Even in the midst of a tough investing environment, Silicon Valley legend and serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen (pictured here) and his longtime investing partner, Ben Horowitz, have completed the raising of a new venture fund, according to numerous sources close to the situation, and it is oversubscribed.

Sources said the fund–which was nicknamed “Project A” but is actually called Andreessen Horowitz–will be $300 million. It is $50 million over the $250 million he and Horowitz had planned.

Several major institutional investors–from universities, for example–have invested large chunks of up to $20 million or more, while a spate of Silicon Valley luminaries has put in amounts of $1 million or less.

The quick completion of the fund raising, in the midst of a national econalypse, is a good sign perhaps for the forward-leaning culture of tech, which has seen some pullback by VCs over the last six months.

Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape–the iconic browser company that was key to introducing the modern Internet to consumers–and a lot of other start-ups, announced on the “Charlie Rose” television show in February that he was creating the new fund.

“For the first time in my life, I am crossing over into the dark side,” said Andreessen at the time (see the video below).

Although he gave few specific details about the fund in that interview, Andreessen essentially said he was simply putting a structure around his own active angel investing, which has included start-ups like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and many more.

Andreessen, who is on the board of Facebook and an adviser to Twitter, has turned into one the the digital sector’s most influential mandarins for innovative start-ups.

His new effort will focus on early-stage investments, he said in the interview with Rose, noting that “our claim to fame is, we’ve actually, you know, by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, we’ve done it, we’ve been on that side of the table for a long time; we know what it’s like.”

Andreessen said then that he and Horowitz had made 36 investments over the last three years of up to $200,000, but that his new firm will make up to $1 million bets on companies they decide to invest in.

Plus, he said then he would be patient: “Like with our new fund, if we fund a company today, we’re thinking about a return in seven to 10 years, so we can go through three or four or even five years of economic downturn, as long as, at some point, we come out the other end.”

Here is the video of Andreessen on the Rose show (he starts to talk about the new fund in the interview at around 18:33 minutes, again at 46:55 minutes and at the very end):

Legendary MTV Networks exec and co-founder John Sykes (pictured here in an interview on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” show) will replace Owen Van Natta as CEO of the controversial music-sharing site, Project Playlist.

He is a high-profile choice to take over for Van Natta, who was officially named CEO of MySpace this morning by News Corp. (NWS).

Van Natta, who also worked at Facebook, will remain an adviser to Playlist, which is based in Silicon Valley. It is not clear where Sykes will be located.

Sykes–who is on the Playlist board–was one of the original executives who launched the iconic music-focused cable channel 25 years ago, before leaving last year. He was also a key exec at both VH1 and Infinity Broadcasting.

He is well regarded in the music industry, an important criterion since Playlist has been dealing with legal attacks from some music labels. Settling with them will be key to the start-up’s survival.

Former AOL and MTV exec Bob Pittman, who is an investor in Playlist, worked closely with Sykes at the Viacom (VIA) unit.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Playlist Names Board Member and Veteran Media Executive
John Sykes as CEO

MTV Co-founder and Former VH-1 President Replaces Owen Van Natta

Palo Alto, Calif., April 24, 2009–Playlist, the leading social media network where over 43 million music fans discover, create and share playlists, announced today that Board Member and industry veteran John Sykes has joined the company as Chief Executive Officer. As a Co-founder of MTV, President of VH1, and CEO of Infinity Broadcasting, Sykes brings extensive operating experience and industry relationships to the company as it partners with the music industry to provide advertising, subscription and e-commerce services to music consumers.

Owen Van Natta will serve as an Advisor to Playlist.

“John was a pioneer of the MTV revolution that forever changed the music industry landscape by giving fans a whole new way to discover and enjoy music,” said Bob Zangrillo, Chairman of Playlist. “Playlist looks forward to leveraging John’s tremendous track record operating media businesses and deep relationships in the music industry as it builds out the world’s premier social media service.”

“Creating and sharing playlists has become a phenomenon in our culture. With over 43 million registered users, Playlist is the number one site where fans go to discover, share and enjoy their favorite music,” said John Sykes, CEO of Playlist. “Leveraging our newly forged partnerships with the music community, we can now offer consumers deep access to their music and provide the industry with powerful new revenue streams.”

Playlist, one of the fastest growing sites on the Internet, continues to establish partnerships with the entertainment industry in an effort to offer a comprehensive collection of content that can be discovered, shared and monetized at www.playlist.com.

