Corporate buyers see a stablization in the environment, with a bias toward optimism. Cisco sees this environment as an opportunity and Hilton Romanski (VP Corporate Development)sees this as very different from last year. Corporate buyers have more ability to do things because they have a clearer idea of what's going on in their own businesses. They see some runway in front of them that will allow them to accelerate a little. Cisco's looking at high quality interaction through video (Telepresence). Video traffic in the mobile space has doubled every five years, so there's more need to build infrastructure.  Collaboration is also a driver of Cisco's business; the ability to bring together groups and use all sorts of technologies to build ideas. Not to mention the transitions happening in the data center, where enterprises are looking to reduce costs and use resources more efficiently.

I asked Bill Gurley whether a new model for early stage funding would emerge now that the VC industry is "slimming down" (perhaps shrinking by 50%) due to the rebalancing of university endowments out of "alternative assets" (illiquid stuff like VC funds) .He answered that the top tier VCS on Sand Hill Road still routinely fund two entrepreneurs and a Powerpoint. He really called the emergence of angels and angel funds a creation of the press, and accused the angels of having a "loud microphone" about what they are funding.

Gurley denied that VCs are moving away from early stage investing, although the panel following him said that if the IPO market heats up next year, as they all think it will, the VCs will go for later stage investments that can become liquid sooner.

Most of the VCs on the panel following Gurley ( David Cowan, Bessemer; Todd Chaffee, IVP, Dixon Doll (DCM) Deepak Kamra (Canaan Partners), Ann WInblad, Hummer WInblad) are trimming portfolios and not hiring.  They are looking forward to raising less money, and having to support only the most promising of their companies.

On government intervention: These VCs know that stimulus money will benefit companies in clean tech and broadband, but no money has flowed yet. In the capital intensive industries of installing solar farms and increasing broadband to rural areas, there MUST be incentive from the government. In health care, a proposed excise tax on medical devices is not welcomed:-)

On Clean tech: Cleantech, partnering with big energy companies, will become a large industry, but there's a limited supply of talented management that can take VC money invested in clean tech and grow the companies. And, as opposed to IT, there are a very limited number of acquirers for clean technologies, which means that the entrepreneurs who invent the technology have to grow the company.  Most early stage clean tech companies are going nowhere, because they can't get the larger rounds to build a company like Cisco around clean tech that can buy early new technologies and use its marketing muscle to get them into the market.

On exits in 2010: what percentage of companies will exit in 2010? not much. 90% of exits in the last few years have been in M&A. In 2010, US will be one of the smallest markets for IPOs. There will be more IPOs next year, but just a modest number. We can see a market environment returning to what it was before the crisis, but we still aren't going to be in a place where IPOs are going to be what they were before 2000.

Ann Winblad: IT growth has slowed, so the IPO and M&A opportunities have not increased in the IT space. We have to see how much large enterprises have cut their budgets to see what the opportunities are in IT. Prediction of high profile IPOs in 2010. Question was aksed: "Will Twitter go public" and Todd Chaffee  (Institutional Venture Partners) refuses to comment..Since he's an investor in Twitter, I think this is a qualified "yes."

Venture-backed IPOs went from 250 in 1999 to an annual average of 20, and last year dropped to 7. Chaffee thinks we will have about 50 this year. Asked again about Twitter, he says many large companies are getting acquired right before they go public, because they've got their operations and financials in shape for SarBox. The threat of a really good company going public will produce more M&A, and the process of preparing to go public cleans up the operations.  But don't plan on it without $100m in revenues.

Precious is showing in limited release in Phoenix.  I guess that's code for "we don't have a very large black population." But at the mall where I saw it today, it has been playing in three theaters for a month. And although I went to see it on one of the biggest Christmas shopping days of the season, the theatre was full at 2 PM. Precious has allure. And that's because it shows the victory of the human spirit over some of the worst life circumstances I've ever seen.

