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Never mind the slew of economic concerns -- hell, make that catastrophic concerns -- hanging over the world. Silicon Valley is riding high. And no venture firm is leading the charge harder than Andreessen Horowitz.

The company started three years ago this month by longtime business partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (first Netscape, then LoudCloud and Opsware). They've since raised $2.7 billion and have backed 150 companies, including newly-public Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, as well as hot private companies such as Pinterest and AirBnb. Earlier this month, Andreessen Horowitz made a $100 million bet on GitHub, a … Read more

Google has acquired e-mail software startup Sparrow in a move that brings its team to work on Google's Gmail product.

Sparrow's chief executive Dom Leca announced the news on the company's site and Twitter account this morning, as well as in an e-mail to existing Sparrow users.

Leca says that the company will continue to make Sparrow available, and keep it up and running with support, however the two versions of the product will not gain any new features.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Citing sources, The Verge suggests the deal came in at &… Read more

Zite, the app designed to get you reading more of what you like, has moved to the Windows Phone 7 platform.

Yeah, you read that right.

While it may seem strange to expand the popular CNN-owned news app to a platform branded with the stigma of being the uncool kid at the mobile handset party, Zite CEO Mark Johnson sees it as a way to move into a market that Microsoft -- and Nokia -- are working hard to build.

"I think there's some real merit to what Microsoft is doing in the marketplace right now. Microsoft isn'… Read more

Groupiter is perhaps the simplest workflow product I have ever seen. It's brilliant, instantly understandable, and looks (based on the demo I saw at a 500 Startups event) highly usable.

I am not yet convinced it is a long-term business, but the product concept is spot-on.

Here's what it does: When you save a file in Dropbox, Groupiter pops up and asks you to enter a comment about the file. Other people you're sharing with can see the comments attached to versions of the files. That's it.

Groupiter CEO Chris Dyball says that since we now … Read more

"What are the odds," Highlight CEO Paul Davison asks, "that you'll have a connection with some random person sitting next to you in a coffee shop?"

He says that he's done the math and knows the answer: "The odds are pretty good." Especially with his app.

Highlight, which had its big coming-out party at SxSW this year, is all about helping people make connections based on common interests, activities, or social proximity. Pegged as the big deal app of SxSW before the show kicked off, it ended up not having … Read more

The gig marketplace Zaarly has launched a clever extension to its business: Zaarly Anywhere. This new service lets users who see a project on a Web site or blog quickly post a request for proposal to the Zaarly user base to get that project done for themselves.

For example, if you see a construction project on Ikea Hackers that you'd like to see also in your own home, but you lack the time or wherewithal do do it yourself, now you can click a Zaarly button on the post about the project to Zaarly's community. Or if you … Read more

Yesterday I posted a review of the news aggregator News360, which I like as a product but fear for as a business. I feel this way about a lot of content aggregation plays.

Zite, for example, was acquired by CNN, otherwise who knows where it'd be. And then there's the heavy-hitter, Flipboard: can $60 million in funding make this business work? If not, it's overpriced for acquisition.

But there is one professional content aggregator that is not just a great product, but a nice business, born of cooperation between rivals. It's also possibly the only way … Read more

Facebook knows who you are, who your friends are, what you like, and where you live. And still the ads suck. Google, on the other hand, gives you ads based only on what you're searching on, and its ads rock.

Can Google's ad performance be brought to Facebook and other social sites? Jeffrey Davitz is trying to do that with his startup, Solariat. The idea, he says, "is to take the Google model of responding to intention and place it in the context of social networks."

Davitz confirms that Facebook can help an advertiser find very … Read more

Last August I covered the news-reading iPad app, News360. I liked the tech, but after I reviewed it, I never used it again. That was as I predicted. It just didn't grab me.

The new one does, though. It shows how much difference a good, clever interface can make for a product.

As before, News360 pores through your declared interests as well as what you post for others to see on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, and what you save for yourself on Evernote. From this analysis it comes up with a bunch of channels and topics within the channels … Read more