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Ten years ago today, my business partners and I sold Applied Semantics to Google. At the time, it was Google’s largest acquisition to date. In the following years we worked together with our new family at Google to grow AdSense into a multibillion-dollar business.

Building Applied Semantics was a roller-coaster four-year process, and the founding team and I learned a great deal during that time. As the anniversary of the acquisition approached, I had been reflecting on lessons learned during the experience. Today, a decade later, I would like to share these lessons with others in the hope that they might find something useful to carry them through both the good times and the not so good — because, eventually, you come out on the other side, oftentimes with a new perspective.

Focus on hiring passionate, hard-working, smart people. Experience is highly overrated.
None of the founding team at Applied Semantics (formerly Oingo) had any startup experience. We didn’t have an MBA among us. None of our parents were business people. Not only did we not have any advisers, we didn’t even really know what advisers were, though many people around us told us that we needed their advice. We had a very limited business network. What we did have was intelligence, creativity and a very strong determination to succeed.

Don’t get too stuck on an idea. Pivot quickly. For most companies, it will be quite clear when and if it’s working.
The original idea of Oingo was to build a Yahoo-like directory of websites which would be run by a network of freelancers competing for the right to build portions of the directory. During the spring of 1999 we worked hard to build a prototype, but soon found a competing product called DMOZ, which was later acquired by Netscape. We tried another three ideas: Oingo Free Search, DomainSense and DomainAppraise, before we finally got to building and releasing AdSense in December 2000.

Several large portals beta tested the product, though none of them were willing to license it. AdSense sat on a shelf for two full years as we launched another two products, DomainPark and Error Page Assistant. In late 2002, we successfully relaunched AdSense — our eighth product launch.

Spend your funding like it’s your own money, and assume it’s the last dollar you may ever raise.
We purchased computers without sound cards because it saved us $20 each. We worked out of our house until we had 20 people working for the company (and at least eight of us living there). We never had a dining room or a living room, and we lost our TV room to a server farm soon after moving in. We only vacated the house because we were served with a landlord eviction as well as a city ordinance that said we had to vacate the property immediately. My father, who is a Ph.D.-educated university professor, painted our first office to save us money. We all took 50-percent-plus pay cuts from previous jobs to keep our burn rate low. We squeezed each dollar in a bubbly time when some startups were throwing parties which cost more than an entire year’s budget for us. We were within 30 days of running out of money at three separate times within our company’s history. There is no doubt that being frugal allowed us to simply survive.

The only thing you can control is where your company is headed. Keep your focus sharp, while avoiding the tendency to bank on an exit.
Six months into the company’s history, we were approached by a large public company to be acquired, and we were very excited about the prospects of working with this company. That deal didn’t go through, and it was disappointing for the team. Three months later, an even larger public company offered to acquire us, and we got closer on terms this time. We got so excited about this deal that for a week we were more focused on the potential acquisition than our own vision. That transaction also fell through. Over the next three years, four other companies would make overtures to acquire us. Over time, we learned not to give too much thought toward a potential acquisition. We learned to focus on creating great products first — an acquisition was secondary. Google was the seventh company to suggest buying Applied Semantics in those four years.

Forgive yourself. You are doing the best that you know how. Things will get better and they will get worse, repeatedly. So get used to that.
We made mistakes along the way. Some painful decisions set us back. We grew too quickly, and it’s still disheartening to think of the friends we said goodbye to during two different rounds of layoffs. We didn’t always trust our own instincts. A decade ago, it wasn’t typical for entrepreneurs in their twenties to be raising large funding rounds, and we were convinced to follow a new leadership that didn’t always embrace our core values. For a time, we started hiring differently, spending differently and managing differently.

Each of the founders risked a great deal in founding the company, but nobody more so than my brother Gil, who put his entire life savings into the company. At times, when things looked grim, it was easy to look back and criticize our mistakes, to think, “What if we made a different decision? What if we had hired a different person? What if we would have built a different product?” If I could say only one thing to my 26-year-old self, it would be this: Even though it feels painful right now, experiencing and working through each of these challenges will ultimately make you a stronger person and your company a stronger business.

Eytan Elbaz is the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Scopely, a next-generation mobile entertainment network. Scopely’s investors include New Enterprises Associates (NEA), the Chernin Group, Anthem Venture Partners, Greycroft Partners and Sands Capital Ventures, among others.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr has joined the board of Flipboard, the mobile-based social media magazine, as an adviser.

“John has been a long-time supporter and adviser to Flipboard and it is fantastic to have him on the board,” a Flipboard spokesperson told AllThingsD. “We feel very fortunate to be working with him and everyone at KP.”

Doerr’s move into an advisory role at Flipboard, first noted by Owen Thomas at Business Insider, is a natural one, as Doerr has had an existing relationship with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue over the years. McCue founded and subsequently sold Paper Software to Netscape in 1996, where he went on to work on and evolve the Netscape browser with Doerr again acting as adviser. McCue also founded TellMe, backed again by Doerr and Kleiner’s funds.

Another Kleiner partner, Eric Feng, recently joined Flipboard as the startup’s new CTO.

McCue was a board seat holder at Twitter before he was asked to leave over what the microblogging site saw as eventual conflicts of interest. Doerr often showed up to Twitter board meetings in an advisory role, but never held an official seat.

The news also comes in the wake of the departure of former Kleiner partner Ellen Pao, who was terminated from the investment firm for “performance issues.” (Pao also happens to be suing the firm, alleging long-standing sexual harassment issues.)

Hearst Ventures, the investment arm of media giant Hearst Corporation, said it was making a minority equity investment in Science, the Los Angeles area tech “studio.”

Privately held Hearst is the sole investor in the new funding, although the company declined to reveal financial terms of the investment.

But sources with awareness of the deal said it was close to $30 million for a stake above 20 percent.

Somewhat akin to a startup accelerator, Science is attempting to quickly create and scale a number of promising companies in a variety of areas, and has launched 13 so far.

Among the Santa Monica, Calif., tech studio’s recent efforts: Dollar Shave Club, a subscription-based products company aimed at men; Ellie, which sells high-end activewear for women; and Wittlebee, a clothes club for kids.

Hearst Ventures is operated by Hearst’s Entertainment and Syndication unit, which is run by Scott Sassa and George Kliavkoff. Kliavkoff will join Science’s board of directors.

“It’s clear to us that, while we have these brands that resonate with consumers, we think there are some learnings we can get from these guys that are hard to get in a big company,” said Sassa. “Being able to be nimble with insight and guidance is important for us.”

Kliavkoff also noted that this was a way to get immediate ownership in a range of promising companies. “We are writing one check and will have an immediate stake in more than a dozen great startups,” he said. “[Science] has been very thoughtful in starting companies in smart areas.”

In a statement, Hearst CEO Frank Bennack said: “Hearst is continually looking for smart investments that bring value and intelligence to the company — our investment in Science does both. We’re excited to partner with Science to continue its trajectory of success, gain meaningful industry knowledge and utilize Science’s platforms for current and future Hearst investments.”

Though quieter than most, Hearst Ventures have made many successful investments over 15 years, including in Netscape and Broadcast.com. More recently, it has funded such companies as Brightcove and Pandora, as well as HootSuite and BuzzFeed.

