One of Yahoo’s senior international execs and longtime entrepreneur Ahmed Nassef is leaving the company to create a new startup called Telfez, which will be a social television effort aimed at emerging markets.

Nassef, who was until now the head of Yahoo’s efforts in the Middle East and Africa, is co-founding the new company with Tamer Rashad, a top Merrill Lynch in the same region. Telfez will be based in Palo Alto, Calif.

“Today the Middle East and Africa region represents an inflection point for television viewership, skyrocketing growth in the penetration of smartphones and connected devices, and heavy social engagement,” said Nassef in a press release. “Increasingly, the millions of TV viewers in places from Capetown and Casablanca to Dubai and Istanbul are watching TV while holding a mobile phone or tablet and connecting with friends on their favorite social platforms.

Nassef has been at the Silicon Valley Internet giant for four years, in which he has doubled its audience and improved revenue growth. He came to Yahoo after the company acquired Maktoob.com, an Arabic language site, in 2009.

Bloomberg is launching Bloomberg Beta, a new $75 million venture capital tech fund that will be headed by former IGN head Roy Bahat.

The newly minted VC is charged with investing in and also creating early-stage startups for the media and financial news giant.

“Set up as a true fund, Bloomberg Beta will invest for financial return, selecting companies independently of their current or future business relationship with Bloomberg L.P.,” said the company in a press release.

The independent fund — with Bloomberg as the only limited partner — will initially focus on data, technology platforms, content discovery, media distribution, as well as networks and communities, human-computer interaction and “radically new organizational models.”

I am not sure exactly what that is, but the longtime tech exec Bahat — he is also chairman of Ouya, along with his stint running the News Corp.-owned gaming network — has already invested in a range of companies, including Newsle, MkII, Nodejitsu, Codecademy, Errplane and ProsperWorks.

Other Bloomberg Beta partners include Karin Klein, who was an exec at Bloomberg; and James Cham, who comes to the fund from Trinity Ventures.

Bloomberg has had some experience in investing, having backed an internal effort, Bloomberg Ventures, which is no longer in operation.

After it announced layoffs of 520 employees and lowered its guidance to Wall Street, Zynga’s stock dropped precipitously yesterday, down 12 percent, to dip below $3 a share.

The decline put the market value of the company at just $2.34 billion, well below the once much-hyped hopes for the San Francisco-based online gaming company that has seen nothing but troubled times since its IPO. In fact, since its late 2011 public offering, Zynga shares are down close to 70 percent.

But perhaps more interesting is that, with $1.6 billion in cash and marketable securities, investors now consider the company to be worth just below $750 million.

In other words, about $350 million less than Yahoo just paid for the blogging platform Tumblr, which has substantively less revenue than Zynga.

That small valuation puts the company in an interesting position, as it seeks to move its business more quickly into the mobile space, as its Web-based business has fallen off more dramatically than expected. Simply put, mobile monetizes less robustly than Zynga’s Web offerings.

The slowness in moving its casual social games to fast-growing new devices, such as tablets and smartphones, has been at the heart of Zynga’s current troubles, forcing management to cut its staff by 18 percent in order to rationalize costs.

ZNGA data by YCharts

That has meant the slashing of its staff of more than 3,000 — which grew quickly via a series of acquisitions made in recent years — and closing offices in New York and Los Angeles to save money.

What happens next will be the subject of much speculation, given its declining worth, including whether Zynga might consider going private or if some other company might contemplate acquiring it.

Most sources close to the company think it is unlikely that its big owners, including venture firm Kleiner Perkins, will want to conduct any kind of dramatic transaction, given Zynga’s currently prone state. Said one person close to the situation, its eventual state will depend on how well the company manages to turn itself around.

Here’s the tough-to-write blog post that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus just put up and also sent to the San Francisco gaming giant’s staff. The company just announced layoffs of 18 percent of the company and also lowered its second-quarter guidance.

In it, Pincus, the founder of what was once a rocket ship of a startup in Silicon Valley, appropriately began on a somber note:

“Today is a hard day for Zynga and an emotional one for every employee of our company … None of us ever expected to face a day like today, especially when so much of our culture has been about growth.”

Indeed, the fall has been fast and hard for Zynga, as it struggles to cope with a massive consumer migration to mobile that happened faster than its management — or, to be fair, anyone in the Internet business — could cope with. Until now, its fast growth has been based on its Web business and flagship franchises such as FarmVille.

But, as several sources noted and Pincus addressed in this note, Zynga must now get smaller again to get larger, doing little things really well rather than a lot of things at scale.

“The scale that served us so well in building and delivering the leading social gaming service on the Web is now making it hard to successfully lead across mobile and multiplatform, which is where social games are going to be played,” he wrote.

Zynga had made smaller cuts of five percent last fall, but the fall-off of its Web business — especially on the Facebook platform — was faster than anticipated, sources said.

That business has, as one person close to the situation noted, been “brittle,” and it broke more easily than expected.

That is not to say there has not been some promise, in games such as Running With Friends and even at its flagship FarmVille, which is still a strong title. And Zynga now has 65 million mobile users.

Pincus had been signaling more changes to come of late, trying to keep the company cash-flow positive, as he sought to rationalize costs.

In the company’s last earnings call, he stressed that 2013 would be “transitional” for Zynga and has rejiggered its top management to better focus the efforts on mobile.

Sources said that severance benefits will extend for several months and include some acceleration of stock options.

Still, it is not a pretty day for Pincus, or for the staff of Zynga, showing a lot of hard-charging entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley the very steep downside of being a public company CEO in a tough and fast-changing environment.

Here’s the full Pincus post and memo:

To our Zynga Community,

Today is a hard day for Zynga and an emotional one for every employee of our company. We are saying painful goodbyes to about 18% of our Zynga brothers and sisters. The impact of these layoffs will be felt across every group in the company.

