Hon­estly, I still have no idea what Tum­blr is, and I have numer­ous friends who live and die by theirs.

Per­haps the biggest shock here is that Yahoo had a bil­lion dol­lars lying around.  They’ve been in rough shape for years, if not most of the decade.  One of my old co-workers at Her­itage got his start at Yahoo prior to com­ing to D.C. and even in 2009, he was telling me hor­ror sto­ries of what was going on there.

I wish them the best with move, but frankly, given the way that Google has become so engrained into the cul­ture that it is now a verb, you have to start won­der­ing just how Yahoo is able to return to its for­mer glory.  Buy­ing up other pieces and com­pa­nies just doesn’t seem like an intel­li­gent long-term strat­egy in my opinion.

Yahoo is buy­ing online blog­ging forum Tum­blr for $1.1 bil­lion as CEO Marissa Mayer tries to reju­ve­nate an Inter­net icon that had fallen behind the times.

The deal announced Mon­day rep­re­sents Mayer’s bold­est move yet since the Wausau native left Google 10 months ago to lead Yahoo’s lat­est come­back attempt. It marks Yahoo’s most expen­sive acqui­si­tion since the Sun­ny­vale, Calif., com­pany bought online search engine Over­ture a decade ago for $1.3 bil­lion in cash and stock.

Yahoo is pay­ing all cash for Tum­blr, dip­ping into some of its remain­ing stash from a $7.6 bil­lion wind­fall reaped last year from sell­ing about half of its stake in Chi­nese Inter­net com­pany Alibaba Hold­ings Group. Tak­ing over Tum­blr will devour about one-fifth of the $5.4 bil­lion in cash that Yahoo had in its accounts at the end of March.

Yahoo also says that “per the agree­ment and our promise not to screw it up, Tum­blr will be inde­pen­dently oper­ated as a sep­a­rate busi­ness” with David Karp stay­ing on as CEO.

Tum­blr, a ser­vice started six years by Karp, a high school dropout, now fig­ures to play a piv­otal role in Mayer’s attempt to reshape Yahoo. To take on the chal­lenge, Mayer ended a highly suc­cess­ful 13-year career at Google, which she helped sur­pass Yahoo as the Internet’s most influ­en­tial com­pany. Since com­ing to Yahoo, Mayer has con­cen­trated on improv­ing employee morale, redesign­ing ser­vices and bring­ing in more engi­neer­ing tal­ent through a series of small acqui­si­tions that have col­lec­tively cost less than $50 million.

Said to be first on Mayer’s agenda with the new acqui­si­tion — get­ting ads on people’s Tum­blr blogs to increase rev­enue flow.

Cur­rently, Tum­blr has never allowed adver­tis­ing.  It, like most online social start-ups, has let their users do what they want with ads.  Most of what has kept Tum­blr going in recent years has been start up fund­ing.  It explains why they only have 175 employ­ees at the moment.

Today’s “EASTER” doo­dle from Google.

No non­sec­u­lar bun­nies.  No non­sec­u­lar eggs.  No images of Spring.

But hey, let’s honor a dead, wannabe Communist!

For­get about Easter folks.  Google wants you to wish Cesar Chavez a Happy Birthday.

Cel­e­brate by mov­ing on from a rigged search algo­rithm that frankly isn’t as great as it used to be.  [Man I hate SEO manipulation…]

By the way, Chavez was him­self Catholic, and prob­a­bly would be hor­ri­fied that a cel­e­bra­tion of his birth­day would take prece­dence over Easter — the num­ber one day on the Roman Catholic (and Chris­t­ian) Calendar.

No seri­ously, if you ever watch episodes of the “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” spin-off — the last series to actu­ally take place in the neigh­bor­ing star sys­tems near Earth — you will actu­ally see var­i­ous secu­rity mea­sures and pay­ments dealt with by thumbprint.

A team of enter­pris­ing young tech­nol­o­gists want to give this to us now.

As a mech­a­nism for pay­ment, the credit card remains just as hardy as ever. It has so far defied the threat of mobile phones, and less plau­si­bly, QR codes, among many other forms of payment.

