Yesterday, the Obama administration dribbled out the news that it was going to nominate current Commerce Secretary Gary Locke as the next ambassador to China.

If approved, Locke will surely have his hands full on a wide range of issues, many of them impacting the tech sector, including piracy, privacy and government-sponsored censorship.

Perhaps more interestingly, the move leaves open a post–which the Obama administration actually had a hard time filling initially–that could get a true turbocharge if it were filled by an exec from the fast-growing digital arena.

It’s not a bad idea, since tech is probably now the most critical business arena in the U.S. and one of the only markets in which this country innovates and excels at.

While the Commerce Department has a huge and disparate domain, from international trade to the census to promoting American businesses, its digital footprint has been much less profound than the industry’s increasing importance to the U.S. economy.

After all, despite some interesting international efforts, most of the current crop of tech stars are U.S. born and bred and leading the way in digital innovation.

In fact, every big trend right now in value creation are all coming out of tech.

Gaming? Zynga.

Social networking? Facebook and Twitter.

Retail? Groupon.

Mobile? Google and Apple.

So, why not pick a business person from the area to lead the government agency dedicated to business?

But that’s where it gets dicey.

One more obvious candidate would be outgoing Google CEO–and Obama favorite–Eric Schmidt.

I would assume he might welcome such a prominent post, although putting him in place at Commerce would be a tough road.

Issue one and only: The investigations of Google’s aggressive business practices by federal regulators make this an awkward decision for Obama, given Schmidt would be open to a lot of scrutiny going through confirmation.

But there is a long list of others who could be considered to serve, especially if you think well outside the box.

What about former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, who certainly has the management cred?

Or mega-VC John Doerr, who–despite his recent social fever–might finally get to push his beloved clean-tech agenda onto a larger stage?

What about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who recently showed she could deliver a boffo speech and who might lend some Silicon Valley magic to her former Washington, D.C. rep?

And while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ laugh would have a hard time getting Congressional approval, why not consider someone who has profoundly changed the way an entire business sector does business?

In that vein, Reed Hastings of Netflix also fits the bill.

Except these three execs are pretty busy these days. So, what about former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, whose failed bid to be California’s governor as the Republican candidate leaves her without a post.

President Barack Obama had picked a GOP pol as his second choice for Commerce head, in fact, so Whitman or even Cisco CEO John Chambers are not out of the question.

The point is to perhaps move outside the Beltway’s comfort zone and pick a Commerce Secretary who represents the future rather than the past.

But a company that rewards consumers for recycling led The Wall Street Journal’s second-annual ranking of venture-backed clean-tech companies.

Recyclebank, which provides recycling-rewards programs in 29 states and the U.K., has had a growth spurt since its 2004 launch. In October, the New York-based company brought on Jonathan Hsu, former head of onliine ad firm 24/7 Real Media, as its chief executive.

Two solar-power firms, Suniva Inc. of Norcross, Ga., and eSolar Inc. of Burbank, Calif., came in second and third, respectively.

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The long recession only tiptoed through the 2,300-acre office park, with many start-ups here expanding their operations over the past 18 months. One prominent tenant, solar company Nanosolar Inc., began producing solar panels in March and plans to add space and more employees to its 350-person work force.

Scientific-equipment maker Stratedigm Inc. moved into a 6,000-square-foot space in Edenvale—more than double its old office size—as it revs up sales. And several biomedical start-ups that were started under one roof also upgraded to bigger offices in the park.

Edenvale shows how Silicon Valley’s start-up economy has quietly broadened beyond information technology. It now includes a growing cadre of bioscience and “clean technology” firms, presaging a more-diversified economic base and bolstering the valley’s status as the world’s innovation hotbed.

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What is it about TED, the iconic conference founded an astonishing 25 years ago, that gets so many people who don’t go in a lather?

Read one tweet from Mathew Ingram of GigaOm, for example: “and so it begins–all the pretentious and annoying tweets from people at TED, just to prove that they are that special :-)”

Yes, that’s it! Maybe because they did not get enough hugs as kids! (Personally, I would tweet from, like, a fist-pumping party with the “Jersey Shore” cast to prove I was special.)

All kidding aside and back to TED, I suppose it could be the high cost of the ticket or the fact that it is hard to get in at all for any price, since it sells out so quickly, or that the presentations from the stage by some of the world’s top thinkers are so incredibly highbrow.

