Another great tool from Google: Google News Timeline.

Google News Timeline - Venture Capital results from 2001

It shows all the news that you search in a timeline! You can see the news in a more coherent way. It is much easier to build stories and check for historical patterns.

Before moving to my comparison of Internet Burst news and the current crisis, let me ask you when these headlines were written (don’t read them yet)?

Venture Capital On The Rocks

Venture Capital Firms Face Stricter Regulations

Venture capital harder to find for companies in search of funding sources

Venture capital investments plunge 23%

Boston-Area Venture Capital Firm Slashes Investment Fund by 63 Percent

Attempts to Find Capital Frustrates Toledo, Ohio, Wireless Internet Founders

Venture Capital: Cautious VCs again looking at incubation

Second-Quarter Chill Continues for Venture Capital

Venture capital downturn worsens

Guess what? All these news were written in 2002! They are very similar to the news that we have about the venture capital industry today as you can compare here:

Venture capital slashed $476 million in quarter

Is Venture Capital in Trouble?

Venture capital performance among worst in a decade

College Endowments Deserting Venture Capital

Bleak outlook for venture capital as Silicon Valley tries hand at self-funding

National Venture Capital Association predicts investment slowdown into 2009

Venture capital industry squeezed

Venture capital-backed IPOs hit 30-year low in 2008

Venture Funding in First Quarter Drops 50 Percent

As you can see, it looks that the news are very similar between 2002 and 2009. Who knows if we may have a similar downturn period of two years as you can see below.

Internet Boom Burst

The bad news started to pop up from April 2002, with the news: Venture capital harder to find for companies in search of funding sources, until February 2004, with the news: Technology Venture Capital Fund-Raising Accelerates.

2 years of VC industry downturn.

Current Crisis

It started from October 2008, with: The Tech Sector’s Venture Capital Is Drying Up, and it continues with today’s: Venture Funding in First Quarter Drops 50 Percent.

Seven months of VC industry downturn.

If this pattern happens again, we may still have to wait 17 months before any big good news! It will be the time of my MBA graduation.

This is an impressive beta tool from Google: Similar Images.

As you can see, I’m searching for Sao Paulo’s images in the tool.

Google Similar Images - Sao Paulo

Then, I select one of the picture to get similar images and the tool gives back a list of images related to what I was looking for!

Similar Images results for Sao Paulo

Impressive!

Balsamiq Mockups Intro

Hey,

I usually do not promote things (except for exceptional and high-productivity products or tools). I’ve just found out an interesting software that allows us to create a product layout in a couple of minutes.

It is a software called Balsamiq and it is a very very easy to use. Check the video next to this post to see it in action!

What you can do with it:

- Really fast prototyping.
- Create mocks for Websites or desktop softwares.
- Create GUI and interface that suits your project needs.
- Share and export easily to your team members.
- Type to find interfaces to your mockups

Go to there website to find out more: http://balsamiq.com