Yahoo is preparing to begin layoffs of what could be thousands of employees starting next week, according to multiple sources, and is then expected to announce a new restructuring of the company the week after.

The swirl at the Silicon Valley Internet giant has grown more intense this week, as new CEO Scott Thompson has brought in top management for a series of meetings both Tuesday and Wednesday to outline the plans.

What has emerged — although sources noted that Thompson and others communicating the pending changes said nothing was yet set in stone — is the picture of a drastically slimmed-down organization with a focus on media, advertising and new but unclear “future” initiatives.

First the layoffs: Sources said the cuts will be deep and mostly aimed at the product, research and marketing units of Yahoo, which are likely to take place Wednesday. The ultimate goal, said multiple sources, is to cut many thousands from Yahoo’s staff of close to 14,000 employees, which is actually much larger, due to contract workers not officially in its roster.

The entire cut will not take place at once, said sources, since Thompson and others are still trying to figure out how to dispense with its ad technology org and, potentially, its search business. He has been in discussions with both Microsoft and Google about this, although there are other possibilities, too.

Both these parts of Yahoo together have about 2,500 staffers, whose fate is not yet sorted out.

Also still baking is the new structure, although sources said it is most likely to be comprised of a global media division, one that encompasses Yahoo’s communications and search businesses, and ones focused on global and also regional sales. There could also be a small organization of about 50 aimed at future innovation.

Americas head Ross Levinsohn is the likeliest exec to run the media arm, while Shashi Seth — who now heads search and marketplaces — would be the obvious candidate for the the communications/search one.

Thompson has already been conducting a search for a new worldwide sales head, although one possible internal exec for the job could be Rich Riley, who was recently running Yahoo’s Europe, Africa and Middle East region.

It is not clear how Chief Product Officer Blake Irving fits in the possible new org, since much of the development could now move to the decentralized units.

Some current operational execs — such as service engineering and ops head David Dibble, CFO Tim Morse, and top lawyer Mike Callahan — are likely to continue to operate as before.

Thompson, along with consultants he has hired from the Boston Consulting Group, presented the possible plan in front of Yahoo’s senior execs on Tuesday. That was followed by more meetings with a wider range of top management yesterday, although Thompson was not as highly specific in these meetings.

In fact, according to a half-dozen sources, Thompson apparently grew somewhat testy in one of the gatherings, when asked if there was a strategy he was going to announce in more detail to the group.

(Dear Scott, these are very talented employees who love the company and who have been through the wringer and it’s not their fault that leadership has failed them, so it might be a good idea to treat them with as much respect as possible right now.)

More to come, obviously.

The comedian, who played the Facebook CEO on “Saturday Night Live” and even appeared at Facebook’s developer conference, has co-founded the new travel start-up CanaryHop.

The Los Angeles-based company is creating a marketplace where travelers can look for tours from well-established vendors or any individual professing to have a skill and looking to make a few bucks.

CanaryHop officially launched yesterday.

The site explains that a “Canary” is “a tour guide, a local, someone with a special talent, a person who is passionate about their community, an expert at something, or a teacher.” For example, it could be a professional chess player willing to give lessons, someone who runs a surf camp, or simply a foodie who knows the best restaurants in Chinatown.

Meanwhile, a “Hopper” is a traveler.

Still don’t get it?

Samberg does his best to act out how it works in a funny and pretty entertaining video. In it, he wakes up not knowing where he is, but for some reason has a bunch of new talents, like being able to speak French, throw knives and charm snakes. Unfortunately, you’ll have to visit the site here in order to see it.

Instead, here’s Samberg impersonating Zuckerberg on SNL, right after the release of “The Social Network”:

Who in their right mind would lie to Ira Glass?

That was my first reaction to the revelation that the theatrical monologuist Mike Daisey had lied or fabricated — or in his words, “taken dramatic license” with — certain parts of his stage play, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”

When I met people at parties in recent weeks and told them that I write about technology and that I had devoted more than a decade to covering Apple, the first question I used to get was: “Did you know Steve Jobs?” Since about January of this year, that first question has become, “What do you think of Mike Daisey?”

I haven’t had a real answer. I hadn’t seen his show, which was favorably reviewed by the New York Times, nor had I heard the episode of the highly respected public radio documentary program “This American Life” titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” that had been adapted from his play.