All true. Nonetheless, TED still represents one of the best venues for deep and varied thinking on a wide range of important issues, even if there are moments that might seem twee and elitist to some.

TED2010 officially opens tomorrow morning in Long Beach, Calif., although events at the conference actually began last night. Speakers run the gamut and will talk on a wide range of topics, from poverty to clean tech to global warming to ukulele playing.

There are celebrities and billionaires in the crowd too, which also includes a lot of Silicon Valley’s movers and shakers. All that Davos-in-California vibe is what probably irks people, but it is a lot less annoying than you might imagine.

In fact, as someone who runs another conference–D: All Things Digital–with Walt Mossberg, I can appreciate how well TED is managed, run and presented.

To the naysayers, I would also have to point out this: The entire content of TED–as well as other TED events across the globe–pretty quickly gets put up on the Web, on one of the better designed and more innovative Web sites out there, for all to experience. Embeddable and free.

While it might not be the same as schmoozing real time, if it is quality content you care about–and I do–then anyone with Internet access can eventually see it.

And it is indeed well worth exploring that nonprofit conference–originally created by Richard Saul Wurman, using the acronym for “Technology, Entertainment and Design,” and now run by Chris Anderson–digitally.

So even if you are overly annoyed that you aren’t there–Chris, you might want to invite Sarah stat anyway to stop her from writing another heartbreaking diatribe next year–see it for yourself online from the TEDTalks site.

Here is one video of activist Eve Ensler, for example, talking about “girl cells” at TEDIndia, which is just amazing to hear–and there are plenty like it to choose from:

In 2009, venture capitalists invested $17.7 billion–37 percent less than in 2008 (see chart below; click to enlarge). And they funneled that money into just 2,795 start-ups–37 percent fewer than the year prior. The sectors where these declines hit hardest: Software, clean tech and biotech.

“The venture capital industry had no choice but to slow the investment pace in 2009,” NVCA president Mark Heesen said in a statement. “The weak exit environment resulting from an unstable public market combined with a challenged limited partner base sent a strong message to the venture community to pull back the reins–and the VC’s listened.”

While the market for VC investments in 2010 is likely to remain tight, the situation is improving. Said Heesen: “Now that the economy has begun to show signs of improvement, we expect to see dollars flow more freely back into those sectors that offered the most promise before the recession began–clean technology, life sciences and IT. The seed and early stage pipeline needs replenishing across all industries and the health of the startup community in the next decade will be dependent upon more robust first-time financings. 2010 should be the year to begin that process in earnest.”

David Weiden, one of Khosla’s partners who concentrates specifically in tech investments, said the firm is allotting more money towards clean tech because that sector boasts “a lot of opportunity where there’s relatively little competition relative to the size of the market.” In the crowded tech field, meanwhile, opportunities can be “somewhat harder to come by,” he said.

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“We’ll be focusing on early stage investments across a diverse range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and, no doubt, other areas we haven’t thought of yet,” Managing Partners Rich Miner and Bill Maris explained in a blog post. “Central to our effort will be our fellow Googlers, whom we view as a critically important resource to help educate us about potential investments areas and evaluate specific companies.”

Presumably, then, the scope of the fund’s investments will be as diverse and, ahem, fascinating as the whims of Google’s leadership. Which isn’t always a good thing. That said, Google Ventures may do much to help the company innovate itself out of this downturn and perhaps even spot and engulf the next Google (GOOG) killer before it has a chance to live up to its namesake. As Google Ventures explains in its FAQ, it’s not above engulfing a company it’s incubated. “Acquisitions by Google of portfolio companies are possible, but this is not the goal or focus of our investment activities. Our focus is building great companies and generating long term financial return.”

Obviously. But for Google, right?

[Image Credit: Ignorance Is Futile!]

“We’ll be focusing on early stage investments across a diverse range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and, no doubt, other areas we haven’t thought of yet,” Managing Partners Rich Miner and Bill Maris explained in a blog post. “Central to our effort will be our fellow Googlers, whom we view as a critically important resource to help educate us about potential investments areas and evaluate specific companies.”

Presumably, then, the scope of the fund’s investments will be as diverse and, ahem, fascinating as the whims of Google’s leadership. Which isn’t always a good thing. That said, Google Ventures may do much to help the company innovate itself out of this downturn and perhaps even spot and engulf the next Google (GOOG) killer before it has a chance to live up to its namesake. As Google Ventures explains in its FAQ, it’s not above engulfing a company it’s incubated. “Acquisitions by Google of portfolio companies are possible, but this is not the goal or focus of our investment activities. Our focus is building great companies and generating long term financial return.”

