TSMC, considered a bellwether for its client base, which includes U.S. technology companies Qualcomm Inc. and Nvidia Corp., reduced its capital-spending budget for the second time this year, citing deteriorating market conditions in a further sign of difficult times for chip makers. TSMC now expects its capital spending for this year to be $7.3 billion, down from $7.4 billion. The contract chip maker also trimmed its 2011 revenue growth target in U.S. dollar terms by half, after posting a worse-than-expected 35 percent decline in net profit for the third quarter.

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IBM, one of the first big tech companies to post quarter results, is seen as a barometer for investment in technology by governments and corporations. While IBM has benefited from a push toward higher-margin businesses, such as data-analysis services, worries have emerged that the weak global economy is having a negative impact on tech spending, particularly by governments.

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Note that Mahaney isn’t changing his estimates for these companies’ financial performance — just the way he thinks the market will value them, “primarily to global Macro conditions.”

Still, it’s worth noting some of his specific concerns for some companies that go beyond “the world economy has the circle-the-drain-quality to it.”

AOL: Citi drops its target from $18 to $15 (it’s now trading around $12). “In Q2, we witnessed YHOO, WBMD and AOL report lower Display revenue, which could be signs of increased competition from ad networks and social media for premium ad dollars.”

Demand: Target dropped from $10 to $8, which is about where the stock is trading now. “We view the company’s reliance on Google traffic as still a bit of an overhang. And we believe DMD’s quality content strategy is still something of a work-in-progress.”

Google: Target dropped from $690 to $575, currently trading around $504. “The return on GOOG’s prior investments (Mobile, Display) have been very good, but the return on GOOG’s new investments (Social, Commerce, Local, and now, in a BIG way, Mobile) are still uncertain — and the social investments ARE catch-up defensive; 2) cost structure still not ‘under control’; and 3) increasing regulatory risk.”

Flint — who, ironically, is a renter in the high-priced city of San Francisco — said Trulia is spending time to build out its management team and is currently looking for a CFO.

Earlier this week, it appointed Dr. Jed Kolko as chief economist. Kolko will lead the company’s research department and will also comment on market trends.

Flint said the San Francisco-based company has raised $33 million in venture capital and was no longer interested in seeking private equity. “We are really focused on the IPO,” he said.

He declined to provide a timeline, or to confirm reports from last week that Trulia would seek an IPO in 2012.

Now that one of the company’s closest competitors is public, Flint knows exactly how well Trulia stacks up. “It makes me even more excited about the opportunity,” he said. “While we compete, I’ve been happy about them telling the story to the market.”

Flint says the company has 300 full-time employees, attracts 17 million unique visitors to its site every month, and has been breaking even for 12 months.

In comparison, Zillow has 264 employees and 25 million unique monthly visitors [up from the 20.8 million I pulled from its latest quarterly filing.]. In its first quarter as a public company, it also recorded its first profit. Zillow priced its IPO at $20 a share. Immediately after, its stock soared to as much as $45 a share, but it is trading today at $27 a share. It is valued at $763 million.

Move, Inc. is another public company in the space, and manages the Realtor.com site. It is trading at $1.53 a share and has a market cap of $244 million.

Flint said Trulia’s biggest differentiation in the space is the amount of user-generated content it receives, including agent recommendations. It recently rolled out estimated home valuations to compete with Zillow’s Zestimate service.

Today, it is live only in the San Francisco area, but Flint said Trulia made an effort to make that more social by allowing people vote on whether they agree or disagree with the value of a home by clicking thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

What’s on their minds? The economy, obviously.

Except not quite that obviously. In the fine print, YouTube notes that the chart above “excludes the “Other” category, which has received 26% of all questions, ranging from education to State’s rights.”

Disclosure: News Corp., which owns Fox News, also owns this Web site.

And now for our media bummer of the week: Even without a 2008-style meltdown, ad spending is already contracting.

Kantar Media says that U.S. ad spending grew 2.8 percent in Q2. That’s still growth, but it’s the smallest quarterly gain since the media business began crawling out of its post-Lehman hole.

In fact, it turns out that ad spending has been slowing since the second half of last year. Ad buys grew by 8.7 percent in Q3 2010, but have been shrinking since then.

Some sales guys I’ve talked with are still shrugging off the decline as the result of more difficult comps: It was a lot easier to post big year-over-year increases when the preceding year was the apocalypse.

