Plympton was the publisher of three of Amazon’s first Kindle Serials. The company continues to commission new series — one upcoming project is WinkPoke, an ongoing series of short stories about love in the digital age – but they probably won’t be exclusive to Amazon. Plympton sees its acquisition of DailyLit as a way to gain readers across platforms. To help oversee the technical aspects of the acquisition, Plympton has hired Jacqueline Chang, an MIT graduate and previously an engineer at StumbleUpon, as its chief technology officer.

When DailyLit launched, its mission was to deliver free, public-domain works of fiction in installments to readers’ inboxes. It’s since expanded to include some paid titles and occasionally partners with publishers to give away some in-copyright content (a Jhumpa Lahiri short story, for instance). There are now 953 free titles on its platform. DailyLit says that over 800,000 readers have received over 50 million installments of books. But the company’s been slow to adapt to tablets and smartphones, which — along with Kindle — weren’t around when it launched. Danziger recalls that New York magazine included DailyLit in its “Approval Matrix” in 2007 — and placed the idea of reading on your phone in the “Brilliant but Despicable” quadrant. “I remember thinking, at least we got ‘brilliant,’” she says.

With the acquisition, Plympton hopes to tap DailyLit’s reader base and modernize its delivery platform — and it plans not just to promote Plympton’s original series, but also promote serialized titles from other publishers. Lee says that Plympton wants to “re-imagine the entire DailyLit experience. That means everything from commissioning works meant to be read natively in digital format to finding the best way to deliver those stories to readers when they want and how they want it.”

The announcement was timed to coincide with the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York Wednesday.

As Larry Page’s blog post makes clear, Motorola has a huge trove of mobile IP, having invented the first portable handset and also the then smallest feature phone. Having hardware design capabilities inhouse will let Google more easily develop some reference phones that provide as well rounded a user experience as the iPhone and Windows Mobile 7 (although this will require as much if not more software UX discipline).

Nonetheless, there are many negatives to being in the hardware business, such as margin compression (caused ironically by Android) and real COGS (other than servers and bandwidth this is an unfamiliar concept to Google). Most of all, for Android to succeed it must be widely adopted by many handset makers and the last thing Google should want is for this acquisition to scare off the likes of Samsung and HTC. I therefore predict that Google will only retain parts of Motorola – the patents and the hardware design capabilities, but close down or sell off much if not all actual manufacturing and handset distribution (to the extent that Motorola still has any of these in-house to begin with). That is of course assuming that Google is not tempted to go overboard once they have this done and get into the carrier business as well as Jean-Louis Gassée suggested for Apple. Being vertically integrated would be a terrible idea.

Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures. This is reposted with permission from his blog, Continuations.

This article originally appeared in Continuations.

Mobile Phone as Personal Identity: “The only thing more stable than most people’s phone number is their social security number,” said Wenger, identifying mobile phones as “the first true single-user device.” Laptops were designed around the idea that multiple people might be using them, but “your phone knows it’s you.” While USV’s thinking on this issue is early, Wenger is looking ahead to a time when somebody figures out “how to create identity in a distributed fashion around someone’s mobile experience.”

Why Union Square Ventures hasn’t invested in content companies “Is there nothing that can be done for them?” Sander asked. Wenger said USV has found, in most cases, that the economics of the content business aren’t conducive to venture investments and “won’t make for venture-type returns” (one exception he listed is the Huffington Post). That’s because he sees a nearly infinite supply of content — and a fixed demand, with total attention “only growing by the number of people coming online….You have to build a business around scarcity, and the scarcity is attention.”

As for aggregation startups like Zite and Flipboard, Wenger said USV has met with most of them — and still doesn’t think most of them have “real value and real engagement from end users, where it’s not just another reading venue. . . . Whoever cracks the nut on that will have something very interesting, and making mobile part of that experience will be critical.”

Voluntary Contribution Models: The New York Times’ paywall model, Wenger said, could have been enacted in a more interesting way, by letting readers who get the most “emotional value” from Times content pay more for it. It’s still early, but sites like Kickstarter (which USV has invested in) have demonstrated that business models that “let people self-identify how much value they are deriving from a project” can work. And these contribution models “appeal to more fundamentally positive emotions than guilt.”

Bringing Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley: NYC has now reached a critical mass startups, said Wenger, though attracting product managers and interaction designers is still a challenge — but the initial hurdle is simply “getting kids excited about working for startups, as opposed to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) or Facebook or Wall Street.” USV backs Hack NY, which brings computer science interns to New York, and Wenger credited Google for making “a conscious choice to put engineering in New York.”

Mobile Phone as Personal Identity: “The only thing more stable than most people’s phone number is their social security number,” said Wenger, identifying mobile phones as “the first true single-user device.” Laptops were designed around the idea that multiple people might be using them, but “your phone knows it’s you.” While USV’s thinking on this issue is early, Wenger is looking ahead to a time when somebody figures out “how to create identity in a distributed fashion around someone’s mobile experience.”

Why Union Square Ventures hasn’t invested in content companies “Is there nothing that can be done for them?” Sander asked. Wenger said USV has found, in most cases, that the economics of the content business aren’t conducive to venture investments and “won’t make for venture-type returns” (one exception he listed is the Huffington Post). That’s because he sees a nearly infinite supply of content — and a fixed demand, with total attention “only growing by the number of people coming online….You have to build a business around scarcity, and the scarcity is attention.”

As for aggregation startups like Zite and Flipboard, Wenger said USV has met with most of them — and still doesn’t think most of them have “real value and real engagement from end users, where it’s not just another reading venue. . . . Whoever cracks the nut on that will have something very interesting, and making mobile part of that experience will be critical.”

Voluntary Contribution Models: The New York Times’ paywall model, Wenger said, could have been enacted in a more interesting way, by letting readers who get the most “emotional value” from Times content pay more for it. It’s still early, but sites like Kickstarter (which USV has invested in) have demonstrated that business models that “let people self-identify how much value they are deriving from a project” can work. And these contribution models “appeal to more fundamentally positive emotions than guilt.”

Bringing Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley: NYC has now reached a critical mass startups, said Wenger, though attracting product managers and interaction designers is still a challenge — but the initial hurdle is simply “getting kids excited about working for startups, as opposed to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) or Facebook or Wall Street.” USV backs Hack NY, which brings computer science interns to New York, and Wenger credited Google for making “a conscious choice to put engineering in New York.”