Valleywag
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Posts Tagged “
Netscape
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hires
Andreessen to stack Facebook board further in Zuckerberg's favor
Netscape cofounder and propagator of porn social networks Marc Andreessen will join Facebook's board of directors, Kara Swisher reports. Andreessen will join current board members Accel Partners Jim Breyer, Clarium Capital's Peter Thiel, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Andreessen is the chairman of Ning, a company which sells tools for rolling your own social network. If your mom has an excellent visual memory, she will probably remembers him for appearing on the cover of Time magazine without shoes on. You can tell her that he dresses better now, but only slightly. Why Andreessen, and not a proxy for new investors Microsoft or Li Ka-Shing? More »
aol
The three letters Marc Andreessen can't bear to type
Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, left bored by running a social-networking startup, has much time on his hands to write excellent analyses of the tech industry. His blog post on why Microsoft-Yahoo might fall apart seems prescient in the wake of that deal's failure. But there's one odd thing about his writeup. Read this passage:Big mergers and acquisitions, particularly among public companies, particularly among public companies that have large shares of their respective markets, can take a year or more between the day the deal is signed and announced, to the day the deal is actually executed and closed. During that year plus, all kinds of things can happen that could cause the deal to fall apart.More »
deals
Marc Andreessen's hidden hostility to takeovers
Ning founder Marc Andreessen is already on the record about Microsoft's proposed takeover of Yahoo: He thinks it will likely go through, and turn out to be a good deal. It's a remarkably sanguine take for someone who saw Netscape bought and destroyed by AOL. In a thorough analysis for which he dragooned two corporate lawyers, Andreessen elaborates: Yahoo has few defenses, aside from a poison pill, and Microsoft will likely succeed. For all its thoroughness, the analysis is less interesting for what it says about Microsoft-Yahoo than for what it says about Andreessen. More »
marc andreessen
Why Marc Andreessen should stick to his keyboard
Every time Marc Andreessen steps away from his desk, disaster abounds. For the father of the Netscape browser, the creator of the Web as we know it, the legendary barefoot geek from the magazine covers, expectations are way too high. And so the disappointments pile up. The Andreessen of today is not the Marc we remember. His pate has gone from mophead to Klingon; his wardrobe, inevitably a tracksuit with leather shoes, is an utter disaster. And when he speaks, he says absolutely nothing. John Battelle, the slickster salesman-interviewer of bubbles past and present, tried to get some fighting words out of Andreessen on stage at Web 2.0 Expo. He failed, utterly, epicly. Andreessen praised Bill Gates, said competing with Microsoft was interesting, described Microsoft-Yahoo as "a good deal." More »
9:40 AM on Fri Apr 25 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,788 views,
12 comments
Latest by n/a: @broozier: Males shouldn't be jealous that's a female trait Watch you mad 'cause you push dimes and he sell weight? more »
party report
Mozilla's 10th anniversary made Valleywag feel old
Mozilla's 10th anniversary party at 111 Minna last night felt a little like a high school reunion for the kids who didn't go to their high school reunion. The Mozilla Foundation, maker of the Firefox browser, feigned poverty by renting just half the gallery space and serving up crudités and issuing one drink ticket per guest, only later splurging by opening up the bar. There was some awkward dancing to Soft Cell's "Tainted Love," old jean jackets embroidered with the Netscape logo, a gargantuan chocolate cake and a photo booth. Many of the oldsters who were around when CSS was just a dream and Ajax was still used to scrub toilets also traded reminiscences of Burning Man, tech society's annual prom. Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker earned part of her $500,000 salary by giving a brief speech. And sign-toter Frank Chu showed up, uninvited but always welcome. But the talk of the party was the man who wasn't there. More »
lou montulli
Early Netscape engineer admits to owning the Mozilla M5
Yesterday we speculated that a BMW M5 with a "Mozilla" vanity plate might belong to Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker, who could afford the $80,000 car with her $500,000-a-year salary. We were wrong. "I will admit to it being mine," Lou Montulli, one of Netscape's founding engineers, commented on the post. On his personal site, Montulli admits to more. More »
geek love
Aussie swimsuit model is Netscape founder's new new fling
63-year-old Netscape cofounder Jim Clark began dating 27-year-old Australian swimsuit model Kristy Hinze almost three years ago, she told Australian Women's Weekly . They kept the relationship quiet until now, a few months before she begins hosting the Australian version of Project Runway. Along with Netscape, Clark founded Silicon Graphics and Healtheon. Clark's latest venture, a condo project in Miami, was an unqualified bust. But it hasn't damaged Clark's net worth, reported to be around $1.1 billion. More »
propeller
Mahalo.com developer Chris Finke blew up a bad screenshot of Jason Calacanis AOL's Netscape Propeller redesign. But we need more pixels to make sure something's actually changed. (Photo by dvanvliet)
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AOL's Digg competitor gets a redesign
Mahalo.com developer Chris Finke blew up a bad screenshot of 
mitch kapor
The man who didn't let AOL kill Firefox
Tomorrow, Netscape is officially dead: AOL is ending support for the venerable browser. But its offspring, Firefox, is thriving. Both Netscape and Firefox had several brushes with death. In 1998, "Microsoft was driving their monster truck after us and they were about to pin us to the wall," former Netscape software engineer Brendan Eich recently told the San Francisco Chronicle. Before that could happen, however, Netscape execs James Barksdale, Eric Hahn, Mike Homer and cofounder Marc Andreessen decided to open the browser's source code to the community. Behold, Mozilla. But the organization wasn't independent of Netscape owner AOL yet. And here's a shocker, AOL executives nearly killed Mozilla through neglect. So who saved the baby?More »
netscape
AOL discontinues a browser no one uses
The surprise in AOL discontinuing the Netscape browser isn't that the Netscape browser is gone. It's that it was still alive, and that anyone was still working on it. From the moment AOL bought Netscape in 1998 this was a foregone conclusion. AOL was interested in Netscape's Web traffic, not its browser; it continued using Microsoft's internet Explorer in its online service even after the acquisition. That it took AOL nine years to finally kill off the Netscape browser speaks to the Internet giant's fatal sluggishness. Not to mention its unresponsiveness to customers. Netscape has long been nothing but a memory. With its antiquated and buggy browser gone, it can now be a fond one.
