According to numerous sources close to the situation, the Tumblr brand will continue on in the wake of its $1.1 billion acquisition by Yahoo.

That includes definitive promises by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to once-sale-shy Tumblr CEO David Karp to allow him to shepherd the fast-growing blogging product, with no forced integration with Yahoo’s many other content properties.

That said, sources added, there will be more back-end changes to marry infrastructure, such as undergirding Tumblr’s nascent advertising business and giving it more distribution opportunities.

“At the beginning, at least, it’ll be hands-off,” said one person close to the situation. “It has to be.”

While that is probably no surprise, it’s still good news for Tumblr employees as well as its very opinionated user base, which is not likely to greet a takeover by a corporate giant of the social, iconoclastic user-generated content service.

That said, Yahoo execs discussed and are aware of issues around porn published on the site, although they believe it to be fixable over time.

As Peter Kafka noted:

To spell that out: Tumblr’s advertisers don’t have to worry about their stuff showing up on blogs like We Want Porn. At worst, it’s possible that they’ll end up advertising to a user whose dashboard includes posts from We Want Porn. But in general, they ought to be pretty well insulated from that stuff.

By the same token, if Yahoo wanted to, it could end up scrubbing Tumblr of porn, and losing a lot of users and views — but it probably wouldn’t lose much in the way of monetizable users. Unless it turns out that the majority of Tumblr’s core users have signed on exclusively to use porn.

Or, as a Tumblr investor also told Kafka: “Non-story. Tumblr is the Internet. It’s a dashboard-follower model, opt-in.”

Moving on from porn, sources close to the situation — okay, pretty much everyone is chit-chatting away now — said that Mayer spent a lot of time with Karp (who was in Silicon Valley last week, in fact, visiting her) about the transition, and about how the new ownership would impact him and the service.

One source called them “kindred spirits” on the issue, and that Mayer has been given great purview by the Yahoo board to foster Tumblr to prevent it from turning out like Flickr, Delicious and many other big acquisitions dating back to GeoCities. (I was there covering that deal way back when, and what a mess that was!)

Mayer is well-liked by product and engineering entrepreneurs, and has often focused on them at Yahoo, over the perhaps more important demands of business and advertising execs.

That would appeal to Karp, who once famously said that online advertising made him physically sick. Still, he has recently begun to embrace ad sales at Tumblr.

Within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages on users’ dashboards, which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year, and sources said it could get to up to $100 million this year.

“We’re going to be very careful here,” said a source with knowledge of the acquisition.

A source at Tumblr agreed: “This will be a very delicate dance, since so much could go wrong if done without care.”

Still, some at Yahoo are worried that the company might be chasing the youthful demographic at Tumblr too assiduously. “This is a very fickle audience,” said another high-ranking Yahoo exec. “Chasing a young one is a very tricky thing.”

Yes, indeed, but Mayer thinks she is the one to be able to pull it off and make Yahoo relevant with an even wider consumer base.

AllThingsD broke news of the deal in the offing last week, which has since been approved by Yahoo’s board.

The Yahoo board has approved a massive $1.1 billion all-cash deal to buy Tumblr.

It’s not clear when the official vote was taken, but sources close to the board said the acquisition was a foregone conclusion and was unanimously approved by the directors of Silicon Valley Internet giant.

The deal will likely be announced Monday morning, said numerous sources.

AllThingsD.com initially broke the story of the acquisition efforts and later followed up with details of the exact price and the board meeting to approve the transaction.

There were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based social blogging service. That said, Tumblr had held some very preliminary discussions about various deals with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and also Twitter earlier this year.

As part of the Yahoo deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who will get a windfall of cash from the acquisition — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain a lot of control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure, said sources.

Yahoo had been mulling some kind of deal with Tumblr, from a strategic investment to an outright acquisition, for about six weeks. Sources said that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had decided that buying the company was going to be “the stake in the ground of what her strategy is going forward for Yahoo.”

And that is to attract younger audiences with just the kind of user-generated content Tumblr has pioneered to impressive growth.