Science was founded in late 2011 — with $10 million funding from big-name investors including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners and White Star Capital. Its CEO is well-regarded entrepreneur Mike Jones, who was most recently CEO of Myspace. Prior to Myspace, he had started and sold Userplane to AOL in 2006. In addition, well-known entrepreneur Peter Pham is chief business officer at Science.

“I am very proud of work that the Science team has accomplished since launching,” said Jones, in a quick interview tonight (short enough so that his wife would not get angry at me for ruining Valentine’s Day). “I am extremely excited about opportunities for Science companies going forward.”

More to come, but here is the very clever viral video that Dollar Shave Club did on its launch:

It’s nothing like your grandpa’s Safari. RockMelt for iPad caters to the shifting attitudes we have in the way we experience content on tablets. The result is an attractive mish-mash of an interface design that borrows heavily from Facebook’s Timeline, Pinterest’s tiles and Twitter’s ever-flowing stream.

As CEO Eric Vishria puts it: “It is unquestionably a really different beast. And that is a good thing.”

Philosophically, RockMelt as a product builds on top of the two predominant schools of thought in how we browse the Web today. Google champions intent-based search — type in a word, receive endless pages of links. Social surfing, the other school, posits that our friends are better referrers of new content than any algorithm. While still nascent, the meteoric rise of Facebook and Twitter, and their ability to deliver massive traffic around the Web, give the theory legs.

RockMelt exists somewhere in the space between the two. First launched in 2010, it’s a browser like Chrome or Firefox but with deeply integrated social features. Navigating the Web, the idea goes, shouldn’t rely on either philosophy entirely, but incorporate the best of both worlds.

As browsing has changed over the past two years, we’ve shifted on other fronts as well. We’re moving from desktops to smartphones. From text to visuals, from the static to the stream.

Confused? Here’s an example: Don’t expect a browser window defined by the blank search bar up top. Open the app and integrate it with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and you’re presented with a never-ending stream of squares and rectangles of different stories, populated by the people you’re connected to. It’s sort of like a portal site, only it is one curated by the folks whose views you (presumably) care about.

The reasoning here: First, the mobile browser market is clogged with competitors. Dolphin, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Chrome — each one offers similar functionality, comes in a similar layout, all battling for the same slice of the mobile browser marketshare. RockMelt’s drastically different appearance, according to co-founder (and ex-Netscape veep) Tim Howes, makes it stand out among its contemporaries.

Second, consider the medium. We don’t use tablets in the same manner as we do our desktops. IPads are seen primarily as consumption-first devices, amenable to displaying products and content in easily swipe-able, fast-scrolling ways. There’s a reason sites like Fab.com and The Fancy have such high rates of purchasing through tablets.

So RockMelt for iPad takes our habit and works with it, presenting stories in pop-out panes that make content look more attractive.

“The thing about the Web is that it’s vast,” Vishria told me. “But it’s dirty.” RockMelt tries to solve the problem, as Vishria puts it, of combining the expansive nature of the Web with the beauty and richness of an app. Hence the new presentation.

Third, there’s the social component. Along with Facebook and Twitter integration, RockMelt builds another social layer into the browser itself. You can follow others who use the application, and the app will suggest more stories to you based on what they’re sharing. Moreover, you’re able to comment, share and add an array of “Like”-type emotions to each article (sort of like Buzzfeed’s “LOL” or “WTF” subcategories). The idea here is, not only will content circulate externally via Facebook and Twitter sharing, but internally via RockMelt’s additional social layer.

I’ve played with the application for the past two weeks, using it both with and without some of the social components. I’ll say this: It is attractive. It is fast. And to be frank, the initial feeling was jarring. When I imagine using a browser, I expect to experience the Web in a certain way, navigating my usual haunts via search bar, going to Facebook or Twitter only on occasion.

With RockMelt’s app, I feel like I’m browsing shelves in a store. I haven’t decided quite yet if that’s a good thing or bad thing.

Is this something I could come back to repeatedly? Is this too much of a shock to the system that I’m used to, the standby of the white search bar, the blank page?

Vishria believes that the process of discovery — the neat, pretty way content is wrapped up in little packages and presented to the user — will be what draws us in. Browsing and exploration will be what keeps us there. And to be fair, the search bar is still there — it’s just not the focal point.

Obviously the jury’s out on this — at least until the app has been in the wild for a few months or so.

To get a better sense of the product, check out RockMelt’s commercial below (complete with Honey Badger commentary).

There are seven billion people in this world and only 1.2 billion computers — but close to six billion cellphones. That makes the commercialization ability and growth potential for the mobile Internet massively greater than that of the PC-based Internet. China, the world’s biggest Internet market, recently surpassed the U.S. in smartphone activation, and the mobile browser is once again coming to the forefront. Here’s why.

In emerging markets such as China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, the mobile browser is a critical channel that connects people to the Internet in ways that the PC browser never did. For many people, it is their only connection point to the Internet — take Indonesia, for example, where linking its thousands of islands by a fixed nationwide network was prohibitively expensive, so they prioritized the build-out of a mobile network.

Since cellphones are much cheaper than computers, and the mobile Internet is much more accessible than fixed-line Internet in emerging markets, users purchase their first cellphones much earlier than their first computers, which sets user habits to surf the Web through cellphones.

In fact, Internet traffic flow on mobile devices surpassed that of the PC in India in May of this year, and the number of mobile Internet users overtook that of the PC in China just a month later.

The graph above is slide 18 from Mary Meeker’s 2012 Internet Trends presentation

In addition to user habit, technological advancement has contributed to the widespread use of the mobile Internet. For example, cloud computing has made mobile browsing work where bandwidth and mobile devices’ computing power are lacking. Before, in many parts of the world, browsing the Web through a cellphone with its native browser was extremely inconvenient and slow. Opening a Web page took almost a minute — intolerable to most users, particularly those accustomed to surfing on a PC. It was also ridiculously expensive. For example, opening a 2MB Web page in China (the typical size of a homepage for popular Chinese Internet portals), would cost 60 RMB, or almost $10. With cloud computing, data can be compressed by 80 percent or more, offering much faster and affordable Web surfing.

With the bandwidth issue easing and mobile devices becoming more capable, the cloud computing technology approach makes mobile browsing accessible to a much larger worldwide population, and gives users an overall improved mobile Internet experience.

Mobile Apps vs. the Browser

People in the industry have made sweeping generalizations like “The Web is dead.” Yes, apps are important, but they will never replace browsers. Internet surfing has gone has through three stages: the first was browser-centered (Netscape), the second was client app-centered (Apple). With Web surfing on cellphones, particularly in emerging countries, the third stage is back to being browser-centered. Here’s why:

• Security. This is a serious issue on cellphones. Installing an app means opening up a myriad of ports, which is like punching holes in a wall. Cellphones are closely connected to a user’s identity and financial information, which attracts thieves. The browser has been created with a high level of security; the browser sandboxes the Web apps running on it, hence providing an extra level of security over apps.
• Service. What users really want is the functionality that an app provides — not the app itself. With the Internet browser becoming more capable, Flash-based games can run on a browser, as can videos. For a long time, people used dedicated video software, but with YouTube, people have become accustomed to watching videos on a browser — and may not need a video player at all. The apps are still there, of course, but they’re morphing into Web apps.
• Standardization. Today we need to develop for different platforms like Android, iOS and Symbian. This takes a tremendous amount of resources from developers, and users are reluctant and annoyed with having to update their apps all the time. But for a Web app, it’s “develop once, run on multiple platforms.”

