Lost in the sauce of the national work-from-home debate of last week that engulfed all things Yahoo, was a fascinating tidbit that several employees passed on to me from a recent Friday FYI meeting at its Silicon Valley HQ.

At the gathering, CEO Marissa Mayer talked briefly about the new telecommuting arrangements for some staffers, including the controversial new work-from-home memo that HR head Jackie Reses had issued that day.

But when Reses — who also wears another corporate hat as head of M&A at Yahoo — spoke she mentioned to the crowd that Yahoo was working on two “significant” acquisitions and about six smaller talent “acqhires.”

“It was kind of odd to telegraph it in such a big forum,” said one employee of Reses’ comments at the meeting in late February.

The revelation was unusual, to be sure, but perhaps not a surprise, given the recent run-up in Yahoo stock, its healthy cash position and, most of all, its need to add meaningful growth to the current efforts at turnaround.

And while some of its recent buys have been interesting and focused on improving its moribund mobile efforts, they have also been very small. And, as one high-ranking exec there told me, they “don’t move the needle in the way we need to in bringing in senior talent or loads of users or serious revenue.”

Indeed, while Yahoo shares have benefited greatly from the impressive performance by Alibaba Group in China, which is clearly on a roll, many think that showing actual improvement in its core business will be critical in the months ahead.

While making changes to Yahoo’s homepage and email, as well as cutting products, has been done, it is not yet clear what the impact is; the changes are aimed more at holding on to consumers rather than exciting them with new offerings.

Yahoo could also create its own new products to wow the masses, but that has been harder for it over the years. (Remember Livestand? Yeah, not so much.) In any case, an innovation infusion of such a large magnitude will take some time, given Mayer has to get the right people into place to do so.

Thus, a big purchase of an exciting new company with prominent leadership seems more likely than not and sooner than later. While Mayer has not articulated her vision for the new Yahoo in anything more than general ways, what she buys will say a lot.

Thus, sources said that Yahoo has been looking at a range of such acquisitions, in a number of categories such as advertising tech, mobile monetization and, of course, consumer “daily delight,” which is a phrase Mayer has used a lot.

It would be bold if Mayer went all out and made a mega-buy that would shake up the competitive landscape. My first choice for that is Pinterest, the scrapbooking phenom that was just valued at $2.5 billion in a new funding round. Mayer has also shown a lot of interest in blogging superstar Tumblr, while at both Google and Yahoo, as well as Foursquare, the well-known location app. Of course, there is also the troubled gaming giant, Zynga.

All are very pricey and would face rival interest, but such a move would be akin to Facebook’s billion-dollar blockbuster purchase of Instagram. Many now think that was prescient and cheap, given how important mobile photos are to the current digital ecosystem.

The list of possible big deals goes on: Hulu (which needs a tasty content element to make sense) as a video play; Millennial Media or Jumptap for mobile advertising; Quora for social answers; Flipboard for social media consumption; Rubicon or PubMatic, for ad targeting; and many more.

But all of those begin at the billion-dollar or more range and I have checked with a number of these and come up peanuts. Still, there are a whole lot of choices for Mayer and Yahoo in the $200 million to $500 million price range.

Here, Yahoo has the financial strength to make at least two of these significant purchases that Reses mentioned, as well as developing a much better reputation for Yahoo to keep real talent interested.

As one prominent startup exec, who had told me he never would consider selling to Yahoo in the past, said recently: “They are no longer complete losers, although Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon are still cooler.”

Hey, it’s a compliment, even if it’s a back-handed one, so it will be interesting to see who finds Yahoo cool enough.

Tonight, the company responded by holding firm on its efforts to limit content to registered users by default. However, it opened up three different loopholes that allow non-registered users in, similar to the way pay-walled news sites like the New York Times offer access to non-paying users.

Quora exec Marc Bodnick argued in a blog post that people should join Quora because participation is a key part of the site. When users register, they contribute answers and votes and follows, and they are drawn back into the site. That engagement and retention results in “increasingly large audiences” for writers, Bodnick said.

But for those who want to share their own writings and their favorite answers and posts more broadly — which is, after all, another way to find an audience! — Quora is providing the following openings:

1. Share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Starting today, when you use the Share button to share on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, people won’t be asked to join Quora to read what you’ve shared.
2. Sharing URLs. Another option is to share pages using short links (e.g., when you want to share via email). You can get a short link by clicking the Share button and then copying the short URL listed at the top of the Share box. Other people can open that link without being asked to join Quora to read the content.
3. Open any Quora URL. If you come across a Quora link anywhere and you want to read it without being asked to join Quora, you can add the text “?share=1″ to the end of the URL. Example: http://www.quora.com/Hostage-Situations/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-a-hostage-negotiator?share=1

As for mobile access, Quora still would rather users download its apps, Bodnick said in a follow-up statement.

Accounting for about 25% of overall traffic, mobile platforms are important and growing on Quora — for both reading and contributing. We’ve worked hard to create the best mobile experience with our Android and iOS apps, and we encourage users to download them for the optimal mobile experience. We are always listening to the feedback of our community, and will continue to iterate the way that we help people discover the best Quora experience on any device.