According to numerous sources, Mayer determined quickly in her research that the site was just the kind of property that Yahoo needed to make it both “cool” and relevant to new consumers.

Yahoo is looking to bolster its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different demographic and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

Tumblr’s mobile usage has also been strong, which also interested Mayer. While Tumblr started as a desktop-based service, its mobile offering has ramped up quickly in the last few years. ComScore says that a quarter of the service’s U.S. visitors now come from mobile devices.

At this price, it will be Mayer’s biggest acquisition so far. Since she became CEO last summer, Mayer has made only a series of small acquisitions of mobile startups at a low cost.

According to sources, the Tumblr brand will continue.

The deal, if consummated, will be a big win for investors. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far and is now at a reported valuation of $800 million. Investors include Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners and the Chernin Group.

While Tumblr’s Karp has resisted various offers for the company over the years, Mayer spent a lot of time with him reassuring him that Yahoo could turbocharge his business. He has also been searching for a COO to help him build out the infrastructure of its business, especially its advertising one.

And as Peter Kafka and I previously wrote, Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocketship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards,” which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year and sources said it could get up to $100 million this year.

Tumblr has been represented by Qatalyst Partners’ Frank Quattrone, while Yahoo’s Mayer, as well as M&A head Jackie Reses and CFO Ken Goldman, have been on the company’s side.

Interestingly, what got me first focused on Tumblr last week were Goldman’s comments at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference last week, where he underscored the need for the aging Yahoo to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

Tumblr, apparently, fits the very expensive bill.

And Animoca couldn’t be happier about that.

Co-founder Yat Siu calls them “fast food apps.” His 150-person company, a conglomerate of 12 smaller studios, has developed and published more than 350 apps, he said, currently at the rate of about four every week. Its goal is to one day crank out a new app every day as it expands its reach further into Asia and beyond.

Siu, who is also the CEO of Animoca’s parent company, Outblaze Ventures, said as much in a recent interview with AllThingsD. But he also had a lot more to say about the advantages of working outside of Silicon Valley, the maturation of Google’s Android ecosystem and why quantity is sometimes better than quality.

AllThingsD: What’s the difference between being based in Hong Kong and being based in Silicon Valley?

Yat Siu: In terms of our [Android] ecosystem, it is the dominant marketplace, whereas in the Valley, there’s a lot of focus on Apple. We don’t have that much venture capital available to us, so we have to focus on profitability and the bottom line very, very quickly. Our games aren’t all profitable, but our business is. And we’re just a small island city, so we do not have a domestic market. It’s go global or die.

How do your games fare in different regions?

When we first started [in 2011], the U.S. was our biggest market, but just because it had a larger ecosystem. That’s changing today. North America as a continent is now in second place to Asia because Japan and Korea are driving a lot of the revenues. … The people who are buying iPhones or Android phones in the U.S. today are not the first movers, whereas in Asia, a lot of the marketplace still has way under 50 percent smartphone penetration rates. In Japan, at the start of this year, it was under 30 percent.

Is Android fragmentation a problem for you? Putting most of your eggs in that basket means you’re dealing with phones that range from the very low end to the very high end, right?

Two years ago, we had a testing rack of 600 devices. Now, Samsung is outselling basically everyone else, except in China and Japan. The second thing that’s different now is that “low end” is no longer really “low end.” You used to have really poor devices with poor resolution and processing power. Even the so-called “cheap” devices that are sold in China today are quad-core or dual-core devices; they just cost $100, is all. And they’re all standardizing around Jelly Bean (the most recent version of the Android OS). The whole Android philosophy was, “Here, take the operating system. Do what you want. Good luck!” We had weird memory issues because people would be coding stuff on top. Now, with Jelly Bean, most of the stuff that’s going on in the operating system is going on in the application side.

Pretty Pet Salon is one of the more popular games Animoca has published, and started a “Pretty Pet” franchise.

Tell me about your games and how they perform. How do you evaluate success?

