Inc.com writes that “

[a]n overwhelming majority of entrepreneurs say they're undeterred by the shaky economy and would have launched their businesses anyway, according to a survey released this week by Ernst and Young.  Of 116 business owners drawn from the New York-based accounting firm's Entrepreneur of the Year finalists, 92 percent said a poor economy would not have stopped them from launching their startup. As it is, most of the owners launched their businesses during recent boom times.  While many said they're worried the U.S. economy is weaker than believed, 54 percent said they're confident the country will maintain its global economic prominence, the survey found. Over half of the survey responds said they felt their greatest contribution to the economy was job creation, while 28 percent cited innovation and quality of life.”

Internetnews.com reveals that “Facebook, the fast-growing consumer social networking site, doesn't need money, its CEO said at the Web 2.0 Summit.  Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said his company isn't worried about revenue for now. It's flush with Microsoft cash, and besides, it already does make money.  ‘Growth is our top priority,’ said Zuckerberg, in an onstage interview Thursday with the event's program chair, John Battelle.  ‘We're not focused on optimizing for revenue. That doesn't mean we don't have a revenue strategy.’  He pointed out that Facebook has two revenue channels, direct ad sales to brand advertisers and a self-service online ad platform that lets advertisers buy ads with a credit card. Facebook works with two-thirds of the top U.S. advertisers, and approximately 25 percent of the country's retailers created Facebook pages in 2008 to promote their offerings, according to a survey by Shop.org, a unit of the National Retail Federation. Facebook also has ‘thousands and thousands’ of marketers buying self-service ads.”

Yahoo!Tech reports that “Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Friday that Microsoft is ‘not interested’ in making a new offer for Internet company Yahoo, despite Yahoo's share price currently sitting at less than half what Microsoft initially offered.  Speaking at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia lunch in Sydney on Friday, Ballmer said:  ‘Look, we made an offer, we made another offer. It was clear that Yahoo didn't want to sell the business to us, and we moved on.’  Ballmer said other deals with Yahoo had also been unsuccessful.  ‘We tried at one point to do a partnership around search, not advertising. That didn't work either, so we moved on, and they moved on.’  ‘We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition,’ he said.  ‘I don't know why they would be either, frankly.’”

According to the Mercury News, “[f]or the first time ever, clean-tech investments nationwide cracked the $1 billion mark in a single quarter, and biotech investments were also up.  But overall, venture capital investments slipped 7 percent in the third quarter of 2008, with $7.1 billion going into 907 deals compared with $7.7 billion into 1,033 deals in the previous quarter. Investments in Silicon Valley were similarly down, with $2.77 billion going into 297 deals compared with $3.1 billion going into 318 deals in the previous quarter.  Those were the highlights of the latest MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters.”

And in a different article, the Mercury News writes that “[t]hree inside-the-Beltway Washington lawyers had some advice for Silicon Valley on Thursday: Get involved now.  They said the valley should be selling itself as part of the solution to the country's many problems as the Obama administration tries to revive the economy and begins shaping its policies and priorities on issues ranging from energy to health care.  If they kick back now that the election is over, the valley's tech industries will be trampled by competing interests, warned Reginald Brown, a lawyer with the national law firm WilmerHale's Washington office.”