San Francisco -- Barely days after separating from corporate company Time Warner, AOL Inc. is negotiating to sell its ICQ instant-messaging service to Russian Internet-investment Russian firm, Digital Sky Technologies, is best known for its $200 million stake in Facebook, according to people familiar with the matter.

Quoting unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal said that talks between AOL and the conspicuous Facebook investor are still in the early stages, and AOL has reached out to other parties as well, according to a person familiar with the talks. The sources said that AOL could fetch somewhere between $200 million and $300 million from the sale.

The move reflects one of the first major action from AOL's new chief executive, Tim Armstrong, who just guided the company through a spinoff from Time Warner. AOL bought ICQ's parent firm, Mirabilis, in 1998 for $287 million and other payments worth up to $120 million.

Los Angeles -- AOL has renewed its logo and plans to launch the new look after it is liberated from its oppressive Time Warner overlords, as it faces a tough year ahead. But AOL is trying to emerge from this rough patch as a stronger company -- previewed its new brand identity Monday and stepped up its seemingly eternal campaign to reduce its workforce.

The company this week is demonstrating “its new brand identity for its future as an independent company devoted to creating the world's most simple and stimulating content and online experiences.”

The company is offering takeovers of about 2,500 members of its workforce as it attempts to reduce its employee headcount by nearly a third over the next few months. The once high-flying company and its nearly ubiquitous online greeting -- “You've Got Mail” -- still has several vibrant features and the company believes it will be in a better position to exploit them as a standalone operation.

New York -- Even as the dwindling economy seems to be recuperating, but ahead of broader layoffs at AOL, the soon-to-be-independent company issued pink slips to 100 of their employees on Tuesday, in what several industry blogs are predicting it as a prelude to mass layoffs expected to occur once the company completes its spin out from parent Time Warner next month.

The slashing was first reported by Gawker Media's Valleywag blog, will be widespread across the company, according to a source close to the decision.

While today's layoffs are broadly spread across AOL's various departments, however, it is not exactly part of AOL head Tim Armstrong's comprehensive cost-cutting initiative -- code-named “Project Everest” -- which he has said is planned to look at streamlining roughly 10 individual teams at the company, and which is expected to take effect within the next month. Of AOL's roughly 6,000 employees, layoff estimates range between 1,000 and as many as 2,000.

New York -- The Googlization of AOL's top brasses continues. AOL, the struggling Internet unit of Time Warner, on Tuesday announced the appointment of another Googler veteran… The latest is former YouTube monetization head “Shashi Seth,” who will now serve as SVP for Global Ad Products at AOL.

In his new position, Seth will be responsible for managing the company's sprawling family of advertising and monetization technologies, where he will be entrusted with building and scaling AOL's advertising platform and developing new products. He will also have global oversight of Advertising.com and the company's other display ad products. He will report to Jeff Levick, president of global advertising strategy. Levick himself is a recent recruit from Google, as is Tim Armstrong, AOL's chief executive.

San Francisco -- Barely two months after being designated as AOL's new COO, Kimberley Partoll, as well as SVP of Search & Local head John Kannapel are quitting the company amid reorganization, as CEO Tim Armstrong is searching for ways to cut down the company's costs, according to multiple media reports.

Partoll's exiting is particularly surprising because Armstrong only named her as COO in July. According to a source familiar with the matter said the re-organization is meant to streamline management.

The move is part of a reorganization of AOL's executive entourage under the new CEO as he prepares the company to be spun off from Time Warner Inc. this year.

Partoll, who was EVP for access, business intelligence & new ventures, before being promoted in July to act as COO, was highly attributed with selecting ad agency “Leo Burnett” to revamp the AOL brand. An AOL vet, she literally just got the job as part of Armstrong's first-100-days review; in the memo announcing her promotion and a slew of other changes, Armstrong called her “an outstanding operating executive.”

San Francisco -- AOL's instant messaging service (AIM) striving to keep pace with the growing trends does not want to be defeated by the web's latest and most popular social networking and publishing tools, so it has decided to join them -- on Tuesday announced a major update by integrating the AIM Lifestream application that lets people update, follow and reply to messages on modern social services Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, and Delicious.

“It is lighter, swifter and cleaner,” said Jeremy Rephlo, director of product manage for AIM.

Additional integration into instant messaging of AIM Lifestream will display updates from the social feeds referred above and, besides, lets people to post back to the services. The suite of products, including clients for Macintosh and iPhone apps, and a Web client, will be launched on September 22. The current Lifestream Web site shows the development of the project so far. The finished version will bring instant messages into the mix.