We look at every product as a gateway to another product. The key driver is popularity. Monetization will come, we think, once people are in there, but the ability to cross-promote to other games becomes important. We want to make sure that the user always has at least a few of our games to play, because we don’t believe that there is such a thing as a person who can play a game for years and years and years. It’s “fast-food apps.” People just want to consume quickly, move quickly and go on to the next thing. It doesn’t mean that they won’t come back to it, but they’re not prepared to invest console-style, sitting down and playing for four hours.

And if you spent $60 on a game, you’re probably going to invest a lot more time than if you spent nothing or spent 99 cents.

That’s true, too, definitely. But also, with mobile, whether it’s in trains or one-handed game time, sometimes it’s just when you’re lying in bed, the behavior that we’re seeing now is that a person is playing a game, and then after five minutes, he wants to move on to another game. He’s not necessarily playing the same game for an hour. He’s like, “I feel like something else.” It’s no different than people switching TV channels every once in a while, except they’re switching games.

So it’s not as much of a “hits-driven” business for you as it might be for others?

It’s all relative. What is a hit? Because it’s a global audience, a niche segment is pretty large. And yet, if you have a five-million-user niche, is that a hit? It’s probably a hit for an indie studio, but it’s not a hit for us because of the scale we operate in. Typically, we call anything a hit if it has over 15 million downloads, but as a franchise, as a series. We might have one app, and then if it does well and has a few million downloads and reasonable revenues, then we put sequels and additions on top of it. Out of the series, we may wind up having something like 20 or 25 apps.

For those games that aren’t sequels to existing games, how do your studios come up with new things to publish?

We have studios that are as small as six people. The producer is empowered to have his own budget and his own creative vision. There’s a weekly meeting where all the producers come together and talk about what they’re doing, and then go off and do their own thing. The advantage for the business is, if you start off with a studio of six people and it bombs, who cares? It’s not great for them, but the business can afford to do it. If they do well, they have a platform.

The independence of our studio is also attractive to our staff. They have the chance to be a startup without the startup risk. They don’t have to worry about payroll or finance, they can focus on the product and build their own team. The additional unintended advantage is that, in Hong Kong, we’re unique. So, if you want to do games and you want to publish your games, then, frankly, there’s nowhere else to go. People come to us because the other option is banking or finance — which is a good career, just not if you don’t like it. If we were in the Valley, we might end up getting slaughtered by the amount of recruitment and loss of staff. Who knows?

But it’s worth noting that you do also maintain an office here in San Francisco for non-game development roles like partnerships and PR.

In the past, the meccas of the global gaming space used to be different. They used to be Sony, Nintendo and, at one point, Sega. But it was never centered around Silicon Valley. That changed with the smartphone. Now the new mecca is the Bay Area, because Google Play is here and Apple is here. We have an office here because we have to pay homage to the new temples. Even though we’re not in the Valley, it’s absolutely required for us to go in. Every other app company that’s international that wants to succeed must do the same.

Almost all of your revenue, about 95 percent, comes from in-app purchases. Are you looking at other business models?

Advertising will come, but it is not dominant yet. Primarily, the buyers for that now are other app companies, and we’ve got our own network. If we focus more on our cross-promotion, we get more out of that than necessarily opening up inventory to everyone else. Right now, ads are generally low-quality, and they’re also spammy, so it’s a bad user experience. But that will change. The experience is there already — think about how much time you’re spending on mobile versus PC — but [ads] have to deliver value to the user. Facebook has the right idea. People who like casual games, you should really only show them other casual games. Today, the targeting doesn’t exist.

What does your conversion rate of non-paying to paying players look like? The typical curve has a lot of people at the bottom paying nothing or almost nothing, then a long tail with a bump at the end, composed of a small number of players who pay a lot.

That is the hardcore type of model, where basically you have a very low conversion rate, something like 2 percent, and a very high consumable model where people can spend thousands of dollars. That’s not our model. If you look at games like Pretty Pet Salon, you’d be hard pressed to spend more than 20 bucks, just because of the game play. We are expecting to have more volume of titles with a larger frequency of players coming in from outside. So, for instance, Pretty Pet Salon has an 8 percent conversion rate. Now, when we start working with Forgame (Animoca recently accepted a “strategic minority investment” from the Chinese hard-core game maker), that is different. We will listen to their suggestions, and it does appear that that will be the strategy, because people are prepared to spend that kind of money. It’ll be a learning experience for us.