And again, if you’re in digital ad sales and you don’t work for Yahoo or AOL, you’re probably not seeing any sign of a slowdown at all. And if you sell newspaper ads, you’re used to bad news because you haven’t really had good news in years.

But if things really do crater worldwide — and today doesn’t look like much fun at all — then all bets are off, no matter what you’re selling.

Three of Silicon Valley’s more prominent venture firms — Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and the Founders Fund — are nearing the closing of new funds that will total almost $2 billion.

This despite a bad economy, turbulent markets and lackluster venture returns of late. That said, limited partners looking for an investment edge apparently seem to still be adding more dough to the VC kitty.

Sources familiar with the fundings, in fact, said the raises have been much easier than previous ones.

Khosla has raised almost $2.4 billion since 2009, including $1.3 billion in 2010. Its fourth is now nearly completed, at just under that, which the firm had previously signaled in regulatory filings it planned to raise.

The third fund has been spent on cleantech companies, but also on early-stage high-profile Internet start-ups such as Square.

Redpoint will focus its fund — which sources said was $400 million — on growth opportunities.

Its last fund in 2010 was $400 million, too. It has invested that money in start-ups, such as Jumptap, Kabam and Pure Storage.

Lastly, the Founders Fund — with high-profile partners Peter Thiel and Sean Parker — is aiming at a $350 million fund with a $150 million “cushion” to raise more. Its last fund of $250 million was raised last year.

Founders Fund has recently made investments in Path, Azumio and Topsy.

Well, Mr. and Ms. Entrepreneur, your friends at IBM are thinking of you today. Big Blue will today announce the availability of $1 billion in new financing options specifically aimed at small and medium businesses to pay for purchases of new tech hardware, software and services.

Now before you roll your eyes, harrumph, and restrain yourself from saying “Who cares about small and medium businesses anyway?” allow me to answer: You do. In the U.S., small businesses account for a huge swath of the economy, accounting for about two-thirds of new jobs created over the last 15 years, and they hired 40 percent of high-tech workers. They also employ roughly 90 percent of the workforce of the entire world.

And get this: According to IBM, the total amount spent on technology each year by small and medium businesses — IBM defines them as having fewer than 1,000 employees — amounts to a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Compared to that, well, a billion is a little slice. But when credit is hard to get from ever-more-cautious banks in a tough economy, CIOs will see it as a welcome move. Half of small businesses crash and burn within five years because they can’t get access to capital.

Not only is IBM making the cash available but it is making it easy to get. Most of IBM’s small and medium business customers interact with Big Blue not directly, but through business partners — third parties like CDW and Ingram Micro — who sell IBM gear and do the heavy lifting associated with getting different bits of hardware and software working right. They also tend not to have huge IT departments as larger companies do, says Andy Monshaw, the general manager of IBM Midmarket Business. “It’s a really fragmented market with literally thousands of local players,” he says. “It’s a market based on long-term local relationships.”

Entrepreneurs are running up against expectations of the so-called “consumerization of IT.” They have easy-to-use technology at home, but the stuff at the office is older and not cutting it. One big thing these companies are looking at is cloud computing. An IBM survey found that 60 percent of them are shopping around for cloud services. That got the attention of IBM’s Global Financing unit, which helps customers pay for new gear and services in much the same way that car dealers help people buy cars — by providing attractive financing packages.

On top of that, IBM has come up with a long list of products and services that are priced in ways that make sense to smaller companies — stuff that gets charged on a per-user or consumption basis. IBM has hacked together a list of products and services to fit with the effort, including cloud services, analytics and security, as well as products from recent acquisitions like Netezza, Cognos and Cast Iron.

Certainly there’s a lot of hand-wringing going on, especially in the U.S., about what it will take to get the economy creating jobs again. In fact, the president of the United States is going to talk about that very subject in an address to Congress and the nation tonight. And a survey done by Pepperdine University and Dun & Bradstreet found that 35 percent of small business owners say their biggest impediment to hiring more workers is access to capital.

The Taiwan personal-computer maker had previously said that it expected a profit in 2011, but Acer Chief Executive J.T. Wang said Wednesday that inventory adjustments, falling demand for notebook PCs and a weakening global economy led to a change in outlook.

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The Dow slid 512.61 points, or 4.3%, to 11383.83, erasing all its gains for 2011. The slump of the past few weeks has driven the Dow down more than 10% from its May intraday highs, putting the index officially in correction territory.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 60.26 points, or 4.8%, to 1200.08, putting it in correction territory, having fallen more than 10% since May. The Nasdaq Composite slumped 136.68 points, or 5.1%, to 2556.39, also in the red for the year.

