Asa Mathat | AllThingsD

What was your favorite TV show as a kid?
Growing up in Greece, we had a little black-and-white TV, so I spent most of my time playing outside — it’s the ultimate reality show.

What qualities do you like in a person?
Empathy, fearlessness and humor.

What qualities do you dislike?
Multitasking — i.e., having dinner with someone and engaging with someone else on one of your devices.

What’s the single most important issue in the world today?
Being hyperconnected to everything and everyone, but disconnected from ourselves.

What would you be doing if you were not in your current job?
Trying to start up some other version of it.

What is your greatest achievement to date?
My two daughters.

iPhone, Android or BlackBerry?
BlackBerrys (four, to be precise). And oh, dear God, can someone please save BlackBerry?

If you could meet any historical or fictional person, who would it be?
William Shakespeare. On his birthday last week, I tweeted my feelings about him: “Whoever you were, there’s never been anyone like you.” And hardly a day goes by when we don’t unknowingly quote him.

What site/app do you check first when you wake up?
That’s not fair … HuffPost, of course.

Do you have a dog or cat or other pet?
I once shared ownership of a dog with my daughter Isabella. The dog was Oliver Pistachio Huffington, and it was shorter than its name.

What’s your favorite mode of transportation?
I love trains.

What was the last book you read?
“What Money Can’t Buy,” by Michael J. Sandel.

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
A single-shot Venti cappuccino with 2 percent milk and a green straw, followed by a second single-shot Venti cappuccino with 2 percent milk and a green straw, followed by a third …

What do you drive/ride?
A Toyota Prius.

Who was your biggest influence growing up?
My mother. She gave me unconditional love and unconventional wisdom. And the belief that if her children didn’t eat every 20 minutes, something terrible would happen to them.

Describe an ideal day.
An ideal day is any day that follows a good eight-hour sleep.

AOL, which has had some turmoil in its executive ranks of late, has promoted Jim Norton to be its new head of sales.

The New York Internet company said Norton would be “responsible for sales on all of AOL’s owned & operated properties, including sites like The Huffington Post, Engadget, Stylelist and MapQuest,” as well as a range of other areas.

AOL has rejiggered its advertising execs and strategies several times in recent years, and Norton is not precisely replacing its former advertising head Jeff Levick (who left for Spotify) and is more akin to another top former AOL ad exec Mark Ellis (who left for Yahoo).

That job has now been folded into the portfolio of Chief Revenue Officer Ned Brody, to whom Norton will report.

“We need to become faster in our operations,” said Brody in an interview this morning about the shift. “We brought in Jim to bring in singular focus on selling.”

Brody said that AOL is working on how to increase the “value proposition” of its variety of advertising and marketing offerings and to quicken the process.

Norton came to AOL from Google in 2009 and before that worked in a wide range of ad jobs.

Here’s the official press release on the move:

JIM NORTON NAMED HEAD OF AOL SALES

New York, NY — December 9, 2011 — AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) and Ned Brody, Chief Revenue Officer, today announced the promotion of Jim Norton to head of AOL Sales. Effective today, Jim will be responsible for sales on all of AOL’s owned & operated properties, including sites like The Huffington Post, Engadget, Stylelist and MapQuest. Additionally, he will also lead the sales of all cross platform marketing solutions, including display/Project Devil initiative, video and mobile. This announcement is reflective of AOL’s commitment to putting the strongest leaders in place to service clients in the most efficient and effective manner. Jim will continue to report to Brody.

“Jim has proven himself within AOL to be a fantastic leader,” said Brody. “He not only has deep knowledge and incredible expertise in the marketplace, but a real ability to effect change.” Brody added, “Customers want the best products and packaged solutions all in a fast and efficient manner. Consolidation of leadership under Jim will place even more focus on putting our clients front and center and deliver on their goals and needs.”

“It’s a tremendous honor and opportunity to take on this new leadership role,” said Norton. “It allows me to continue to work with some of the best sales professionals in the business. It’s also a privilege to work with some of the world’s biggest brands.” He added, “We want to continue to be the preferred media partner for marketers and agencies.”

Jim joined AOL in 2009 and was SVP, AOL Advertising’s Advance Sales team, which focuses on national and regional advertisers across all categories, as well as new business. He was also VP of Product Sales working with AOL product teams on maximizing their offerings to advertisers, including MapQuest, Patch, AOL Mail, AOL Video and Mobile. He also managed AOL’s Search and Sponsored Listings business, and helped launch and manage AOL’s self service advertising platform, Ad Desk.