Following a slowdown in technology IPOs after Facebook’s offering last May, companies including microblogging service Twitter Inc., peer-to-peer lending site Lending Club Corp. and software-tools startup Atlassian are among those preparing to go public, said executives and people familiar with the matter.

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Because I get bored on Sunday nights, I opened up Yahoo’s recent regulatory filings for some light reading and, as usual, found some tasty information that the company had kindly dropped in for my erudition, but declined to call my attention to.

Namely, that the Silicon Valley Internet giant is paying not so very much for its mobile acquisitions, according to several documents the company has filed.

In fact, Yahoo’s average price paid for each of five of the 10 startups it has purchased since last fall is a tiny $3.2 million in cash.

For example, here’s last week’s 10-Q referring to three of CEO Marissa Mayer’s first acquisitions — content curation app Snip.it, which Yahoo bought in January (funding amount unknown, but the $10 million acquisition price reported by some sites is clearly wrong, as you will see from the filing); recommendation app Alike (funding amount unknown), which was on February’s menu; and recommendation app Jybe (funding amount unknown), which the company picked up in mid-March:

The Company did not make any acquisitions during the three months ended March 31, 2012. However, during the three months ended March 31, 2013, the Company acquired three companies, all of which were accounted for as business combinations. The total purchase price for these acquisitions was $10 million and consisted entirely of cash consideration, primarily allocated to goodwill. Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price over the fair value of the net tangible and intangible assets acquired and is not deductible for tax purposes.

The Company’s business combinations completed during the three months ended March 31, 2013 did not have a material impact on the Company’s condensed consolidated financial statements.

Going back further, Yahoo’s purchase of recommendation app Stamped last October (it had $3 million in funding) and video-chat app OnTheAir ($880,000 in funding) in December were also on the cheap — a bargain at $6 million total — according to its 10-K filed a few months ago:

During the year ended December 31, 2012, the Company acquired two companies, which were accounted for as business combinations. The total purchase price for these acquisitions was $7 million. The total cash consideration of $7 million less cash acquired of $1 million resulted in a net cash outlay of $6 million. Of the total purchase price, $6 million was allocated to goodwill and $1 million to cash acquired. Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price over the fair value of the net tangible and intangible assets acquired and is not deductible for tax purposes.

The Company’s business combinations completed in 2012 did not have a material impact on the Company’s consolidated financial statements, and therefore pro forma disclosures have not been presented.

It will be interesting to see what Yahoo reveals as to the price, and how it will account for the late March acquisition of Britain’s news reader Summly, which AllThingsD reported was a loftier $30 million.

The Summly deal did not appear to have closed by the end of the quarter, so no purchase information has been released, although it will be soon enough, along with that of the more recent string of mobile buys by Yahoo: To-do app Astrid, social polling app GoPollGo, travel rewards app MileWise and mobile gaming studio Loki.

For those four tiny companies, which were doubtlessly also bought for very little, Yahoo did tout what it’s really after in a festive tweet on Friday.

Warm entrepreneurial bodies:

We recently added 22 entrepreneurs to our growing mobile team. Welcome to Yahoo! @astrid @gopollgo @milewise @lokistudios!

— Yahoo! Inc.(@YahooInc) May 10, 2013

Facebook’s top lawyer Ted Ullyot is leaving the social networking giant, apparently to take some time off.

Facebook disclosed the departure today. Ullyot, 45, will be officially gone in July; the search for his replacement will include internal and external candidates.

As general counsel, Ullyot has presided over a myriad of new, unusual and sometimes controversial legal issues, including managing high-stakes and complex litigation that ranged from Facebook’s battle with the Winklevoss twins, to a patent fight with Yahoo to investor disgruntlement around its initial public offering.