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Yahoo turned in another weak performance in the second quarter, with yet another decline in revenue.

This time it was five percent, compared to last quarter’s six percent. In other words, at least things are looking up as they go down!

While earnings per share rose smartly, Wall Street is still looking for strong sales growth from the Silicon Valley Internet giant, which seems unable to provide it.

Blamed most this time for the revenue fall: Yahoo’s changes in its display sales operations in the key Americas region, reasons for which were largely unspecified in the initial company press release. (You can see the damage in this slide deck from the company here.)

Maybe Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will explain it all in its upcoming conference call with analysts (or she could try the I-don’t-know approach taken by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch in PhoneGate hearings in Britain earlier today!).

2 pm PT: It starts with the usual regulatory blah-blah, which I always enjoy.

Bartz gets right into it, opening with the key problems with China’s Alibaba Group, as well as its display and search revenue weaknesses.

The fight with Alibaba is over its Alipay payments unit, which was spun out of the Chinese company without Yahoo’s say-so. Yahoo is a big shareholder.

Bartz says that the company was working on a settlement night and day.

But she quickly gets onto how display did not perform as expected in its key Americas arena. “Obviously, I am not happy,” she said.

Obvi! Neither are shareholders, Carol.

She says it was not about new competitive development. It was not about the economy. It was not about engagement.

So what was it? Changes in its sales leadership and organization, says Bartz, which has included talent walking out the door in droves.

A lot more than Yahoo expected, but no surprise to anyone who has been paying any attention to the brain drain at the company.

Bartz promises a new approach to sales, part of its endless turnaround, which is beginning to feel like a digital version of “Waiting for Godot.”

Search revenue, though, says Bartz, was better than expected.

2:11 pm: CFO Tim Morse is on now, running through the numbers and the display shortfall in the Americas region.

“We simply did not have appropriate coverage,” says Morse, noting consumer products, tech and autos as weak spots in the advertising market.

Thank goodness, then, for the guarantees from search revenue in the Microsoft partnership deal.

More numbers and then it is back to Bartz to talk about search, which is going better than the last quarter, when it was the culprit for the revenue decline.

She says that Microsoft and Yahoo were working together to improve the issues.

“We’d like to be further down the road,” says Bartz about the goal of search revenue per search growth, as well as settling all the other problems, such as the Asian issues.

And, by further, I am presuming she means actual forward movement, which is what roads are actually for.

2:27 pm: Q&A time, the part of our program where Wall Street analysts do not ask the questions that need asking (and where I win fancy journalism awards for pointing this delta out!).

Therefore, Bartz is first thanked for providing “color” about the display disaster and is not asked about more specifics of the disaster itself.

The second question still does not get to it either, but she does note Yahoo’s sales force has to sell beyond “Gee, we’re big” and come up with better ad solutions.

“The issue is we did not have enough sales people in front of the big clients,” says Bartz.

That’s because all those former Yahoos are now working at Groupon, LivingSocial, Facebook and on down the line and now in front of big clients for those hotter companies.

2:34 pm: Question about its Asian assets. Yahoo’s talks with Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba are separate, says Bartz, although I would add that they have non-movement in common.

And also a question about Yahoo’s interest in the acquisition of the Hulu premium online video service.

Bartz winks verbally and says nothing, which translates into: Of course, it is interested.

More on the reasons for the display fall-off, which Bartz makes clear is not due to big competitive threats, but internal issues.

Maybe she’s saving big competitive threats as the reason for a revenue decline in the third quarter!

I look forward to the quarter I get the finger pointed at me for causing revenue to fall, due to my snarky posts.

Now, we are into softball questions about improvements in engagement. It’s up, but no one asks why Yahoo is still not doing anything very cutting edge in product innovation compared to competitors.

I believe Google has launched at least 14 new social networks since this Sunday, along with its strong quarterly performance last week. And Apple, well, blew away its quarter today as it is about to release more cool new stuff later this week.

And that might be the crux of the issue for Yahoo, which might not solve its woes by throwing a more focused sales army at the issue.

That’s because Yahoo’s products are simply not nearly has social as Facebook or even Google right now, which might be the true problem as old customers move on to new advertising solutions.

Whatever the reason, Yahoo clearly needs a refresh of its ad products and how it sells them, especially in its fast-growing mobile, video and communications products.

