I was living vicariously through WSJ's Julia Angwin's Mogul-fest tweets last week (ironically throughout the week she tweeted that several moguls didn't see the future in Twitter). While in Sun Valley, Angwin reported a brief interchange with Murdoch regarding the future direction of MySpace. Murdoch stated that MySpace needed to be re-focused "as an entertainment portal."

Silicon Valley - Marc Andreessen and long-time business partner Ben Horowitz have raised $300 million in fresh capital to form a new venture capital company called “Andreessen Horowitz.” The focus of all investments will be “new” business model areas, including consumer internet, cloud computing and consumer electronics. The company will also invest in some B2B-plays, such as virtualization and cloud storage.

New York - The fashion and personal style discovery platform, StyleCaster, has raised $4 million in a first round led by billionaire Quicken Loans owner Dan Gilbert.

Palo Alto - Bling Nation, a mobile payments infrastructure service, has raised $8 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Meck and Camp Ventures. The money will be used to work with banks in local U.S. communities to set up the infrastructure required for its Redi Pay Bling mobile payments service.

Last reports I saw had Facebook at over 200 million active worldwide unique users (and growing) and an estimated $200m-plus in annual revenue in 2008. Pretty kooky to claim it'll be a failure, eh? Let me start by saying that social networking itself is a utility that is not routinely differentiated by any particular protectable intellectual property. It's a utility that demonstrates a better way for the online and mobile web audience at-large to connect with each other. But it's also a utility that ultimately threatens to be its own worst enemy.

GE said its cable operations continued to deliver double-digit growth, but NBC Universal had a "tougher performance overall due to a soft advertising market and fewer major DVD releases" compared with a year earlier, writes TheStreet.com.

In Hollywood, direct-to-video movies, and the folks who make them, have always been second-class citizens. But it's clear from recent media earnings reports that recent changes in the DVD market are now driving the type of movies the upper crust is making as well. Call it, direct-from-video. In Viacom's Q4 earnings call earlier today, for instance, CEO Philippe Dauman said slumping DVD sales are weighing heavily on green-light decisions at Paramount Pictures.

Foxboro, Mass. - Play Hard Sports, a Foxboro-based provider of online sports game, has raised $8 million in its second round of venture capital, which was led by New Enterprise Associates, according to a report by PE Week Wire, which cited a regulatory filing. Play Hard is developing online sports games with no large downloads and no required fees to play.