the suffering Groupon, which has been pilloried by Wall Street since its late 2011 IPO, although sentiment has improved since Mason’s ouster.

Gross billings, which is the amount consumers buy from Groupon overall, without subtracting payments to merchants, were up four percent, to $1.04 billion, on strong growth in North America. Sales were off internationally, though, by 9 percent.

International business, which has a bigger active customer base than North America, was the cause of much of Groupon’s declines, a problem execs have been trying to address with a new “One Playbook” strategy to consolidate systems.

On the conference call, COO Kal Raman called the situation “a tale of two Groupons.”

On a GAAP basis, Groupon had a loss of one cent, from two cents in the same period a year ago.

Groupon also said North American transactions on mobile devices accounted for 45 percent of the overall number, up from 30 percent last year, while email fell to less than 45 percent of the deals sold.

On a less happy note, Groupon said that its outlook for the second quarter would be below consensus.

Here’s the the Chicago-based Groupon’s official press release, as well as some tasty financial slides, so you can read it all for yourself:

GRPN

GRPN_1Q13_Earnings_Slides

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD.com this week:

1. Daily-deals site LivingSocial was hacked, compromising the names, emails, birthdates and encrypted passwords of 50 million users.
2. In an essay, Reed Hastings laid out his predictions for the future of streaming video, which includes not just his company, Netflix, but also HBO, ESPN and anyone else transitioning from a channel to an app.
3. Walt Mossberg reviewed the Galaxy S 4, Samsung’s new flagship smartphone, and concluded that “while I admire some of its features, overall, it isn’t a game-changer.”
4. What are Google’s plans for its high-speed Internet project, Google Fiber? Theories abound, but good luck divining an answer from CEO Larry Page’s words.
5. According to multiple sources, Twitter is testing local discovery features that will help you better understand what’s happening not just around the world, but also down the block.
6. Android’s seemingly inexorable ascension over the iPhone may not be inexorable, after all. A new report says customer loyalty will let Apple overtake Google in smartphone market share by 2015.
7. On the 10-year anniversary of its sale to Google, Applied Semantics co-founder Eytan Elbaz explained what he and his partners learned from starting up and getting acquired.
8. For the first time, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer publicly commented on the controversy created after Yahoo banned its employees from working from home.
9. Speaking of Mayer, she’s officially joined the board of wireless gadget maker Jawbone, and it’s likely to be a good fit.
10. Apple needs some new hit products to drive growth, and CEO Tim Cook says they’re on the way… just not until this fall.

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD.com on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

That may change. According to multiple sources, Twitter is in the process of testing a new feature that lets you discover tweets from people within a certain distance of your location. The idea is to surface relevant activity based on where you are in the world, serving up tweets from others around you — whether you follow them or not.

The feature, as I understand it, came out of the company’s recent hack week at the beginning of this month, where a few engineers worked on projects related to local discovery. A number of employees have been testing the feature in the Twitter app ever since.

The type of tweets you’d see, ideally, are the most relevant ones nearby, especially when they follow a trend or a flurry of closely connected activity. So a football game or a concert, for instance, may be a great use case here.

Or perhaps even more importantly, it could be used in completely unplanned, spontaneous instances.

Here’s an example, and a real kicker: I’ve been told that a few employees were testing the new feature in Boston last week, around the time that the brothers Tsarnaev allegedly carried out a series of horrific bombings during the city’s annual marathon.

When reached for comment, Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said the company had nothing to share on the matter.

It’s fascinating to me that Twitter is toeing the waters of discovery through a local lens more explicitly than ever before. Currently and historically, the company already factors in location when suggesting content inside the Discover tab and also when serving you ads. It also goes without saying that to try this stuff out during the recent Boston tragedy — which was arguably watched by much of the world through Twitter just as intensely as it was over broadcast networks — is incredibly interesting, if only to imagine what possibilities it could hold for other mass events in the future.

The big question for me: Twitter, what took you so freaking long?

For a company that prides itself on its interest graph — the pulse of what everyone in the world is talking and thinking about — something like a localized version of discovery seems like a natural extension of what it means to use Twitter in a meaningful way.

