Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Super VC Andreessen and eBay's John Donahoe on Mobile Payments, Love Notes in the Cloud and More!

No love notes in the cloud for Marc Andreessen, maybe–but everything else is fair game.

That’s one of the funnier exchanges in an onstage interview BoomTown did earlier this week with Andreessen, the well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur and now venture capital kingpin, and eBay CEO John Donahoe.

It took place at the PayPal X Innovate 2010 conference in San Francisco, in a keynote that focused a lot on the move to mobile payments and cloud computing.

And, according to both Andreessen and Donahoe, the smartphone is at the center of the action going forward, especially by shoving all the heavy lifting of information to the cloud.

While talking about music service, using Spotify as an example, Andreessen noted: “Everything should be configured to a social experience. Everything except love notes, or anything like that. That probably doesn’t belong in the cloud.”

I disagree, Marc! Love is lofty!

Interestingly, though, Andreessen–the man responsible for creating the invaluable Web browser–still thought it would remain as durable as ever going forward.

See him talk about all this and more in the longish video below, in which Donahoe also does a slip-’n’-slide on the stage’s carpet.

Here’s the video (don’t click on the main video screen or you’ll be jumped to another screen; click on the toolbar instead):

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work