Twenty ten is here.  It's going to be a good year.

With unemployment sitting at 10%, out of control U.S. government spending, tight credit markets, and wars waging in all sorts of places on the surface 2010 looks kinda tough.  But it has to be better than 2009.

When the financial crisis first hit back in September of 2008 the general advice that I was giving startups was essentially make it through 2009 and 2010 will be a better day.  I still believe that to be true.  2009 was about survival, 2010 will be about growth.  Growth is good.

The availability of capital will increase in 2010.  This will be driven by a continued acceleration of M&A activity in 2010.  According to DMNews, citing a report by Petsky Prunier (a digital media, information, and marketing investment bank) a total of 201 deals valued at $13.5 billion occurred in Q4 2009, a 78%
jump vs. Q3 and a 246% increase compared with Q4 2008.  Nice numbers.  If this exit trend continues as companies seek to buy both top line sales growth as well as innovative technologies it will trickle down to increased earlier stage investments.  As a result, I expect to see a small surge of early stage and follow on investments toward the middle of the year.

2010 will see significant strides in the development of applications that make meaning from the ever increasing stream of data flowing through the Internet to make it more relevant and useful.  I see this happening in both consumer and business markets.  Cloud computing and the ability to manage such resources will see much development in the coming year and we may finally start to see meaningful semantic apps that will lead to the next stage of the development of the Internet in ways that we are only beginning to understand. 

So goodbye two thousand nine, hello twenty ten.  It's going to be a good year.