Yes, Twitter makes much of the foo foo special moments its users have when connecting with people on the other side of the planet (or in some cases, connecting to others off our planet entirely). I won’t begrudge them that; it is pretty fantastic.

I’d argue, however, that Twitter could be infinitely more useful to me were I to open up the app and see something happening down the block: A yard sale, a car accident, half-off a tasty fried chicken sandwich. That’s Foursquare’s entire value proposition with its newly revamped, search-focused app. If done right, Twitter could potentially be even more powerful in this respect, feeding off the hundreds of millions of potential intent signals flowing through its pipes on a daily basis.

So this may have come out of a recent hack week project, but ideas like this have been in the works for a long time. People I’ve spoken to said that for years Twitter has kicked around just exactly what discovery is supposed to mean for the company. Does Twitter relegate it to the Discover Tab alone and “experiment” with how people use it, as product VP Michael Sippey said at our D: Dive into Mobile conference recently?

Or perhaps an even bigger coup: Does Twitter insert these local tweet suggestions into your main Twitter timeline directly? I hear Twitter has considered both options — again, for years people inside the company have agonized about the right way to handle this — but there’s no decision quite yet.

To insert suggested location-based tweets into your main timeline, however, is a really big deal for Twitter. Touching the holy grail that is the timeline — the list of people that users have selected to follow — isn’t something the company takes lightly. For one, it could tick off Twitter’s early user base, or alienate all the folks who have carefully curated their follow lists over time.

But here’s something to think about: Right now, Twitter isn’t worried about the longtime, early user base. The company is launching products on “Good Morning America.” It’s cooperating with the Grammys and the Oscars. It’s pushing products like Vine at Cannes. It’s making the head of comms into a consumer marketing director as well.

The service’s 200 million active users pales in comparison to Facebook’s billion. Twitter needs to go truly mainstream.

Ultimately, if that means changing some of the core elements of the product and peeving the hardcore Twitter users, I’d guess Twitter may soon be approaching the point that it is willing to make that choice. It has already chopped off the legs of its client developer base and shifted everyone’s attention to the official Twitter apps.

My impression here, though, is that even Twitter isn’t sure yet what it wants to do. It could again test how this feature works within the Discover tab and maybe move it into the timeline later. Or perhaps just keep it inside Discover. Or, in all possibility, scrap the feature as it stands entirely and try it a different way. Twitter doesn’t move that fast on major changes like these.

I will say, however, that I’m glad to see the company is at least looking at tweaking its formula, even if there’s potential to upset part of the user base.

Frankly, it’s about time.

According to sources, two high-ranking Yahoo execs have departed the company — longtime strategy exec Raymond Stern and advertising exec Liz Ritzcovan.

Stern — whose recent Yahoo title has been SVP of business development and partnerships — was hired at the Silicon Valley Internet giant in 2009, and has held a number of jobs in areas such as business development, audience, mobile and local. Ritzcovan has been at the company since early 2011, most currently as a VP of marketing solutions.

Meanwhile, SVP of advertising and data platforms Scott Burke has been elevated to the executive staff, reporting directly to CEO Marissa Mayer. Sources said Mayer has put him in charge of all ad tech platforms in a continuing product overhaul at Yahoo.

As March approaches — a time when stock options and bonus payments come due — insiders at Yahoo said to expect a lot of such talent movement within the company. Sources also noted that Mayer has been working hard to bring in new execs from outside Yahoo, but has been having a harder time than she expected recruiting high-level talent.

“We believe that distilled information, deeply personalized and made accessible anytime and anywhere, is what makes mobile experiences a part of our customers’ daily lives,” the Alike website posted to its blog. “In Yahoo! we’ve found a team as excited about this vision as we are, and who are serious about making it real.”

The app is focused on an area in which many companies are dabbling right now: Mobile-based location discovery. Facebook, for example, recently upped its “Nearby” feature inside of its Facebook app, which helps you find places close to you that your friends have checked in to. Google, too, is beefing up mobile discovery with Google+Local. And of course there’s Foursquare and Yelp, two search-and-discovery-based apps that are more and more focused on the mobile device.

Yahoo stands out among the pack of these companies, in that the company is largely seen as “weak” in its mobile department thus far.

