Where's the money going...

I receive an email newsletter called VentureWire that provides a quick update of VC money and M&A activity. It's a really quick view of where the money is flowing and I've found it interesting at a macro level - just to determine where investment money is flowing.

Two years ago, there was lots of money flowing to medical stuff (meds, diag devices, monitoring, etc.)

Last year was wireless (WLAN, hardware, hotspots, mobile, content, etc.) and all things security related.

This year, so far, there has been lots of activity in web sites (the ubiquitous Web 2.0 variety), along with wireless AND medical - not so much about security (but some) and there is some activity in the development world (mostly around SOA & SaaS).

As far a buying activity, the big boys have been busy - eBay, Cisco, IBM, McAfee, Yahoo, Google, etc. - the trend is to buy "cool" companies before they raise too much money and have too much of an expectation from the people that started them or their investors. That way, the bigges can swoop in and for a few million, get possibly some cool stuff, if not, it's still cheaper than going through an internal business planning process that produces squat.

But, check out VentureWire - BTW, they go purchased by the Dow Jones a couple years back (after the whole bust thing), probably when for nothing and DJ got a steal.