And, of course, over privacy issues. In many ways, given the Silicon Valley company’s pioneering role in social networking, Ullyot has had to work in a relatively undiscovered landscape, which has also attracted a great deal of scrutiny from consumers, regulators and investors.

He started in the fall of 2008, and has managed all the legal aspects of the company and built up the team from 10 when Facebook was a startup to more than 70 as a public company. In that time, Facebook has grown from 500 people to 5,000 and from 100 million to over one billion active users.

It has certainly been a ride for him, from beating back the Winklevii over their allegations related to the founding of Facebook to settling the patent dispute with Yahoo to handling the Federal Trade Commission investigation and more.

It is not clear what he will do next, but sources said he does not have another job lined up as of yet.

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).

According to sources close to the situation, well-known tech exec Jon Rubinstein will be joining the board of Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chipmaker that has gotten a big boost of late for its role in the explosion of mobile devices.

Rubinstein is an interesting and logical choice for Qualcomm, having been a high-profile player for a long time in the mobile space, beginning with his work on the iPod while at Apple. After he left his last job at Hewlett-Packard last year, though, he has been very low-key.

(Update: Qualcomm confirmed the appointment in a press release.)

For Qualcomm, the selection of Rubinstein to join the board is something to watch, as he is the second exec from Silicon Valley to be tapped by the company recently. In March, Qualcomm hired tech investor Laurie Yoler as SVP of business development, making her “responsible for augmenting existing business relationships in Silicon Valley, as well as developing new strategic business opportunities for Qualcomm in the region.”

Rubinstein has even more experience here and is also familiar with a range of mobile efforts over the years, some of which were successful and others not so much, from his work at Apple, Palm and then HP. He is also a board member of Amazon.

Aside from CEO and Chairman Paul Jacobs, Rubinstein — who has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science — will be the most technically experienced director on the 11-person board.

Qualcomm declined to comment.

Here’s a nice primer on Rubinstein by Arik Hesseldahl, in a report on his leaving HP early last year:

Best known for his work on Apple’s iconic iPod music player, Rubinstein left Apple in 2006 and joined Roger McNamee as a partner in the private equity firm Elevation Partners, following its 2007 investments in Palm.

In 2009 he replaced longtime Palm executive Ed Colligan as its CEO, and oversaw a dramatic restructuring of the company’s products, including a significant rebuild of its smartphone operating system. Gone was the legacy PalmOS that had been used in so many popular devices like the Treo that for a time competed seriously against Research In Motion’s BlackBerry.

PalmOS was replaced by WebOS, which first appeared on the Pre smartphone, then later on the Pixi and Veer devices. After HP acquired Palm, WebOS was also used on the abandoned TouchPad tablet, and is now an open-source operating system overseen by HP.

Rubinstein’s departure is no big surprise. Sources said he hadn’t been seen at HP’s offices following the decision by former CEO Léo Apotheker to get out of the business of making WebOS-based hardware. His future plans have been the subject of speculation for some time.

After HP decided to exit the WebOS hardware business, Rubinstein was assigned to a vaguely described “product innovation role” within HP’s Personal Systems Group during a management shakeup last July. It was an unusual move and one made with little explanation at the time. But sources say it was a preface to Rubinstein’s departure, one intended to lessen its PR impact when he finally left. “That ‘innovation’ gig he was given in July was his first step toward the exit,” said one source, a former Palm exec with close ties to Rubinstein.

Accel Partners has added longtime tech exec Rob Solomon — who was most recently president and CEO of Groupon — as a venture partner. The high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm said Solomon will focus on early stage and growth equity opportunities and focus on “operational issues like product management, scaling infrastructure, business operations, and mergers and acquisitions.”

Said Accel Partner Andrew Braccia in a statement: “[Solomon] has been at the helm of some of the most high profile consumer internet brands and has demonstrated a unique ability to inspire and lead teams through both rapid growth and challenging times.”