But the acquisition is in line with CEO Marissa Mayer’s recent cheerleading of mobile, an area in which she plans to up Yahoo’s game in the coming year.

“We were very impressed by the team and their approach to building personalized experiences,” Yahoo said in a statement. “The entire Alike team will join Yahoo!’s mobile organization in San Francisco and Sunnyvale.”

Alike’s team will shut down its existing iPhone and Web apps as a result of the acquisition. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This is how Nextdoor, the private social network focused specifically on the neighborhood, was built. Users communicate with one another to form tighter bonds around their community, only sharing identity information directly with those inside their area, usually spanning no more than a handful of blocks.

But Nextdoor needs to expand faster, before another startup moves in on its turf (or evicts them, if you’ll pardon the analogy). And the company aims to do just that with Nextdoor 2.0, a revamp of the site with features aimed at jumpstarting growth while focusing on the startup’s strongest areas.

The biggest area of change: Instead of restricting users to their previously cordoned off districts, they’re able to post information to nearby neighborhoods, those bordering the area a user resides in. That’s different from before, where users were made to keep up with the Joneses only in their immediate vicinity.

Philosophically, it’s about crossing boundary lines where it makes sense, and posting information about local activity and goings on with those still close enough to care about it.

“It’s powerful,” CEO Nirav Tolia told AllThingsD, “because it begins to let groups emerge that transcend neighborhood lines.”

From a business and growth standpoint, however, it’s a jumpstart in increasing engagement (in theory, at least). Move folks past just keeping in communication with their closest neighbors, and you increase the potential for engagement and activity on the service itself. Sustaining that just begets more growth, and for a young startup with ambitions as high as Nextdoor’s, growth is good.

But is growth at the cost of the company’s value proposition too much? When I spoke with Tolia in the past about Nextdoor, the biggest selling point on the network was the company’s built-in constraints; it’s more private than Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. And it’s supposed to be.

To that point, it’s worth noting that Greylock Partners led a new funding round of $21.6 million, adding managing partner David Sze to the Nextdoor board. Sze’s history involves early work on both LinkedIn and Facebook, helping both companies grow into what they’ve become today. (Shasta Ventures, Bezos Expeditions and Google Ventures all also participated in the round.) Perhaps Sze’s influence, among others, convinced Nextdoor and Tolia that it needed a kick from a growth perspective.

For what it’s worth, Path — another private social network at which Sze is an adviser — also made major changes to its app, all aimed at kickstarting growth and engagement. Perhaps a growth rate that burns too slow isn’t enough in what Tolia described as a “winner-take-all market” such as the one he sees Nextdoor competing in. Move fast, or get usurped by someone even faster.

In that vein, Nextdoor’s 2.0 user interface has seen some tweaking, and Tolia says it has been optimized for mobile phone and tablet use, bringing feature parity across platforms beyond the desktop. We should expect mobile apps sometime in the next year or so, as well.

I imagine that when those apps do come out, they’ll sync up with Nextdoor’s third major emphasis, crime and safety. It’s one of the biggest use cases for those on the Nextdoor network, so the startup is playing to its strengths. Urgent alerts sent through the service can reach users by SMS, and Nextdoor eventually plans to integrate police and fire department notifications as well.

Time will tell on the company’s future plans. My best guess is that after cooperating with local government and now institutions focused on safety, the site will likely aim at other obvious community pillars. Churches? Or perhaps schools?

Whatever it has in mind, it certainly has the money to do it. With upward of $40 million raised and Tolia saying most of that is still in the bank, the company has plenty of room to grow.

We’ll have to wait and see if everyone in the neighborhood agrees.

It was widely praised, mostly because, hey, search is fun! And the user interface is pretty slick.

Perhaps lesser noticed, however, was a side effect of searching through your Path history — a social discovery mechanism.

The “nearby” search option lets you find your past entries on locations, well, nearby. So if you’re a San Franciscan who last checked in to a restaurant in, say, Los Angeles, about a year ago, you can run that nearby search next time you’re down in Los Angeles to rediscover and potentially revisit said eatery.

Or, as Path CEO Dave Morin told me, it “reduces the friction of remembering an event.”