(Image courtesy of imageshunter/Shutterstock)

But not every A needs a Q to get started. Some people just have cool stories and information in their heads that they want people to read.

So Quora is inverting itself and offering a basic blogging tool, starting today.

This isn’t a blog service with custom layouts and nifty widgets. It’s not a full competitor to WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr or even Medium. It’s a place to write good stuff and get read by the Quora audience.

While Quora might not yet be an enormously popular site, it’s perfectly suited to get distribution for interesting writing, according to spokesperson Marc Bodnick.

That’s because unlike on other social networks, where content is generally only delivered to an audience of friends and followers, Quora is also organized by topics. All users subscribe to some number of these 300,000 topics, and sees new posts about them in their feed.

“Because of the topics system, you can come onto Quora as a nobody and be read by tens of thousands of people in a couple of days,” Bodnick said in an interview today.

Quora estimates that active writers average 30,000 monthly views, with some extremely active and popular writers getting more than one million views per year.

So essentially, Quora users are already blogging. Now Quora is just calling it blogging. And it will live alongside the site’s existing question-and-answer activity.

The new Quora blog layout is a sparse page. Instead of related Quora content in the right bar, blog post pages show other posts by the same author. There’s no notion of customizability, or importing an existing blog from elsewhere — but there are RSS feeds for each author.

As Bodnick described it, this is not a place for cat photos or day-in-the-life diaries, but rather for long-form personal essays, opinions and information.

Plus, Bodnick said Quora is totally fine with writers cross-posting and promoting their other work, and Quora won’t do anything to edit the blog posts besides making sure that topics aren’t being spammed.

But even though Quora blogs are different from Quora Q&A, they “will be a first-class content form on the site,” Bodnick said. Quora is really pushing this distribution angle — saying that most people who start a blog elsewhere have very little chance of it being seen. “If you write something good, we’re pretty much assuring you it’s going to get read,” he said.

On the logistics side, Quora has had a previous bookmarking tool called “Boards” that didn’t make a ton of sense, but people had already been harnessing it to write blog posts. The Board feature is being recast as the new Blog tool, and should be available to all users today.

Plus, Quora has built a nifty mobile rich-text editor for the iPhone that it will be introducing in the coming weeks, and bringing to Android after that.

Leszek Glasner / Shutterstock.com

With the end of 2012 approaching, I started to assess what’s happened in the space this year and identified a few areas with the potential to reshape the social landscape. As we move into 2013, a year in which funding appears to be harder to secure, these factors will be instrumental for both start-ups and larger companies alike.

First, the move to mobile has definitely affected interest-based networks. A notable shift was Pinterest’s launch on phones and tablets, but many other start-ups also made a mobile push. Fitocracy, an interest based social network oriented around fitness that was originally Web-only, launched its iPhone app earlier this year, and has seen usage on mobile surge to a huge percentage of its overall engagement and traffic. Thumb, an iPhone and Android-based social network that allows people to ask questions and get instant responses, sees extremely high user engagement through its mobile apps, to the tune of over five hours per month per monthly active user and over 1 billion total yearly responses.

Users are spending lots of time engaging on social media from their mobile devices, but they are discerning and demanding. Consumers want responsive, well-designed mobile apps, and as engagement on mobile continues to grow, social services that nail their mobile experiences will reap the benefits of this momentum.

Brands are looking for a piece of the action on social and mobile

Second, a consistent concern over the year has been the effectiveness of advertising as a revenue driver on new social and mobile platforms. On the eve of the Facebook IPO, GM pulled back from its $10M advertising spend, and they are not the only ones who have doubted Facebook’s plan to drive revenue on mobile. More recently, after a disastrous snafu that released earnings early, Wall Street analysts dropped Google’s share price by nearly 9 percent due to concerns that its mobile ad business would not monetize as well as it did on the Web. These examples underscore a basic concern, namely, mobile and social-oriented networks are not set up to monetize as well as the Web on desktops.

My own view is more optimistic. Certainly social networks will have to refine their offerings for brands. This will likely take experimenting that will result in both good and bad outcomes that focus on solutions that benefit both companies and users. Mark Cuban recently critiqued Facebook’s approach on its Promoted Posts because it failed to reach a balanced solution for both parties. Over time, I expect that the mobile and social spaces will offer new opportunities to advertisers and brands to adapt and connect more effectively with their target markets. This isn’t a broken market; it’s just still in early stages of maturity.

As with any maturing process there are both good and bad examples of how brands can work with social networks. Even on Facebook, which is the most heavily embraced by brands, many are weak in how they connect with fans and followers. For example, I’m a fan of Canon cameras, as are nearly 1.1 million other Facebook users. Visit Canon’s Facebook Fan Page, though, and it’s a ghost town. The last activity on the page I see was from April of this year. It’s ridiculous. Canon is the global market share leader in digital SLR cameras, with over a million fans willing to interact with them on Facebook. Yet the brand shows no evidence of photo contests, no showcasing of products, and lacks recent video demos of its cameras or lenses. Clearly, there are still global brands that haven’t really leveraged Facebook yet.

