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We have talked about the power of utilizing social networks for businesses before in our Weekend Reading series with books like The Facebook Era , by Clara Shih and Crush It! , by Gary Vaynerchuk, and this week we've got another book under a similar vein. Published just last month, Social Networking for Businesses: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs , by Rawn Shah is a guide for companies looking to take advantage of the collaborative communities of social networks to improve their business. Sponsor Author Rawn Shah has plenty of experience in this very subject as he is the Best Practices Lead on the Social Software Adoption Team at IBM. In Social Networking for Businesses , Shah breaks down the essentials and methods of modeling social experiences for businesses to get the most out of their users and customers. One of the most important factors to the success of social business experiences is the leadership of those experiences, says Shah, who points to the success of blogs and Wikipedia as examples. "The success of each blog is a result of the leadership of its owners, who independently set the rules for what to publish and who can contribute," says Shah. Wikipedia, he says, only succeeded when its leadership structure changed to let anyone to contribute, allowing the best content to rise to the top and be curated by public editors. "This defining change in how people could make decisions on the content and direction of the site -- a leadership model that allowed anyone to become an editor and leader -- drove Wikipedia's overwhelming success," says Shah. Other topics covered by Shah in his book include building skills to create and manage social experiences, building a social culture within your business, collaborating with customers and users on ideas, and measuring the results of social environments. "Online communities and social computing software are rapidly appearing both on the Internet and within organizations as a means to allow people to collaborate, although quite frequently without a plan or a link to organizational and business value," says Shah. "By framing collaboration around specific goals and methods instead of herding people towards generic ideas, social computing can help develop and direct innovative development in an organization." This book is a little more of a deep-dive than some of the other books we've recommended over the last several weeks. If your startup is looking to encourage unique social interaction between your users and your business, this could be a great book to check out. Disclosure: A review copy of Social Networking for Businesses was provided to ReadWriteWeb by Pearson Education and Wharton School Publishing . Discuss
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Weekend Reading: Social Networking for Businesses, by Rawn Shah
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When hundreds of clueless commenters decided mid-February that ReadWriteWeb was the place to log in to Facebook, alerts went off in my personal network like alarms at a fire station. For the past few years I've been doing research on misunderstandings online; since it's the subject of my doctoral thesis, all my friends know I eat, sleep, and breathe this topic, and was likely to be so buried in it that I'd miss new developments. It's a good thing they woke me from doctoral sluggishness; with thousands of comments, this is the biggest such thread I've seen. The ReadWriteWeb/Facebook thread looks a lot like previous threads, but it has some interesting new developments. Sponsor Guest author Gillian Andrews is finishing Gumbaby.com . She channels her Internet literacy energies into the hacker radio show The Media Show on YouTube, an irreverent, puppet-fueled stab at mass education. As ReadWriteWeb readers have learned, misunderstandings like these never fail to entertain and astound. They've been a repeat topic of interest on community blogs; MetaFilter, for example, has scratched its collective head about this many a time. Accusations always fly: these "strangers" (as I've come to call them) are idiots, illiterates, came from AOL, shouldn't be allowed out on the Internet without someone to hold their hand. Less often, a few voices speak up from the development community and say, Wait a minute, we build the software the Internet runs on - isn't this partly our fault? The ReadWriteWeb thread lays the blame to some extent on search engines, as ReadWriteWeb writer Mike Melanson has already written. But it also points to the rise of social networking services as a culprit. Social Networking Software Changed the Landscape Examples of misunderstandings abound in listservs, blog comment threads, newspaper article comment sections and even Wikipedia. Blogs where people ask to get an account canceled are pretty common. The login fiasco on this website is the first time I've seen a firestorm of misunderstanding sparked specifically by people trying to log on to an unrelated website. But then, the ability to log into a service from an unrelated website is only a few years old. Is it any surprise that people are thrown by it? These commenters arrived from a search engine, looking for Facebook. At the bottom of the page where they landed, ReadWriteWeb offered them the opportunity to "Sign in with Facebook." They did - many comments link directly to a Facebook profile. What happened when they signed in? They were dropped right back on the ReadWriteWeb page where they started, with no indication of what had happened save for the line "Thanks for signing in, X. Now you can comment." Text Boxes: They're Confusing When commenters signed in to Facebook on ReadWriteWeb, it rewarded them with a text box labeled "Comments (You may use HTML tags for style)." Where do these comments go? It doesn't say. It's down at the bottom of a huge window, which means when you're looking at it, you can't see most of the page's identifying information at the top of the page. (Except for the URL, but I'll get to that in a minute.) Many text boxes around the Web are woefully under-labeled. When I was beginning my research, a guy who worked at Blogger said to me, "People will put just anything in a text box," and it seems to be true. Evidence abounds that people interpret comment boxes in any number of ways. Some think they are sending private email. Some think they're