Andreessen

The 3D printing movement is well under way -- albeit with some hype built in -- and Shapeways, a marketplace where people can design, create, and sell their own products, is leading the charge.

Shapeways, sometimes known as the Etsy for 3D printing, now has 10,000 "shop owners" -- people who have designed products, from iPhone cases to jewelry and shoes, that they print out and sell via Shapeways. The New York-based company is building out its recently opened 3D printing factory in the Queens borough of New York City, where its printers are cranking out roughly … Read more

Queen Elizabeth has honored five engineers who created the Internet and World Wide Web in her first Prize for Engineering.

Louis Pouzin, Robert Kahn, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and Marc Andreessen will share an award of 1 million pounds. They are credited for helping spawn the Internet, (Sorry, Al Gore. You didn't quite make the cut.), which the prize site said is "an engineering achievement that has changed the direction of the world."

"The Internet and WWW led to a communications revolution of unprecedented power and impact," the site said.

Pouzin, Kahn, and Cerf made … Read more

The one thing everyone wants to know about Christian Gheorghe's life is the one thing he won't talk about.

In Silicon Valley, where the top talent at the hottest companies -- the Zuckerbergs, the Brins, the Cooks, and so forth -- are household names and paparazzi bait, Gheorghe's name isn't in play. Though he is a Silicon Valley CEO, his company, Tidemark, makes enterprise-focused performance and financial management applications, certainly not the sexiest of products.

But to a category of people who matter a lot in Valley -- the VCs -- Gheorghe is a bona-fide hero, … Read more

Famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen believes there is one major difference between Tim Cook and Steve Jobs: a desire for market share.

Speaking last night at an event in New York City, Andreessen said that Jobs' "single playbook" was to "invent a new product category, start with 100 percent market share, and then every day that goes by, lose market share until some terminal outcome."

Andreessen pointed to the Macintosh computer, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad as examples of that strategy. He noted -- correctly so -- that while Apple might own … Read more

If you think your tax bill was bad, try being Marc Andreessen.

The venture capitalist and Facebook board member disclosed today in an SEC filing that he sold more than 2.3 million shares of Facebook at prices ranging from $22.85 to $23.83 per share. All told, the sales added up to more than $54.1 million.

The selling is not a reflection of his belief in Facebook, however. Rather, he's using the money to pay taxes that he owes from his restricted stock units, which were recently converted into actual shares. Facebook said in September that … Read more

Andreessen Horowitz, the famed venture-capital firm run by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, is not selling the Facebook shares it acquired through direct investment.

Reports surfaced yesterday saying that Andreessen Horowitz, one of the earliest and biggest investors in Facebook, was offloading some shares it directly acquired through investment in the social network following a mandatory lockup period. However, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing has revealed that only Marc Andreessen himself has personally offloaded some shares. According to TechCrunch, which was first to report on the news, a spokesperson from Andreessen's firm said that the sales will only … Read more

Silicon Valley leaders are hoping that immigration reforms known as "Startup Act 2.0," which have been stalled in the U.S. Congress, will fare better under President Obama's second term.

"I think the main issue the tech industry should focus on is Startup Act 2.0," Andreessen Horowitz's Marc Andreessen told CNET yesterday. "That would be amazing not just for Silicon Valley but for American job creation -- since the companies that are founded by skilled immigrants create so many jobs for Americans."

So far, at least, the left coast's … Read more

As soon as President Obama offered the phrase "horses and bayonets" during his final debate with Mitt Romney last month, the Twitterverse lit up. It wasn't long before we learned that the quip turned out to be the most tweeted remark of the final presidential debate, good for some 105,767 tweets per minute.

The media duly took note of the occasion. In fact, each time there's big news -- Hurricane Sandy or a presidential debate -- the media quickly inform us how the event is playing out on social media. Indeed, we've come to … Read more

Few industries are under greater assault by technology than higher education -- and few companies are doing more to upend the way people learn the world over than Udacity, the young Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that's brought computer science classes online and watched hundreds of thousands of students enroll. For single classes.

The startup is led by Sebastian Thrun, a former Google VP and fellow who led the development of Google's self-driving car and Google Glasses. And those are just some of his accomplishments. It was while he was a professor at Stanford University that he stumbled … Read more