One YC-backed startup is bet­ting that fin­ger­prints and other forms of bio­met­ric iden­ti­fi­ca­tion may be the pay­ment method of the future though. Called Pay­Tango, they’re part­ner­ing with local uni­ver­si­ties to offer a quick and easy way for stu­dents to use their fin­ger­prints to pay instead of credit cards.

The four-person team is basi­cally almost fresh out of Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity. The co-founders, Brian Groudan, Kelly Lau-Kee, Umang Patel and Chris­t­ian Reyes, grad­u­at­ing later this sum­mer and have expe­ri­ence in human-computer inter­ac­tion and infor­ma­tion systems.

They built an ini­tial pro­to­type with a fin­ger­print scan­ner and credit card reader with off-the-shelf parts for between $1,500 and $1,700. They’re bring­ing the costs down after iter­at­ing on it for 10 weeks and they have a work­ing ver­sion of it at three loca­tions on the Carnegie Mel­lon campus.

“The very ear­li­est prod­uct was just basic,” said CEO Umang Patel. “But it was a great prod­uct to get out there and users responded to it very early on.”

The on-boarding process for users is really easy. They touch the fin­ger­pad with their index and mid­dle fin­gers and if they’re not in the sys­tem already, Pay­Tango auto­mat­i­cally detects that. It will ask them to swipe a card to asso­ciate with their fin­ger­prints and then enter in their cell phone num­ber. That sign-up process made it fast enough for 100 stu­dents to sign-up within four hours on campus.

“YC-Backed” is short for Y-Combinator, an angel invest­ment firm which helps finance about 40 to 50 com­pa­nies a year.  The teams they help must then move to Sil­i­con Val­ley for three months and fin­ish their ideas where it gets pitched to fur­ther investors.  Some of there past suc­cess sto­ries have been Red­dit and Dis­cus, which is the com­ment­ing sys­tem this blog uses.

One step closer to a cure.  Here’s hop­ing they have the abil­ity to repli­cate it not just for more chil­dren, but even­tu­ally who have the disease.

A Mis­sis­sippi baby born with the AIDS virus appears to have been cured after being treated with an aggres­sive reg­i­men of drugs just after her birth 2½ years ago, an unusual case that could trig­ger changes in care for hun­dreds of thou­sands of babies born glob­ally each year with HIV.

The find­ings, reported Sun­day by researchers, mark only the sec­ond doc­u­mented case of a patient being cured of infec­tion with the human immune-deficiency virus. The first, an adult man known as the Berlin patient, was cured as a result of a 2007 bone-marrow transplant.

The new case was dis­cov­ered after the baby girl’s mother stopped treat­ment on her, and doc­tors real­ized that the virus was unde­tectable even with­out drugs, which HIV patients nor­mally must take for the rest of their lives.

Researchers cau­tioned that the report on the baby girl involves just one patient, and the find­ings appear to have lit­tle imme­di­ate rel­e­vance to peo­ple who con­tract HIV as adults or ado­les­cents and are almost always diag­nosed and treated long after their ini­tial infec­tion. But if fur­ther study con­firms that very early treat­ment can cure HIV-infected new­borns, it could spur wide­spread use of such an aggres­sive reg­i­men in babies born with HIV, nearly all of them in low– and middle-income countries.

World Health Orga­ni­za­tion guide­lines now call for treat­ing infants born to an HIV-infected mother with a mod­est daily dose of anti­retro­vi­ral treat­ment for four to six weeks—or until test­ing deter­mines the baby’s own HIV sta­tus. If the baby tests pos­i­tive, a more aggres­sive treat­ment is begun.

But WHO doesn’t address use of a more intense med­ica­tion approach right after birth, in part because few stud­ies have exam­ined the issue. In addi­tion, it is dif­fi­cult to deter­mine with cer­tainty that early whether a baby is HIV-positive, and overtreat­ment would risk wast­ing scarce med­ica­tions that offer a bet­ter chance of help­ing other patients.

Again, we’ll have to see if this can be repli­cated to see if it is a for­mi­da­ble treat­ment for infants and tod­dlers with HIV.  What appears to be the case here was that they reversed the tra­di­tional pro­to­cols used — mod­est treat­ment at birth — and instead let the child’s super-charged immu­nity in the days and weeks after birth to help elim­i­nate the disease.