Obviously. But for Google, right?

[Image Credit: Ignorance Is Futile!]

The large round by Oak, which was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist Fred Harman, will give the popular online news and blog site a valuation of just “south of $100 million,” a source said.

The new funding, the Huffington Post’s third, will be used for expansion of its offerings and the hiring of editorial and business talent.

“There is an inevitable shift from offline to online with people increasingly getting their news media online, and this election proved how powerful the Huffington Post could be,” said Harman (pictured here), in an interview with BoomTown. “And I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site.”

Indeed, the Huffington Post–which is now billing itself as ‘”The Internet Newspaper”–has been hitting on all cylinders during the current election season.

And it hopes to continue building that momentum into the Obama administration, which will give the liberal-leaning site a lot of advantages in coverage.

The Huffington Post has also become a powerful news aggregator, much as the more conservative Drudge Report has, sending traffic all over the Web from its site by linking with a variety of online sites. It also has a strong offering of high-profile bloggers.

But the site’s leaders are also hoping its traffic strength will allow it to be as strong in arenas outside of its flagship political arena, including in business, local, “green” and investigative news.

It will also use the money to make acquisitions, the company said in a press release about the funding, which it put out this morning.

It’s certainly a long way from May of 2005, when its high-profile co-founder, Arianna Huffington, was roundly mocked for launching the site. Today, she has seen her power grow as the site’s traffic and influence have.

The site’s namesake operates out of her California-based office in Los Angeles, while the company has its HQ in New York.

The Huffington Post’s traffic in September 2008, for example, quadrupled from a year before to 4.5 million unique visitors, according to comScore (SCOR). That performance made it the No. 1 “stand-alone political blog and news site,” besting Drudge.

“The cycle of print media is accelerating downward and there are not as many companies with a balance sheet and focus to do it right online,” said Harman, who will join the Huffington Post’s board. “The news market is really up for grabs in a lot of ways…and it is a good time for those who are viewed as authoritative.”

But, like a lot of advertising-reliant businesses, the Huffington Post is also facing a tough market and must show it can compete under more dire economic circumstances and build a sustained and profitable business.

This slug of money should give it a lot of room to do so, said Harman, who has invested in several digital media companies, such as Demand Media and Federated Media. He was also one of the lead investors in aQuantive, the digital advertising business that was bought by Microsoft for $6 billion in 2007.

“Who knows how deep this economic situation is going to be,” said Harman, who noted that he and others kept investing in aQuantive through the last Web downturn. “But strong companies that keep investing through a bad cycle can emerge as winners.”

Previous investments in the Huffington Post have totaled about $12 million. That funding has come from Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners, as well as seed money from co-founder Kenneth Lerer and former AOL exec Bob Pittman.

Funding reports about the Huffington Post appeared about a week ago in the Times of London, with the post claiming a $15 million investment and expansion into investigative and local news.

But the most detailed posts were done by paidContent, which was the first to name Oak as the new investor and said the round was $20 million.

“This is forming to be a perfect storm for the venture capital industry that may result in a significant contraction of firms and capital,” explained Steve Carnevale of Point Cyprus Ventures, who believes institutional investors will eventually put less money into venture capital. “This storm has two fronts. The U.S. economy and the long investment cycle associated with life sciences and clean tech. First, the economy as a whole. The U.S. is bankrupt as a country as a result of massive borrowing that has grown over 30 years. This borrowing created an inflated investment portfolio that made available capital to tertiary alternative investments like venture capital. We are at the beginning of a massive de-leveraging that has unprecedented consequences for the economy and the venture capital industry. … The industry will contract not only because of overall economic weakness, but because the fundamental investment cycle will be dramatically longer. … Now the majority of venture capital is going into life sciences and increasingly clean tech. These types of investments will take longer to produce returns then in the traditional VC investments in the computer industry. When institutional investors figure that out, they will reduce their capital availability for this kind of alternative asset. … Therefore, the VC industry will get sandwiched between the economy and it own fundamentals.”

Ugly times for venture capital. That said, as Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz often notes, the best time to invest is often “when people are cowering under their desks.” ‘Course it was Sequoia that just held that “RIP: Good Times” meeting last week. …

[Image credit: Sad Guys on Trading Floors]