(Photo: Imgur)

Looks like the tech industry is still poaching from Wall Street, and the WSJ is ON IT! [Wall Street Journal]

Facebook's first quarter results are in, and it looks like the company's mobile ad revenue is finally increasing. [New York Times]

The father-son duo of NYC-based VC firm Lerer Ventures is launching a website in conjunction with Mayors Against Illegal Guns called StoptheNRA.com. [TechCrunch]

Now that the neckbeard lobby is growing in influence, can Hollywood A-listers master the Reddit AMA without having another Rampart situation on their hands? [LA Times]

Now New York Senator Chuck Schumer is going after patent trolls. Perhaps he's jealous of all Mayor Bloomberg's startup cred? [TechCrunch]

"Hey guys, we can make TV too!" - AOL [Adweek]

(Photo: KPCB)

Mystery hacker Guccifer has been terrorizing America's political elite by hacking into their email accounts and proving that even former presidents aren't really that great at their newfound painting hobby. Now, The Smoking Gun reports that Guccifer has begun targeting Silicon Valley. Ugh, guess that means tech really is cool now.

The Smoking Gun reports that venture capitalist and Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr is the latest victim of Guccifer's exploits. The hacker was able to get into Mr. Doerr's AOL account (how are you a VC with an AOL account?) and send emails to The Smoking Gun from it. Guccifer also provided TSG with a screenshot of the inbox's contact list to further prove his successful hack.

“do you like my new face?” Guccifer wrote in an email to TSG. “i wear glasses right now an I have 2 zillion + in my bank accounts:))”

Aside from wearing glasses and being filthy rich, Mr. Doerr made headlines last year when he was named in a gender discrimination suit filed by Kleiner Perkins partner Ellen Pao. He vigorously denied the claims made in the suit.

Even Guccifer probably can't explain why a Google boardmember has an AOL account.

(h/t Daily Dot)

Just not the best fit, probably.

“What’s just depressing to me is how—and it’s not just for us, let me generalize it—the moment a company goes public the conversation shifts from how they’re trying to change the world and the product they’re building to how they’re making money.” Andrew Mason probably wasn't ready to be the CEO of a publicly traded company. [Fast Company]

Meanwhile, at TED: Vint Cerf is dreaming of a day when we can use the Internet to communicate with aliens. Dude must make it a point to believe six impossible things before breakfast. [Gizmodo]

Former Gilt CEO Susan Lyne is now Brand Group CEO at AOL. Resident enfant terrible Alexia Tsotsis published the memo and added, "As far as we can tell, Arianna, with her Hellenic iron fist, has retained her dominion over the HuffPost stronghold, and we’ll continue to push the boundaries of what we can do until we get fired." Noted! [TechCrunch]

In other shuffles, Federated Media founder John Battelle is once more CEO of the blog network that he founded, taking over for Deanna Brown, who is leaving for an unspecified new project. [Forbes]

Apple Fellow Guy Kawasaki is now advising Motorola. [Android Authority]

(Photo: Chillsauce)

When you hear of someone who has an AOL email address, what's the first thought that comes to mind? A dad? Someone who still uses dialup? A TechCrunch employee? Now you can add "strip club aficionado" to your stereotypes of AOL email users, at least according to a new study by the British event planning group Chillisauce.

The company analyzed the data of almost 100,000 customers and discovered that those with AOL email addresses were most likely to plan a visit to a strip club. Gmail and Hotmail users were slightly classier, opting for "activities such as pub crawls, eating out and nightclub entry."

Among the study's other findings: iPhone owners have the most friends, booking trips with an average group size of 15 or more, while Nexus users are foreveralones. According to the release, "Google Nexus owners, on the other hand, are less popular with the smallest group size of five or less." As a Nexus owner: thanks.

“There could be plenty of men with AOL email addresses who are now sweating about what their wives and girlfriends think they get up to,” Chillisauce's director said.

If this is the reason you stop using AOL email, we don't even know what to say to you.

