Who said the venture capital industry is sucking wind lately?

Well, it is–but not today and, especially, not Accel Partners, which sold two of its portfolio start-ups to large public companies for a total of $1.5 billion.

That would be the sale of AdMob to search behemoth Google for $750 million in stock, and the acquisition of Playfish by gaming giant Electronic Arts for about $300 million.

While Accel is not getting all that dough, it’s not a bad haul for the day.

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Bucking a trend of contraction in the venture industry, Accel Partners today announced that it had raised two funds totaling $1 billion.

The well-known VC firm said that it had closed the $480 million Accel Growth Fund and the $525 million Accel London III.

The first will be managed from its Palo Alto, Calif., HQ, focusing on “growth equity” across several sectors, while the London fund will be managed there and aim to invest in early-stage and growth companies across Europe and Israel.

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According to sources, Facebook is moving to eliminate its observer status slot from its board. That position is currently held by Greylock Partners David Sze.

The reasons might be as simple as the fact that as Facebook grows, it needs a more formal board process, especially as it prepares for a public offering sometime in the future.

In that case, the observer slot might be eliminated, as the company moves to add more members to the board.

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Oh the sweet irony of Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg getting awarded a big round glass object, suitable for mantel-showing-off, from Harvard types.

Especially since he is now the school’s second most famous tech mogul dropout–after Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

But that was the case last night at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt Regency, where the 24-year-old Zuckerberg collected the 30th Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award from the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California.

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This past Saturday night, BoomTown attended the tony San Francisco book party for Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, “The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It.” It was hosted by megablogger Arianna Huffington and Melanie Ellison, an old friend of Zittrain’s from high school, as it turned out.

And BoomTown took our Flip video camera, of course!

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Silicon Valley luminary Marc Andreessen has been asked to join the board of Facebook, according to several sources with knowledge of the situation.

While the arrangement is not completed yet, sources said the longtime entrepreneur has verbally agreed to accept the post to become the fourth member of the board of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social-networking site.

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After BoomTown broke the news yesterday that top Google exec Sheryl Sandberg was tapped by Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg to be COO of the hot social networking company, I talked with her and got the usual blah-blah quotes about scaling and growing operations and building a platform and how she wasn’t leaving Google as much as “going to an opportunity.”

But, as loyal readers will find out in the weeks and months ahead, she is sure to make for a much more lively new character in our ongoing and near-obsessive coverage of the Facebook saga, which we at BoomTown HQ like to call “As the SuperPoke Turns.”

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Over the next week, I will be posting the most popular videos on BoomTown from 2007.
Here’s my personal favorite, which I call “I Heart Mark Zuckerberg.” It is a short and–let’s just say it, shall we?–deeply uncomfortable encounter BoomTown had with the Facebook founder and CEO.
(To be fair, we caught him completely unaware when he [...]

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Why does the idea of a marriage between Hollywood writers and VCs make me slightly queasy?

But that’s just the feeling I got when I read the always sharp Joseph Menn of the Los Angeles Times, who penned an interesting piece earlier this week about writers in Hollywood turning to venture capitalists as the strike drags [...]

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What can we say about investor Peter Thiel, when it is much better to listen to him talk?

Here’s a longish video I made at Thiel’s office on San Francisco’s Presidio (no Sand Hill Road mundanity for Peter!) yesterday with the man who has become Silicon Valley’s most interesting venture capitalist and all-around great character of [...]

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Well, we’re glad it’s done, our conflict of interest shoved aside by the hey-big-spenders at Microsoft and we can again resume our incredulous analysis of the insane $15 billion valuation of Facebook.

No matter who would have gotten to make nice with founder Mark Zuckerberg in the hefty ad-investment deal–Google or Microsoft–we will be sticking to our guns on this ridiculous roundelay of hype and circumstance.

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Since we are refraining from writing about the current deals being mulled over by Facebook (see this post and also this disclosure)–one for its international ad business with rivals Google and Microsoft vying for the privilege of losing money in a guaranteed revenue deal and another to complete a mega-round of funding that will value [...]

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“Why,” said a sharp Silicon Valley figure to me last night, “would Facebook give away the cow for the price of a quart of milk?”
Why, indeed, although it would be a $15 billion quart of milk.
But it was an interesting point he was making about the situation the hot social-networking site finds itself in right [...]

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An interesting new site debuts today called Global Grind–an aggregation and destination site aimed specifically at the hip-hop community–that combines what looks like the widgety NetVibes home-page approach with a hipper version of Digg plus a lot of curated content-pointing.
It’s not so different in its technology or even its look (see below)–you could swap out [...]

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Here’s an interesting idea if you don’t want to get bought and you can’t quite IPO yet and you need to have a tidy war chest for expansion or perhaps a choice acquisition or two: Bring in more investors and raise more money at a huge valuation.

That’s a concept that the top dogs at Facebook are seriously mulling over now, according to sources, after getting so many inquiries from investment funds and several bigger companies–such as its ad-serving partner, Microsoft–about grabbing a stake in the fast-growing social networking Web site.

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