Few people are more delighted that Skype cofounders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis finally settled their lawsuit with eBay (EBAY) on November 6 than Marc Andreessen. The venture capital firm he cofounded last summer is one of a group of investment outfits that will now take control of the Internet communications company in a planned $2 billion deal. I caught up with him just after the settlement was announced to ask a few questions: More

The trouble with being number one in any industry is that you have nowhere to move but down. Few companies know this better than Nokia (NOK), the Finnish telecommunications giant that has dominated cell phones for so long that in some parts of the globe the brand itself has become synonymous with the device. More

It has 55 million users and no business model. But that's a touchy subject.

Ask Evan Williams whether Twitter ought to be trying harder to identify ways to make money, and the founder of the short-burst messaging network just laughs.

"It's funny," he says, in a mid-October interview in the young company's warehouse-like offices in a gritty part of San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. "People think we're back here in the office looking around saying, 'Where is that business model? Is it in the couch cushions?' There's a very logical process we've gone through, and you could say we've set the wrong priorities. But if you look at building long-term value, then generating cash isn't necessarily the highest priority." Read the rest of the story here.

Imagining life at Bizarro Google.

Schmidt says consumers would revolt if Google started acting evil. Photo: Google

On Wednesday morning Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin met with a group of reporters and talked about a number of issues, from the outages its Gmail service has experienced to its efforts to digitize books to the company's culture.

Schmidt repeatedly deflected questions about the competition, saying Google prefers to focus on, well, Google. (In response to a question about Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer's assertion that adoption of Google's Chrome operating system amounts to little more than a "rounding error," Schmidt quipped: "I don't respond to Steve Ballmer questions.")

But Schmidt did offer a long explanation of why Google isn't Microsoft — like when it comes to hemming customers in to its technologies and systems. More

Tech journalism loses Corcoran and Anders

It's a sign of the times that two of the tech world's finest, most seasoned, intelligent and nicest journalists no longer are plying their trade for the mainstream media. That they're also married means an entire household's prodigious output isn't finding its way anymore into the pages of two important business publications.

Elizabeth Corcoran and George Anders, she formerly of Fortune competitor Forbes and he formerly of The Wall Street Journal, are on their own these days.

Anders, a bigshot columnist and book author who spent years at the Journal in multiple postings, left a while ago. He reports that he's working on a book on talent. More

Topic A in the blogosphere: An agency wants to suss out paid endorsements on blogs.

Log on to New York food blog AmateurGourmet.com today, and you’ll see an advertisement for cookbook publisher Cook’s Illustrated, served up by Google’s (GOOG) AdSense service.

No surprise, really, since AdSense matches advertisements to website content. Indeed, Adam Roberts, who writes the blog, has twice tested and reviewed recipes from Cook’s Illustrated. What could be more relevant to readers than a link from one recipe site to another?

Yet despite their utility to readers, ads like these might get Roberts, Cook’s Illustrated and Google in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission.

Today, the Commission announced its new “Guide Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” The announcement marks the first regulatory update since 1980, and a long overdue attempt to grapple with the digital transition. More

Think of the new Via product as "instant 2.0"

It’s been decades since coffee has received an upgrade. Sure, there has been a steady beat of packaging improvements. All those cute, colorful foil pods that get popped into machines that then spit out a variety of brews. But according to coffee historian Mark Pendergrast, not since coffee giants General Foods (now part of Kraft (KFT) )and Nestle (NSRGY) spent millions in the late 1960s figuring out how to freeze-dry our morning addiction, has the actual coffee been the subject of a technological push forward.

Let’s face it, that has been a good thing. No offense to all you Taster’s Choice die-hards, but trying to improve upon a well-roasted coffee bean, ground to perfection and then brewed to your personal taste (I’ll take a double espresso with a little bit of foam) has mostly been a big mistake. We have all benefited from coffee’s return to its low-tech origins. But now the company that arguably has benefited the most from the artisan approach to coffee, Starbucks (SBUX), is taking us back to the future with its new line of instant coffee dubbed Via. More

Otellini predicts computer sales will be slightly up in '09 even as he promotes new chipset for portable devices that are not-so-PC-like.

Otellini predicts PC sales will be flat or up a bit. Photo: Intel

Intel (INTC) CEO Paul Otellini, with a more bullish call than many analysts, expects sales of PCs in 2009 to at least rival 2008. “My own bet is that we are likely to see unit (sales) flat to slightly up,” Otellini told analysts and developers gathered in San Francisco Tuesday morning for the annual Intel Developer’s Forum.

Otellini described that kind of resilience as astounding given the dismal economy.

“The PC market flat-to-up in the midst of the worst recession in 70 years shows that we have built something that is indispensable," he said. The Intel boss also predicted resurgence in the computer market in the coming year. “We’ll see how 2010 plays out,” he said. Earlier this month, Goldman Sachs (GS) revised its forecast for PC unit sales to “roughly flat.” Analysts for the investment bank had previously predicted a 4% decline in PC unit sales. More

How To Recommend Movies (and Win $1 million)

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

It was like the machine learning world’s version of “American Idol” Monday in New York:  A seven-man multinational group dubbed BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos was awarded $1 million by Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings as the winners of the Netflix Prize.

Cooked up three years ago by Hastings, the Netflix Prize challenged all comers to improve the recommendation technology used by the online movie rental company by 10%.

As they clutched the Ed McMahon-style check, and slung enormous gold medallions stamped with “Netflix Prize 2009” around their necks, it was the first time the winning team – a collection of computer scientists, electrical engineers and statisticians  – had actually ever physically been in the same place at the same time. More

Palm Pixi

The clearest indication at whom Palm is aiming its newest smartphone, dubbed Pixi, is the new Facebook application that debuts in the younger, smaller sibling to the Palm Pre. If that is your thing, then perhaps your gadget has arrived.

At a meeting in San Francisco Tuesday afternoon, Palm chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein kept the Pixi half hidden in the black and orange slipcover that comes with the Pre. The top half of Pixi looks a lot like its older sibling, but when Rubinstein performed the full monty as it were, the device revealed itself as a candy bar-type phone that echoes the Pre’s styling without the slide-out keyboard.

Matte black, with the same sticky keys as the Pre, the Pixi is noticeably thinner and a tad smaller than Pre. Slick was my first impression, and still is. When I put my Blackberry Bold down on the table, it looked chunky by comparison. Rubinstein didn’t noticeably gloat, but pointed out that Pixi is more than 10% thinner than Apple’s iPhone 3GS, and 20% more svelte than any Blackberry device (there is a reason that Pixi is launching at New York’s Fashion Week after all). More