Katie Couric in Warby Parker. (Photo: Facebook.com)

Rose-Colored Glasses Warby Parker just released its annual report for 2012, and it's a pretty fun slideshow to click through. The glasses empire now has 113 full-time employes and 42 part-time employees. Of those bespectacled folks, 108 have company-sponsored gym memberships. In other Warby Parker health news, 2,507 pounds of salad were eaten in the office this year. Although there are not too many exact sales figures in the package (besides the fact that 296 monocles were sold this year) a diagram on the last page shows that sales from the first quarter of the year to the last one have nearly tripled. Warby Parker says it gave out 250,000 pairs of glasses this year, some of which went to victims of Hurricane Sandy.

G Train Still Lost Forever If you take the Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 trains, you already know what time your train is coming based on the large signs that tell you. In December, the MTA released an iOS app to tell you the subway times. But now the MTA is providing a web app, as well as a native iPhone app, so that you can know what time your train is coming before you get to the station. The web app is located at onthego.mta.info and has real-time updating data for all of your arrival times. Most importantly, the MTA has decided to release the data behind the app to developers. Let's hope someone whips up something cooler than this thing.

Fund This Office Kickstarter will soon be moving to into its new Greenpoint offices in the former home of the Eberhard Faber Pencil Co. Renovations to the space began in the summer, and renderings of the new office were released yesterday and then swiftly taken down. The gorgeous plans show that the former factory will contain a lot of rooms, including a theater, an art gallery, a lounge, a library, a green roof and a cafeteria. Oh yeah, and offices too--have to do work at some point.

Thinkers Posthumously Fill in the Rap Deets Rap Genius is speeding right along on its quest to become the Talmud of the Internet. John Wesley, back from the grave, now has an account to comment on the teachings of the bible. And none other than Samuel Johnson is reading between the lines on some of Shakespeare's juiciest bits. Now if we could only get Heidegger to fill us in on some 2 Chainz lyrics, we'd be all set.

Whistle While You Cowork An article published yesterday on FastCompany has some interesting stats on coworking. The piece says that "50% of all coworkers access their work space around the clock" and that "71% report a boost in creativity since joining a coworking space." Secret Clubhouse, the coworking space originally established by The Barbarian Group cofounder Rick Webb, gets highlighted in the article as well. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the space served as a functional workplace for employees from all over the city.

LinkedIn for the Klout Enthusiast A new jobs site launched today that takes your personal connections into account when matching you up with jobs. CareerSonar is a site that matches the employment history of your friends with every job available online and shows you which jobs you could be connected to. In the "it's who you know" world, this might make the most sense for looking for a job online.

Girl Put Your Records On(line) Accessing your medical records online is an impossibility right now, but the NYC-based New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) and Health 2.0 are trying to fix that. Yesterday, the two organizations launched the Patient Portal for New Yorkers Design Challenge. They are looking for designers and developers to create a prototype for a website for patients to access their medical records online. This seems like something important!

Jerseylicious Accelerator Wants You TechLaunch, New Jersey’s premier Technology Accelerator, is now accepting applications for its 2013 class. The program is slated to begin in May and will culminate in mid-September with a Demo Day at Montclair State University. The teams that make it past the selection process will join the class and will each receive up to $25,000 of seed capital.

Be an Average Boyfriend The Netflix for fancy flowers, H.Bloom, has recently announced the launch of a special Valentine's Day service its calling "H.Bloom Hero." It allows men to become "heroes" by scheduling flowers to be delivered to their loved ones on Valentine's Day. Not sure if that makes a guy a hero or just a subpar boyfriend, but we're all just taking what we can get at this point, right?

Better Gets Better Betterment, the personal investing startup that helps users manage stocks-and-bonds portfolios from an online dashboard, hit a milestone last week, topping $100 million in assets under management. That was cause to celebrate and also for a minor redesign. "We have a dashboard screen on the wall that shows our assets under management and how they grow each day,” said CEO Jon Stein in an email. “We've finally had to adjust the font because the number wouldn't fit anymore."

Hipster Becomes the Man AOL is switching things up a bit and poaching one of its mobile employees for its venture fun. Doug Ludlow, the former CEO of the AOL-acquired photosharing startup Hipster, is leaving AOL's mobile side to become the first innovation partner at AOL Ventures. The title is extremely unclear, but it's understood that Ludlow will be spending a bit more time back in New York and getting out of AOL Ventures' Palo Alto headquarters.

