Josh Topolsky, the editor-in-chief of Engadget, is leaving the AOL-owned property, one of the largest tech news sites on the Web.

Also departing is Managing Editor Nilay Patel, said sources. [UPDATE: Patel delivers the goodbye news himself in a blog post here.]

Sources said the move by Topolsky (pictured here, although the coffee cup is not permanent) and Patel is not out of the tech news arena and both are considering several options.

[UPDATE: Topolsky just confirmed the move in a blog post on Engadget, which is below, writing, in part: "I'm not leaving the industry or the news game--in fact, I've got a few fantasy projects in mind that hopefully you'll be hearing about soon."]

Sources said the departures have been a long time in coming, related to a range of ongoing issues the veteran editors have had working for the large New York-based Internet company. Sources said it was not precipitated by AOL’s recent $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post.

In fact, AOL’s new content head Arianna Huffington had tried hard to persuade Topolsky to stay on, but that “he had already mentally made up his mind to go.”

This has been a regular occurrence at the site, including two top Engadget editors–Paul Miller and Ross Miller, who are not related–who departed the tech site in recent months. Both stated publicly that they did not like the editorial direction AOL was going in, especially a controversial content strategy document titled “The AOL Way.”

In a post in mid-February, Paul Miller was explicit about the issue on his personal blog:

I’d love to be able to keep doing this forever, but unfortunately Engadget is owned by AOL, and AOL has proved an unwilling partner in this site’s evolution. It doesn’t take a veteran of the publishing world to realize that AOL has its heart in the wrong place with content. As detailed in the “AOL Way,” and borne out in personal experience, AOL sees content as a commodity it can sell ads against. That might make good business sense (though I doubt it), but it doesn’t promote good journalism or even good entertainment, and it doesn’t allow an ambitious team like the one I know and love at Engadget to thrive.

In this case, “The AOL Way” was not the main reason for the departure of Topolsky or Patel (pictured here, looking rather fetching), sources said, but was more about the challenges of working within a large corporate entity.

Engadget is one of the largest in tech, with 14 million unique visitors a month. Its main competitor is Gawker’s Gizmodo. AOL also owns TechCrunch, another tech news site.

BoomTown sent an email to AOL execs for comment and am awaiting a reply.

UPDATE: Topolsky just posted a goodbye on the Engadget titled, “Hello, I Must Be Going”:

It’s hard to believe that I’m currently writing the words I seem to be writing, though a casual stock-taking of my senses dictates that it must be true. Here I am, at my computer, typing letters one by one into a plain text document, rolling along through one of the strangest posts I’ve ever penned for this site. Okay, probably the strangest ever.

After nearly four years at Engadget, it’s time to make my exit. There are things I’m after and challenges I want to take on that just don’t fit with my day-to-day schedule here, so off I go.

I didn’t make this decision lightly. The time I’ve spent here has been–without question–the most amazing, rewarding, and just insanely fun period of my life. And I like to think I’ve had some pretty good times. The Engadget staff is easily the greatest collection of human beings I’ve ever encountered, and they’ve made waking up and freaking out over tech news for 12 to 18 hours a day into basically a party. I’ve never worked so hard or had so much fun doing it. I don’t use religious terms very often, but if there’s such a thing as being blessed, I would say the opportunity I had to work with these people certainly made me feel that way.

And it’s not just the core team at Engadget; all the groups at Weblogs (and its director Brad Hill), have been tremendous friends, partners, and peers.

Then there’s you guys — the readers. The hive mind. The Engadget fan-boys and -girls. It’s hard to sum up my experiences with the readership of Engadget in one paragraph. It would probably be hard in a hundred. But I can say that you’re simply the most informed, passionate, and excited group of people anywhere on the planet. Sure, you can get a little crazy sometimes–but what an astounding group of super-geniuses you are as well. Writing and working for the throngs of people who visit this site every day has been a huge challenge, a learning experience, and just kind of awe-inspiring.

But as I said, it’s time for me to step away. I’m not leaving the industry or the news game–in fact, I’ve got a few fantasy projects in mind that hopefully you’ll be hearing about soon.

