NEW YORK (AP) — A new study shows that funding for business startups declined in 2012, the first time that’s happened in three years, as venture capitalists spent less money on fewer deals.

Capital-intense sectors like clean technology and life sciences were among the hardest hit, according to the MoneyTree study released Friday. It was conducted by PriceWaterHouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters.

In all of 2012 startup investments fell 10 percent to $26.52 billion from $29.46 billion. There were 3,698 deals completed, down 6 percent from 3,937 in 2011. Venture investments also declined 13 percent in the final quarter of the year, to $6.4 billion from $7.38 billion a year earlier, though the number of deals was the same in both quarters at 968.

“General economic uncertainty continues to hinder capital investments, and venture capitalists are no different,” said Tracy T. Lefteroff, global managing partner of the venture capital practice at PwC U.S. “As the number of new funds being raised continues to shrink, venture capitalists are being more discriminating with where they’re willing to place new bets. At the same time, they’re holding on to reserves to continue to support the companies already in their portfolio.”

By industry, software remained the largest investment sector last year, the report found, with $8.27 billion invested into 1,266 deals. That’s up from $7.51 billion invested in 1,176 deals in 2011.
San Francisco’s SquareTrade Inc., which provides electronics warranties, landed the biggest round of funding in 2012 — $238 million from Bain Capital. Mobile payments startup Square Inc. was in second place with $200 million secured from Citi Ventures and others.

Timeline: The Birth Of Silicon Valley

Courtesy of Arthur Rock
Think of the most technologically innovative companies of the past 50 years, such as Intel, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter. Each company has a Silicon Valley address — and each one got backing from venture capitalists. Over the past decade, more than 35 percent of the nation’s venture capital has gone to Silicon Valley startups.
High-tech and venture capital go hand and hand in the valley where technology and venture capital grew up together.
Today, when tech entrepreneurs go looking for money, they could easily end up on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto, Calif., with its clean brick sidewalks and high-end boutiques.
Among the venture capitalists with an office on University Avenue is Bill Reichert.
“Within five blocks there are probably between 30 and 40 venture capital firms,” he says. “And there are probably also about 30 or 40 different startup companies that have been funded by venture capital firms.”
Reichert co-founded Garage Technology Ventures. One of his firm’s best investments was the streaming music service Pandora.
On a typical day in his third-floor offices, Reichert is searching for another winner. It’s a Silicon Valley ritual: Passionate young entrepreneurs visit him every day, looking for financial backing.
Today, he gets a visit from Virginia Klausmeier. She arrives in a casual suit with her laptop and PowerPoint presentation ready to go. This is her third time in front of Reichert, and she is seeking more than $1 million to support the next phase of her clean diesel fuel project.