Because Tweetdeck Popups Suck Rapportive, the add-on that replaces Gmail's ads with information about your contacts, has just launched an early version of Twitter integration to its service. The update lets you follow, reply and retweet your contacts from within Gmail.  You can request early access to the feature here.

QLabs (Photo: Foursquare)

Good news, Silicon Alley denizens. After much demand from fellow gossip-mongers, Betabeat has decided to resurrect your favorite recurring Friday feature. Welcome back to Rumor Roundup! Overheard a juicy tidbit about impending departures or imminent acquisitions? Dying to dish about startup blunders or frothy financing? Holler at your girls: tips@betabeat.com

THE SUN SOMETIMES SETS ON THE AOL EMPIRE Multiple sources have told Betabeat that AOL Ventures plans on shutting down QLabs--the press-shy experimental think tank in Soho located at 670 Broadway. "The time frame must be darn near immediate," one source told Betabeat, alluding to some urgency around winding down existing projects. "It's dead," said a source with indirect knowledge of the decision. "Their funding ran out," the second source added, speculating that the initiative had a set funding size, but "nothing yielded."

During a rare visit to QLabs in May, Betabeat discovered that the 4th floor space functioned as sort of the yin to AOL Ventures' investment yang--with both organizations trying to keep their corporate parent nimble.

QLabs hired a number of hackers who collectively decided on ideas to pursue. After some market research, the team, which operates non-hierarchically, churns out a prototype in six to eight weeks. If the minimum viable product fails to take off, it gets scrapped. The unspoken expectation, QLabs director Chris Danzig told Betabeat in May, was that it would produce a hit within two years, or roughly five months from now. “It’s very possible it could be a successful business with a few tweaks,” Mr. Danzig said back then. “But I’d much rather throw away something that has potential than burn away time on something that’s not working.”

In an email, Mr. Danzig said, "As a general policy we don't discuss the lab with the press (only the lab products)."

QLabs managed to get traction on at least two products, the incubator told us in May: Framey, which lets users post video comments on websites, and Brom.ly, an events recommendation service that pivoted into an events recommendation tool for the Huffington Post.

The recently launched HuffPost Labs, which operates like a startup for online news experiments within the Huffington Post, also works out of QLabs.  (Codecademy and Turntable.fm were working out of the spacious environs this spring.) But HuffPost Labs director Connor White Sullivan told us that the two incubator-like organizations are distinct. "We get our budget from HuffPost," he said of his budding four-person team. "All I can tell you is they're excellent engineers that built good products."

"As we refine our strategy, we have become more focused on our innovation agenda," an AOL spokesperson told Betabeat. "This was one component of a broader portfolio in AOL Ventures.”

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS A cadre of Silicon Alley citizens–including Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste and CNET columnist Ben Parr–headed to Vegas two weeks ago for some end-of-summer partying and ended up having a meet cute with Ron Jeremy. Turns out that the notorious porn star likes hanging with the tech set. He showed up to the same mid-day party Mr. Baptiste and Mr. Parr were attending. "Ron Jeremy just came to our private party," one source told Betabeat. "He told us about his rap song with Lil' Wayne who the Hipset guys are close with.” Oh Mr. Carter, say it ain't so?

WWJD? Apparently some trolls have signed Instapaper founder and bombastic blogger Marco Arment up for an email newsletter he certainly didn't authorize. "Thanks to whichever of the trolls signed me up for all of these Jesus email newsletters yesterday," Mr. Arment tweeted. "Not a good week for liking other people." Following a very public spat, perhaps it was someone at The Verge?

SECRETS OF THE SOUL Whoever said ladyblogs are just for ladies clearly hasn't met NYU journalism professor Clay Shirky. Professor Shirky copped to enjoying advice columns on the women-focused site The Hairpin at a reading at HousingWorks Books. “My favorite bit of anonymity on the web is this thing that Edith Zimmerman runs on the Hairpin, called 'Imperfect Advice from Strangers,'" he said. "Which is the best name for an advice column, ever.”

News Patch, we hardly knew you.

