Hewlett-Packard’s perhaps most respected board member, Marc Andreessen, wasted no time trashing its Silicon Valley antagonist, Oracle, at a conference Wednesday.

“The clock is really ticking,” he said about oldline software companies, singling out Oracle as “the most vivid case.”

Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Andrew Chung is heading to Khosla Ventures, where he will focus on the cleantech and information-technology. At Lightspeed, he oversaw investments in biofuel company Solazyme, solar company Stion, and clean coal company Coaltek, among others. Chung will help fill the shoes of cleantech partners Jim Kim and Alex Kinnier, who left Khosla last month.

It used to be that lazy entrepreneurs could rely on the old language-barrier excuse for why they weren’t expanding into fresh markets/sourcing from China/JV’ing with that start-up in Brazil.

Not anymore– if the Vocre app from San Jose startup myLanguage, unveiled  afternoon at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, works as advertised. Speak into your phone at English, and the guy listening at the other end in Beijing will hear your words in Mandarin (or he’s in Paris, French; in Tokyo, Japanese; or a handful of other languages).

Ashton Kutcher may have more clout in Silicon Valley than in Hollywood.

The star of movies like “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and now of the hit show ‘Two and a Half Men” told conference goers at TechCrunch Disrupt that he tried to get the studio to plug some of his Internet start-up investments on the show– but they wouldn’t do it without compensation.

Kutcher, who said he majored in biochemical engineering in college, has invested in some of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies. His bets include check-in service Foursquare, bed-and-breakfast service Airbnb, and personalized magazine Flipboard.

Think of the founders of Freestyle Capital as the Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz for the seed-round set.

Serial entrepreneurs Josh Felser and Dave Samuel have been playing around making investments for the last couple years, but only recently decided to go public about Freestyle. “We kind of wanted to make sure we were decent at this,” Felser explains. So far, so good– Freestyle has already shepherded through exits for three portfolio companies, including the sale of social-analytics company Backtype to microblogging company Twitter earlier this month.
Now, the two are throwing the veils off Freestyle, which is a $27 million fund making investments in the social Internet. The investments in the 21 companies the duo made before formally opening their fund are getting rolled into the product, which includes fund of funds Hall Capital and Weathergage among its limited partners.
Felser and Samuel plan to invest around $500,000 in each start-up, typically in the social Internet.
Like Andreessen and Horowitz, Felser and Samuel have worked together as entrepreneurs for years– albeit on a smaller scale. Five years ago they sold online video company Grouper to Sony for $65 million; before that, they sold music site Spinner to AOL for $320 million.
For now, Freestyle will stick to the seed stage of investing, even though the field is rather crowded these days. But Felser and Samuel say they can add value through their own work as entrepreneurs. And seed is what they know best. Once the companies grow bigger, there are “better investors than we are to give them advice,” Felser says.