sending a chat message, and get belligerent when nobody responds right away. A few seem to think it's a word processor, and "Submit" means the same thing as "save." A comment which really blew my mind was posted to a blog by a woman who appeared to confuse comments on a blog with "online prayer" - an Internet activity which is probably unfamiliar to most denizens of high-tech blogs. Google it, though, and you'll find numerous pages, with Pat Robertson's organization ranking among the top ones . Online prayer sites provide a form that lets you include your name, contact information, and a comment about what prayers you need - a form which looks startlingly like a blog comment form. The idea is that your message will be sent to Robertson or other church staff, and they will pray for you. Sometimes the form includes a promise that your message will be kept confidential; other times, there is no such promise, but it seems to matter little to those who don't understand where a comment form goes anyway. Online prayer may be new to you. Logging in to Facebook through another site is new to most of us. It's worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of people alive today were never taught to read a webpage in school, the way they were taught to read the title, author information and pages of a book. This brings us to another theme in the ReadWriteWeb thread which is repeated across most other misunderstandings of this type. Literacy is Not the Problem - New Kinds of Literacy Are ReadWriteWeb readers and other "natives" call errant commenters any number of nasty names (and use an upsetting amount of eugenic language, suggesting these "idiot" commenters should be "weeded out of the gene pool.") One favorite insult is "illiterate." As stated, this is a little unfair when most of these people never had a chance to learn Internet skills in school, where skills might be broken down into simple elements that most of us don't even remember learning. (When you learn to read a book, for example, you learn which way to hold the book, how to turn pages, reading left to right, chunking letters into phonemes and words into sentences.) But beyond being unfair, it's not wholly correct to call them illiterate. They do read and write. They just don't always do so in ways that are considered appropriate by the technologically skilled (and the code they write). Literacy has never been a single monolithic skill. It involves both reading and writing, and these two skills are independent of each other. More to the point, literacy involves reading and writing differently in a range of situations. You may consider yourself literate because you have read Shakespeare, or because you can write a coherent quarterly report. But you don't write your quarterly report as a sonnet. Different forms of literacy apply at different times, and people can be good at some kinds of literacy while needing assistance in others. Basic decoding (reading) and writing are rarely the problem in these misunderstandings. While many comments left by strangers on the threads I have studied are misspelled, use bad grammar, or are written in all-caps (or, even more confusingly, All Initial Caps), plenty can't be distinguished from the comments left by tech-savvy commenters when it comes to writing skill. In fact, "strangers" are more likely than natives to write their comments in ways we all learned in school. In most of the threads I have studied, they make it clear who they are addressing ("Dear Facebook,") who is writing ("Thanks, Linda") and even how to understand where they are coming from geographically. They do this to the point of redundancy, sometimes entering this information into more than one comment field. One stranger, trying to reach Maury Povich on a classic thread dug up by MetaFilter, writes a spellchecked-perfect traditional letter, right down to the formatting of the date and greetings. (When was the last time you spellchecked a hastily written comment?) Other errant commenters are published authors, or even have advanced degrees. Again, their problem is not traditional literacy; the problem is that the Internet demands new kinds of literacy, and they haven't had the training yet. Mocking them in a comment thread doesn't improve their skills. Reading-wise, there are plenty of indications in my data that strangers have read other parts of the page. There seems to be a general trend that they are less likely to directly address a celebrity (for example) when the comments right above their own come from natives who say "ommfg, this is not Maury Povich's website!" My favorite example of a stranger demonstrating her reading skills is a commenter on a thread where a blogger wrote about his joy at learning that all kinds of things - M&Ms, ketchup bottles, soda, etc - could now be customized. The blogger titled his post "Ketchup of the People." The commenter wrote: I found the order for custom printed m & m's in the coupon section of the providence journal sunday paper. It said nothing about ordering ketchup first or anything about the blog. All I wanted was to surprise my 80 year old aunt who loves m & m's with this special custom order. What is this a scam or something? If it is, it's pretty cruel? Please respond. Through some referral-log forensics, the blogger and his readers determined that this commenter had, in fact, entered the URL provided by her newspaper. The problem was, the offer had expired, and the only remaining reference to this URL was on the blogger's page, where she landed. So she set about trying to make sense of what she found in the best way she could. Would she have to order ketchup first? Was the blog somehow a gatekeeper to the order? This all sounded fishy - was it a scam? Presented with apparent nonsense, all of us do our best to make sense of it; that's just what the human brain does. On the Web, people don't always have the information they need to understand what's going on. Next page: What is a URL? What is a URL? One of the most important elements errant commenters aren't using, which the tech-savvy have at their command, is a page's URL. Internet-illiterate commenters generally don't know what "URL" means, or what one does. Check the URLs attached to their names in blog comments; you will often find they have entered an email address, subject line, their name, or something to the effect of "I don't know what this is" in