On the other hand, companies that are finding ways beyond advertising to connect with people encourage me. Walmart, for example, is starting to use Facebook to connect with users and drive business to its stores this holiday season. Here’s one recent example from my own Facebook stream:

This is fun. As a video game nerd, I get pulled in thinking about whether a Halo or WoW toy should be the rollback of the day. Walmart connects with me in an interesting way, and if I engage, the company gets potentially useful data. Walmart is starting to evolve.

The potential for mobile social companies is even larger. Brands see the rising engagement and importance of mobile, and are working to figure out how to leverage it effectively. I look to companies like BlueRun Ventures portfolio company Verve Mobile, that focus on mobile ads targeting users leveraging location data, and see this opening all sorts of new opportunities and campaigns options for brands and advertisers. There is often a misperception that location-based marketing is about catching a consumer as they are in front of the shelf or just walking into the store. On the contrary, there are more creative ways to leverage location that are as insightful as search was to intent. For example, understanding that your target consumer is shopping at competitors’ stores or has visited a number of locations in your category is a strong signal of purchase intent. These are opportunities that weren’t available before smartphones. Couple location with data from social or interest-based graphs, and it becomes a powerful platform.

The fact that the relationship between social and mobile networks and brands is still maturing bodes well for start-ups, as they are nimble enough to test the countless avenues toward revenue. This is especially true for the interest-based social apps and services, which are known to quickly gain users and engagement. Brands are going to be looking for scale and how much time their users spend on the service interacting. By focusing on building a great community, there will be an opportunity to ride the wave of advertising dollars that will inevitably shift into social and mobile as brands adapt. Start-ups also need to think about what an ad unit really means on their service and how they can monetize their brands without compromising their product experience. The aperture for advertising is more important than ever in mobile and it is something that both brands and start-ups need to work together on to get right.

Facebook hasn’t snuffed the competition; the social space continues to evolve

New interest-based networks continue to crop up, some breaking through quite strongly. Pinterest is the obvious leader of the bunch, proven by its ongoing expansion and growth this year. But multiple other interest-based social networks suggest a future that is more diverse and not dominated by one player like Facebook. For example, humor site 9gag exploded in the last 18 months to become a top 500 site globally, according to Web analytics firm Alexa. Fitocracy gives the athlete in us a place to share fitness achievements without sounding like a bore or braggart, and sees its users spending an average of 3.5 hours on the app each month, a number that is second only to Facebook and Thumb in terms of user engagement. Go ask a question on the mobile opinion network, Thumb, and you’ll get more than 50 responses in just a few minutes, as Facebook recently gave up on its foray into question and answer. User appetite for these new services continues to expand.

There are two broad categories of interest-based networks, and both are seeing companies succeed in 2012. One category is verticalized, subject-themed networks such as Foodspotting (food), Rapgenius (rap lyrics), 9Gag (humor), Wedding Party (weddings) and Fitocracy (fitness). The promise of these services is that they deliver value to users in a specific slice of their lives. They create strong, loyal communities that can be valuable targets for brands. The challenge they face in the evolving ecosystem is how to sustain growth and user acquisition given their vertical focus.

The other approach is horizontal: Pinterest, Quora, Path, Thumb and PandaWhale. These services span a broad range of topics, but offer a different interaction model — whether through pinboards in the case of Pinterest, or questions and answers in the cases of Quora and Thumb. These networks have broader audiences that can be spliced into specific targets, but will require large scale to deliver meaningful targets in specific areas (e.g. number of users on Quora that are interested in a particular topic). In this segment, the mechanics for driving engagement and analytics will be very important to delivering advertising targeting and conversion.

Both approaches will likely yield winners. And there are many questions I ask myself when evaluating these companies and looking ahead to 2013. For vertically focused networks, the question will be when and whether those services need to scale into other areas. Will Foodspotting expand to offer Winespotting? Will Wedding Party extend into Baby Shower Party? And will the users follow?

For horizontal services, the question is how to extend the entire platform more broadly, to make it more mainstream. Pinterest has seemingly crossed this chasm. Some have questioned whether Quora will do so, though I’m extremely confident it will.

Looking back on what has shaped the ecosystem to this point, it is impossible to ignore the effect continued growth on mobile and increased interest from brands will have on the current batch of social contenders in 2013, new and old. The goal is to deliver a service that adds value to users, builds a community, and helps power users and key contributors gain recognition and notoriety. But the path to success will be varied. I will say that from my vantage point as an investor that, heading into 2013, if mobile doesn’t factor very heavily into the approach of an interest-based social network, then I’m not interested. Skate to where the puck is going is the lesson here.

Jay Jamison is a Partner at BlueRun Ventures, who focuses on early stage mobile, consumer and enterprise investments. He also serves on the boards of AppCentral (acquired by Good Technology), AppRedeem, Foodspotting, and Thumb. You can follow Jay on Twitter @jay_jamison or read his blog at www.jayjamison.com.

Indeed, when I wrote that Facebook was to introduce its own version of a Snapchat app last week — a mobile messaging application that allows users to send self-destructing text, photo and video messages to one another — many began writing their Snapchat eulogies.

Not so fast. While Facebook’s new Poke app shot up to No. 1 in the App Store for its first few days on the market, it has settled back down to spot No. 39, according to the latest numbers on Apple’s App Store leader board.

