The second quarter venture capital numbers from the MoneyTree report don’t paint quite as rosy of a picture for Washington state as last week’s report from Dow Jones VentureSource. But they still show an uptick in the number of deals and dollars when compared to the first quarter — an especially tough time for the venture business when most investors were sitting on their hands and pocketbooks.

The MoneyTree report from the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that $122 million was invested in 32 deals in Washington, an increase in dollars over the previous two quarters but less than half the amount for the same period last year.

The VentureSource report — which was released late last week and uses a different methodology — showed $271 million invested in 40 deals in the second quarter. It also reported that Washington ranked third in the number of deals and fourth in investments.

The MoneyTree report, by contrast, placed Washington state in fifth place in deals and sixth place in investment dollars.

Oregon only recorded one deal for $3.6 million, while Idaho recorded two deals for $275,000.

Venture capitalists are trying to navigate a tough market, one in which initial public offerings are few and far between and M&A values aren’t what they were even 12 months ago. Meanwhile, many VCs are deploying capital to existing portfolio companies rather than new startups.

So far this year, more than half of the deals in Washington state involved later-stage companies.

Still, the uptick in investments in the second quarter in Washington state and in the U.S.– as reported by both VentureSource and MoneyTree — could indicate that venture capitalists are getting a little more optimistic about deploying capital. But, one thing is for certain: The venture business is not what it was.

The $6.8 billion invested in U.S. companies in the first half of the year represents the smallest total since 1997.

Here’s a look at the companies that received funding in Washington state during the second quarter, according to the MoneyTree report.

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and Real confirms hiring of Hulett  

RealNetworks tonight confirmed that it has hired Matt Hulett, the former CEO of online advertising startup Mpire, as its new chief revenue officer for RealGames North America. It’s a homecoming for Hulett, a former Expedia and AtomShockwave executive who worked as a RealNetworks group manager earlier in his career.

“Matt has a strong track record of developing and leading successful ecommerce companies,” said John Barbour, president of RealGames, in a statement released by the company. “We are thrilled to add an executive of his quality and experience to our team and are sure he will have a very positive impact on our North American businesses.”

RealNetworks described Hulett’s job as a new position that will be instrumental in the company’s syndication and direct-to-consumer games segments. Technology news site Xconomy, citing anonymous sources, last week broke the news that Hulett was joining RealGames.

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and Soda fountain of the future  

Want to try a Raspberry Coke or Fanta Peach? Check out the soda "fountain of the future," developed by Bellevue-based Bsquare and Coca-Cola. The sleek silver vending machine dispenses up to 100 types of drinks, including many that have never been sold before in the U.S. The touchscreen dispenser uses "highly concentrated flavor cartridges" and "microdosing technology" to produce its concoctions, as displayed in the video tour below.

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FAQ: Explaining Microsoft’s new role in Linux kernel development  

Announcing Microsoft’s contribution of 20,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel this morning, the company called it the beginning of the process, not the end — promising to be an active participant in the ongoing development of the code under the open-source community.

Microsoft is contributing the driver code to help Linux distributions run on its Hyper-V virtualization technology on Windows Server 2008. But how exactly will Microsoft be involved? Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel developer and Novell fellow who oversees the Linux Driver Project, answered our questions and explained the process in a phone interview.

How the process is structured: "It’s a big, widespread community, but every part of the kernel has a maintainer. So everything is divided up into maintainers and subsystem maintainers. It’s a big tree hierarchy. Microsoft’s developers are going to be responsible for maintaining this bit of code. Any changes they make they’ll send off to me, who happens to maintain the area in which this code is going to live in. Then I will batch up these changes and send them off to Linus (Torvalds) when we do merges for the main kernel tree."

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