Norwest Venture Partners on Wednesday announced that it had closed a new venture-capital fund sized at $1.2 billion. That’s nearly double the size of the Silicon Valley venture firm’s last fund in 2006, which closed at $650 million.

The new fund is unusual in this day and age amid a tough fundraising environment brought on by the recession. What’s more, many venture capitalists argue that funds need to be smaller to get back to the basics, especially since venture capital isn’t an industry that necessarily scales upwards.

Here’s what Promod Haque, NVP’s managing partner, had to say about all this:

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Efforts to reform the U.S. health-care and bank lending systems are likely to lead to an increase in information-technology spending, said one potential beneficiary, Sudhakar Ram, chairman of IT firm Mastek.

Overhauling the country’s IT systems could cost as much as $250 billion to $300 billion over five to seven years, he said in an interview. In addition, he estimated that electronic health records will cost some $150 billion to $200 billion under the Obama administration’s health-care initiatives ($20 billion of stimulus funds have already gone toward the project).

Stronger systems might have mitigated last year’s economic turmoil, Mr. Ram said. “The subprime crisis started with poor controls at the loan origination process, which a halfway decent loan-origination system should have trapped,” he said. “The core systems are several decades old and written in outdated programming languages.”

That’s like blaming superhighways for traffic jams, said Andrew Bartels, an analyst at Forrester Research (FORR) who studies tech-spending trends.

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In a development that only Scrooge and the Grinch would find amusing, the tech industry has entered into a fevered period of pre-holiday job cuts. In the last few weeks, there have been layoff announcements from Adobe (ADBE) (680 jobs), Electronic Arts (ERTS) (1,500 jobs), Sprint (S) (up to 2,500 jobs), Microsoft (MSFT) (800 jobs), RealNetworks (RNWK) (70 jobs), AOL (100 jobs), Sun Microsystems (JAVA) (3,000 jobs), Blue Coat (BCSI) (roughly 150 jobs), Lexmark (LXK) (825 jobs) and Nokia Siemens (NOK) (potentially north of of 5,000 jobs).

Applied Materials (AMAT) could be next.

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Jon Gray was manager of planning and analysis at Xsigo Systems, a San Jose-based technology start-up. He was laid off in November 2008, after almost two years with the company. Previously, Mr. Gray, 34, spent seven years in various finance roles at Symantec Corp. (SYMC), a security software maker. He lives in Los Gatos, Calif.

My productivity lapses don’t come from Facebook. My problem is a combination of world news sites and Twitter. Using RescueTime, an online time management tool, I’ve named two productivity goals for myself. One goal sets my unproductive time at less than 90 minutes per day. The other sets my highly productive time at greater than five hours per day. After setting up these goals, I’ve been able to monitor what applications I use, what internet sites I visit, and the exact duration of both. It quickly becomes painfully clear how easily I can become distracted and miss these goals. As I only report to myself, this tool is obviously self-policing, but it has been extremely useful to see when I’m not being as focused as I need to be. For example, I’ve adjusted my morning time with a cup of coffee and reading the news from 45 minutes down to about 15.

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Depending on whom you ask, U.S. online shopping is either in unprecedented decline–or one of the only bright spots in American retail.

On Thursday, comScore (SCOR) reported that U.S. online spending in the third quarter slipped two percent to $29.6 billion versus last year. That represents the first time since comScore began tracking the figures that online spending has shrunk for two quarters in a row. (Online shopping was flat in the first quarter, and slipped one percent in the second quarter.) ComScore was slightly more upbeat about the potential of growth in the fourth quarter, if only because we’ll be comparing it to last year’s dismal fourth quarter.

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EBay Inc.’s (EBAY) PayPal plans to unveil a new system that makes it easier for software developers to integrate the online payments system right into their programs–as the company takes new steps to protect its turf.

With the new open software, called Paypal X, users won’t have to type their username and password into a separate PayPal Web site in order to complete a payment. Instead, people will be able to sign into PayPal and make purchases, such as virtual weapons, right inside an application such as a game.

“We’re taking all of our product capabilities and making them open and that much easier for you to use,” said Scott Thompson, PayPal’s president.

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A coveted visa program that feeds skilled workers to top-tier U.S. technology companies and universities is on track to leave thousands of spots unfilled for the first time since 2003, a sign of how the weak economy has eroded employment even among highly trained professionals.

The program, known as H-1B, has been a mainstay of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, where many companies have come to depend on securing visas for computer programmers from India or engineers from China. Last year, even as the recession began to bite, employers snapped up the 65,000 visas available in just one day. This year, however, as of Sept. 25–nearly six months after the U.S. government began accepting applications–only 46,700 petitions had been filed.