The show — or shows — hit a cultural nerve at a critical moment. Apple is the biggest company in the world, sporting a market capitalization of $546 billion as of Friday, with $100 billion worth of cash and investments on its balance sheet and the most popular stable of consumer electronics products in the world, especially the iPhone and the iPad. All of them are manufactured by workers in China, who labor for wages that are low by Western standards, put in hours that by Western reckoning are long, under conditions that to Western eyes aren’t ideal, doing jobs that by any standard are incredibly tedious.

Daisey’s stage show, which became a sensation among New York’s chattering classes, sought to draw attention to the plight of allegedly oppressed workers at Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturing partner in China. As New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood put it, the play “is a mind-clouding, eye-opening exploration of the moral choices we unknowingly or unthinkingly make when we purchase nifty little gadgets like the iPhone.”

The stage show had been adapted for radio on public radio’s “This American Life,” which is probably the most-respected radio documentary program in the history of broadcasting. And the Daisey episode was presented as documentary, meaning the radio show’s staff of journalists and producers were vouching for it being true.

The problem: Much of it wasn’t.

In the show, Daisey described a trip to China, as well as a visit to Foxconn’s outer gates and other manufacturing companies in Shenzen, where many are located. He delivers a detailed and emotionally riveting account of meeting girls as young as 12, 13 and 14 years old who claimed to work for Foxconn. This would be in violation both of local laws and of Apple policies.

He also told of meeting workers poisoned by a chemical called n-Hexane, used to polish screens.

And, perhaps most movingly, he related a tear-jerking scene in which he showed a working iPad to a man who said he had crippled a hand while making its parts in a Foxconn metal press, yet had never so much as seen one of the devices powered on. Seeing the iPad’s screen in action, he tells Daisey, “is like a kind of magic.”

The word “magic” fits oddly here, because these meetings didn’t happen as Daisey said. “This American Life” yesterday aired a lengthy episode entitled “Retraction,” documenting Daisey’s many liberties with the facts.

To help do so, a reporter for another public radio show — Rob Schmitz of “Marketplace” — did what no one else in the media seemed to be willing to do, which was subject Daisey’s claims to scrutiny. Most damning of all in Schmitz’s report was the testimony of Daisey’s translator, called Cathy. She was found — after Daisey had told TAL he had lost contact with her — and disputed many of the anecdotes taken from the play and used in the radio segment about Foxconn.

Among the fabrications: Daisey didn’t speak to quite as many people nor visit nearly as many plants as he said he did. She disputed finding underage workers. The n-Hexane poisoning incident occurred not at Foxconn in Shenzen where Daisey visited, but at a Wintek facility in Suzchou, more than 900 miles to the north of Shenzen.

The stage show, and therefore the radio show that was derived from it, turned out to be a mixture of facts and fiction. Which might be fine for a production on the New York theatrical stage, where fiction and fact blend readily. And, while it might be okay in entertainment products, you don’t expect it from a prestigious radio documentary program.

And that is where the problems began.

When Daisey’s monologue was adapted for “This American Life,” outrage began to grow among people who wanted to do something about it. It was, Glass says, the most downloaded episode of “TAL” ever, and public radio listeners did what public radio listeners tend to do. For one thing, they started a petition. More than a quarter of a million people have signed a petition at Change.org, inspired by the TAL production based on Daisey’s work, demanding that Apple make changes.

That includes crafting a “worker protection strategy” for new products released, as well as publishing data from Fair Labor Association audits.

Feeding the frenzy, Daisey stepped up as the leading voice for worker rights in China’s electronics industry. He was seemingly everywhere in the media. Since the TAL segment aired in January, Daisey has been seen on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” in a report that, like the “TAL” episode, is now going to have to be retracted or at the very least walked back.

Another CBS-owned property, CNET, hosted Daisey as part of “Reporters Roundtable,” alongside Charles Duhigg of the New York Times, co-author of a series of front page stories in that newspaper. Duhigg ended his “Roundtable” appearance by urging people who care about the issue to go and see Daisey’s play.

Daisey also appeared on MSNBC repeating the same anecdotes and tarnishing the usually shiny Apple. And on HBO. And PBS. And C-SPAN.

Needless to say, there will have to be many more retractions in the days ahead.

At this point, it’s hard to determine what’s more outrageous, Daisey’s lies to Ira Glass and his team, or the national media’s willingness to give Daisey a platform to repeat the same lies and fabrications without making the slightest effort to vet them.

