Every so often, venture capitalist Larry Cheng puts out a list of the top VC blogs. Previously, he ranked the blogs by how many subscribers they have on Google Reader. But now he’s changed his methodology and is ranking them by average monthly unique visitors, based on Compete data. He just came out with his new global ranking for the fourth quarter of 2009. Below are the top ten blogs from that list.

If you compare this list to the last one, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is now the top VC blogger, followed by Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures (who previously was No. 1). Now, the always-provocative Paul Graham of Y Combinator is No. 3, whereas he wasn’t even in the top ten on the old list. Other new entrants to the top 10 include Mark Suster of GRP Partners, Dave McClure of Founder’s Fund and soon to launch his own seed fund, and Bijan Sabet of Spark. Some VCs who dropped out of the top ten include Marc Andreessen and David Hornik of August Capital.

Four VC blogs in the top ten are new under the Cheng’s method, which better captures which ones are capturing attention since it is based on an average of the last quarter’s audience. Of course, this method does not capture people who read the blogs via RSS. So pick your poison. You can subscribe to the Top 10, Top 25, Top 50, or Top 100 on Google Reader, if that’s your thing (can someone create corresponding Twitter Lists for these VCs?).

Cheng is a managing partner at Volition Capital, which was Fidelity Ventures until it was spun off on Monday. His own blog, Thinking About Thinking, ranks No. 12.

Top 10 VC Blogs (Average Monthly Uniques, 4Q09)

1. Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, A VC (100,279)
2. Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures, How To Change The World (82,838)
3. Paul Graham, YCombinator, Essays (71,924)
4. Brad Feld, Foundry Group, Feld Thoughts (45,633)
5. Mark Suster, GRP Partners, Both Sides of the Table (39,389)
6. Bill Gurley, Benchmark Capital, Above The Crowd (23,084)
7. Dave McClure, Founders Fund, Master of 500 Hats (21,462)
8. Josh Kopelman, First Round Capital, Redeye VC (12,972)
9. Bijan Sabet, Spark Capital, Bijan Sabet (12,451)
10. Jeremy Liew, Lightspeed Ventures Partners, LSVP (12,097)

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The Top Ten VC Blogs (New And Improved)

Are you tired of living in public, sick of all the privacy theater the social networks are putting on, and just want to end it all online? Now you can wipe the slate clean with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. (Warning: This will really delete your online presence and is irrevocable). Just put in your credentials for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or LinkedIn and it will delete all your friends and messages, and change your username, password, and photo so that you cannot log back in.

The site is actually run by Moddr, a New Media Lab in Rotterdam, which execute the underlying scripts which erase your accounts. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is a digital Dr. Kevorkian. On Facebook, for instance, it removes all your friends one by one, removes your groups and joins you to its own “Social Network Suiciders,” and lets you leave some last words. So far 321 people have used the site to commit Facebook suicide. On Twitter, it deletes all of your Tweets, and removes all the people you follow and your followers. It doesn’t actually delete these accounts, it just puts them to rest.

The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine runs a python script which launches a browser session and automates the process of disconnecting from these social networks (here is a video showing how this works with Twitter). You can even watch the virtual suicide in progress via a Flash app which shows it as a remote desktop session. You can watch your online life pass away one message at a time. Taking over somebody else’s account via an automated script, even with permission, may very well be against the terms of service of these social networks.

From the FAQs:

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can I stop the process?
No!

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can YOU stop the process?
No!

What shall I do after I’ve killed myself with the web2.0 suicide machine?
Try calling some friends, take a walk in a park or buy a bottle of wine and start enjoying your real life again. Some Social Suiciders reported that their lives has improved by an approximate average of 25%. Don’t worry, if you feel empty right after you committed suicide. This is a normal reaction which will slowly fade away within the first 24-72 hours.

The light-hearted video below explains the benefits of committing Web 2.0 Suicide and disconnecting from “so many people you don’t really care about.” Unplugging from your social life online will leave you more time for your real life, which you’ve probably been neglecting. With the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, you can “sign out forever.” Not that we are recommending you do this in any way. But you may enjoy the video.

web 2.0 suicide machine promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo.

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Wipe The Slate Clean For 2010, Commit Web 2.0 Suicide

This guest post was written by Martin Seibert, a German Internet media consultant.