Clareece "Precious" Jones (Gabourey "Gabbie" Sidibe) is an illiterate pregnant overweight teen-ager who has been raped by her father and has been impregnated twice. She sits in school dreaming about being lighter-skinned and escaping to a better future, but she never even speaks in school.  At home, her mother (Mo' Nique) beats her and orders her around. Precious' first child was born with Down's Syndrome and is named "Mongo." Precious's mother, a welfare queen, "cares" for Precious and her child because it enlarges her check for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). In fact, Mongo doesn't even live with Precious and her mother, but is kept by the grandmother, who brings her over when the social worker appears, so the worker thinks there is an intact home.  In between social worker visits, the mother is careful to reinforce to Precious that she's dumb and can never be anything, because she needs Precious for the welfare. To make things more complicated, the mother is jealous of Precious because her boyfriend rapes Precious. The situation couldn't be much more disgusting.

Precious has never been to a doctor, and never had a friend. And then a random school principal goes to her house and tells her she's been thrown out of ordinary school because she's pregnant again, but is eligible for an alternative school called "Each One Teach One."  This changes Precious' life forever, and turns a drama that's tough to watch into something that leaves you in the Christmas spirit.

I'm sure most people I know cannot identify with Precious.  But since I already know my foster daughter at age 7 was made to carry cocaine under her tongue from a dealer to her mother, and steal food to eat while her mother and father sold the food stamps for drugs, I think I'm convinced there are families this disfunctional. My foster daughter also told me her parents had intimate relations in front of her, and also fought bitterly in front of all their children. Physically. Luckily, she's a grown woman now with a child of her own, and she didn't have it at age 16 (when she got pregnant as a teen, I took her to Planned Parenthood and she still thanks me).

Ironically, the working title of my book on foster parenting "Foster Mom" was "each one reach one." The people who made this movie know what I have already discovered: you help people one life at a time.

When I started on Brightkite, it was only because I try every piece of software I can. I couldn't believe it would be something I'd want to use. After all, why tell people where you are? However, it wasn't long before I was posting photos of my dogs from the beach at Half Moon Bay. And then I discovered Trail Guru, which could tell me the distances of my hikes and help me find my way. An iPhone App, Trail Guru transferred my exercises from the phone to the site, so I could see how many miles I travelled in a week, biking, walking, or running (well, no longer running). For a while I was addicted to that.

Then came the payoff: push notifications. Switching to Foursquare to join all my buddies who departed Brightkite,  I discovered it was fun to see where everyone else checked in, and to compete for silly useless things like Mayorship, Badges, and being first among my friends on any given week.  I am a fierce competitor, beaten weekly only by some strangers in Phoenix who must be pizza delivery people or bike messengers. I mean, I found myself trying to unlock the "Player" badge (I did) and the "Gym Rat" badge (I didn't, and it still bugs me why I haven't). And now I'm equally into Gowalla, which has a pretty interface, an apparently less competitive raison d'etre, and some funny things you can drop out of your pack to become a founder of places.

Really, though, these geolocation apps are addictive because they are a simple version of online multi-player games, and because they extend the idea of community.  Today, for instance, I followed my friend Chris Johnson from Terralever on his errands.  He went to the car place, and the market, and he ended up at the Rockerij at 4:30. Jeez, wasn't he just at Dick's Hideaway (owned by the same people) last night? Hmmm...maybe he has food trade or something:-)

While he was going to places in Phoenix, Steward Alsop was moving at breakneck speed through the Bay Area. I swear he uploads all his geo posts at once; no one can check in that many places in such a sort time. I suspect he's an investor in Gowalla.

And lots of men checked in at soccer fields today, taking their kids to practice or the game, spending time with the family.

It's a window on the world, and I really love it.  I learn about the people by knowing where they are and what they do, just as they learn about me.  And I think we are all the better for it. Besides, you can always turn those notifications off if you don't want to know what your friends are doing. Me, I never will. I'm too nosy.