What’s Next for the Browser

By nature, the browser is a user’s access point to the Internet. Software companies such as Netscape and Microsoft went against nature by developing products as isolated pieces of software. Both Apple and Google are innovation leaders in the Internet industry, and serve as great examples for newcomers. The lesson learned from Netscape and Microsoft is that we should not view the browser simply as a single software tool; instead, it should be treated as an Internet service platform. Google knows this with its platform, and tries to fulfill the needs of vastly different users by enabling them to customize their browsers with plugins and Web apps.

Users turn to the browser for three reasons: Information gathering, entertainment and daily life enhancement. The capabilities browser companies provide must match those service areas, like personalized navigation. Smart technologies can now adjust picture and text size, provide voice control, offer different reading modes or change delivery priorities based on the network environment.

Browser companies gain customers and market share with industry-leading performance, but that is far from enough to build a service platform. To build a global ecosystem of users, there also needs to be a strong business-building component, like account management and billing services, or platforms developed specifically for game use. Dedicated operations teams need to conduct research in market dynamics and actively monitor user feedback to drive timely updates that satisfy the ever-changing needs of users.

Only by focusing on the diverse needs of users wherever they reside can we fully realize the value of the Internet browser. The time is now for the tech industry to take more of a global view of what that means.

Yongfu Yu is the chairman and CEO of UCWeb, whose mission is to provide a better mobile Internet experience to billions of users around the world. Earlier in his career, he was a VP at Legend Capital. Yu graduated from Nankai University in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and minor in computer science.

What was your favorite TV show as a kid?
As a teenager — “I, Claudius.” Derek Jacobi was my favorite actor for years. That’s how I got the idea for my oldest son’s name.

What qualities do you like in a person?
Integrity, intelligence, humor, openness.

What qualities do you dislike?
Any dishonesty, even of the white lie variety, and too much “the world revolves around me.”

Name one thing you will regret never having done (if you never do it).
Spending time with many grandchildren.

What’s the single most important issue in the world today?
Lack of education and opportunity for women in the third world.

Do you still buy CDs or rent DVDs?
Yes, particularly Netflix-mailed DVDs, as the selection is larger than download.

What would you be doing if you were not in your current job?
Before I decided to go into business I wanted to be in the foreign service.

What is your greatest achievement to date?
My children — they are great people. I look forward to seeing how they contribute to their world.

iPhone, Android or BlackBerry?
Blackberry from 2003-2008, then iPhone.

If you could meet any historical or fictional person, who would it be?
Albert Einstein.

What site/app do you check first when you wake up?
Email.

What was the last thing you fixed?
I’m our home IT manager — the last thing I fixed was getting the wireless working in my husband’s office despite our 1920s home being all lath-and-plaster walls.

What was your first computer?
An ATT PC 6300.

What was your biggest mistake?
I wish I had moved our family abroad for a year so the kids could have gone to school in a foreign country and learned the language.

Do you have a dog or cat or other pet?
No — I prefer to focus on people rather than animals.

What’s your favorite mode of transportation?
For pleasure, I most enjoy hiking/walking.

What was the last book you read?
“Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War” by Nathaniel Philbrick.

If you could have any superpower, what would you choose?
Teleportation — my family lives all over the country — I would love to be able to see them instantly.

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
A large popcorn at the movie theatre.

What was your biggest most recent purchase?
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100.

Whom do you idolize?
Nobody. I don’t believe in putting anyone on such a high pedestal. We’re all human.

What do you drive/ride?
A 2002 Lexus SC430.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I wish I had a better singing voice.

Who was your biggest influence growing up?
Of course my parents — accomplished physicians, parents, grandparents and community members. I was particularly influenced by my maternal grandfather in terms of the values he shared with me and practiced himself.

Describe an ideal day.
Be on vacation visiting a new place — some exotic city or place in nature. I’m with my entire family and we’re walking and exploring and seeing new things all day. Then we have dinner together, then a concert.

It was one of those moments. I picked up the paper and said, “That’s it.”

– Mary Meeker, on picking up the New York Times on May 7, 1994, and reading a story about a new start-up called Mosaic Communications (which later became Netscape)

Andreessen (pictured from a legendary Time Magazine cover on which he appeared in the late 1990s) was the first speaker today at Fortune Magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference being held in a very rainy — but still beautiful — Aspen, Colo. Asked by interviewer Andy Serwer what he’s excited about right now, Andreessen looked back.

“It feels like a lot of the work we put into building the PC industry and the Internet and now the smartphone industry, a lot of that work got us to the point where we have the Internet in everyone’s hands,” he said. “It seems like now the game is really beginning, and we’re going to see what the great killer apps and the great Internet franchise businesses are that are going to be built. That was the conversation that everyone was having in 1999. We were all just early. Back then there were only 50 million people using the Internet versus two billion, and now and we’re on our way to five billion smartphones. Now we have the chance to build the businesses that we thought we were going to build in 1999.”

Asked about Andreessen Horowitz’s huge investment last week in GitHub, he referred to his op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about how software is eating the world and described GitHub as “software eats software development.” Another recent investment in Solum he described as “software eats the soil sampling business.”

From there he pivoted to an argument that the consumer electronics industry is coming back to the U.S. Yes, it’s true, he says, that products like iPhones and tablets get assembled in China, but they often include components made in the U.S. and run software that more often than not was designed in the U.S. “You have to ask where the profits go, and they really go to the U.S. The assembly part is really an arbitrage of labor and transport costs.”

And while Andreessen Horowitz has tended to invest more heavily in software plays, it does have a few bets on hardware. Lytro, which demoed at last year’s AsiaD conference, and Jawbone are two examples.

Andreessen said the firm has made an investment in a third hardware company that he declined to name. “We’ve recently made a stealthy investment that we can’t talk about, but hopefully next year everyone will get to take one home to the kids.”

That’s a side component of the $1 billion patent sale that AOL and Microsoft announced this morning. As part of the transaction, AOL announced that it was selling off “stock of an AOL subsidiary” at a loss, in a move that’s supposed to reduce its overall tax bill.

AOL didn’t disclose the name of that subsidiary in its press release, but a person familiar with the transaction has clued me in: It’s Netscape.

Microsoft will buy the underlying patents for the old browser, but AOL will hang on to the brand and the related Netscape businesses, which make up a grab bag of stuff these days: An ISP, a URL, a brand name, etc.

All of which probably makes sense on someone’s ledger books. But the transaction may still make a few heads spin, at least for people who remember Internet history and/or have access to Wikipedia.

And though the immediate question over whether or not HP would ultimately keep the platform or sell it to someone else is now answered, it was clear from talking with Whitman and Andreessen that there are still a lot of issues to sort out. There are questions about business models, how to work with outside developers, hardware manufacturers, and even over how many people will keep their jobs.

It’s also notable that Andreessen was on hand because of his history with open source projects. As the creator of the Netscape Web browser, Andreessen was there for that company’s much-remembered IPO, its acquisition by AOL, and the transformation of the Netscape browser into an open source project now called Mozilla, which produces the popular browser Firefox.