That’s all well and good if you like to eat at the same places all the time. But competing takes on discovery from the likes of Foursquare, Yelp, Spindle, Facebook and Google offer other, more feature-rich signals, and the ability to discover new experiences rather than rediscover old stuff you’ve already done.

Moreover, almost all of those competitors draw on far larger data sets than Path currently offers with its five million users. Mining the history of activities of of the masses serves up many more potential opportunities to visit new places.

Here’s where Path deviates: Using search, we can scan back through the history of our friend’s experiences, browsing some of the many places they’ve checked in, and sorting it by city, by keyword, by theme. Within that history, Morin’s philosophy goes, we’re able to find some of the best restaurants, bars, or areas of interest — not, mind you, due to the many signals that the other services rely upon, but because our network of Path pals have visited them.

“Maybe the question isn’t necessarily, ‘Is this the best data set to find a restaurant?’ Morin said. “Maybe the question is, ‘Have my closest friends’ — you know, the ones you’ve befriended on Path — “‘decided to go to these restaurants?’”

It’s a curious approach, and a bit charming, considering it’s somewhat backward from most of the other sites working on discovery. The sample set, by the nature of the network, is smaller by design. And less choice, in Morin’s opinion, makes for better results in the context of Path.

I’m not sure I totally buy that quite yet, however. I wonder, between the Paths, the Foursquares and the Facebooks of the world, just how many folks remember to check in to locations via Path. As always, it runs up against the problem of “Do we need another social network?” by perhaps not being the go-to app for checking in.

Still, it’s novel. And the search function works quite well. Now we’ll see if it keeps users active, engaged and checking in.

As does Facebook, which is pushing hard into local discovery territory with Nearby, an updated feature inside its mobile app that offers suggestions on businesses and places of interest you may want to check out.

Nearby functions best by taking cues mined straight from your Facebook account — stuff you “Like,” stuff your friends have “Liked,” places you’ve checked in to, etc. The relevance argument here is that Facebook has a wealth of user data to draw upon for recommendations, perhaps more than Yelp or Foursquare.

It’s not entirely new ground. Facebook tried this sort of thing more than two years ago with Places, the company’s supposed Foursquare killer. Check in to joints, find friends, meet up and so on.

Surprise! Facebook didn’t kill Foursquare, nor did Yelp suddenly vanish. Foursquare has grown to upward of 20 million registered users, while Yelp went public and is growing by the day with overseas acquisitions. (Now, while they’re not dead, parsing Foursquare’s and Yelp’s business models and long-term prospects is another discussion entirely.)

So what’s different in round two? For one, it’s a heck of a lot nicer than the original effort. It’s personalized, it’s more robust, and all of your Facebook activity really does help fuel it.

In other words, it’s an actual discovery mechanism.

It’s probably going to be a whole lot better, considering Facebook acquired location-based services experts Gowalla, helmed by the very smart (and exceedingly pleasant, I may add) Josh Williams, almost a year ago to date.

But, you know, there’s the whole problem of intent to consider. Does my “Liking” a Facebook page for a business mean I’m inclined to visit them, or purchase anything from them? That’s the case that Facebook’s marketing department is trying to make to both SMBs and big brands right now, with mixed results.

Google, on the other hand, has this sort of thing pretty much nailed. Intent is built directly into how a Google search works. Looking for a restaurant address and times? Google it. On the move and looking for something to nosh? There’s a local discovery bar built into the Google.com homepage when you’re viewing on your mobile browser. In other words, ask Google and ye shall receive.

I’m curious, too, to see how often Facebook users swipe sideways in the app to dig through their tabs and find Nearby. I know I spend most of my time checking my News Feed from the app, rather than messing with other things. We’ll see if other folks use it differently.

Also of note: Facebook recommends you update your profile with lots more relevant information to make Nearby work better. Not too shabby of a way to collect more user data through the power of subtle suggestion, eh Facebook? Nice try.

Expect the new feature to come in an app update Monday afternoon.

Today at a local mobile conference in San Francisco, Groupon CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason appeared for another onstage interview and was immediately asked about the various and sundry mishegas of late at the daily deals site.

And said, um, not much. It wasn’t exactly his fault — there is almost no plus to him saying much.

