Ning is a free social network customization building platform created by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini. The company recently announced that they will be rolling out an application platform for developers to build upon. The company launched Ning Apps to about 1.5 million social networks hosted by the service as of yesterday. Ning Apps is based on the Google OpenSocial platform. About 90 applications from a wide variety of services are available as of today.

Some of the applications include Hulu, Wordpress, PollDaddy, Twitter Tracker, Qik, and Tungle.me. These applications have different skins in order to match the look and feel of the social network that they are being installed on.

Ning raised $15 million back in July which gave them a valuation of $750 million. What the company’s exit strategy is… I don’t know.

About four years after eBay acquired Skype for about $4.1 billion, $2.6 billion of which was upfront cash, the company has decided to sell a big chunk of it it off to several investors.  Skype was valuated at $2.75 billion when eBay decided to sell 65% worth of the company to investors such as Silver Lake, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

eBay will receive about $1.9 billion cash when the deal is complete along with a $125 million note in principal from the buyers.  eBay itself will retain 35% in Skype.  The transaction is expected to be complete by the fourt quarter of this year.

“This is a great deal, unlocking both immediate and long-term value for eBay and tremendous potential for Skype,” stated eBay President and CEO John Donahoe in a press release. “We’ve acted decisively on a deal that delivers a high valuation, gives us significant cash up-front and lets us retain a meaningful minority stake with talented partners. Skype is a strong standalone business, but it does not have synergies with our e-commerce and online payments businesses. As a separate company, we believe that Skype will have the focus required to compete effectively in online voice and video communications and accelerate its growth momentum.”

Back in April, eBay said that they were planning on spinning Skype into its own brand and preparing a separate IPO for the VoIP company.  Now it is assumed these investors that took control of Skype will work together in preparing the IPO.  This gives eBay the ability to focus all of their energy on their own company and on PayPal.

How much money does Skype make?
In 2008, Skype itself made $551 million in revenue which was a 44% increase from the year before.  eBay’s total revenues for 2008 was $8.5 billion.

How many users does Skype have?
By EOY 2008, Skype had about 405 million users which was a 47% increase from the year before.

Several investors are considering making a bid on Skype, the voice-over-IP service owned by eBay.  eBay bought out Skype for about $4.1 billion in September 2005 but failed to find a real way to integrate the service into their system.

Some of the investors considering making a bid includes Andreesen Horowitz and Index Ventures.  Index Ventures was one of the early investors in Skype.  There is also rumored to be another multi-billion dollar private equity company involved according to TechCrunch.

At one point eBay was considering having Skype have their own IPO.  It is unclear whether the current Skype CEO Josh Silverman will still be involved if an acquisition does take place.  While Silverman was running Skype, the company grew to $551 million in revenue this year.  By 2011, eBay expects Skype to hit about $1 billion in revenues.

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis both started Skype together shortly after KaZaa.  If Skype gets acquired, then the private equity companies and investors would probably work towards an IPO.

Social network customization service Ning.com has raised $15 million in Series E funding.  This investment places Ning at a valuation of $750 million.  Last year Ning raised $60 million at a $500 million valuation.

Ning currently has about 29.3 million registered users and over 1 million social networks.  The company was founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini.  Andreessen recently launched his own venture firm with former partner Ben Horowitz.  The venture firm that was started by Andreessen is called Andreessen Horowitz.

“The growth at Ning has been massive in the last year and, combined with the quality of the team and seeing that kind of momentum, it worked out well for us both,” stated Lightspeed Venture Partner Managing Director and co-founder Ravi Mhatre.

[via AllThingsD]

Talking Points Memo is a politics blog that was founded by Josh Marshall in 2000 during the Florida Recount.   Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the new $300 million tech fund Andreessen Horowitz has invested some of his own personal money into TPM.  This round of funding is not substantial and is rumored to be between $500,000 and $1 million.  Given the low cost of operating a blog, this round of funding could keep the company running for quite some time.

Several other unknown angel investors participated in this round of funding as well. Last month Andreessen invested in Alley Insider, a blog network that focuses on technology, finance, politics, and celebrity news.

TPM previously kept the website running from advertising and three fundraising events.  The company has 11 employees and is profitable.  The website receives about 1.5 million unique monthly visitors and about 15 million page views.  One of the groundbreaking stories that gave TPM a lot of attention was when eight U.S. attorneys charged with political circumstances.

Last month Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have been able to raise $300 million in funding for their new venture capital firm called Andreessen Horowitz.  Yesterday Marc announced the launch of the VC firm on his personal blog.

The VC firm will have the ability to invest between $50,000 and $50 million in a company depending on the stage and opportunity.  The firm plans to aggressively invest in startups that will often times involve thousands of dollars.  Ben and Marc will be General Partners in the firm starting out.  In investments that involve $5 million or more, Ben or Marc will most likely join the Board of Directors.