Don’t worry though, Engadget is going to keep doing what it does best: being awesome. We have an amazing staff of senior editors and writers that will keep the machine chugging along (and growing!) for years to come. My friend and our editorial director Josh Fruhlinger will be taking on a bigger role in our day-to-day during the transition, and I won’t be completely disappearing from the site–I’ll stay on as editor-at-large, to advise and direct when necessary. I’ll also be sticking around to host more episodes of the Engadget Show, so you can continue to get your fix (if you’re into nerdy video shows about gadgets and technology, that is).

And with that, I’m shuffling over towards the door, just underneath that dim exit sign that keeps blinking on and off, its fluorescent bulbs cracking with some syncopated rhythm all their own. It’s just started to rain a little bit outside, but I’ve got my coat and umbrella. I’ll be fine, and so will you.

Till we meet again…

Today, BoomTown gassed up the MINI and headed down to see one of the more innovative new start-ups I have encountered of late.

That would be a new social magazine concept called Flipboard, which is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via a rich app on the Apple (AAPL) iPad.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this social magazine, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of content linked out to. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

Co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard decloaked itself tonight, announcing both a $10.5 million funding from top Silicon Valley power players and also the acquisition of Ellerdale, a relevancy search engine for the real-time Web.

The funders include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of high-profile investors, such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz, angel investor Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. (NWS) exec Peter Chernin.

Flipboard currently has about 20 employees at its downtown Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“Flipboard is a social magazine filled with all the the things your friends are sharing,” said McCue, who co-founded Tellme, the speech recognition service acquired by Microsoft (MSFT). “We’re trying to bring the timeless principles of print to social media.”

(You can read The Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret’s review of Flipboard here.)

McCue left Tellme a year ago and was casting about for a new start-up when he settled on creating a new way to digest and present the noisy flood of information being spewed 24/7 by social networks.

Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, who backed Tellme, said he was immediately intrigued by the idea.

“It is at once intimate and alive and beautiful,” he said in an interview with me earlier today. “This is the next wave of social media and redefines what magazine is…and I think it will be one of the defining apps on the iPad.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

Ellen Pao, also of Kleiner and a member of Flipboard’s board, said she hoped publishers, whose Web sites are reconfigured from tweets and other social links by the app, will welcome the new distribution format.

“Traditional publishing is facing a crossroads and this imagines it from the ground up,” she said. “I hope it paves the way.”

We’ll see about old media reactions, which has been decidedly mixed to aggregation apps like this.

The New York Times (NYT), for example, attacked rather than embraced another terrific news reading iPad app called Pulse, accusing it of misusing its content.

It was a stupid move against inexorable concepts such as Pulse and Flipboard, which are beginning to make sense of the changing digital information landscape.

Here’s the video interview with McCue, followed by the official press releases about Flipboard:

FLIPBOARD LAUNCHES WORLD’S FIRST SOCIAL MAGAZINE

INSPIRED BY THE BEAUTY OF PRINT AND DESIGNED FOR iPAD, FLIPBOARD TRANSFORMS THE SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIENCE

Raises $10.5MM From Legendary Investors KPCB and Index Ventures and Media Innovators Including Jack Dorsey, Dustin Moskovitz, Ashton Kutcher and The Chernin Group

Acquires Ellerdale, Names Arthur van Hoff CTO

FORTUNE BRAINSTORM TECH–ASPEN, COLORADO – JULY 21, 2010–Founded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple®, Flipboard™ began a quest today to transform how people discover and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. Flipboard also announced the immediate availability of it’s Flipboard App for iPad™, a social magazine that brings to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook. Flipboard’s first public demo will happen at the FORTUNE Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado at 4:40pm MDT tomorrow.

“With over 1 billion posts shared every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO. “We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.”

Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. Simply launch Flipboard and “flip” open the cover to get started. From the Table of Contents readers can view their sections and personalize the magazine.

The Facebook and Twitter sections let readers quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link – instead they instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content.

Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. Choose from Flipboard’s suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter lists to make Flipboard even more personal.

The Flipboard App is available for free at www.flipboard.com or from the App Store on iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

ACQUISITION OF ELLERDALE
As part of it’s quest to fundamentally improve the social media experience, Flipboard also announced the acquisition of Ellerdale (see press release: “Flipboard Acquires Ellerdale”). Ellerdale’s advanced semantic analysis of large, real-time data streams will enable Flipboard to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks. Flipboard will also retain the world-class engineering team at Ellerdale, including Arthur van Hoff, a leading Silicon Valley technologist who played a major role in the creation of Java. Arthur will become Flipboard’s Chief Technology Officer and spearhead the company’s technology strategy.