Bartz talks about getting better expertise, a tighter regional focus and other issues of going to market, which is perhaps something she might have realized many, many quarters ago.

After all, she’s been in charge for a while, and these issues are not new.

In fact, in an earlier quarter, Bartz was stressing “tentpole” events and anchor media properties and the power of the size of Yahoo as a selling point.

This was in April, in fact, in the first quarter of this year.

As I wrote then:

“CEO Carol Bartz excited was the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s traffic gusher for big tentpole events such as the Super Bowl and the Oscars. In fact, Bartz practically sounded like a gushy “Entertainment Tonight” flunky when talking to Wall Street analysts about Yahoo’s Oscar news, games and other offerings. She proudly noted the site’s efforts generated more than a billion pages views.”

Now big is out! Moving on!

The last question is another about Yahoo’s talks with its Asian partners.

“It’s complex,” says Bartz.

You can say that again.

In an unusual appointment for the longtime public servant, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will join Silicon Valley venture powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz as a part-time “Special Advisor.”

Summers got to know the firm with an assist from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who was a student of his when he was a professor at Harvard University.

Summers was later president of Harvard, as well as director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama administration until late last year.

“I am doing this because I feel technology in general and information technology in particular is now having a real pervasive macroeconomic impact in our time,” said Summers in a phone interview this afternoon from his home in Boston. “Long after people have lost their memory of the dramatic financial crisis in recent years, they will remember what technology has done to transform our economy in these same years.”

Summers said he increasingly wanted to become closer to this important trend and thought he could contribute to the innovation in Silicon Valley by helping its portfolio companies better understand the global economy.

He was introduced to Andreessen Horowitz at first by Sandberg, who was also Summers’ chief of staff while at the Treasury Department, and was attracted to its investment philosophy.

“They have distinctive elements of strategy that seemed to be a good fit, such as their emphasis on market disruption,” said Summers. “They also have an audacity of the vision and were really supporting transformation.”

Summers said he would serve as an advisor to Andreessen Horowitz companies, focusing on global opportunities they should take advantage of.

He will not become a VC, though. “My life to date has been as a professor and public servant, so I am not in a position to be a major investor,” said Summers.

That said, Marc Andreessen quickly noted in the interview that “if Larry brings in a company, we are going to take a serious look at it.”

While he was not a partner, Andreessen said Summers’ compensation would be linked to the long-term performance of the firm.

Summers will travel between Massachusetts and the West coast, but will also continue to work on outside projects.

What he will not be doing is giving any long-winded economic lessons to entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

“I am not sure there is the attention span for some of my lectures out there,” he joked.

Here is Andreessen’s blog post about the Summers appointment:

Meet Larry Summers, Our New Special Advisor

By Marc Andreessen

Today I’m delighted to announce that economist and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is joining our team as a part-time Special Advisor.

A lot of people already know who Larry is, but here are the highlights of a remarkable career to date:

* Admitted to MIT at age 16, originally to study physics — clearly our kind of nerd.

* Became tenured professor of economics at Harvard at age 28, where he first started mentoring a young undergraduate named Sheryl Sandberg, who ultimately became his chief of staff at the US Treasury.

* Received John Bates Clark Medal for his research at age 38, one of the two most prestigious awards in the field of economics (the other is the Nobel).

* On the staff of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors in 1982-1983. (For those of you too young to remember, Reagan was a noted Republican.)

* Undersecretary for International Affairs and then Deputy Treasury Secretary for President Clinton between 1993 and 1999. Intimately involved in resolving major macroeconomic crises in Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. Became US Treasury Secretary in 1999.

* President of Harvard from 2001 to 2006.

* Until late 2010, served as President Obama’s director of the White House National Economic Council.

* And, most importantly, a pivotal character in the recent movie “The Social Network”.

Larry will be an advisor to our firm and our entrepreneurs on several topics:

First, as technology continues its relentless colonization of broad swaths of the global economy, Larry will help us understand the scope and nature of the opportunities in front of us and our industry.

Second, many of our companies are seeking to restructure and revolutionize various markets — such as telecommunications, advertising, entertainment, education, health care, and financial services — and Larry will help us and our entrepreneurs analyze and understand the economics and dynamics of those markets.

Third, Larry’s deep insight into global economics and geopolitics will be highly useful to our companies that intend to expand globally — which is to say, all of them.

