2010 will bring more promising investment opportunities for angel investors and will feature more exits than any year in the past decade. That’s the conclusion of a panel discussion at the AlwaysOn Venture Summit in Menlo Park, Calif. featuring several prominent angels and veteran investors. The panel suggested that there will likely be 50 or more initial public offerings in 2010, making it a banner year for start-ups and their financial backers.

The panel also suggested that public technology companies will start acquiring smaller companies again, in the interest of staying competitive. For example, with Google’s recent acquisition of AdMob Inc., a mobile ad network, for $750 million in stock, every other media company is realizing that they will have to acquire innovation just to keep up.

Other panelists said promising new industry segments are emerging. With the proliferation of social media and government spending on healthcare software and cleantech, angel investors will have ample opportunities in emerging business areas.

Investors will be looking for start-ups that can go a long way on a small budget. For cleantech that means a focus on material sciences, software and thermoelectrics. Other panelists said new communications platforms like Twitter have sparked a revolution of real-time content sharing that will spawn hundreds of new companies and provide lucrative returns.

The conclusion was that 2010 will be a time of opportunity for angels.