Details on Marc Andreessen’s New Fund (Plus Five Other Interesting Things He Said)

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are launching their much-anticipated $300 million venture fund this evening, aptly called Andreessen Horowitz. The fund will make investments of $50,000 to $50 million (yes, $50 million), but will generally focus on early stage opportunities. And here's a fun fact: they don't currently have a website, and apparently they aren't sure they will have one in the future. For now they've reserved a16z.com for use if they do ever launch a site. Basically, if you don't already know Andreessen or Horowitz, or know someone who knows them, getting in contact with them is going to be...difficult. Marc Andreessen has long been one of my favorite people to interview, because he is tapped into nearly every hot company and isn’t afraid to answer questions directly. That is, when you can actually get him to sit down with you and a camera, notepad or tape recorder. But last week, he had to chat it up with the press since he and long-time partner Ben Horowitz were announcing their new $300 million venture fund called Andreessen Horowitz Venture Capital. This is not going to be your typical venture capital firm. For one thing, there’s that $300 million fund size. That’s pretty big for a first-time fund and gargantuan when you consider there are only two general partners, Andreessen and Horowitz. It’s big enough that some people didn’t think they’d be able to pull it off.

NTT Docomo Buys 35 Percent Of PacketVideo For $45.5 Million

Mobile video is taking off in Japan, where mobile operator NTT DoCoMo just invested $45.5 million in PacketVideo, which s a long-time supplier of mobile video software. The all-cash investment gives NTT Docomo a 35 percent stake in PacketVideo, which is s subsidiary of NextWave Wireless (a holding company that owns rights to wireless spectrum in the U.S. which it plans to use for a Wimax network). NextWave acquired PacketVideo in 2005 and the company is now its main source of cash. The investment indicates how important PacketVideo's technology is to NTT Docomo, and raises the possibility of an outright purchase down the line. Other customers of PacketVideo include Verizon Wireless, Orange (in France), and T-Mobile. They might not feel so warm and fuzzy about PacketVideo now being so closely aligned with another carrier, even if it is in Japan.

Tweetraising: The Potential For Charities On Twitter

Twitter has been hailed as an incredibly useful marketing tool for businesses and brands, both big and small, to disseminate information and engage with consumers on a massive scale. But what about non-profits? The ability to use social media to fundraise for charitable purposes has been questionable. A few months ago, the Washington Post reported that Causes, one of Facebook's popular applications used by non-profits to raise money, was not netting much money for charities, despite its large amount of users (according to the application's page, it has 26 million monthly users). Twitter, the current darling of the social media world, is increasingly being used by charities. In addition to building awareness, Twitter has potential to raise charitable contributions. One of the more successful initiatives launched in the Twittosphere was February's global Twestival, which raised over $250,000 for charity:water, a non-profit organization devoted to bringing clean drinking water to developing nations. The volunteer-run organization held events to bring Twitter communities in nearly 200 cities together. 250K sounds like an awful lot of dough to raise over the microblogging network, but this amount fell way below Twestival's goal of $1 million.

iPhone 3GS. Jailbreak. Mac.

Only a couple of days after George Hotz became the first hacker to release a jailbreak app for the iPhone 3GS on Windows, there's a Mac-compatible version out too. This time, Hotz got some help from two fellow coders to be able to please the Mac folks, but he also made some improvements to the Windows version. Happy jailbreaking, and in case you didn't know yet: happy unlocking too.

Japan’s Rakuten: Can The Biggest E-Commerce Site You Never Heard Of Become a Threat for Amazon Globally?

The term "e-commerce" still lacks a universally valid definition, but even if you just bundle B2B and B2C transactions under it, it's a multi-trillion dollar business globally. Last year, Nielsen found [PDF] 86% of the global web population made an online purchase already (North America: 92%). For the US alone, B2C sales are expected to grow from $130 billion this year to over $200 billion by 2013 (excluding travel). In North America, Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla in the B2C arena - by very, very far. After the US launch in 1995, the company quickly established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Japan. But although Amazon wins in Canada and Europe, things are not going as well in Asia. In China (where Amazon started offering a localized site in 2004), it practically gets destroyed by local player Taobao [CN]. Traffic-wise, Amazon gets dwarfed by a local e-commerce site in Japan, too: Rakuten. Amazon is active in Japan for a good reason: In its last report [JP, PDF], the Japanese government said the country's online B2C sector grew by 21.7% to over $55 billion in 2007 on a year-on-year basis. (Note: Statistics from different sources can vary widely because of totally different methods of measurement. The Japanese numbers, for examples, do include travel.) Now it seems Rakuten wants to take its global plans (laid out numerous times in the past) to the next level, with CEO Hiroshi Mikitani saying just this weekend he wants to see his company generating $1 million in daily sales outside Japan by the end of this year. This short case study tries to shed light on Rakuten's background and key success factors, why they win against Amazon in Japan and what efforts they make to go global.