The circumstances around Apple’s manufacturing arrangements in China aren’t new. As a columnist for Businessweek I wrote about Apple’s first round of “sweatshop” allegations in 2006, well before the age of the iPhone and the iPad, which had at the time first come to light in part because of the reporting by London’s Daily Mail.

I’ve never been to China. Many people know more about the on-the-ground facts concerning Apple’s factories than I do. But there are many reporters who have been there. In 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Fredrik Balfour wrote a powerful cover story for that magazine, which aimed to get to the bottom of the string of suicides that occurred among Foxconn employees that year.

ABC’s “Nightline” visited Foxconn earlier this year. Its report was criticized in some circles, because at the time of his death, Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs happened to be the largest shareholder of that network’s parent company, Disney. Also, ABC had been invited by Apple and Foxconn. Even so, “Nightline” anchor Bill Weir, seeing conditions very different from what Daisey described in the course of his reporting, wondered if Mike Daisey’s work was questionable.

At the very least, Daisey is a dramatist who now admits he chose to lie, but for reasons known only to himself. The chance to raise his profile and sell more tickets to his monologue are obvious potential motivations. Whatever it was, his dramatic product is meant to be consumed as thought-provoking entertainment, not as fact-based journalism, which many people assumed it was.

This is the crux of Daisey’s defense for lying to Ira Glass and his fact-checker: That he’s not a journalist and took dramatic license with the events, and now regrets doing the “This American Life” segment.

And that’s the real shame here.

Clearly, people care about how workers who make our electronics are treated, or there wouldn’t have been a market for Daisey’s show, or for an hour-long radio documentary adapting it. And the subject is one we need to discuss at length as a society. The net result of Mike Daisey’s efforts to put self-promotion ahead of the facts has badly muddied the waters, and has probably done more harm to the people he sought to help.

So, instead of illumination on a serious topic, we are left with little. Mike Daisey is an opportunistic fabulist and should be ashamed of himself for lying. Ira Glass and his team are ashamed for giving him wider attention, and have said so. But there are many more people who should be even more ashamed for taking Daisey’s lies at face value. There should be many more retractions and apologies in the days ahead.

But now we have to start the conversation about Apple and Foxconn and workers’ rights all over again, this time with real, verifiable facts at our command. Is that so much to ask?

(Image courtesy of Mike Daisey’s Web site.)

In an effort to minimize the impact of massive layoffs that Yahoo’s top management has been planning, according to sources close to the situation, one of the latest ideas to save costs and presumably jobs by new CEO Scott Thompson is to sell off much of its advertising technology platform, including Right Media.

And among the possible buyers Thompson has been targeting in recent visits: Google and Microsoft, as well as Silver Lake, the private equity firm that had once been talking to the Silicon Valley Internet giant about making a large investment in the company.

(That particular deal has gone south, but there is always yet another scheme on the horizon at Yahoo!)

The concept behind such a sale, according to several sources inside and outside the company, is to turn a cost center into a revenue source, with Yahoo essentially outsourcing a business that was a cornerstone of its strategy. A negotiable number of employees affiliated with those units would then move over to the new owner.

The most ideal plan, said sources, would be to sell Yahoo’s whole advertising technology “stack,” including the Right Media Exchange, a marketplace for advertisers, publishers and ad networks to trade online ads. Yahoo bought it for $700 million in 2007.

According to info on the company’s site, it has “300,000 active global buyers and sellers and more than 11 billion daily transactions.”

Also part of the possible package is APT, a system Yahoo has built to make buying and selling online advertising easier. In addition, Yahoo’s technologies for display-ad serving have been mentioned as a possibility for sale.

It’s unclear what the potential sale means for the new ad strategy that U.S. boss Ross Levinsohn and his lieutenant Jim Heckman have been pursuing since last summer. That plan included its own acquisition of ad network Interclick and an attempt to sync up with rivals AOL and Microsoft in an effort to fend off Google and some third-party players, like ad networks.

But the reason for contemplating much a major move — which has been considered before, but never has been seriously offered — are obvious: While Yahoo once dominated this arena, it has steadily lost ground, especially to Google. The search giant has made almost all of its money in search-related ads, but has been moving aggressively via its DoubleClick and other ad-serving entities into higher-level ads.

