This is my 4,212th post on TechCrunch, and my last as editor in chief. The past few months have been a whirlwind for everyone at TechCrunch. We’ve had a lot of departures lately, but behind the scenes we’ve also quietly been building a new TechCrunch.

For every departure there’s been a new hire, we’ve been rolling out new features across the site (like the video and events hubs), and there is more goodness in the works including an awesome tablet app I am personally excited about. I didn’t want to leave until TechCrunch was set up for the next few years. And now it is.

When I joined TechCrunch in 2007 as Michael’s co-editor, the prospect of helping to build a new media brand online from scratch was what convinced me to jump from the magazine world to blogging. I got my share of headlines as a blogger, but what I found really exciting was helping to create a media business from whole cloth. It’s been an amazing ride, and I’d like to thank everyone at TechCrunch past and present for making it possible.

There is a lot of noise around TechCrunch right now because TechCrunch is changing. Ignore the noise, and focus on the work. In the end, that is the only thing that matters.

Photo credit: Federico Soffici

One of the marks of a great blogger is following your convictions and convincing the world of the truth you know in your heart. Jason Kincaid is that blogger, whether he is calling out Apple for enabling patent trolls or VEVO’s hypocrisy in using pirated video at an event. Jason joined TechCrunch in 2008 straight out of college. He learned fast and just kept getting better, even veering off into video. Here he is interviewing Al Franken, and he also hosted one of our most popular TCTV shows, TC Cribs. (He is also incredibly stylish).

After four years, Jason is leaving TechCrunch. He decided to write his farewell on his own personal blog, which I encourage you to read. Jason has many fans here among readers and the staff alike. He helped to define the character of TechCrunch during our formative years, and he will always be a part of our family. In his farewell, Jason comes back to what makes TechCrunch special and what kept him working here tirelessly. It all comes down to the startups and the conversation writers like him get to have with them:

That conversation never gets old. And, better yet, I always got to ask them questions about everything ranging from data mining to real estate to the optimal times to plant vegetables — all of which, somehow, fall under the wide-sweeping umbrella of ‘tech’, provided they have a website or smartphone app. And when I wasn’t meeting with startups, I was often tasked with things that made the lifelong tech geek inside of me gleeful.

Jason is not sure what he is going to do next, but he feels it is time to move on. Truth be told, he’s been feeling that for a while, as he notes in his post. Thank you, Jason, for all you’ve given to TechCrunch and sticking it through as long as you did. We can’t wait to see what you do next.

Back during the heyday of #OccupyWallStreet in New York City (before winter dispersed most of the protestors there), an iPhone app called Vibe became popular among that community. It allows people to post messages, photos, and videos within a geo-fenced radius—everything from a “whisper” (visible only to people within 165 feet) to a “bellow” (visible worldwide). The messages can be set to expire and users can post with a pseudonym or link the app to their Twitter account. Other users can respond to create a threaded conversation.

Vibe is the creation of Hazem Sayed, and his two-person startup was acquired by betaworks last December. Betaworks never announced the deal, but I’ve been able to confirm it. Sayed and at least one other person who worked on Vibe now work at betaworks. The deal was likely in the low six figures, with betaworks now owning a majority of Vibe.

The Vibe app is intriguing. Local, pseudonymous communications on your mobile device can be very compelling in the right contexts. But the Vibe app needs some work. For one thing, if you want to see all the “vibes” pinned to a map, you have to download a separate app also created by Sayed called AskLocal. I suspect betaworks is throwing additional engineers at Vibe to improve it beyond its basic concept.

Pseudonyms in social networks are coming back in vogue, and they make particular sense for apps used by protestors. There is a culture of pseudonymity on the web which lets some people open up more than they would otherwise. And being able to shout out to people around you through your mobile phone is something that could become appealing to people other than protestors. I could see the app becoming popular at concerts, sporting events, or even just as a way to pin messages about local stores and restaurants.

Music magazines are getting hit with a double whammy in the age of digital media. Like all print publications, their audience is going online—but so is the music. Why read about a new album when you can just listen to it on Spotify? Spin magazine is responding by shifting its focus online in a big way with a major redesign that literally puts the music first with a music player right at the top.

