I love our planet as much as the next person, but I despise efforts by companies and people to get credit for caring about the earth with empty gestures.

Like Pepsi’s ridiculous Aquafina press stunt. Or all this black screen Earth Day nonsense. Or bringing in goats to eat your lawn. Or banning black cars.

But I can’t find anything wrong with Frito Lay’s creation of a 100% biodegradable bag for SunChips. It will completely compost in 14 weeks under ideal conditions. I can imagine a day when most of our trash goes into our own back yard, simply to melt away into the ground.

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Eyjafjallajökull has become a curse word in Europe as the Icelandic Volcano continues to delay flights across the Atlantic. The cloud of volcanic ash is creating havoc for travelers and European startups who can’t get anywhere. But entrepreneurs in London at least are coping with impromptu meetups.

If you haven’t seen images yet of the volcano up close, there are some on Flickr and YouTube. Reader Baldvin Hansson sent us these photos (here is his entire set), which he took in a small plane near the volcano (presumably upwind).

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With last week’s declaration by Twitter that it intends to start identifying places based on the coordinates of geo-coded Tweets, the location land rush is in full swing. A long list of companies including Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, SimpleGeo, Loopt, and Citysearch are far along in creating separate databases of places mapped to their geo-coordinates. Mapping businesses, in particular, to the GPS locations near where people are checking in, Tweeting from or pegging a photo is the first step to be able to show them geo-targeted ads, which could help fuel local mobile online advertising in a major way.

Here is the problem: These efforts at creating an underlying database of places are duplicative, and any competitive advantage any single company gets from being more comprehensive than the rest will be short-lived at best. It is time for an open database of places which all companies and developers can both contribute to and borrow from. But in order for such a database to be useful, the biggest and fastest-growing Geo companies need to contribute to it. I put this suggestion to Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley the other night at a party, and he was enthusiastic about the idea.

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When startups ask me whether they should outsource product development, I usually advise against it. If they’re desperate to save money, they should outsource some testing or ancillary-product development, not core products. That’s because the developers of innovative technologies need to interact with each other and be close to customers and markets. In my book, outsourcing is for corporate I.T. departments and for large companies with global operations, not for small tech companies. I said this in my BusinessWeek column, three years ago. I also cited research that showed that the tech industry has never constituted more than 15% of the outsourcing market (banking, finance, and insurance accounted for 40%; telecom, 17%; and manufacturing, 12%)—and this includes the product development that companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, and Cisco perform in their offshore locations.

When I wrote that BusinessWeek piece, Peter Harrison, CEO of outsourcing services provider GlobalLogic—who happens to be a good friend and someone I have mentored over the years – tore into me. He insisted that I was wrong and offered to prove it by introducing me to his customers. I ignored him (as I often do). But Peter is persistent. Last week, he roped me into his customer conference to have dinner with Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, who is a GlobalLogic investor. Peter also had me meet some of his customers.

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Venture capital funding picked up in the first quarter to $4.7 billion, from the year ago period, according to both Dow Jones VentureSource and the MoneyTree Report (PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association). Dow Jones says venture funding rose 12% from $4.2 billion in Q1 2009 (the number of deals jumped to 597 from 522), while MoneyTree noted a 38% increase to $3.4 billion (the number of deals rose to 681 from 635). Although deals were up versus the first quarter of 2009, they were down from the fourth quarter– Dow Jones logged $6.9 billion for Q4 2009 and MoneyTree recorded $5.2 billion.

In terms of number of deals, the software industry boasted the most with 144 rounds of funding, according to MoneyTree. However, that represents a relatively low number for the industry— in fact, it’s the lowest number of deals since the fourth quarter of 1995.

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Today is a big day in Asia’s Internet industry. Earlier today, Korea’s NHN said it will buy major Japanese portal Livedoor, and now Tencent, China’s largest Internet company, has announced [PDF] it plans to invest $300 million in cash into Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies (DST).

DST itself has been in the news repeatedly over the last few months, especially after investing $200 million in Facebook and $180 million in Zynga last year. On its homepage, the firm claims its portfolio companies command 70% of all page views on the Russian speaking web.

Tencent racked up $1.8 billion in revenues last year [PDF], with operating profit reaching a staggering $882 million. The Shenzhen-based company’s key service is instant messaging platform QQ, which boasted no less than 523 million active users at the end of last year. Tencent also operates a web portal (QQ.com), a social network (Qzone) with nearly 400 million active users (self-reported), a gaming portal (QQ Games), a search engine (SOSO), and a number of other services.

Tencent will get a 10.26% stake in DST, 0.51% of total voting power and the right to nominate “one observer” to DST’s board of directors. Both companies also said they’ll be entering a strategic partnership, without providing details.

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Venture capital firms are having their own problems raising new money from limited partners. Capital inflows in the first quarter were down 31 percent annually to $3.6 billion in the U.S., according to the National Venture Capital Association. Venture funds were also down 11 percent from the fourth quarter.

Only 32 funds were able to raise money in the first quarter, down from 44 last quarter and 57 a year ago. Only 5 new funds were launched, with the vast majority of the money going to established funds, including Battery Ventures and Oak Investment Partners. Both raised new $750 million funds.

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Editor’s note: Big Data has been around for a long time between credit card transactions, phone call records and financial markets. Companies like AT&T, Visa, Bank of America, Ebay, Google, Amazon and more have massive databases they mine for competitive advantage. But lately, Big Data is finding its way to the smallest startups. The Web and cloud computing brings Big Data everywhere. But what exactly is pushing Big Data forward?

To answer that we brought in an expert, Bradford Cross. Bradford is the Co-Founder and Head of Research at FlightCaster. FlightCaster is backed by Y Combinator, Tandem Entrepreneurs and Sherpalo Ventures. The company analyzes large data sets to predict flight delays. Bradford is chair of the Dealing with Big Data track at Cloud Connect this week.

We are in a Renaissance for computer science, engineering, and learning from data right now. The scale of data and computations is an important issue, but the data age is less about the raw size of your data, and more about the cool stuff you can do with it. Now that there is so much data, it is time to unlock its value. Really neat things are happening already—like the way the people of the world can educate themselves on all manner of issues and topics, or the way data and computing serves as leverage in other scientific and technical endeavors. There will be lots of amazing stuff on the web, but innovation will come in other domains as well. The recent big data trend is about the democratization of large data more than its growth.

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As Apple goes on the offensive against Android, it risks alienating more and more developers. Today, another prominent developer is chose the opposing side. Tim Bray, the well-known software architect and blogger, is joining Google to help rally even more developers around the Android mobile operating system.

Bray is the co-inventor of the XML Web standard, and most recently worked at Sun Microsystems. In a blog post, he explains that he is drawn to Google in part because he hates the iPhone, or at least its closed and controlling environment from a developer’s perspective.

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Editor’s note: When venture capitalists invest in early stage startups, more than anything else they are investing in the founders of the company and their ability to lead their employees through the most improbable set of circumstances to take an idea from a germ to a real and profitable business. In this guest post, Ben Horowitz of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz explains the leadership traits he and his co-founder Marc Andreessen look for before they invest in a startup. Some of their investments include Skype, Zynga, Factual, and RockMelt. Before becoming investing partners, Horowitz and Andreessen co-founded Opsware, which they sold to HP for $1.6 billion, and prior to that Horowitz was an executive at Netscape.

At Andreessen Horowitz, we favor founders running the company. The reasons are many (and will be the topic of a future blog post). As a result, we spend a great deal of time thinking about the characteristics required to be a founding CEO. Perhaps the most important attribute required to be a successful founding CEO is leadership. So what is leadership and how do we think about it in the context of the CEO job? Are great leaders born or made?

Most people define leadership in the same way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography when he said: “I know it when I see it.”

A better definition comes from former Secretary of State Colin Powell who said: “You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere if only out of curiosity.” For our purposes, we can generalize this to be the measure of the quality of a leader: the quantity, quality and diversity of people who want to follow her.

