Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association have released a report today indicating that U.S. venture capitalists expect their market to contract but anticipate growth in emerging markets, including China, India and Brazil, over the next five years. The 2010 global venture report surveyed over 500 VCs worldwide.

According to the survey results, more than 90 percent of U.S. survey respondents, as well as VCs in Europe and Canada, expect the number of venture firms to decrease between now and 2015, while a majority of venture capitalists in China, India and Brazil anticipate adding more venture firms in their respective countries during the same time frame.

U.S. VCs have a depressed view of the industry thanks to a weak IPO market and unfavorable tax and regulatory policies. More than half the U.S. respondents also believe that limited partners will be less inclined to invest in U.S. venture capital funds in the next five years.

Crowdcast, a provider of social business intelligence (SBI) solutions, has raised $6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Alsop-Louie Partners.

The company’s name is a combination of the words ‘crowd’ and ‘forecast’, and its self-declared goal is to help companies find out what their people really know about their businesses, in order to make better strategic leadership decisions.

Here is a great post written by Josh Hannah, a serial entrepreneur (Betfair, eHow, wikiHow) and Venture Capitalist with Matrix Partners.

Other bloggers, most notably my partner David Skok, have written extensively about building a sales and marketing machine for a SaaS business.  This, in our Matrix view, is the true revolution enabled by SaaS — the ability to unseat the traditional enterprise sales process and its multi-year sales cycles, multi-year implementations, and direct enterprise sales forces for a more efficient sales and marketing machine, and an environment where the best ideas and products (and not necessarily the best salesman) wins.

I recently invested in a great fast-growing SaaS startup called Huddle. Here I will lay out an element of their model that I think is working especially well, and one area of challenge for the business.

Here is a great article brought to my attention by Jeremy Beck from Scio Consulting. The article is written and published by VC firm Trident Capital. Enjoy!