So much for "hyperlocal" news as the Next Big Thing. Ad Age Digital reports AOL is preparing to make big changes to Patch. Instead of replacing the vanishing hometown newspaper, AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong says Patch.com is now on course to take on classified ads giant Craigslist:

But perhaps the most interesting news was AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's comments about upcoming changes to its hyper-local news network Patch. Ad Age has heard in recent months that the much-maligned news network was being rebuilt, with its original code base totally scratched. On today's earnings call, Mr. Armstrong alluded to this, saying that while the first generation of Patch relied on journalists creating news about a town, the next iteration will also push more into listings and commerce.

Mr. Armstrong also told Ad Age that the new iteration of Patch coming later in 2012 will unlock "the vitality" of towns "for a much deeper, richer engagement level."

Police blotter listicles about guys shoplifting cases of Axe from the CVS are arguably a pretty rich level of community engagement but it's hard to argue with the success of Craigslist and the Village Voice Media-owned Backpage. But as AOL may find once all the old code is changed and Patch subdomains re-purposed, there will also be greater potential for controversy.

Mr. Siegler. (Photo: LinkedIn)

The blogosphere is a brave new news world, but it's generally assumed that blogs that report the news adhere to basic journalistic standards—like not deliberately inserting bits of misinformation into their virtual pages. Right?

Former TechCrunch blogger MG Siegler took a dig at bloggers who rewrite others' reporting. "I used to love to plant one really weird bit of random information (sometimes even false) into stories to catch the rewrites," he tweeted earlier today. There's that TechCrunch swagger.

@marcoarment I used to love to plant one really weird bit of random information (sometimes even false) into stories to catch the rewrites.

— MG Siegler (@parislemon) July 5, 2012

The tweet was in response to developer Marco Arment's comment on the coverage resulting from his blog post about a bug in Apple's App Store. The story was first reported by The Verge, then re-reported by Mashable, and merely rewritten by Gizmodo and Betabeat. While rewrites are endemic in the blogosphere, deliberately misleading or confusing readers in order to play gotcha with your fellow news writers seems dicey. It's the same reason most major media outlets hate April Fool's Day—if you want your readers to trust you, it's risky to write anything untrue unless it's an obvious joke.

Mr. Siegler was on vacation in Paris and did not immediately respond to an email asking for comment. TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis did not immediately respond to an email, nor did former TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld. "I think he's mentioned doing it before. Innocuous stuff that would catch out anyone who claimed they had their own source. Frankly that harks back to the days when TC was a comparative ethical utopia against what it is today," the ever-available TechCrunch alum Paul Carr wrote in an email. "I think it was stuff like 'I'm hearing it'll have a six inch screen' as opposed to seven. Yeah, I wouldn't do it but, again, on the grand scheme of things..."

UPDATE: Ms. Tsotsis responded to Betabeat by email: "So I don't know which specific posts MG is referring to here, but I'm sure the 'random' pieces of information are more like typos or skews on a range of numbers (like a valuation being between $20m-$30m as opposed to $25m) versus outright, blatant intellectual dishonesty. MG cares too much about being right to pull stuff like that."

Mr. Siegler also responded in a post on his own blog.

LaToya Drake, an AOL communciations rep, declined to comment. "We don't comment on former employees, in particular, what they're tweeting," she said. But would it be against AOL's policy to include "random information" and, or "misinformation" in posts on TechCrunch? "We can't comment," she said, and pointed to AOL's terms of service, which includes this disclaimer: "For general information, discussion, and entertainment purposes only and we make no representations or guarantees about the truth, accuracy, or quality of any content."

For the record, inserting "random information (sometimes even false)" into posts is verboten at Betabeat. We surveyed a few tech blogs blogs. "Hell yes it would be against our policy," said Abraham Hyatt, managing editor at ReadWriteWeb. "We definitely don't publish false information in our posts! As to posting things just to catch out other blogs, that's not something ReadWriteWeb focuses on," echoed founder and editor-in-chief Richard MacManus. When asked if this was kosher at The Next Web, U.S. editor Brad McCarty responded "no." "Absolutely not," said Danny Schreiber, managing editor of Silicon Prairie News. When asked if publishing "random information (sometimes false)" would go against GigaOm's policy, executive editor Ernie Sander told Betabeat, "Yes, it would go against our policy -- and the person who did it would probably be fired." Editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky concurred that "Yes it would," be against The Verge's policy as well.

