Is venture capital's love affair with Web 2.0 over? | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

"Silicon Valley remains the hotbed of Web 2.0 activity, but the hipness of start-ups with goofy names is starting to cool in the face of economic reality.
Dow Jones VentureSource on Tuesday released numbers of venture capital activity in Web 2.0 companies and declared that the 'investment boom may be peaking.'
Venture capitalists put $1.34 billion into 178 deals in 2007, an 88 percent jump over 2006. But once you strip out the $300 million that Facebook raised from Microsoft and others, the numbers don't look as bullish.
The pace of deal flow, or the number of fundings, has slowed, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. Deal flow in 2007 went up 25 percent to 178 deals, but nearly all of those occurred outside the Bay Area, where the number of deals slipped downward.
'Web 2.0 deals in the Bay Area actually dropped from 74 deals in 2006 to 69 last year and investments were down 3 percent from the $431 million invested in 2006. It's clear that the real growth in the Web 2.0 sector is happening outside of the Bay Area,' Jessica Canning, director of global research at Dow Jones VentureSource, said in a statement."