The hypothetical wormhole to this absurdly ambitious goal? The wish list.

Wish co-founders Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhang

The startup is called ContextLogic, and it’s got some of tech’s most smartypants investors behind it, as well as 10 million people already signed up for its wish-list service, called Wish.com.

“We want to be Google AdWords for the retailer,” explained co-founder and CEO Peter Szulczewski, an engineer who previously worked on ad algorithms and search at Google for five years.

Users sign up for Wish to make wish lists. They save, tag and recommend products to each other (and, by default, it’s social-spammy, with automatic posts to your Facebook profile and rewards for inviting friends). Then the company matches participating merchants with potential customers, and sends out discounts for specific products.

So, basically, it’s like personalized coupons.

The target retailer for Wish is an Amazon Marketplace merchant who wants to get more distribution without paying Amazon a significant portion of each transaction. To that end, Wish plans to launch self-serve tools for retailers next month, Szulczewski said. Eventually, it wants to get more closely involved with transactions by offering checkout tools.

The 20-person, San Francisco-based ContextLogic has raised $8 million in funding, led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s Formation 8, with former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Factual’s Gil Elbaz, Sling co-founder Blake Krikorian, Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter, Steve Chen of YouTube and Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures and others participating.

Because the Wish experience is all about tastemaking and discovery, “We’re creating hundreds of Fab.coms in different verticals,” said co-founder Danny Zhang, who previously worked on the Overture team at Yahoo.

Wish users have saved 100 million products, and recommend 100,000 of them per day, according to internal data.

There are many other wish-list products out there; for instance, Amazon and Pinterest. Zhang and Szulczewski say Wish’s advantage is that the wish list is pretty, it’s tightly and smartly integrated with an advertising platform and, most of all, it’s constantly being optimized.

Plus, Wish is especially sticky on mobile. Via iPhone, Android and iPad apps, engagement and sales are double what they are on the Web, the company said.

Our next three speakers will talk about the role mobile plays in people’s lives around the world, in humanitarian efforts, entertainment and community, and sports. We expect them to be some of the most entertaining and memorable voices from our great lineup on Oct. 29 and 30 in New York City.

Katie Jacobs Stanton leads international strategy at Twitter, which she joined in 2010 from the U.S. Department of State.

Stanton spent two years in Washington, D.C., leading the State Department’s mobile donation campaign for Haiti, which raised $32 million for victims of the devastating earthquake there. She served as the White House’s first director of citizen participation, where she got the Obama administration tweeting via @whitehouse. Previously, she led development of products at Google and Yahoo.

At Twitter, Stanton is helping the company build out its international presence. She set up the company’s first overseas offices in the United Kingdom, Japan and Germany and is playing a key role in helping the company set up partnerships in Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Troy Carter is the founder and CEO of Atom Factory, and for the past five years he has managed Lady Gaga through her ascent to global superstardom. Carter doesn’t live just in the music world; his many tech projects include co-founding the community platform Backplane and investing in a number of start-ups, often alongside Menlo Ventures’ Shervin Pishevar.

Carter and Gaga’s LittleMonsters.com gets as much at 60 percent of its traffic from mobile. They recently announced that her next album, which is due next spring, will be released as an interactive app.

And last but not least, as CEO of MLB Advanced Media, Bob Bowman gives people something they want — live streaming baseball — and gets them to pay real money for it. MLB.tv now has 3.7 million total subscribers and delivers 1.1 million live video streams per day.

The outspoken Bowman has been a pioneer in jumping into mobile headfirst, with the AtBat app available on nearly every flavor of smartphone and tablet.

Bowman’s appearance will be well timed, not only because MLB is an early adopter of the iOS 6 Passbook feature, but also as it will be right in the middle of the World Series when he speaks at our conference.

If you’d like to join us and Stanton, Carter and Bowman at Dive Into Mobile, grab one of the remaining tickets before it’s too late.

Think of it as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook with a purpose.

In other words, #waywire wants to be a media company where teens and young adults can share user-generated content, kick off a debate and spur discussion.

“There’s a big void out there,” said #waywire’s Founder and CEO Nathan Richardson. “There’s a lot of people using social utilities to say things, but very few places are bringing context around it.”

Richardson said his company is targeting millennials — a generation of people who grew up completely wired and never read news from a paper, make calls from a landline or take pictures that require developing.

“There’s an opportunity to give them the way to give them a place to upload user-generated content that matters to them and marry it with curated content to give context and then anchor with original content,” Richardson added.

One of those contributors will be Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, who is also one of the company’s founders.

In an interview, Booker joked that you can follow him on Twitter at your peril, because he sends so many tweets. He said the idea for the company started to jell earlier this year as he sought other ways to shift America’s public conversation away from “divisiveness” and toward “solutions.”

Mayor Booker plans to contribute content for the network, but since he’s already got a day job, he will not be part of company’s management. To keep everything separate between his role at the company and his role as a public figure, he will keep his stake in #waywire in a trust while he’s in public office.

The New York-based media site is coming out of stealth on Monday to announce that it has raised $1.75 million in capital to get off of the ground. The site will launch in beta this summer, but will start accepting registrations as soon as Monday.