Microsoft has also been trying to compete, as has AOL, but it’s getting to be an expensive race, and one where Yahoo would have to make major investments to once again gain momentum. Building up this business again had been the aim of co-founder Jerry Yang, who wanted to go big in the arena in a number of ways before he left the company earlier this year.

But those days seem to be over at Yahoo.

“A lot of what has happened so far under Scott [Thompson] has been trying to find more revenue anywhere it can be generated, and get out of businesses that are not growing,” said one person. “Right now, it’s a lot about what we shouldn’t do rather than what we should.”

That has meant visits to see both Google and Microsoft about possible deals by Thompson, with the involvement of CFO Tim Morse and Chief Product Officer Blake Irving.

Thompson (pictured here) has also recently been talking to Silver Lake about the ad-platform sale, in a deal that might include the Andreessen Horowitz venture fund. This would be a different kind of transaction, said sources, in which a separate company would be formed, with Yahoo owning a piece and contracting with the new entity to provide ad technology.

All this activity is related to the layoffs in the works of perhaps thousands of employees, which were to have been communicated to the company this week.

Sources said those have been delayed for some weeks for several reasons, including whether to consider more deeply if certain larger business units can be spun off, sold or somehow transformed. (To be clear: Major layoffs are still being planned, but now might take place in two parts, said sources, in what is a quickly changing and volatile atmosphere at Yahoo.)

Another area being looked at, said sources, is Yahoo’s search advertising partnership with Microsoft, which has not been as successful as had been expected. While Yahoo has been working with the software giant about improving the results, Thompson has apparently been contemplating other possibilities, including working with Google (calling all regulators!) and/or laying off up to 900 employees who work on the company’s search offering.

Any of these moves could, of course, cause a firestorm of controversy, which Thompson appears to not worry much about. He was the driving force in Yahoo’s patent lawsuit against Facebook earlier this week, which is largely attracting a negative reaction across the tech landscape.

A number of prominent voices have spoken out against the legal action, including well-known VC Fred Wilson, who yesterday penned a poisonous blog post, titled “Yahoo Crosses the Line.”

It ends thusly: “I am not writing this in defense of Facebook. They can and will defend themselves. I am writing this in outrage at Yahoo! I used to care about that company for some reason. No more. They are dead to me. Dead and gone. I hate them now.”

Ouch!

Also weighing in publicly via Twitter was former Yahoo director Eric Hippeau, who was one of the company’s first investors, which is embedded below:

Pathetic and heartbreaking last stand for Yahoo bit.ly/yirCcj It’s all over. I loved you very much.

— Eric Hippeau (@erichippeau) March 13, 2012

Double ouch!

All I can say is that Thompson certainly has a lot of gumption. That has actually been his M.O. from the start, said several sources, with the former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit and dark horse cold-emailing his way into the Yahoo CEO job.

True story: He had not been among its list of possible candidates — largely because he had been placed in his job at eBay many moons ago by Heidrick & Struggles, which was conducting the Yahoo CEO search, and that’s a talent acquisition no-no to poach someone you placed.

That did not stop Thompson, who thought he might be good for the job and reached out directly to board members at the end of the selection effort, which then led to the search committee and soon enough to the job in what was a very quick vetting and secretive (although not secretive enough!) hiring process.

Since then, Thompson has been on a tear, from working on a restructuring to trying to assuage activist shareholder Dan Loeb to helping put the kibosh on its Asian stake sale talks to suing Facebook. And now this sale effort, too.

If the peripatetic Thompson — who might need a dose of Ritalin before this thing is over — wanted to get noticed by the tech powers that be: Mission accomplished!

“He’s definitely someone who appears to have decided on shooting the moon with a lot of these actions,” said one person close to the situation, referring to the move in the card game of Hearts, which is a risky gambit to capture every penalty card worth 26 points in order to win. “I just hope no one loses an eye in the process.”

(That would be triple ouch, by the way.)

No comments all around, but everyone was certainly cordial on this rainy morning.

The new campaign — set to the tune of “Let’s Stay Together,” by Al Green — is much more tame than last year’s ad. The 30-second spot focuses on creating family memories around campfires, swimming holes and hiking trails; memories that often can be made in or near homes — not in hotels.

HomeAway, which operates vacation-rentals marketplaces, including HomeAway.com, VRBO.com and VacationRentals.com, went out on a limb for its Super Bowl commercial last year. If the point was to generate buzz before filing for its initial public offering, it was a success.