Part of this has a simple explanation. For the first few days after Facebook released Poke, the company inserted links to the App Store into users’ news feeds, prompting them to download the new app. That sort of distribution power is rivaled by few, as the news feed is literally front and center for every single one of Facebook’s billion-plus users. That, combined with the release day press blitz, pushed the app to the top of the charts.

But now Facebook seems to have taken that placement out of the feed. That’ll obviously sink the download rates for the new app. And it has only been out for a few days, so it’s not necessarily a measure of the app’s long-term growth.

Still, it says something that while Poke rests at No. 39, Snapchat currently sits in fourth place on Apple’s Top Free Apps list. It has the benefit of having been the go-to app for ephemeral messaging for months, not to mention the word-of-mouth power that Poke can’t attain in just a few days.

The larger issue here isn’t just about Snapchat vs. Facebook. It’s about cloning services in general. We’ve seen Facebook copy apps and other start-ups many times before; the Questions feature aped Quora’s style, while Deals was supposed to be a Groupon killer. Same with Google, whose Currents brought out forecasts of the demise of Flipboard, while Google+ made many tell Facebook to be wary.

How did all those turn out? Well, Facebook killed Questions a few weeks ago, and all the other clone products haven’t exactly dominated the competition. (When was the last time you used Currents? Ever?)

The lesson: A giant competitor playing in your space does not mean you’re dead in the water. If you’ve got a year-long head start, a loyal user base and a firm grasp on the technology you’ve built, it may not make a difference if Facebook or Google rips your app off (and in the case of Poke, it’s a straight feature-for-feature rip).

Obviously this Snapchat vs. Poke thing will take time to play out. Just remember, even for a behemoth like Facebook, there’s no such thing as a sure thing.

Leap Commerce is hoping to create a place where consumers can go to ask questions and get answers from experts on all kinds of products. “There’s an entirely new evolution around how people are considering or are thinking about purchasing items,” said Amit Chatterjee, Leap’s CEO and co-founder.

He said people are increasingly deliberate when it comes to buying mid-range items, like a dress, a stereo or a refrigerator. It’s not quite a car, but it’s more than picking up a tube of toothpaste. In today’s world, he believes reviews are not enough — you want “consideration from friends, or a buddy.”

While many companies are trying to crack the code on social commerce — and most have failed — Leap Commerce has another spin on the concept, with a lot of its expertise coming from Facebook engineers. Last year, Chatterjee co-founded the company with Karel Baloun, one of the first senior engineers to join Facebook in 2005. He is now Leap’s CTO. Leap’s head of products, Kent Schoen, also worked at the social network, spending five years on product management, marketing and operations for Facebook ads.

On Black Friday, Leap Commerce launched the latest iteration of its shopping app, called Spark.

The application, which is available on iPhone and iPad, is strikingly similar to its first app, Best Decision, except for the ability to get advice from friends and experts. It allows you to search across many e-commerce players by aggregating sites like Amazon and Gilt Groupe. While there’s no shortage of items to browse, the experience is a little clumsy since full-sized product pages from around the Web are scaled down and embedded into the app. To make it easier, however, items can be added to one universal shopping cart, where they can be purchased quickly.

Chatterjee says where the app really shines is in providing a fun, collaborative shopping experience where crowds can chat about some of their favorite items, making it very similar to Quora, the question-and-answer site. For example, he said, if you are considering buying a pair of skinny jeans, you can bring in images and tags from the product inventory, and you can say, “I prefer this pair for the following reasons.” Others can quickly vote up or down, and there are 16 emoticons that allow users to provide quick feedback without having to type a lot.

It’s still early days, but since launching the day after Thanksgiving, Chatterjee said, 2,000 questions have been asked, including 167 in the past 36 hours. He said the goal of Spark is to reduce shopping cart abandonment, since consumers will feel more confident about making purchases. Initially, Leap plans to monetize the app through affiliate fees, but eventually, Chatterjee said, they will have enough data to provide insights on users to brands, which can also propose questions about products on the site to get consumer feedback.

This isn’t a full-blown presence system — there is no Quora buddy list or chat function. The Q&A site’s new “Online Now” feature is for the very specific purpose of connecting Quora users who have questions with people who are both likely to answer a particular question and online at that very moment.

Quora has long shown suggestions for the best people to answer a question. Starting today, it will sort those people by their availability. The intent is for people to get answers faster. So instead of emphasizing a canonical best answer, Quora wants users to feel like they can ask a pressing question — for instance, a movie or restaurant recommendation, or help with a problem — and get a quick response.

As it tries to grow, Quora has experimented with ways to make users feel more connected and engaged. Not all of them have been popular. In August, it started publicly displaying when a user had read a post — not commented on it or upvoted it, but simply read it. That feature was later toned down, though it wasn’t removed.

This time around, the company is putting more effort into being clear about how Online Now is released. For instance, online status isn’t shown for users until they have visited the Quora homepage. However, after that it is automatically turned on; so users are effectively opted in by default after they’ve been notified.

Privacy-conscious users who already opted out of Views are automatically opted out of Online Now as well.

But social apps — one of the most popular app categories — aren’t showing up to Microsoft’s launch party.