Google Wave is a hot topic at the moment. The ambitious group collaboration and micro-messaging platform started rolling out in beta via an initial batch of 100,000 invitations two months ago. Many people still want invitations. Among those who’ve tried it, some criticize it, some praise it. For now it has a lot of usability problems that are described below. Yes, you should look at Google Wave. But there is no need to desperately long for an invitation yet.

Nevertheless, this post outlines how you’ll probably use Google Wave in the future and also gives you advice on how to implement it in your company or your team of coworkers. It also reveals some big usability problems in the current version. Those issues aside, I would like to show you the advantages of the “wave” once again and describe some cool use cases that might make you love it at some point in the future.

Introduction to Google Wave

If you don’t know the wave yet, you might want to see this movie:

Advantages of Google Wave

• Innovative interface
  The user interface of Google Wave breaks new ground and yet is not unfamiliar as its layout resembles the inbox of your mail application. The timeline that lets you recap how the wave has evolved and changed since your last visit is something that even wikis don’t have today—a feature that will surely be copied extensively in the future due to its intuitive usability.
• Waves activate participants to contribute
  Furthermore, the user interface motivates further contributions to the wave. This is an excellent way to convince a lot of people to participate.
• Real-time collaboration
  It is a completely new experience to actually see your friends, colleagues and contacts type in and change content in real time. No other application apart from a few client-side chat tools currently offers such a service via a web interface. If you’re a tech geek, you’ll love that part of Google Wave. It is a powerful innovation when it comes to real-time communication and collaboration. It is competing with the well-known comforts of email, wikis and chat, but in a lot of use cases, I think Wave will win.

What is Google Wave good for?

Brainstorming, early concept creation and discussion is what I see Google Wave being used for extensively in the near future. It can also serve as a multi-user note-taking platform for meetings and sessions in your company or university. If you want to organize an event collaboratively, Google Wave will most likely replace wikis. That’s a punch in the gut for all creators of wiki software.  These are just the most obvious uses.  As more people use Google Wave and become comfortable with it, they will begin using it in entirely new ways.  The real-time communications it makes possible will override its weak points because of the greater efficiency it allows for any group trying to work together.  One day the wave is gonna rock! But that is not today.

Google Wave is overly complex (Steve Rubel)

Robert Scoble put it this way: “This service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity.”

What he means is shown in this video I have put on YouTube:

If you look at the public waves being updated at a speed that none of us can follow, you will understand how especially non-tech-savvy users will find it overly complex. I hear them say: “I just don’t want to know all this stuff.”

Even if “all this stuff” is relevant content from your teammates, you’ll have to filter and sort it all out to make it manageable. I believe it’s possible, but Google Wave users will have to learn how to do it.

The interface after login with an open wave

Disadvantages and usability problems

• Missing revisions with rollbacks
  There is no professional revisioning system in place yet. If somebody messes up your wave and you want to undo it, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise: You have to do it manually. So folks, please do not delete too much content on waves.
• No permanent hiding of replies yet
  At the same time, Google Wave does not offer a way to permanently hide replies. Result? The main text in the wave is disturbed by images, boxes, colors and text from all participants. This can become a real mess and might even prevent you from reading the important content. The Google Wave team should definitely address this.
  (Look at the screenshot above and see how nice the small “+” sign fits in. That should be the default.)
• Why can’t I invite everybody yet? Closed preview kills value
  Right now Google Wave is not suitable for real usage as too few people have an account. If you can’t invite everybody, the value of a wave decreases dramatically.
• Where are notifications for updates of the waves I follow?
  There are no means of monitoring waves. This is Google Wave’s biggest weakness.  I don’t get an email, Gtalk alert, or any other notification in the communication systems I already use today when there is new activity in a wave.  As I am still heavily using RSS feeds (in contrast to other TechCrunch authors—by the way, almost 4 million TechCrunch readers use RSS feeds as well), I’d love an RSS feed of the waves I want to keep an eye on. Unfortunately, this isn’t yet an option.
• Too slow for a real chat
  For a real chat, Google Wave is much too slow. The performance of live transmissions varies from good to very poor and back without any understandable pattern. Today, you’ll want to keep using Skype or Jabber clients for chatting. I expect this to change, once we see local implementations of Google Wave in companies. Most of the server power can then go to the companies’ employees, clients and partners.
• Google Wave is unstable
  If there are peeks, Google Wave seems to have trouble with the load of lots of users. Here is a screenshot that I see way to often.
  