So Mason did not.

Not much about thinly sourced rumors of acquisition interest by Google.

Not much about the palpable tension and discussions between him and some board members about whether he should remain as Groupon’s top leader.

Not much about its lackluster stock, down more than 80 percent since its IPO just over a year ago.

Not much about its issues in Europe or about its growth prospects.

“What I have said about Groupon is everything I will say about it,” he said. “I am focused on looking forward.”

Bokay!

Actually, Mason, who is a very clever man, joked effectively, “Let’s not talk about mobile,” which was the actual focus of the Mobile-Loco conference he was appearing at.

Fair point, and he moved into explaining what Groupon was up to these days (more of the same, but more with the mobile).

About one-third of the Chicago-based company’s business is now done via mobile, by the way.

“Our mobile customers have been our best customers,” he noted, making the point that smartphones appeal to a more cutting edge consumer and also merchants.

“I think they are willing to use technology when the value proposition is clear to them,” Mason said about retailers, one of whom he worked at recently. “They do it because it is important to them.”

Mason also talked about local, payments and other generalities about the social daily deals business.

All of which he answered with a level of nice confidence that belies troubles that the novice CEO is trying to overcome. It’s a tough task for anyone, of course, and not one that many would be able to handle with as much equanimity as Mason does in public. So, on one level, you have to hand it to Mason for putting himself out there so much at a difficult time and chatting away.

But not about what the audience wanted to hear about. Which is to say: What’s really next?

Sosh is the ultimate hipster app — it curates things that are new, fun, weird and memorable. If something gets bookmarked by too many people, it’s no longer pushed to other users. And for now, it’s only in San Francisco.

As Sosh CEO Rishi Mandal put it yesterday, “A Kanye concert won’t make it, but a secret hipster bluegrass show by The Head and the Heart will.”

Sosh just closed $4 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures. But wait, venture-backed start-ups are supposed to be scalable, right? In this case, not yet, but Mandal said Sosh plans to tackle New York and family-friendly activities next.

The company may be small — it’s been live for about a year — but it has a rabid following. More than half of registered users visit every week, according to Mandal, and 30 percent of all the personalized emails the company has sent have been opened. The average user is 29 years old, female, and already connected to nine Sosh members (through Facebook) on the first day she joins.

Sosh serves up about 500 activities, places, venues and curiosities per weekend in San Francisco, based on a process of crawling the Web, filtering out 75 percent for being bland, and then green-lighting picks by hand. It runs a site, an iPhone app and sends emails.

The company doesn’t have a sales team, though it has developed relationships with local merchants after they ask where a swarm of people is coming from, according to Mandal. “The thing local is missing is people coming back of their own volition,” he said. Sosh also has special events for active users, a la Yelp, and a popular T-shirt (see above).

Founded by alumni of the app company Slide, Sosh had previously raised $1 million from investors such as Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant, Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures.

The verdict from the San Jose, Calif., federal jury came early Saturday morning South Korea time, a day after a Seoul court, ruling on the same case, came out with a judgment that gave Samsung its biggest victory since the two companies began their global legal battle 16 months ago.

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Similar to Local Updates, Promoted Updates allow businesses to push out recommendations to potential customers, serving as advertisements to Foursquare users as they move throughout the world.

The updates appear based on factors like proximity, time of day and past places you’ve visited, Foursquare says, so that users will only be seeing the most relevant sorts of ads. So, for example, say you’re in SoMa around noon, and have a history of eating at sandwich joints. If a merchant like Caffe Centro (one of my lunch standbys) placed a promoted update message, you’d probably see it in your stream.

“We’re thinking of them as Google search ads for the real world,” product manager Noah Weiss told me in an interview. “But instead of a Google ad driving traffic to a site like BestBuy.com” — one of Foursquare’s initial launch partners — “we drive traffic to the actual Best Buy store.”

Promoted Updates only appear when a Foursquare user opens the Explore tab, essentially an in-app recommendation engine that suggests places of interest nearby, again tailored to your Foursquare history. That’s somewhat in line with the Google analogy; A search query requires intent, putting in a request, and being served a series of relevant suggestions by Google. That’s how Foursquare sees Explore, a way to express the intention to discover places of interest without knowing exactly what it is you’re seeking.