My first question was about what kind of contribution — both financial and otherwise — HP is prepared to make to this new open source project.

AllThingsD: Meg, do you have any thoughts on how much you’re going to contribute to this webOS effort in terms of money and people at this point?

Whitman: I won’t give you a dollar number but I will tell you that it will be a substantial software investment but it will not break the bank at HP. This is a wonderful asset, actually, but what I was telling employees this morning is you’re a start-up now. You’re a start-up with a number of people, 750,000 installed devices out there, and with your first venture capitalist, and that’s HP. And let’s go figure out how to change the world out there.

The thought that it’s now a start-up makes me want to turn to you, Marc, and ask, what do you think of that?

Andreessen: I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved in a number of what I think have turned out to be very successful open sourcing projects that are a lot like this. And of course the big one that I was in the middle of was the transition from Netscape to Mozilla, which is not a perfect analogy but there are a lot of similarities and that just turned out marvelously well. And then obviously Linux has been a huge transformative force in the industry in the last 10 years, and both Linux as an open source project and Red Hat as a business have been spectacular. So we live in a world now where open source now, unlike 10 or 15 years ago, is mainstream, it’s widely accepted, it’s widely adopted, it’s trusted, enterprises are willing to bet on it, hardware companies are willing to bet on it, and chip companies build it into their plants from day one. So I think we have a real opportunity to have something really special happen.

Meg, in looking back to before your time as CEO when there was a plan to have webOS on printers and all the consumer PCs. Will there be any changes to those plans?

Whitman: I think we’ve got to walk before we run here. And let’s see what form webOS takes. In 2012 as you know we’re bringing two Windows 8 tablets to the market, we’re excited about that, we’re going to be working with them [Microsoft] constructively, but there may be an opportunity in 2013 to think of a different device, maybe come back to tablets. Let’s just see how it goes, but obviously HP would be one of the likely suspect hardware manufacturers for webOS.

So you’re not closing the door entirely to hardware down the road, just not right away?

Whitman: In all likelihood, not in 2012. The 2012 road map is already done.

One thing that comes to mind is that, based on our reporting, there may be headcount reductions in webOS at some point. Can you give us any clarity on that?

Whitman: I can’t. We have released no numbers on that and the reason is we don’t know. I’d tell you if I knew, but we don’t know. We’ve got to get a business plan, a product road map, a business model that we think will work, and decide how we’re going to engage with other hardware manufacturers, how we’re going to engage the open source community and that will determine ultimately the types and numbers of people.

There are a lot of things to like about Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, who works by day as a lecturer focusing on strategic philanthropy at Stanford University, and also is the founder and chairman of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and the founder of SV2, the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund.

But my recent favorite was when — before being interviewed with her husband, well-known tech legend and now powerful VC Marc Andreessen, about her new book, “Giving 2.0: Transform Your Giving and Our World,” at a big fancy dinner honoring them — she called the Netscape creator her “trophy husband.”

That was what you might call a good one.

Actually, there are a lot more weighty, serious good ones to take note of in the book, which was recently released, in which Arrillaga-Andreessen tries to find new ways to think about giving.

Interestingly, given her spouse, the answers are not all about digital solutions, and do not require being a gazillionaire geek, either.

Here’s a video interview I did with Arrillaga-Andreessen — who hails from a prominent Silicon Valley family, and was inspired by her parents to focus on philanthropy — talking about the book, and where the sector is going:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111115/laura-arrillaga-andreessen-talks-about-giving-2-0/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111102/dialing-up-20-years-of-gadget-reviews/ http://allthingsd.com/20111102/dialing-up-20-years-of-gadget-reviews/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 01:05:52 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=139783 I began writing these Personal Technology columns 20 years ago, in October 1991, with the aim of reviewing computers and other digital products for average, mainstream users. The first line of my first column was: “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it’s not your fault.”

Consumer technology has come a long way since that day. Digital gadgets—then too often designed by techies for techies—have become essential to our lives, and much easier to use, even if we still need the Geek Squad and the Genius Bar more than we should. And the pace of change has been mind-boggling.

In 1991, most consumer computers didn’t have built-in audio beyond just the ability to beep. Most lacked any way to communicate with the outside world—even via a slow, dial-up modem. The Internet wasn’t available to most people. Search engines and social networks didn’t exist.

Mobile phones were huge bricks. Digital cameras for consumers cost a fortune and took monochrome pictures. Digital music players and video recorders, e-readers and tablets were nowhere to be found.

So, this week, I decided to take a look back at some of the game-changing products that appeared in this column over the past two decades and propelled us from that primitive landscape to today’s interconnected digital world. This list of milestones is just a sampling; yours might differ. Also, since I write for average consumers, the list is weighted toward consumer products, not gadgets for geeks or corporate use.

I’ll also write about what is yet to come—areas that could use big gains.

The pocket-size phone: In January of 1992, I declared Motorola’s MicroTac Lite to be the first mobile phone you could carry easily in a pocket. It was the first to weigh under half a pound and was “only” an inch thick—about triple the thickness of a slim smartphone today. It cost between $1,500 and $2,500.

Getting America Online: In May of 1992, I rated an obscure online service, America Online, as the best. It was much smaller than its chief rivals at the time, CompuServe and Prodigy, but its use of a standard-looking graphical interface made it more attractive.

Faster modems: Though it would be hardly recognized today, the external dial-up modem was a crucial device in connecting computers around the world. In June 1993, I recommended a popular $200 model, the Sportster, from a company called U.S. Robotics, that had gotten to the amazing speed of 14,400 bits per second. Comparing it with a broadband connection now is like comparing a bicycle to a locomotive.

Color digital camera: In 1994, the Apple QuickTake 100 could store up to 32 shots for a mere $700.

Mossberg on ‘What’s Next?’

So where do the opportunities lie for the biggest technology gains? Here are possibilities:

Better batteries. The entire digital universe would be revolutionized by batteries that could last more than a day in heavy use.

The ‘natural user interface.’ The graphical user interface is being replaced by the multitouch interface. Microsoft’s Kinect device for controlling its Xbox game console shows there is a future in controlling all devices via smart cameras that recognize faces and gestures.

Easier, integrated TVs. Many people watch videos from the Internet on their TVs, but the process is clumsy. Somebody needs to make the process unified and simple.

Flexible displays. These have been promised for years, but never made practical. Imagine being able to unfold, or roll out a large display screen.

Whatever is in store for consumer digital technology, I look forward to covering it.

Polished Windows: Apple’s Macintosh had popularized the graphical user interface starting in 1984. A year later came a crude version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system. But, in 1995, Microsoft caught up via Windows 95, cementing the victory of the graphical interface.

The Web browser: The Internet had been around a long time, but in 1993 I noted it was still hard for average consumers to access. That changed with the spread of the World Wide Web and Web browser. In January 1996, I hailed Netscape as the champion browser over Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Power in your hand: In March of 1996, I called the new Palm Pilot the first hand-held computer “I can imagine incorporating into my daily life.” Where the Apple Newton and others had failed, little Palm created the device that would make Personal Digital Assistants popular and pave the way for the smartphone.