According to the New York Times, “Years ago, Henry Kissinger suggested that Mr. Summers be given a White House post in which he was charged with shooting down or fixing bad ideas.” We can’t arrange that, but we are excited to have him on our team, both to do that and to contribute lots of new ideas to us and to our companies.

You’d think there would be a party in Redmond, Wash., today, as software giant Microsoft soundly beat Wall Street expectations in its third-quarter earnings released earlier today.

Microsoft said it had revenue of $16.43 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2011, which was up 13 percent from a year ago. Net income was $5.23 billion, or 61 cents per share, a rise of 31 percent and 36 percent, respectively.

The surge was led by sales of Office, Kinect and Xbox and a stronger economy.

But there are shadows, too, as results were dragged down by weaker revenues for its flagship Windows unit.

The report comes as Microsoft’s stock continues to lag, declining 14 percent for the year.

Buzz kill!

BoomTown livedblogged the call for Wall Street analysts:

2:30 pm PT: Peter Klein, Microsoft’s CFO, who sounds super peppy, outlined the strong quarter, especially for its Office products.

He also mentioned some glitches, such as Microsoft’s still-struggling efforts to increase revenue per search (RPS) in its longtime search and online advertising partnership with Yahoo and the slower growth of the PC sector upon which the software giant’s Windows relies.

PC should stand for “possibly crappy,” but good-boy Klein did not say so.

Investor relations dude Bill Koefoed also read through the news, sounding at times like a sports announcer on a cable television network.

“Quuuuaaadrupled…,” he intoned about one part of Microsoft’s business.

This all went on for a while, since Microsoft has a lot of divisions. Servers & Tools. Online Services. Entertainment and Devices. Fashion & Cute Tops.

Okay, not that one, but a girl can dream.

It was all fun and games until Koefoed got to the Yahoo problem, which Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had used as a cudgel in her earnings report recently.

Yes, it is a bummer. But soon it was back to the happy land of Xbox!

Klein said he was pleased with the results in a jaunty manner, which made me desperately wish Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer led the call.

Because he’s always one obnoxious query away from a volcanic popping off.

Which is why I love those Yahoo calls and Bartz.

Buzz kill!

2:54 pm PT: That was fast–the call was quickly into questions.

The first is about COGS–cost of goods sold–and how it impacts gross margins.

Klein said the expenses were volume driven. I’d explain, but then I would fall asleep.

The next question was about stock buybacks.

That might get the stock up. Yeah, said Klein, they’ll keep doing that–not that it has helped much on the share price front.

More and more questions, about the PC market, the issues at Yahoo (let’s get that RPS up!), the Windows Phone 7 business.

I’ll be honest, I was a bit bored and started reading a riveting Business Insider interview with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on his myriad conflicts of interest related to his tech investing while also blogging as a news guy.

Whatever you think about him, that dude is good copy.

Wait, back to growth rates for Office!

It’s going great, said Klein (hey, maybe Arrington will invest!).

The call wraps up on news of an upcoming investor conference, being held near Disney World.

Oooh, party time!

Several major venture-capital firms were vying to fund Uber, his fledgling company. While presenting his business plan at the offices of Benchmark Capital, Mr. Kalanick briefly excused himself to phone three other potential investors. His message: They needed to move fast.

One Benchmark partner, Bill Gurley, wouldn’t have it. “No need to talk to those guys,” he told Mr. Kalanick. “Let’s get the deal done here.” After two days of wooing, Benchmark provided nearly $12 million in capital for a 20% stake in Uber, pegging its valuation at $60 million.

That is just one scene in the latest gold rush to sweep Silicon Valley, where prospectors are now fighting over buzzy start-ups and companies are getting their pick of deep-pocketed backers. The momentum is driving a wave of deal envy and trash talking—complete with power plays, personal feuds and turf wars among Wall Street bankers, billionaire speculators and venture-capital veterans.

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Thirty-six U.S. venture-capital funds raised more than $7 billion in the first quarter of 2011. That’s up 76 percent, by dollar commitments, compared with the first quarter of 2010, which saw 44 funds raise $4 billion, according to Thomson Reuters and the NVCA.

Bessemer Venture Partners VIII raised $1.6 billion during the quarter, while Sequoia Capital 2010 raised $1.3 billion and J.P. Morgan’s (JPM 46.97, +0.13, +0.28%) Digital Growth Fund raised $1.2 billion.