Just like Twitter and Facebook did with their respective “promoted” products, Foursquare aims to increase a merchant’s visibility through promoting it in the stream, that portion of the app which receives the most eyeballs. What’s more, updates also offer the ability to attach a message. Such a message could contain a deal or special promotion, a potential hook to getting more foot traffic in the door.

In a more grand sense, Promoted Updates are in line with Foursquare’s attempt to take seriously its monetization strategy. For some time, merchants have had access to this wealth of user check-in data — gender breakdown, visitation frequency and times of day, among other statistics — but until recently, they haven’t had the opportunity to put it to good use.

Now, after more than three years of collecting data, Foursquare will actually sell tools like Promoted Updates to businesses that wish to capitalize on the popular, 20-million-user-strong platform. Typically those tools have been found from third-party vendor companies, cutting Foursquare out of a potentially lucrative revenue stream.

For now, details are scant on just how lucrative it is for Foursquare. Chief Revenue Officer Steven Rosenblatt tells me each partner pays on a cost-per-action model, and each promotion lasts for several months, though he wouldn’t go into further detail.

The tool is currently in a pilot mode, launching with only a handful of about 20 or so partners including the Gap, Walgreens and Best Buy. After a few months of testing and feedback, the company will likely roll it out to more of its participating network of more than one million existing merchants.

The company plans to revamp its dashboard tools for small-business customers this week, beginning with “local updates,” a messaging system that allows businesses to contact their customers directly.

Businesses can currently offer specials — essentially, deals that show up inside the venue information page when users check in (the most frequent example are loyalty specials, or what Foursquare calls “digital punchcards”). With the new tool, businesses can send out messages to their regulars, updating them on timely offers or deals. I think of it as a targeted sidewalk chalkboard, aimed at customers who have already expressed interest in the business.

“We’ve built this because merchants are seeing tons of visitors, but until now have had no way to interact with their customers directly,” product manager Noah Weiss told me in an interview. “For updates, we’re actually using our own algorithms to decide who their best customers are, based on a number of factors — check-in frequency, current location, how recently you’ve checked in — so you’re only showing updates to the people who care to see them.”

This is important for Foursquare’s maturation, as the company aims to go beyond the “gamified” check in. The company took the “users first, business model later” approach in its early days, using the popularity of a “gamification” model to bolster its user base. But games and badges don’t yield revenue (at least, not directly), and Foursquare has shifted tack in the past year to pitch itself as a discovery engine for local points of interest, focused intensely on businesses.

After paying attention to the user side by relaunching its app, complete with an overhauled UI, Foursquare is tackling the stickier problem of giving its merchant partners better tools to pitch the more than 20 million active Foursquare users.

Previously, merchants have had access to a dashboard with a relatively large amount of customer data: It includes granular information such as male-versus-female breakdown, the most frequent customers, which regulars haven’t checked in for some time and the like. But even though businesses have had this wealth of customer insight, there hasn’t been a way to act on it effectively, outside of blanket specials.

Updates are Foursquare’s first step in giving verified businesses the ability to act on that data from the company’s own dashboard, without requiring those businesses to end up going the third-party social marketing route. (Hearsay Social is one prominent example of this type of company.)

What’s more, it’s a scalable solution. Large corporations or chain stores like Starbucks or H&M can give administrator privileges to individuals at the store and regional levels, as well as push out updates to customers at the national level. So, for example, a J.C. Penney district manager in Seattle can push an umbrella sale to its damp customer base, while another manager in Texas can update her patrons on that day’s deal on short-shorts. It’s contextual, and on a national level, context is king.

Like the company notes in a blog post, expect more of this to come in the future. It’s possible that this is another step toward a fuller, more robust suite of tools for merchants that Foursquare could actually charge for, providing a potentially lucrative revenue stream for the company.

As an aside, it’ll be interesting to watch Foursquare’s next series of moves, given that the problems of social, mobile and local are some of the most relevant to today’s tech economy. Especially relevant is the Yahoo CEO appointment of Marissa Mayer, who formerly served as Google’s VP of local and location services. To say that Yahoo is weak in mobile is a vast understatement, and Mayer could score early industry points as CEO by making a large talent and tech buy in acquiring Foursquare.

