The move is a major one for LivingSocial in many ways, establishing for the Washington, D.C., start-up a major beachhead in a key Asian country.

It is also the biggest of the nine acquisitions LivingSocial has made over the past year.

Ticket Monster’s name might well refer to the scary growth it has been experiencing. In the past year, Ticket Monster (known popularly in South Korea as TMon) has grown rapidly from virtually no revenues in May 2010, when it was founded, to $24 million last month.

It has more than 600 employees and offers roughly 60 deals a day to South Koreans. The company, which purchased Malaysia’s Integrated Methods in June, had also been preparing for an initial public offering.

For LivingSocial, which is the second-largest deals provider after Groupon, TMon will provide a critical home base in Asia, which has been historically difficult to enter for U.S.-based companies.

As Groupon has demonstrated, it can be both challenging and costly. LivingSocial is expected to follow Groupon and file for an IPO. Groupon runs its own division in South Korea.

So far, LivingSocial operates in a handful of Asian countries, including the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, through acquisitions of Ensogo and DealKeren earlier this year. Once the deal is approved by South Korean regulators, LivingSocial will operate in 23 countries in total.

The similarities between TMon and LivingSocial are easy to spot.

In addition to daily deals, TMon has also rolled out specific niches targeting families, events and travel, as well as offering instant deals, which can be purchased and used in the same day. It also sells a variety of products, from books to handbags to other fashion goods, through flash sales.

Its general e-commerce capabilities may have also appealed to Amazon, one of LivingSocial’s major investors.

“They have been studying their favorite U.S.-based company for a bit now,” LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy joked.

More seriously, he added that LivingSocial has been having conversations with TMon for awhile.

“We like the team and how fast they’ve been able to innovate and grow beyond one business line into multiple business lines. They’ve done a lot of the same things we would have asked them to do,” he said.

Ticket Monster CEO Daniel Shin, who is a bit of an Internet star in South Korea, said the company has been modeled after both LivingSocial and Groupon.

“Obviously, we take a lot of best practices from around the world,” said Shin, who moved to the U.S. from South Korea when he was nine and returned in January as one of the company’s founders. “We started last May, and both LivingSocial and Groupon started earlier than that, so any learnings we could take away from them, we did.”

Shin declined to name Groupon as one of the other bidders, but said Ticket Monster was “contacted by a lot of different parties.”

The company raised $11 million in capital from Insight Venture Partners of New York and South Korea’s Stonebridge Capital.

O’Shaughnessy said it will likely continue to make acquistions as it expands globally.

“We’ve been pretty aggressive on that front,” he said.

Photo Credit: Ticket Monster.

In a company statement announcing the deal, TI CEO Rich Templeton described the deal as being about “strength and growth.” He said National had done a good job boosting its profitability and reining in expenses, and that the combination will, upon the close, boost TI’s earnings per share.

TI specializes in wireless chips sold into mobile phones while National specializes in analog chips. TI is in the analog chip business too and has 30,000 analog products in its portfolio, which will now be supplemented by the 12,000 analog products that National sells. In one go, analog products will become more than 50 percent of TI’s business.

Another key factor: National’s manufacturing prowess. It owns chip factories–usually referred to as “fabs”–in Maine, Scotland and Malayasia, and TI says it will continue to operate them.

Terms of the agreement call for National shareholders to receive $25 in cash for each share of National common stock they hold at the time of closing. TI expects to fund the transaction with a combination of existing cash balances and debt. As of December 31, TI had about $3 billion in combined cash and short-term investments, and no long-term debt. TI also had access to a variable-rate revolving credit facility that gives it access to a combined $1.9 billion until August 2012; I’m presuming that the remaining $1.5 billion or so will be borrowed. National also has $879 million and change in cash on its books, but a little more than a $1 billion in long-term debt.

Investors seem cautiously optimistic about the deal. TI shares are up slightly in after-hours trading. National shares are naturally soaring by 70 percent to catch up with the valuation of the deal. One other company whose price I just checked is that of Fairchild Semiconductor. It’s a rival to National in the analog and power-management business. Its shares are up 94 cents–or more than 5 percent–after hours, and there’s no mistaking the speculative hope that it could be the next takeover target.

When Yahoo launched its massive advertising campaign–featuring the tagline, “It’s Y!ou”–earlier this fall with splashy events in New York and slick marketing rollouts all over the U.S., not everyone at the Internet portal loved it.

“It’s not M!e,” joked a longtime Yahoo (YHOO) exec to BoomTown in an email, one of many like it that I got from inside the company, all of which worried about whether the motto and ad effort had enough punch and point to get Yahoo back on track.

And, outside the company, several too-early reports purported to show that the $100 million campaign to revitalize the Yahoo brand was not working because it had not increased audience–although both Forrester Research (FORR) and Nielsen penned counterarguments.