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The review by the Securities and Exchange Commission, disclosed in a letter to a lawmaker, could fuel the fast-growing market in private shares of technology firms such as Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Zynga Inc. The steps under consideration would help such privately held companies raise more money without incurring the increased reporting and other requirements of becoming a public company.

According to the letter and people familiar with the matter, the likely changes would include raising from 499 the number of shareholders private companies can have without being required to open their books, and also making it easier for such companies to publicize share offerings.

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Through a technique known as “gold farming,” players sit at rows of computers, and the businesses pay them to play, gathering virtual goods that can be sold later. Another part of the $3 billion market involves something called “powerleveling,” in which people manually play games for others to enable them to pass through levels more quickly. The practice started when individuals began selling in-game goods through markets like eBay and has now expanded into the real business described in a Thursday report by the World Bank Group’s infoDev program.

The report says half of “gold farms” are now automated–run by programming a computer to play the game. Others still use actual players, and about 20 percent aren’t farms so much as theft rings, in which hacker groups steal goods from other players and sell them, the report says.

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In a move likely to ripple across the stock market, Nasdaq OMX plans to announce Tuesday a rare rebalancing of its Nasdaq-100 index, which will reduce the big weighting of Apple Inc. The company currently makes up more than 20 percent of the index.

The rebalancing was driven in part by the seemingly unstoppable rise in Apple shares, which are up more than fourfold in the past two years. The tech company’s big weighting means that a change in fortune for the maker of iPhones, iPods and iPads has a huge impact on one of the most heavily traded indexes in the market. After the rebalancing, which takes effect May 2, Apple will make up 12 percent of the Nasdaq-100.

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Kureha, which has a 70 percent share of the global market for a crucial polymer used in lithium-ion batteries, had to shut its factory in Iwaki–near the quake’s epicenter–after the March 11 disaster struck. It is the only place where Kureha makes this particular polymer.

Its chief executive said Japan’s natural disaster would accelerate the company’s plans to move more of its production overseas. “For a company like Kureha, this is the only way of surviving,” said Takao Iwasaki in an interview on Monday.

Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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“I’m going back to Cali, Cali, Cali
?I’m going back to Cali . . . hmm, I don’t think so”?
—LL Cool J

Lately, everybody seems to be talking about a new technology bubble. Many very smart CEOs, VCs, reporters, and analysts can’t seem to stop worrying about the second coming of the dot com bust. Are the prognosticators correct? Will we head mercilessly into another crash? I don’t think so.

A Comparison Between Today’s “Bubble” and the Last Tech Bubble

Since so many distinguished people report a broad variety of qualitative bubble signs, let’s attempt to pattern match the quantitative data. As we do so, keep in mind that the relevant bubble statistic is not valuation. It’s the valuation:value ratio. High valuations are fine if the underlying value is there. Let’s look at public market comparables and venture capital flows to see if we can find a match.

1. Public market comparables
In the great bubble of 1998-2000, the boom in public valuations mirrored the boom in private valuations. Similarly, in recent high profile private financing rounds for private technology companies with valuations over $1B, the valuation multiples were at or below corresponding multiples for publicly traded companies such as Google. This has generally been the case for the bulk of deals that we’ve seen at Andreessen Horowitz. If publicly traded technology companies are not at bubble-like prices, then private technology valuations aren’t either because they are roughly equivalent.

To find out whether or not today’s public technology companies have hit bubble valuations, let’s compare some companies that survived the great bubble with their bubble era valuations:

The Enterprise Value-to-Revenue multiple (EV/Rev) and Price-to-Earnings multiple (PE) are commonly used metrics to tell the valuation:value story. Companies that produce little value today might still receive high valuations due to high growth expectations. The PEG Ratio normalizes the valuation:value ratio for growth expectations by tracking the valuation:value ratio per unit of expected earnings growth.

Bubble era valuation multiples were more than 10 times higher than current comparable multiples. As you can see, not all of these multiples are comparable as some of the bubble era multiples were NM—not meaningful—due to negative earnings. This means that the valuations ascribed to these companies were not quantitatively based on the earnings they were generating or projected to generate.

The valuation:value ratio of today’s private and public technology companies look nothing like the bubble ratios.

2. Venture capital flows
A basic driver for a private technology market bubble is the over-supply of venture capital into the sector. If too much venture capital hits the streets, valuations will bubble up. The inflation-adjusted data from the last bubble tells the story:

In the three-year period from 1998-2000, venture capital firms raised more than $200 billion, which represented about 0.55 percent of the national GDP. To put that in perspective, that’s more money than the entire venture industry raised collectively over the prior 18 years.

