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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During the last U.S. recession in 2001, the newly unemployed often gathered to trade horror stories and job-seeking tips at groups like the Five O’Clock Club. During this recession, of course, the newly unemployed swap stories online, particularly on social networks.

But, for at least one social network for the jobless–the The 405 Club, named in honor of the $405 a week maximum given out in New York unemployment checks–online is not enough. They still like to meet in person, occasionally.

So on a warm Wednesday afternoon this week, the members of The 405 Club gathered at Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park.

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As Silicon Valley’s stock-driven wealth machine sputters in the recession, technology start-ups are exploring new ways for employees to tap their holdings.

Many of the moves have been triggered by Facebook Inc., which this week paid current and former employees who participated in a program that let them sell a portion of their shares in the privately held social-networking site. Current workers were allowed to sell up to $1 million worth of Facebook stock or 25 percent of their vested shares, whichever was greater, according to people familiar with the terms.

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Well, apparently Americans are still going on vacation.

Priceline (PCLN) this morning posted Q2 revenue of $603.7 million, well ahead of the Street consensus of $575.1 million, with pro forma profits of $2.02 a share, crushing the Street at $1.75. Gross travel bookings in the quarter were $2.38 billion, up 12.8 percent from a year ago. Pro forma EBITDA was $126.2 million, up 24.6 percent year over year.

In a statement, the company said that despite the recession, “leisure travel demand for the summer peak season has been stronger than expected, driven in part by the availability of compelling discounts.”

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The economy hasn’t spared many sectors of the economy. But if you have to be in business these days, software isn’t a bad choice.

The typical publicly traded software company is still growing, despite the worst recession in most people’s memory, according to investment bank Software Equity Group.

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After a few months of lagging sales, market researcher NPD Group is finally saying the recession caught up with the video games industry. All it took was for gaming to suffer its biggest year-over-year sales drop in 9 years.

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In recent weeks, some big-name tech execs have said that they think the economy has hit a bottom. On Wednesday and Thursday, some smaller–although still pretty large–software companies reported earnings, and their CEOs were a little less rosy about the end of the recession.

Salesforce.com (CRM) on Thursday reported a 23 percent increase in revenue from the year-ago period. But the company lowered its full year revenue outlook from between $1.3 billion and $1.33 billion to between $1.25 billion and $1.27 billion.

Marc Benioff, CEO of the online-software maker, didn’t sound like a man who believes the worst is over. He said during a conference call that new customers are taking longer to make decisions and that existing ones aren’t expanding the way they historically have. And he balked when asked if the company’s month-by-month performance indicated any trends: “I feel most comfortable really just delivering these aggregate results right now,” he said.

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Gawker Media impresario Nick Denton, one of the more vocal Cassandras of media collapse last fall, got a surprise this spring when things turned out to be, well, not so bad. Mr. Denton told us earlier in the year that sales were actually up double digits, and it appeared marketers’ reactions to the recession were “more strategic” than he thought.

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How has the recession affected entrepreneurship? So far, it’s helped to drive it up.

That’s according to a new study from the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City-based organization. The study, out Thursday, found that an average of 320 out of 100,000 adults created a new business each month last year even as the recession took hold, up from 300 out of 100,000 adults in 2007.

That pattern is similar to the last downturn earlier this decade, when entrepreneurship levels also rose during the tech bust.

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One might think that the recession would compel people to file their tax returns earlier. Who couldn’t use the extra cash? But it turns out that Americans have never filed later.

That’s according to a man who knows something about taxes: Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit (INTU), which makes the popular TurboTax software. “Technology makes it easier to wait later,” Smith said in a recent interview.

About 35 million tax returns are done with software or online, and about 22 million of those are done through TurboTax. People have waited longer to file each year for the last decade, says Smith. There’s usually a small peak in late January when workers get their W-2s, then a lull in February and March. On April 14, the number of people filing through TurboTax shoots up and stays there until the deadline passes a day later.

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In a recession, budgets are tightened, jobs are cut, and those who remain are expected to do more with less. Given this type of economic reality, it’s surprising to hear of an industry reporting an increase in spending on anything, much less on something as new as social media. Yet that’s exactly what’s occurring. According to a new Forrester Research survey of 145 global interactive marketers in both B2B and B2C companies with more than 250 employees, the use of social media as a marketing tool is on the rise. What’s more, Forrester reports that over 50 percent of marketers said they will be increasing their spending on social media marketing in the coming months.

Part of the reason for this increased spending is the low cost of social media tools. Compared with larger expenditures like advertising, social media requires much less investment. In fact, three-quarters of those surveyed who knew their budgets said they allowed for $100,000 or less for social media tools over a 12-month period.

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For a vivid reminder of the way the Internet–combined with a vicious recession–can destroy a well-established industry, consider today’s news from the collapsing Yellow Pages business.

Idearc, a 2006 spinoff from Verizon (VZ), late yesterday warned investors that it is considering various ways to restructure its mountainous debt; among the options it’s mulling over are a prepackaged bankruptcy filing; though the company said if it can’t negotiate a prepackaged deal with creditors, it might filed for bankruptcy protection anyway.

CEO Scott Klein said in a statement that the directory publisher is “making progress on our transformational and cost-cutting initiatives,” but that “the unprecedented economic challenges this nation is facing are creating never-before-seen obstacles for our clients and, as a result, for us as well.”

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A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists–even Wall Street quants–have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li’s work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut–determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related–and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

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There was a time when the geeks who keep a company’s tech systems running could get by without knowing the finer details of corporate strategy. You called the chief information officer when you needed a server upgrade, not a strategic plan.

Well, those days are over.

This downturn could mean the end of the sequestered CIO–that rumpled executive who, like Scotty on “Star Trek,” has limited social skills and usually emerges from the engine room only when something blows up. In these tough times, CEOs are frequently calling tech chiefs out of the wiring closet and into the boardroom, and putting their business skills to the test.

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Amid a recession that has many families cutting back on their spending, sports teams are trying to find new ways to lure fans to their stadiums and off their couches. One part of the strategy will be on display this weekend at the NBA All-Star game in Phoenix.

Fans in the city will get a behind-the-scenes look at the festivities and be able to interact with some of the league’s stars–thanks to a high-definition video-conferencing system. The system, called TelePresence and made by Cisco Systems (CSCO), uses giant screens to create an experience as close to a face-to-face meeting as possible. (Cisco is one of the NBA’s “official partners,” so it gets to use league events to promote its products.)

“When people come to a major event like All Star they want to feel like they have something special and not just sit in a seat,” says Steve Hellmuth, executive vice president of operations and technology for NBA Entertainment. “This technology lets fans have a special in-person experience with a player.”

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