Venture Capital firms often invest with each other multiple times, developing relationships and cliques. Analyzing those relationships and the network they form is a valuable exercise. I supplied CrunchBase data to Drew Conway, a PhD student in Political Science, at NYU. He blogs at Zero Intelligence Agents. Drew has made a first post about the data, which you can find here.

I am working with Drew to bring insights to the TechCrunch community. The first visualization is embedded below. It requires Silverlight and is best viewed in Full Screen Mode. I will paraphrase Drew’s explanation of the graphic below:

When pitching to VC’s, entrepreneurs hype the heck out of their ideas, years of experience and management teams. But I’ve never heard of anyone touting their luck or connection to God. After reading the posts on TechCrunch, one could easily get the impression that God doesn’t play much of role in Silicon Valley. But ask any successful entrepreneur in private what made them successful, and you might just hear a different story. In a research project my team just completed, the majority of 549 company founders told us that their most important success factor, after “experience” and “management team”, was “good fortune”. Many respondents wrote in comments stressing the extreme importance of faith and God.

You didn’t think that successful entrepreneurs were this pious did you? Neither did I. After all, what did God have to do with Google aside from Jeff Jarvis stealing his book title from fans of Jesus and their much copied meme? Did God build the Internet? Did he build the microchip? I’ve never been religious myself and have always believed that with hard work and determination, you can surmount just about any obstacles. But I also learned the hard way that you can do everything right and fail. Sometimes you do just about everything wrong and make it big. My belief: success is 51% luck and 49% execution. You need to execute with precision, but a little luck goes a long way. It is always good to have God on your side. So it was interesting and illuminating (pun intended) to see what other entrepreneurs thought about this.

I have been remiss in my blogging duties recently, for that I apologize. I have been catching up on some learning. I finally relented and bought into the ggplot2 graphics package for R. Hopefully, I will share some of that with all of you soon. I also decided to pick up some Ruby on Rails and finally learn some more about social network analysis, an area that I have long wanted to delve into. There is actually a meetup about R and social network analysis tomorrow at the LinkedIn offices, more information available here.

One reason that I want to learn more about social network analysis is the growing influence of social networks on the Internet. One of the biggest social networks on the Internet is Twitter. It is always interesting to see new data visualizations around Twitter, especially those that reveal network effects.

The technology world is an ecosystem. Companies interact in a variety of ways. They develop on each other’s platforms, they offer services associated with each other’s products, they compete with each other and work together. It is difficult to capture many of these relationships. They are amorphous and asymmetric in many cases. A bigger, stronger, growing network is a signal of a companies health.

CrunchBase captures a lot of information about new startups (just passed 28,000 companies). Startups will often include other companies and platforms that they rely on in their overviews. The graph below is a measure of a platform’s or company’s influence on Crunchbase startups from February 08 until June 09.

For more TechCrunch Analysis, check out the Q3 09 Trends Report here, or buy it now:

AOL, Yahoo and Disney all made big Digital Content moves in Q3 09. AOL and Yahoo, both under new leadership, clarified their positions as online content portals. Disney acquired Marvel, a hot content property with a lackluster online presence. All in all, Digital Content was conspicuously hot in our TechCrunch Q3 Report.

On Thursday at the Web 2.0 Summit Sean Parker gave a presentation entitled “The New Era of the Network Service.” In it, he argues that so-called “network services” like Facebook (which he helped start) and Twitter will soon dominate the web, rather than “information services” like Google and Yahoo. MG hailed Parker’s presentation as important and interesting. I saw the presentation quite differently.

Google is in fact the greatest benefactor of Network Services the world has ever seen. Google’s core product, search, is built around network theory. Why doesn’t Google get credit then? Because it is difficult to envision Google’s network. The Internet, the whole gigantic, enormous Internet is Google’s network. Look no further than an early research paper concerning Google’s PageRank.

Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit, Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker did her annual data dump slide presentation, this year focusing on the growth prospects of the mobile Web. As usual, there were 3 or 4 slides that really captured the trends she was talking about, particularly the ones around iPhone adoption and how that phone in particular is catapulting mobile Web usage into the mainstream.

You can see her full slide show below (all 68 of them), but let me pull out the three iPhone slides that helps put its growth into perspective. The first one above shows the growth of data traffic on AT&T’s mobile network. It is 50 times higher than it was just three years ago. I added two arrows to show when the first iPhone launched in June, 2007 and the iPhone 3G in July 2008.

AT&T saw massive pops in data usage following those two launches as consumers discovered the unadulterated mobile Web for the first time

For more TechCrunch Analysis, check out the Q3 09 Trends Report here, or buy it now:

Some of Silicon Valley’s savviest investors are focusing on CleanTech and BioTech. TechCrunch’s Q3 09 report shows that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, New Enterprise Associates and Flagship Ventures are 3 of the 11 most active venture firms in Q3 09. And all three made more than half of their Q3 09 investments in CleanTech/BioTech. No other firm had more than 3 investments in the two categories combined.

In the third quarter of 2009, we saw a slight rebound in venture funding from earlier in the year. But which venture capital firms were the most active in the quarter? One of my favorite new tables in our latest TechCrunch Trends report, which is based on company data we collect in CrunchBase, is the ranking of the most active venture capital firms.

We’ve reproduced that ranking below in two interactive tables which show the top 25 most active VC firms in both the third quarter of 2009 and the most active year-to-date. (You can see a list of the top 100 most-active VC firms in the quarter ). The rankings are based on the number of deals each firm participated in during each time period. Draper Fisher Jurvetson tops both lists, with 17 deals in the third quarter, and 34 year to date. Then it was followed, for the quarter, by Sequoia (12 deals), Kleiner Perkins (11 deals), NEA (9 deals), and Benchmark (8 deals). The top ten for the year-to-date rankings show many of the same firms, although they move around a little.

For more TechCrunch Analysis, check out the Q3 09 Trends Report here, or buy it now:

The App Store is the dominant mobile software platform. At the end of Q3 09 Apple announced that over 2 billion applications had been downloaded from the App Store. To compete in the mobile world you have to compete with that. Nevertheless, Q3 saw major developments in competing application platforms, including mobile browsers.