The slim laptop: In 1998, Sony set the standard for usable, thin and light laptops with its Vaio 505, a $2,000 wonder that came with a decent keyboard. It inspired many others over the years.

The simple computer: Also in 1998, beleaguered Apple shook up the PC market with the iMac, a colorful, speedy, one-piece desktop computer that set up in a matter of minutes and was ready to surf the Internet. I called it “the coolest looking desktop personal computer I’ve ever used.”

DVR: The next year, I reviewed two digital video recorders, including TiVo, which went on to become a verb, and to revolutionize TV viewing.

Google: In 2001, I recommended Google as not only the best search engine on the Web, but “the most useful site.”

The iPod: Later that same year, Apple changed the music industry, and its own fortunes, with the $400 iPod, which held 1,000 songs in a device the size of a deck of cards. It blew away all competitors.

The prototype smartphone: Also in 2001, Handspring, a company run by the founders of Palm, rolled out the Treo 180, which I declared the first decent hybrid of a PDA and phone. Later Treos sold by Palm, competed against the BlackBerry, which got its own phone functionality, but was mainly a corporate tool.

Legal music: In 2003, Apple introduced the iTunes music store, which gave consumers an easy, reasonably priced path to buying music, and again changed the industry.

The iPhone: In June of 2007, Apple upended the cellphone business with the iPhone, which put a powerful hand-held computer in your palm, and used innovative “multitouch” finger gestures as its interface.

The e-book: There had been many failed attempts at an e-reader, but in late 2007, Amazon offered the Kindle, which finally made books digital.

Android: In October 2008, T-Mobile and Google released the G1, the first smartphone to use the Android operating system—the principal competitor to the iPhone.

The iPad: Many companies had tried and failed to create a popular tablet computer, but in April 2010, Apple succeeded with the iPad, which has spawned a host of apps, a gaggle of competitors and a new category of digital device.

View the slideshow

Key Columns

• The first column: “How to Stop Worrying And Get the Most From Your Computer” (Oct. 17, 1991)
• The case for the Mac: “PC Shoppers May Find It’s Wise to Develop A Taste for Apples” (Aug. 6, 1992)
• Explaining the Internet: “Internet, a Vast Link That Isn’t Missing, Can Be Hard to Find” (May 13, 1993)
• The case for an “information appliance”: “The Info Appliance Is a Good Idea Waiting to Happen” (June 13, 1996)
• Six years in: “Computers Remain Complex, But Good Changes Are Coming” (Oct. 23, 1997)
• The 10th anniversary: “Consumer Technologies Make Startling Advances in Decade” (Oct. 25, 2001)
• Exposing “smart tags”: “Microsoft Will Abandon Controversial Smart Tags” (June 28, 2001)
• Condemning tracking cookies: “Despite Others’ Claims, Tracking Cookies Fit My Spyware Definition” (July 14, 2005)
• How the multitouch interface is taking over: “Multitouch Interface Is Starting to Spread Among New Devices” (Jan. 31, 2008)
• Apple fumbles MobileMe: “Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed To Be Reliable” (July 24, 2008)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111102/dialing-up-20-years-of-gadget-reviews/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110907/yahoos-next-ceo-maybe-snoop-dogg-ya-digg/ http://allthingsd.com/20110907/yahoos-next-ceo-maybe-snoop-dogg-ya-digg/#comments Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:00:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=117602

The firing of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz leaves open one of the bigger and more difficult jobs in tech — one that has taken its toll on many.

Nonetheless, rapper Snoop Dogg stepped right up to the Twitter plate yesterday, as soon as news broke of the ouster.

Tweeted Snoop Dogg:

“Im takn over as tha CEO of Yahoo. Need sum of tha Snoop Dogg content ya digg. Nuff Said.”

Not nearly nuff!

Thus, while the Yahoo board has yet to begin a search, I have already been hard at work on selecting the next CEO.

(Last time, the company took none of my suggestions, but after the most recent result, the directors might want to pay mind!)

Sources said Yahoo is looking for an experienced Internet type, either from inside or outside the company.

“Yahoo has put its flag in the ground as a digital media company with a technology base,” said one source. “The job requires big buckets of expertise and needs someone who will grow the company.”

Here I go with the outsiders:

Peter Chernin: The former News Corp. exec has been eyeing Yahoo for a possible takeover with other investors. Both Yahoo and I had picked him when co-founder Jerry Yang stepped down as CEO almost three years ago, and he had declined the offer. This time, perhaps a big chunk of the company and total autonomy would work, even if making a hit like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is more fun.

Sheryl Sandberg: The COO of Facebook is sort of the anti-Bartz, with a smooth and efficient persona, and she is an experienced tech exec. But the former Google exec is at a place of growth at the social networking site, and is unlikely to want to leave the big show, especially since a blockbuster IPO is looming.

Jason Kilar: The Hulu CEO is in the midst of the process of selling the premium video service, with Yahoo as a bidder. While he has some tense relations with the studios, Kilar is top notch in his dedication to consumer products, and has a lot of experience from his stint at Amazon, too.

Dan Rosensweig: Currently CEO of IPO-headed Chegg textbook rental service, the former Yahoo exec never got a chance to run the company as its top leader. Well-connected and still well-liked by the troops at Yahoo, it still would be pretty hard for him to go home again.

Dave Goldberg: Sure, he’s married to Sandberg (see above), but the savvy CEO of polling phenom SurveyMonkey is one of the sharpest thinkers in Silicon Valley. He sold his music company to Yahoo many years ago and has a strong background in consumer online services.

Jon Miller: The chief digital exec at News Corp. almost got the CEO spot years ago when Carl Icahn was agitating for change at Yahoo, before Time Warner blocked him via a noncompete. With the mishegas at the media giant, and dwindling digital businesses there, it might be a good escape hatch for Miller.

Susan Wojcicki: The accomplished Google exec, who runs all its ad products, has the kind of calm, cool, collected persona that Yahoo could use right about now. The search giant was founded in her garage, and she has been a key part of its success since then. Wojcicki is also an understated class act in hey-look-at-me Silicon Valley.

Todd Bradley: The Hewlett-Packard exec just got blindsided when the company kicked webOS to the curb. While he is in line to run a possible spinoff of the device business, Bradley might also want to jump out of the frying pan into the fire.

Mike McCue: The CEO of Flipboard would certainly energize Yahoo with his intense focus on quality and consumer delight. The news app start-up could be a good addition to Yahoo, and McCue, the former Netscape and Microsoft exec who is well-liked in the Internet scene, would be, too.

Joanne Bradford: The former Yahoo advertising head bolted Bartz’s regime early on to run revenue for Demand Media. Well-liked in the ad business, she also knows where all the bodies are buried at Yahoo. Since ads and media are key at the company, she’d make an interesting choice.

Yusuf Mehdi: The Microsoft online exec would also be a left-field candidate to run Yahoo, given his even-keeled personality and longtime experience in the sector. And, though pricey, Mehdi’s impact on Bing search has been important. But he’s also been involved in the software giant’s lackluster ad and search partnership and still has not turned around the situation at MSN.

Kevin Johnson: The former Microsoft exec and current CEO of Juniper was once slated to be the CEO of Yahoo, had Microsoft managed to win the company in its hostile takeover attempt. In fact, Johnson was the architect of the idea of Yahoo running the media and Microsoft running the tech.