None of us ever expected to face a day like today, especially when so much of our culture has been about growth. But I think we all know this is necessary to move forward. The scale that served us so well in building and delivering the leading social gaming service on the Web is now making it hard to successfully lead across mobile and multiplatform, which is where social games are going to be played.

These moves, while hard to face today, represent a proactive commitment to our mission of connecting the world through games. Mobile and touch screens are revolutionizing gaming. Our opportunity is to make mobile gaming truly social by offering people new, fun ways to meet, play and connect. By reducing our cost structure today we will offer our teams the runway they need to take risks and develop these breakthrough new social experiences.

Because we’re making these moves proactively and from a position of financial strength, we can take care of laid off employees. We’re offering generous severance packages that reflect our appreciation for all of their work and we hope this will provide a foundation as they pursue their next professional steps.

Although these are hard decisions, I’m confident that our strategy of building leading franchises and supporting them with the largest network is the right one for the long term. I’m encouraged by our recent progress. Running With Friends is a great example of the quality player experience we can deliver, already receiving an average 4.5 app star rating from 22,000 players in less than one month after launching. Our FarmVille franchise teams continue to innovate and deliver ground breaking new social experiences like County Fair which, despite only being available on the web, is engaging 39 million monthly players.

I want to thank every one of you for the spirit, creativity and energy that you’ve invested in Zynga. You’ve reintroduced a generation of people to gaming and through these games offered them new ways to connect with their families, make new friends and even sometimes find love.

Everyone will be affected by these changes and I’m sure there will be many follow up questions to this email. If you have specific questions relating to your project or team, please talk to your manager. For any other feedback or thoughts feel free to email me directly.

Mark

“After four incredible, indelible years at Twitter the time has come for me to fly the coop. My last day will be June 28,” Sarver said in a tweet.

Before joining Twitter in 2009, Sarver worked on consumer products at Skyhook Wireless for three years, and founded real estate startup Bluetrim in 2005.

Over the years, Sarver’s role has been to work with Twitter’s surrounding ecosystem, composed of thousands of developers, communicating with them on a regular basis about what is cool — and more importantly what isn’t cool — to do with Twitter’s data.

But Sarver joined the company in 2009 under a very different regime, when Twitter co-founder Evan Williams was still CEO of the company. Williams was known for his “let a thousand flowers bloom” stance on the Twitter ecosystem, essentially encouraging developers to use the Twitter API for all sorts of applications and businesses.

Under current CEO Dick Costolo, that’s certainly not the case. Halfway through his tenure, Sarver was essentially charged with shepherding developers into a shifting world where Twitter client applications were pooh-poohed and analytics and big data plays — not to mention Twitter’s ambitious Cards project — were more directly emphasized. As a result, Sarver took the brunt of the heat from the very upset developer community at large for the better part of two years.

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard that Sarver has been ready to go for a little while now. Couple that with the fact that Sarver’s shares are fully vested after his four years at the company, and it makes sense that he’s taking off.

No immediate plans for afterward, he said, but I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on him, as Sarver has managed to build up his profile rather well during his time at Twitter. (That, and he’s a nice, well-liked guy in the tech community.)

It’s probably worth noting, too, that Twitter is now looking to hire his replacement — as Sarver pointed out in his series of goodbye tweets — who will likely report to Jana Messerschmidt, VP of biz dev and platform.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo has bid from $600 million to $800 million for the premium video site Hulu.

The reason for the wide range is due to the fact that the Silicon Valley Internet giant — similar to most bidders in the new effort to acquire Hulu — has proposed several different prices based on a variety of circumstances. That includes the length of the licensing rights for content and how much control the programming companies selling Hulu have over their media.

At the same time and separately, according to sources inside the company, Yahoo is also contemplating at least two other significant purchases — in the $150 million to $200 million range — each for a mobile and a communications company.

It’s certainly an ambitious and busy M&A agenda for Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer, who just forked over $1.1 billion in cash to purchase youth-skewing blogging site Tumblr last week.

Presumably, she is interested in upping Yahoo’s longtime lackluster video efforts — it famously lost out at the last minute on the acquisition of YouTube many years ago to Google — as the arena becomes more critical to advertisers.

But, said sources, while allowing the bid to proceed, Mayer is more focused on the integration of Tumblr, as well as other acquisitions that will bolster other key product areas.

Thus, sources said that the Hulu effort is being led at Yahoo by Los Angeles-based Ian Weingarten, VP of corporate development, who works for M&A head Jackie Reses.

AllThingsD.com first broke the news of that deal, as well as Yahoo’s initial interest and subsequent bid for Hulu, which is owned by a trio of media giants: News Corp., Disney and Comcast.

The site, which has both a subscription and an advertising business, was on the market in 2011, with the hope for a bid of $2 billion that came with several years of programming rights. The sale was pulled after those higher bids did not materialize.

But Hulu is on the market again in the most advanced effort to sell it so far, with bids coming in from a range of suitors over the last week.

Yahoo’s Mayer and COO Henrique De Castro had met with Hulu’s team earlier this month for a get-to-know-you, just after an effort to buy a large stake in French video site Dailymotion was blocked by the government there.

Besides Yahoo, others interested in acquiring Hulu include: Separate bids from private equity firms KKR, Guggenheim Digital and Silver Lake (in conjunction with Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor); Time Warner Cable; DirecTV; and the Chernin Group.

There could still be others, of course, though a deadline for initial bids has passed. Interestingly, so far, neither Google nor Amazon have made official efforts, perhaps because the pair already have robust video platforms.