Joining Booker as co-founders are Richardson and Sarah Ross. Most recently, Richardson was president of Gilt City; before that, he had a variety of media roles, including CEO of ContextNext Media, head of Dow Jones online, and general manager of Yahoo Finance. Ross comes to #waywire from Katalyst Media, TechCrunch and Yahoo.

Here’s the full release:

First Round Capital and Innovation Endeavors Lead Seed Funding Round in New Social Artery #waywire

NEW YORK, NY, JULY 2, 2012 — #waywire, a social artery for video news, inspiration and leading voices, today announced it has closed a seed capital round led by First Round Capital and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, along with Troy Carter and a group of angel investors. #waywire is focused on providing a network that will serve to fundamentally alter the tone and content of public dialogue around some of society’s most pressing issues. The network will provide original, syndicated and community created video content, allowing today’s digital generation to develop informed opinions on topics and then engage in positive debates and discussions.

“As soon as I was exposed to the #waywire concept, I knew there was something truly different here,” said Howard Morgan, Managing Partner of First Round Capital. “Most people agree that there is a real problem with the tone of our public dialogue. #waywire will work to change that by building a network that latches onto the attitudes of the digital generation and deliver rich content that helps to educate and inform as well as provide a forum to express opinions.”

The company was co-founded and is led by Chief Executive Officer, Nathan Richardson along with Sarah Ross another #waywire co-founder. Richardson brings an extensive track record of building and leading successful online properties including prior positions as president of Gilt City, CEO of ContentNext Media, head of Dow Jones online and General Manager of Yahoo! Finance. Ross comes to #waywire with digital experience from Katalyst Media, TechCrunch and Yahoo! Inc. Howard Morgan, of First Round Capital, will join the #waywire Board of Directors.

“There are networks to connect friends, and there are simple ways to share news articles or stories, but there is a definite opening in the social spectrum for a network where people can go and learn about issues that truly matter to them and engage with peers and experts on a wide range of topics,” said Richardson. “This existing gap contributes to the divisions that impact our national dialogue. We think #waywire can help address this problem by providing millions of people – especially the young, digitally savvy generation – a network for video news, inspiration and leading voices.”

Also among #waywire’s co-founders is Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, N.J. The idea behind #waywire came from Mayor Booker and grew from his desire to shift America’s public conversation away from divisiveness toward a debate focused on achieving solutions. The Mayor plans to contribute original content to the #waywire network where he will discuss America’s most significant challenges with a variety of thought leaders from diverse backgrounds. Mayor Booker will not be part of day-to-day management of #waywire and will have no editorial involvement in the network. His ownership stake will be maintained in a trust while he remains in public office.

“When I experienced the possibilities of social media and video, I saw the beginnings of an answer to a problem that is facing America. I believe #waywire can be a network for people everywhere to move away from partisan grandstanding toward a productive national debate about solutions to the problems we are all facing,” said Mayor Booker. “It is also extremely important to me that we not only begin to convene an online dialogue with as many people as possible, but provide a series of face-to-face conversations in live settings.”

#waywire will begin accepting email registrations for the site’s private beta release at www.waywire.com. Additional content agreements are expected in the coming weeks.

Neither of those developments* are news, so let’s skip ahead and get to the stuff that’s not being talked about today, but should be:

In addition to the angels Turntable has announced — who include Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter, former Facebook sales boss Tim Kendall, and big media investor Vivi Nevo — the company has also brought on other big music industry heavy hitters as investors/advisers. Turntable won’t confirm their names, but I’m told at least a couple of them hold big jobs at music labels, so go ahead and guess if you’d like.

Oftentimes the angel list accompanying a funding announcement isn’t much more than a vanity exercise. But in this case the news is important because Turntable is indeed trying to negotiate licenses with the big music labels and publishers.

That’s a change in strategy for Turntable, which had earlier argued that it wouldn’t need licenses, because it was a “non-interactive Web radio service” a la Pandora. So having executives at the big labels who are also investors is a nice advantage for Turntable to have.

And they’ll need as many as they can get, because they’re going to try to create a new kind of license. Basically they’re gunning for a hybrid license which would have them paying more per stream than Pandora does, but less than a full-fledged, on-demand interactive service like Spotify ponies up.

As I wrote in August, the notion of creating a brand-new digital music license and getting buy-in from all the big players would have seemed ridiculous a few months ago. But for whatever reason — lots of folks point to Spotify finally getting its U.S. deal approved after two years of work — people both inside and outside of the labels are murmuring positive things about what Turntable wants to do.

It will still be expensive, though — assume the start-up will have to hand over equity and a recurring royalty stream to make this work.

Just as important for Turntable: Parlaying its buzzy status into something regular people might actually want to use. Turntable says its users stream a million songs a day, but doesn’t say how many people are actually using it. But it’s clear that so far this is primarily something that appeals to a relatively small group of musical digerati.

And that group appears to have been shrinking since the company’s first burst of publicity this summer, according to metrics from AppData.

*One tiny correction for other reports about Turntable’s funding: Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, who had invested in Stickybits, the company that famously pivoted into what we’re seeing today, isn’t in this round. Via email, he says that he didn’t sign to back the company once it became a music start-up because his Kapor Capital “is focusing now on education, health care, and other positive social impact areas.”