Indeed, Solomon has had a long Silicon Valley career, including as an top exec at Yahoo, running its e-commerce efforts. He was also CEO of SideStep, a real-time vertical search engine in the travel sector that was later sold to Kayak and is also on several boards, including HomeAway.

But Solomon is best known for his stint as the No. 2 exec at the Chicago-based Groupon, the once high-flying daily deals site. But, for a variety of reasons, including wanting to be located in California, he left the company two years ago.

Solomon emailed me last night to explain why he decided to take a job as a VC at Accel and here’s what he wrote:

“I love the tactics and strategies associated with scaling up Internet companies. Nothing is more exciting then digging deep into a space and then figuring out which companies stand the best chance to create new markets and become iconic category defining companies. I was lucky enough to work with some of the world’s best founders, technologists and executives at Yahoo and that experience taught me what is possible in a very short span of time. I’ve joined Accel because they have an incredible global platform to find, nurture, fund and grow the next generation of global iconic Internet companies and nothing could be more exciting to me for my next career adventure.”

At a human resources conference yesterday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer finally commented on the massive controversy generated after the Silicon Valley Internet company decided to end its work-from-home offering to its employees.

News of the change came in February after AllThingsD published a hopelessly awkward memo on the new dictate that resulted in a firestorm of debate.

That was no surprise, since the missive was confusingly penned by HR head Jackie Reses, who noted, in part: “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.” Along with an incomprehensible aside about the “cable guy,” there were few details.

And because Yahoo PR’s goal is to not comment, except when pushing shiny new products, it was disinclined to say anything at all once the memo was public. ATD reported initially it was a couple hundred employees, but the memo made it unclear who would be impacted and how. Yahoo later made an unusually bloodless statement that work from home was not what was right for the company at that time, given its need to turn itself around.

Mayer underscored that point in her keynote speech, with Fortune reporting that she put up an image of a purple elephant with WFH letters on its side and said, “I need to talk about the elephant in the room.”

She also tried to push blame onto, well, I am not sure whom, noting, “It was wrongly perceived as an industry narrative.” This mistakes-were-made tactic was clever, but the situation spun out of control simply due to the fact that Mayer was tin-eared on a hot-button issue and was poorly advised not to give a quick and cogent explanation of it at the time, causing a lot of unnecessary external and internal confusion and worry.

What was too bad was Mayer had a valid enough point — even if it was very harsh medicine to end the popular policy — that Yahoo probably needs all hands on deck right now to return to innovative relevance. She also said in her speech that while “people are more productive when they’re alone … they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.”

As I said, it’s an excellent point, even if how Mayer delivered her message turned out to be a lesson as a new CEO in how it’s not what you say, but how you say it. And, of course, when.

While the tale of a print magazine embedded in a troubled media company makes for much better reading, everyone loves a listicle. So, Time has once again put out its annual countdown of the 100 “most influential people in the world, from artists and leaders to pioneers, titans and icons.”

And, as usual, global techies represent big-time on the list, including:

* Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — about whom Virgin Group’s Richard Branson wrote, “It’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.”

* Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom, who gets inexplicably feted by entertainment bon vivant Ryan Seacrest (we are down with this anyway).

* Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos (yay for Ted, who is Mr. Nice Guy, especially for Hollywood).

* Ren Zhengfei, CEO of China’s telecom giant Huawei.

* Oh-Hyun Kwon, Samsung CEO, about whom former Apple CEO John Sculley wrote, “As Samsung builds a campus in Silicon Valley, all eyes will be on Kwon to see if the CEO with a PhD from Stanford can be as successful with software as he has been with hardware.”

* Music manager and Internet talent discoverer Scooter Braun.

* Minecraft developers, Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, whom my sons revere (and therefore are deserving of kudos!).

* OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, who is now CEO of Match.com.

* Microsoft and Apple irritant David Einhorn, who is the only hedge fund investor dude I like.

* Deservedly ubiquitous Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose “Lean In” is a bestseller.

* Apple design guru Jony Ive, about whom Bono noted, “Jony Ive is himself classic Apple. Brushed steel, polished glass hardware, complicated software honed to simplicity.”

* Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who are among many in tech trying to change education.

* Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.

* Google Ideas guy Jared Cohen.

* Afghanistan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, who gets praise from Sandberg.

* Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, about whom “Veronica Mars” star (and user of the fundraising tool) Kristen Bell said, “There’s something so smart and magical about that idea — connecting consumers with creators and letting them vote with their own money.”

* And listicle Olympian and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, garnering a major feting from Google’s Eric Schmidt, who wrote: “Google was lucky to have her help us grow into what we became, and Yahoo is lucky to have her taking them someplace new.”

(Cover photo by Mark Seliger for Time)

The center of gravity at the university appears to have shifted. The school now looks like a giant tech incubator with a football team.

– Nicholas Thompson, in a New Yorker article entitled, “The End of Stanford?”

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]

Sandberg and her team have been encouraging women to post their personal stories of when they leaned into their careers and Mayer certainly does that in her post, including discussing taking the job at the top of the troubled Silicon Valley Internet company when she was seven months pregnant.

She wrote:

Looking back to reflect on the question: Could I really take the helm of Yahoo when I was 28 weeks pregnant? Even now, it sounds absolutely crazy. I considered if and how I could make it work: learning more about the role, getting words of encouragement from close friends and family, and developing a plan. I’ve always believed you can never have everything that you want, but with work and dedication, you can have the things that really matter to you. If I took the opportunity, it was clear that I would have to find a way to have time with my baby without a long maternity leave. I also knew going forward that there wouldn’t be much time beyond my job and my family for anything else. Ultimately, I decided I was fine with that, because my family and my job are what really matter to me.

In the piece, Mayer also noted that she jumped at the chance to run Yahoo, which had actually put Google in business in many ways with an early search deal. She started her career at the search giant and was one of its higher-ranking execs.

“The alignment with my experience and career was uncanny: search, email, homepage, news, finance, maps, social, mobile and more,” she wrote, although she also said that after “13 years of really hard work at Google, I had been envisioning a glorious six-month maternity leave.”

Not so. Mayer took off from Yahoo only a few weeks after she had her baby son last fall, and she said it has turned out well for her. “I’ve come to realize that being a mother makes me a better executive, because motherhood forces prioritization,” she wrote. “Being a mom gives you so much more clarity on what is important.”

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.

There’s no doubt that the highly-valued Flipboard has been at the forefront of social publishing.

With its popular app for the Apple iPhone and iPads, the Silicon Valley startup now has 50 million readers, who use it to elegantly consume content from Facebook, Twitter and a myriad of sources from all over the Web.

Now, in its new second version, the company is moving from a show-me paradigm to a make-something one, allowing users to “create magazines,” according to Flipboard.

In fact, that’s a bit of a broad definition of create — Flipboard 2.0 is more about allowing regular people or professional publishers to curate any kind of magazine in any niche.

For example, in testing the app, I made a magazine about Pop-Tarts. (Does anyone have a problem with that?)

Using a new “plus” button and a pretty easy interface, it is meant to take self-expression to new levels using video, images, text and even music. To help grow audiences for these quasi-creators, as well as find stuff to use, Flipboard has also launched a new content search feature.

There should be some fun stuff created to keep users flipping on the service, but it’s clear the offering is also a lot about finding more revenue for the startup. Using specialized magazines, for example, publishers can instantly create one-offs of previously published content — from Vanity Fair’s “Royal Weddings” to Martha Stewart Living’s “Home How-Tos” — and presumably sell advertising against it.

Flipboard has also partnered with crafts retailer Etsy to make what is essentially a prettified catalog, complete with an integrated shopping cart, for which there are all kinds of lead fees.

Since it has remained independent so far despite some big acquisition interest, figuring out a solid business plan is important, especially since Flipboard did a massive $50 million fundraising round that valued it at $200 million two years ago.

Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, Comcast Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, Facebook co-founder and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, investor Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company run by former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

There are a lot of other new features in the latest Flipboard, but you can read Walt Mossberg’s review of it here, as well as watch my video interview below of Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue about it all, as well as its business outlook: