Venture-backed IPOs continue to be almost nonexistent for the second straight year, as the number of exits in Q3 2009 was only three, according to new data from Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

Overall, IPOs are up over 2008, but don’t start celebrating yet, the NVCA cautions.

“The fact that the many in the media are classifying three IPO’s as resurgence is evidence of how low our expectations have become,” said Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA.

The three exits, worth a total of $572.1 million, fell short of Q2’s five exits worth $720.7 million.

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New Hampshire is the fastest state in the union. At least in terms of internet speed.

The home of Mount Washington — which, incidentally, holds the record for highest recorded winds on Earth — had an average connection speed of 6.4 Mbps in Q2 2009, dropping the previous leader, Delaware to second with an average speed of 6.3 Mbps, according to Akamai’s Q2 “State of the Internet” report.

New Hampshire is the only state with more than 50 percent of its connections averaging 5 Mbps.

As on the global level, so at the state scale: what ultimately dictates broadband speed is the size of the territory you need to cover. Which is why the seven fastest states are in the Northeast.

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Behavioral marketing is one of the cornerstones of Web advertising, but most Americans do not like it, a joint study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center and UC Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology finds (PDF).

Sixty-six percent of Americans do not want advertising that is geared towards their perceived interests and generated by captured information.

The amount of public distrust of behavioral marketing is so high that 63 percent of Americans believe that advertisers should be required by law to immediately delete user information.

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Between June 2008 and June 2009, 224,100 high-tech jobs were cut, representing 3.7 percent of the workforce, but in the first six months of this year job loss has slowed to 2 percent, according to a report by the TechAmerica Foundation using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Overall, high-tech job loss was lower than the national average of 5.1 percent across all industries for the year.

In the first half of this year alone, between January and June, 115,000 jobs were cut, and tech losses now outpace the private sector, though high-tech decline slowed to 2 percent from January to June 2009.

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A few years back, at an old job in a state far, far away, one of my fellow co-workers was fired because of a post she made on MySpace.

Wherein she threatened to put laxative in our coffee.

A long HR battle ensued, the main point of contention being whether what she had MySpaced (didn’t it look like I just wrote in Sanskrit there?) was technically in the public or private realm.

A few years later, we all know the answer to that question. Every week there’s a new Facebook/Twitter firing or faux pas, the latest that I know of being when a California Pizza Kitchen employee criticized his company’s uniform switch.

With human resources departments increasingly having to deal with social-network-related problems, there still isn’t any consensus on how to treat social-networking job infractions.

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The PC industry has been hit hard this year, but it has fared better than initially predicted.

Gartner, which in June forecasted a 6 percent fall in PC shipments this year, reports that the actual total will be 2 percent, with 285 million PCs shipping in 2009.

“Mobile PC shipments have regained substantial momentum, especially in emerging markets, and the decline in desk-based PC shipments is slowing down,” said Gartner research director George Shiffler.

In the first half of 2009, sales were down 4.4 percent year-over-year.

Gartner’s predictions have gotten increasingly positive as 2009 has progressed. In March, the research company projected an 11.9 percent drop in sales, the worst-ever industry decline.

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A new study by The CleanTech Group reinforces the argument that e-readers are ultimately more eco-friendly than print.

The production of one e-reader is the equivalent of the production of 22.5 paper books.

CleanTech predicts that e-readers will save 9.9 billion kg of CO2 over the next 3 years, when e-reader sales are expected to reach 14.4. In 2012, CleanTech predicts, e-readers will save 5.3 billion kg of CO2.

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Analysts predict that e-paper, the display technology used in e-readers, will reach nearly $10 billion in revenues in 2009.

Research group DisplaySearch predicts that 1.8 billion units will ship in 2018, totaling $9.6 in revenue.

DisplaySearch forecasts a compound annual growth rate of 41 percent for revenues and 64 percent for units shipped. Total revenue in 2009 is expected to be $431 million, more than triple last year’s $129 million.

“E-paper displays are taking off with consumers due to their low power consumption and ease of reading, especially in sunlight,” said Jennifer Colegrove, director of display technologies at DisplaySearch.

“In addition, e-paper displays are ‘green’ because they reduce paper consumption,” Colegrove said.

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The thing that stops many new Twitter users in their tracks is the visual chaos. Twitter is a messy place, with short verbal blasts and bit.ly links flying in all directions, a far cry from the minimalist restraint of Facebook profiles.

Pear Analytics studied Twitter’s noise-to-message ratio, analyzing 2,000 public tweets generated between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. CST over a two-week period.

They placed tweet content into five categories: News (minus tech news, which Pear took out of the category), Spam, Self Promotion (corporate self promotion, not the kind you see on Facebook), Pointless Babble (the kind you see on Facebook), Conversational (tweets that turn into conversation) and those with Pass Along Value (anything retweeted).

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Last week, Ignite Social Media published a fat social network demographics report which covers more than 40 of the top sites (PDF).

Ignite’s numbers were culled from search data, so they have to be taken with a grain of salt, but they do highlight some popular conceptions that might have to be reexamined, especially in regards to the idea of Twitter’s population being considerably older and more male than Facebook’s.

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