Jim has over 20 years of experience in the media business. Prior to joining AOL, he spent 3 years at Google most recently as National Sales Manager for Google’s Agency Activation team. Prior to that role, he was a Senior Account Executive on the National Tech B2B team servicing many of the leading global tech marketers. He’s also held a number of traditional sales and marketing roles, including four years as Sales Manager at Tribune Broadcasting’s WLVI-TV (Boston’s WB), radio ad sales at Kiss 108FM and a variety of brand marketing roles at Miller Brewing Company and GMR Marketing. He’s a life long Bostonian and graduated from Boston College with a BA in Communications and BC’s Carroll Graduate School of Business with an MBA in Marketing and Technology. He’s married with three children and splits his time between Boston and New York City.

The funding is particularly notable because Topsy is part of the much-maligned Twitter ecosystem. The San Francisco-based company’s search index consists of more than eight billion tweets.

Perhaps the only other Twitter ecosystem start-up of Topsy’s magnitude is UberMedia, which has raised some $21 million in VC funding and gobbled up various Twitter clients. Twitter blocked some of the company’s apps for three days last month, saying they violated multiple
policies.

Twitter competes with both start-ups, offering its own search site and software clients for various platforms.

Besides running its search site, Topsy also provides analytics tools for marketers and widgets for publishers including IDG Media, The Huffington Post and Discovery Communications. The company brags that its search is super speedy (capable of processing over 1 million documents per second) and smart (ranking results based on social graph analysis, which Google and Bing are only starting to do).

Here’s the official press release from the popular news and blogging site, The Huffington Post, which announced $25 million in funding from Oak Investment Partners this morning.

(BoomTown’s story on the funding is here, along with an interview with Oak’s Fred Harman)

Sources told BoomTown the investment gives the site–which had 4.5 million unique visitors in September, a quadrupling from a year ago–a valuation of “south of $100 million.”

Here’s the official release:

The Huffington Post Announces $25 Million In Funding From Oak Investment Partners

Harman joins The Huffington Post board of directors, whose members include: Eric Hippeau, Managing Partner of Softbank Capital, Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Betsy Morgan.

The large round by Oak, which was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist Fred Harman, will give the popular online news and blog site a valuation of just “south of $100 million,” a source said.

The new funding, the Huffington Post’s third, will be used for expansion of its offerings and the hiring of editorial and business talent.

“There is an inevitable shift from offline to online with people increasingly getting their news media online, and this election proved how powerful the Huffington Post could be,” said Harman (pictured here), in an interview with BoomTown. “And I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site.”

Indeed, the Huffington Post–which is now billing itself as ‘”The Internet Newspaper”–has been hitting on all cylinders during the current election season.

And it hopes to continue building that momentum into the Obama administration, which will give the liberal-leaning site a lot of advantages in coverage.

The Huffington Post has also become a powerful news aggregator, much as the more conservative Drudge Report has, sending traffic all over the Web from its site by linking with a variety of online sites. It also has a strong offering of high-profile bloggers.

But the site’s leaders are also hoping its traffic strength will allow it to be as strong in arenas outside of its flagship political arena, including in business, local, “green” and investigative news.

It will also use the money to make acquisitions, the company said in a press release about the funding, which it put out this morning.

It’s certainly a long way from May of 2005, when its high-profile co-founder, Arianna Huffington, was roundly mocked for launching the site. Today, she has seen her power grow as the site’s traffic and influence have.

The site’s namesake operates out of her California-based office in Los Angeles, while the company has its HQ in New York.

The Huffington Post’s traffic in September 2008, for example, quadrupled from a year before to 4.5 million unique visitors, according to comScore (SCOR). That performance made it the No. 1 “stand-alone political blog and news site,” besting Drudge.

“The cycle of print media is accelerating downward and there are not as many companies with a balance sheet and focus to do it right online,” said Harman, who will join the Huffington Post’s board. “The news market is really up for grabs in a lot of ways…and it is a good time for those who are viewed as authoritative.”

But, like a lot of advertising-reliant businesses, the Huffington Post is also facing a tough market and must show it can compete under more dire economic circumstances and build a sustained and profitable business.

This slug of money should give it a lot of room to do so, said Harman, who has invested in several digital media companies, such as Demand Media and Federated Media. He was also one of the lead investors in aQuantive, the digital advertising business that was bought by Microsoft for $6 billion in 2007.

“Who knows how deep this economic situation is going to be,” said Harman, who noted that he and others kept investing in aQuantive through the last Web downturn. “But strong companies that keep investing through a bad cycle can emerge as winners.”

Previous investments in the Huffington Post have totaled about $12 million. That funding has come from Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners, as well as seed money from co-founder Kenneth Lerer and former AOL exec Bob Pittman.

Funding reports about the Huffington Post appeared about a week ago in the Times of London, with the post claiming a $15 million investment and expansion into investigative and local news.

But the most detailed posts were done by paidContent, which was the first to name Oak as the new investor and said the round was $20 million.