Net Results: This is the time when Silicon Valley runs its numbers and produces an economic snapshot of the previous year.

Final December figures on everything from job gains and losses to the number of hotel rooms occupied,air freight tonnage shipped,office space let and houses sold - oh yes, and venture capital invested - let the pundits declare an economic verdict on a year already slipping into memory.

The good news is that 2004 showed the best end-of-year decline in unemployment figures since the economy turned rotten in 2001.

Santa Clara county, the heart of the Valley, lost only 600 jobs during December, bringing overall county unemployment levels at year end to 39,800, a huge 30.9 per cent change for the better over annual figures in 2003, leaving the unemploymentrate at the end of the year at 5.1 per cent.

On the other hand, if you want to focus on the cloud rather than the silver lining, the drop in unemployment does not seem to be linked to any large rise in employment - the figures actually declined at the year end by 0.4 per cent, with a 2004 overall figure of a 0.3 per cent drop in those employed.

So it looks as if the reduction in those unemployed relates to people leaving the area. Maybe it is the final clean-out of the disillusioned, the hangers-on who hoped the Valley economy would rebound.

Likewise with companies - if you were going to fold, it seems, you'd have folded by now. Bankruptcy figures were down 3.5 per cent on 2003. Other figures show the road to recovery is still pretty rocky.

But new business applications were down 14.4 per cent over the year before, and hotel room occupancy was lower than 2003 - a painful 47.9 per cent last year, compared to the slightly better 53.2 per cent in 2003.

Not that such news did anything whatsoever to dampen housing prices in the area. If you think a glum local economy would bring any relief to home buyers in this eternally rocketing market, think again. The median home price for the county rose to $610,000 in 2004, up $90,000 on 2003, a healthy 17.3 per cent increase. But sales of homes were down 11.6 per cent over the year, reflecting that fewer people were making a move with costs so high.

All that said, the overall tech picture seems a bit rosier. The Nasdaq index, full of technology companies, was up in 2004 by 8.6 per cent.

But the fact that the index of 150 Valley companies tracked by the San Jose Mercury News was down 1.9 per cent on 2003 seems to indicate that the Valley is not yet a significant part of an overall tech recovery.

However, on the venture capital front, signs are that health is returning to the Valley as well as nationwide. Overall VC investment was up to $20.9 billion in the US in 2004, the first rise since 2001, and a jump from $18.9 billion in 2003, according to figures from PricewaterhouseCoopers' regular VC survey.

Investments in Valley companies in the final quarter of 2004 were up 12 per cent on the same period last year, to $1.7 billion.

Compared to the Irish venture funding market the numbers seem massive - but recall that in 2000 VC funding to Valley companies alone reached nearly $35 billion and you get a picture of the loss of cashflow in this area.

The Valley still gets the lion's share of VC money, too - some 32 per cent of the total in the US.

Biomedicine takes 32 per cent of overall Valley funding. Software isn't far behind, with 30 per cent of funds. Networking and telecoms take 14 per cent, electronics and hardware 8 per cent, financial and consumer 5 per cent, IT services 2 per cent, industrial and business 2 per cent, media and entertainment 5 per cent and semiconductors 13 per cent.

The bad news for early phase start-ups is that the bulk of money went to later-phase firms.

According to the Mercury News, a lot of the money is going into companies that have to do with what might loosely be termed the digital home - technologies consumers will use for home entertainment or general digital services. Money went to companies working to provide streaming video on demand, to send wi-fi throughoutthe houseand to provide wireless data to digital devices.

So they are betting that whatever the coming years bring, we the consumers will be ready to fork out for more digital and electronic stuff for our homes. Given the state of average personal debt in the US, and now Ireland, that's probably not a bad guess; we seem happy to spend money we don't actually have on things and services we really don't need but like to have anyway.

weblog: http://weblog.techno-culture.com