In the video above, digital general manager Jeff Rogers gives us an exclusive preview of the new site, which launches tomorrow (the music-streaming player launches in early March). It is part of a sweeping redesign of both the print magazine and website. The print magazine is larger, back to the original size of Spin, with a mix of heavy stock and glossy paper. It will only come out bi-monthly instead of monthly and become more of a high-end collector’s item for music aficionados.

The homepage is divided into sections. As you scroll down, the background color and layout changes. The top is news, interviews, and profiles, with a black background. Then below that are the music reviews: essentials, classic, and “worst music.” There will also be a whole new set of blogs to keep the stories fresh.

The new Spin site is filled with thousands of reviews—both long form and 140-character Twitter reviews. The print magazine will no longer carry reviews. They have all been moved online. “Getting your reviews in a magazine is like getting your stock quotes in a newspaper,” says Rogers.

The new site takes some of its design cues from Spin Play, the magazine’s iPad app that came out last year. Every article has full tracks that you can listen to while you are reading, and even as you browse around the site, the music keeps playing in the player which takes up the top nav bar. Clicking on the player while you are listening to a song gives you more songs and articles about the artist, and the ability to buy the song through iTunes or Amazon.

There will also be a Spin 30—which are 30 songs the Spin staff thinks you have to listen to now, and other Spin Lists. Hit play at the top and you get the current playlist. Spin is offering full tracks, but only a few hundred at any given time. It is not trying to compete with streaming music services like Spotify, rather it is doing what magazines do best: offering an edited selection of articles and related music. (In the future, it plans to export its playlists to other music services like Spotify). The majority of songs are promotional tracks which will exist on the site for a limited time, but Spin will license tracks as well.

Spin is finally treating its website like a product instead of just another music news site. It will be a place to go to not just to learn about music, but to experience it.

If anyone has any doubt that iPhones, iPads and other iOS devices are the future of Apple, just take a look at the chart above from Asymco.  It shows all iOS products sold cumulatively versus all OS X products ever sold (Macs) over the past 28 years. The iPhone has only been around for four years, but in that time more iPhones have been sold than all the Macs ever sold in Apple’s entire history.

The total number of Macs sold is 122 million. In 2011 alone, if you tally up all the iOS devices including iPods and iPads, 156 million were sold—more than all Macs ever sold. In one year. All told, Apple has sold 316 million total iOS devices over the past few years, iOS devices simply overwhelm OS X devices in terms of how many are out there. No wonder Apple is making OS X look and feel a little bit more like iOS.

I don’t even know how to describe the steepness of that iPhone sales curve. Even “skyrocketing” doesn’t do it justice.

New York City seed investors are growing up, and raising bigger funds. IA Ventures just raised $105 million and ff Venture Capital closed its second $27 million fund last November (which I am reporting here for the first time). I asked ff VC’s John Frankel and David Teten to come into the TCTV studio to talk about the new fund and their approach to investing. Their first $6.3 million fund, which they raised in 2008, was the top-performing venture fund through the end of 2010, according to Preqin, with a net IRR in the high-40 percent range, says Frankel.

The new fund,which they raised over the course of a year, has already deployed capital to 23 startups, including Klout, ThinkNear, Livefyre, Voxy, and Kohort. The fund will stop investing in new companies at around 30, which it should hit by the end of this year. The rest of the capital will be reserved for follow-on rounds. The only way to get outperforming returns, believes Frankel, is to stay focussed. Frankel was an angel investor and before that worked at Goldman Sachs. Angel investing saved him from the Street, much like it did Roger Ehrenberg at IA Ventures. (In addition to Teten, Hashable CEO and Quigo founder Michael Yavonditte is a part-time venture partner at ff, which stands for “Founder Friendly”.)

If you look at their portfolio, there are a lot of data, analytics, and consumer Internet plays, but they always invest in the entrepreneur first. “We don’t think about the world by themes.” says Teten. “Our approach is the people who know the most about growth sectors are the entrepreneurs.” Adds Frankel: “Our teams drive our themes.”

In the video, we get into why ff invested early in Klout, among other topics. “A lot of people saw it as a Twitter analytics company,” says Frankel, who sits on Klout’s board. “We saw it as a way for people to manage their online footprint.”

