This year, AlwaysOn honors the talented investors in the Global Silicon Valley who have been funding technologies greatest ideas in digital entertainment, on-demand computing, cloud and infrastructure, and digital media. With the advent of a strong layer of early funding options, more companies are coming into the VC sphere with engaging products and well-developed business plans.

Competition remains fierce for VC dollars, and the 2013 Venture Capital 100 winners have brought strong products forward, creating vibrant new companies and invaluable new services. With the mobile world still dominating the technology marketplace, both business and consumer users are being treated to plenty of choices in terms of products and services.

The exit market continues strong, building on last year’s list of exceptionally profitable IPOs and acquisitions. This year’s Top 25 VC Firms and Top 10 Corporate Venture Investors of 2013 list represents a wide range of investments, from Internet to cloud infrastructure to mobile to enterprise. This year, 35 companies raised $7.3 billion, creating $64 billion in public market capitalization. The largest IPO was Twitter (TWTR), the California-based social media platform, which raised $2.1 billion last November, leading the tech-based IPO offerings for the year.

The OnMedia 100 represents the top emerging companies that are creating new business opportunities in the world of media, advertising, marketing, branding, and public relations. The winning companies are staring down the entrenched, legacy institutions that have long dominated Madison Avenue and creating new ways of reaching their sophisticated and increasingly mobile audience.

Today’s digital media, advertising, and marketing startups are shifting to take advantage of the trend toward both socialization and personalization. Consumers are demanding a new type of advertising—one that brings the products and services they want to them.

The AlwaysOn Power Players in Digital Media list honors the most influential people in the banking, venture capital, legal, and accounting world who support technology entrepreneurs that are bringing massive technology breakthroughs to the digital media world. These individuals and their firms are the infrastructure workhorses behind the ideas that make the Global Silicon Valley an incubator for success, creating strong companies that are building forward-thinking, indispensable products.

The OnDemand 100 represents the top emerging companies that are creating new business opportunities in the world of on-demand, cloud computing, and SaaS. The winning companies are creating a complex world of interconnected business intelligence, merging valuable legacy data and systems with vital new streams of information. New application developers, especially those serving the expanding mobile market, now rely on cloud infrastructure to create, deploy, and manage their apps.

The AlwaysOn Power Players in the Cloud list honors the most influential people in the banking, venture capital, legal, and accounting world who support on-demand entrepreneurs that are bringing massive technology breakthroughs to the cloud, on-demand, and SaaS world. These individuals and their firms are the infrastructure workhorses behind the ideas that make the Global Siliconn Valley an incubator for success, creating strong digital media companies that are building forward-thinking, indispensable products.

The AlwaysOn Global 250 represents the top emerging companies that are creating new business opportunities in the Global Silicon Valley. These startups are opening up a new era in worldwide innovation that’s not only changing the way people live, it’s bringing a bright, new vision to the business world. Thousands of new ideas are making their mark, thanks to an expanding venture economy and a wide range of options available to entrepreneurs with the tenacity to take their idea from concept to market.

With the unprecedented shift from desktop to mobile, cloud and infrastructure innovators are making it possible for an entirely new generation of application and software solutions to enter the technology marketplace. The enterprise world has endured a long ramp-up to the cloud, but is now flocking to it with alacrity.

Dataguise provides automated and advanced database security solutions to help ensure regulatory compliance and protect against data theft. Dataguise’s dgdiscover focuses on sensitive data discovery and classification across the enterprise, while the dgmasker product solution provides secure masking of database content with unprecedented flexibility and functionality across heterogeneous environments.

When Viacom filed suit against YouTube back in 2007 the web was a very different place. Video, which is likely to be 90% of web traffic by 2014, was a tiny blip on the radar screen. And YouTube, while backed by the highly regarded Sequoia Capital and growing quickly, was still very much a fragile entity that could have been crushed by a significant defeat.

You have to wonder if Viacom, in hindsight, now realizes that their billion dollar lawsuit drove the video startup into the arms of Google where it now has grown to become a powerful force in web video and likely challenger to the cable dynasty that is Viacom.