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Editor’s note: The most valuable employees of any technology company are the engineers and scientists, which is why everyone in Silicon Valley does whatever they can to ensure the continuous supply to this talent pool. The size of the talent pool is ultimately determined by the number of people who graduate from colleges and universities with science, technology, engineering, or mathematics degrees. The U.S. is graduating fewer and fewer scientists and engineers, causing concern in many quarters.

While many people agree this is a problem, not everyone agrees on what should be done about it. Former Intel chairman and CEO Craig Barrett is a strong proponent of priming the pump with more undergraduate science, engineering, and math students. Duke/UC-Berkeley professor (and regular TechCrunch columnist) Vivek Wadhwa thinks that better rewards for people who pursue engineering and science degrees is the right approach. So we asked Barrett and Wadhwa to debate the issue of how best to fix technology education in the U.S. Their exchange is below:

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What happens when you pair seven visual artists with seven engineers and technologists? The New Museum in New York City is about to find out. An upcoming exhibit called Seven On Seven will put together artists and programmers for one day and tell them to come up with something together. It could be an application, a work of art, a full-blown product, or anything they want. Some of the participating technologists include Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg, former Facebook data dude Jeff Hammerbacher, and Tumblr founder David Karp.

The seven pairs of collaborators will present their final project at the New Museum on April 17. We have 50 discount codes good for $100 off the $350 ticket price (just enter the code “techcrunch” here).

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Sometimes it is obvious where the world is headed, but some people and industries become frozen in place and time. They are like the duckbilled dinosaurs happily munching on the still-abundant plants around them when the meteor strikes instead of the small furry mammals underfoot who take cover every day by natural habit. In the print newspaper industry, it’s the same story. Everyone wants to wall off the Web and keep grazing on declining ad revenues.

A week ago, I wrote a post based on a conversation I had with Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen in which he made the case that print media companies would be better off shutting down their print operations now (“Burn the boats”) and move forward unencumbered into the digital age, no matter how painful that may be. That suggestion hit a deep nerve, and continues to do so.

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Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.”

Yesterday, Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.

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Yesterday, browser market share figures came out from Net Applications, and the big news is how Chrome is moving up the ranks at the expense of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and even Firefox, compared to December.  But you have to look further back to get a sense of what is really happening.

The various flavors of Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, and IE8) together have 62.1 percent market share, down from 68.5 percent last March.  That is a 6.4 percent drop in about a year.  During the same period Chrome went from 1.6 percent share to 5.2 percent.  Firefox and Safari each gained about a percentage point each over the same period to 24.4 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively.  (Although Firefox is a tiny bit down since November, when it peaked at 24.7 percent).  If you add up the gains from those three—Chrome, Firefox, and Safari—that is where most of IE’s share went. But even that doesn’t tell the whole story because if you look at share of individual versions of the different browsers, you can see another dynamic in play.

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The following guest post was written by Edo Segal (@edosegal).

Earlier last week, as the day was coming to an end and I was speaking with my 5 year old at bedtime we shared the highlights of our day. I started by telling him the company that created the iPhone is about to come out with . . . I paused—how do I describe it?—well, a “big iPhone” I said. About this big, I gestured holding my hands about 10 inches apart. “Wow, Amazing!” was his instant reaction as his eyes lit up. Even my 5-year-old knows that bigger is better, especially when it comes to tactile interfaces. In fact, the advantages are probably more obvious to his generation than it is to ours.

For this first generation born into a world of the iPhone, Wii and soon the Xbox’s Project Natal, the distance between the metaphor created by these devices and the reality of their interaction is constantly shrinking. My wife is currently doing her PhD research on the merits of tangible interfaces for young children in education and the data is telling. There is no doubt that there is great potential to enhance learning with tactile computing. Through that lens the “Bigger iPhone” is akin to a bigger yard to play in or a bigger room. This insight is telling. For these kids the iPhone’s primary function is by no means a phone. It is first and formost a gaming device, followed by a networked camera, followed by everything else. Through this lens one can see the importance of the iPad in the historical trajectory of our human-computer interaction. What’s lost in all the complaints about what the iPad is lacking (multitasking, camera, etc.) is that people need to view the iPad on more than its merits as a first-generation product. Rather, they need to understand it in context of the evolutionary arc of computing.

