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The global economic downturn this past year or so has brought obvious panic to the technology market, especially the startup and small company environment, where companies have historically been less concerned with revenue models and more concerned with venture investment and acquisitions.  Economic sentiment got so bad at points that many of the more venerable technology media outlets have made wide proclamations in the past year that only those companies that have stockpiled enough cash would survive.  The web 2.0 crash was imminent and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Fast forward to today, passing the midway point of the year, and things are perhaps looking better than anyone expected.  CrunchBase (a TechCrunch site) has reported today that new venture funding is up 19% – approximately $1 billion from $5.4B to $6.4B.  Interestingly, the raw number of deals actually decreased in Q2 as opposed to Q1 – 560 to 516.  This likely is a sign that investors are being more picky about their investments, but on the flip side, investing more heavily into ideas they like.

Another optimistic note in their reporting was the fact that series A rounds of funding increased in Q2 – which is a sign that new ideas are being invested in – this is of course very healthy for our overall economic scene.  Entrepreneurs are starting new companies and those companies are getting the funding they need, this is a great thing.  You can check out the series A funding rounds here.

Some of the highlights of funding activity this year have been:

• Ning, which just secured a series E round of funding at $15 million
• Pandora getting a series D round for $35 million from Greylock Partners
• TweetDeck (whoe doesn’t like TweetDeck) securing $2 million series A round from Betaworks
• Qik – Series C round for $5.5 million
• Tesla Motors getting $465 million from the US department of energy to help with debt
• Imeem – $2.4 million from Sequoia Ventures

etc…That really just scratches the surface of some interesting companies I’ve been following.  In any case, this is all good news and I keep my fingers crossed that it continues to improve for the foreseeable future.