Venture capital firms tightened their purse strings in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the latest MoneyTree Report released by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The total dollar amount invested in venture financings was $5.4 billion, down 33 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 (when it was $8.09 billion) and down 26 percent from the third quarter of 2008 (when it was $7.3 billion). For the entire year, the total venture capital invested into startups was $28.3 billion, down 8 percent.

The decline in investing mapped the decrease in exit options, even though VCs are supposed to have a 5 to 7 year investment horizon.

More money continued to flow into later stage deals. And broken down by sector, venture dollars going into Internet deals fell 26 percent quarter over quarter as well to $787 million across 170 deals (a 20 percent decline from the third quarter). Even investments in clean tech startups dipped 14 percent sequentially to $909 million across 62 deals. For the year, Internet financings were pretty much flat at $4.9 billion, while the dollars going into clean tech deals increased 52 percent to $4.1 billion.

It’s not like Microsoft is going to be disappearing any time soon, especially with the success of the Windows 7 beta, but its death grip on the PC industry is being eroded on multiple fronts and it’s a good exercise to imagine what it might be like if MS were to take the French leave.

It’s important to note that the question of what happens after Microsoft doesn’t need to mean “what would happen if Microsoft left the picture entirely.” Mostly because that’s not going to happen: they’ll be a part of the post-Microsoft world too, because “Microsoft” is more than a company, it’s a way of thinking about computing.

Despite the continuous stream of layoffs, CrunchBoard this week has the most diverse job listings I’ve seen yet. There’s both a range of job types–from marketing to technical–and a wide variety of job locations, from New York to Dallas to San Francisco to Portland, OR.

Want to work as a social media planner in Philadelphia?
Or a product manager at Newsweek Digital in New York?
Or maybe in the online marketing manager with a SEO focus at Match.com in Dallas?

(Here at TechCrunch, we’re looking for a Rails Developer.)

Some other jobs currently on CrunchBoard:

How bad is the economy? In an effort to raise money for his rent, one man named Victor is trying to sell his Digg account on Craigslist for $650. It’s not because Victor is a power user on Digg. The name of the account is “youtube” His post on Craigslist reads:

Conspiracy theorists, start your engines.

Right now if you run a Google search for “palm pre” from a mobile phone, you’ll be shown that there are 0 pages related to Palm’s upcoming smartphone, which will soon faceoff with Google’s Android, Blackberry, and the iPhone in the battle for touch-screen supremacy.

In fact, a number of searches with the world “Palm” in it are turning up zero results (even “palm tree”), though many searches still work just fine. The bug seems to have existed for at least the last two days according to recent tweets.

The issue seems to only be affecting Google’s mobile site, which is used for both the iPhone and the G1 (as well as a number of other phones).

Update: Looks like the problem has been fixed.

Youtube has officially enabled High Quality in embedded videos. The new embedded player sports a little HQ button in the expandable menu, which is strangely absent from Youtube’s on-site player.

One can only assume that they decided they were ready for the blast of traffic that will certainly result from the huge amount of embedded high-quality videos to come. Doubtless the stream pipe has to be a lot fatter for the HQ videos, but advances in compression efficacy have ensured that doubling the image quality doesn’t double the size of the video.

DailyFill, a gossip site in the same vein as TMZ and Perez Hilton, is off to an impressive start. Less than two months after launch, Quantcast is already reporting 1.7 million unique visitors – a figure on par with PopSugar’s traffic numbers (though we should note that the Sugar network as a whole sees much more traffic).

The site first grabbed attention because it was created by Slingshot Labs, a startup incubator owned by News Corp. The incubator also has ties to MySpace (also a News Corp property), though it is a separate company.

If you know a boy between 6 and 12 who likes cars, check out the beta for a new virtual world designed by Ridemakerz, the build-your-own-car toy store. We have invites here.

The toy store commissioned the Electric Sheep Co. to build a browser-based virtual world for boys based on its Webflock platform. When I wrote about Ridemakerz back in December, here is how I described the project:

The number of people on the Internet surpassed one billion in December, according to comScore. The actual number is probably higher than that (Internet World Stats counted nearly 1.5 billion Web surfers worldwide as of June 30, 2008). In any case, only between 15 and 22 percent of the world’s population is on the Internet. We have a long way to go.

Using the comScore numbers, here is the breakdown by country and region:

President Obama will hold onto his Blackberry for personal communication but anything government related that is considered classified will probably be handled on the Sectera Edge. We published some pictures of the General Dynamics device when we broke the news ’bout Obama’s Blackberry plans last week, but CNN got a short video demo explaining the devices capabilities; yes, they do demo the classified button. Only time will tell if Obama actually carries both devices though. Video after the break.