The past few days have been my personal Job Summit.
One of my former foster kids, now a mother with a husband and three children, called me on Dec. 1.
"Do you know anyone who needs house cleaning?" she asked.
"Not offhand," answered. "What's the matter?"
"The rent is due today and we can't make it," she said. "I'm willing to do anything."
I couldn't think of a way to help, short of referring her to Craig's List, which she had already been using. She moved from Sierra Vista, a small town south of Tucson, to Phoenix because her husband had been laid off and there were no jobs in Sierra Vista. They were sure they would find something in Phoenix, so they upended everyone's lives and moved in with her younger sister, who is a shift supervisor at Starbucks's and is herself a single mom.
After a month, the sister asked her to leave, because she was already letting their youngest brother live with her. He's 22. He's out of work as well.

The next morning, I got a call from another former foster kid, who is in community college and has been out of work since May, right after he got married. His wife works at Costco. Her father, a long-time teacher, was RIF'ed last spring from the school he had been teaching at for years, and was just laid off from his temporary job. My foster son cried on the phone: "I didn't get my emergency unemployment funds and our rent's due. He was upset because he knew his wife would be mad if he couldn't pay his part of their expenses. She gets terrified, because she has never had money worries before.

The state of Arizona has begun making it difficult for people to collect their benefits as promised, because the state itself has to borrow money these days. It is operating off a line of credit.

Telling him that the squeaky wheel got the grease, I made him go down to the Department of Economic Security and ask what happened. He texted me that the company he had been laid off from had ceased operations, and that created further paperwork before his benefits could be extended.  It would be another month before he received them. He has gotten to the final interview stages of several jobs, but no one pulls the trigger -- people are very skittish about hiring anybody in this environment.

So that was yesterday. This morning I went to the park with my dogs and met up with two women who often walk with me. Slightly younger than I (well, maybe ten or fifteen years), they got laid off from their full-time jobs last winter. For the past year, one has been giving massages to make money (fortunately, she's trained and licensed), and the other has been doing some part-time consulting. Neither has health insurance. One is drawing from her 401k. Both of them shop at the Goodwill, formerly the choice of my foster kids who are undereducated and unskilled, now the choice of middle class families whom I suspect are using it as a kind of swap shop, trading things they can't wear for things someone else couldn't wear. Not much money changes hands.

No one I know has escaped dramatic lifestyle changes, including myself. If nothing else, we are de-leveraging as a population.

So today was Obama's Job Summit. While it was taking place, Bernanke was assuring members of Congress that he was urging community banks to lend and making it easy for them to do so, while Congressmen were telling him that wasn't happening with his regulators on the ground. Those regulators are covering their butts against the kind of meltdown that occurred from easy liquidity in 2005. Bernanke's employees are busy fighting the last war.

I've totally lost faith in the government to understand what's happening in the street, much less do something about it. Half of them talk a good game and do nothing; the other half talk about reigning in the deficit. In the mean time, the most recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize has decided to throw a few hundred billion more away in Afghanistan, building hospitals and schools in a foreign land where people would just as soon we left them alone.

Only a true sense of community will get us out of this. We all have to work together to build something for the future. If we innovate and then collaborate (not one without the other, please), we can come back. Without innovation, or without collaboration, we will all hang separately.

This week on Leo LaPorte's  excellent podcast about Google and all things cloud, there was a conversation among Mashable's Pete Cashmore, Jeff Jarvis, Gina Trapani, about how they composed their blogs. Almost all of them were composing  in the cloud, with an occasional look back to a text editor. Pete composes in Wordpress, Gina composes  in MediaWiki, and Jeff also composes in blogging software. Only Leo even talked about a text editor. No one would dream of composing in Microsoft Word -- online or off --because Word doesn't translate well to blogging tools.

That let me to think about the fact that I'm now composing my blog in Gmail. Most of the time, if I don't have illustrations, I compose in an email to Posterous and just send it along from Posterous to my Wordpress blog! I don't even go to Wordpress anymore. The only time I use something on a desktop is when I'm live blogging a conference and the wi-fi sucks (surprisingly often)--and then I use Evernote, sync it to the cloud, and move it to Wordpress.

Why is this important? Because 50 years ago, I started composing on a manual typewriter when most other people composed in longhand and transcribed.  Many famous authors wrote in longhand their entire lives. People thought I was crazy for going straight to the typewriter. But I've gone seamlessly from the typewriter to the word processor (we could dictate into a  Digital Equipment Corporation word processor in the Maricopa Community Colleges in the 70s, when I was a professor.)  They thought I was crazy for dictating instead of typing when I did that.

