Melinda Gipson, formerly of the Newspaper Association of America and of GateHouse Media, attended the Stanford AlwaysOn Summit last week.The following is one of Gipson’s reports. Watch this space for information about where to find more newspaper-oriented coverage from Gipson of the AlwaysOn Summit.

AlwaysOn Ups Ante Naming 250 Stars in ‘08

Palo Alto, CA – Tony Perkins has probably earned the right to crow. He famously predicted the “dot-bomb” right before it went off, for instance, and through the darkest aftermath, companies he and his AlwaysOn advisors picked as leading potential entrepreneurial investments have managed to stay ahead of the curve for profitable exits. In venture capital or VC-speak, an “exit” is that point at which early investors see a return on their investment, either through the company going public – as likely this year as a woman in the White House – or in today’s more common “merger.”

Being a member of past AO 100 companies gave you about a third of a chance to exit at three times the industry average, Perkins claims. A study from the 451 Group found that, among the previous AO 100 companies 23 companies have been acquired in just the last 12 months for a total of $5.5 billion.  Microsoft

Deals are clearly down from a 2005-2006 high of 27, and – depending on who you ask – all were bought out by another company rather than through public offering. Microsoft is the largest “serial acquirer” of AO firms, having now bought six of them.

That said, the yearly listing is somewhat misleading – companies that have appeared on past lists may recur – among this year’s top 250 are many repeats such as Aggregate Knowledge, Digg, Facebook, Gaia – last year’s winner – Topix, Tremor, Trulia, Yelp and Zillow, being among those already familiar to newspaper companies in one way or another.

There’s a long list of “green tech” start-ups, which, while probably worth watching, don’t have a lot to do with publishing; and infrastructure plays – other than making the point repeatedly that selling software as a service is here to stay – don’t generally become competitive game-changers.

Four categories do: Mobile, Consumer & Community, Online Advertising Service Providers and Enablers, and we’ll cherry-pick each of these a bit to raise a flag or mark trend lines.

But we don’t want to miss the forest for the trees. A few key trends are worth highlighting without being tied to any single company.

1. Angels are becoming the new early-stage investors and VCs of Silicon Valley, but entrepreneurs in large measure are shouldering more of the burden to become profitable fast. In this economy, start-ups generally are being asked to make it farther on their own steam using their own seed capital, and to demonstrate larger growth rates and revenues before measuring up to even angel investment. As Ron Conway, founder of SV Angels, put it, “It takes more money to fund a mediocre business than a great one.”

Investments of $500,000 at a time – what a panel of angel investors referred to as sufficient to establish “microcaps” – may in large part be viewed as sufficient start-up cash because it just takes less money to start a tech company these days. There’s so much disruption in the ecosystem of the Web that companies like StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter, and Spiceworks all were built on rapid internal growth, until they got to the point where they sometimes need to jump a chasm to bigger growth and “build the plumbing” required of a larger company, as one investor described it.

Sarbanes-Oxley compliance certainly puts a crimp on growth, and may create the kind of leverage that causes smaller companies to sell out earlier than they might otherwise, just to acquire the kind of infrastructure needed to support the reporting requirements, investors complained. But companies aiming to grow from the start have to invest in SOX plumbing from the get-go, because just like a house built without it, it’s much more costly to add later.

2. While green investments are widely expected to grow by 10 percent or more in the coming year, summit attendees surveyed say that the digital entertainment sector expected to receive the most funding this year is mobile (43 percent of voters thought so, as compared with 25 percent of respondents who thought social media would lead, 20 percent who voted for content and 11 percent who picked tech enablers.) Mobile also was voted as the sector most likely to see more M&A activity, and within the category, the the biggest opportunities were seen for mobile content. As for total investments, mobile was ranked a close third after “greentech” and digital entertainment in total anticipated investment dollars this year.

Those most in the know about mobile – panelists from Nokia, Google, and Qualcomm – all predicted that carriers will likely have to find a way to share the individual handset location coordinates that are so instrumental to applications that can be personalized to a given cell-phone user. There’s just too much upside opportunity there to be ignored, they agreed. Multiple Google panelists affirmed that the new Android operating system, on track to be available in commercial phones by Q3, will be flexible enough to accommodate many applications never envisioned by the search behemoth. It will, as one asserted, be “nothing like Microsoft.”

3. Several entrepreneurs, and their investors, managed to comment in completely different contexts that no-one has managed yet to crack the code on “local” services online.  Among those on the AO 250 who are trying: OpenTable and NearbyNow. Though it didn’t make the AO list, Outside:in did present in the summit CEO forums and pointed out that its local BuzzMap of most blogged about places in D.C. Maryland and Virginia, is now live on on the site of its partner WashingtonPost.com.  And BookingAngel.com, an Australian company poised to give OpenTable a run for its money, said unequivocally that Internet Yellow Pages are “dying.” A most concerted effort among all local leaders appears to be a focus on some version of a “pay for results” or pay-per-booking business model. But, at least in the case of BookingAngel, the reservation works automatically, generating a qualified lead sales opportunity until the prospective business client is virtually forced to reject business or pay between $3.50 and $8 per reservation. If the local search marketplace in increasingly populated, it certainly appears that the survivors will have at least proven their right to survive.

4. The more mature the Internet supposedly becomes as an industry, the more likely companies sound like they were named by a 4-year-old.