Ever since Apple released OS X Lion, its desktop operating system started the long trek towards iOS, Apple’s other, more popular operating system. With the next version of OS X, Mountain Lion (released today as a developer preview), OS X will prowl even closer to its iOS cousin.

A number of the new features in OS X come directly from iOS. These include deeper iCloud integration, Messages, Reminders, Notes, a Notification Center, a Game Center, AirPlay, and built-in sharing to Twitter, email, and more.

As time goes on, Apple is building more and more iOS features into OS X to create a more seamless experience between the two. As Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned earlier this week at a Goldman Sachs conference, many more people’s first experience of an Apple product is an iPhone or iPad than a Mac. “The iPhone started to introduce Apple to hundreds of millions of people who had never met Apple before,” he said. This famed halo effect of the iPhone is orders of magnitude larger than it was for the iPod. People who buy an iPhone are more likely to buy a Mac, and when they do buy a Mac they are going to expect a familiar experience.

Of all the iOS features being ported to the the Mac, the most significant ones are iCloud, notifications, and social sharing. Of course, iCloud is already a part of some Mac desktop apps like iPhoto, but with Mountain Lion it will embrace iWorks docs. All of your docs will be synced to the cloud, eliminating the headaches of keeping track of different versions. Apple could open up this iCloud functionality to other apps as well, making it a key feature of the OS (but it is going to have to increase the free storage from the measly 5 GB it offers now). iCloud is the link between iOS and OS X apps, and it will only keep growing.

Apple’s own desktop apps such as Safari will start featuring the sharing button icon familiar to iOS users (the box with the right-facing arrow coming out of it). This will allow users to share a web page, photo, or document via email, as a message, to Twitter, or other services. In this way, sharing will be baked right into the OS. Facebook isn’t included as an option here yet, but that could happen if the two companies ever work out their differences.

Finally, adding push notifications to the desktop could be the biggest change of all. Anyone with an iPhone or iPad knows how addictive the app notifications can be (or annoying, if it’s not your iPhone). Notifications have become the new message bus—persistent, always in your face, and realtime. They are IM for apps, and increasingly they are the way our machines talk to us, pulling us into an app with constant pings saying, “Hey, something just happened.” These push notifications will start with Apple apps, but will soon become available to developers via an API. As iOS developers create more Mac companion apps, you should start to see the same notifications pop up whether you are on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

Earlier today, Barry Diller introduced Aereo, a company backed by IAC, at a press conference in New York City. Aereo streams broadcast TV to your browser and provides a DVR in the cloud by miniaturizing TV antennas and packing them in equipment that sits on the network. In the video above, which we took at the event, you can see Diller’s opening remarks and part of CEO Chaitanya Kanojia’s presentation. At the end, I grabbed Diller on camera to ask him how does this expand beyond just broadcast channels to cable and beyond.

If Aereo can build a big enough audience with bringing broadcast TV to iPads and other screens, then the company can try to cut deals with other channels for carriage. “Eventually,” says Diller, “it is my belief that the world really deserves a la carte programming.” He continues, “It would be much better for users to say, ‘These are the programs I want, I don’t want you to bundle them for me.’”

Is TV in the cloud is on its way? Will the cable industry ever succumb to this type of logic? I sure hope so.

Silicon Valley thrives on change. At TechCrunch, we chronicle change, honor it, and, lately, we’ve been living it. As we rebuild TechCrunch, it’s the talent of our writers that sets us apart. We are adding two new names to the editorial staff, saying goodbye to some colleagues, and promoting from within. First, the new hires: Ingrid Lunden starts today as a TechCrunch writer and Colleen Taylor will soon join us as our TechCrunch TV reporter.

Lunden is an American writer living in London. She was most recently at PaidContent, which was just bought by GigaOm. In fact, the GigaOm deal went down the same day Lunden signed on with us. I can tell you that made for interesting negotiations. Lunden will be covering mobile, digital media, and breaking tech news. And, of course, she will be covering European startups and tech companies, along with our TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher, who continues to do a great job as the Euro specialist. She is very aggressive when it comes to breaking stories, which is why I know she will do great here at TechCrunch.  I will let her introduce herself in her own post.