Last night, well-known Internet entrepreneur Marc Andreessen appeared on the “Charlie Rose” television interview show, talking about the digital sector and unveiling the news that he is creating a new venture fund.

I had heard rumblings about Andreessen’s funding efforts earlier this week, with sources I talked to nicknaming it “Project A.”

Actually, Andreessen said the new firm is called Andreessen Horowitz (zzzz), because he is doing it with longtime investing partner Ben Horowitz.

“For the first time in my life, I am crossing over into the dark side,” said Andreessen.

Although he gave few specific details about the fund, Andreessen essentially said he was simply putting a structure around his own active angel investing, which has included start-ups like Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn and many more.

His new effort will focus on early-stage investments, he said, noting that “our claim to fame is, we’ve actually, you know, by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, we’ve done it, we’ve been on that side of the table for a long time; we know what it’s like.”

Adding that he and Horowitz had made 36 investments over the last three years of up to $200,000, Andreessen said his new firm will make up to $1 million bets on start-ups.

Of course, for most of the interview, Rose zeroed in on hot topics like Facebook, the social-networking site on whose board Andreessen serves.

The voluble tech star did his job, talking about how Facebook could turn on the spigot and make all sorts of money anytime it wants and about the recent controversy around its Terms of Service kerfuffle.

He also talked about the Andreessen-backed Ning social network service, the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, Twitter, why the New York Times irks him, Google (GOOG), the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle e-book reader and gaming.

Ironically, the Netscape co-founder and his Xbox from Microsoft (MSFT)–eek–“have a very close personal relationship.”

But Andreessen also told Rose a little bit about the new fund he is raising money for, for example, while discussing the economic meltdown.

Talking about the fact that innovation will survive, Andreessen said: “Like with our new fund, if we fund a company today, we’re thinking about a return in seven to 10 years, so we can go through three or four or even five years of economic downturn, as long as, at some point, we come out the other end.”

Here is the video of Andreessen on the show (he starts to talk about the new fund in the interview at around 18:33 minutes, again at 46:55 minutes and at the very end):

Ah, Michael Wolff! Always throwing stink bombs and making deliciously wackadoo declarations about the Internet.

This time, it’s in a dinner interview the author had with BusinessWeek’s media columnist Jon Fine recently.

Wolff (pictured here) slaps around the News Corp. (NWS) social-networking site MySpace with a series of his trash-buckling phrases, some of which are true and some a bit more of a stretch.

But he sure is entertaining!

One of Wolff’s more controversial moments:

“If you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.”

This is vintage Wolff, to make a big hissy-fit fuss at an opportune time.

Surprise! His latest book, a bio of media mogul Rupert Murdoch (who owns this site), titled “The Man Who Owns The News,” is coming out right about now.

And speaking of vintage, Wolff can be seen in the video below whacking away at the early Internet just over a decade ago, with me and Feed’s Steven Johnson in an appearance on the “Charlie Rose” television show.

It was the era of AOL’s dominance, with Yahoo (YHOO) as the comer and Web 1.0 in its fully overvalued glory.

“It’s craziness, it’s loco, it makes no sense,” said Wolff about the Internet, circa July 27, 1998.

His caustically funny book “Burn Rate” on his naughty early Internet adventures, wherein he was the only person not to get rich in Web 1.0, had just come out.

(And I had just come out with my book on the rise of AOL–the fall of AOL sequel came out in 2003.)

Later in the interview, Wolff could not help himself and makes a truly bad prediction: “I think the myth of the Internet is that it is going to come into everybody’s home.”

Oops, the Web is pretty much ubiquitous only 10 years later.

But Wolff does go on to make a lot of the same salient points he makes today about MySpace and the Web’s hot-today-gone-tomorrow ethos.

The video of our segment starts at the 30-minute mark.

Michael has not aged a day, but please, please excuse my shoulder pads and deeply unfortunate haircut (how did I ever get a date?):

Here is that video from MarketWatch about the joint interview PBS’s Charlie Rose did with John Chambers of Cisco and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, where they trotted out that old saw about coopetition.

In other words, how the tech giants might compete, but also interoperate for customers’ sake. Let’s say we keep this one near the top of the pile, just in case it turns out differently.

“The Newspaper Is Dead. Long Live the Newspaper.”