Neither Facebook nor Twitter have built applications for the Windows 8 platform. Neither have other popular applications like social discovery app Foursquare or Quora, the question-and-answer Web site.

The largest critique from early users of Microsoft’s new release is the paucity of apps available for the platform. Windows 8 uses a different kind of “modern style” application, optimized to work across tablets and smartphones as well as the desktop. And not every third-party company has been willing or able to devote resources toward building a version of their app for Windows 8.

It looks like at least some of the companies never had any plans to bring native apps to the Windows 8 launch in the first place. Twitter on Tuesday announced that it was in the process of building a “great” native application for Windows 8, though didn’t anticipate releasing it for another few months.

Facebook, too, hasn’t built a native app for Windows 8, and has not yet announced any plans to do so.

Quora continues to focus on the most popular and growing platforms, iOS and Android, according to a post from Quora product designer Anne Halsall. Same goes for Microsoft’s mobile platform: “We have a few things on our list to get to before we start looking at Windows Phones, but I’m hopeful that someday we will,” Halsall wrote.

No response from Foursquare when I asked if something is in the works.

To be fair, Windows 8 threads some social functionality into the OS itself, much as Apple did with its recent Mountain Lion update. Users can connect their Facebook and Twitter accounts to their Windows 8 profiles, and can update and browse statuses from within the “people” application. And obviously we’re able to access all of these applications through the Internet Explorer 10 browser that comes stock with the OS.

But this misses the point. Part of Microsoft’s pitch for the new software is interoperability among multiple platforms — from desktop to tablet to smartphone. And it’s specifically optimized for touch, hence the slick tile-based interface. The whole charm of building an OS that operates smoothly across platforms is having apps that take advantage of that very capability. If I’m forced back into the browser for this, there’s no real advantage to using Facebook on Windows 8 over any other platform.

It is perhaps a smart move for third-party social developers to wait and see what sort of traction Windows 8 has before pushing out an application for the platform. After all, devoting resources to building for a new platform costs time, money and (wo)manpower. Outside of hiring dedicated Windows developers, that would mean pulling people away from working on the major platforms like iOS and Android.

Still, Windows is the most-used desktop operating system in the entire world. The new OS has already been installed on more than four million systems in the first week since it went on sale (now just another 396 million to go.) If the demand is there, it’s a safe bet that the apps will come.

On Tuesday, Pao disclosed on Quora that she had been asked to leave Kleiner Perkins.

The VC firm responded that Pao had not been fired, but is instead “transitioning” out of her job.

What does that actually mean? What’s happening is that Kleiner Perkins asked Pao to cease her duties but is keeping her on payroll at the moment, according to her attorney, Alan Exelrod of Rudy, Exelrod, Zieff & Lowe.

“On Monday, Ellen was told to clean out her office that day, not come back to the office, turn in her computer, have no access to documents, and essentially stop doing work because her job would be ending in the future,” he said. “She had 30 days to transition off corporate boards.”

Exelrod said that Pao is still on the KP payroll, but refused to disclose what date she was given for her last paycheck. “She’s looking for work,” he said. “The essence of what they told her is, ‘Don’t come back, you’re not working here any more, you’re gone.’”

Update: Kleiner sent a new statement that responds to Exelrod’s comments.

Kleiner’s actions were not retaliatory. The firm informed Ellen Pao that it would be separating her employment as the result of longstanding, documented performance issues and not because of the litigation or because she is a woman. The firm was also generous and fair in its offer to help her transition her career in ways that are inconsistent with retaliatory conduct. They were willing to keep her on the payroll as an employee for 6 months and to vest in venture funds, and then pay her severance, all without asking her to release her pending legal claims which is entirely inconsistent with an intent to retaliate. Her lawyer may believe he has additional legal claims based on retaliation. Their view seems to be that even existing performance problems prohibit an employer from taking action once an employee has sued. We believe otherwise.

So it seems that Kleiner Perkins and Pao essentially agree on what’s happening, but differ on what to call it. What really matters, though, is how this affects the lawsuit.

“We view this as retaliation for her raising these issues and filing the lawsuit, and because she’s a woman and the circumstances of the situation,” Exelrod said.

Kleiner Perkins had previously said that Pao’s performance was the reason she had not been promoted at the firm, rather than discrimination.

“She’s performed well there for many years, and anything they say about her performance is just a pretext for their retaliatory and discriminatory motives,” Exelrod said.

The case is currently headed to an appeals court, so Kleiner Perkins can argue again that it should be arbitrated instead of litigated. Exelrod said he and Pao will file a charge of discrimination with the State of California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, and that once that arbitration issue is resolved, they plan to add the issue of termination to the existing lawsuit.

Here is Kleiner Perkins’ full statement from the wee hours this morning:

Ms. Pao’s Quora post is misleading. She remains an employee of the firm. Because of long standing issues having no relationship or bearing on the litigation, Kleiner approached Ms. Pao to facilitate her transition, over an extended period of time, out of the firm. The proposed terms, that did not require Ms. Pao to waive any legal rights or claims, are generous, fair and intended to support Ms. Pao in a successful career transition.

In an update to a previous answer she had left on Q&A site Quora, Pao wrote, “I have been terminated from my job at KPCB. On Monday afternoon, senior management told me to clean out my office, leave, and not come back.”