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The success of private-sale sites like Gilt Groupe, which holds daily members-only sales of off-season luxury items, have led to imitators hoping to emulate the success of a business model that’s catching on with recession-strapped consumers.

Private-sale sites let shoppers experience the cachet of owning luxury items without paying full price. Their Web-only setting eliminates the public guilt of making big-ticket purchases down a down economy. And the short time in which items can be reserved in shopping carts means customers have to click fast, enhancing the allure for some.

One of the newest such sites is One Kings Lane, which focuses on furniture and other housewares. Like the Gilt model, it sells luxury goods from two or three brands a day at 50 percent to 70 percent off original prices.

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Cash-strapped consumers have been slow to buy personal computers in the recession. But with the launch of Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) new Windows 7 operating system Thursday, PC makers are aiming to reverse that trend–and then some.

Companies are expecting that Windows 7’s improved features over earlier Microsoft operating systems, including Vista and XP, will lure more consumers into stores. And they are betting that heightened demand will allow them to stanch recent price declines in the market.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), Dell Inc. (DELL), Toshiba America Inc. and Acer Inc., among others, are releasing a flood of high-end laptops with slim cases and glossy designs, and new one-piece touch-screen desktops, that they hope consumers will be willing to pay a premium for.

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If the world’s eighth-largest economy were a member of the proper religious order, it’d be time to call in a priest to administer last rites.

Name almost any serious malady and the state of California has it: the nation’s highest marginal tax rate coupled with an abysmal public education system; the most home foreclosures; a free-falling commercial real estate sector; lame-duck governor with no legislative support and a disdain for an annual budget process that he refers to as kabuki theater; unemployment somewhere between the official number of 12% and the whisper number of 18%; a 20% drop in year-over-year revenue; municipalities that have either declared bankruptcy (Vallejo) or are on the verge (Los Angeles); and a black-box permitting process that scares away business investment even while every week, 3,000 more taxpayers migrate to greener pastures.

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There was a telling bit of news on the continued travails of the U.S. consumer today from a small Texas retail chain called Conn’s (CONN). (In general, I would say calling a retailer “Conn’s” is not something I would recommend. But I digress.)

Conn’s sells consumer electronics, home appliances, furniture, mattresses, computers and lawn and garden products in 75 stores in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. And according to a statement from the company this morning, this is not an ideal time to be in that particular line of business.

“Economic conditions in the company’s markets have deteriorated significantly during the current year,” the company warned, citing a rise in the Texas jobless rate to 8 percent in August 2009 from 5.6 percent in December and 5 percent in August 2008. “As a result, the Company’s sales and credit portfolio performance have been adversely impacted.”

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Comments by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) yesterday apparently have triggered worries on the Street that the PC manufacturers, in their zealous optimism about the prospects for Microsoft Windows 7 (MSFT), may have built too many PCs.

As I noted last night, AMD said on its post-earnings conference call with the Street that it expects a less-than-seasonal sequential increase in Q4 revenues, due in part to the “the big build we’ve seen of PCs in anticipation of the Win 7 launch.”

That has triggered concerns that the PC industry has built too much inventory–and that it could result in both reduced component consumption in Q4 and beyond, and lower pricing for memory, which has benefited in recent weeks from higher NAND and DRAM prices.

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Does writing a blog constitute work? That appears to be the position of the New York State Department of Labor, which recently declared a laid-off attorney ineligible for unemployment benefits because she was bringing in $1.30 a day from blog ads.

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The economic slump has bottomed out and optimism is returning, but it will take some time for business to return to more normal levels, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) International President Jean-Philippe Courtois said Monday.

Mr. Courtois’s comments echo those of Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, who told delegates at a Confederation of British Industry conference Monday that he expects the economy to stay weak and recover only slowly.

Still, Mr. Courtois was more optimistic on the outlook for emerging markets, which he said are doing well. Microsoft doesn’t separate out business performance geographically.

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Global chip revenues in the third quarter are getting a big boost from inventory restocking, according to the research firm iSuppli.

According to iSuppli, in the second quarter inventories dwindled to “lean, but appropriate levels,” in a reversal of the excess inventory levels reached in 2008. In the third quarter, the research firm contends, suppliers have moved to build inventories in an attempt to reach a supply/demand balance. As a result, iSuppli contends, global chip revenues will likely by 3 percentage points above actual demand, “increasing an artificial bump in sales for the industry.”

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