Marc and Ben believe that the CEO of a company should be one of the founders.  The firm also believes that the product should be the heart of any technology company.  Most companies get built around the product.  The firm will focus on investments centered around consumer Internet, business Internet, mobile software, application software, networking, storage, etc.  The company will unlikely be involved in green and clean tech, space elevators, electric cars, or movie production studios.

[Horowitz: left, Andreessen: right]

Back in April it was rumored that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz was seeking $250 million for an early stage fund.  It turns out that the two have raised a bit more than that: $300 million.  Andreesen and Horowitz started a company together called OpsWare which sold to HP for $1.6 billion.  Before that Andreessen and Horowitz worked at AOL together.

The fund was nicknamed Project A, but now it is called Andreessen-Horowitz.  The fund was built through the support of several major institutional investors along with several universities.  Some of them have invested as high as $20 million each while others have put in $1 million or less.

Andreessen started Netscape and serves on the board for Facebook and eBay.  Andreessen is an adviser in Twitter and an angel investor in Facebook, Digg, and LinkedIn.  Both Andreessen and Horowitz invested in Qik together.

[via AllThingsD]

Earlier this week, I read an interesting piece from GigaOM about my favorite homepage Netvibes.com.  I depend heavily on Netvibes so I personally hope that this company succeeds.

The company has about $16 million in funding from Index Ventures, Accel Partners, Neil Rimer, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Chappaz, and Martin Varsavsky.

Last week Netvibes unleashed a new feature that allows users to build their own custom start pages.  Netvibes is able to make money by offering white-label and corporate versions of their service.

“We are on our way to being breakeven this year,” stated Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini. “We are focused on profitability this year.” That’s not bad, considering he is up against Google’s iGoogle platform.”  Netvibes receives about 3 million active visitors per month.

The company has made about a couple of million dollars in revenue this year.  The company plans on tripling sales by signing up several large customers.  The reason I found GigaOM’s post so interesting is because I did not know much about Netvibes’ revenue until now.  Based on these figures, if you depend on Netvibes as much as I do, you can remain confident that this service will be here in the long run.

[via GigaOM]

The Business Insider is a blog that recently relaunched under one brand.  The Business Insider was founded by Henry Blodget and this is the third round of funding.  Although Blodget never announced himself how much was raised, it is rumored to be around $5 million.

The participants in this round of funding is believed to be Allen & Co., Marc Andreessen, Jim Friedlich, and Matt Luckett.  Previous investors may have also participated.  The last round of funding was around July 2008.

It is not known what The Business Insider plans to do with this round of funding, but it is expected that they will be revamping their entertainment section.

[via paidContent]

[Horowitz]                                                                                       [Andreessen]

Marc Andreessen started a company back in 1999 with Ben Horowitz.  Andreessen was the Chairman and Horowitz was the CEO of the company.  HP bought the company out for $1.6 billion.  Andreessen started the company about a year after AOL spent $4.2 billion on Netscape, another company he founded.

Andreessen and Horowitz worked together at Netscape before starting Opsware.  Lately Andreessen and Horowitz have been investing actively in businesses together which is good practice for their fund.   This past August the both of them invested in live online streaming video company Qik.

According to a report at PEHub, the both of them are planning to launch an early stage venture capital fund.  The opening fund is expected to be around $250 million because that is what the two are shopping around for.  Initial investments would be around $500,000.  This is five times the amount that Horowitz and Andreessen normally invest out of their own pockets.

It is uncertain whether they will be able to raise that sort of investment for their venture capital company in this type of economy, but between the two they have an impressive track record so you never know.

Ning, the social network platform created by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini has hit the 1 million milestone.  Over 1 million social networks have been created using their platform.  The company was started in October 2004 and launched officially in October 2005.  The company raised over $100 million in funding.

About 22 million users have registered for the service and they lost about 20% of traffic this past December because of the decision to shut down adult content and porn social networks.  Last February the traffic has been able to catch up.   Ning’s traffic comes mostly from social networks that have a strong following.  For example, thetwilightsaga.com is a fan website built on Ning that had 94,000 people join within two months.

[via CNET]

Athena von Oech announced today that Ning has hit 850,000 registered social networks. Ning is a service that allows users to create social networks on-the-fly. The service is free for basic social networks, but premium social networks are charged. Ning was founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen and Gina Bianchini. Ning has over $104 million in funding and is valuated at about $500 million based on their investments. Legg Mason, Allen & Company, and Andreesen are the primary investors in the company.

“We just passed 850,000 social networks on Ning and we couldn’t be more excited,” stated Oech. “We love checking out the new and interesting social networks popping up – at the rate of over 3,000 each day, and about 100,000 in the past month alone. Wow!”

Ning plans on launching new features next week including improvements to chat and redesigned media players. Below is a video demo of the new features:

Find more videos like this on Ning Network Creators