"Yes, that would absolutely be against our policy," said Dylan Tweney, executive editor of VentureBeat, "Our job is to 'seek truth and report it,' to quote the SPJ [Society of Professional Journalists] (which we do)."

"I can’t fathom what 'random information' is. The idea of putting false information in a post is also something I can’t fathom," New York Times technology editor Damon Darlin wrote in an email. "Planting false info in stories to catch non-linkers? Both unethical and pathetically petty," said Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.

The asking price is said to be between $70 and $100 million--a clear indication to Ms. Lacy (a former TechCrunch editor) that "AOL is hoping to make something off the drama of the past couple of years:

$70 million would net the struggling Internet company about $10 million profit on what AOL originally paid for both TechCrunch and Engadget’s original parent Weblogs Inc. According to one source, AOL management has been seriously considering the move since early this year. The news also sheds light on why Arianna Huffington was so relaxed about relinquishing responsibility for the division last month, according to reports."

All that said, Ms. Lacy acknowledges that her sources know of no "serious bidders" at the moment. Michael Arrington certainly isn't interested. "I don’t know anything," he told PandoDaily, "No one tells me anything. I am not in the least bit interested [in buying back TechCrunch]. I was Team Pando all the way until Sarah Lacy fired me. That does not change my position on TechCrunch."

What will happen next? Will Vox Media, owner of The Verge, pony up such a substantial sum? Has the seemingly neverending TechCrunch drama poisoned the well for potential buyers in spite of its huge name recognition? Will J.R. emerge from his coma? Why was Bobby also The Man From Atlantis?

We'll surely have these answers and more very soon. Or not.

Ms. Huffington (flickr.com/worldeconomicforum)

The post-lunch session of the Guardian Activate Summit kicked off with an interview between Guardian U.S. editor in chief Janine Gibson and a woman whom Ms. Gibson called "the Madonna of our industry:" why Arianna Huffington, of course. Ms. Huffington, who donned a smart navy blue blazer and a perfectly coifed blond bob, introduced herself with some opening remarks about what she called the "fetishization of social."

"The fetishization of social is celebrating something going 'trending' or going 'viral' without asking what it is that's going trending or viral," said Ms. Huffington. "We all need to do a better job of asking those questions, otherwise we’re going to find ourselves in the same dangerous area that mainstream media have found themselves in, where everything is breaking news. Donald Trump endorsing Mitt Romney, Balloon Boy, all these things."

We found this comment especially pointed coming from Ms. Huffington, as The Huffington Post just tweeted, "Miley Cyrus saves a dog left outside of Walmart," a piece that has all the classic elements of a viral story (major celebrity + cute animal + feel-good component) without any of the explanation. We really do need to be asking why Miley Cyrus' dog saving abilities are going viral, wouldn't you agree?

After her lengthy self-introduction, Ms. Huffington fielded a few questions from Ms. Gibson. How did you feel when Obama made the joke about the Huffington Post winning the Pulitzer at the White House Correspondents Dinner, she asked?

"Any time the President of the United States jokes about your Pulitzer it’s kind of a good joke for me," quipped Ms. Huffington.

As always, there were the usual questions about whether The Huffington Post "steals" articles by aggregating them.

"The HuffPost is two things," replied Ms. Huffington. "It’s a journalistic enterprise--it employs 500 full-time journalists--and it is a platform. Even if I had a trillion dollar budget, I would always make sure Huffpost is a platform. We live in a link economy, and the joy of a link economy is that we can promise readers the best of the web, whether we produce it or link."

"Ubiquity is the new promiscuity," she added. "When people say they want to launch a site to show their stuff, that train has left the station long ago. Now it’s about, 'Can you put your stuff everywhere?'"

Ms. Huffington also said that maintaining a bootstrappy spirit is key to continued success. "I want us to keep that startup spirit even as we’re growing and scaling, because that’s really at the heart of staying ahead," she said.

Do you see any Lady Gagas coming to usurp your Madonna title, wondered Ms. Gibson?

"I think there can be room for Madonna and Lady Gaga," emphasized Ms. Huffington.

Quietly, almost as if she didn't want the audience to hear, she added, "It’s a very manly way of looking at things, like who has the biggest swinging dick."

Check out our coverage of the morning 2012 Guardian Activate Summit session with LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman here.