Chernin’s bid, as had been widely reported, started in the $500 million range, which is interesting since the longtime media executive was once the COO of News Corp. and was critical to Hulu’s creation. Translation: He’d know just what the video platform is worth and how the place works.

Of course, low bids at the start are part of the normal process; sources close to the owners said that any bids under $1 billion are unlikely to be accepted.

One thing is certain: Now comes what will look a lot like a very noisy game of musical chairs, in which the various groups will vie for one-upmanship, even as they talk to each other about possible joint efforts. Who the most attractive candidate is, of course, will be much debated.

In addition, there is much disagreement over who and how Hulu should be sold by two of its owners, Disney and News Corp., which have squabbled over its direction from the start. (Comcast gave up its management rights as a concession to federal regulators a few years ago, so is sitting on the sideline twiddling its giant cable thumbs and doubtlessly wishing it could be a bidder, too.)

No matter the ceaseless bickering among giants, the trio of media conglomerates are providing Hulu’s most valuable programming, largely television shows from their broadcast networks. And that is the real point of the negotiating, according to many involved.

“Hulu is a very nice brand and technology, but the entire negotiation will be about the control and price of the content,” said one person close to the situation. “It’s the only thing that matters.”

I sent an email for comment to Yahoo, but expect no response.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

Despite largely anecdotal media speculation, it’s not clear how the acquisition of Tumblr by Yahoo for $1.1 billion will be greeted by users of the New York blogging service.

But rival blogging service WordPress’s founder Matt Mullenweg posted on his blog last night that WordPress imports from Tumblr on Sunday — after news of the deal had been broken by AllThingsD.com — had risen from a typical 400 to 600 blog posts an hour to more than 72,000.

Whoa!

That said, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Some users of Posterous fled the blogging service when Twitter bought it, and some Instagrammers huffed off when Facebook nabbed the photo-sharing site.

And, by comparison, Tumblr says it get 75 million blog posts per day — so 72,000 are just a drop in the ironic blogging ocean.

Plus, Mullenweg thinks the high price paid by the Silicon Valley Internet giant was low.

“I think we’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain, and while Yahoo’s all-cash deal by some metrics, like revenue, is very generous, I think it’s a tenth of the value that will be created in these platforms over the coming years,” wrote Mullenweg.

Here’s his post:

It now looks pretty certain that Yahoo has pulled off a deal to buy Tumblr for 1.1B. The relationship between WordPress and Tumblr has always been pretty friendly: Tumblr’s own blog used to be on WP, WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a Publicize option alongside Twitter and Facebook, our Akismet team sends them daily emails of splogs on the service, and there’s healthy import and export traffic both ways. (Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.)

News like this, whether from a friend or a competitor, is always bittersweet: I’m curious to see what the creative folks behind Tumblr do with their new resources, both personal and corporate, but I’m more interested to know what they would have done over the next 5-10 years as an independent company. I think we’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain, and while Yahoo’s all-cash deal by some metrics, like revenue, is very generous, I think it’s a tenth of the value that will be created in these platforms over the coming years.

The maker of Android and Chrome is just about to kick off a three-hour keynote, and if you want to see it for yourself, you can: Here’s the livestream. Meanwhile, we’ll be doing live coverage, but it’ll be quick blurbs and takeaways rather than transcribing every last Googley word.

Anticipation is high; Google shares just topped $900 for the first time ever.

“We are very fortunate to have two platforms,” says Sundar Pichai, who is now in charge of both Chrome and Android and also Google Apps. He’s addressing an I/O audience of 6,000 in-person attendees and some 1 million via livestream. He notes the advent of smartphones and connected devices has been a massive, rapid and global change over just the past six to seven years.

There have been 900 million Android activations to date, announces Pichai. Here’s some more context on those numbers, via Ina Fried.

As an update to Google Play services, Android product leader Hugo Barra announces three new location tools for developers that will reduce battery drain and add awareness of users’ location and activities for the purposes of geofencing and activity tracking (the latter thing is just like the Moves app for iOS, which understands the difference between walking, running and biking motions as you’re carrying a phone).

A few more of Barra’s Google Play updates that get cheers from developers will help sync accounts and notifications across multiple devices. Plus, new game developer tools on Android, iOS and web will show personalized leaderboards, help players challenge each other and save games.

Google introduces a brand-new development environment, Android Studio, for building applications. It helps rapidly visualize layouts across different devices, languages. This goes over extremely well with the developer audience.

And here’s some more stuff that developers care a lot about, and other platforms like Apple’s iOS don’t do a great job of. Later this summer, Google will add new Android analytics tools to help developers do things like track conversions from their app advertising and visualize revenue over time and geography. Plus, a biggie for people making new apps: Beta testing and staged rollouts with private feedback.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty APIed out,” says Barra. Yes indeed!

On to content and entertainment: Personalized recommendations for content in Google Play are rolling out “over the coming weeks,” and navigation is improved. This gets the mildest round of applause so far.

But here’s the real news: Google Play Music All Access, which comes with “a uniquely Google approach,” says Google content guy Chris Yerga. For some savvy handicapping, here’s Peter Kafka’s advance take.

What is interesting about it? The radio service is interactive (you can mess with what’s coming next), it has personalized recommendations and it includes Google’s collection blended with your personal library. It’ll cost $9.99 per month but there are some promo and trial options. Here’s a fuller summary from Mike Isaac.

Barra shows off a Galaxy S4 running Google’s Nexus version of Android rather than jammed with Samsung stuff. Not cheap, though. It’ll be sold for $649 on Google Play on June 26. Ina Fried has more here.

Back to Chrome and Chrome OS. The browser now has 750 million monthly active users, up from 450 million last year. As for Chromebooks, Sundar Pichai offers no actual numbers, but says they’ve been the No. 1 seller on Amazon for a while. (C’mon, where are the numbers?)