That’s a nice kicker at the end of an excellent essay on the shift in newspaper reading from Slate’s Jack Shafer (full disclosure–I once worked for him when I was but a wee lass).

Shafer’s not saying much new here: Guess what? People are increasingly getting their news on the Web and they like it that way!

But, as usual, he says it well:

Horrible as it may sound, on many days the newsprint front page tastes of already chewed gum.

“I’m not the average reader, but anecdotes convince me that the average reader is becoming more like me every day—reading tomorrow’s news today.”

And he has some good suggestions for the troublesome trend, too: more succinct stories; better use of graphics on heftier inside pages; and, of course, acceptance of inevitable change.

I would add: Pray fervently that the trend is not moving quite as fast as it actually is.

Go Ahead and Use That SUV and Feel Better–Not

OK, I will admit I have been somewhat dubious about these carbon-offset credits you can buy to balance out your energy consumption.

Now, I am even more disturbed after seeing this video about the topic, given that Michel Gelobter of the think tank Redefining Progress and founder of Climatecooler.com says some companies that can cause increased global warming are being planned, so we can pay them not to be created.

In the meantime, also read Valleywag Owen Thomas’s entirely on-point screed about the global warmingness of the techie-heavy Burning Man event, now taking place in the Nevada desert.

Confused?

Here’s the video:

Could Yahoo ever become a takeover target?

This kind of patently annoying answer from a CEO could certainly help fuel such a scenario–this time in an interview Microsoft head Steve Ballmer had yesterday with Charlie Rose:

Rose: Are you in talks to acquire Yahoo?
Ballmer: If I were, I wouldn’t say anything, and if I weren’t, I wouldn’t say anything.

Translation for those who don’t speak corporate hoo-ha: There were talks. They did not work out as yet. But we thought we could still keep Yahoo in play all by ourselves by being vague.

It’s a technique perfected, in this case, by the master of this particular deal-making game, Rupert Murdoch, who put an $8 billion value on his MySpace property by floating the idea of trading a 25% stake of Yahoo for MySpace in an earlier interview with Time magazine:

But as MySpace showed signs of reaching saturation, Murdoch began very preliminary, exploratory talks about trading the site for 25% or more of Yahoo. ‘Terry Semel was enthusiastic about it,’ he says of the then Yahoo CEO. ‘We were looking to see if it was a good idea. I wasn’t sure.’ ”

It is all very interesting in a top-level kind of way at this point, as I doubt new CEO Jerry Yang, who is ferreted away working on a master plan to fix Yahoo right now, has any intention of selling Yahoo before he is done with his top-to-bottom evaluation of the company, even if a sale is the right option in the end.

He might not have a choice, though, as a rival Web exec pointed out to me the other day, noting that the downturn in the stock market, helped by the continued speculation and goosing of the rumors of a Yahoo sale, could spell trouble for the Internet portal.

Why?

If the market continues to decline, bringing down the economy, even fast-growing online ad sales will surely take a hit. His theory went that if Yahoo has a weak quarter or two, its shares–already down at lows not seen for more than three years–could get sliced and diced further.

Some think Yahoo is currently not as much of a bargain at about $23 a share now, especially given its turnaround status. Still, its market value remains a lofty $31 billion.

But what if the price to own Yahoo–hit hard by economic forces it could not overcome, as it sought to heal itself–declined to $15 billion?

Corporate anti-takeover measures notwithstanding, of course, that would then make it a screaming buy for players like News Corp., Microsoft and even Google. And that leaves out more rapacious private equity funds, who would surely jump into a race to buy a company that still has gigantic traffic, enormous brand equity and a spate of terrific online properties.

Former analyst Henry Blodget had his own interesting take in a recent piece about the possible recessionary impact on both Google and Yahoo. While Google’s Bad and Ugly scenarios include flattened revenue and a huge drop in operating profits, Yahoo faces an even more dire landscape.

Writes Blodget:

For Yahoo, the situation is scarier, because the company is growing slowly even now. In our GOOD scenario, revenue growth slows to 5%, as do expenses. In this case, operating profit grows slightly. In our BAD scenario, revenue drops 5% and expenses stay flat, cutting the operating margin and operating profit nearly in half (this is perfectly plausible). In our UGLY scenario, revenue drops 20% and expenses stay flat–and suddenly the company loses $600 million a year.”

Although Blodget might be ramping up the volume a bit too much here, it’s always good to be mindful of the worst-case scenario.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.