But the Austin, Texas-based company ended up having to yank the ad after drawing criticism over a particularly disturbing image: In the commercial, a doll — which was obviously not a child — was thrown against a wall to demonstrate how cramped hotel rooms can be, compared to more spacious rental houses.

The updated — and more subtle — campaign will air in select markets during NBC’s broadcast of the 69th Golden Globe Awards. Following its debut, the spot will air on the Travel Channel, the Food Network, HGTV and other special promotions, including the Grammy Awards on Feb. 12, the Academy Awards on Feb. 26 and the “Survivor” finale.

Second time’s the charm?

In the past seven months, Fab has grown rapidly, registering 1.65 million users, who have purchased 750,000 products.

It now plans to grow even faster, with the help of this acquisition.

Both companies have a similar mission: To bring independent artists and craftsmen, who make aesthetically appealing and sometimes out-of-the ordinary items, to a large marketplace.

Fab.com does this mostly for home decor, and New York-based FashionStake does it mostly for fashion and apparel. The sites have the flavor of a Gilt Groupe, which sells high-end fashion at a discount, except they offer more undiscovered brands, at more reasonable prices.

In a blog post, Fab CEO Jason Goldberg said FashionStake co-founders Vivian Weng and Daniel Gulati will join the Fab company.

Goldberg did not disclose terms of the deal, but it’s possible that he tapped into a large cash reserve, which includes a $40 million round of capital raised last month from Andreessen Horowitz and others.

FashionStake, which launched in September 2010, has received investments from a number of players, including Battery Ventures, Forerunner Ventures and Gilt Groupe co-founder Alexis Maybank.

Last year, FashionStake acquired Moxsie, another retailer of independent fashion.

Just as the annual Consumer Electronics Show kicks off this week, according to a report from the NPD Group: Consumer electronics sales during this past holiday period dropped six percent from last year.

That should be some not-so-welcome news for the vendors at the Las Vegas gadget confab, which is seeking to show off new wares to excite said consumers.

Those offerings had better step it up, from a look at the NPD Weekly Tracking Service, which noted that the decline was coming off another decline from a year ago.

While 2011′s drop was not as bad as 2010′s, it’s not the right direction, although the tally did not include some of the more explosive device categories being prominently featured at CES, such as tablets.

Said NPD: “Total consumer technology sales (excluding cell phones, tablets, e-readers, and video games) fell 5.9 percent to around $9.5 billion for the 5 weeks ending December 24, a slight improvement over the 6.2 percent decline in 2010.”

Sales of personal computers and televisions fell 4 percent, with flat unit volumes.

“2010 was the first year in quite awhile where the real drags on the core CE marketplace were not TVs and PCs,” said Stephen Baker, VP of industry analysis at NPD, in a press release. “Revenue for those two segments outperformed while the rest of the market dropped by more than 7 percent. The accelerated rate of decline in older technology categories such as DVD, GPS and MP3 players put a ceiling on how well the industry could perform during the holiday.”

Consumers did snap up flat-panel TVs, with screen sizes of 50 inches and higher rising by 32 percent in unit sales.

And the rocky 3-D TV business also grew by more than 100 percent, with TVs with “3D capability accounting for more than one in every five dollars spent on TVs during the holiday.”

Also up: Home theater systems (10 percent) and stand-alone streaming devices (65 percent).

But those increases did not stem the overall negative tide.

For other sectors, here’s the damage to holiday revenue in percentage change from 2011 dollars spent:

Blu-ray players: Down 17 percent.

Camcorders: Down 42.5 percent.

Digital picture frames: Down 37.5 percent.

GPS: Down 32.6 percent.

HDD: Down 25.1 percent.

Mice and keyboards: Down 7.1 percent.

MP3 players: Down 20.5 percent.

Multifunction printers: Down 9.9 percent.

Point-and-shoot cameras: Down 20.8 percent.

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Well-known online advertising exec Frank Weishaupt, who recently ran North American marketplaces for Yahoo, will join ad display performance firm Criteo to head up sales.

Weishaupt, who left Yahoo several months ago, will be based in Boston and will be hiring up to 100 salespeople. He’ll report to another former top Yahoo sales exec, Criteo President Greg Coleman.

Interestingly, one of the pair’s most pressing challenges going forward will be the recent move of Yahoo to block “retargeting” firms.