Next, an update on some of the underlying Web formats, tools and components that Google contributes to. This now includes a data compression proxy for Chrome for Mobile that sounds like like Opera and Onavo. Plus, some demos of what’s in the pipeline, including a nifty race car game played on a track made of five devices laying next to each other that keeps in sync using Web sockets. Lauren Goode has more on all the Chrome news here.

Sundar Pichai is giving out Chromebook Pixels to everyone at I/O, which they are rather stoked about.

How about them Google Apps? Lots of people use them — 74 of the top 100 U.S. universities. That was an extremely short segment.

And another little launch coming this fall: Google Play for Education. Google wants to help schools manage Android tablets, offering a library of apps recommended by teachers, and mechanisms to push apps directly to groups of student devices.

Plus, cute kids around the world use Chromebooks, as displayed in like the 30th feel-good product movie of this keynote.

Vic Gundotra says he’s here to introduce 41 new features for Google+, which I hope he is not going to go through one by one.

The G+ feed is now three columns, with posts tiled like Pinterest.

Google is also going to automatically tag posts with hashtags so people can find related content. These are extracted with image recognition and text analysis.

Also, Gundotra says as part of Google’s efforts to help computers get out of people’s ways, it will better support multiplatform conversations. That means: group messaging, persistent conversations between groups (a la GroupMe a few years ago), albums of shared images, synced notifications, free group video and support for Web, Android and iOS as of today.

On to photos: Google wants its data centers to be your darkroom, says Gundotra, who seems to only speak in slogans. G+ saves “all the pixels, because some memories are not meant to be downsized,” says Gundotra, with a nice visualization that shows how much larger G+ photos are than Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Also, new tools will help users find their best photos and edit them, especially faces. Vanity, eat your heart out.

For further reading, Mike Isaac has detailed pullouts on the new G+ stream design and Hangouts.

“Auto awesome” features like collage generation, smile detection, making a series into a GIF and stitching panoramics are now generated automatically. And these features have been in “dark launch” so Google is already ready to spring them live on every photo you’ve ever uploaded.

Next up: Amit Singhal wants to talk about “the end of search … as we know it.” He’s the smiley guy who always talks about the Star Trek computer. Yup, there we go: He dreamed as a child of building the Star Trek computer for the world.

Google’s Knowledge Graph is today coming to Polish, Turkish and Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, adding to nine existing languages.

Singhal announces conversational search for the desktop and laptop. Users can launch voice queries by saying, “Okay, Google.”

Plus, Google Now, the smart personal assistant app, is adding reminders, public transit and TV shows.

Johanna Wright demos a voice search using the new tools for Chrome and Chrome OS with the premise of planning a trip to Santa Cruz. Her computer listens to a set of queries including “How far is it from here” that returns directions with current traffic.

More snazzy voice demos: Saying “when does my flight leave” returns a personalized result based on email archives, “show me my pictures from New York last year” brings up photos with those characteristics, and giving commands sends emails and sets reminders. Basically it’s like Siri, but it seems to actually work.

Ina Fried has more on this voice search section here.

Maps head Brian McClendon comes next. Google has a long history of building and growing its map quality — subtext: Unlike some other noobs in the industry — and McClendon recaps the history of Google’s mapping layers: local data, imagery, street view (including underwater view) and base maps. Over 1 million websites are using Google maps today, he says.

Google Maps for iPhone is “sleek, simple, and let’s not forget, accurate,” says Daniel Graf. So what’s next for mobile maps?

Google is launching a unified five-point rating scale for local results, says Graf, which doesn’t really seem like an innovation to brag about. There’s also a nice new swipeable interface for browsing venues, plus discount offers appearing within listings (from Starbucks at first, with more to come). Also, some Waze-like features: accident reports and live rerouting. And, a tablet version for both iOS and Android. But none of it is ready yet. Will be out this summer.

An interface preview of the new desktop Google Maps UI shows that they’ve gotten rid of the uninformative map pins in favor of labels shown directly on each place. The big idea: “The map is the user interface.” Maps are personalized based on users’ history (like Google Now), so they can each navigate via their own landmarks and find related places and nearby streets each time they click.

A new transit schedule viewer looks a lot like Hipmunk. Users can also submit “photo spheres” from their phones by capturing a big multidimensional photo all around them. Also, here’s a mindblower: When you zoom out, the view of the Earth shows clouds in real time. And you can zoom all the way out to the Milky Way.

This isn’t released to the public yet, but you can sign up to check it out at maps.google.com/preview.

Larry Page appears onstage, a surprise given he just explained his vocal cord paralysis condition publicly yesterday. He has a message for developers: Technology is amazing.

Page is having a bit of a Bono moment. He explains the arc of Google’s vision: Technology should do the hard work, so people can live their lives. “I think we’re all here because we share a deep sense of optimism about the potential of technology to change people’s lives and help the world.”

Page says he wants to build great things that don’t exist, so press comparisons to competitors are overdone. “Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero-sum.”

Progress displaces the past, Page notes. “I’m sure people in the future will think we’re just as crazy as we think people in the past were, having to do hunting or farming all the time.”

And to that end, recruiting young people to care about science is important. Page explains that Google participated in the upcoming movie “The Internship” as a way to market computer science.

And now something even less expected: Page takes audience questions. First up, predictably, is Robert Scoble. Page notes that he didn’t need to see Scoble’s picture of himself in the shower wearing his Google Glass. Point for Larry.

Page answers a question about the potential of a Web-based operating system for mobile; he’s disappointed about the industry state of warring platforms, saying, “The software you write should run everywhere easily.”

How does Google protect freedom, asks a woman from Colombia. It’s difficult and important, says Page, but transparency is key.