Tim Armstrong: Well, he might have been a good candidate before the downward slide of AOL and a recent series of questionable judgments. If Armstrong can’t keep a loud tech blogger in line, it’s not clear he can wrangle the Yahoo beast.

And here’s the insider scoop:

Ross Levinsohn: The former News Corp. exec is running the Americas for Yahoo, which puts him in charge of the company’s key businesses. But he’s still struggling to turn the ad business around, and how well he does that could be a major determinant of his success. But fantastic hair!

Blake Irving: The former Microsoft exec has an amiable nature and is well-liked at Yahoo, but he still needs to show that the company can ship some innovative products, and quickly. Like Livestand, the news reader, which is muchly late.

David Kenny: The Yahoo board member is now president of Akamai, which might preclude him from the job. But the well-regarded exec — he’s a snazzy dresser, too — ran one of the Internet’s top digital ad agencies and now has tech chops from the content delivery network.

Memo to Yahoo board: I have a million more ideas, from former Viacom exec Tom Freston to former Yahoo board member Eric Hippeau. Or why not bring back a passel of former Yahoos to advise, such as former CEO Terry Semel or former president Sue Decker?

Or Oprah! I hear Winfrey will be in Silicon Valley later this week, and she has a lot more free time now.

Like Snoop Dogg, she would fo shizzle be the bomb to cover.

Related posts

• As Yahoo Continues to Wobble, Investors (And Board) Eye Options
• Exclusive: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Tim Morse Named Interim CEO
• Carol Bartz’s Last F%*& You — Now Aimed at Yahoo Board
• Yahoo’s Statement on Bartz Ouster
• Wall Street Likes Bartz’s Firing — Yahoo Stock Spikes on News
• My Picks for Yahoo’s Next CEO — Maybe Snoop Dogg, Ya Digg?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110907/yahoos-next-ceo-maybe-snoop-dogg-ya-digg/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110829/kleiner-plays-catch-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20110829/kleiner-plays-catch-up/#comments Mon, 29 Aug 2011 11:00:35 +0000 Pui-Wing Tam and Geoffrey A. Fowler http://allthingsd.com/?p=114633 Venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led the late-1990s dot-com frenzy with investments in Netscape Communications Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and, later, Google Inc.

But after spreading its bets to clean technology — and missing out on early-stage investments in some of the hottest new Internet companies — the firm is scrambling to grab a leadership role in the latest Web boom.

That was evident at a June event in San Francisco, where the firm hosted a packed room of entrepreneurs. At the front of the room, Kleiner venture capitalist Bing Gordon spent an hour onstage espousing his theory of “gamification” — that is, how start-ups can benefit from using online gaming techniques — to the gathering.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110829/kleiner-plays-catch-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110719/when-employees-misinterpret-managers/ http://allthingsd.com/20110719/when-employees-misinterpret-managers/#comments Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:43:30 +0000 Ben Horowitz http://allthingsd.com/?p=100218 “Time is money, so I went and bought a Rolex.”
– Wiz Khalifa

When I ran Opsware, we had the non-linear quarter problem also known affectionately as the hockey stick. The hockey stick refers to the shape of the revenue graph over the course of a quarter. Our hockey stick was so bad that one quarter, we booked 90 percent of our new bookings on the last day of the quarter. Sales patterns like this make it difficult to plan the business and are particularly harrowing when you are, as we were, a public company.

Naturally, I was determined to straighten out the hockey stick and bring some sanity to the business. I designed an incentive for sales people to close deals in the first two months of the quarter by issuing bonuses for deals in those months. As a result, the next quarter became slightly more linear, and slightly smaller than anticipated — deals just moved from the third month to the first two of the following quarter.

When I ran a large engineering group at Netscape, I measured one of our engineering products on schedule, quality and features. The team shipped a product with all the required features, on time and with very few bugs. Unfortunately, the product was mediocre, because none of the features were that great.

When I was at HP, we ran all the businesses by the numbers with extremely strict revenue and margin targets. Some divisions made their numbers, but did so by underfunding R&D. They dramatically weakened their long-term competitive position and set themselves up for future disaster.

In all three cases, managers got what we asked for, but not what we wanted. How does this happen? Let’s take a look.

Flattening out the hockey stick: The wrong goal

In retrospect, I should never have asked the team to flatten the quarters. If that is what I wanted, I had to be willing to — at least temporarily — accept smaller quarters. We had a fixed number of sales people who were maximizing the size of each quarter. In order to deliver linear quarters, they had to modify their behavior and adjust their priorities. Unfortunately, I liked the old priority of maximizing revenue better.

Given the situation, I was actually pretty lucky. Sun Tzu in his classic work “The Art of War” warns that giving the team a task that it cannot possibly perform is called crippling the army. In my case, I did not cripple the team, but I screwed up my priorities. The right thing to do would have been to make the hard decision up front. What was more important (a) maximizing each quarter or (b) increasing predictability? The instruction only made sense if the answer was (b).

Over-focusing on the numbers

In the second example, I managed the team to a set of numbers that did not fully capture what I wanted. I wanted a great product that customers would love with high quality and on time — in that order.

Unfortunately, the metrics that I set did not capture those priorities. At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them every staff meeting, my people intensely focused on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result.

Interestingly, I see this same problem play out in many consumer Internet start-ups. I often see teams who maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why?

For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overfocus their teams on their retention metrics, but do not spend enough time getting into intense depth on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product.

It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.

Managing strictly by numbers is like painting by numbers

At HP, we were highly focused on results. As with the situation at Netscape, some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable and some will not. If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important goals. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers — it’s strictly for amateurs.

At HP, the company wanted high earnings now and in the future. By focusing entirely on the numbers, HP got them now by sacrificing the future.

Note that there were many numbers as well as more qualitative goals that would have helped:

• Was our competitive win rate increasing or declining?
• Was customer satisfaction rising or falling?
• What did our own engineers think of the products?

By managing the organization as though it were a black box, some divisions at HP optimized the present at the expense of their downstream competitiveness. The company rewarded managers for achieving short-term objectives in a manner that was bad for the company. It would have been better to take into account the white box qualitative and quantitative issues and reward only those managers that hit their numbers while readying the company for a strong future.

Closing thought

In the examples above, it is easy to see that there are many ways to be misinterpreted. To get things right, you must recognize that anything that you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors. Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create. Otherwise, the side-effect behaviors may be worse than the original situation.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110719/when-employees-misinterpret-managers/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110601/apps-or-browsers-yes-says-marc-andreesen/ http://allthingsd.com/20110601/apps-or-browsers-yes-says-marc-andreesen/#comments Thu, 02 Jun 2011 05:21:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=81795 Can’t ask for a better authority on the browser vs. app debate than Mr. Netscape himself. Spoiler alert: Marc Andreessen says that everyone’s right–but that in the long run, it’s going to be browsers, again.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110601/apps-or-browsers-yes-says-marc-andreesen/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110510/boomtown-will-have-what-marc-andreessen-is-having-investors-splashy-win-in-microsoft-skype-hookup/ http://allthingsd.com/20110510/boomtown-will-have-what-marc-andreessen-is-having-investors-splashy-win-in-microsoft-skype-hookup/#comments Tue, 10 May 2011 07:28:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=43758

When a group of powerful investors, including Silver Lake Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, waded into the mess at Skype less than two years ago with a $1.9 billion cash investment for a big chunk of the company, it was–how can BoomTown put this delicately–a hot mess.