For now, we’ll have to wait and see how Foursquare scales its business on its own, slowly trudging toward a viable, long-term monetization strategy.

The appointment of Marissa Mayer as CEO of Yahoo earlier today was a definitively splashy move by the board of the troubled Internet giant.

And a key impresario of the showy hiring of the high-profile Google exec? None other than Yahoo’s former foe now turned driving force Daniel Loeb of the Third Point hedge fund.

It was classic Loeb style — brash, quick and done with an eye to the optics of the move as well as its impact.

The selection of the high-profile Mayer was unanimous among the Yahoo directors, who have now clearly gone in a product direction over a media one, represented by interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.

The choice came down to Mayer or Levinsohn and, in this, there really was no choice to speak of given her much more honed tech and product pedigree.

Mayer was integral to the early days of Google especially, in charge for a long time over its search product. More recently, though, she had been working on local efforts.

But, it was notable to many inside and outside the company that she did not get one of the key senior vice president nods at Google in a major reorg of the company under new CEO Larry Page.

“She was pretty much voted off the island, even though she was critical to its earliest successes,” said one person close to the situation.

Recently, multiple sources said she had been quietly seeking an exit from the search giant, including considering several venture firms. She also recently joined the board of retail giant Walmart.

Loeb, who had met Mayer relatively recently, was one of the key forces in pushing the board to consider aiming for someone of her level.

In fact, multiple sources said that he has become an influential voice — perhaps the most influential — on the board. While there has been a search committee run by director David Kenny, Loeb has also been actively buttonholing prospects, including focusing his early CEO search efforts on Hulu’s Jason Kilar.

That did not pan out, as Kilar withdrew himself from contention, but sources said Loeb kept pushing for a big name who would burnish Yahoo’s bruised reputation.

It’s all part of a series of efforts by the New York hedge fund head — who has been spending a lot of time of late trying to learn the complicated byways of Silicon Valley — to be more than just a smash-and-grab money man.

Loeb now owns close to six percent of Yahoo and is intent on reviving its prospects and, more importantly, its moribund stock.

And nabbing Mayer — who often appears in glossy magazine spreads, part of an effort that she has promoted that has made her the face of the search giant over the last decade — fits into that strategy well.

Indeed, Mayer will now be charged with the difficult task of creating innovative products to win at Yahoo going forward and even competing with Google in some arenas.

It’s clear she will attract talent, and is reportedly considering several other current and former Googlers to bring on board at Yahoo.

It will take a lot of such deep expertise, given Yahoo’s dicey prospects of late, with problems ranging from its advertising technology to weak morale to, perhaps most importantly, the continued lack of a clear strategic direction.

Whether Mayer can stem the tide is unclear, with some comparing her task to an even bigger version of the massive challenges and slow turnaround another former Googler, Tim Armstrong, has faced at AOL.

“Is she the Tim show, part 2, or can she remake Yahoo into a successful narrative going forward?,” said one person close to the situation.

One thing’s for certain: Today, at least, it was also the Dan Loeb show.

Mayer’s duties will be filled by her lieutenants, according to two sources with knowledge of the organization.

Mayer’s product list included Google Maps, Google Earth, Zagat, Street View and local search for both desktop and mobile. She is handing off those responsibilities on short notice, after abruptly resigning today.

Some of the more prominent members of Mayer’s team are Jen Fitzpatrick, VP of engineering for Google+ Local; Brian McClendon, VP of engineering for Google Maps and Google Earth; and Bernardo Hernandez, director of product management and managing director at Zagat.

Mayer’s reports will now answer to Google’s SVP of commerce and local, Jeff Huber, though a broader reorganization seems likely, a source said.

Here’s Google CEO Larry Page’s statement on Mayer’s departure:

“Since arriving at Google just over 13 years ago as employee #20, Marissa has been a tireless champion of our users. She contributed to the development of our Search, Geo, and Local products. We will miss her talents at Google.”