Not every treat­ment is going to work, and not every patient is going to respond to it.  But this one more option that hope­fully will end a real med­ical men­ace that human­ity is deal­ing with.  Right now, HIV is “med­ically man­age­able” with a cock­tail of medication.

One hopes that dis­cov­er­ies like this lead to actual cures in the next decade or so.

Guess all the smart tech peo­ple who were on-board dur­ing the cam­paign aren’t on the clock anymore.

(heh)

At the begin­ning of the year, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s new 501©4 polit­i­cal non­profit, Orga­niz­ing For Action, was launched with all the usual bells and whis­tles. But the tech wiz­ards at OFA for­got one impor­tant rule in today’s Inter­net world: Reg­is­ter all the iter­a­tions of your web­site address before some­one else does.

Now Obama’s team is fil­ing com­plaints against the folks smart enough to get the addresses before he did.

As Obama’s OFA made its debut, no one in his pur­port­edly Internet-savvy cam­paign had obtained the cor­re­spond­ing .com, .net, .org or .us sites, nor did OFA reg­is­ter other names that are close to its offi­cial one, as is the sen­si­ble prac­tice. In the case of the .net address, a fel­low named Derek Bovard had already reg­is­tered the .net address by the time Obama’s team took notice.

Bovard has routed his new site to the home­page of the National Rifle Association.

So, when­ever any­one goes to www.organizingforaction.net they end up see­ing the home­page of the NRA.

Not sur­pris­ingly, OFA is pissed and has filed a com­plaint to the Inter­net Cor­po­ra­tion for Names and Num­bers (ICANN) which rules, runs and con­trols all URLs.

Bovard says he believes he has a solid claim to the domain and has doc­u­men­ta­tion from the U.S. Patent Office to back him up.  Chances are, if he’s forced to give it up, he may well be allowed to be com­pen­sated for it.

Time will tell what hap­pens next, but the idea that as sophis­ti­cated an Inter­net oper­a­tion as OFA got pwned like this is too hilar­i­ous to ignore.

UPDATE — Don’t feel too sorry for OFA.  It was reported this week­end that those who raise $500,000 get a pri­vate brief­ing with Pres­i­dent Obama along with other high-level mem­bers of the admin­is­tra­tion in an arrange­ment which makes the sell­ing of the Lin­coln Bed­room under Clin­ton look like child’s play.

The White House had a fun press brief­ing today try­ing to avoid explain­ing what they were doing.

This isn’t a tele­vi­sion as it is more of a movie the­ater in the side of your house.  Your own “drive-thru movie” if it were.

If that 55-inch TV set you bought last year sud­denly doesn’t mea­sure up to your game-day fan­tasies, con­sider this Super Bowl-size alter­na­tive: A 152-inch one, yours for a cool half-million. That’s the price tag on Panasonic’s model TH-152UX1, billed as the “world’s largest, 4K2K plasma dis­play” (we’ll get to that 4K2K part in a minute). The set is indeed a mas­sive one — equiv­a­lent to nine 50-inch screens and weigh­ing in at a whop­ping 1,272 pounds. (For one instal­la­tion at a restau­rant, a fork­lift was used to put the TV in place.) But Pana­sonic says it’s not just about size: It’s also about pic­ture qual­ity — the 4K2K refers to the res­o­lu­tion — mean­ing 4,096 by 2,160 pix­els. In other words, it can deliver four times the res­o­lu­tion of a stan­dard high-definition set, says Rick Albert, a Pana­sonic vice pres­i­dent. Albert adds that the res­o­lu­tion is key for com­mer­cial pur­poses, such as using the set to dis­play graph­ics or charts at a large gath­er­ing — indeed, the set’s tar­get mar­ket is the busi­ness crowd, not the high-end homeowner.