With lawsuits flying over intellectual property violations, turmoil in the relationship with its eBay owners and increasing competitive pressures, you get the mess part.

But there was also the hot, because of so much potential in the fast-growing Internet telephony and video communications company.

Hotter today, it seems.

Microsoft–in what would be its most aggressive acquisition by the software giant in the digital space–is poised to announce that it will buy Skype, forking over $8.5 billion all in, which includes the assumption of the Luxembourg-based company’s debt.

Sources said that the splashy deal is now done and will be announced early this morning to much fanfare.

That is a far cry from 2009.

In fact, at the time that his newly hatched venture firm made its biggest deal yet, Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen was all sunshine and ponies about the just-settled tense legal situation.

As I wrote after talking to him then:

But, as Andreessen told BoomTown in a phone interview about the aggressive legal tactics of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis that resulted in them finally seizing a stake in the Internet telephony giant by suing him and many other Silicon Valley players:

“We did not take it personally. It’s a clean sheet of paper.”

Well, it is actually a torn, stained and very worn out piece of paper, due to all the various machinations, but bygones!

Andreessen–who knows a thing or two about legal tussles, if you recall Netscape-Microsoft–said the real point is that it is time to focus on the business of Skype rather than fighting over who controls Skype.

“It’s really good to have everyone lined up and rowing in the same direction. We have to capitalize on the opportunity, because Skype is poised for a new wave of growth,” said Andreessen. “They have an amazing head of steam, because the logical way for voice and video communications to be conducted will be over the Web.”

It turns out he was right, given the haul that Andreesen Horowitz and other investors will be getting now.

The price tag essentially tripled the $2.75 billion valuation then. In fact, a year before, eBay had actually written down the value of Skype to $1.9 billion.

That means for its $65 million–it was reported then the Andresseen Horowitz stake was $50 million, but it was more–it will nail nearly $200 million.

That could be much more depending on what percentage of the deal the VC firm actually got.

Andreessen Horowitz’s stake is joined with Silver Lake, as well as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

In total, they own about 56 percent of Skype, worth about $4.5 billion.

Another 30 percent is owned by eBay, which seems to have done a little better than even-steven for all its trouble with Skype.

It will get $2.4 billion now, having paid out about $3 billion back in 2005 for Skype. It got the $1.9 billion in the latest investor deal in 2009.

The big winners are Zennström and Friis, who keep on selling the same company to corporate moneybags over and over, while also suing anyone who looks at them crossways.

The Skype co-founders–who started out as Internet scofflaws with their Kazaa music-stealing service–had a 14 percent share, giving them $1.1 billion.

Like I said–not that I actually invest in any of these tech companies I cover–I’ll have what the lawsuit twins and Andreessen are having.

Back in 2009, in fact, he laid it out with regards to Skype pretty presciently.

“One of our investing mottos is that we invest in strength, not lack of weakness,” he said. “The question is how big is the opportunity.”

Big, apparently, now that Microsoft is footing the bill.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110510/boomtown-will-have-what-marc-andreessen-is-having-investors-splashy-win-in-microsoft-skype-hookup/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110414/exclusive-flipboard-confirms-50-million-funding-at-200-million-valuation/ http://allthingsd.com/20110414/exclusive-flipboard-confirms-50-million-funding-at-200-million-valuation/#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:23:12 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42652

Late last month, BoomTown posted about a huge venture funding effort by the high-profile and even more highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, Flipboard.

Today, its co-founder and CEO Mike McCue confirmed the $50 million round at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, in a wide-ranging interview at the start-up’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” he said. “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

The bulk of the new second round of funding–Flipboard had previously raised $10.5 million–came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

Insight’s Jerry Murdock said in an interview that he was excited about the idea of “social endorsement” that Flipboard was pioneering.

“We back great entrepreneurs and Flipboard is that and also in an obviously unique position to solve a problem of media consumption in the digital age,” he said. “The sky is the limit. Or more precisely it is the best environment to consume curated real-time content for Twitter and Facebook, because of the user experience and social endorsement integration with the content.”

Insight is also an investor in Twitter.

Also stepping up in the new Flipboard round is Comcast’s venture arm, as well as previous investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Twitter co-founder and product guru Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

“From a Comcast perspective, we’re intrigued with Mike and what he’s doing with content aggregation,” said Amy Banse, Comcast Interactive Capital’s new head. “We think we can learn from him and he from us.”

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

The elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In its current offering, there are pull-quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on a social networking or microblogging site.

McCue said the new giant pile of cash will be used to increase its 32-person staff to about 50, international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development on more platforms.

The next in the arena will be the iPhone version of Flipboard, said McCue, followed by one for the Google Android mobile operating system eventually.

Left unsaid, of course, was the need for funding to fight the likelihood of increased competition in the hot space for delivering both professional and social content to consumers on a wide range of devices.

Rivals are varied, such as Silicon Valley’s most adorable news reader start-up Pulse and also Zite, a news reader which was recently sued for copyright infringement by a group of major publishers.

There are bigger potential players, such as Google, which is trying to find various ways to move into the social space.

In fact, said several sources, Google and others have made acquisition approaches to Flipboard, which has instead opted for raising more funding and staying independent for now.

McCue declined to talk about that, but did note that he is not surprised by publisher interest, especially of the worried and wary kind, in the arena.

“Anyone not respectful of others’ content is going to get in that kind of trouble,” he said, noting Flipboard has struck deals with 17 big publishers so far, including this morning’s announcement about a partnership with Oprah Winfrey’s and Discovery’s OWN cable network. “There is not one half to this equation.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

McCue said advertising will be the key to Flipboard’s business plan in the future, although it’s not clear if the company will ever sell advertising itself.

Rather, it will partner with publishers seeking better distribution in the explosive tablet and smartphone market, where Flipboard has been gaining traction quickly.

But until that is sorted out, there is now $50 million more in the Flipboard kitty to figure it all out.

“With this funding, we can grow at the right pace and have a lot of flexibility to get the product right,” said McCue. “And, that’s the most important thing.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110414/exclusive-flipboard-confirms-50-million-funding-at-200-million-valuation/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110331/exclusive-global-marketing-vp-allison-johnson-leaving-apple/ http://allthingsd.com/20110331/exclusive-global-marketing-vp-allison-johnson-leaving-apple/#comments Thu, 31 Mar 2011 10:00:45 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=59543

Allison Johnson, who has served as Apple’s vice president of worldwide marketing communications since 2005, is leaving the company, according to several sources.

The reason?

To co-found a new marketing and communications firm with another Silicon Valley communications luminary, Former Facebook PR exec Brandee Barker.

Sources said Johnson will begin work at the venture after negotiating her departure from Apple, which is likely to come sometime before the summer.

Beyond that, the details are slim. The new firm doesn’t yet have a name or a client list, although presumably answers site Quora and social buying service Groupon, two of Barker’s current clients, would sign on with the venture.

There’s no dearth of marketing and communications talent at Apple, but Johnson’s exit from the company is still notable.