• Portability: no exporting of waves possible yet
  There isn’t an export feature to my beloved wiki yet. I’d love to have the wave content “natively” (not as an embed) in my Confluence, Foswiki (TWiki), XWiki, Mindtouch, DokuWiki or MediaWiki whenever I want it. To Google and wiki vendors: please give us that kind of portability.
• Google accounts should not be required
  Why do I need a Google Account to participate in a wave? That is a big problem if you want to engage with clients and non-tech-savvy users.
• Who is really online?
  Google Wave tries to display who is online by showing a green dot on the profile picture, but it’s not reliable yet. In fact, I’ve even seen people writing content who were identified as being offline.
• Remember: don’t share confidential information in waves
  As soon as you invite somebody to a wave, he can access it forever. If the discussion reveals secrets you don’t want to share with all participants, you’re out of luck: there is no way to get anybody out of the wave. The only chance you have is to create a new wave from the existing one. If you don’t want to do that, you’d better keep confidential information out.
• No markup editing like in wikis
  There is no source code view in Google Wave that you would want to use as an experienced wiki user to control what appears and how.
• Waves lack readable URLs
  Waves already have permanent URLs. But how readable is this? “https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,minimized:search,restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252Be-cg7PN0A.1″. The Google Wave team will have to come up with more readable versions that are short and self-explanatory. This one should instead read: “https://wave.google.com/wave/google-wave-learnings-advantages-usecases-and-usability-flaws/252Be-cg7PN0A/fullscreen/”

To-do’s for you to use Google Wave in your company

The following list to be a bit premature. As one cannot install Google Wave yet, this is just a checklist to help you prepare for it.

1. Technology

• Server infrastructure and a good sysadmin: You will clearly need a server and a skilled admin to set up a Google Wave server, if you want to use it in your company. If you want a lot of employees, partners and clients to use it, you should prepare to invest in good hardware to make the real-time experience a good one. Up until now no one has been allowed to install the preview version of Google Wave. This means that nobody knows how difficult or easy it will be to install it and how easy it will be to connect it with other public wave servers. Still, it should be helpful to have a sysadmin around who knows what he is doing.
• HTML5-compatible browsers: Google Wave is an HTML5 application. If your company still works on Internet Explorer 6 or below, you will not be able to use Google Wave flawlessly. Therefore, make sure all participants have access to up-to-date browsers.
• Fast web connection: A decent web connection for both servers and clients is highly recommended to have a good real-time communication experience.
• Firewall configuration: Your admin should know how to configure your firewall so that your Google Wave server can communicate with the world.

2. Organization

• Define the goal of the wave and make sure everybody understands the purpose and the content of your wave. If you don’t, a lot of “side-noise” will arise.
• Create wave guidelines: You should set up guidelines for your wave participants to make sure they understand what the wave is for.
• On-boarding: Make sure that everybody you want to work with has a Google Wave account. (I know, this is quite difficult today. And that’s why Google Wave isn’t that useful yet.)
• What application is to be used? Differentiate the systems in your company so that everybody understands when to use emails, wikis, chats, databases and when to use Google Wave. How to set them apart? I don’t know.  This will emerge organically.
• Give Google Wave a purpose: Make sure people understand how to use Google Wave. You don’t want them to turn it down before even testing it thoroughly. That is especially true for the non-geek users.
• Not too many wavers on one wave: You should beware of inviting too many people because you can’t kick them out afterwards.

