Bloomberg LP is preparing to bait developers with a new research and development office in San Francisco, and Michael Bloomberg couldn’t be more excited about it. “I had dinner with [San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee] last night, and he said everything was fine,” he told a table of Bay Area entrepreneurs, while discussing the challenges that many of them face, including competition for top developers. As Re/Code reports, the new facility will put up about 100 engineers. 

O, the Oprah Magazine is attempting to boost its sagging circulation with a new tiered subscription plan, O's Circle of Friends. Benefits range from a behind-the-scenes newsletter and product discounts for $39 (Prime), through luxury beauty items for $99 (Plus), to tickets to Winfrey's latest personal appearance tour,  a chance to test products for the magazine, and a birthday card from the great lady herself, all for $199 (Premier).

Maria Zhang, the Yahoo engineering exec who was sued for sexual harassment by another female employee, just filed a cross-complaint against her accuser, Nan Shi. “It alleges defamation and claims Shi was trying to ‘extort’ Yahoo,” Vallywag reports. “Although Yahoo was named as a defendant in Shi's sexual harassment suit, the cross-complaint was only filed by Zhang, not Yahoo (the party allegedly being extorted).” 

Yelp just increased the limit on its API for sourcing local information -- from 100 calls a day to 25,000 -- without the need for pre-approval. Why? “Yelp wants as many inroads and reminders for its service around the Web as possible,” TechCrunch writes. “By freeing up usage of its API, Yelp becomes more appealing to developers looking to help people discover local businesses, and could persuade them to use its database instead of Foursquare or Google Places which were much more openly available until now.” 

Google+ (which we thought was effectively shutting down), is lifting any and all username restrictions. “In 2012, YouTube and Google sought to crack down on inappropriate and vulgar YouTube commenters by forcing all users to comment using their real name via Google+ profiles,” ReadWrite reports. “Two years later, Google+ is back at square 1.” 

Next month Condé Nast will debut Condé Nast Portrait, a high-end U.K.-based publishing service for private individuals worldwide, providing such options as "coffee table books to commemorate anniversaries or achievements, combining existing imagery with shoots by leading photographers," and "a fashion or party shoot that uses the Condé Nast stable of stylists, and is presented in a magazine," writes Samantha Conti.

To what lengths will tech giants go to keep talent from defecting? Well, we now know that Google established a policy back in 2007 to immediately present counter offers to any employee being pursued by Facebook. An email exchange between Google managers, and obtained by Quartz, explains that Google is “open to significantly enhancing the offers to candidates who also have offers from Facebook.” 

The subject of much speculation, there is little chance of an AOL/Yahoo tie-up as long as Marissa Mayer has a say in the matter. “Mayer has told a number of people inside and outside the company that she just does not ‘get’ the merger, despite all the potential benefits,” Kara Swisher reports in Re/Code. “As explained to me, she finds it small, unexciting, uninspiring and backward-looking.” Tim Armstrong, on the other had, reportedly digs the idea of a merger. 

Norman Pearlstine reads The Awl. Less surprisingly, Pearlstine -- presently doing a stint as chief content officer of Time Inc. -- tells The New York Observer that consumer media habits are changing, and digital businesses models remain a work in progress. He also insists that Time Inc. being spun off from Time Warner was a good thing. “As a consequence of the spinoff we have the opportunity to be great storytellers across multiple platforms,” according to Pearlstine. 

Conde Nast has changed a longstanding, if sometimes vague, advertising policy -- called internally the "beauty rotation" -- which "dictated  the order in which ads from Revlon, Estee Lauder, L'Oreal and Procter & Gamble appeared in the front of certain... magazines," writes Michael Sebastian. Ads from Revlon were always first, "when the companies bought multi-page spreads in the opening section of the magazines, before the table of contents. And it appears to mean that the amount of money the companies spent on ads was not a factor in their placement, according to people familiar with the arrangement." Conde Nast execs …