Google is not letting the tough economic climate cloud its long-term vision. Declaring that “the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies”, Google announced the launch of Google Ventures – its latest venture capital fund.

Google Ventures will be focusing on early stage investments in young start-ups. It is expected to invest up to US$100 over the next 12 months – not just in the internet and software space, but also in areas such as clean-energy, bio-tech and health care.

So, if you believe you’re on to the next big thing and could do with a financial leg-up, why not pitch your vision to Google Ventures?

Still wondering what Web 2.0 is all about?

Here’s a rather creative attempt at explaining the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 without any words from the folks at Not in Words:

Google recently announced in its blog improvements in its search technology which shows that it is getting serious about semantic technology.  Semantic technology is considered by many to be the future of the Web.

In essence, semantic technology encodes meanings separately from data, content and application code.  Through this, software is supposed to be able to provide more intelligent and responsive interaction than with traditional informational technologies alone.

In the search space, the holy-grail of this “meaning-centered” approach is to enable so-called “natural language queries.”  This is the idea that you can ask natural questions or discuss things at a conceptual level as you would with another human-being and expect the search engine to understand you and provide relevant responses.  This is very different from how search is conducted currently where you basically search for keywords that you guess would be relevant to your topic.

In Google’s case, the new technology can apparently “better understand associations and concepts related to your search” – thus enabling Google to offer you even more useful related searches.  This will be presented as an expanded list of useful related searches and the addition of longer search result descriptions.

For more insight into the Semantic Web, check out this “Introduction for Noobs” by Manu Sporny below:

The silver lining in the seriously diving economy is that it is apparently spurring entrepreneurship.  Discouraged by the shrinking job market, many laid-off workers and new graduates are turning serious attention to building their own business plans.  Indeed, many governments hope that this forced injection of talent and ideas into the entrepreneurial ecosystem can help turn their economies around as some of these new start-ups succeed.

Many among this wave of start-ups are taking full advantage of the maturing Internet to market their ideas and find partners, suppliers and customers.  Increasingly, these start-ups are also leveraging on  the rise of web-based services to manage core operational functions efficiently and cheaply.  Everything from setting up your office IT network to invoicing and managing your books can now be managed easily and effectively through the web.

A recent New York Times article gives an interesting anecdotal view of this trend of forced entrepreneurship in the United States.