Way Too Competitive: Tech Gurus Flock To World Series Of Poker

6,000 or so people have congregated at the Rio hotel in Las Vegas for this year's World Series of Poker to fight for $50 million or so that will be split among the last 10% of players left standing. Among them are a number of tech startup entrepreneurs. We're tracking four of them, plus any others that pop up. This is David Sacks' third WSOP. Sacks, a former PayPal exec and the CEO of Geni/Yammer, walked away with nothing two years ago. Last year he took home $25k in prize money, and twittered every hand. This year he's way up after the first day, with $91k in chips. That likely puts him in the top 10% of players. He is twittering summaries of his play at @davidsacks. You can see his player card here with last year's results. Jason Calacanis (Mahalo founder) is playing today for the first time. He's been sponsored by FullTiltPoker (they paid his $10k buy in) and looks absolutely ridiculous. Look for his twitters later this afternoon.

Since March, Internet Explorer Lost 11.4 Percent Share To Firefox, Safari, And Chrome

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser. Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers.

Cherry, The Mobile Operator That Doesn’t Care Whether You’re On Wi-Fi Or Not

The chances of me being genuinely amazed at something I see a Belgian tech company achieve are rather slim. But occasionally, it happens. Last week I went to local entrepreneur meetup BetaGroup and saw five startups pitch their stuff to the 200-person audience. The last one to get its five minutes of fame was Cherry, a new mobile operator that promised to "revolutionize the telecom world". Needless to say, I was as curious as I was skeptical. Then the company's CEO got up on stage, introduced himself, took out his Nokia smartphone, called some random guy in the audience and had him call him back on his phone afterwards. Projecting his mobile phone screen on a bigger screen for everyone to see, he demonstrated how he didn't need to launch an application and just browsed his contact list to call the other person. Standard functionality, sure, but the cool part of it was the fact that the phone was lacking the presence of a SIM card, which is supposed to identify you as a subscriber of a telephony service.

The Reality Of PR: Smile, Dial, Name Drop, Pray.

One thing I hated about being a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini back in the day - we got to work on really cool deals (the last deal I worked on before leaving for a startup was the AOL/Netscape merger), but we were only brought in at the very end to paper everything. We fought over the fine print in the contracts after the meat of the deal was ironed out by CEOs. Skinning and dressing whatever the hunters bring back to the cave is fine for some people. But it's not exactly being in the middle of the action. PR firms today aren't much different than corporate lawyers. They are paid to perform a service. They like to think of themselves as core to the strategic action of their clients. But more often, they're just there to spin whatever happened in the most favorable light possible. Then they smile and dial and pray for coverage. Occasionally they are called in to smother a story, which is mildly more exciting, I imagine. But when a CEO is wondering what she should do next to drive her business forward, she generally doesn't call her PR firm for advice. Or at least I hope she doesn't. PR firms are apparently just as frustrated by always being in the back seat as the law firms are. I'm fascinated by Clair Cain Miller's article in the New York Times today about PR in general and the birth of a startup, Wordnik, specifically.

Twitter + World Of Warcraft=Tweetcraft

For all of you World of Warcraft fans out there, there's a new Twitter client that is worth checking out. TweetCraft is an in-game Twitter client for WoW that lets you send and receive Tweets within a game. If you are busy in the middle of a WoW match, you can put Tweets in a queue to send when it's more convenient. The client also lets you upload in-game WoW screenshots using TwitPic and will automatically send out Tweets when you log in, enter an instance or get an achievement.

Amazon Applying For In-Book Advertisement Patent

Before everyone gets in a huff, let's consider Amazon's intentions with these patent applications. Surely they would never allow advertisements to be placed in books which you have purchased legitimately at full price, so let's put that out of our heads. But what if you could take a few bucks off the cover price at the cost of a few contextual ads relating (if possible) to the book's content? Personally, I wouldn't mind — partially because I don't use a Kindle or intend to any time soon, but more because it's a no-lose situation. Amazon wouldn't risk alienating its loyal Kindle base with dirty tricks like this, so it's safe to assume it'll be at least somewhat opt-in. An abundance of free or reduced-price content would widen the appeal of the reader — I imagine many people are put off e-books by the idea that they are not getting their money's worth. As offensive as the idea of inserting ads into a book is to me (and surely to the average reader), it's almost certainly part of a value proposition which increases the utility of these expensive little buggers.