Our second hire is Colleen Taylor, who will join us as our dedicated TechCrunch TV reporter. One of our big thrusts over the past year has been TechCrunch TV, and now Colleen will help us broaden our video coverage. Currently a reporter at GigaOm, Colleen is a rising star and a skilled interviewer (read her recent interviews with Marc Andreessen on Silicon Valley startups and Tim O’Reilly on fighting SOPA). Before GigaOm, Colleen was an M&A reporter for Mergermarket, a Financial Times publication, and graduated from Columbia University.

At TechCrunch, Colleen will still be writing, but developing new kinds of posts which incorporate both text and video. We’ve been looking for a long time for someone with the combined skills to fill this role, and become the familiar face of TCTV.

Just as Lunden steps into her new shoes at TechCrunch, one of our other writers based in Europe, Robin Wauters, is leaving after more than three years and 3,700 posts. Robin will become the European Editor of The Next Web (read his post). Fittingly enough, the first time I met Robin was at a Next Web conference in Amsterdam years ago (he started out there as a contributor).

When I tell people that Robin lives in Belgium, they are always surprised because he breaks so much U.S. tech news. In blogging, speed is half the battle, and Robin is one of the fastest bloggers I know. But he is also deeply entrenched in the European startup scene (he even ran his own European startup conference, Plugg). The Next Web is a natural next step for him.

While I don’t relish competing with him or any of the other recent TechCrunch departees, like mobile editor Greg Kumparak who last week joined Sarah Lacy at PandoDaily, the competition will make us better. It always does. The fact is that TechCrunch writers are in high demand elsewhere for a very good reason—because they are very good.

As long as we keep building TechCrunch and don’t lose our focus on startups and the tech community, we’ll do better also. I truly believe that.  Technology is touching every part of the planet. As it transforms new industries, our team of writers will be there to cover them. We’ve added some amazing new writers recently like Eric Eldon, Josh Constine, and Anthony Ha. And more are on the way.

There is one final change I’d like to talk about. TechCrunch has always prided itself on being a flat organization with no real editors other than Michael and myself. That was fine when there were six writers, but now that there are 15, it is time for some organization. In our San Francisco headquarters, Alexia Tsotsis and Eric Eldon will become senior editors leading our coverage of Silicon Valley. Veteran writer Leena Rao will also become a senior editor, focusing on covering social commerce, venture capital, and the enterprise more deeply. And Matt Burns will take charge as our new mobile editor (he’s already rethought the way we do gadget reviews with more in-depth video).

Yes, TechCrunch is changing. But with change, comes opportunity.

Barry Diller always enjoys riling the media industry from which he sprang. A few minutes ago at a press conference at IAC headquarters in New York City, Diller introduced a new startup IAC is backing called Aereo that is building a DVR in the cloud that broadcasts live TV to your iPad, computer, or TV.  Diller has always believed that Internet TV would be a healthy counterweight to “media concentration” as media companies increasingly want “to protect that closed system.”

The problem with Internet TV so far, says Diller, is that “there wasn’t a lot to watch” other than “cats swinging from chandeliers.” And other hardware solutions presented the problem of more boxes in the living room. “Who wants another remote, box, wires?” asks Diller. “Everyone already has enough of all that stuff.”

But he sees Aereo as a way “to transform television and how you receive it.” The way it works is it actually sends live broadcast TV to your computer or iPad. Aereo builds boxes the size small refrigerators with arrays of tiny TV antennas inside. Each of those antennas can be programmed to deliver broadcast video over the Internet to viewers. (One video stream per viewer at a time). And this is how the company gets around legal barriers, it is just tuning into live TV. This is a similar approach in concept to what Slingbox did, but instead of tuning into your own TV, it tunes into a TV antenna in the cloud.

The iPad app looks like a program guide with DVR functionality. So you can record any show available on the system, but only broadcast stations like ABC, NBC, and FOX are available at launch. Cable channels aren’t available. The other limitation is that the service will be capacity constrained. It needs one tiny antenna per user in order to stream TV to them.

Aereo is launching live today in New York City. The service is invite only and will cost $12 a month for a virtual DVR with a dual tuner and 40 hours of storage.

Shares of Apple (AAPL) closed above $500 today for the first time, ending the day at $502.60. Apple, the world’s most valuable company, now boasts a market capitalization of almost $470 billion. That is up 9 points from yesterday’s close, and up more than 80 from where the stock was the day Apple announced its impressive quarter on January 24th. Everybody was blown away by the numbers.