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In the State of the Union Address last Wednesday, President Obama said “the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy and America must be that nation.” At the same time, on the other coast, 75 clean energy investors, entrepreneurs, and researchers were debating whether the U.S. can gain this leadership position. They agreed that even though Silicon Valley leads the world in technology, it is not clear if it will ever lead in Cleantech. The Valley may develop some breakthrough technologies, but without government help these are unlikely to translate into global leadership. The technology world is rightfully allergic to government assistance and intervention. Cleantech is different, however, and we aren’t dealing with a level global playing field.

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Which venture capitalists funded the most companies last year? We went through our funding data in CrunchBase to come up with the Dealmaker Rankings below. The most active VC was Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which invested in 57 deals throughout the year by our count, followed by Kleiner Perkins (49), New Enterprise Associates (47) Intel Capital (46), Sequoia Capital (42), First Round Capital (34), and Accel (33). You can see all top 25 in the interactive table below, which is followed by another table for just the fourth quarter of 2009. Mohr Davidow and DAG Ventures broke into the top ten for the quarter. You can compare those to the tables we published for the third quarter.

The rankings are based on the number of deals each firm participated in during each time period. But you can also you can also re-rank the table by clicking on the different column headings to find the VC firms which participated rounds with the largest total or average values. By doing that you can see that the bigger VC firms with the most capital to deploy, such as New Enterprise, Kleiner, Accel, Venrock, and Sequoia, were the most active in the bigger rounds. The fbFund, True VEntures, First Round, and Charles River Ventures dominated the smaller, earlier stage rounds. And then interestingly, firms like Benchmark, Greylock, and Highland Capital were active at both ends of the spectrum.

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Most people don’t realize this, but Northern California actually has two giant technology centers: Silicon Valley and Sacramento. Silicon Valley is the world’s entrepreneurship capital and Sacramento is California’s State capital. They are less than 100 miles away from each other.  But technologically, they’re light years apart. While Silicon Valley’s workers conceive the next revolution in technology, Sacramento’s workers toil away at maintaining computer systems which were built in the tech equivalent of the Mesozoic era. Both depend on each other: Sacramento workers maintain the State’s infrastructure and public services, and the Valley’s workers generate the revenue to pay Sacramento salaries. The irony is that while the Valley entrepreneurs desperately look for problems to solve, Sacramento has problems aplenty and no saviors in sight.

Witness the problems which the state experienced last November when it couldn’t issue checks to unemployed workers whose benefits had run out before Congress authorized a payment extension. Workers had to wait up to two months to receive their checks because the Employment Development Department couldn’t make timely changes to its computer systems. Like most of the State’s systems, these were built in the 70’s and 80’s in antiquated computer languages like COBOL, Adabas Natural, Assembler and PL/1. They run under operating systems like CICS and IMS.

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Free speech is a basic human right and is essential to creativity and innovation. But every society places limits on this, particularly when it transgresses into “hate speech” – which disparages someone or some group on the basis of race, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. Calls to violence are tolerated even less. These often lead to jail terms.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been the tech world’s champion of free speech since its inception in 1990. I have always admired this group for defending the oppressed. But when organizations achieve too much success, they often develop a sense of confidence and arrogance that, when unchecked, leads to their downfall. They begin to believe they can “do no evil”. A recent statement by EFF makes me wonder whether it has reached this stage and needs to have its “Google China” moment. Michael Arrington wrote in 2007 that “EFF may be getting a tad overzealous in its desire to defend our right to violate copyright and other intellectual property laws, and needs to take a step back and consider if the oppressed are now becoming the oppressor”. I’m beginning to believe that Michael was right.

Let me explain the background of a case which EFF has just passed judgment on so that you can decide for yourself whether this is indeed the situation.