About fiber, Page says increasing capacity increases the potential for doing interesting things. Beyond gigabits, the next step is low-latency connections.

Meanwhile, Google stock is trading above $906, with the company’s market cap passing $300 billion.

On Glass production, Page isn’t willing to say much of anything specific. He says it’s about making users happy. He loves using it with his young kids.

Page’s advice for a kid: Try to cut deep to the real issues. The power grid and manufacturing, not incremental stuff. Asking how far are you off the raw materials cost helps you think about the longer view.

Here’s Mike Isaac’s story on Page’s appearance.

12:19 pm: Just going to add in a timestamp here to note this has been ridiculously long.

Page extends his positivity riff into limitations. He says he doesn’t just want to inspire computer scientists, he also wants lawmakers who understand technology. There should be something in the world like Burning Man, Page says, where technologists can have safe places to experiment on the effects of what they build without deploying them into the normal world.

On healthcare, Page says the main problem is regulatory issues around keeping medical information private. He says he got tons of emails after writing about his vocal cord condition yesterday. “After disclosing, I feel I should have done it sooner. Why are people so focused on keeping medical history private? The answer is insurance companies. That makes no sense. We should change the rules around insurance so they have to insure people.”

Page endorses a question about getting more women into tech, and he says that cheap smartphones are key to global social development.

Page goes offstage as it’s announced that Billy Idol is the evening I/O performer. Meanwhile, nobody has the strength to stand given they haven’t had nutrition or water since dawn. What I mean to say is, it’s finally over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demand Media, the online content company, said it had earned nine cents on an adjusted basis in the first quarter, on revenues of $100.6 million, topping Wall Street estimates of eight cents on $99.6 million in sales. On a fully diluted basis, earnings were one cent a share, or $700,000, compared to a loss of two cents, or $1.8 million, in the three months compared to a year ago.

“Strong growth from our owned & operated content and media properties drove our Q1 results, highlighting the unique capabilities of our content discovery, creation and distribution platform. Further, we accelerated our paid content strategy with the acquisition of Creativebug, a premier online destination for arts and crafts instruction, which will provide our large eHow crafts audience with an expanded learning experience. In addition, we signed up over 400 resellers to our new gTLD tools and received more than two million expressions of interest for domains to be registered with new gTLDs,” said Richard Rosenblatt, chairman and CEO of Demand Media in a statement. “We are excited about the distinct long-term growth opportunities for both of our businesses.”

Demand’s eHow site seems to have driven a lot of the gains in the content area.

Demand shares rose in trading yesterday by close to two percent, to close at $8.58, also its stock is down 7.6 percent for the year.

The company did not mention the planned split of its registar and content business that it announced in the last quarter in the current results, which might be covered on the conference call the Santa Monica, Calif. company will have with analysts at 2 pm PT.

In its last earnings release for the fourth quarter, Demand said it was spinning off its domain registrar business from its media one in a bid to better clarify the company to investors.

Since it went public several years ago, there has been some level of difficulty for each part of Demand to easily explain itself to Wall Street, given the very different natures of its key — but very different — revenue units. In a statement at the time, Demand said that it was “our intent to spin off our registrar business and separate into two independent, publicly traded companies.”

The company noted that the two units “divergent strategic priorities and opportunities” would be better in the new configuration with a pure-play media company and domain services company. At the time, the company said the transaction was expected to take place in the next nine to 12 months, although it required a number of company and regulatory approvals to do the tax-free spin-off to create two different stocks.

In a different kind of transaction, Demand had talked a little more than a year ago to a private equity company about taking the company private. The effort was abandoned, in which Boston-based Thomas H. Lee Partners would have purchased Demand for a price of up to $1.2 billion, due to a number of challenges. Its current market valuation is now about $744 million.

Until we hear more about the spin-off plans from Demand execs, here’s the full release from Q1 to peruse:

1Q 13 FINAL RELEASE

Joyus, the video shopping platform startup led by former top Google exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, said it had raised $11.5 million in a second round of funding, led by InterWest Partners and Time Warner Investments. Existing investors Accel Partners and Harrison Metal also participated.

In related news, Joyus said that Ido Leffler, co-founder of natural beauty brand Yes To, would join its board.

The San Francisco-based Joyus has now raised total capital of $19 million to push its efforts to combine video with retailing online. Along with the funding news, the company underscored the efficacy of its approach in a study it also released that it says shows “fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands can directly monetize video through direct response product sales.”

Using premium video content to flack its wares, Joyus said that it converts at 5.15 times the rate of visitors who only browse product listings on the site and that its viewers buy 4.9 times more than those who don’t watch the product videos.

“Every time someone watches a video, Joyus can measure the resulting sales revenue, creating the first ever metrics for return on investment (ROI) using online video to drive product sales,” said Joyus, which noted that on a half-dozen product areas that the average revenue per video (RPV) view ranges from 47 cents to 93 cents, meaning every thousand views of video on Joyus produces between $470 and $930 in direct sales revenue. Joyus shares a cut of the sales on its site with its merchants and provides the purchasing tools.

While others might dispute this performance and many online retailers have added video to their sales processes, Joyus CEO and founder Cassidy said in an interview that online retail has to shift from a focus on engagement statistics and monetization via brand advertising to direct product sales results.

“The data on video shopping needs to be aimed at a return on the investment rather than on just brand recognition,” she said. “We think by providing an informative and entertaining experience, where you can make purchases right away, consumers buy and that this is the direction online commerce is moving.”

As I noted in a previous post about Joyus when it launched in mid-2011: “If you think about a link-laden infomercial, you’ll get a general idea of what is being created by Joyus.”

While Cassidy did note that a comparison could be made to television shopping networks like HSN, which shows elaborate demos of its products, Joyus has its own tech stack and video platform that allows shoppers to watch in a non-linear way that is preferable online and also on mobile.