INVESTORS
Flipboard is backed by legendary investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures. Other key investors also include Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, The Chernin Group founded by Peter Chernin, Ron Conway, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith, and Ashton Kutcher. The company has raised $10.5 million in a Series A venture capital round.

FLIPBOARD ACQUIRES ELLERDALE TO BOOST CONTENT RELEVANCY IN NEW SOCIAL MAGAZINE

Arthur van Hoff Joins Flipboard as Chief Technology Officer

PALO ALTO, Calif.–July 21, 2010–Flipboard today announced it has acquired Ellerdale, the real-time Web intelligence company. The acquisition concurs with the launch of Flipboard, a social magazine designed for Apple’s iPad, which provides a faster and more engaging way to discover, view, and share what matters on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Ellerdale, founded in 2008, has developed a Web Intelligence technology that applies semantic analysis to large, real-time data streams to extract relevant and valuable information. To date, Ellerdale has indexed over 6 billion messages from around the social Web and currently processes nearly 70 million messages per day. This technology and data set will be become the relevancy engine for the next release of Flipboard, enhancing the reader’s experience by always surfacing the most important and personally interesting information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Designed from the ground up for the iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. With Ellerdale’s technology, future versions of Flipboard will be able to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks.

“Ellerdale has developed an impressive solution for understanding the ever-increasing stream of social data coming at us every day,” said Mike McCue, CEO and co-founder of Flipboard. “This technology will add deep relevancy for our readers, enabling us to present social content in a way that is not only more beautiful, but also more meaningful. It’s a great combination.”

Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale, is joining Flipboard as the company’s new chief technology officer. Van Hoff, who played a major role in the development of the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, and was founder of six high-tech companies, including Marimba, Strangeberry and Zing, will spearhead Flipboard’s technology strategy.

“Combining the two companies creates a situation in which one plus one equals three, bringing together Flipboard’s innovative front-end with Ellerdale’s powerful real-time relevancy engine on the back-end,” said Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale and Flipboard’s new chief technology officer. “Our technology will play a key role in providing readers with the content that matters most to them.”

Mike McCue and Evan Doll founded Flipboard earlier this year and received $10.5M in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. The founding team members come from Apple, Netflix, Tellme/Microsoft, Aardvark and Adobe. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100720/meet-flipboard-mike-mccue-talks-about-stealth-social-magazine-start-up-that-just-nabbed-10-5-million/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20100428/aliph-in-collaboration-deal-with-cisco-jawbones-in-the-workplace/ http://allthingsd.com/20100428/aliph-in-collaboration-deal-with-cisco-jawbones-in-the-workplace/#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:40:39 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=27775

Today at a partner event, Cisco will unveil a wide-ranging collaboration with Aliph–a San Francisco start-up that is famous for its noise-cancelling Jawbone Bluetooth mobile headset–to deploy its software and device in its IP phones in the enterprise.

It is a big win for Aliph, since the networking giant is a dominant player in the arena to provide telephony solutions to businesses, part of its Voice and Unified Communications division.

The idea, said sources, is to use the Jawbone device and the software that manages it to allow workers to move around an office and have the call move with them, echoing increasingly mobile consumer behavior.

BoomTown had heard rumors of intense interest in Aliph by Cisco (CSCO) months ago and assumed a purchase to add to its growing consumer portfolio, such as its recent acquisition of Pure Digital’s Flip camera line.

But that did not turn out to be the case–instead it is more a partnership, said sources, to use Aliph’s technology.

The company was formally launched in 2006–in fact, at the D: All Things Digital conference–by Alexander Asseily and Hosain Rahman, who met as Stanford University undergraduates. It is funded by Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

With the stylish and innovative Jawbone–the most recent of which is reviewed here by The Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret–Aliph turned a lot of heads in the wireless headset space, aimed directly at high-end consumers.

Now, it is apparently pivoting into the workplace.

While Rahman confirmed the collaboration, he did not give a lot of details, although he did agree to sit down with me last night to broadly sketch out the new relationship.

Here’s the video of the interview:

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