In any case, none of the noise seems to have bothered the Silicon Valley-based Yahoo, whose execs say they are thrilled with the results so far. Thus, Yahoo is staying on message as it moves into the latest phase of the multiyear effort.

That includes adding to the overall brand promise more specific “product proof points” that focus on Yahoo’s “hero products,” such as search, email, homepage, mobile and more.

Yahoo’s new lead creative team at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners has been working on the next direction, which will roll out after the new year and stress “relevance.”

The next push will include even more online advertising, as well as more outdoor branding. But it will also add guerrilla marketing, such as live demos at analog locations, from Internet cafes in Malaysia to senior citizen centers here in the U.S.

What’s not changing at all is the main brand declaration, as the message rolls out to more countries in the months ahead.

“We are committed to ‘It’s You,’ and it is a foundational element that will remain intact,” said Penny Baldwin, SVP of Yahoo’s global integrated marketing and brand management, in an interview with me. “Now we are going to be demonstrating and tuning the experience.”

Added Baldwin, who arrived at the company this summer: “The first chapter has been to root the brand position…since the image and stance was muddied in the past. Now, we are going to clarify our position.”

And that position is that Yahoo execs believe feedback from sales, consumers, employees and advertisers to the campaign has been largely positive and will goose its business.

More to the point, said Baldwin, the effort has started to show some results, especially in international markets such as India and the U.K, where the brand campaign first launched.

“Our main message has been to say that we have more of what you want and less of what you don’t want and showing relevance is working,” said Baldwin. “We are simply give it more meaning and more evidence, so consumers will spend more time with us.”

Baldwin points to several different and more recent polls, including from comScore (SCOR) and Nielsen, that do indeed show increases in Yahoo homepage engagement of three to five percent from September to October.

A Yahoo spokesman said that the company’s goal has been mostly to “increase engagement with U.S. audience (where we saw positive results in page views, time spent) rather than on unique visitors, which will take longer as we already have about 80 percent penetration.”

In less mature markets, the spokesman noted, both traffic and engagement are the goals.

As for any grumpy employees, the spokesman said a recent internal Yahoo survey showed that about 80 percent of employees responded favorably or very favorably to the brand, and another 13 percent were neutral.

(Apparently, that was the 13 percent who all emailed me!)

Most important, he said, Yahoo was sticking to its guns because it has seen “statistically significant lifts in ‘brand familiarity’ and ‘future brand usage.’”

That’s a fancy way of saying people are noticing the ads, which would be hard not to, since they are everywhere (including on this Web site).

And there will be more where that came from, said Baldwin, as the company leans further into its initial efforts at making consumers think again about Yahoo.

“This is a brand transformation issue,” said Baldwin flatly.

In case you don’t remember, Friendster was once the buzziest of start-ups. And in 2003, when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school and Twitter’s Evan Williams was still working on Blogger, the company turned down a $30 million offer from Google (GOOG).

That deal would be well worth more than $1 billion today. But reports peg MOL’s purchase price at about $100 million.

Today, Friendster’s primary role is that of a cautionary tale for Webby start-ups: Look what happens if you miss your window. “I don’t want to be another Friendster” is a well-worn cliché that still has resonance, and I heard it just the other week while sitting in the office of an Internet CEO whose company may be on the block soon.

Looking for a more positive spin this morning? Okay, try this: Friendster’s sale represents the Internet’s power to reinvent companies. Even though no one you know uses the site, it never went away, and it has quietly amassed a reported 100 million users, almost all of them in Asia.

Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam lack the kind of technology and financial resources that China and some other large countries use to police the Internet. The Southeast Asian nations are using other methods–also seen in China–to tamp down criticism, including arresting some bloggers and individuals posting contentious views online.

That is distressing free-speech advocates who had hoped that Southeast Asia–until recently a region where Internet use was relatively unfettered–would become a model of open debate in the developing world as its economies modernize.

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Tell me why you aren’t going to be the next Friendster.”

– Venture capitalist David L. Sze’s 2006 litmus test for entrepreneurs who claimed to have the next MySpace.

If Orkut is the Facebook of Brazil, then Friendster is the Orkut of Asia. The company, which created the social- networking market only to forfeit it to Myspace and Facebook, is apparently doing quite well in Asia. So much so, that it’s used its success on that continent to secure some new venture funding and a CEO with a Google (GOOG) pedigree. In a statement proclaiming itself the No. 1 social network in Asia this morning, Friendster named Richard Kimber, Google’s Managing Director of Sales and Operations for South East Asia, as CEO. The company also said it has raised $20 million in new venture funding from DG Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, and the Founders Fund. Friendster plans to use that money to hire up and bolster its presence across Asia, specifically Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Perhaps, we’ll see that Friendster movie yet–though I still can’t imagine a worse concept.