The $500 mark is a psychological milestone. But many Apple bulls have been predicting it. What you need to look at really is the market cap. And while $470 billion is astounding, it is not unprecedented (during the 1990s boom, companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and GE reached that height). Also, it is important to remember that Apple holds nearly $100 billion in cash. Without that cash, it’s market value presumably would be less.

In fact, Apple’s share price moves in lockstep with its ever-increasing cash position. Horace Dediu at Asymco has plotted out the correlation between the stock price and Apple’s cash. According to Dediu’s calculations, Apple’s stock hit $500 right on schedule.

British video search company Blinkx saw its stock spike briefly this morning, following an announcement that it will power AOL’s video search. AOL is one of the largest video destinations on the Web, with about 450 million video views per month according to comScore.

Blinkx will also incorporate AOL’s premium videos in its own search engine. (Presumably, that will include TCTV videos, since we are owned by AOL). Blinkx itself attracts 55 million U.S. video searchers a month. AOL’s video properties are watched by about 40 million unique viewers (comScore), so the deal could significantly expand blinkx’s reach.

But doesn’t AOL already have its own video search technology? Back in 2006 it acquired a video search engine called Truveo. Up until recently, Truveo was powering all of AOL’s video search. But it’s been on life support for months, and now with this deal the plug is being pulled on Truveo. (Update: To be clear, it is the Truveo video search platform that is being retired. The engineering team is being redeployed to work on content creation and distribution tools. Also, the blinkx deal is only for video search on AOL.com).

Failed acquisitions aside, AOL wants its videos to reach the broadest audience. An internal-only video search engine doesn’t do much to reach new audiences. Of course, most people search for videos on Google, not blinkx. And somehow YouTube always seems to turn up as the top video results on Google. If your videos aren’t on YouTube, they are sort of invisible. But if they are on YouTube, you have to cut them in on the ad revenues. So media companies are trying to push video viewers to their own sites through deals like the one AOL just did with blinkx.

Two weeks ago at the Crunchies, Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft’s top executive in Silicon Valley, came up to me and handed me a Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone. It was out of the box, fully charged, and ready to go—alive in my hand. It’s a beautiful phone. Thin, solid, bevelled, and bright. Later that evening, I pulled it from my pocket and I’ve been playing with it ever since. This is not the first Windows phone I’ve seen, but it is the first one that’s made a lasting impression.

The Lumia 800 is the flagship Windows phone. It’s not available yet in the U.S., although an unlocked version is rumored to be coming on Valentine’s Day (for the absurd sum of $899, which includes a bundle of other gear). This is a standalone $500 phone unlocked, which means it could go for $200 or less with a contract. Its cousins the Lumia 710 and 900 are priced at $50 and $99, respectively, in the U.S. John Biggs and I talked about the 710 last month on Fly or Die, and that one is okay too. But the 800 is potentially an iconic phone.

When you hold one in your hand, it’s clear that the smartphone wars are far from over. It is too easy to dismiss Windows Phone 7 as being too little, too late. (That was our first reaction too). No, it’s clear that Windows Phone has more than a fighting chance. Microsoft will make sure that the economics are much more attractive to the carriers than the iPhone’s so that they push Windows Phone. If consumers bite, Windows Phone could emerge as a very strong smartphone platform.

The biggest drawback right now is the apps. There are 50,000 of them, but they are mostly hit or miss. They will get better over time. It’s still early. The few games I’ve played are solid enough, but the social apps need some work. They are too bare bones and stripped down, but I’ll give them this: they don’t look or act like iPhone apps. Windows Phone apps have their own look and feel, with a common theme being swiping sideways to get to a different tab or screen.

I am not quite ready to give up my iPhone 4S, but, as I argue in this episode of Fly or Die, if I had to choose between a top of the line Android and the Lumia 800, it would be a toss up. The 800 does not feel cheap. It is a sleek device that shows off Windows Phone 7 in the best light possible. A lot of care was put into getting many of the details right in Windows Phone 7—little things like the animated transitions when you launch an app or open up a new window. It’s a device that makes you want to swipe just because it is a pleasurable experience. (Be sure to read Robin’s and MG’s takes on Windows Phone also).

