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The law firm Fenwick & West LLP has released its Third Quarter 2010 Silicon Valley Venture Capital Survey. The survey looks at the valuations and the terms of financing for over 100 technology companies in Silicon Valley that reported raising capital in the third quarter of this year. And not surprisingly, perhaps, the survey found that valuations are up.

According to Barry Kramer, a partner in the firm and a co-author of the survey, during the third quarter, "up rounds exceeded down rounds 52% to 30% with 18% flat. This was similar to the second quarter of 2010, when up rounds exceeded down rounds 55% to 27%, with 18% flat, and the fifth consecutive quarter in which up rounds exceeded down rounds."

Andreessen Horowitz has raised another $650 million for its investment fund, the firm announced yesterday. The firm is just shy of 18 months old, started in June of 2009 as a joint venture between Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen. The initial fund was $300 million, which the firm has used to make investments in a number of prominent companies, including Foursquare and Zynga.

The size and the speed with which the firm raised this second round - in under three weeks - points to the momentum, and more importantly, the respect with which the firm is seen. But even so, with swirling controversies around what the future of investing will look like - seed, angel, and VC alike - it's not surprising that Horowitz has taken to his blog to explain some of the questions people may have about the "why's."

Investment research firm CB Insights has released its report on the third quarter of 2010. And the report is very much a mixed bag: overall funding dollars are down, but the number of deals is up. And seed funding in particular, according the report, is strong.

VC funding dipped to $5.4 billion in the third quarter of this year, a five quarter low. But deal activity recorded its second highest tally in 8 quarters. Absence of mega deals, according to the report, hurt the funding total. The report finds that California, Massachusetts, and New York saw a decreased number of deals and the amount of funding (from 70% of funding dollars in the second quarter to 63% in the third quarter), while Washington state saw an increase.

Last week, we looked at one of the latest reports from the investment research firm CB Insights, tracking the top venture capital firms across the U.S. in terms of their deal activity. According to that report, over the past year the top 30 firms participated in 663 unique deals (almost a quarter of all deals) with amounting to almost $9 billion in investment.

CB Insights has broken down these deals further to examine the trends in terms of deal flow by sector, and no surprise, investment in Internet technologies led the pack, comprising 36% of the deals and 26% of the dollars the top VC firms invested. (Healthcare was the number 2 sector for both the deal numbers and deal size.)

Investment research firm CB Insights has released its list of the top venture capital firms of 2009-2010. CB Insights gathers data on the VC industry, tracking its investments over time and releasing quarterly reports on the number and size of investments, as well as some recent reports on the demographics of the founders receiving VC money.

As an entrepreneur, it's important to stay in-the-know about the venture capital industry and how new data compares to previous years. Thanks to some recently released numbers from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), we can clearly see some continuing trends in the industry that could affect startups and their ability to raise capital. As the first half of 2010 comes to a close, funds raised by VC firms trended downward while IPOs, mergers and acquisitions continued to build momentum.

On Saturday VC Paul Kedrosky wrote about "The Coming Super-Seed Crash," sparking a debate across several blogs and Twitter about the state of VC and angel investment. Kedrosky's post describes the changing landscape for startup financing with the rise in "super-seed" firms, those that deal with about $20 million in investments and "specialize in seeding a bazillion companies."

When angel investor Chris Sacca announced the launch of his new investment firm Lowercase Capital on Friday, he positioned the news with a lengthy essay - the firm's "creed" - titled "Venture Capital is Broken."

In it, Sacca observes that ten years ago, it cost over a million dollars for a tech business to launch, with steep hardware, software, office, and Internet costs, not to mention the "lavish parties so print media would write about their pipe dreams."

According to reports by the venture capital database, VentureDeal, overall venture funding for Internet technologies in the first quarter of 2010 held steady compared to the last quarter of 2009.

These reports assess four sectors: alternative energy, biotech, telecom and wireless, and Internet and ecommerce. Of these areas, overall investment in biotech sector fell, while alternative energy and telecommunications startups received more funding than last quarter.

BlockChalk, the anonymous location-based social networking service, just announcedthat it is now a venture-backed startup. BlockChalk's investors include Battery Ventures, Mitch Kapor, Harrison Metal, Founder Collective, Joshua Schachter, Josh Stylman, Tom McInerney, and David Liu. The company, which focuses on giving neighborhoods a forum to share information, plans to use its new funding to hire more engineers and expand its service aggressively.