bad ideas
Netscape cofounder fails at real estate
Jim Clark is finding real estate a tougher game than the new new things he started at Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon. The New York Times reports that five years into a Miami real estate venture, Clark and partner Tom Jermoluk might not be able to repay a $110 million construction loan.More »
angel investors
Ram Shriram made a mint, invests in Mint
Ram Shriram is No. 271 on the Forbes Billionaires list. He's a veteran of Netscape and Amazon, and an investor in StumbleUpon and Google. He owes his place on the list to the latter, where, as an angel investor, he had more shares than anyone besides the company's founders at the time of its IPO. Now he acts as a "sherpa" to young companies, helping guide them to success. He also participated in financial-planning startup Mint's latest round of financing. Mint CEO Aaron Patzer shares a story about Shriram's investing habits after the jump. If you want this guy as your startup sherpa, take notes. More »
The new "old" Netscape, AOL's clone of My Yahoo, is rumored to go live at the classic netscape.com domain tomorrow, September 19th. The old "new" Netscape, Jason Calacanis's clone of Digg, is already accessible at propeller.com.
netscape
AOL spins its Propeller
AOL's Digg clone, formerly branded as Netscape and already pronounced dead, will be rebranded as Propeller. The announcement came from Tom Drapeau, the head of AOL's Netscape division since Jason Calacanis's brief tenure. Muhammed Saleem, a Propeller editor né Netscape Scout, thinks technology sites should be eating their hats for the grave predictions. Maybe the site would have had a chance at life and competed with Digg, the social news site, if it had launched with original branding instead of misusing the name of the already-dead Netscape. But AOL angered and turned off a loyal community when, under Calacanis, it killed the original Netscape and, after Calacanis's jealous pursuit of Kevin Rose, its own Digg clone — even if the sites ignominiously remain on life support and AOL refuses to accept that its time to pull the plug.
netscape
Calacanis's Digg clone finally dead?
Tom Drapeau, the current head of Netscape at AOL, is finally admitting that Jason Calacanis's jealous attempt to clone Kevin Rose's Digg was a failure. Sort of. Calacanis, who left AOL earlier this year to launch Mahalo, an also-ran Web directory, had hoped to persuade Netscape's loyal but dwindling base of users to embrace Digg's social-news model, where users submit headlines and vote on them to determine their ranking on the site. Drapeau confirms what TechCrunch predicted weeks ago — after initially denying it: Users do not want the Netscape brand associated with Calacanis's social-news experiment. But Drapeau continues to stubbornly insist that Netscapers "remain committed to delivering a compelling social news experience for our users." They just don't know when the site will be available, what it will be called, or what they'll do with it. More »
obituary
Netscape's name lives on -- but death would be better
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's rumor that Netscape would be killed off has proven off the mark. Not because several Netscapers have surfaced to deny the rumors, but because you can't kill something that's already dead. There may be a community that, out of laziness or inertia, still visits its grave daily. But a society of denial-ridden necrophiliacs hardly makes for a compelling audience. When AOL purchased Netscape in 1998, it did everything imaginable to keep the brand alive — and everything imaginable to kill it. It forced the worst features of AOL onto Netscape and migrated the best features of Netscape to AOL — not that it helped either. And Jason Calacanis's brief tenure at AOL? That dirt-grubbing graverobber just made things worse, and then left for greener pastures. More »
feuds
Jason Calacanis and Kevin Rose, interviewed together on the second episode of the GigaOm Show? Of course, the "fur would fly" — or so hosts Om Malik and Joyce Kim promised. Despite recent photographic evidence of a peace accord, Calacanis did, after all, try to undercut Kevin Rose's Digg social-news site with a revamped Netscape during his short tenure at AOL. So, did the claws come out?
More »
Jason Calacanis-Kevin Rose catfight devolves into pussyfest
Jason Calacanis and Kevin Rose, interviewed together on the second episode of the GigaOm Show? Of course, the "fur would fly" — or so hosts Om Malik and Joyce Kim promised. Despite recent photographic evidence of a peace accord, Calacanis did, after all, try to undercut Kevin Rose's Digg social-news site with a revamped Netscape during his short tenure at AOL. So, did the claws come out?
More »