The News Corp. phone-hacking scandal continues to spiral out of control, sweeping up more and more of the companies employees and executives. In the UK, 8 people were arrested, including five News Corp journalists, in the broadening scandal, which may embroil deputy COO James Murdoch—Rupert’s son and heir-apparent. A paper copy of a deleted email found in a crate ties James Murdoch directly to the events under investigation, which involved the routine and illegal hacking of phone voicemails on behalf of a News Corp publication.

This email evidence would never have been found if it wasn’t printed out because News Corp, like many corporations, regularly deletes archived emails. It is standard practice, but the technical reasons given for deleting emails are usually not the real reason they are eliminated. The only real reason to destroy old emails is to avoid liability and future lawsuits.

Reading the account in the New York Times about this newly discovered email from former News of the World editor Colin Myler to James Murdoch, which dates back to 2008, you get a sense it wasn’t meant to be found.

Mr. Myler’s electronic copy had been lost “in a hardware failure” on March 18, 2010,” while Mr. Murdoch’s electronic copy had been deleted on Jan. 15, 2011 during an “e-mail stabilization and modernization program.”

Big corporations routinely delete old e-mails. Between April 2010 and July 2011, News International discussed e-mail deletion with HCL Technologies, which manages its e-mail system, on nine occasions, according to a letter HCL wrote to Parliament last summer.

Most of the reasons were mundane. But in January 2011, HCL said, News International asked whether HCL was capable of helping “truncate” — meaning delete — “a particular database” in the e-mail system. The question came shortly after disclosures in a civil suit brought by the actress Sienna Miller raised fears that material about widespread phone hacking at The News of the World might become public.

Companies know that incriminating evidence always exists in emails because emails document the conversations and decision-making that goes on in all organizations. But they need a justification other than “We don’t want to get caught.” So that’s how you get corporate doublespeak like “e-mail stabilization and modernization” programs, with its vague suggestion that there is a technical reason to delete old emails, as if a company’s entire email system might crash under the weight of old emails stored on a server.

Let’s just be clear here. By putting in place policies to routinely delete old email archives, companies are protecting themselves from future incrimination. And News Corp isn’t the only company that does this, by any means. It’s a preventative measure. But it only works if they destroy any incriminating emails before they are caught. Once an investigation starts and the prospect of subpoenas arise, destroying emails is no longer a legal option. In this case, that may come back to bite News Corp.

It’s February, which means Toy Fair in New York City. Every year, Mind Candy CEO Michael Acton Smith comes to town to peddle his little monsters. Those would be Moshi Monsters, one of the largest social game sites for kids 6 to 11, with 10 million monthly visitors. It’s huge in the UK, and this year Smith is going to make a major push into the U.S.

And it’s not just online. Moshi Monsters are finding their way into all sorts of kids merchandise, including collectible toy figurines (more than 20 million sold in the UK alone last year), plush dolls, games, the No. 1 kids magazine in the UK, mobile apps, and even temporary tattoos. While we were talking about his plans in the video above, Smith put one of the tattoos of the Snookums “moshling” character on my arm. My kids were pretty impressed when I showed it to them.

Last year, Smith’s goal was to sell $100 million worth of Moshi Monster merchandise, and he exceeded that goal, selling $105 million worth directly and through licensees. Mind Candy’s revenues was a portion of that, but it is profitable with 100 employees and Smith says revenues “tripled” last year.

He is constantly pushing the brand into new areas, including Moshi TV, which is like a YouTube for Kids with a mix of original and curated programming. If you haven’t heard of Moshi Monsters yet, you will. The toys will be in Walmart, JC Penny and pretty much everywhere else this year.

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason just finished his first post-IPO earnings calls with Wall Street analysts. (We covered it live and looked at the numbers). “We believe we are on the cusp of a sea change” in behavior, he noted. “We’re about to see what technology can do for local commerce.”

Listening to the call, I’d say his performance was mixed. He sounded a little nervous at first, but warmed up to the task just as he did during the IPO roadshow, joking with the analysts that one of the most requested features Groupon hears from customers to “stop sending me pole-dancing deals.” (Don’t worry, they’ve got personalization technology to help filter those out).

Mason warmed up, especially during the Q&A session. He seems most comfortable diving into the details of Groupon’s business, less so during the scripted portion of the earnings calls. After all, he is from Chicago, which is more of an improv town.