Reached this evening, a Kleiner Perkins spokeswoman said she had no comment, but promised to get an answer about Pao’s employment status at the firm as soon as possible.

Update. Kleiner Perkins provided a comment:

Ms. Pao’s Quora post is misleading.  She remains an employee of the firm.  Because of long standing issues having no relationship or bearing on the litigation, Kleiner approached Ms. Pao to facilitate her transition, over an extended period of time, out of the firm.  The proposed terms, that did not require Ms. Pao to waive any legal rights or claims, are generous, fair and intended to support Ms. Pao in a successful career transition.

Pao also replied to a Facebook message with a “no comment” and referral to her lawyer.

The Quora update came through at 10:49 p.m. PT on Monday, and is attached to Pao’s verified account. Previously, Pao had posted that she continued to work at Kleiner Perkins as the legal case progressed.

That was an awkward arrangement for all involved, but one where any further negative action toward Pao would reflect poorly on the venture firm. And that’s what appears to have happened now, at least according to Pao.

This latest update was appended to a Quora entry, for which the question is “Did Ellen Pao quit KPCB after the lawsuit?” and Pao’s full answer is:

No, and I don’t plan to quit.

Update: I have been terminated from my job at KPCB. On Monday afternoon, senior management told me to clean out my office, leave, and not come back.

Thank you, Quora community, for your support.

Pao had said in her lawsuit that she suffered from harassment at the firm by multiple partners, that the firm did not address her complaints about the matter, and that she was shut out of promotions and other opportunities because of her gender. Kleiner Perkins replied that Pao’s own performance kept her from advancing at the firm and that her claims had no merit.

The latest action in the case was a judge denying Kleiner’s repeated efforts to send the case to arbitration.

Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever

The departure was confirmed by a company spokeswoman, who said Cheever would no longer have a day-to-day presence at the company.

Cheever co-founded Quora in 2009 with Adam D’Angelo; they both left Facebook after having early and significant roles. D’Angelo is the Quora CEO while Cheever didn’t have a formal title but had most recently led the development of the company’s Android app.

The shake-up doesn’t look good for Quora, but it does give the company another parallel to Facebook, where Mark Zuckerberg is the sole co-founder and member of the early team to remain.

Cheever is a Harvard grad who was heavily involved in the creation of Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform. He was formerly at Amazon.

In a canned Q&A on the site, it asks, “Why is Charlie Cheever stepping away from Quora day-to-day?” D’Angelo wrote, “We decided it was best for Charlie to step away from his day-to-day role at the company. He will always be a founder of Quora and will be an advisor to the company.”

Plus, they didn’t want to waste time building and maintaining native apps when the Web was the way the mobile world was going (hopefully).

That plan didn’t really work. The mobile Web apps often were slower and didn’t fully make use of the capabilities of each phone. It was almost like a voluntary handicap.

So today, both the Web giants and the most promising Web start-ups are going native. Every press briefing I go to, I hear people brag about how “we didn’t just port” the latest mobile app from one platform to another.

You see this with Facebook, which recently (finally!) rewrote its iOS app to be a native app, seeing significant gains in speed. Or with Pinterest, which just launched its first Android and iPad apps, which the company’s founders emphasized were lovingly crafted for each platform. Tumblr also recently overhauled its apps, and the mobile-first companies like Instagram and Foursquare figured this out from the start, of course.

Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever

The latest is the Q&A service Quora, which today launched its first Android version, for both phones and tablets including the Kindle Fire.

Quora is not a huge site — it reportedly gets single-digit millions of visitors per month, and it’s only available in English — but it’s well-respected for its content, product and team, led by early Facebook programmers Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo.

Between its iPhone app and mobile Web site, Quora says it already gets 25 percent of its traffic from mobile. So Cheever, with whom I met yesterday, has shifted his internal focus entirely to mobile, he said.

For the Android app, Cheever said, “We really decided to make this really first-class, and do everything the way people who use Android phones would expect to work.” That means integrated voice search, homepage widgets, landscape mode, the works.

The Quora app does use some HTML5, Cheever said, in instances where Web views have better performance.

So this is actually a bit more subtle than native versus Web; what’s important is the new Quora app is handcrafted for the Android environment.

“Some people tried to be almost religious about HTML5, and the reality is the technology and performance isn’t here yet,” Cheever said. “The idea we wouldn’t invest in making great experiences seems kind of silly.”

Okay, but what about the problem of Android fragmentation across all the different devices and versions? Cheever replied that in some cases mobile support for Web features seems to be more fragmented than support for native stuff.

What about the commitment required to move to new platforms beyond Android and iOS (Quora actually doesn’t have an iPad version yet either)? Cheever also downplayed that issue, saying Quora is considering Windows Phone, but he doesn’t really see any other significant platforms beyond that.

Making the commitment to these dedicated apps is already paying off for Quora, Cheever said. That’s because so many people use their phones as computer replacements or equivalents. Offering a mobile app that does everything a Web site on a PC can do has encouraged a higher level of participation. Quora users don’t just consume content on their phones, they also create it.

