All Things Digital

Now what?

The party-all-night social-networking site that has been MySpace so far got a massive morning-after shock yesterday when 30 percent of its workforce was laid off.

And today, MySpace, which is still 1,000-strong, has to face the cold, harsh light of day in the aftermath of the restructuring and get busy quickly figuring out a way to reinvigorate a brand that has suffered after a stunning rocket of a start many years ago.

So, based on many sources I have spoken to over the last week, here’s a rundown of the next steps MySpace will likely be taking and who’ll be making them.

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Even in the midst of a tough investing environment, Silicon Valley legend and serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen and his longtime investing partner, Ben Horowitz, have completed the raising of his new venture fund, according to the numerous sources close to the situation, and it is oversubscribed.

Sources said the fund–which was nicknamed “Project A,” but is actually called Andreessen Horowitz–will be $300 million. It is $50 million over the $250 million he and Horowitz had planned.

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Adding the final leg of its new strategy to reinvigorate AOL, the Time Warner online unit said it was buying two small local start-ups, Patch Media and Going.

Each acquisition–which focus on hyperlocal community news (Patch) and events (Going)–is small, about $10 million.

Ironically, local has previously been a big arena for AOL, which launched its Digital City unit with great fanfare more than a decade ago. AOL still runs Digital City, as well as its CityGuide listing offering.

But, in a move that will surely be scrutinized, Patch is a company whose principal investor has been AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong. AOL declined to say how much he had invested in the company, but sources said it was less than $5 million.

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After officially announcing that AOL was going to be spun off yesterday, Tim Armstrong, the CEO of the Time Warner online unit, held an all-hands meeting for employees today.

BoomTown reported the details of the new structure of AOL yesterday, which the former Google advertising exec discussed at the gathering.

Here is a quick synopsis of the meeting, which included a focus on content, advertising and making AOL’s acquisitions work better via a new ventures unit.

Also, a dash of Googleyness.

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Yahoo’s SVP of Northern American Audience, Jeff Dossett, is leaving the company.

Reasons for the departure are personal, said sources, who said that Dossett is most likely to do a start-up.

Dossett did not return emails asking for comment, but Yahoo confirmed his resignation to BoomTown.

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While there were reports that the Time Warner board was meeting today to approve the spin-off of its AOL online unit, it actually gave the move an “enthusiastic endorsement” last night, according to sources.

Time Warner just put out the press release about the move that would make AOL an “independent, publicly traded company.”

But, several sources with knowledge of the situation said AOL CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong is set to make massive changes to the structure of AOL, sweeping aside its current set-up almost completely.

That includes keeping the access business, which many thought would be sold off and putting many of the companies it has recently acquired–including its pricey Bebo social networking site–in a separate ventures unit, which will try to attract outside investment.

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We launch the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif., today, after a long weekend of preparations and way too many meetings, as you can see in the video below.

(Including packing the mountain of swag bags for attendees, upon which one of my kids sits in this photo.)

The conference kicks off with an evening interview tonight with Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

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Last week, BoomTown paid an economically-minded visit to the Redwood City, Calif., offices of BillShrink, a Silicon Valley start-up aimed at helping consumers find cheaper prices on gas, cellphones and plans and credit cards via a Web-based comparison and alert system.

Launched about a year ago and armed with about $9 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures, it has aims of moving into a range of other money-saving arenas too.

But today, it got a major boost in its existing business by inking a deal to be part of a huge national advertising campaign by T-Mobile aimed at boosting price awareness among consumers, an apt message for these econalyptic times.

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One of the first Silicon Valley start-ups to go public in a long while–OpenTable–is expected to come to market this week, with venture firms hoping it will prove a tasty treat for Wall Street.

Whether the $42 million initial public offering of the online restaurant reservation service proves to be a bellwether or not is unclear since its business has–despite strong revenue gains over the last two years–run up operating losses for much of its lifespan of more than 10 years.

In any case, OpenTable is most definitely a creature of Silicon Valley. Its CEO, Jeff Jordan, is a former top eBay exec, and one of its VC backers is Benchmark Capital, among others.

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Well-known venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson will be at Google Wednesday to give a talk about “disruptive industries.”

The Googlers should be mighty interested, given that the object of their current annoyance and also desire, Twitter, is one of the hottest investments of late for Wilson’s Union Square Ventures.

Before Google execs try to hand over a big bag of money to Wilson to stop the microblogging madness, Wilson asked readers in a post to help him improve the talk.

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It’s another packed week for tech, especially in Silicon Valley, where the kibitzing never ends and the econalypse is almost completely ignored.

As if you did not have enough to do, what with all that pointless tweeting, here are some choices for those who want a little analog action, including watching me annoy Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, who is also trying to become California’s next Attorney General.

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BoomTown went down to Silicon Valley’s most exclusive country club–also known as Stanford University–where Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took to the stage for a talk at Memorial Auditorium for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar.

Ballmer–who went to and then dropped out of Stanford Business School for a job at the fledgling Microsoft–was in an ebullient mood and even joked about problems with the Windows Vista operating system.

Party on, Steve!

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Was it more than a month ago that the Google was rumored to be in “late-stage negotiations to acquire Twitter”?

Not so much late-stage, I guess. So, I guess it should come as no surprise that it was time to fob yet another rumor that yet another moneybags of a company–this time, Apple–is in “late-stage negotiations to buy Twitter.”

But despite very serious interest in the hot microblogging service by every company that can afford considering such a thing, including Apple, getting across that late-stage line would require major investors in the hot start-up to be very involved, and they are not as yet.

So, rather than be on the edge of your seat about all these endless, alleged late-stage high jinks, here is a five-step list to cut out and keep when the questionable rumors of “late-stage negotiations” with Microsoft, News Corp., Verizon, Cisco and more inevitably show up.

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Since leaving Google several years ago, where he last worked on wireless spectrum issues, it’s hard to say exactly what role the digital jumping bean who is Chris Sacca plays.

He’s not an entrepreneur, although he seems to know all of them in Web 2.0 world and advises 18 start-ups. He’s no longer a big-company exec, although he was one and knows a lot of them too. He’s not a venture capitalist, although he is involved in a private equity firm and invests in a lot of the start-ups he advises, like the red-hot Twitter, and knows those guys too.

In any case, here’s my chat with the Silicon Valley gadfly, whom BoomTown has dubbed the Start-Up Whisperer.

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Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

Well, we’re still going–making the same long-term bet that the digital revolution will keep rolling as we did at D1. Here’s our lineup for D7.

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