Virginia Klausmeier (left) makes her pitch for Garage Technology Ventures to invest in her clean diesel fuel company, Sylvatex, to Bill Reichert and Joyce Chung, two of the firm’s general partners.
Cindy Carpien/NPR
Reichert grills Klausmeier about the size of the market for her product, which she plans to sell to refineries. He wants to make sure he should invest in her company.
“We see lots of brilliant innovations” Reichert says, “any one of which could be economically exciting — but we’re looking to pick the ones that are the most successful.”
If Reichert picks right, he can win big. He could bring back returns 20 times over for himself and his investors. Perhaps he could find the next Facebook, Google or Apple.
Though these sorts of meetings are commonplace in Silicon Valley today, it used to be harder for entrepreneurs like Klausmeier to find financial backing. Because just decades ago, there were no venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
Take a company like Hewlett-Packard. In 1938, Bill Hewlett and David Packard used the bootstrap method to start their company. They began tinkering in a garage, backed by $500 and a used drill press. It took a long time to build their business.
The other method back then was to know the right people. Martin Kenney, a venture capital historian who is a professor at the University of California, Davis, says that when they were starting out, industrialists like Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie asked friends and business contacts for money.
“You would go to that person and maybe have a business plan, but often not have a business plan, and explain your idea,” he says. “And if you were properly socially connected — that was very important — that individual might put some money in your young firm.”
Betting On Electronics
According to Stanford archivist and Silicon Valley historian Leslie Berlin, the big change in funding for tech startups — or “connecting high-tech brains with money” — took root in 1959 in the area now known as Silicon Valley.
Berlin says that back then, business people were becoming more interested in electronics. “They didn’t know how it worked. They didn’t know what it did,” Berlin says. But, “They thought it was going to be big.”
At that time, the area had the beginnings of a tech sector. William Shockley, who co-invented the transistor, had his lab here. Stanford University opened its Industrial Park, where companies like Lockheed, General Electric and Hewlett-Packard established facilities.
The nascent tech sector drew the attention of three men who would open the area’s first venture capital firm with the intent of investing in technology.
Two of the men were William Draper and Frederick Anderson, both retired World War II generals. The third was former Ford Foundation President Rowan Gaither.
Though there had been some early venture capital activity on the East Coast, the structure these men set up was new. And Berlin says that it is widely seen as the precursor to today’s venture capital firms.
Here’s how their plan worked: The venture capitalists — VCs — would go out and find new companies. Then they would match investors with these new companies. The VCs got a cut of any profits, and — key to the arrangement — the investors could not be held liable for any legal problems at the startup.
Like ‘Finding A Gold Mine’
Draper, Gaither & Anderson got $6 million worth of investment, Berlin says, and had to find a place to put it. The attempt to invest money sounds comical today.
“People who worked at Draper, Gaither, Anderson would describe driving around to little companies and saying basically, ‘Do you need any money?’ ” Berlin says. “And they had a hard time finding anybody to take it, because it sounded so shady.”
Berlin says some people at the startup firms reacted by thinking, “Wait a second — these people want to just give me money? Why?”
In the end, Draper, Gaither & Anderson didn’t do that well. And it was a different Silicon Valley firm that showed how venture capital investments could pay off. One of its founders was Arthur Rock.
At his spacious San Francisco office overlooking the Bay Bridge, Rock, now a trim and elegant 85-year-old, chuckles as he thinks back on his career. “There’s no way that I know of, other than finding a gold mine, of making as much money as you can [make] in technology” he says.
Rock co-founded Davis and Rock in 1961. The firm hit it really big with an investment in Scientific Data Systems, or SDS — one of the first companies to use microchips in computers. Davis and Rock invested close to $260,000. Eight years later, Xerox purchased SDS for almost $1 billion.
In 1968, Rock brought together the funding for another new company. Its name was Intel.
“It’s probably the only company I ever invested in that I was 100 percent sure would work out,” he says.
After the success of Davis and Rock, venture capital firms popped up all over the area. And in the years that followed, it was dubbed Silicon Valley.
Modern venture capital funding helped build Apple, eBay, Yahoo, Google and Facebook.
Perhaps those companies, or business like them, were destined to happen — but if their founders had had to struggle more, or get loans from a bank, it would have taken much longer.
Professor Kenney says that venture capitalists are more willing than banks to take a risk because the payback can be so big. He says that he believes venture capital sped up the pace of innovation “and brought new technologies forward that may have come about, but certainly would have taken much longer.”
“It also gave an opportunity to brilliant engineers and entrepreneurs to actualize their technological dreams,” Kenney says.
An Atmosphere For Innovation
In today’s Silicon Valley, tech entrepreneurs like Klausmeier flock to venture capital firms in Palo Alto to help turn their dreams into reality.
It was her late father who created the clean diesel fuel her company uses, Klausmeier says. “He was the chemist behind the whole technology,” she says wistfully. “He was my mentor, and he worked on this for years.”
Her father did that work at their home in Oregon. But Klausmeier has moved to Silicon Valley because she thinks if you are a young tech entrepreneur, this is the place to be — much the same way Hollywood draws young actors and filmmakers.
“You need to be around people that believe in you on many different levels, and this is the place,” she says. “Everyone does believe that you can create change … and that it’s going to be profitable. And they’ll invest in you and make it happen.”
Klausmeier says that being in Silicon Valley, with its infrastructure of funding and tech success stories, “is just so inspirational.”
There have been attempts to re-create Silicon Valley in other cities, such as Boston and New York, and internationally in Berlin and Bangalore. But none of those places draws as much venture capital as Silicon Valley.
The Valley remains the premier destination for tech entrepreneurs with a dream and, as venture capitalists discovered decades ago, backing the right technology is like discovering a gold mine.