“We are aimed at those customers who are bred and born on digital, so the merchandising formula is different,” said Cassidy. “This is a shopper from 30 to 50 who wants entertainment and commerce together in a format that is convenient.”

The real story here is mobile (as always). The company’s mobile ad revenue accounted for 30 percent of the overall ad biz — a whopping jump from the 23 percent of mobile ad revenue raked in last quarter.

A good thing for the social giant, considering the company’s entire user base is slowly trickling over to accessing the site via mobile device. Monthly active users viewing the site on mobile devices came in at 751 million, a 54 percent jump year over year.

Scary at first, perhaps, for the Web industry as a whole, with all the companies in the Valley scrambling to make the move to mobile effectively. Now, optimistic as ever, Facebook continues to position it as an opportunity, not a liability.

Check out my notes from the company’s quarterly conference call earlier on Wednesday, starring CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman.

———————
1:55 pm PT: Gotta love the flute music. Holding patiently.

2:00 pm: About to start!

2:02 pm: Buncha standard legalese. Please hold for actual substance.

2:03 pm: First up, Mr. Zuckerberg.

2:04 pm: Zuck says he’s surprised how the growth keeps going even though there’s more than a billion people using the service.

Funny, considering the growth rate is slowing overall.

2:04 pm: FLASH — Zuck is super stoked on Facebook Home, the company’s recent mobile software release.

It’s great! Gonna be huge! Alas, we just released it and only a few phones can use it. So please hold for more awesomeness.

2:06 pm: Next up, Instagram. Zuckerberg also loving how great CEO Kevin Systrom is doing with the platform. 100 million users. Fantastic!

2:07 pm: Zuckerberg playing up how important Facebook Platform is to the company. Especially mobile apps from third parties.

“I think it’s clear now that we can create a lot of value for devs by providing identity,” he said. “We’re starting to see real revenue from mobile app installs.”

2:08 pm: Platform emphasis makes sense. Facebook really needs great content flowing through the news feed to keep you coming back and looking at it. That means cool-looking apps and stuff.

2:10 pm: Again, big emphasis on Home, Graph Search and the like as “long-term investments.”

In other words — THE MONEY FROM THESE PRODUCTS WILL COME LATER, Y’ALL.

2:11 pm: Time to Lean In! COO Sheryl Sandberg is on the call.

2:11 pm: Sandberg reiterating how awesome the shift to mobile is. We check our phones so often, that’s perfect for mobile ads!

Mobile ads biz doing great internationally — “particularly in Asia.”

2:12 pm: Sandberg, like Zuckerberg, is pushing the company’s mobile app install ads product. Basically a paid way to stick your app inside the mobile news feed. Click on it, and it’ll send you to the Google or Apple app store and have you download the app.

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard anecdotally that those ads do indeed drive significant downloads. Good ad product, it seems.

2:13 pm: Sandberg talking about the Atlas acquisition, which closed last week.

Big deal for ad measurement success. Basically it’ll be another way to show the ad folks that yes, your Facebook ads are worth it and no, don’t measure by clicks like you’re used to with your stuffy old Google ads!

2:15 pm: Sandberg, in a nutshell: FORGET CLICKS. We got way better ways to measure ad success.

2:18 pm: Sandberg feeling great on Q1, and still pushing the fact that it’s early days in the ads biz for Facebook. Keep on keepin’ on.

2:19 pm: Here comes CFO Ebersman.

2:19 pm: Mobile still huge in terms of who’s accessing the site. As we know.

2:20 pm: Crazy. Mobile-only users visiting Facebook on a monthly basis at 189 million users.

2:21 pm: Payments and fees revs were up year on year. Games in particular were up 12 percent.

Huh. Q1 saw a record number of people playing games on Facebook.

2:23 pm: Warning: Expenses are gonna swell. But we’ve been saying that for a while. Infrastructure, engineers, new campuses, new products — all of that costs money.

2:24 pm: So take note of that last thing Ebersman said.

Q1 had a record number of people playing games on Facebook, while Zynga’s contribution to that dropped by 37 percent. Other game developers are up 60 percent.

That’s a big deal. Larger diversification of the games and payments ecosystem.

2:29 pm: Growth and engagement geographically is up internationally, Ebersman says.

Mobile obviously responsible for that.

2:30 pm: A question about different screen form-factors.

2:32 pm: Zuckerberg: Sure, there will be more screens. Whether it be desktops, or phones, or “glasses … whatever the products are.”

“The big question for us is which platforms do we see growing the quickest?”

2:32 pm: “Ads during the first six or seven years of Facebook were just in the right-hand column.”

“Whatever the form-factors going forward…” we’ll get it right. –Zuck

2:35 pm: A question on Atlas: “As people are looking more holistically at all the ad spend they’re doing, they’re looking at everything leading up to that purchase — not just the last click.” –Sandberg

2:36 pm: So again, the Atlas buy is about more measurement than just the last click before buying a product. Offline influence, etc.

2:36 pm: Sandberg “increasingly encouraged” by SMBs around the world in their willingness to take up Facebook’s ad biz.

Hope so! That’s not really where the focus is right now, though.

2:38 pm: Sandberg really pushing the fact that tons of SMBs have Facebook Pages.

Still doesn’t help the little guys without massive followings break through to the news feed, though. We’ll see.

2:40 pm: Ooh, a video ads question!

Hope they don’t dodge it.

2:40 pm: Sandberg says video is a “really exciting area” — and advertisers can use Facebook’s existing embeddable video product in their ads.

Continuing to explore the area, Sandberg says, but nothing to announce today.

Shucks.

2:41 pm: Ah, a question about Instagram and monetization.

When you gonna slap ads on our pics, Sheryl?