In 1980, when I got the Apple, it was Bank Street Writer and MacWrite.

And now I'm composing in the cloud. Do you see where I'm going with this? There's a lot of futility and not much benefit in resisting change. Things have gotten easier and easier for me, and I'm writing more and more. Technology hasn't impeded my devotion to the humanities --quite the contrary. It has made both producing and consuming them far more accessible. We will be in the cloud sooner than you know. Even Office Live may be behind the times, especially for publishing..

How much of our rising health care costs comes from fraud in the  health care system by players who know how to game it for their own benefit?  Enough to cloud the reform debate, that's for sure. And it can't be pinned on one player; it's up and down the value chain in medical care.

On the one hand, you have the recent 60-Minutes report on drug dealers in Miami who defraud Medicare by opening fake clinics and pharmacies. They get reimbursed for artificial limbs ordered for patients whose IDs they have bought on a black market for Medicare information.

Further up the line you have hospitals who bill Medicare for procedures that could be done in an outpatient setting where they would cost less, or for total care of a patient whose actual care is split between two hospitals, both of whom bill for the entire care. (Go look on the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services web site for the Recovery Audit Contractor pilot program in which this was discovered.

And then there's the sweetheart deal the insurers got to participate in the Medicare Advantage program, which was started when CMS was afraid not enough providers would participate in Medicare. In Medicare Advantage, all the players get paid more than by regular Medicare for providing the same services. Medicare Advantage is targeted by the cost-cutting initiatives, but here's what the plans said: "many commenters contend that, if rates are reduced, MA organizations will have trouble maintaining their provider networks, because they will have to pay providers less, and will have to raise premiums, increase co-pays and deductibles, especially in rural areas, Puerto Rico, in the case of Special Needs Plans (SNPs), PACE plans, and plans that are in direct competition with cost plans."

Finally, we get to the pharmaceutical companies, where we learn that "by suppressing negative studies, relentlessly pursuing positive trial results, and paying academic researchers to promote their therapy, Merck Schering-Plough has managed to hold onto a $4.6 billion market for a drug that has never been proven to be better than cheaper generics in preventing heart attacks or death. "

That's a pretty shocking allegation from the HealthBeatBlog, where Maggie Mahar, maker of the film "Money-Driven Medicine," does her investigative work. It seems that Merck Schering-Plough holds the patents on Vitorin and Zetia, two widely advertised drugs that in studies have proven no more effective than the vitamin niacin and a generic statin, simivastin.

And this doesn't even begin to touch controversial issues like outcomes-based medicine, which might mean fewer mammograms, CT scans, and other procedures that irradiate us often unnecessarily as the doctor either tries to prevent malpractice allegations or perhaps even owns the imaging center.

Everywhere you look there is waste and downright fraud in the health care system, perpetrated by both payers and providers, public and private. I have no doubt that Obama is right that we could fund health care reform by cleaning up the waste, but the lobbyists for the staus quo don't want it cleaned up. They are profiting from waste and fraud, not from legitimate services, IMHO.

Every year at Thanksgiving I write a post about gratitude. Not that anyone cares what I'm grateful for, because everyone has his/her own set of fortunes and problems, but I like to remember mine and hope it will compel you to recall yours -- especially this year. So here it is, generated while I was doing sun salutations last night in yoga.

I'm grateful because:

I'm here now. John Hardaway and Gerry Kaplan are not, and they were two wonderful men. I am alive, functional, healthy enough to appear in a yoga class and do sun salutations.

I have children. Gratitude here goes to John for making me pregnant unintentionally, and for his courage in persuading me to carry Samantha, the child of transformation. Samantha opened my eyes to the wonder of children and families, and therefore I have Chelsea, My children have been an unalloyed blessing.

