The NVCA published its latest numbers on VC fundraising, and as expected they are not pretty. Only 40 new funds were raised for a total of $4.31 billion. Both numbers are just above half the rate at which firms were raising money before the current downturn hit.

While low, these number are actually better than I would have expected. The total amount raised is slightly higher than last quarter. Usually the NVCA numbers in the first press release are about 5-10% below the final numbers, thus one would expect this to look even better. However about 25% of the total funding amount is just from two funds (August and Bain), this might skew the numbers. And I would expect the downturn to continue.

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The Technology Review today published its list of Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2009 or short “TR10″. One of the Technologies is “Software Defined Networking” and the very well written article heavily focuses on our OpenFlow efforts at Stanford.

A second technology that is highlighted is Siri’s personal assistant software. I am really looking forward to trying out Siri’s product when it goes into beta later this year. For full disclosure, Morgenthaler is an investor in Siri.

When booking travel for our second trip to Europe this year,  the badly tuned Falcon Fraud Manager triggered for both of our payment cards again. It blocked Isabelle’s card and sent out an alert for mine. This itself is bad enough, but how they both banks are then verifying the transaction seems like a recipe for setting up their customers to be phished via the phone.

About 12 hours or so after booking travel I received a voice mail saying they had detected a potentially fraudulent transaction on my credit card, and it asked me to call back the number 1-888-918-7313.

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