2:41 pm: Zuck on Instagram: “They’re really doing well and growing quickly.”

Focus should be on community building. He’s optimistic on biz opportunity, but they aren’t slapping ads on anything just yet.

“They’re growing a lot faster now and were faster to get to 100 million than Facebook even was,” Zuckerberg says.

2:43 pm: Boring question, boring response.

Mobile mobile mobile.

2:44 pm: Two questions: Platform and Graph Search.

Zuckerberg is super happy with gaming ecosystem and how it’s doing, despite “Zynga,” whose growth ain’t great.

Ouch!

2:45 pm: Poor Zynga can’t catch a break.

2:45 pm: Zuck on platform (in my words): Please, dear god, developers. Give us your apps. Distribute them here.

2:46 pm: As far as Graph Search goes, repeat after me. Early. Days.

2:46 pm: “The launch wasn’t this point where we expected a ton of people to start using it. … real roll-out will start pretty soon.” –Zuckerberg on Graph Search

2:47 pm: Fun question from Mark Mahaney: Do the kids still like Facebook? I hear it’s not hip anymore.

2:47 pm: Ebersman: Facebook is awesome for everyone, regardless of age! And yes, kids still like Facebook.

Telling: Ebersman really emphasized Instagram’s influence with the young crowd.

2:49 pm: Funny. I asked my 12-year-old neighbor the other day which apps she used — she told me Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram. (No Facebook!)

2:50 pm: Lotsa mobile app install ad buyers are new advertisers to Facebook.

Makes sense why Zuckerberg keeps making his call to arms for developers.

2:55 pm: “Owning our own data centers removes another party from the mix.”

Also lets them “build them exactly how we want them to look.” Best for efficiency, Ebersman said.

This in light of a recent announcement that Facebook would be building another data center in Iowa.

2:56 pm: Hmm. Sandberg advocates promoted Pages product to SMBs rather than other larger ad spend products.

Sort of a “no duh.” But I’m still not convinced the little guys are getting good ROI there.

3:00 pm: So, 3 percent of the payments revenue bump came from user-promoted posts and, to a lesser extent, Facebook’s Gifts product.

Hmm.

3:01 pm: And that’s a wrap, folks.

Facebook kicked off the first of three developer events on Thursday, continuing its push to court mobile coders to build applications atop the Facebook platform.

Aside from continuing to boast high stats on download rates for apps built atop the platform, the company launched a series of new features and tools for its platform at the Manhattan event, aiming to make it as easy as possible for mobile developers to integrate their apps into the very fabric of Facebook.

I won’t get into the nitty-gritty, as it’s pretty nerdy stuff. But, in a nutshell, the new tools make it somewhat easier for developers to share user activity from their apps to Facebook, with features like native sharing code, a faster mobile login, and a new version of the Facebook software developer kit for iOS. Basically, more tools for mobile devs.

That matters, Facebook reminds us, because small-time developers face a constant uphill battle in pushing out and promoting their applications amid the crowded typical markets like Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

“Your app is a pale blue dot — to paraphrase Carl Sagan — in the app cosmos,” said Doug Purdy, director of platform products, at the event. “So how do you get found in that cosmos?”

Better sharing features, the pitch goes, make your app more surface-able within the Facebook network, which in turn will drive more people to the respective app markets to install your app. In addition to Thursday’s launches, Facebook has pushed updates to Timeline, the launch of Graph Search and ongoing tweaks to News Feed over the past year, all in the name of giving better placement to outside app activity.

Benevolent of Facebook? More like a sense of enlightened self-interest. Facebook needs third-party app activity to populate its News Feed in order to keep the public inside the Facebook app, scrolling through the feed and engaged on a regular basis.

Turns out that folks like messing around with app activity and photos much more than just text-based status updates. Facebook scratches your back with better sharing tools, and you’ll scratch Facebook’s back by keeping eyeballs on the feed.

The social giant isn’t the only company trying to court developers. Facebook’s New York conference falls just two weeks after Twitter’s recent mobile developer conference. There, the microblogging service unveiled improved and expanded versions of Twitter Cards, Twitter’s developer-centric technology that better integrates outside stuff like video, pictures and stories into Twitter’s platform.

Again, the philosophy here is simple: The more content-rich a company’s stream is, the more you’ll see people stick around the product in the long run.

Now the onus is on developers to choose which platforms — if any — they’ll decide to build atop of, and how much work they’ll put into it.

But to what end?

The most likely reason is simply to lessen the company’s heavy reliance on Android, as I noted here yesterday. But there’s another, as well, one that speaks to Samsung’s ambitions in the mobile space. The company is positioning itself for a full-on platform play.

“We see Samsung seeking to transition to more of a vertically integrated platform play of hardware, software, and services to compete more effectively against Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others,” said Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu. “The company has been co-developing Tizen with Intel, while also ramping software efforts, including investments in Silicon Valley.”

And those investments are substantial. There’s a startup accelerator, a Silicon Valley R&D center, a sales and R&D campus, and a strategy and innovation center on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road. They’re all new, or newly announced. And it’s not unreasonable to conclude that they’ve been established at least in partial support of a platform effort.

Question is, has Samsung’s success given it enough heft to pull off a new platform in a market that Apple and Google so thoroughly dominate? And is it even possible to do so when it’s so thoroughly tethered to Android’s app ecosystem?

Says Wu, “We believe replicating Google and Apple’s model as a platform play will prove very difficult where arguably only Amazon is seeing success.”

Amazon, of course, has forked Android. Samsung hasn’t. Yet.

One of Yahoo’s top women execs, Elissa Murphy, who is VP of engineering for cloud services, is departing the Silicon Valley Internet giant to become CTO and head of platform efforts at Go Daddy, said sources.

