There were two pieces in the Wall Street Journal last week on the subject of the US venture capital market losing momentum. First there was a piece about the widening gap between capital being invested and capital being raised.

And hot on the heels of this there was a piece about a possible ‘cash crunch’ saying that some of the momentum had come out of the market, that some start-ups were struggling to raise money and valuations were starting to come down.

I think the US market is cooling off a little and see this as a healthy and inevitable phase for it to go through.  Over the last few years the megatrends of cloud computing, social and mobile have jet-propelled the start-up scene and as a result more and more exciting companies have emerged that seemed to have the potential to really disrupt their industries. The trailblazers for this new generation are companies like Facebook, Zynga, Twitter,  Groupon, LinkedIn, Dropbox and Skype.

However, as sure as night follows day, a heated market will always be followed by an over-heated market. You know you’re in an over-heated market when valuations get so high it’s difficult to work out how they were calculated, more and copycat companies emerge and all start-up related costs go through the roof such as office space and salaries.

At the end of the day even an exciting and fast-growing market is ultimately finite – we only have a certain amount of money to spend. In all the excitement people sometimes forget this.

So things are cooling off a little but I see this as a natural correction in the cycle and I don’t expect there to be a dramatic fall in valuations and confidence – as I’ve said before I really don’t believe this is like the bubble of 2001. This new generation of companies are leveraging the three megatrends of mobile, social and cloud computing that are completely reshaping the technology landscape – and the largest ones are so much more mature with much more substantial revenues than was the case ten years ago.

There have been some extraordinary events in May that makes me feel it will be seen as a defining month for the cloud (as opposed to evidence of a second internet bubble as some have been saying).

Firstly, we had the Microsoft acquisition of Skype for $8.5B – more than three times what the previous investors paid only two years ago and around 10x 2010 revenues. Whether you think Microsoft overpaid for Skype or not (and only time will tell – see my post) what it does show is the huge value they placed on internet-based voice and video communications of which Skype is not only the clear leader but also the verb that’s used to describe it. It also showed the huge cash reserves the big technology companies have and how much of it they’re prepared to spend to stay competitive in world that is moving more and more into the cloud – a world that is in danger of passing them by.

Secondly, we had LinkedIn’s IPO delivering results that exceeded virtually all expectations. Their shares opened at the higher end of the expected range at around $40 and reached $94 at the end of the first day reflecting a 109% increase. The company’s valuation had reached almost $9B and nearly 20x current year revenues (expected to be in the $450-500M region). Whether this is sustainable or not (probably not) it shows the level of excitement and belief in the potential of social networking and, more broadly, of cloud computing.

Lastly, we saw Salesforce, the leader in the SaaS market, report record quarterly results with revenues up 34% to $504M and on track to be the first SaaS company to exceed $2B for the year. Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s outspoken CEO, talked about being a top 5 software company overall showing how cloud companies are now starting to measure themselves against the whole market rather than just within their category; he also had some sharp words to say about Microsoft:

‘Customers continue to want visionary products that give them a competitive advantage, not the me-too Zune-type products locking them into these old, proprietary, desktop-driven platforms that are dying off.’

I believe there’s a revolution happening in the world of computing and communications that we haven’t seen since the rise of the PC in the 1990′s. This revolution can best be described as cloud computing. The broad concept of ‘cloud computing’ includes terms such as on-line services, software as a service and on-demand computing.

The cloud computing revolution means that more and more computing and communication resources are moving to the ‘cloud’ in the form of infrastructure, platforms, services and applications all of which used to be delivered through physical products or premises that we could actually see and touch. This new form of computing means that resources are residing in the cloud and are therefore available at any time and from anywhere, giving complete freedom of choice and mobility to the user.

In addition to enabling greater mobility there are numerous benefits to this new computing model including the lack of upfront costs; fixed monthly pricing covering all service, support and upgrades; quick and easy set-up; access to vast amounts of data that can be used to constantly fine tune and improve the service; and the ability to empower users by giving more people access to resources without the need for a PC on every desk. All the user needs is any device connected to the internet whether that is a PC, a tablet, a smartphone or a laptop and they can access their information, their services and their applications instantly.

This blog is about all aspects of the cloud computing revolution including the entrepreneurs, the leading players, the investors and the new trends and technologies. But most importantly, it will be about the emerging, fast-growing businesses that will play such an important part in this major transition – challenging the very foundations of the IT industry.