As AOL lays off a third of its work force as it prepares to go independent, it’s looking to drop its ICQ and MapQuest units, according to reports by Kara Swisher. But with the deluge of information hitting web users these days, location and presence are two of the most promising ways to parse the online world (GigaOM Pro sub. required). They’re also two of the most innovation-rich veins of the last year, with projectile growth of mobile location apps and the ongoing real-time status arms race. While AOL is busy revising itself to be about content and advertising, both of those areas of focus benefit greatly from context and relevance.

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Though there’s no lack of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, you can count one more. Maveron this week announced it is opening a San Francisco office, headed by partner Amy Errett, the former CEO of Olivia.com who joined Maveron as an entrepreneur in residence two years ago.

Errett (a fly-fishing enthusiast, as pictured) told us that Maveron differentiates itself because it will only fund consumer-focused businesses, and it spans the range of seed to late-stage investments. With portfolio companies such as kids’ browser KidZui, language education site Livemocha and online college enabler Altius Education, Errett said her two main areas of focus are “web-enabled consumer services — classically things consumers did offline — and online education.” Continue »

Employee shares of Facebook are selling for $21 on SecondMarket, valuing the social network’s common stock at $9.5 billion, Bloomberg is reporting today. That’s up 42 percent in the past four months, which SecondMarket takes to mean that an IPO is nigh, but could also just reflect Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s cash-flow positive. And $9.5 billion doesn’t include the preferred shares issued to investors. Continue »

With of an infrastructure of social location information just starting to coagulate, the monetization side is raring to go. Since real-time mobile advertising is inherently somewhat invasive (and by extension, somewhat creepy), these products end up less groundbreaking than they could be. (Which is OK by me.)

A new offering from a San Francisco-based company called 1020 Placecast — which is announcing today that it’s raised a $5 million Series B — will be trialed with three retailers over the holidays; it uses a double-opt-in relationship built directly between users and their favorite shops. Once users sign up to receive alerts on a phone that has persistent location information (BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android), they get pinged with marketing messages from that brand every time they enter a “geo-fence” targeted area, as small as a single city block. Continue »

Nextstop, a user-generated travel site, is releasing an API for its location-specific short-form recommendations. The self-funded company, founded by former Google product managers, only launched in June and has attracted low hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, however it has ambitious plans to be a global (read: not hubbed around a few cities like Yelp) and comprehensive resource of recommended places and activities. Continue »

With only less than a week left until our NewTeeVee Live conference, we’re raring to go. Some of the sessions I’m most excited about for next week’s conference are the startups and the stars, so I wanted to call them out for you. We are getting close to a sell-out crowd, so you’re highly encouraged to snag your ticket ASAP. Continue »

Vdopia, a profitable iPhone advertising platform, has raised $4 million in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which only launched in the U.S. in March, claims it’s seeing 4 percent click-through rates for its pre-roll videos before applications start — an impressive number that Vdopia says does not include accidental clicks, as so many ad stats do. Continue »