New York -- AOL Inc., which is being separated from Time Warner, said it has appointed “Brad Garlinghouse,” a former Yahoo executive who was accredited with exposing the deep problems at the Internet company, as President of Internet and Mobile Communications, spearheading AOL's global efforts to expand the reach of its e-mail and instant messaging, the company announced early on Tuesday.

Garlinghouse, who was most recently served as an in-house senior advisor at venture capital firm Silver Lake Partners, will also assume an expanded role heading up AOL's Silicon Valley operations from its Mountain View, California campus.

In his new role, Garlinghouse will take on the battle to expand the reach of AOL's popular e-mail and instant-messaging services. AOL, also said Garlinghouse will serve as the company's West Coast lead for AOL Ventures, the company's unit in charge of investing in start-ups and spinning off businesses arm headed by Jon Brod. He will be stationed at AOL's offices in Mountain View, Calif., where the company's email operations are based.

New York -- As it sets itself up to disunite from Time Warner, AOL today said that it has assigned Publciis Groupe's “Leo Burnett” to help the company communicate its upcoming reinvention to people around the world. The company moved quickly, giving five large and small agencies two weeks to prepare a presentation, AOL COO Kim Partoll told the trade mag.

Earlier this year, Time Warner Inc. announced that its Board of Directors had permitted its management to move ahead with plans for the complete legal and structural separation of AOL from Time Warner. Following the proposed transaction, AOL would be an independent, publicly traded company.

Leo Burnett will offer strategic brand communications consulting services to AOL as the brand sets up to ameliorate its purpose and personality. Burnett bested undisclosed agencies in what AOL described as “a closed request for proposal process.”

New York -- AOL today announced that it has appointed former Time Warner Cable Inc. executive Arthur Minson as its chief financial officer as the Internet company prepares to separate from Time Warner Inc. and tries to fix its struggling business.

AOL said new CFO Arthur Minson, who was earlier deputy CFO at Time Warner Cable, helped manage that division's separation from Time Warner this year, New York- based AOL said today in a statement. Prior to that he had been an AOL executive handling corporate finance. Minson, 38, begins at AOL on Sept. 8, replacing Nisha Kumar, who left in the first half.

AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong said in an interview that while Minson's spinoff experience with the cable unit was important it was not the main reason for the appointment.

New York -- AOL is out in a legal scuffle with its moniker. This week, the company has filed a lawsuit against “Advertise.com”, for trademark infringement and employing unfair competition practices, with the Internet giant claiming that the name and the design are quite similar to its own Advertising.com and Ad.com, all the while offering very similar services.

In the official complaint filed this week in federal district court in Virginia, AOL argued that the “Plaintiffs and their predecessors have continuously used and extensively promoted the ADVERTISING.COM and AD.COM names and marks in connection with the provision of a variety of services.”

AOL argues that Advertise.com's name deceives customers into thinking that the company is affiliated with the AOL brands Advertising.com and Ad.com.

New York -- AOL is moving intensely into the fast-growing world of mixed martial arts, buying MMAFighting.com, an eight-year-old independent enthusiast Web site devoted to the sport of mixed martial arts, its third acquisition in a month to lure online advertisers.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but AOL executives said the new site MMAFighting.com, which was launched in 2001, will cover all the stories and multimedia from the already extensive Mixed Martial Arts now on AOL's sports site, FanHouse, within the next few months, New York-based AOL said in a statement today.

And after a planned relaunch of MMAFighting.com later this year, both properties' staffs and resources will become the home for the current MMA FanHouse, AOL's flagship sports destination. The newly unified destination will provide MMA fans with in-depth information on the sport, which to-date has been unavailable in the mainstream sports media.

London -- In a move to make the new-look of AOL more appealing, the web-services company has named Bebo's European VP and MD "Kate Burns" to the newly created post as head of its European Advertising Sales operations, just before new AOL CEO Tim Armstrong completes his 100-day company review.

According to AllThingsD, which in May reported that Bebo would be transformed in to a new "AOL Ventures" unit, after president Joanna Shields quit. Burns had been the de facto Bebo boss in Shields' absence, and Bebo does not yet have a replacement lined up.

Burns would be responsible for expanding ad sales on AOL's owned and operated properties in Europe, improving its Advertising.com third-party network, and delivering unmatched consumer insights.