I blogged about Dutch virtual reality business Layar last week and I spent 20 minutes last night playing with the app whilst I was waiting for a friend to come meet me for a drink in north London. As I mentioned in last weeks post they have an active developer community and what these developers do is write Layars which run within the Layar augmented reality browser. All Layars share the same underlying structure – when the Layar is opened the iPhone/Android phone opens up the camera and the screen shows the camera view augmented with content relevant to that Layar which is tied to a specific location and within a distance set by the user.

I think I’ve read Paul Graham’s post on “Startup = Growth” three or four times now. And of course on Twitter I’ve seen the Tweets, ReTweets and superlatives on what a great post it is.

Viewing the article through the lens of a venture capitalist there’s much to agree with under the mantra of “growth!” And when you read the article carefully it allows for a period of discovery in your business. For example:

The AlwaysOn X Fund rebounded 4.3% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 2.3%, and the S&P 500 advanced 2.2%. Year to date, the AO X Fund is up 9.4%, the NASDAQ is up 20.4%, and the S&P 500 is up 14.3%.

Long time leader Lululemon impressed with another strong quarter, beating expectations and posting 50% EPS growth for the second quarter. Revenue growth was 33%, driven by 15% same-store sales growth. While growth was slightly decelerating vs. the previous two quarters (partly due to seasonality), LULU set Q3 expectations above the street’s consensus. The stock responded in kind, advancing 12.4% on Friday, and finishing the week up 18.3%.

A founder’s skill is knowing how to recognize new patterns and to pivot on a dime. At times the pattern is noise, and the vision turns out to be a hallucination. Knowing how to sort between vision and hallucination can avoid chaos inside your startup.

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Yuri, one of my ex students started a big-data analytics company last year. He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30.

This is a hot topic I’ve been asked a lot about recently.

• You’re on a first date with a VC – how much should you tell them?
• You’re heading into a full partner meeting and you’ve been asked for a full data pack before – should you give it?
• When is it appropriate for a VC to call your customers?

There is no universal answer and my discussions with various VCs on these topics have yielded many differing opinions. Having been on both sides of this sensitive topic, the following is my personal advice.

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio finished the week down 0.6%, the NASDAQ was up 0.5%, and the S&P 500 advanced 1.3%. Year to date, the AO X Fund is up 7.7%, the NASDAQ is up 10.3%, and the S&P 500 isup 6.8%.

Fashion retailer Michael Kors reported very strong Q1 results with a robust +36.1% in same-stores sales growth, which was slightly up from its Q4 same-store sales growth at +35.8%. Revenue growth was 58%, and earnings increased 87% year over year. KORS added 71 net new stores during the quarter and raised its Q2 expectations, with same-store sales growth expected at +35%. For the week, KORS was up 2.3%.

Risk.

As engineers, we don’t need to take risk like econ majors. Have you ever played Risk, the Parker Brothers game?! The winner sits in Australia protecting one border and never "risks" ANYTHING.

They should rename that game, "Sit and wait on Australia so you can slowly conquer Asia." Nine armies. Three borders. Zero risk. True story.

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio fell 0.7% last week, while the NASDAQ was down 0.5%, and the S&P 500 was down 0.6%. The AO X Fund finished 2011 up 4.6%, the NASDAQ was down 1.8%, and the S&P 500 was flat at -0%.

New rumors arose that the new iPad 3 will come in two different models and will be out as soon as Q1 2012. Impressively, Apple’s iPad and iPhone users accounted for 92% of all mobile purchases in December in the U.S. For the year, AAPL finished up 25.6%.

Around this time last year, I wrote about how we need to get back to allowing conversation to occur without texting, emailing, browsing, Tweeting, Facebooking, or doing whatever else zeros and ones can do these days on smart phones, iPads, notebooks, etc. I am as guilty as the next person of falling for the perception that any response latency is unacceptable. As 2012 fast approaches, this needs to go on top of my New Year’s resolution list: focus on the live conversations at hand, rather than parallel conversations on the Blackberry screen.

My partner Brad and I spent Thursday in DC along with a bunch of entrepreneurs and VCs. We talked to dozens of our elected officials about an issue that is very concerning to us, protecting the safe harbors of the DMCA. 

The DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It received unanimous support in the Senate and was signed into law by President Clinton in 1998. It is a complex piece of legislation but it contains four "safe harbors" for "network service providers. The four safe harbors are explained here. "Network service providers" is shorthand for web services. Companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are "network service providers."