Mason did flub a few lines, at one point struggling to find the right word to describe a statistic. “The opposite of ‘only’” was what he was looking for. But he recovered and it was an interesting stat. Citing a recent Lionsgate survey of people who came to see a movie which was being marketed through a Groupon deal, of the 93 percent of respondents who saw the deal, only 7 percent would have gone to see the movie anyway. And 3 out of 4 people who use a Groupon in general bring a friend with them, suggesting that merchants get a lot more value than just the economics of any given deal. Mason also says that “9 out of 10 people spend more than the value of the Groupon.”

Looking past the anxiety of a first earnings call, Mason did communicate Groupon’s focus on delivering longer term value to both merchants and customers, which is exactly what he has to do to take Groupon from version 1.0 to the next stage. “We are transforming our relationships from a one-and-done deal event to something that is longer term,” he concluded. This will be a recurring theme. Expect Mason to hammer that message home any time he can.

Groupon just announced its first earnings report after going public last October (it missed, read our liveblog of the earnings call here.). For the full year, Groupon’s revenues were $1.6 billion, up 419 percent. The daily deal company, however, lost $350 million, most of that attributable to its very aggressive international expansion (7,000 out of its 10,000 employees are overseas). In North America, it turned an operating profit of $22 million, which was counteracted by $137 million in international operating losses.

Gross billings (which is the amount Groupon collects before giving local merchants their cut) was more than $4 billion for the year. Gross billings is a good measure of the Groupon economy in that it is the dollar amount Groupon is bringing in total to local commerce.

For the quarter, revenues were $506 million, up 194 percent. The net loss was $42.7 million, which at least was down from $379 million quarterly net loss the year before. Revenue growth reaccelerated to 18 percent from the third quarter, when quarterly growth had slowed to 9.4 percent.

Also notable is that Groupon is spending significantly less on marketing, $156 million in the quarter versus $170 million in the third quarter and $291 million the year prior. Groupon is also shifting its spending from trying to acquire new customers to get existing customers to spend more. “We are investing more in transactional marketing,” says Groupon CEO Andrew Mason. “It is designed to drive purchases, not just new subscribers.”

Some other stats from the earnings:

Active customer base: 33 million, up 275% from Q4 2010 and up 20% from Q3 2011

Active gross billing per active customer (trailing 12 months): $188, up from $160 in Q4 2010

Mobile downloads: 26 million

Cash: $1.1 billion

Before big data was a hot investing theme, Roger Ehrenberg was one of the first seed investors to focus almost exclusively on startups using data as a competitive edge. His NYC-based fund, IA Ventures, has backed companies such as Billguard, Coursekit, DataSift, Next Big Sound, Simple, ThinkNear, and Yipit. His first fund, raised in 2010, was a $50 million seed fund. Now, IA Ventures just raised $105 million to double down on data plays in Fund II.

The bigger fund will give IA Ventures the ability to make bigger bets, while still sticking to early stage deals. “I think the biggest difference is we now have the firepower to lead seeds, As and also Bs,” says Ehernberg,, “and we can take companies through the growth stage.” Up until now, IA Ventures mostly backed pre-revenue companies somewhere “between a Powerpoint and a prototype,” says Ehrenberg. Those require a lot of hands-on work to help get them to a revenue-producing stage, which IA Ventures will continue to do, but its team can only help so many companies.

With Fund II, IA Ventures will try to achieve a more balanced portfolio made up of both seed and later-stage companies already generating revenues. It is expecting to invest in about two dozen companies over the three-year life of the fund. The first investment from Fund II was the Next Big Sound’s recent $6.5 million series A, which IA Ventures led (writing a check for $4 million, it’s biggest ever).

Ehrenberg is among a new class of VCs with roots as an angel investor. He personally backed Buddy Media, bit.ly, TweetDeck, Invite Media, Clickable, and Stocktwits. In another life he was an investment banker, but he doesn’t like to talk about that now. He turned his angel investing into a real seed firm, which is now moving up the stack. Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech Ventures, which also just raised a new $55 million fund, is a similar angel-turned-VC, but with a different investing style.

