andreessen

Netscape veterans Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have thrown their financial support behind Qik, a mobile live-video service.

Qik's investment announcement on Tuesday comes roughly a month after the company debuted its public beta, with several new features designed to improve the service that allows people to stream live video from their cell phones onto the Internet, to such sites as YouTube, Mogulus, MySpace, Orkut, and Justin.tv.

Andreessen and Horowitz will also serve as board advisers on Qik.

"We are thrilled to have Marc and Ben involved in Qik, both as investors and advisers," Ramu Sunkara, … Read more

As has been repeatedly rumored, Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen will be taking a seat on Facebook's board of directors. In a press release issued Monday afternoon, the veteran entrepreneur--co-founder of Netscape, former CTO of AOL, and now co-founder of social site Ning--was announced as the board's fourth member. He'll join Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as well as two of the company's early investors, Accel Partners' Jim Breyer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, now of the Founders Fund and Clarium Capital.

"Marc is an industry leader, and we're fortunate to have him join … Read more

The rumors have been floating around for a while, and now Mike Arrington is reporting that Marc Andreessen is going to join Facebook's board of directors. (Kara Swisher had the original news break back in May.)

Best known as the founder of Netscape, Andreessen these days is involved with Ning, which supplies a platform for "white label" social networks that you can brand as your own.

We'll try later to get more clarity about how all of this is supposed to shake out.

If the move indeed goes down, Facebook will pick up a plugged-in entrepreneur … Read more

I'm In Like With You, a social-network-turned-gaming-site that caught a brief flurry of press for its eye-popping design when it launched, has just closed a $1.5 million round of venture funding led by Spark Capital. It's the first funding the site has received since its angel round last year.

In addition to Spark, the round includes current investors Baseline Ventures, Betaworks, and veteran investor Ron Conway, as well as an investment from Netscape and Ning founder Marc Andreessen.

The funding round was widely rumored as the site--having failed to live up to the hype it first generated … Read more

Update at 5 a.m. PDT Wed., May 14: Andreessen's analysis of Google Friend Connect has been added.

Marc Andreessen sees a number of companies suffering from the same disease.

"...I think a lot of companies have what I call 'strategitis.' Instead of launching a product, which would apparently make too much sense, they come up with a 'strategy,'" he says. "There's a strong temptation for companies that don't have strong social networking franchises to roll out social networking 'features' instead of products, and in reality, consumers like to have products."

Andreessen is … Read more

Facebook has asked tech veteran Marc Andreessen to join its board of directors, according to Kara Swisher at All Things D. The deal isn't finalized, apparently, but Andreessen has "verbally agreed" to the commitment.

The Netscape founder is currently at the helm of his own social-networking site, Ning, which lets Web users create their own branded community sites without technical expertise. Because of its focus on niche communities rather than mass communication, it's not a direct Facebook competitor.

Facebook, meanwhile, has been padding its ranks with seasoned industry leaders as a means of competing with the … Read more

The nuclear winter in technology talk sparked by Marc Andreessen wasn't exactly on my mind as I got rid of some boxes in the garage over the weekend.

But beneath a tub of paperback books and snow chains I'd managed to never use, there was an archeological treasure: boxes of old reporters' notes and Web 1.0 tchotchkes from an array of tech boom companies my wife and I wrote about in the 1990s for publications such as PC Week and Business 2.0.

There was a lint brush from BroadVision (an e-commerce software company...still in business) … Read more

Maybe it's a throwback to my childhood recollections of "duck and cover" school drills, but this nuclear winter Andreessen thing is still rattling around in my head.

First, the gloomy view: The economy is slowing down and so what's up with the increasingly pointless me-too social-networking apps getting link love these days on Techmeme? They're cute, but outside of the echo chamber regulars, who really cares? Let's be frank: The world does not need another social news aggregator or online scheduling assistant.

Now, the slightly more optimistic view: This isn't the first time … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--So there was Marc Andreessen, scaring the bejeesuz out of the crowd at the Web 2.0 Expo here with talk of a "nuclear winter" descending upon techdom. Maybe it was the Lex Luthor resemblance that made it seem extra sinister.

For the record, this line is becoming old hat for Andreesen--in a blog post he wrote after Ning raised $60 million net in a private round of funding, Andreesen said the money would "enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (more than 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 … Read more