3. Culture

• Do not delete content without permission: My brother had created a new wave to evaluate Google Wave. We were all filling in texts, comments and arguments. Within a very short period of time, a really cool document had evolved, and I thought: “you should make this a blog post.” So I started to restructure it, changed arguments and content into text, and deleted the comments afterwards. The bashing and flaming that triggered from people who were angry with me for killing their content was enormous.
• Make rules and copyright clear: After I had restructured our wave and taken all the bashing for deleting the obsolete comments, the first participants asked if they could use the content in their blogs. We became aware of the as-yet unanswered question: “Who owns a wave? Who may do what with it? Who is allowed to use its content?” Make sure to clarify this in advance with your coworkers.
• Be aware of the complexity: The basic use and advantage of Google Wave should be clear to your employees once you roll out Google Wave. If the purpose is not clear, its complexity will quickly drive away many of your colleagues. Good luck trying to convince them to come back.
• Get ready for live feedback stress: A special problem in a wave is that you get answers to what you write while you’re still writing it. Every other means of communication leaves room to formulate and write your message first. In Google Wave the stress of a personal meeting with live communication can occur. (See the video above if you don’t know what I mean.)
• For now, consider only inviting geeks: Today, nobody can really control documents in waves, and there’s no real revision yet. And waves change a lot. Therefore, it’s better to invite people who can give good feedback. The more wavers, the more complex a wave will become.

Overall evaluation and outlook

If you criticize Google Wave, you should keep in mind that it is a “preview” now. It’s not a beta, and it’s not a final release. The Google Wave team has set out to create “email as it should be in 2010″. And from what I see, they have a good chance of doing so, but 2010 is less than two months away. However, I am willing to bet that this piece of software will eventually overcome Robert Scoble’s criticism.

For professional collaboration, I still recommend the wikis mentioned above. But if you’re into real-time collaboration, Google Wave will eventually be your choice. Just make sure to bring advanced web skills.

Sources
A lot of the content for this blog post was created in a wave. As no one knows who owns the content in a wave, I would like to list all who participated: mseibert (That’s me!), jseibert, eicker, bfri, Silke, Sam, Gerrit, Ton, Paul

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Why Google Wave Sucks, And Why You Will Use It Anyway

Editor’s note: Today, being a news junkie requires not just the ability to keep up with hundreds of breaking stories a day, but the ability to redistribute those stories to your followers and news sites. To get some insight into the modern news junkie, we asked Mrinal Desai to share with us how he screens the news in the guest post below. Desai is the co-founder of CrossLoop, but some of you may recognize him more from Twitter or Techmeme, where he tips stories every day—580 of those tips have appeared as headlines since the beginning of this year. You can read his last guest post here.

Like many out there, I have been, am and always will be a news addict. For many news junkies, it is the fleeting, current fix of information about a breaking topic that interests them, only to be replaced by the next headline. They jump from headline to headline, forgetting the one they just read as they move on to the next one.

For me personally, news is not only timely information on the current state of affairs but also a way to take a deep dive, to connect analysis and information together and learn through application.  I am looking for insight.  It could be patterns, it could be knowledge about an industry or it could be an opportunity to become introspective and ask questions.

Keeping this in mind, here is a snapshot of my consumption and distribution of news both offline and online.  I’ll divide the way I screen the news by the screens on which it comes to me.

No Screen:

• I don’t start a day without reading The Wall Street Journal in print
• Currently, I get 4 magazines and I go through them on the weekend: The Economist, The Atlantic, Wired and Fortune. Before they stopped, I used to also get Business 2.0 and MIT’s Technology Review.

Screen 1 – MacBook Pro:

Apps: Twitter, Google Reader, Techmeme and a little bit of Facebook

Twitter: I’ve been a user since January 2007.  Its always on for me. I invest a significant amount of time in figuring out who/what to follow based on my interests.  Today this ‘list’ stands at 489. Building this list is a continuous process and it typically consists of people who can teach or inform me of something, news sources and people I respect and with whom I want to build a long term relationship with independent of business. Of this, I have a column/list/group called “Pigeons” (birdie, early days of communication—you get it, right?).  I read each and every tweet of this group. I have about 75 in this group. 15 of my personal favorites, apart from @techcrunch and all those who write for it @techcrunch/team, are:

@bxchen – Technology Reporter, Wired
@148apps – iPhone App Reviews
@msuster – General Partner, GRP Partners
@jennydeluxe – Technology Reporter, The New York Times
@scobleizer – everything social media
@Learmonth – Reporter at Adage
@jasonhiner – Executive Editor at TechRepublic (CBS Interactive)
@leplaporte – Technology Journalist and Broadcaster
@appadvice – Editor, Webware (CBS Interactive)
@taylorbuley – Technology Reporter, Forbes
@sarahintampa – Writer, ReadWriteWeb
@reckless – Nilay Patel, Engadget
@gizmodo – Everything gadgets blog
@dmac1 – Technology reporter, Business Week
@joshk – General Partner, First Round Capital