She’s a seasoned and respected executive who came to Apple from Hewlett-Packard, where she managed public relations during the brutal proxy battle over HP’s acquisition of Compaq Computer. A former co-worker there once described her as “prime minister” of HP.

At Apple, Johnson has managed global advertising for some of the company’s most revolutionary products and the iconic ads for them. Those ads have been created by TBWA\Chiat\Day, which plays a powerful role at Apple.

Of course, this key part of Apple’s business is watched over closely by CEO Steve Jobs, to whom Johnson has reported directly.

In any case, Johnson’s departure is a loss for Apple, but quite a get for Barker and her new venture and a boon for Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs.

In typical form, Barker said “no comment” when asked about the news. And an Apple spokeswoman declined to comment as well.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110331/exclusive-global-marketing-vp-allison-johnson-leaving-apple/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20110214/kleiner-perkins-invests-in-facebook-at-52-billion-valuation/ http://allthingsd.com/20110214/kleiner-perkins-invests-in-facebook-at-52-billion-valuation/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:13:25 +0000 Scott Austin http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=36340 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Facebook are together at last.

VentureWire reports today that Kleiner is taking a small stake in Facebook by buying as much as $38 million of stock from other shareholders at a valuation of $52 billion–a bit higher than the $50 billion price tag that Goldman Sachs and DST Global set when they recently invested $1.5 billion.

Kleiner, which made billions of dollars during the dot-com boom from early bets on Google, Amazon.com and Netscape, missed out on Facebook in 2005, choosing instead to stick with another social-networking site it sunk money into in 2003, Friendster. Since then, Kleiner has had to play catch-up to restore its reputation as one of the premier Internet investors.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110214/kleiner-perkins-invests-in-facebook-at-52-billion-valuation/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110122/why-andreessen-horowitz-models-itself-after-a-hollywood-talent-agency/ http://allthingsd.com/20110122/why-andreessen-horowitz-models-itself-after-a-hollywood-talent-agency/#comments Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:02:31 +0000 Deborah Gage http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=35451 Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have raised nearly a billion dollars in the 18 months since they founded their Silicon Valley venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, even though they’ve never been venture capitalists before.

How’d they do it? The obvious reason is that the two partners are incredibly successful entrepreneurs – Andreessen co-founded web-browser pioneer Netscape Communications Corp., hiring Horowitz as one of the company’s first product managers, and the pair founded software company Opsware Inc., selling it to Hewlett-Packard Co. for $1.6 billion. As a result, entrepreneurs trust their expertise, so they get access to the best deals.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110122/why-andreessen-horowitz-models-itself-after-a-hollywood-talent-agency/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110121/backstage-at-the-onions-new-tv-show/ http://allthingsd.com/20110121/backstage-at-the-onions-new-tv-show/#comments Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:05:56 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28426 One day, maybe not that far off, we won’t distinguish between video we watch on the Web and the stuff we see on TV. But for now, TV is still the big leagues–the place you go if you want the biggest stage, and the most money.

Which might explain why the Onion has not one but two shows on TV right now, both based on the great stuff the satirists are already doing on their Web video site.

There’s SportsDome on Comedy Central, a beat-for-beat replication of ESPN’s SportsCenter. And starting tonight on IFC, there’s the Onion News Network, an uncanny amalgamation of News Corp.’s Fox News, Time Warner’s CNN, Comcast’s MSNBC et al.

Here’s a representative sample:

Snowy Conditions Proving Hazardous For Nation’s Idiots

I think it’s pretty great, but I’m a 100 percent biased observer, since I’ve been friends with some of the Onion crew for forever–think pre-Netscape. If you want a less objective take on the new show, you can check out this glowing New York Times review, or this measured one from Time.

Last week, I stopped by a promo for the show–a real/fake press conference starring the fake newsreaders, in character, moderated by Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, who appeared as himself–and then sat down for a chat with Carol Kolb, a longtime Onion writer (and a pal–see above).

We talked in a makeshift green room set up at the very serious Paley Center for Media, and midway through, our conversation gets interrupted by the show’s cast. But that just makes it more real, right? If your coworkers aren’t cool with a few f-bombs, then this isn’t safe for work:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110121/backstage-at-the-onions-new-tv-show/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101216/q-why-no-twitter-board-seat-for-kleiners-john-doerr-a-his-google-board-seat-plus-is-the-star-vc-looking-at-spotify-and-groupon-next/ http://allthingsd.com/20101216/q-why-no-twitter-board-seat-for-kleiners-john-doerr-a-his-google-board-seat-plus-is-the-star-vc-looking-at-spotify-and-groupon-next/#comments Thu, 16 Dec 2010 13:14:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38683

Yesterday, star venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins forked over $150 million in funding to Twitter.

At at $3.7 billion valuation, that got him a big chunk of the San Francisco microblogging site.

But what it didn’t get him was a seat on the board of Twitter, which many figured he would be given for after handing over so much moolah.

According to sources familiar with the situation, that’s due to Doerr’s being a director on another board: Google.

Several sources who BoomTown spoke to, after breaking news of the massive funding, said that his being on the board of the search giant was seen as too much of a conflict of interest.

A conflict because Google has plans to wade deeply into the social space. And also, of course, because it is the No. 1 potential acquirer of Twitter, as the Silicon Valley company seeks to gather more tools to fight its latest rival, Facebook.

Doerr has very deep ties at Google, having been on its board since mid-1999.

He got that seat, along with Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz, after he ponied up a critical $25 million equity round for Google in June of that year.

Interestingly, no other Kleiner partner was named to a Twitter board seat either.

But, some speculate, it might make sense for Mary Meeker–who just joined Kleiner to head up digital investing efforts, after a long-time stint as a Wall Street analyst for Morgan Stanley–to eventually become a Twitter director.

Meeker has, of course, deep IPO and M&A experience.

And, frankly, after adding Flipboard’s Mike McCue and former DoubleClick exec David Rosenblatt yesterday and former Netscape exec Peter Currie recently to its all-boy board band, a woman director might be a good idea to consider.

Other directors at Twitter include Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, Co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo.

I reached out to Doerr for a comment, but he has not yet replied; Twitter declined to comment.

Even more interesting to consider is what Kleiner will invest in next after this mega-funding, given how aggressively many sources said Doerr had pushed to lead the Twitter round.

And, in fact, sources said that Kleiner is looking closely at new funding rounds for both the Spotify music streaming service and Groupon, the social buying start-up that recently decided to turn down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and an earlier $3 billion one from Yahoo.

Groupon is now seeking more funds to remain independent and hold onto its lead in the fast-growing local discounting market, sources said.

(Bloomberg also reported on Groupon’s new fundraising efforts, although it was written about after it turned down the Google offer.)

And Spotify, which is hugely popular outside the U.S., is trying to enter this market, but needs more funding to expand and perhaps strike better deals with music labels.

Both are the just the kind of companies Doerr has targeted in what looks like a serious effort to compete with other firms–especially Andreessen Horowitz and Russia’s DST Global.

They have garnered the heat Kleiner used to have, largely by backing more of the top entrepreneurs recently.

Doerr has already put money into social gaming phenom Zynga and also started an sFund for social-focused investments.

Add Twitter to the pile and you can see where this is headed: Except for the board seat, John Doerr will no longer be denied.

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