In a post last week, Peter Kafka wrote that Yahoo told Criteo and others that “it would stop selling them its ‘Class 2’ remnant inventory, which the companies used to purchase on behalf of clients and essentially resell at a premium. The idea, theoretically, is that Yahoo will sell more of those ads itself.”

Here’s the official press release:

CRITEO TAPS FRANK WEISHAUPT AND EXPANDS FOOTPRINT; OPENS BOSTON OFFICE

Leading online advertising performance platform expands US presence with Boston office and hires Former Yahoo! digital media veteran

PALO ALTO, CA — (NOVEMBER 14, 2011) – Criteo, the global leader in performance display today announced that Frank Weishaupt, former Vice President, North American Advertising Marketplaces at Yahoo!, will join the company as SVP of Sales. The company also announced the continued expansion into the US Market with the opening of an office in Boston, which will focus on sales and service to mid-market advertisers and publishers. With offices in over three continents, Criteo now employees over 400 employees while serving personalized ads on behalf of over 1200 e-commerce clients across 20 countries globally.

“Criteo is committed to bringing performance to the display advertising landscape,” said Greg Coleman, President of Criteo. “I am thrilled to have Frank, a true industry veteran with a very successful track record of scaling sales organizations, join the team to continue our momentum. Our goal at Criteo is to bring our solution to a wide variety of advertisers and publishers, and Frank will be focused on helping meet that objective.”

As a 15 year digital media veteran, one of Weishaupt’s key priorities will be to build a sales organization in Boston focused on mid-market advertisers and publishers. Weishaupt has been a key part of exponential growth for several of the world’s most influential digital media companies.

“Criteo has created a name for itself as the global leader in performance display advertising. I am excited to have joined a company that is committed to growth and a team with such passion to drive this industry forward,” said Frank Weishaupt, SVP of Sales at Criteo.

Prior to joining Criteo, Weishaupt held several key management at Yahoo! over a 10-year period. Most recently he had General Management responsibilities for the US Display, Search, and Ad Technology businesses. The focus of the role was overall monetization strategy, pricing and yield management, strategic direction of the Yahoo! Ad Network, and general management of the ad platforms and global exchange.

Weishaupt holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Northeastern University.

Criteo is hiring and looking for team members to join the global leader in performance online advertising marketing.

Coffee & Power, which was started by the founder of Second Life, is launching an online marketplace that allows people to buy and sell small tasks with one another — or even to meet up in person at a company-owned cafe in San Francisco.

The site is a little like Craigslist, but focuses on giving people a venue to sell things such as tutoring lessons, software development services, commissioned art or something as random as Hula Hoop lessons.

The concept draws from the latest trend in making small amounts of money from things you may already possess, through a designated community.

Others examples include Airbnb, which assists with renting out a room in your house; RelayRides, which lets you make money by leasing your car; and Zaarly, another online marketplace for people to sell used items or hire someone for their skills.

Coffee & Power was started by Philip Rosedale, the founder and former CEO of Second Life, a virtual world that flourished into a small economy, where players buy and sell items made within the game.

Rosedale explained to me how Second Life overlaps with what he’s doing at Coffee & Power:

“Second Life became more inspiring for me than anything else — not because it was an unbelievable Lego set, but because of what people did economically with the Legos. People were able to use it to create new jobs and inspire themselves to do new things with their skills they weren’t doing previously.”

For instance, Rosedale said, a person might be a software engineer in real life, but on Second Life, they might design women’s shoes and make $2,000 a month selling them to other players.

“We saw that in Second Life, and if we are right about Coffee & Power, we can affect even more people,” he said.

The site first went live in April, but is relaunching today. In that time, Rosedale said that 2,000 people have used it, completing 700 so-called “missions” — which are transactions — for a total of $10,000. The average value has been $15.

Some of the missions include offering to shop at Trader Joe’s for $25, or asking if someone could turn a suit into a zombie costume. Rosedale’s son will bake you brownies or teach you card tricks.

With all of these sites, there’s potential for fraud or deceptive practices. Airbnb had the most public example, when an apartment was ransacked by a renter and the owner’s identity was stolen.

Coffee & Power is employing some of the usual tools to help verify a person’s identity, such as allowing users to link their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. But the most original part of the company’s concept is funding a coffee shop in downtown San Francisco, where members can meet up to exchange items and drink coffee for free. The cafe at 1825 Market Street is the first site, and Coffee & Power plans to open up additional spaces in other locations as it expands.