You can follow them all in one click on the Twitter List I created called “Fifteen”

Screen 2 – iPhone: I have played with a few iPhone news apps, both paid and free.  These include the mobile apps from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times , Byline, Fluent News, News Fuse, BBCReader, NPR News, ReadItLater, ZenNews, and News Pro. I also visit mobile news sites. Being a little glued to Techmeme, I was very excited to see its new mobile version for smartphones—the icon took a spot right away on my home screen:

After experimenting and trying them all out, though, my current favorite native iPhone app is Newsstand (iTunes Link) which stays on my dock. Its a $4.99 app but it does the following extremely well for me:

1. Synchs beautifully with Google Reader and is fast.  It allows me to organize my folders, move them up and down and importantly very easily “Mark all as Read”

Below is a snapshot of my Feeds and a folder creatively named ‘Top News” that I keep a close watch on every day.

2) Newsstand has a lot of social goodness to share through Twitter, Delicious, ReadItLater and Instapaper

What’s Missing:
—bit.ly so that I can track data on the links I share as I do on Tweetie 2 with my API key.
—Sharing on Facebook
—Ability to RT or @respond to my twitter stream that I subscribe to as an RSS feed from within Google Reader.

Before social media, I always shared news via email to specific people. Now I have replaced email with these easy tools:
—Twitthat bookmarklet. One click.
—Twitterbar a Firefox Add-on customized with a prefix. One click.

—Google Reader’s Share is connected to my Twitter account. One click.
—Facebook Share bookmarklet or if I want it all on one place, I recommend Shareaholic.

Screen 3 – TV. I do not get my news here since I watch very little TV.

Screen 4 – eReader
I have a Kindle that I use to read books and have not switched from print to this one yet for news. As you can imagine, I get enough news on my other screens all day and like some time away from it.

Below is a visual of how I personally share news and the tools I use. Everything goes through Twitterfeed as my central hub for news going in and out.  Note that lately I stand undecided between Seesmic and Tweetdeck. (Image courtesy: Zurb, click to enlarge).

I spend a significant amount of money on news—4 print magazines, 2 newspapers with one online and iPhone apps.

The only screen I care about:

• well written analysis
• Unique and timely content/information
• Thought provoking story telling
• “Connection” with the writer—literally or figuratively from a style perspective
• Delivery channel. Find me—the “paperboy route” has changed

How do you screen the news?

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Screening The News

Facebook is much more than a social network. Twitter is much more than an information network or serendipity engine. Each represent a dashboard for your attention, a foundation for conversations and collaboration, and a matrix for your social graph and contextual relationships. In other words, Facebook and Twitter essentially represent the entrée to the future of the social Web as each strive to host, what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and others, refer to as our personal social operating system (OS).

What Windows is to PCs and OS X is to Macs, Facebook and Twitter are to our social architecture and enterprise. Certainly there’s a David and Goliath element here depending on which company you immediately view as Microsoft or Apple. However, Mac and Windows are simply operating systems, not networks per se, and that’s where the metaphor of an OS breaks down. Either way, there is the perception that there is a competition between Facebook and Twitter for your attention and your network.

Why? At the very least, Twitter and Facebook combine the elements of productivity and interactivity, combining a social OS, a global network, and a platform for open development.

The fabric of our online activity stems from a sophisticated social framework that facilitates the exchange of information and sustains professional, conversational, and contextual connections. Facebook and Twitter, like Windows and Mac, allow us to interact cross platform, while hosting dedicated applications that support our engagement, productivity, and communication.

As much attention as we pay to this mythical clash between Facebook and Twitter, the truth is that it’s not unprecedented to maintain identities in more than one ecosystem. For example, I use both Mac and Windows-based systems, I use both Facebook and Twitter. Yet according to new data from Hitwise, it appears that the epic battle between the two perceived leaders in Social Media is one-sided—or perhaps better stated, dominated.