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After four years in the online video business, one thing is clear: if you produce high quality content and build sufficient distribution across a large enough number of consumer touch points, you can generate more than enough revenue from multiple sources and platforms to build a profitable, stand-alone business.  But no one said it would be quick or easy. Building distribution isn’t obvious and most producers fail to build any meaningful reach, but if you can hatch an editorial direction and business strategy that can attract an audience, over time you will be able to create a real business around it.  But keep in mind the surprises below.

Surprise #1: Lack of Definitions and Standards After All of These Years

Steven Spielberg was trying to transition online with Pop.com in the 1990s and, until his resignation last week, Real Networks’ Rob Glaser has been “at this” for 16 years since 1994 .  Yet to this day, in online video, we still don’t speak a common language.

Heck, we’re not even on the same planet. The first thing you realize about video advertising is that most of the money being generated from video content isn’t derived from in-stream advertising (such as pre-,mid-, or post-roll) but rather by in-banner ads (be they standard display ads or rich media). Yet when you look at the projections being forecast by eMarketer and Forrester, they focus mainly on videos sold inside the video player.

Editor’s note: Earlier this week, guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan wrote a post about the state of online video. In this post he follows up with some thoughts on what’s holding back this budding industry. Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, a leading producer of premium, informative and entertaining video content. The company’s catalog of 5,000 videos has generated over 100 million streams since 2006..

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Every so often, venture capitalist Larry Cheng puts out a list of the top VC blogs. Previously, he ranked the blogs by how many subscribers they have on Google Reader. But now he’s changed his methodology and is ranking them by average monthly unique visitors, based on Compete data. He just came out with his new global ranking for the fourth quarter of 2009. Below are the top ten blogs from that list.

If you compare this list to the last one, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is now the top VC blogger, followed by Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures (who previously was No. 1). Now, the always-provocative Paul Graham of Y Combinator is No. 3, whereas he wasn’t even in the top ten on the old list. Other new entrants to the top 10 include Mark Suster of GRP Partners, Dave McClure of Founder’s Fund and soon to launch his own seed fund, and Bijan Sabet of Spark. Some VCs who dropped out of the top ten include Marc Andreessen and David Hornik of August Capital.

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It’s no secret that Apple doesn’t like Flash. It won’t allow Flash apps to run on the iPhone or iPod Touch despite all of Adobe’s cajoling and pleading, and despite the fact that it’s long been working in the labs. The iPhone’s lack of support for Flash is a major inconvenience for both consumers and developers, and is a gaping hole in the iPhone’s arsenal.

But all of that is about to change because Adobe is going to bring its 2 million Flash developers to the iPhone, with or without Apple’s blessing. As it announced in October, the next version of its Flash developer tools, Creative Suite 5 (currently in private beta), will include a “Packager for iPhone” apps which will automatically convert any Flash app into an iPhone app. So while Flash apps won’t run on the iPhone, any Flash app can easily be converted into an iPhone app. (Microsoft is taking a similar approach with Silverlight). This is a bigger deal than many people appreciate.

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In my recent post on how stealth mode is a bad idea, I advised entrepreneurs to come out of their shells.  To build marketable products, you need feedback from customers, potential investors/partners and business advisers. And the veil of secrecy which comes with being in stealth mode blocks this feedback. But there is a flip-side that I want to make entrepreneurs more aware of: It is a tough world out there and some big and small competitors will deliberately or accidentally steal your ideas. A few of these players are predators much like the beasts of Pandora. So there needs to be a balance. You need to air your ideas, but use every available mechanism to protect yourself. When you do come under attack, run as fast as you can or fight like hell.

I’m going to explain all this through three examples. But first, I’ll cover the basics about patents.

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Two days ago, the knives came out in full view between Apple and Google. On the same day that Google launched its latest Nexus One Android phone, Apple announced the $275 million acquisition of Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising platform. It was as if Steve Jobs was sending Eric Schmidt a very public message: You mess with my business, and I’ll mess with yours.

