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In a new study released by Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureSource, cleantech startups focusing on energy efficiency raised more from venture capitalists in the last quarter of 2009 than those working on electricity generation. While fewer dollars were spent from the third to fourth quarters, more investments were made, especially in the energy efficiency category, suggesting more focused investments.

According to ChubbyBrain, a New York based research company dedicated to democratizing startup and investor information, VCs invested a total $5.329 billion in Q2 2009. This represents a nearly 61% increase over the $3.314 billion of investment ChubbyBrain tracked in Q1 2009. This is partly a story about signs of recovery, which is very encouraging. It is also a story about trusting data and the research methodologies used to collect data such as this.

Do you remember the headlines about VC investment "falling off cliff" after some data was reported by NVCA in early April? We took a contrarian view, saying the trend was down, but challenging the doom and gloom that was jumping from the headlines. This was based on our own online research and some anecdotal data from interviews. Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures also dug a bit deeper. The more we looked into this, the more we saw that the underlying data was not as authoritative as one might imagine. Many people popped up in the comments offering additional data. One was a New York City-based startup research firm (founded as recently as February 2009) called ChubbyBrain (great name!), which tracks this kind of data for a living. So this month, we relied on ChubbyBrain to help us dig deeper and get you the facts.

In the last two months, we have interviewed six VCs. In each case, we asked the same question: "How is early-stage financing doing during this downturn compared to the last one in 2001/2002?"

In this post, we consolidate all the responses, to see if a consensus among VCs emerged. But we also dig a bit deeper. We have been tracking Series A deals since the global financial crisis started. There is some concern that VCs are not walking the walk, that they say all the right things about investing through a downturn, but they may not actually do those things. In this post, we shine a light on that question.

Disclosure: I love Fred Wilson's blog. Union Square Ventures (USV) has invested in some amazing ventures that were far from obvious (i.e. they took risks), and they have invested in my friend Alex Iskold's venture. So, I am a fan. Hopefully, I was able to be a good journalist, restrain my enthusiasm, and ask Albert Wenger some good, probing questions. Read on and judge for yourself.

This is the first in a weekly series of interviews with venture capitalists. We chose True Ventures to kick off the series because it closed a Series A deal for Syncplicity in the dark days of October 2008, earning it a spot on our A-Team. When it closed a second Series A with Loopfuse in February 2009, it joined a very small contingent of VCs that have done two Series A deals since the financial meltdown.

Link shortening services are so common you can't throw a stone online without hitting one, but TinyURL is the undisputed champ. It's one of the oldest, its name says what it does and despite repeated outages - its downtime is small enough that millions of people keep using it.

TinyURL has also allowed incomprehensible amounts of value, both in terms of technology and in terms of money, to sit on the table unclaimed. For years. Now a group of some of the web's hottest investors are betting a few million dollars that a smart TinyURL competitor called Bit.ly can take advantage of being the conduit through which millions of people visit sites of interest to them.

For our third VC Interview, we decided to check out the early-stage VC scene in Europe. So we spoke with Paul Jozefak, Partner at NeuHaus in Germany. We found him via his excellent blog. We wanted his perspective on how the venture scene in Europe differs from the one in the US. We also wanted to see if the surprisingly healthy early-stage financing market that we are seeing in the US is echoing in Europe.

This is the first in a weekly series of interviews with venture capitalists. We chose True Ventures to kick off the series because it closed a Series A deal for Syncplicity in the dark days of October 2008, earning it a spot on our A-Team. When it closed a second Series A with Loopfuse in February 2009, it joined a very small contingent of VCs that have done two Series A deals since the financial meltdown.

True Ventures got our attention by closing a Series A deal in the dark days just after the financial meltdown, funding Syncplicity. It has just announced that it is funding LoopFuse, a late entrant to the very crowded marketing automation space. Sean Dwyer, CEO of LoopFuse, confirms that the Series A investment is $1.4 million. This puts True Ventures into the very elite class of VCs that have sealed two Series A deals in web technology since the financial meltdown (the other VC is Emergence Capital).