Another twist is that Coffee & Power does not let people transact in U.S. dollars. As with Second Life, all missions are conducted in a virtual currency.

Coffee & Power will charge people 15 percent to cash out whatever they earn, which in turn will encourage people to keep the money on the network and spend it on other items in the community.

The company raised $1 million in funding early this year from angel investors, including LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who also invested in Second Life. It has three founders and one full-time employee, and has gotten most of the development work accomplished through hiring software developers online.

The six-month-old San Francisco start-up says the funding will go toward developing a local marketplace that helps people find goods and services that people nearby are willing to sell.

Zaarly Co-Founders Ian Hunter, Bo Fishback and Eric Koester (from left to right).

For example, someone might post that they are willing to pay $100 for someone to fix their light switch; or $50 for someone to take them to the airport; or $20 for cowboy boots for a Halloween costume.

Consumers can look online or download an iPhone or Android app to alert them of new listings based on their location.

“It’s the opposite of every other marketplace,” said Bo Fishback, Zaarly’s CEO and co-founder.

The company’s first round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sands Capital Ventures with CMEA, Venture51, CrunchFund, Marc Ecko and Artists & Instigators also participating. The company had previously raised angel financing in March from Ashton Kutcher, Ron Conway and other prominent investors.

While the model is different from Craigslist and eBay, it shares similarities with such start-ups as Uber or Airbnb. Uber connects people looking for a ride with a private car service within five to 10 minutes, tapping into the glut of town cars at any given time during the day. Airbnb connects travelers with locals who are willing to rent out rooms in their homes.

Fishback said Zaarly’s goal is to host all kinds of deals, and that he could envision someday partnering with specialists such as Uber or Airbnb.

The company has 30 employees and plans to ramp up to 50 fairly quickly.

Fishback doesn’t have a clear sense of how the company will make money in the future; instead, the company is focused on signing up as many customers as possible. Right now, it’s free if you conduct the transaction in person by cash or check. If you opt to pay by credit card, Zaarly charges a convenience fee.

The platform, called X.commerce, was unveiled yesterday at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco and is designed to help any size retailer, ranging from family-owned stores to Toys “R” Us, keep up to date as shopping goes online and mobile.

In an interview, X.commerce’s VP and General Manager Matthew Mengerink explained that the basic package is free, and if a retailer elects to add extras, there could be a small flat fee paid to developers. Additionally, if the retailer wants to host its inventory on eBay’s servers, it would cost between $25 and $125 a month, depending on the amount of inventory in the system.

So, what’s the catch?

Mengerink says there isn’t one, although the company does have a plan for how to make money.

But first, here’s an explanation of what you get for free.

At the core is Magento, an open source e-commerce platform that helps retailers quickly create basic Web sites. Other features include Milo, which lets retailers list their in-store inventory on the eBay site; or Red Laser, which gives them access to mobile bar code scanning technology; or even third parties, like Kenshoo, which will manage online marketing campaigns (of course, retailers will have to pay for the ads).

He explained that it was in eBay’s best interest to make the tools free because retailers often said in the past that they don’t have the cash.

“Our innovations slowed down because they don’t have the money,” he said.

X.commerce is a big bet for eBay and will represent its fourth major division, joining the eBay Marketplace, PayPal and GSI Commerce. The platform has been stitched together through a variety of acquisitions over the past year, which are just now starting to jell and make sense.

During the keynote yesterday, eBay’s CEO John Donahoe said, “The whole entire company’s mission is to enable commerce. We want to enable merchants of all sizes to compete in this new environment and we will not compete with them.”

As for how it will help generate revenue, the plan is for the X.commerce platform to be one big lead-generation machine for eBay’s other services, namely PayPal and GSI Commerce.

For instance, if retailers first build a site based on X.commerce, there’s a chance they will pick PayPal, even though it is one of 500 payment gateways available on the platform.

Additionally, Mengerink said, if the retailers become successful, perhaps they’ll need more robust tools and graduate to GSI Commerce, which eBay acquired in March for $2.4 billion.

GSI powers online presences from such retailers as Calvin Klein, Levi’s, Sports Authority and Radio Shack, and will do everything from take pictures of products to fulfilling the orders. GSI takes a portion of sales from the increase in revenues to the site.

EBay will also have a more steady flow of revenue from applications sold on the X.commerce site through an upcoming app store that it will be launching. Developers will be able to create applications or widgets for e-commerce Web sites and sell them in the store. Each time a retailer buys one, eBay will take a 20 percent cut.