Flush with lots of capital, venture capital firms naturally invested at historically high rates–from 1998-2000 alone, venture capital investments also topped $200 billion. Again, more dollars were invested in this single 3-year period than in total over the prior 18 years.

Now let’s take a look at the current version of the same inflation-adjusted data:

Total venture capital raised from 2008-2010 was just shy of $55 billion, about 0.12 percent of the national GDP, with the trajectory of capital raising declining in each year. In fact, 2010 venture capital fundraising is at the same level as it was in 1995 and 1996.

Approximately $90 billion has been invested by the venture capital industry from 2008-2010—less than half of the 1998-2000 level. More significantly, total capital invested should continue to remain constrained in light of the significant reduction in new venture capital dollars raised over the last 3 years. Keep in mind that because the life of a venture capital fund is generally 10 years, it takes a while to see the impact of lesser fundraising on total dollars invested.

The inflows don’t actually look that bubblicious.

The Long Awaited Arrival of the Internet Boom

Looking at the numbers in the previous section, you may be wondering: “how in the world did people get so totally out of control in the last bubble?” The short answer is that the expectations of the great Internet boom vastly outstripped the actual activity. Specifically, the market wasn’t nearly as big as anticipated and the products were not nearly as good as imagined–at the time.

When Netscape peaked in the late 90s, we had 90 percent market share and 50 million users. The total Consumer Internet market was 55 million people. That’s about 36X smaller than today’s 2B. Worse yet, over 1/2 of those 55 million were dialup users. In addition, to horrible bandwidth and latency, the technology products were very crude in other ways. Programming languages were radically less functional, hardware was literally a hundred times more expensive, and there was no virtualization or cloud computing or AJAX. Constrained by such an early and weak technology platform, companies built poor applications. As a result, the expectations of what the Internet would be radically outstripped the reality of what it was. And hence the great crash of 2000 and 2001.

Since then and over the last 10 years, everything has gotten better. Much better. Servers moved from proprietary systems made by Sun, IBM, and HP to commodity hardware at a fraction of the price while radically improving in performance. The open source movement dramatically reduced the cost and improved the quality of systems software. Average consumer bandwidth increased 100 fold due to cable modems, DSL, and high-speed wireless networks. Cloud computing, which was not available then, now enables companies to build massively scalable products with very little initial capital outlay. The combination of the Internet and open source transformed the functionality in modern programming tools, increasing developer productivity 10 fold. The resulting applications have been so easy to use that even older generations of consumers now rapidly adopt new technology like Facebook. And there are 2 billion people on the Internet. All of these factors have led to an exciting new set of leading companies, including a special few which grew to over a billion dollars in annual revenue in less than 5 years. Welcome to the great Internet Boom of 2011.

At this point, you may still be worried about the startling rise in valuations of privately held technology companies. As I mentioned before, privately held technology companies trade at reasonable valuations vs. publicly traded comparable companies. These public companies trade at reasonable valuations vs. historical precedents.

In addition, these companies are significantly more mature–in terms of revenue and profit generation–than their counterparts in the last bubble. For example, the 1998 IPO class had average revenue of $120 million (and net losses of $65 million to boot). If you just look at the tech IPOs that have been completed year to date from 2010, the average revenue of this group is north of $300 million.

What about companies with reportedly very little revenue and very high valuations such as Twitter? A good investing rule of thumb is that any company that simultaneously saves Charlie Sheen’s career and starts a revolution in Egypt may be on to something. While Twitter doesn’t make that much money yet, historically media companies that capture hundreds of millions of highly engaged users tend to make money.

Where do we go from here?

You still may be thinking that Twitter and Zynga are great, but now it’s really over–there is no new opportunity. If you think that, you’d be wrong again.

In addition to the unprecedented number of people now reachable via the Internet, we are at the very beginning of a gargantuan new technology cycle: the move from Web/PC computing to cloud and mobile.