As of October 2009, Facebook accounts for 6 percent of all U.S. Internet visits while Twitter represents only 0.14 percent. In fact, visits to Twitter.com peaked at .20 percent between June and July 2009 and has slowly lost attention in the interim, a point TechCrunch has noted as well. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco recently, co-founder Evan Williams acknowledged the slowdown in traffic to Twitter.com in the U.S., for now, but he also stated that they are in the process of finalizing new features that will reverse the downward trend. Williams also reminded us Twitter continues to recognize growth in both mobile and abroad.

And, for those who take solace in the hope that traffic is migrating from Twitter.com to mobile clients, there is some truth to the theory. However, new visitors count for everything and Twitter needs to do a better job capturing new users and holding their interests after they register. The company needs to look further than its resident celebrities to attract and sustain traffic.

For the time being, regardless of numbers, Facebook and Twitter serve a purpose, and thus, remain the Mac and PC in the lives of many. And, until the day that I am forced or compelled to pledge allegiance to one or the other, I will continue to cultivate relationships across multiple landscapes and suggest that you do the same.

But which one’s the Mac and which one’s the PC?

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In The Fight Between Facebook And Twitter, Which One’s The Mac And…

Google released a new mobile navigation app today and GPS navigation companies such as Garmin And TomTom saw their shares take a plunge. The announcement shaved $1.2 billion off of Garmin’s market cap alone. It’s shares are down more than 16 percent so far today to $31.60. TomTom’s shares are down 21 percent to $8.11.

And this is just for an Android app. But Google could very well make it available to other phones as well, and that is what has investors worried. GPS navigation apps are among the most expensive, and most lucrative, of all mobile apps. TomTom sells its iPhone apps for $50 to $100, with a different app per country.

Google just cut the traditional GPS navigation companies at the knees by releasing what may be a far superior product for free. It is not a standalone navigation app. Rather it taps into a lot of the resources Google makes available on the Web, including Google Maps, Streetview, voice recognition, and sophisticated search. You can use voice search just as you would look for something on Google’s search engine. “Where is the Pizza Hut in downtown Palo Alto”? If Google’s search engine can find it, then so can Google’s navigation app. Garmin and TomTom can’t compete with that kind of Web-scale computing power.

And Google is happy to give its navigation app away for free because it leverages many existing technologies it has already built for the Web, and it encourages more people to use Web-capable phones and do local searches on them. It’s strategy is to give the software away for free, and make money on the search ads.

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Google’s New Mobile App Cuts GPS Nav Companies At The Knees

Does the world really need another URL shortener? Apparently, the U.S. government thinks so. It just launched http://go.usa.gov as a link shortening service for government employees. It shortens links from any .gov, .mil, or .si.edu site.

For instance, http://go.usa.gov/llX takes you to a page on Nasa’s site with some nice satellite imagery showing the Fall colors in Wisconsin. And http://go.usa.gov/liO is a link to www.Recovery.gov (I think you save two characters n that one). The idea is that if you see one of these short links you know it is coming from a government employee, which doesn’t exactly make it official but is supposed to make it more trustworthy.

When you see a go.usa.gov tweet, it will be like getting a messge directly from Uncle Sam, or rather, one of his minions.
But I mean, really, can’t they just use bit.ly like everyone else?

With commercial link shorteners such as Cli.gs and Tr.im falling by the wayside, maybe the government will start a short URL bailout next. Go.USA.Gov!

(Hat tip to Anil Dash)

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Go.USA.Gov! Our Taxpayer Money Hard At Work Shortening URLs.

Kids these days. It seems like they’re writing HTML before they learn how to talk. And a lot of them are starting companies before they graduate from high school.

Here’s a list of some of our favorite teen entrepreneurs. And please keep in mind that there are lots of startups we’ve yet to hear about. So if you are a young entrepreneur, make sure to leave a comment below and add you bio and startup information to CrunchBase.

Jessica Mah

Jessica Mah, 19, is currently the CEO and Co-Founder behind Indinero, a Mint.com for small businesses. Mah started her first startup at 13. Last year, she founded internshipIN.com, a site to help high school and college kids find internships in their area. Now, at 19, Mah is finishing up her Computer Science degree from the University of California, Berkley, as well as being the CEO of Indinero.