Interview: Karen Dyer, video game actor

Dearest CrunchGear readers: I recently had the honor and privilege of speaking to Karen Dyer, who is not only the voice of Sheva Alomar, from Resident Evil 5, but who also did said character's motion capture. I hope you enjoy it on this day, our day of freedom. Obviously, “K” is for Karen, and “N” is for Nicholas. With that... N: Well, first off congratulations. Resident Evil 5 was a big hit. It sold something like 4 million copies. K: That's what I hear! N: Excellent. But before we get into the game, I just wanted to bring up something I saw on your bio. It says here you're known for your circus skills, and I just wanted to say how that awesome that is. And I wanted to ask, where do you study that? Because I don't know if your average community college offers that type of training.

PollDaddy Traffic Soars, Releases Ratings Widget With Possible Digg Competitor On The Horizon

It's no secret that bloggers love their polls — they're a great way to increase user engagement, and sometimes you can even get some useful data from them. But most people probably don't realize just how popular these polls really can be. PollDaddy has just released some of its latest stats, and they don't fail to impress: the company is now serving 430 million poll impressions per month, with a reach of over 74 million people worldwide, giving it a Quantcast rank equivialent as the 22nd most visited online service in the world. That success is due in no small part to PollDaddy's acquisition by WordPress's parent company Automattic last fall. Bloggers could embed PollDaddy into the WordPress blogs (as well as other popular blogging platforms) long before the acquisition, but now PollDaddy is also being included as a feature on WordPress.com, Automattic's premium hosted blogging platform — and home to over 8 million blogs — that appeals to users who don't want to deal with having to set up their own blog install. In other words, PollDaddy is now accessible to a much broader audience.

Short Is Sweet: Postcards Begat SMS Begat Twitter

Recently, I've noticed something. If you send me an email, the likelihood that I'm going to respond is pretty small. But if you send me a message on Twitter, the likelihood that I'll respond is much higher. Certainly, part of it is that I get fewer messages on Twitter. But you might be surprised at how close it's getting in volume when you add @replies to direct messages. The bigger factor for me, is the length of the messages. If I open up an email and see it filled with paragraphs of information, guaranteed my eyes are going to glaze over. Certainly sometimes it's an important message that I do need to read, but most of the time it's just a core message filled with paragraphs of bloat. I don't want or need the bloat, I need the core message. And that's why I love Twitter. You simply cannot go over 140 characters. And more often than you may imagine, that's enough. Now, on the face of it, plenty of people will disagree with me on that point. But think about it. In an age where we're bombarded by tons of information, from multiple angles, all day long, there is something beautiful about brevity.

What’s Right and Wrong with Media Now

Like most things on the Internet, there’s a good side and a dark side to where the media business is headed. The good side is very good: thousands of layers of mostly needless middlemen and processes are being eliminated as journalists get a direct channel to their readers. And, because it’s a two way medium, readers get that channel right back. And in the cases where the subject of an article has been wronged, the Web gives them powerful megaphones to fight back. In short, the more everyone has a voice, the more reporters are challenged to make sure they are right, because they will be called out. Look at what happened with the plagiarism scandal around Chris Anderson’s new book. Anderson says it was a mistake around a change in how they were going to use citations, and I take him at his word. But it’s safe to say any author who’d considered borrowing heavily from Wikipedia won’t now. We like to think that we act virtuously because of personal or professional pride, but nothing enforces those ethics like the real possibility of getting caught and hugely embarrassed. But the bad side is also very bad. The elimination of those layers – typically fact checkers, editors, lawyers and just time to make sure a work is fully baked—also allows mistakes, lazy reporting, a dependence on rumors, and hot-headed, unfair treatment to subjects. Worse: The metrics around the Web make it crystal clear which kinds of stories drive the most traffic. That leads to salacious reporting for the sake of clicks and comments. It’s easy to point the finger at blogs, especially by certain members of old media losing money quarter-after-quarter. (Cough, cough.) But this is not just a technology change as most corners of media are fighting for survival, it’s become a cultural change. And this week, I’ve been struck by two non-blog examples that reflect the tension. Right about now most people reading this probably have guessed the example of salacious reporting and unfair treatment I’m driving at is Ben Mezrich’s new book on Facebook. I’ll say upfront I haven’t read it. Galleys have been very closely guarded. Once I do read it, if everything everyone who has read it has told me is wrong, I’ll apologize for what I’m about to say. But, on a professional level, I find the ethics behind this project disgusting.