San Francisco -- AOL's Truveo, which boasts itself as the second largest video search engine both in the US and worldwide, is releasing a global revamp tonight across 17 of its country-specific sites, including in the U.S, where it is aiming for a less-cluttered, almost Google-like home page. The company says the update makes it easier than ever to find video on the web.

Looking to seize the video search market share from Google Video, Blinkx, and Microsoft Corp.'s new Bing site, AOL said the revamped Truveo indexes more than 350 million online videos. It also signed an agreement with a top U.S. Spanish-language broadcaster Univision to add Truveo's video search capabilities to Univision.com.

San Francisco -- Breaking a barrier from being a traditional search engine to reflect it brand name: “Ask” following the very recent trend, that is finding answers to your questions or problems. Well, according to Ask.com, they have the answer. At one of the search industry's leading annual conferences, SemTech 2009, in San Jose, California, Ask.com took the wraps off its proprietary database of 300 million Q&A pairs for consumers in the United States and United Kingdom.

We know today for awhile that Answers sites are growing rapidly. For instance Bing, Hunch, and Wolfram Alpha to name a few are all striving to achieve the same goal of providing answers quickly to searchers.

San Francisco -- Struggling to ramp up its revenue and seize its share of local advertising, Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit on Thursday went on a shopping spree under the aegis of new CEO Tim Armstrong, and surprisingly enough the company has acquired two local online media companies Patch Media Corp and hipster-oriented events listing site Going.com, as part of a broader strategy to build the company's position in the relatively fast-growing local online advertising market.

AOL, in a statement, confirmed the acquisition of New York-based Patch Media Corp., a provider of local news and information platform for local towns and communities, and Boston-based Going Inc., a platform for users to share information about events in major cities.

London -- Former Bebo architect Joanna Shields, the high-profile new media topper who promoted the success of teen-friendly social networking site, Bebo, has decided to part ways as prexy of AOL's People Networks division, making a U-turn from New York to London to settle with her family and pursue entrepreneurial interests.

According to an internal memo to staff, AOL's new global chief executive Tim Armstrong and picked up by Kara Swisher, wrote: “Joanna Shields has decided to exit from her role as president of People Networks/EVP of AOL and return to London to spend more time with her family and allowing Shields to follow her specialist startup executive skills -- perhaps hinting that her days at AOL were always bound to be limited.”

London -- Seeking to reclaim its laurels, AOL UK today has launched a beta version of its new homepage that include access to third-party multiple email accounts and social networking services from a single online destination.

The beta site launched effective today (12 May), allows AOL users for the first time, to access multiple email accounts, including AOL Mail and rivals Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Google Mail including access to social networks interface such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace along with AOL-owned Bebo and AIM.

The UK launch of new homepage model follows the US, which was relaunched in September and is growing at 7% in page views and 26% increase in total minutes spent on the page year on year, according to comScore figures.

San Francisco -- Ask.com, a unit of Internet business company InterActiveCorp., on Tuesday said that its Chief Executive Office, Jim Safka, has suddenly decided to step down from his position with the company due to personal reasons, after serving the company for 18 months, according to reports from Wall Street Journal.

The current President of Ask.com Scott Garell would take over Safka's duties, with Garell's title changing to president of Ask Networks.

Safka has joined the company last January, replacing Jim Lanzone right in the midst of parent company IAC's massive restructuring.

San Francisco -- Exploring to widen the parameters of its online identities manager Socialthing social networking news feed service, AOL on Tuesday announced plans to integrate it in across corporate sibling Warner Bros. Television Group (WBTVG).

The service, acquired by AOL last summer, is aimed at assisting users to trace the Internet activity of friends. A feed of members' activity across Warner Bros. entertainment sites -- TheWB.com, KidsWB.com, DCHeroZone.com, MomLogic, Essence.com and TheCW.com -- will be displayed on their Socialthing profiles.

San Francisco -- Barely weeks after taking the helm as chief executive at AOL, Tim Armstrong in his first management shake-up last week, appointed a former Google Inc. colleague “Jeff Levick” as president of global advertising and strategy, overseeing its Platform-A advertising sales business.

38-year-old Levick, who has most recently employed at Google since 2001, as vice president of industry development and marketing for the Americas, is the latest in a series of Google executives who have announced plans to leave the company.

Levick, will now become the new president of global advertising and strategy at AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc., and will report to AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong who joined from Google on April 1.