January 4, Mashington Group and the council member from Blue Angels Startup & Investment Club (BASIC) with the delegation from Shenzhen ，China，January 4, Mashington Group and the council member from Blue Angels Startup & Investment Club (BASIC) with the delegation from Shenzhen, China, visited two famous Incubators in Chicago, 1871 and CATAPULT. These two places are filled of Chicago’s brightest digital designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs that using the new technologies and new-style business models.

The delegation group also has a meeting with Kevin Willer, who started the Google office in Chicago, is CEO of Chicago Entrepreneur Center and 1871 as well as partner at New World Ventures, Jason Zielke, the Vice President of the Clean Energy Trust, and Nick Rosa,  the founders of Excelerate Labs and Healthbox.

During the meeting, they had discussed about how to bring more Chinese investment into Chicago, and to build a connection with Chinese company, also to promote Chicago companies into China Safely.

（Business News, from NBC）Stocks opened slightly higher after a key U.S. jobs report showed the pace of hiring by employers had eased slightly in December but gave signals of some momentum in the labor market’s recovery since the 2007-09 recession.

Though the data showed lackluster economic growth was unable to make a dent in the still-high U.S. unemployment rate, it calmed fears about the possibility of the U.S. Federal Reserve ending its highly simulative monetary policy.

The Dow Jones industrial average was up 17.12 points, or 0.13 percent, at 13,408.48. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index was up 1.49 points, or 0.10 percent, at 1,460.86. The Nasdaq Composite Index was up 0.75 points, or 0.02 percent, at 3,101.32.

“When it comes to Fed policy, this report should keep policy steady. There was talk of a scaling back of (Quantitative Easing) yesterday, but this number is a snapshot and is basically where it was when the Fed decided to do more QE last month,” said Tom Porcelli, chief U.S. economist at RBC Capital markets in New York.

Minutes from the Fed’s December policy meeting, released Thursday, showed Fed officials were increasingly worried about the risks of asset purchases on financial markets, though they looked set to continue with the open-ended stimulus program for now.

(Company News) In order to let our customers and partners understand our company’s strengths and services better, we decided to re-revision our website. Through the efforts of IT department, the new version will be officially launched in January 2013!

For the new version of our website, you will still find beautiful and simplify structure pages and easy to read edition as usual. More than that, the new website will further narrow the distance with our customers. We hope that more visitors could communicate with us through the function of message board, and we will respond promptly to your queries or suggestions.

Mashington Group wishes all of you have a healthy and prosperity 2013! Happy New Year!

(Company News), December 13, the company management participate in the real estate activities sponsored by the United States Federal FDIC and accept the well-known business magazine, “Crain’s Chicago’s Reporter Interview.”

December this year, the United States recover a substantial increase in the number of the local real estate market continues to further expand to the scope of recovery in the real estate industry.

The data show that there are 201 cities in the metropolitan area real estate market continued to improve in December, an increase of 76 compared to the previous month, for the first four months of consecutive growth. These new real estate markets, including Atlanta of Georgia, Bloomington of Illinois , Ann Arbor of Michigan, Seattle of Washington, Green Bay of Wisconsin.

This substantial increase indicating that the key index of the U.S. real estate and economic power is steady or improved. This is an important stabilizing signal in a slow recovery.

Currently, the main problem of improve the real estate market is tight credit standards for potential buyers, as well as supply and demand imbalance.