With the Nexus One, Google basically designed its own phone and is selling it directly to consumers through a new Google online phone store. It is getting into Apple’s territory: making devices and merchandising them. Likewise, by buying Quattro, Apple is moving into Google’s territory: namely, advertising. The Quattro deal was also a response to Google’s previously announced $750 million acquisition of mobile advertising network AdMob, which Apple also tried to buy.

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In the advertising industry overall, revenues generated by direct and brand advertising are roughly split 50/50. But in the online world, where direct advertising is represented mostly by search and email ads and brand advertising by graphical display ads, the split is closer to 70/30 in favor of direct ads.

Last year, with the economy down, the display portion of the U.S. online advertising industry had a particularly rough time. Total revenues in 2009 were down 5.2 percent to $7.5 billion, estimates JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan in a new Internet industry report. But he forecasts that in 2010 U.S. display advertising will rebound 10.5 percent to $8.3 billion, buoyed by a rising economy and actions to reduce the glut of display ad inventory for higher quality sites and content.  For instance, both AOL and CBS are making moves to remove their premium ad inventory from ad networks where prices get beaten down to the lowest common denominator.

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If one of Twitter’s New Year’s resolutions is to reduce sightings of the fail whale, it is off to a good start. Last week, the service was up a laudable 97.97 percent of the time, beating out even Facebook’s availability of 97.22 percent, according to benchmarks published by AlertSite. The only site in the benchmark with better uptime was YouTube, with 99.13 percent availability during the week.  (MySpace and LinkedIn showed below average uptimes of 94.74 percent and 95.48 percent, respectively).

Twitter is almost as famous for its downtime as it is for anything else. So the fact that Twitter had more uptime than Facebook last week shows how far it’s come along—or maybe nobody was Tweeting over New Year’s and sharing pictures on Facebook instead.  Let’s hope Twitter can keep it up, or else we’ll have to pull out the Hitler parody videos again (embedded below).

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After a year when venture funding was in the doldrums, it roared back in the fourth quarter of 2009 to nearly $15 billion, according to a tally of the venture rounds in CrunchBase. The total value of disclosed fundings for the quarter was $14.85 billion, up 113 percent from a year ago (when the total was $6.96 billion), and up 78 percent from the third quarter of 2009 ($8.35 billion).

One of the big funding rounds of the quarter included Zynga’s $180 million, but clean tech cleaned up even more, with Horizon Wind Energy bringing in $318 million in financing, Silver Spring Networks adding $105 million to its coffers, and Sun Run Generation raising $90 million.

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Now that the aughts are behind us, we can start the new decade with a bang. So many new technologies are ready to make a big impact this year. Some of them will be brand new, but many have been gestating and are now ready to hatch. If there is any theme here it is the mobile Web. As I think through the top ten technologies that will rock 2010, more than half of them are mobile. But those technologies are tied to advances in the overall Web as well.

Below is my list of the ten technologies that will leave the biggest marks on 2010:

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With all the excitement about the Crunchies awards, I thought I should cast my ballot: Twitter. No, not because it’s the best product (I think Android is), but because it has impacted me the most. To young TechCrunch readers, this post will seem pretty lame. An old professor trying to seem hip by writing about social networking. Yawn. But I’ve never been a fan of social media. I have more than 500 connections on LinkedIn, but have never invited anyone to network with me. I’ve never used LinkedIn to ask anyone for an introduction. I never had a blog (I find it much more effective to write for BusinessWeek and TechCrunch). I never had a Myspace account (does anyone still use Myspace?). Even when I signed up for Facebook, I did it reluctantly because I kept getting friend requests and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

But Twitter is a different. I get a stream of concise notes from people who want to bring things to my attention and from news outlets. I can follow anyone who seems extraordinarily interesting (and doesn’t tweet about brushing their teeth every morning). And I can read up about people I’m not following any time I want. And I get immediate feedback to my ideas.

I didn’t feel this way a few months ago. To me, Twitter seemed like another silly tool for kids to tell each other how much alcohol they had just consumed.

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