Although it's today probably the hardest time in recent decades to raise venture capital, there are some companies and deals that still get wooed and relentlessly pursued by various VC firms, as this article attests. It has some examples on VC partners turning up the heat and schmoozing their targets, even sending rare bottles of wine to the CEO's house.

By the way, the hot companies named in the article are: Scalix (enterprise-level Linux mail and calendaring solution), MySQL (software development and related support and services for the MySQL open-source database), Biz360 (active marketing intelligence solutions), Inquira (customer search and navigation applications for business Web sites).