So far Quora users seem to ask questions, write answers and read other people’s contributions from their phones just the way they do from their computers. There isn’t demonstrably more location-based content or quick on-the-go questions, as you might expect from mobile users, according to Cheever. “We expected to have more divergence,” he said. “It’s almost surprising there isn’t a big difference.”

With “Embedded Quotes,” publishers can now click an embed link from underneath Quora user entries and take a snippet of code to insert in their sites. It’s an easier, faster option for outsiders, and presents a fairly attractive bit of Quora content for third-party platforms to display on their sites (check out the screenshot here).

It’s much akin to Twitter’s similar pitch for “embedded tweets” last year; again, a streamlined way of sticking content inside third-party sites. Quora’s pitch positions it as a better way to expand its users’ authorial presence outside of Quora.com.

But it’s really about executing a growth-stage tactic: Expanding Quora’s presence outside of its own site. Make it easier for publishers to feature your content on their sites and they’ll do your product evangelizing for you.

It’s also a much-needed bit of good publicity after the company debuted its “Views” product earlier this month, a move by Quora that put on display all user reading activity for others to see, much to the chagrin of Web privacy wonks. Still another growth-stage move, Views was made to foster activity inside the site itself. Unfortunately, pushing everyone into Views by default left a bad taste in the mouths of many.

Embedded Quotes is a simpler — and much less controversial — way of achieving growth. Now we’ll see if publishers take the new feature up.

“Views” is meant to make Quora more lively — users will now see real-time trending stories in their Quora feeds when multiple people they’re following have viewed a story.

The company told me it built the feature to help Quora contributors get a better idea of how their posts and public boards spread.

But that’s not all of it, since this is not just a back-end analytics tool.

Quora users will be able to see, in the right-hand column of every question, answer and post, how many views it has received. When they click through, they will see the names and pictures of who saw the content, starting with people they follow (see below).

I’ve written about how new read-receipt features from Facebook and other social and messaging services are hastening an end to online lurking by making passive participation active and accountable. Quora Views totally extends this trend — now just the simple act of visiting a page will be shared, by default.

Quora product manager Sandra Liu Huang told me she is aware that people may not always want to share as they surf.

Though Views will be turned on by default for all Quora users starting today, it shares somewhat selectively. Quora only shows views that are referred from within its own service — so, from the main feed and its weekly digest emails. If users visit a page from a search engine or link on Twitter or Facebook, their views won’t be shared. Views to content in adult categories aren’t shared.

Further, users can turn off Views entirely in their Quora settings, or delete their own views on each individual page. And Views aren’t automatically shared through to users’ Facebook pages the way other activity on Quora is through a Facebook Open Graph connection.

Quora exec Marc Bodnick told me that the Views project is part of a larger effort to help Quora content creators get broader distribution. Views gives the authors better insight into how their contributions are spread.

Elsewhere, featured Quora content will be included as a channel on the Pulse and Flipboard newsreaders starting this week. And Quora just redesigned user profiles to show lengthier excerpts of that user’s posts, so, for active writers, they look much like a blog.

“People on Quora are writing to be read,” Bodnick said. “What we’re telling you is that Quora is a distribution mechanism that works.”

Huang acknowledged that with the addition of Views, Quora is now accumulating a ton of different and potentially overlapping signals, as the service already has a complex system of follows and upvotes for its various types of content.

She said that eventually these may be condensed, but there are no plans to do so at the moment.

Pearl CEO Andy Kurtzig

Haven’t heard of it? That’s at least partly by design, but now the company is looking for some attention — and to break away from the rest of the Q&A pack — by calling itself Pearl.com.

Pearl has 10,000 vetted experts on hand to help answer its users’ questions for a fee. For an average of $30, users can find a lawyer, mechanic, doctor or another professional to discuss whatever problem they are having. Then, after a few weeks, the archives are posted online anonymously for other people to see.

The average response time is 7.5 minutes. The site gets 250,000 questions per month, and each Pearl transaction comes with a money-back guarantee if users don’t think the advice is good.

Pearl has affiliate deals with Dr. Phil, Judge Judy and “Car Talk” to offer question boxes on each of their sites. It also recently built an API and will soon release mobile apps, Kurtzig said.

Pearl just raised $25 million in Series A funding from investors such as Glynn Capital and Charles Schwab (the person, not the company; “Chuck” is on the Pearl board, too).

I scan my phone to pay for a latte at Starbucks, I snap pictures of checks to make bank deposits. Once, I used it to buy a few screws at Home Depot without ever pulling out my credit card.

But this week, Apple officially announced its first steps into the payments space with Passbook, an application that electronically stores loyalty cards, gift cards, boarding passes, electronic movie tickets, coupons and more on the phone.

Passbook comes out this fall, and Apple hasn’t yet said if it will accept payments or store any credit card information. But based on several conversations I’ve had over the past week, nearly everyone expects that is where Apple is headed.

The truth, however, is that accepting payments is a lot trickier than it sounds. Transferring money responsibly between parties is extremely sensitive. Even for Apple, it could prove difficult to come up with a game changer that would be as elegant as they’d like it to be and make everyone happy.

Passbook

But, for now, Apple’s first step is Passbook.

The point of the application is to make it easier to keep track of gift cards, coupons, passes and tickets and other things that get lost in your wallet or on your phone.

