Marc Andreessen

If it looks like a bubble and walks like a bubble...

Tech luminaries who point to all the bubble talk as proof we know more this time around may need a history lesson.

FORTUNE -- Marc Andreessen reportedly said this today at the AllThingsD conference: "A key characteristic of a bubble is that no one thinks its a bubble … If everybody's upset, it's a good sign . . . I hope there are lots of bubble stories."

The trouble with his declaration is MORE

Can Microsoft put Skype at its core?

The one company that wanted Skype: Microsoft. Can the service unite Microsoft's far flung empire and raise its tech profile?

FORTUNE -- You'll be hearing about video chat a lot more over the next few years thanks to Microsoft's headline-making $8.5 billion acquisition of the popular Internet telephony company Skype, which both companies confirmed in a joint announcement earlier today. It's the largest sum Microsoft (MSFT) has ever forked over for MORE

Ning: A social pioneer changes direction

The online company is saying goodbye to consumers and hello to big (paying) companies.

At a time when the hottest tech giants (Apple (AAPL)) and startups (Zynga) are focused on serving consumers, social-media company Ning is going in the opposite direction: It's largely abandoning individuals in favor of corporate customers such as publishing houses and nonprofit organizations. Even more surprising: The company is charging money for a service it once gave MORE

Titles and promotions

It's not silly formalism. Startups that don't develop a consistent approach to job titles and promotions do so at their own peril.

By Ben Horowitz, contributor

"Hmmmmmmm . . . now what's a title to fit me? a champ like Tyson, a captain like Kirk, no Employee of the Month 'cause yo, I do work" -Big Daddy Kane

Often when I meet with startups, the employees have no job titles. This makes sense, because everybody MORE

Andreessen Horowitz's cloud vision

Best known for its consumer tech investments, the fund ventures into enterprise cloud computing.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is best known for high-profile investments like Zynga, Foursquare and Skype. But the fund, headed by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and his longtime business partner Ben Horowitz, is also betting big on business-to-business upstarts, and these days that means backing companies that enable or rely on cloud computing.

Last summer Andreessen Horowitz made MORE

What's in it for RockMelt?

The polished browser has gotten a lot of press for its social media integration and more efficient search features. Even more interesting though, is its untapped potential.

In a market that's been dominated by Mozilla, Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) for years, it's counterintuitive, and that's being kind, for a new start-up to emerge with, of all things, a new browser.

But that's what the 30-man team of RockMelt MORE

Ning CEO: Building a better web site

Jason Rosenthal, CEO of Ning, positions his company as the Facebook for the set that cares about communicating with a network beyond their friends. With 70,000 paying users and 80 million monthly visitors, the white-label social network company is a quiet force among small organizations, especially schools and other non-profits. With a famous founder, browser pioneer Marc Andreessen, and a scary competitor in Facebook, Rosenthal took over as CEO this MORE

Andreessen: Valley statesman, HP's front man

Why HP was wise to put director Marc Andreessen forward as the board's spokesman on the Mark Hurd crisis.

The delightfully jarring aspect to Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) bombshell news and investor conference calls last Friday was the board member the venerable company put forward as its public face:  Marc Andreessen, not so very long ago the enfant terrible of Silicon Valley.

It was surprising at first blush, given that Andreessen is anything MORE

Andreessen: what's next in tech

Aww, social networking is growing up

A brief history of social technology, and what it means to you

By Gina Bianchini, CEO and co-founder, Ning

At the outset of online social networking, around, say, 2002, early users had to wedge their personalities into static, cookie-cutter profile pages -- it was the price we all paid for the convenience of this new and powerful social tool.  How times have changed: Instead of altering yourself to fit the MORE