After layoff activity in the tech industry quieted down around the holidays, it’s come back with a vengeance in January. According to our Layoff Tracker, 80,076 job eliminations have been announced or completed since the beginning of the year. The total number of tech layoffs since we began tracking in late August is now 195,856.

This past week alone, substantial layoffs were announced by Ericsson (5,000), Intel (6,000), and Microsoft (5,000). The biggest job loss by far is the 34,000 employees of Circuit City, which announced it is going out of business last week.

Music recommendation engine / social network Last.fm has launched an official, feature-rich application for the Android platform that enables users to stream radio stations (including personalized streaming radio), consult up-to-date concert information and also offers the ability to track users’ listening habits based on their Last.fm profile.

The company says the application should be available here, but I’m not seeing anything there yet so maybe we should just be patient until they get around to effectively have the app up for download on Android Market. (It’s also nowhere to be found when you actually search from the G1).

Update: it’s available from the phone now.

The application enables users to access their Last.fm profile and millions of streaming tracks on Android-powered phones, and supports ‘background playback’ so you can listen to music while you access other programs.

Apple is doing something right because every other company, including Microsoft and Sony, is laying folks off but Apple is paving the halls with gold. Didja hear? Apple made $10 billion last year and their simple product line is the key. Look at it. There really aren’t that many products: One cellphone, four iPods, three notebooks, and three desktop computers. Now look at HP’s, Dell’s, or even Garmin and TomTom’s product lines. Apple does something different and hopefully others are taking notes.

Apple has a history of finding niche markets and making products to fill that void. However, slowly after Steve-O took over, the product lines condensed into distinct segments geared for a different buyer. You want a basic Macintosh computer? Buy the Mini. The iMac is available for all-in-one solutions and the Mac Pro is truly for the professional. The same thing follows into the notebook and iPod realms showing vastly different strategy than other companies.

One of my favorite startups in Silicon Valley is Rearden Commerce. Few people have heard of it despite the fact that the company has been around since before the first Internet bust in 2000 and has raised $200 million in capital, most of it recently.

The reason few people have heard of Rearden is because they are a behind-the-scene service. They offer a sort of automated assistant that helps people organize travel needs. In 2007 I called it “mashups for adults:”

Their strategy to date has been to sign large corporate customers and create customized websites for their employees. The service acts very much like a personal assistant. Set your profile up with the types of restaurants you like, whether you like aisle or window seats, and your preferred car provider, and Rearden will book all aspects of your trip for you.

MyFolio is a brand new social network in public beta that takes another crack at building an online community service for artists and creatives looking to share their art and converse about it with like-minded people. The startup quietly launched the website a month ago and is entirely bootstrapped by its founder Mustafa Lazkani.

In terms of features, MyFolio covers every basic need for a social network to be useful for its creative audience. Artists can upload and tag media or files for a variety of categories ranging from animation, concept art, films, paintings to music and photography, create a portfolio, manage bookmarks and keep on top of internal messages from other users. Registered users can indicate of their work can be viewed in public or kept private, if it is work in progress or not, and which copyright applies to the work.

Google says the vast majority of the 1 million businesses that use Google Apps opt for the free advertising supported version. To make the free option less attractive they’ve been quietly lowering the number of user accounts that can be associated with a free account. Now as businesses grow, they’ll be forced to move to the paid version much more quickly than before.

Google Apps is a suite of online applications like gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, etc. that are packaged and tailored for business use. It’s growing fast – in a recent post where Google announced the opening of a reseller program, the company said that more than 1 million businesses and 10 million users use Google Apps today, and 3,000 new businesses sign up daily. The largest business user, Genentech, has 20,000 employees on Google Apps.

When Google Apps first launched in August 2006 it was free and described as “a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.”

New startup Ohai has been getting big cocktail party buzz over the last few months. The company won’t disclose much about what they’re doing, except that they’re building a Flash-based massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). And they certainly have the team to do it.

Susan Wu, the founder and CEO, is a former principal at Charles River Ventures and the former CMO of the Apache Software Foundation, and has experience with MMOGs. She’s also a self-confessed World Of Warcraft addict. Her team includes Blake Commagere (CTO), a cofounder of Mogad (acquired by iSkoot); Don Neufeld (VP Engineering), the former technical director at Sony Online Entertainment where he shipped Everquest II, Planetside and 13 other products; and Scott Harsman (VP Production), the former executive producer and creative director at Sony Online Entertainment where he led development of Everquest II, Everquest and other projects.

Neufeld and Harsman both worked at Sony Online Entertainment and brought a team with them. Wu says via email “There are very few teams that have shipped multiple MMOs across different generations of products. We are very fortunate to have Scott, Don and the team they brought over from Sony. There is a significant amount of learning that comes from having gone through dozens of MMO launches that we are applying to our products. Also, while at Sony, our team was involved in the design and implementation of their virtual goods platform.”