Ashley Qualls

Ashley Qualls, 19, started WhateverLife when she was 14, a site designed to give MySpace users free Myspace layouts and HTML tutorials. She employs both her mom, and her friends who do graphics for her. Qualls started WhateverLife in 2004 as a hobby, and now has turned into a business, with her site getting anywhere from 150,000 to 360,000 daily page views.

Donny Ouyang

Donny Ouyang, 17, started his first business in 2006 called Kinkarso Network. Kinkarso Network operates a number of web properties including; BattleForums.com, HostBright.net, ChristianAvenue.org, etc. Ouyang has been featured in Entrepreneur, PC Magazine, Retire At 21, Internet Entrepreneurs, and many other sites.

Sam Purtill

Sam Purtill is one of the founding engineerings of YouNoodle, a service that lets users follow start-ups that they are interested in and predict success of start-up teams based on analysis of historical data about qualities of the team’s founders and other information. Purtill originally built the site, and has been with the company since September 2007. Sam placed his previous project, ClassOwl, on hold to join YouNoodle, despite taking the idea to a product in less that six months. He also has worked on various design projects in Romania.

Grant Bell & Robert Day

Grant Bell is a teenage entrepreneur who is the co-founder of Tomorrow’s Web, an online network dedicated to supporting and engaging with young people with an internet in the web, technology and entrepreneurship. Bell is also the Founder of Pitchie, a stealth startup.

Robert Day is the co-founder of Tomorrow’s Web as well. Day has worked for various web companies such as ChannelFlip and Be Broadband’s OpenHub.

Mark Bao

Mark Bao, 17, is an internet entrepreneur based in Boston, MA. Bao is the founder of Avecora and Ramamia. In August 2009, Bao sold his product, Avecora OnDemand, to Branchr Advertising, and renamed the product Atomplan, which he is still the acting CEO of. In the past, Mark has been involved with the Facebook Platform, launching numerous applications, selling three applications, and organising the Facebook developer meetings in Boston, as well as the main event Facebook Developer Garage Boston.

Zachary Collins & Dustin Snider

Zachary Collins and Dustin Snider are the co-founders of Yazzem, a site which allows anyone to share their thoughts about anything that interests them by starting and joining topics. In July 2009, Collins sold Twtbase.com, a database of Twitter apps, and is also home to the very first Twitter applications search engine.

Patrick DeVivo

Patrick DeVivo is a blogger and entrepreneur in New York City. He founded Youth Bloggers Network in May 2007, and then sold the site to Teens in Tech Networks in March of 2009.

Of course, there are entrepreneurs that started their companies at a young age, and since then have grown their businesses. myYearbook co-founders Catherine Cook and Dave Cook started the company in 2005. Catherine is currently a student at Georgetown University, while also working on myYearbook’s growth and features. myYearbook is one of the largest teen oriented social networks, getting about 3 million unique page views per month according to Compete.

Disclosure: I am the Founder and CEO of Teens in Tech Networks. Teens in Tech Networks acquired Youth Bloggers Network in March 2009. Youth Bloggers Network was founded by Patrick DeVivo, who is mentioned above.

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Ten Teen Entrepreneurs To Watch

Whether it’s a sign of economic recovery or just investment bankers getting ready to take off the month of August, there’s been a lot acquisition activity lately. In the last week alone, IBM purchased SPSS for $1.2 billion, Amazon bought Zappos for $928 million, Sprint paid $483 million for Virgin Mobile, AdKnowledge paid $50 million for Super Rewards, and Yahoo picked up Xoopit for $20 million.

So far in July, the value of the acquisitions we track on CrunchBase totals $9.6 billion, which is nearly three times more M&A activity than the $2.6 billion we tracked in June. M&A exits already started to perk up in the second quarter , according to our latest CrunchBase report. But the increased deal flow on July suggests that corporate buyers are opening up their purse strings even more while acquisition prices are still relatively cheap.

But the bargains might not last. Already, the median acquisition price leaped up to $260 million in July, from $22 million in June. Most of that jump was due to some very big transactions such as the ones listed above, as well as Agilent’s $1.5 billion purchase of Varian and Bristol-Myers’ $2.1 billion acquisition of Medarex. Still, you know what they say about rising tides . . .

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M&A Activity Heats Up In July To $9.6 Billion