Using Passbook, iPhone and iPod touch owners will be able to call up electronic bar codes on the screen to check in for a flight, get into a movie or redeem a coupon. They will also be able to see when coupons expire, pinpoint where their concert seats are or check the balance of a coffee loyalty card. The app uses location-based services too, so when a consumer is close to a movie theater or store, a ticket or relevant coupon will appear on the phone’s lock screen.

Several partners have already signed up for the program, including Target, Fandango, Starbucks, Amtrak, United Airlines and the W Hotel.

Ticket seller Fandango confirmed in a statement that, with Passbook, “moviegoers can bypass the box office at select theaters with their scannable ticket on their iPhone, and with location and time features, the Mobile Ticket will automatically be displayed for quick and convenient access as soon as the moviegoer arrives at the theater.”

As seamless as it sounds, both retailers and consumers will have to do some juggling to make it work.

Target and Starbucks, for example, have already upgraded their hardware at the point of sale to be able to read a bar code from the phone’s screen. And consumers will have to make a conscious effort to save their coupons and bar codes in the application, much like when they add an event to a calendar.

Already a payment provider

If Apple chooses to build more functionality into the app, it does have a few things going for it.

For instance, on Monday Apple said it has about 400 million iTunes accounts — meaning that the company has that many credit cards on file. To put that number in perspective, PayPal has about 100 million active accounts — a quarter of Apple’s reach.

Another benefit is that Apple owns the phone’s hardware and operating system, so if it needed to tweak something, such as integrating near field communication, it could easily do that in the next generation. NFC is often considered the linchpin to mobile payments because it would enable people to tap to pay at the register, without having to show a barcode.

Complexities abound

On the other hand, turning Passbook into a payments network will not be easy.

The simplest route would be to enable users to charge everyday purchases like groceries and gas to their account with a tap of their NFC-enabled phone. The approach would be similar to PayPal’s business, which allows people to check out online using the credit card it has on file.

But that’s not the kind of game changer that everyone is looking for from Apple.

In our digital lives, today’s consumers want more capabilities, such as being able to make charges to a variety of cards, monitor their account balances, pay bills, make returns and save receipts. Coupons and offers should also be part of the mix, based on a person’s interests.

In building an application that does all that, Google has faced several setbacks with its Wallet app, especially when it comes to partnering with the carriers, banks, retailers and handset makers. In particular, NFC has been slow to get off the ground, and carriers — including Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T — have blocked Google’s Wallet from appearing on Android phones.

PayPal has made slightly more progress, but it is still working out the kinks in the system. Currently, the company is focused on signing up lots of retailers so it can learn from real-life experiences, in order to make a big push in 2013.

Apple faces these same technology hurdles, and it would have to build a system that addresses the security needs of consumers while also complying with laws in every country in which it operated. The least of its problems may be figuring out a way to make money in payments — or at least not lose money.

Right now, Apple charges companies 30 percent each time they sell anything on iTunes.

That’s a much larger cut than what they could get away with if they extended it to retailers, who are used to paying around 2 percent. Of that much smaller percentage, Apple would still have to pay the processors, such as Visa and MasterCard.

There are other options, too

Since Apple clearly intends for the service to become one of its flagship applications — like Siri, FaceTime or Maps — how else might it address the payments business?

There are a few more options, based on what already exists in the market.

Instead of copying Google or PayPal, Apple could try to compete with Visa and MasterCard.

Better yet, it could steal a page from Square’s playbook. The San Francisco company, led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has developed a mobile application called “Pay with Square.” The app allows users to pay by giving the clerk their name at the register — no credit card or fancy NFC-equipped phone required. In advance of the payment, consumers would have to store their account information in the app and take a picture of themselves to make identifying them easy.

In addition, the store must have an iPad at the counter, so the salesperson can correctly identify people from their pictures.

The whole experience is pretty slick — just how Apple likes it. Plus, it could generate additional iPad sales. But there’s a catch. Without a critical mass of retailers on board with the program, consumers would not be able to reliably leave their house without a physical wallet.

Should companies be afraid?

The problem with not knowing what Apple has in store makes it impossible for companies to gauge whether they should be excited about the possibilities of Passbook, or whether they should be scared.

Scvngr’s Seth Priebatsch said that it’s not clear to him, either, but he’s willing to take the risk. He plans to integrate his company’s LevelUp application into Passbook, which operates similarly to Square.

“My feeling is that Passbook is very much like [Apple's] Game Center, in that it’ll be a nice additional distribution channel for all mobile payment/loyalty app developers,” Priebatsch said. “Of course, that could come back to bite us all when — not if — Apple bakes in their own mobile payment solution.”

WhaleShark’s SVP of Mobile John Faith also said that his company would consider integrating RetailMeNot — a coupon app it launched this week on the iPhone — into Passbook.

“Our value for companies like Apple, Google, PayPal and Bing is a partnership where our coupon content can become a part of similar consumer offerings — making saving while shopping with a mobile phone a more seamless experience,” Faith said.

If you take the literal translation of the word “passbook,” it seems to be a play on two words: “Passport” and “checkbook.”

It may be inevitable that Apple enters the payments space, but whether it pulls it off is another thing entirely.