We (our fund and other individual investors and the angel group)  have just invested in a company (sorry can’t name names) that is part 2.0 and part not. I am more interested in the “part not” .- there are way too many applications out there that have no real visible revenue streams. Yes, Advertising is great and I certainly think that if one can cheaply, they should join the advertising party (Why Not ?- free money) )with the exception of certain web 2.0 companies ( of course the ones we invested in included) -
To a certain extent the web is basically one big Amway- with Google being Amway of course, and the others sort of doing a bunch of MLM- hey it works, but in the long run businesses that sell advertising to sell advertising to they can sell more advertising will likely be the first to fall at a sign of weakness. But, So far so good- and the party goes on ..
I believe that the web 2.0 will succeed where they are leveraging an existing real business (similar to the businesses that survived the first crash)  or where they are actually selling a service ( similar to 37signals.com) right now there are too many tools and free software out there for anyone to make money on the things all the VCs are investing in. (more on VCs later). Hey this blog is free- and maybe someone will read this and I will eventually have an audience and then some advertising….see how easy ( ok not really easy) but certainly not expensive to get done.

Corporate VCs are back – and that is not really good news for everyone else.
here is a link to NVCA’s article on corporate VC investing-http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1299
(obviously originally sourced from Wharton) Remember this is supposed to be a positive article- I dont see it that way-
To be sure, there are many corporate VCs who are there in the bad and good times but seeing some old busted ones come back should make anyone nervous. Obviously there are some really smart corporate VCs

Disclaimer:  (I personally know many of the corporate VCs mentioned above and interact with them on a regular basis – of course I only know the smart ones)