And here’s Google Chairman Eric Schmidt:

“I worked with Marissa for many years — she’s a great product person, very innovative and a real perfectionist who always wants the best for users. Yahoo has made a good choice and I am personally very excited to see another woman become CEO of a technology company. Best wishes to Marissa and Yahoo!”

Longtime Yahoo exec Raymond Stern (pictured here) — who seems to have fit into a lot of management reorgs in his short time at the Silicon Valley Internet giant — has been named to a new role at the company as SVP of strategy, corporate development and new ventures.

He’ll be reporting to CEO Scott Thompson, according to an internal memo I got sent by the people who send me internal memos from Yahoo. (A group, I might add, that is getting bigger by the day.)

When he got to Yahoo in late 2009, Stern had first been named SVP of North America partnerships and business development for Yahoo. He later had to also pinch-hit as its head of U.S. audience, mobile and local, after an exec left, before being named SVP of North America audience. Then, after another exec took over the audience job, he was back to business development and partnerships and also added the listings business to his portfolio. Then, Stern got mobile biz dev back, after another exec left.

Now, the man who has been the Swiss Army Knife of Yahoo will be the key strategy guy for Thompson, who clearly wants to do a lot of strategizing.

Interesting note: Stern was a former consultant to Boston Consulting Group, which is Thompson’s go-to outside team on his ongoing restructuring of the company. He is also a former Intuit exec.

As per usual, here is the internal memo on Stern’s appointment from Thompson, who is dealing with some other very thorny issues right now too:

Yahoos –

Over the last few months, you’ve heard me talk a lot about focusing our company around our core business. As part of this, we need to find new ways to strengthen, leverage, and monetize our core assets — all in conjunction with our long-term strategy focused on driving growth. To help tackle this challenge, I’m excited to announce that Raymond Stern will take on a new role at Yahoo! as senior vice president of strategy, corporate development, and new ventures, reporting to me.

For those of you who haven’t had the chance to meet Raymond over the last two and half years here at Yahoo!, he previously oversaw distribution partnerships and business development, as well as our Latin American, Canadian, and small business teams. Earlier in his career, he spent 10 years at the Boston Consulting Group, and later had various roles at Intuit including leading strategy and corporate development during a transformational period in the late 90s through the mid 2000s.

In his new role, Raymond will work across the teams to ensure alignment and that we are taking advantage of opportunities around the globe. He will lead three critical areas for us:

Strategy: Raymond will lead corporate strategy, working in close partnership with the senior leadership team and me.

Corporate Development: Raymond will work with the team to find opportunities to accelerate our progress and growth through acquisitions, investments and strategic partnerships. In conjunction with this, Marcus Shen and his group will be renamed corporate M&A, and will continue to be the transactional execution arm supporting Yahoo!’s corporate development initiatives.

New Ventures: Raymond will look at emerging areas outside of what’s happening in the halls of Yahoo! and bring new innovative and disruptive ideas to the forefront.

In the coming weeks, you’ll hear more from Raymond as he works with the leadership team to align our corporate priorities and long-term strategy.

Please join me in welcoming Raymond to this important new role.

/signed
/Scott Thompson

And here’s to your new job, Raymond:

It’s not a sustainable diet, but that’s what was available at the relatively few shops around San Francisco and New York City that are accepting Pay with Square and PayPal’s mobile app.

In case you’ve missed it, there’s a battle brewing over the future of mobile payments — that is, the ability for consumers to ditch the leather wallet and purchase things with their mobile phones. Companies like Google, PayPal, Square, wireless providers and credit card companies are debating various forms of mobile payment technology.

But in the battle over who gets to control your digital wallet, it’s important not to forget the consumer experience. Is it really that much easier to pay with a mobile phone than it is to just pull out cash or a credit card?

That’s what I set out to find this week, mainly using Pay with Square.

Square is a company known for creating a device for small businesses that plugs into an iPhone and can read a swiped credit card, but the company recently renamed and relaunched its app for consumers. Now called Pay with Square, the app works only at stores that are using Square’s register system for the iPad. Currently, around 75,000 merchants across the U.S. are accepting payments via the Pay with Square app.

In my experience, Pay with Square proved to be an easy, enjoyable app to use to purchase things using my smartphone — though it won’t be an everyday app for me until there are more businesses accepting it.