I have been married multiple times. As a result, I have not only two daughters, but also four stepsons and a step-daughter, and twelve step-grandchildren, all of whom enlightened me before my "birth" grandchild was even born. And he's going to be one year old on Dec. 16. I have the world's best extended family. Although I only have one brother, and he and his kids live across the country, I see everybody in this extended family at least once a year no matter where they live.

I was a foster parent. This has given me four adut foster children and a new foster-ish grandchildson. To see why this is important, go see "The Blind Side" this weekend.

i love my work. Coaching and mentoring entrepreneurs is my passion, and I'm able to do it every day, for money and for love. The entrepreneurs are willing to deal with my craziness.

So there you have it. Embedded in the larger points are the ones you probably were expecting, like being able to afford to travel, being able to write, discovering technology and falling in love with it, keeping my house through the recession, holding a successful conference, and having rich and varied networks of friends throughout the world. But if you think about it, they all go under one of the others above. I was always bad at outlining, so I'll skip going into this further.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and be sure to express your gratitude, because it makes you happy!

A comment on Brian Solis' blog post this morning about the decline in Twitter's numbers turned into this post, in which I explore feelings about Twitter that I didn't even know I had:-) But the discussion about Twitter advertising has also prompted some of these thoughts, which I've been discussing with @scobleizer over on his blog. I suggest you read Brian's post and about the last four posts of Scobeizer to understand where I am coming from. This, of course, presumes you have an empty life.

I question myself about Twitter every day, as most of my non-Geek friends on Facebook are drowned in my Twitter stream and wonder why I do things like say where I am (Foursquare). They don't see any reason to use Twitter, and question whether anyone cares what they had for lunch. There has been no serious MSM discussion of Twitter as search, Twitter as discovery, or Twitter as marketing tool -- all of which preoccupy our community. The phrase "real time stream" scares the pants off people, as evidenced by what happens every time FB moves another step toward real time. What we find interesting, others find annoying.

And now, Twitter is thinking of using advertising, and Ad.ly is using advertising already. Oy-vay.  Another deterrent for newbies.

But Twitter MUST cross the chasm and figure out how to be integrated into our lives. I believe it will end up being just another tool in a social network one day, as the Laconica platform suggests. At the end of the day, although world-changing, Twitter is a tool, not a product. It's a GREAT tool for some people, and a terrible tool for others. Example: Scoble hits the wall and goes down to 1500 follow-ees. Then he tries to segment by lists. And he's an uber-geek who gets paid to do this. His wife never sees him:-)

Hardaway is an uber-listener and a fast follower. So when Scoble makes lists, she makes lists. Her lists are crap. They don't contain half the good people Scoble's do. Every list she has, be it health care, politics, tech -- is incomplete. So she follows Scoble's list, Palafo's list, Enoch Choi's list. Then she doesn't have time to look at their lists, and when she does, it's only to poke a toe into the latest flow of the river. She has no idea what has been happening all week, or even all day or all hour. The lists give here a glimpse of the last five minutes of ONLY the news on Palafo's list (which is often repetitive, because it's breaking news), or Scoble's list (always repetitive because geeks operate in memes).

See where I'm going with this? I'm a Twitterholic, with four accounts (me, my entrepreneurship, my health care interests, and my dog). I've invested a huge amount of time in Twitter, both for making friends (that's where it shines, but that part's going away as it grows) and for learning things. Ordinary people with real lives and families don't have time to study real time streams and Twitter apps and lists. And long-time users hardly every see their earlier Twitter-buds anymore. @newmediajim, @susanreynolds, sheilas, preppydude, and many of my long-time Twitter friends are often drowned in my stream, even though I still follow them. They surface only occasionally, and I always want to throw my arms around them, because I "discovered" them on Twitter. But now I have to follow all my IRL friends on Twitter, too, and I'm stuck. If you read this post by another early Twitter user, @conniereece, you will see similar reservations.

Conclusion: Twitter is more difficult than we think. It's not easy to adopt, especially if you are going to do more than just broadcast, which is what most celebs do. It has an unwritten etiquette, which often grabs newbies by surprise, and now it's full of marketers and spammers. All the above is difficult to capture in statistics and algorithms, but I think that's what is happening.