“If eBay and PayPal and GSI show that they can be valuable, they will come to you,” Mengerink said.

At eBay’s developer conference, kicking off Wednesday in San Francisco, more than 4,000 developers and merchants will receive a preview of X.commerce, the company’s new technology platform aimed at developers.

The nonconsumer-focused platform will enable developers to use the tools to build applications for retailers who are looking to have a larger presence on social networks, online and on mobile phones.

Also on stage will be some of eBay’s new partners, including Omniture, Adobe’s marketing and advertising unit, and Katie Mitic, the director of platform and mobile marketing at Facebook.

Mitic, who recently joined eBay’s board, is expected to announce a partnership between the social network and eBay.

The X.commerce division will draw from many of eBay’s existing technologies, including PayPal, but will also tie together several other acquisitions, including Milo, which has created an online database of offline inventory in physical stores; Red Laser, which is a barcode scanning technology; and Magento, which assists in the creation of online storefronts.

In essence, eBay is looking to partner with physical retailers to generate more sales online or by driving more foot traffic to their stores.

That’s in steep contrast to Amazon, which has increasingly focused on driving more and more spending online. It also has focused on the digital distribution of content, such as books, music and video, and is placing a huge bet on hardware, like the upcoming Kindle Fire, hoping to rival Apple’s iPad.

The opportunity still exists for many to grab even just a small percentage of local commerce — regardless of whether it’s through third-party developers or driving more spending online. That’s because e-commerce today makes up only a small fraction of spending, with the bulk of purchases continuing to occur at physical retail locations.

The X.commerce group in eBay joins three other major groups, including the eBay marketplace, PayPal and GSI, which it acquired earlier this year.

X.commerce is eBay’s biggest move to date in becoming a back-end technology provider rather than a consumer-facing brand. The service it builds will be aimed at developers, who will in turn own the relationship with the merchants.

Take eBay’s Red Laser technology as an example. If a merchant creates an application using the technology, a consumer will be able to scan a barcode in the store, and then find out if the item is in stock. The consumer will then have the option of buying it using PayPal directly on the phone without ever leaving the application.

The most consumer-facing element being unveiled tomorrow is what eBay is calling PayPal Access, which will enable online shoppers to log in to a Web site to buy something using their PayPal account, rather than having to create a brand-new account. By using PayPal, the consumer’s shipping address and billing information will automatically populate the store, saving a few tedious steps. PayPal Access will become available to consumers as online merchants adopt it.

Will recent device buyers have a refund option or are they stuck with a dead platform?

Will the Pre3 ever come to market? And what of that cute little Veer? (AT&T notes it continues to sell the Veer in its stores, at least for now.)

So, will there ever be HP printers and PCs with webOS? It no longer seems to be a big part of the strategy, but could there be some products already in the pipeline?

Just what is the future of webOS, if in fact it has one? HP seems to be insisting that the software could have some future, but even they seem to have little idea what that might be.

HP’s CEO said on Thursday the company is open to all possible business models, including licensing, but it is not clear just how many options it really has.

I had a chance to talk about some of these topics and more in a chat with public radio’s Marketplace.

In the ongoing talent drain at Yahoo, longtime Yahoo search veteran Chi-Chao Chang (pictured right) is the next to swirl away from the Internet giant.

Chang was VP and GM of the global search business at Yahoo and has been at the company since 1999.

More importantly, he has been a key exec in Yahoo’s troubled search alliance with Microsoft, so there’s another plus for Yahoo (and by plus, I mean minus). It is not clear where Chang is headed.

On his LinkedIn profile, Chang described his job thus:

“I am responsible for Yahoo’s global search operations and marketplace, and am the executive manager of the Microsoft Search Alliance for the US/CA marketplace. My team runs in-region operations and marketplace analysis for Americas, Asia and Europe.”

But that’s not all today!

Also departing Yahoo is a top PR exec, May Petry (pictured left). She has held a number of different communications jobs at Yahoo over the years, including for its Connected Life unit, corporate and, most recently, for its Americas unit. Petry, who has previously worked at BEA Systems and Sun Microsystems, will head to Hewlett-Packard to run PR for its webOs unit.

(Note to May: I am just as interested in that action-packed business, so get ready!)

I contacted Yahoo for a comment (but let’s just assume I am right, because I am).