Dotcom Crash-era Startup Reanimates By Trending On Twitter

It's not often that Internet companies last 10 years, but Moonfruit in the UK has proved pretty resilient. It survived the dotcom boom the first time round, launching with VC-backing, growing to 65 staff and cutting back to two staff in the space of a couple of years. It's a wonder why they didn't exit in the most recent boom, but here they are still, plugging away. And their resilience is proving to be an asset as their 10-years old web site building business comes back into fashion, even as more recent competitors like Weebly, Yola, MyDragnDrop and Webnode, and many others, try to capture the market for people who want to build simple web sites. So what's the best way to re-invigorate an internet brand after 10 long years? Get trending on Twitter, that's how. So Moonfruit has been giving away 10 Macbooks for every year of their operation, beginning this week. The result is that it has become the top trending term on Twitter three days in a row, as all people need to do is add the hashtag #moonfruit to their tweet. An algorithm is randomly choosing a winner. There are five days left. By the second day this week it had reached 2.5% of all twitter traffic. But could the stunt backfire as fast as it worked?

CallWave Delists From NASDAQ; Fuze Meeting Rises From The Ashes

It's not easy to launch a successful WebEx competitor. Most businesses have long since established their "system" for dealing with web meetings, using old standbys like WebEx or GoToMeeting. And those businesses that are willing to venture into the unknown have had plenty of cheaper alternatives to choose from, like DimDim, for quite a while. But that isn't keeping CallWave from launching one of its own, dubbed Fuze Meeting. And while it's not going to be an easy space to compete in, Fuze Meeting doesn't disappoint. As far as startups go, the history of the company is pretty unique. CallWave was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. After reaching a peak soon thereafter of over $15 per share, the stock dropped steadily, dipping as low as 50 cents early this year. Deciding to cut its losses, the company delisted itself from NASDAQ on Monday after buying back shares from public shareholders at a 44% premium over the current market value and paying out a total of $10 million. CMO Patrick Moran says that the company did this on its own accord, and that its hand wasn't pushed by any banks or VCs. CallWave will soon change its name to Fuze Box to reflect its new position as a startup.

Outsource Your Beta Testing To Prefinery (Invites)

The beta testing stage can be the cornerstone to the successful development of a new site. And many startups have to conduct and implement beta testing of sites, surveys and analytics internally, which can be an daunting task when you are launching a site. Prefinery lets startups outsource the whole beta invite process, from start to finish. Prefinery is offering 100 TechCrunch readers with beta invites to test the site. You can sign up here. Use the invitation code "TECHCRUNCH" when signing up for the service. Prefinery's ambition is to create a valuable first experience for beta testers and to help startups in collecting and organizing information that will result in a better product. Prefinery will do anything and everything when it comes to the beta testing process. The service will create a splash page for your product, generate an HTML sign-up form with fields and survey questions, create an automatic welcome e-mail/message, take signups into a queue, approve users, and trigger invite e-mail. The service will also generate invite codes and assign quantities.

Microsoft And Linux Hold Peace Tweets

Okay, it's not exactly the Camp David Summit that took place in 2000 between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but sometimes the littlest gestures can go a long way. A couple of days ago, upon hearing that Microsoft had officially joined Twitter, the official Linux account sent out a tweet welcoming them. "Welcome to Twitter, @Microsoft!," they said. The tweet sat unanswered for over a day, and it seemed like Microsoft may never answer. But about a few hours ago, they did. "@Linux thanks, nice to be here," they replied.

Video: 50 Cent Confronts Sexman

I don't recall how the YouTube user Pruane2Forever, aka "Sexman", came on my radar, but I definitely remember a few of his videos from a couple years ago. (Here's a old favorite — Not Safe For Work.) Basically, it's this kid who does movie and new media reviews that are (or at least used to be) unintentionally hilarious. These days, he apparently has quite the following on YouTube, as he has over 150 videos that range in popularity from tens of thousands of views to over a million. One of his most popular ones was a video from 4 months ago in which he calls out rapper 50 Cent. Sexman wonders how 50 still has "street cred" after doing endorsements for Vitamin Water, makeup and dildos (I'm not kidding). "What else is he gonna do? 50 Cent diapers for your little gangsta?," Sexman wonders at one point. He concludes that 50 Cent is "just a media whore!" Well, 50 Cent has responded. Yesterday, the rapper posted a video alongside Sexman, who apparently flew from Canada to New York to meet up at the rapper's request.