In fact, there seems to be a divide between East Coast and West Coast superangels. “There is a huge ideological argument right now at play,” says Ehrenberg. Investors like Ron Conway, Dave McClure, and even Clavier make a lot of small bets—60, 100, or more per fund—hoping a few of them will pay off massively. They know that somewhere in their portfolios could be the next Google or Facebook. The East Coast seed investors are a little bit more cautious (they would say “disciplined”). Ehrenberg models IA Ventures more like a small Union Square Ventures or Foundry Capital—a more concentrated portfolio where the investors use their contacts or domain expertise to help take some of the risk out of the companies.

“The optimal point on the risk-return frontier,” says Ehrenberg, “is putting small amounts early, being close, and being in a position to put in more money when there is an opportunity to de-risk as opposed to holding a portfolio of lottery tickets and hoping that one of those lottery tickets looks like Google or Facebook.”

His limited partners seem happy with that approach. They know what they are getting and they can invest in a lucrative theme. Although, truth be told, Ehrenberg doesn’t really talk about “big data” that much anymore. “We never use it because it doesn’t mean anything,” he admits. Data is not valuable unless you do something with it. It only means something when you drill down to the specifics. IA Ventures likes to invest in companies that create contributory databases, where consumers give their data in return for something more valuable (like TC Disrupt finalist Billguard which gives you fraud protection in return for your credit card billing data); core enabling data technologies, or applications that leverage large data sets (like Simple, the new banking product still in private beta).

Blip.tv is going through some changes, with founder Mike Hudack gone and a search for a new CEO still ongoing. But the company raised a $6 million C round from its two main investors in December, and now just added to that with another $6 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank. There is also a new logo, and the company is now called just Blip.

So how is the indie Web video distribution service doing? “We essentially doubled revenue in 2011,” reports COO Steve Brookstein. He tells me that revenues in 2011 were $10 million, and the company expects to nearly double again this year, although profitability is still being pushed off until 2013. But the new cash should tide it over until then.

With 54 employees, Blip is a decent-sized startup with a long history on the New York scene. Originally, it appealed to independent Web video producers as an upload-once, distribute everywhere platform. Last year it started to try to become more of a destination site promoting its biggest stars, some of with whom it signed distribution deals.

Blip claims 13 million monthly unique viewers across its network of embedded players,and about 70 million “monetizable” views (videos it can sell ads against). Brookstein says the CEO search is going well, and Blip is working on redesigning its dashboard for Web video producers to give them better analytics. But it really all comes down to serving the best Web video producers. “We will work with top producers to build audience and give them additional financial incentives,” he hints, without revealing any more details.

Yahoo has its new CEO, Scott Thompson, and founder Jerry Yang stepped down from the company and the board a few weeks ago. But all along, people have been asking when is the rest of the Yahoo board going to resign?

Well, that day is today for four more directors, including chairman Roy Bostock. He was sticking around to try to oversee the disposition of Yahoo’s Asian assets. It doesn’t look like that is going so well. Today, in his letter to shareholders, Bostock disclosed that he would not be standing for re-election to the board, and neither would 3 other directors. Meanwhile, Yahoo elected two new board members: Maynard Webb and Alfred Amoroso. Webb was the chairman and CEO of LiveOps, and before that a well-regarded eBAy executive.

From the letter:

Finally, the board has concluded that in order to accelerate the Company’s transformation, the combination of a new Chief Executive Officer with an enhanced team of independent directors would provide Yahoo! with the expertise and perspectives necessary to drive innovation and growth going forward. Therefore, Mr. Joshi, Mr. Kern, Mr. Wilson and I have volunteered not to stand for re-election at the next shareholders’ meeting.

Furthermore, the board today elected two highly qualified independent directors, Alfred Amoroso and Maynard Webb, Jr. Mr. Amoroso served as President and CEO of Rovi Corporation until December 2011 and, among other positions, had previously served as the President, CEO and Vice Chairman of META Group, Inc., the President and CEO of CrossWorlds Software, Inc. and as a member of the world-wide management committee of IBM Corporation. Mr. Webb, the Chairman of LiveOps, Inc., served as that company’s CEO until July 2011. Prior to that, Mr. Webb was Chief Operating Officer of eBay and Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Gateway, Inc., in addition to management, leadership and board positions at several other companies spanning his 30-year career

That needed to happen. Now Yahoo can get a fresh start.