It’s the second talent raid on Yahoo by the company’s former product head Blake Irving, who is now CEO at one of the world’s biggest Web hosting and domain registration companies. A few weeks ago, he grabbed James Carroll, who was SVP of the consumer and global platform group at Yahoo and who is now running international efforts at Go Daddy.

Murphy is perhaps the highest-profile woman within the tech ranks at Yahoo — besides its CEO Marissa Mayer — and is very well regarded within the company and outside it, too, for her computing expertise. She has overseen a great deal of code contributions to Hadoop, a technology essential to large-scale computing, first developed at Yahoo.

She is leaving the employ of platform head Jay Rossiter, for whom Carroll also worked.

Both Murphy and Carroll had first been hired into Yahoo by Irving.

(Update: Go Daddy confirmed the move, saying she will start May 6 as CTO and EVP of platforms there. “Elissa Murphy is more than just a top ‘woman’ in technology, she’s a top ‘person’ at the top of her field,” said Irving in a statement. “Elissa just plain rocks.”)

She seems to, as currently featured on a Yahoo careers page that touts “stories from our most valuable assets.”

Read the deservedly effusive text about her: “Yahoo!’s ability to retain a fun, startup-like feel is what attracted Elissa Murphy to Yahoo!. The VP of Engineering for Cloud Services says that this unique combination makes for a creative, yet fast-paced environment that is unlike anything else in the industry. ‘You want to build cloud systems but you want to do it quickly? This is the place you want to come to.’”

I have emails into all for comment.

But here’s Murphy’s classy memo to the troops on her departure, in which she praises Mayer, so we don’t need Yahoo PR to return our email for comment:

TITLE: So long!

Hi all,

I’m writing you today to share that I’ve just resigned my position as head of Cloud Services and Hadoop at Yahoo! to pursue a new venture. The time I’ve spent working and learning with you has been wonderful, and it’s not easy to say goodbye. I have, however, been presented with a truly unique opportunity to expand my scope of impact at a company with indomitable spirit, brimming with passion and hell-bent on changing the world.

From my first experience programming a PET computer in 4th grade and throughout my career, I’ve been captivated by the potential for technology to transform people’s lives. In my time with Yahoo!, it’s been adrenalizing to push the limits on one of the world’s largest-scale cloud infrastructures — opening the door for new advances in machine learning and predictive analytics. When I look back on the achievements I’m most proud of during my time here they all center on people and innovation. I am proud to have played a role in making Yahoo! a leading voice in Hadoop by launching the next generation of Hadoop at scale. I am proud that in less than a year alone we’ve been able to accomplish more with Hadoop, Storm, OpenStack and our NoSQL stores than many thought possible. I am proud that we continue to fight for open source and open ecosystems, even as those around us profit from further locking them down. And I am proud to have helped lead the effort to pull ourselves up from our bootstraps, to get back up, and to remind the world that Yahoo! still has a place in their hearts and homes.

But most of all, I am proud to have worked with so many smart and talented people. I feel honored to call so many of you friends, and I thank you all for the opportunity to work alongside you. If you want to connect, you can find me at here.

I want to give a special thanks to Marissa, who has brought a thoughtfulness and determination to Yahoo! that promises new hope for our culture. Marissa, I can’t tell you how much I have appreciated your sponsorship and counsel, and for your support as I move forward. I believe Yahoo’s brightest days are still ahead with you at the helm, and I’ll be watching and cheering for your success in the years to come.

So long everyone — I hope our paths cross in a future more near than distant!

Best,

elissa

[Photo from Yahoo Careers Web site]

According to sources, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is close to launching a new startup called Jelly, which one person called a “native mobile” effort.

While it’s not clear exactly what that means, sources said the well-known entrepreneur has already hired four or five employees to form a team on the mystery product that will likely be aimed at smartphones and tablets.

It’s an interesting move, since Stone is also running a small incubator called Obvious with one of his Twitter co-founders, Ev Williams. They left their daily roles at the high-profile microblogging service to create Obvious, which has startups such as Lift, Branch and Medium in its portfolio.

There has been low-level chatter in Silicon Valley about Stone’s startup, which some have taken to mean he is no longer working as much with Williams at Obvious. But sources said that is not the case and both are involved in helping their small group of startups.

That said, Williams has been focusing more on Medium, an effort to rejigger blogging and content platforms. Meanwhile, another Obvious principal, Jason Goldman, has been focused on Branch, an online conversation-focused site.

Presumably, Obvious will invest in Jelly, but that’s not clear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I noted in a piece last week about the departure of Yahoo Mail head Vivek Sharma for a new job at Disney, the Silicon Valley Internet giant is likely to see a lot more execs unhappy with the new regime of CEO Marissa Mayer take off after annual bonuses start being handed out in March.

Today, it’s James Carroll, SVP of the consumer and global platform group at Yahoo.

In the job, the former Microsoft exec has been in charge of the company’s global R&D centers in China, India and the Middle East and been “responsible for Yahoo’s content, social and membership platforms and the international delivery of all Yahoo! products and services worldwide.” That has included all its efforts at internationalization, international infrastructure development and localization.

Sources said he is leaving to head international at Go Daddy, one of the world’s biggest Web hosting and domain registration companies. Go Daddy is led by former Yahoo product head Blake Irving, who had hired Carroll at Yahoo in 2010.

And, as NBC announced earlier today, editor in chief of Yahoo News, Hillary Frey, has taken a job there as editorial director of news at NBCNews.com, which is undergoing a major refurbishment. She had been at Yahoo since late 2011.

Many more to come, I am told, as execs either decide to depart or Mayer continues to clean house. It’s still unclear who will be taking over these key jobs at Yahoo.

One thing for sure: I don’t expect a comment from Yahoo PR on the changes.