(Company News) Yesterday afternoon (October 28), “Creative Optics Valley” Optics Valley entrepreneurship contest the fourth game of the preliminary round was held at DEMO coffee, Vincent Ma was invited to serve as judges. It is reported that this is Vincent’s first time to come to Wuhan to see the project. Vincent said Wuhan to China is as important as Chicago to U.S. They are both in the core region of the traffic and Military strategy and got talents people gathered. The preliminary round of the competition has all been finished. The finalist will be announced later after audition.

As the organizers of the competition, person in charge of the Donghu New Technology Development Zone, Technology and Innovation Bureau Mr. Ding Peng talked about the original thought of this competition before the start of the game: “We have recently been summed, why there are so many university resources in Wuhan, but in the whole country, especially in the Internet industry, we are not in the top rank? Then we realized that our scientific and technological resources, innovation resources are abundant, but we lack the passion of innovation. So we organized this contest, we wanted to inspire and drive innovation and entrepreneurship through the form of game. ”

The Competition is highly competitive. All the projects score are very close. In the end, Project “Up life” became the final winner, who has been known by many local people in Wuhan.

(Company News) In September 2012, Mashington Group as one of the initiated director of CSIA participated in the preparatory meeting that identified a trio of members in the core promotion team.

The meeting appointed Mr. Dong Jianqiang as executive vice president of CSIA, who is the founder of Shenzhen Net Valley coffee, Mr. Yang Haitao as chairman, the founder of Beijing Entrepreneurship Theater, and Mr. Cheng Chuan as Secretary-General, who is the founder of Haikou Angel Coffee.

Meanwhile, the China Startups Incubators Alliance (CSIA) was officially announced. Mashington Group as the oversea director of CSIA will use its own advantages to play the role of intermediary between the Sino-US venture capital in the work of the Alliance.

On the same day, CSIA was invited to participate in the “Black-horse” competition in Shenzhen. Furthermore, representative of CSIA with “entrepreneurs” Magazine ,Black-horse contest, i“Black-horse” and Tencent open platform signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement, and jointly published the “China startups Incubators Alliance Shenzhen Declaration.”

Chicago: July 1, 2012, with the First “thousands of Talent people plan” entrepreneurship competition has launched at Beijing in May, the committee had a number of global promotional activities, including the promotion event in the Silicon Valley and Washington D.C of United States. In order to encourage more overseas entrepreneurs participating to this competition, a Mid-west promotion event had been officially held on July7 inChicago!

“Thousands of talent people plan” entrepreneurship competition, jointly organized by the “Thousand Talents Program” venture capital center and “Thousand Talents Program” experts Association, aimed to build a specialize platform for the talent people in the world who carries the dream of entrepreneurial and get chance to work in China. This Project also support to the idea that introducing overseas high-level talents into China. The promotion event in Chicago sponsored by the “thousands of talent people plan” venture capital center of China, , Mashington Group, Blue Angel Startup & investment club(BASIC), Chicago Culture & Career Club(CCC). Local Media sponsored by NiHao Media in Chicago and also supported by Chinese Students and Scholars Association in Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, UIC, DePaul University, IIT and etc.

Mr. Vincent Ma (Yaoguang Ma) who is one of the organizers of this event and also the V.P of Mashington Group and BASIC has introduced the Chinese market situation during the past 30 years, and predicted “in 2020, China will become the world’s top or second largest economy entity … the rapid development of the domestic economy in the next 10 years, will provide invaluable opportunities and development space for oversea entrepreneurs. National “thousands of Talent people plan” entrepreneurship competition will no doubt light up the passions of overseas entrepreneurs especially in the Midwest of U.S. Our company and our startup club are more than willing to contribute to the oversea startups career.”

In order to boost project development, besides of a certain amount bonus to the winner, “thousands of talent people plan” venture capital funds and dozens of well-known venture capital company will also invest to the winning projects. Deng Feng, One of the contest judges, founder of Northern Light Venture Capital, said: “Through this contest, it will be able to give more entrepreneurial dream come true with plug in ‘Angel’ wings”. The contest officially launched by today. Online registration deadline is the end of July. The rematch list will be announced in the end of August. And the ultimate winner will be selected in early 2013.