Back when I was a youngster in the early 80s, the technology landscape shifted from Mainframe to Client/Server computing. Interestingly the biggest opportunity wasn’t investing in the lighter weight computers that replaced the mainframes, but rather in new products created due to other results of the change. When you don’t have to pay for computing cycles on a MIP/minute basis, developers can change the way they program. The first major change was the move to relational database technology. Relational databases notoriously wasted CPU cycles vs. the old hierarchical databases such as IMS. However, if you didn’t care about CPU cycles, then you could easily cut your database development time by a factor of 10 or more and radically reduce the level of expertise required. By moving to the relational model, developers were released from the tedium of navigating hierarchical databases and used their new found freedom to rewrite every existing application from financial systems to HR applications and wrote a whole set of new systems like Customer Relationship Management. The relational database and application boom created hugely valuable new companies such as Oracle, Siebel Systems, and PeopleSoft. It didn’t stop there. As a result of the shift in application architecture, the old computing infrastructure became inappropriate and created new companies in Networking, Storage, and Management Software like Cisco and EMC.

The shift to cloud computing will have a more profound impact on the computing ecosystem than the shift to client/server. As with client/server, one of the first technologies to break has been the database. Application developers, no longer constrained by the massive administrative costs to set up servers, can solve previously impossible problems by seamlessly adding more hardware–except at the database layer. As a result, dozens of new exciting companies have emerged to replace the old “scale up” relational technology with new scale out solutions. Moving up the stack, everything about today’s application architectures suffers from the performance, scale, and programming model constraints of relational databases. Much like in the days of hierarchical databases, there is a large and important set of functionality that developers dare not tackle due to these limitations. New application companies like WorkDay and Proferi that take advantage of the cloud to deliver never-before-possible solutions, will devastate their old school RDBMS-based competitors.

While server virtualization enabled cloud computing on the server tier, it broke the current networking and storage architectures leading the way for the next generation of decabillion dollar companies in those categories. In the cloud, where applications have been completely decoupled from the underlying infrastructure, the old network and systems management software no longer works, leading to an opportunity for a new company to grab that $30B market.

The greatest beneficiary of the mainframe->client/server shift was a software company called Microsoft which took full advantage of the switch from dumb ASCII terminals to personal computers. Microsoft broke the mold by delivering solutions to both consumers and enterprises and leading the original consumerization of the enterprise. As today’s clients move from PCs to mobile devices, a huge set of opportunities will emerge for new companies to solve important problems.

The very largest opportunities will likely come from companies for which there are no analogy or precedent. Profound new platforms open the market to ideas never before imaginable.

Conclusion

While we can see many signs of a bubble these days, it’s important to keep in mind that signs of a bubble look almost exactly the same as signs of a boom. In fact, it’s usually not a bubble until everyone agrees that it’s a boom. As Warren Buffet said about the housing bubble:

“The basic cause was, you know, embedded in, partly in psychology, partly in reality in a growing and finally pervasive belief that house prices couldn’t go down. And everybody succumbed, virtually everybody succumbed to that. But that’s, the only way you get a bubble is when basically a very high percentage of the population buys into some originally sound premise–and it’s quite interesting how that develops–originally sound premise that becomes distorted as time passes and people forget the original sound premise and start focusing solely on the price action. So the media, investors, mortgage bankers, the American public, me, you know, my neighbor, rating agencies, Congress, you name it. People overwhelmingly came to believe that house prices could not fall significantly. And since it was the biggest asset class in the country and it was the easiest class to borrow against it created, you know, probably the biggest bubble in our history. It’ll be a bubble that will be remembered along with South Sea bubble.”

Will all the excitement around the opportunities created by the Internet and the shift to cloud/mobile computing eventually lead to a bubble? Absolutely. Are we in a bubble today? I don’t think so.

The big-box stores are backing a coalition called the Alliance for Main Street Fairness, which is leading efforts to change sales-tax laws in more than a dozen states including Texas and California.

Until now, the group has been largely associated with mom-and-pop stores, spotlighting stories of small toy shops and booksellers who argue Internet merchants that aren’t legally required to collect sales taxes enjoy an unfair advantage with shoppers.

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The 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck northern Japan, causing deaths and damage to the northeast and panic as far south as Tokyo, with an ensuing tsunami devastating coastal areas.

Truck maker Volvo AB was among those worst hit as its main facility in Japan was forced to halt production. The Swedish company said damage to its UD Trucks facilities in Ageo in the southeast of Japan, seems to be mainly superficial, but it will be days before the company can do a full assessment.

Volvo employs 10,000 people in Japan, while a further 3,000 work at UD Trucks’ dealerships. Volvo said the dealership at Sendai, close to the epicenter of the earthquake, had been seriously damaged, and it couldn’t yet say how other dealerships had been affected.

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