But Pana­sonic will sell to indi­vid­u­als as well — in fact, the set, which was first intro­duced in 2009, got a lot of buzz when Har­rods, the famed British luxury-goods retailer, start­ing offer­ing it. Pana­sonic won’t give sales fig­ures — and by the way that $500,000 price doesn’t include instal­la­tion — but the com­pany reveals that the sets are going every­where from bars and restau­rants to the 39th floor of an office build­ing. Put another way, there’s big busi­ness in really, really big TVs. “Sales of the 152 have exceeded our expec­ta­tions,” says Albert.

Most eye health experts say you really don’t need any­thing big­ger than 40″ to 80″ TV if you’re view­ing it from your couch five to ten feet away.

How the hell one could even jus­tify hav­ing such a mon­stros­ity in their home — or should I say tak­ing up a wall in your home — is a leap of faith.  Just to give an idea of how big 152-inches is, that’s 12 and two-thirds feet diagonally.

If there is such a thing as “Too much TV,” I do believe this is it.

This could be inter­est­ing to watch and see how it works out.  I’m a fan of pod­casts.  They’re mobile, work great as a sub­sti­tute to mod­ern radio when I’m on long dri­ves, and another means of com­mu­ni­cat­ing a message.

Wouldn’t be shocked to see other cities and other police depart­ments copy this idea in the years ahead — if they aren’t doing it already.

For every She­boy­gan res­i­dent who has won­dered how the win­ter park­ing rules apply to his neigh­bor­hood or how to file a com­plaint, the She­boy­gan Police Depart­ment has some­thing new to offer: podcasts.

The brain­child of Offi­cer Matt Friedl, “SPD Roll Call” will be 10– to-20-minute long audio dis­cus­sions of top­ics that affect the peo­ple of She­boy­gan, includ­ing issues like scams hit­ting the area, and neigh­bor­hood policing.

Pod­casts are audio record­ings avail­able online to be lis­tened to or down­loaded to an MP3 player.

Unveiled dur­ing a press con­fer­ence Tues­day after­noon, the pod­casts — dis­cus­sions among two or three offi­cers — will be posted on the She­boy­gan Police Depart­ment web­site, www.sheboyganpolice.com, and on YouTube.

Even­tu­ally there will be an RSS feed as well, Friedl said. [This means it will be iTunes-compatible in the months ahead, if you know how to set it up.]

Friedl said he that although video pro­duc­tions might be slicker, pod­casts are an easy way for peo­ple to get infor­ma­tion while they’re doing some­thing else.

“I think pod­casts are still rel­e­vant,” he said. “I lis­ten to pod­casts when I’m dri­ving around patrol. I would love for every­one to come in my neigh­bor­hood that I’m assigned to and meet me in per­son, but I under­stand the dif­fi­culty in doing that. This is a lit­tle more infor­ma­tion I can get out and if helps two or three, I’m happy with that.”

Dur­ing his state­ment Tues­day, Chief Christo­pher Doma­gal­ski said the depart­ment is always look­ing for new ways to com­mu­ni­cate with peo­ple, and Friedl’s idea hasn’t been tried before.

“We’re still work­ing to find ways to improve meth­ods to share infor­ma­tion,” Doma­gal­ski said.

Newer pod­casts will roll out every third Mon­day of the month in the future.  So far, the depart­ment has released two pod­casts; one explain­ing the project, the other on neigh­bor­hood policing.

The project is being over­seen by Sgt. Kurt Zem­pel, who once upon a time, ran for state Assembly.

For the record, this didn’t work in “Clue.”

CBS has announced that view­ers will have a chance to choose the end­ing of an upcom­ing episode of Hawaii Five-0 — a move the net­work says is first of its kind.

Dur­ing the Jan. 14 broad­cast, fans will be given a chance to vote for the per­son they want to be named the killer.

Per the sto­ry­line, the team is inves­ti­gat­ing the death of an O’ahu State Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor, and the prime sus­pects are his boss, teach­ing assis­tant and a stu­dent who was caught cheat­ing. View­ers will then vote on CBS.com and Twit­ter (using the hash­tags #the­Boss, #theTA or #theS­tu­dent), and the end­ing that gets the most votes will be aired. (Sep­a­rate vot­ing will take place for eastern/central and pacific time zones, and all three dif­fer­ent end­ings will all be avail­able on CBS.com.)

(See here for “Clue” ref­er­ence.)