Venture capital confidence in Silicon Valley may be returning, according to a newly published study.

The Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index, created by University of San Francisco Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship Mark V. Cannice, is based on a survey of venture capitalists on their projections for the Silicon Valley high-growth entrepreneurial environment in the next 6 to 18 months.

In the current index, venture capital confidence measured 3.03 on a scale of one-to-five, one being the lowest and five being the highest level of confidence.

Last quarter’s rating of 2.77 was a five-year low. Q1 2009 “ended a five-quarter trend of new lows in confidence,” wrote Cannice.

The economy has curtailed VC activity. Because of the recession, deals are more difficult to finance, raising funds take more time, and IPOs are becoming less frequent and more distant.

Cannice notes that no venture-backed firm has had an IPO in the last two quarters, “the first time on record that this has occurred.”

But investors are beginning to see something that’s been in short supply for quite a while. Hope.

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The majority of the most popular Apple apps, according to comScore’s tracking of February 2009 downloads, are Games or Entertainment.

The most popular Apple app according to the number of downloads is Tap Tap Revenge, which has been downloaded by 32 percent of Apple App users.

“Tap Tap’s success demonstrates that there is ample opportunity in the app space for any publisher to obtain significant distribution with a product that engages users,” according to the press release accompanying the report.

“Since the number of app users is growing nearly ten percent each month, that opportunity will only continue to grow for both existing and emerging app developers,” according to the press release.

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Gartner and Forrester have revised their projections for 2009 global IT sales. Both firms changed what they initially projected to be slim market growth to a decline worse than after the dotcom bust in 2001.

“The speed and severity of the response by businesses and consumers alike to these economic circumstances will result in an IT market slowdown in 2009 that will be worse than the 2.1 percent decline in IT spending in 2001 when the Internet investment bubble burst,” said Gartner head of global forecasting Richard Gordon.

Gartner projects a decline of 3.8 percent in technology spending, while Forrester estimates a 3.1 percent drop.

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The average American adult spends eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, whether it’s on a computer, TV, mobile phone or other gadget.

Users who spend the most time in front of a screen are those in the 45-54 age group, who dedicate nine and a half hours to this per day.

These are the results of a new study by the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence (CRE) and Ball State University’s Center for Media Design (CMD).

TV is still the main media activity, followed in descending popularity by computers, radio and print media.

The report finds that the average American spends 142.5 minutes daily in front of a computer, which is dwarfed by TV’s 353.1 minutes. PC users spend almost as much time working with software (46.1 minutes) as they do on the Web (48.8 minutes).

The report doesn’t make clear if the software is installed on PCs or in the cloud.

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Half of smartphone Web traffic in the US comes from the iPhone, according to a report from AdMob Mobile Metrics.

The release of the iPhone 3G last July caused the use of Apple’s smartphone to jump dramatically. In August of last year, iPhones accounted for only 10 percent of smartphone Web traffic. Six months later, it’s 50 percent. Wow.

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Initially identified as the social network for college students, Facebook opened its doors for more and more sections of the population: high school students, then businesses, then everyone in the world. That youthful population that the site began with has gradually been aging because its appeal has been broadening to older groups.

As seen by coverage from Inside Facebook, a tracker for the network, developing and marketing platform, the fastest growing demographic is women over 55 with nearly 1.5 million new users over the last 180 days.

The last six months has seen the biggest growth in absolute new users amongst users 35-44, with over seven million new users.

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If Facebook continues to grow at its current pace, it will be bigger than Google in just a few years, says RBC Capital Markets analyst Ross Sandler.

Sandler expects the social networking site to have more unique visitors than Google by 2011 or 2012, if both sites grow as he projects.

Sandler predicts 85 percent annual growth for Facebook and 20 percent for Google.

Facebook is already starting to drive more traffic to some sites than Google does, according to a recent article in Advertising Age. So will social networking take a chunk out of the search giant? Not right now.

In fact, the opposite is occurring.

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Globally, the U.S. ranks only eighth in innovation and is in danger in falling behind even more.

Such is the conclusion of a joint study (PDF) prepared by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and The Manufacturing Institute (MI), who find that American innovation is in danger of being further surpassed.

“U.S. manufacturing innovation leadership is at risk,” said NAM President and Chief Executive Officer John Engler. “We’ve fallen behind countries in East Asia and Europe. America cannot afford to lose its manufacturing innovation edge and the wealth and jobs that it generates throughout our economy.”

The study ranks 110 nations on an index which weighs the business outcomes of innovation and governments’ encouragement and support of innovation.

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The amount of people accessing the Internet via mobile phone doubled in 2008, according to ComScore.

“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives,” said Mark Donovan, senior vice president of mobile at comScore.

“This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information,” Donovan said.

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11 percent of online US adults use Twitter or similar status updates, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. (pdf)

The 11 percent in December 2008 nearly double’s the total of a half year before, as only 6 percent had sent a Twitter-like communiqué in May of Last year. In fact, the percentage of people sending status updates grew 2 percent between November and December alone.

As expected, status updates are most used by younger users. 19 percent of those in the 18-24 group have used Twitter or a similar service, and 20 percent of those in the 25 to 34 group have.

This is a much different world than the one last year, in which Zappo’s Tony Hsieh was told by a group of students at Indiana University (my alma mater – Go Big Red!), that Twitter “was only for old people.”

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