ReadWriteWeb

During this week's roundtable we had a group of entrepreneurs from the Pune Open Coffee Club gather at the offices of Persistent Systems to participate in the roundtable together. It is a very good format for entrepreneur groups around the world to get together and network around the roundtable programming which happens every week, religiously.

First up today was Jacqueline Floro-Pierre with ShopTranslated from China. ShopTranslated is a mass-market online retailer of plus-sized women's clothing, with merchandise in the $59-$99 range. Jacqueline and her partner Cortney are designing and manufacturing the line out of China and selling in the U.S.

The smartphone battle, as everyone knows, is raging these days. Analysts have been making predications about which mobile operating system platform will end up on top and Nielsen has been tracking market share trends. But what do venture capitalists think about all this? A recent post on Thomson Reuters's peHUB offers a few key insights.

In an overcrowded world of mortal human beings, struggling with scarcity and inequities, networked technology can extend the reach and vision of any of us individually - beyond the wildest dreams of most of human history. The Internet is a great source of hope.

Enter Angel Investors. They give money, usually their own from previous business successes, to early stage startup companies aiming to create the future of the Internet. They enable inventors to quit their jobs and to build their technologies without immediately worrying about revenue. If there's trouble among the Angels, then the entrepreneurs they help fund and mentor face trouble in their efforts to build the future of the internet that we will all benefit from. Michael Arrington's report of collusion among Silicon Valley Super Angels really is as epic a story as it seems - and if the allegations are true, the consequences could affect everyone in the world.

After the success of last week's ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit in Mountain View, California, we are back with this week's best startup advice in the ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup. This week we discuss VCs and NDAs, balancing features between power users and newbies, geeky startups and how one startup shrugged off a lack of funding and made the money themselves. We also have stories about Diaspora, the open source Facebook alternative, as well as an interview with Gary Vaynerchuk about the bright future of geolocation.

The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) announced Tuesday that it delivered letters signed by over 1,700 members of the entrepreneurial community to each U.S. Senator in hopes of raising awareness of potentially harmful legislation. The Senate is considering financial reforms that could eliminate capital gains tax incentives for venture capital carried interest, which the NVCA says could lead to a severe decline in VC investments.

I'm starting to think that the Augmented Reality industry is very close to developing a Jan Brady complex. If you know what a "Jan Brady complex" is, then skip to the next paragraph. For those who didn't grown up with the 1970s-era television show The Brady Bunch, a Jan Brady complex refers to the middle sister Jan Brady who constantly complained that her older sister Marcia received all the attention. Still with me? Good.

Here on ReadWriteStart we are often providing resources and tips for young companies looking to raise funding from venture capitals and angel investors. This week's recommendation for our Weekend Reading series, Money Magnet: How to Attract Investors to Your Business by Jacoline Loewen, is a book aimed at helping entrepreneurs learn how to deal with financing and how to make their businesses attractive to investors.

Earlier this week, we reported on the fact that the first quarter of the year saw venture capitalist investments drop from the end of last year, but start at a higher rate than the beginning of 2009. In the article we mentioned the boom and bust cycle that is found in economics, which in America has been marked by the dot-com bust at the turn of the century, and the financial crisis of recent times. These two downturns are part of a cycle of ups and downs seen throughout history, but could they be getting shorter and more frequent?

Looking for that next booming trend in the tech industry? Perhaps you need to look no further than music, as a report from the site Indie Music Tech shows that this year's first quarter music tech investments nearly doubled from the previous two years. Author Duncan Freeman estimates 25 deals in Q1 2010, far surpassing the 27 total investments in the opening months of 2008 and 2009, but averaging a slightly lower deal size at $4.4 million per investment.

Though rising numbers from the final quarter for 2009 had many hopeful that 2010 would see a rebound of venture capital funds, new data from the Nation Venture Capital Association (NVCA) is bound to disappoint as Q1 2010 saw the lowest first quarter numbers (PDF) in 17 years. According to the NVCA, just $3.6 billion has been raised so far this year by VCs compared to $5.2 billion in 2009 and $7.1 billion 2008.