the URL field that went with their comment.The fact that many errant commenters seem to enter "Facebook" into Google's search field to get to the page also suggests that URLs aren't a part of their Internet literacy skills. Interface designers aren't helping. Most URL bars now resolve into search results. This may seem like a good UI solution, but it is a catastrophic mistake from a literacy perspective. URLs aren't just how we get to a page; they are involved in how we judge its content, accuracy, point of view, and most importantly who owns it. Obscuring or drawing attention away from URLs keeps people from understanding how to judge the quality of material on the Internet. Considering that most people have not had schooling to help them understand the Internet - and it's unlikely that even kids in school today have formal opportunities to learn about URLs, considering the number of schools which limit Internet access - these steps taken by UI designers simply compound the problem. Which leads me to my final point: They're Not Illiterate - You Are As crazy as it sounds, Melanson makes a certain amount of sense when he lays the blame for the Facebook flap at Google's feet . Google is the best search engine going right now, but it's not perfect. The shift to real-time results and its underlying popularity-contest mechanic make it ineffective in specific settings. ("Specific" being key; the other problem with search engines, and the subject of extensive research in schools of information, is their inability to respond to a given user's context. But that's a topic for another article.) Facebook - and even ReadWriteWeb - are also somewhat to blame, considering how the cross-site login service is presented to users; as I noted, the messages sent to those signing in are unclear (thanks for signing in to what? Now you can comment where? What does it mean to sign in to Facebook on ReadWriteWeb, anyway? Is this a scam?) Literacy is a two-way street. They may be dumb for not reading the pages right, but some of the code, search algorithms, and interfaces involved aren't perfect, either. Not to mention the way "savvy" commenters and other bloggers write. The more people linked to the original ReadWriteWeb thread with the words "Facebook login" in the link, the more the ReadWriteWeb thread appeared to Google to be relevant to Facebook login. As has been noted, blog posts with "Facebook" in the title were likely to see more unwanted traffic as well. This even spread the problem to other blogs linking to ReadWriteWeb, some of whom also started to see login requests in their comment threads. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has noted bad titling among a number of we see what you did there ) is not the same thing as a solution to the problem. Photo by Miguel Ugalde Discuss
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It's SXSW weekend so you may be pretty burnt out on conferences - or just sick and tired of hearing about them - but if you're in New York City this week, don't miss what's sure to be a profound and fascinating A Historic Conversation in NYC: Ai Weiwei, Jack Dorsey & Richard MacManus On March 15, at the prestigious Paley Center in New York City, a conversation will take place between Chinese digital activist and artist Ai Weiwei , Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey , and ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus , ReadWriteWeb founder and editor in chief. The moderator will be Orville Schell , the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. The topic of the event is the emergence of digital activism for fostering positive social change. The onsite event is invitation only, but it will be live streamed exclusively on ReadWriteWeb on Monday, March 15, at 6:30 PM EST (-5 GMT), from the Paley Center for Media, New York City. 15 – 16 March 2010: London, England 2nd Annual Social Networking World Forum — London The 2nd Annual Social Networking World Forum takes place at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. The two-day event features four dedicated conference streams: Social Networking World Forum Enterprise social media Social TV World Forum Mobile Social Networking Forum The event features key speakers from global brands, organizations, social networking publishers and developers, pioneering social media leaders, top agencies, content producers, and more. Full workshop program within exhibition area Evening networking reception Pre-show online meeting planner for delegates Free pass for exhibition only 22 – 26 March 2010: New York City Search Engine Strategies New York Conference & Expo Go beyond search at Search Engine Strategies New York . Learn the newest trends, strategic action plans, and technology that industry leaders are employing today. Our experts will trace the natural evolution of search exploring topics such as: digital asset optimization, mobile application development, transition from search to discovery and more.Book your pass today. Enter RWW15 to save 15% off the registration. Sessions include: Digital Asset Optimization Deep Dive Into Analytics Augmented Reality: It's a Brave New World Bringing SEO In-House: The Pros and Cons Advanced B2B Search Marketing Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues 23 March 2010: San Francisco, California S.F. Beta 4.0 After a long winter's hiatus, S.F. Beta is back, for its forth year straight! Join hundreds of founders, investors, developers, and technologists for a lively evening of demos, drinks, conversation, and new connections. Early bird tickets are available, and they're going fast. Register now for discounted admission. As always, we feature startup demos all night. This time around, the theme is Search & Discovery. If you're building the next Google (or the next Google acquisition), we want you here! Email cperry@sfbeta.com for more info. 26 March 2010: San Francisco, California Freemium Summit The first Freemium Summit is a one day event focused on exploring what it takes to succeed under the freemium business model. Across all segments of the media landscape, entrepreneurs and executives are pioneering models that combine a free offering with a premium, paid offering. This hybrid business model is one of the most exciting areas of business model innovation impacting the world of media and the Freemium Summit will explore the most important topics on the minds of leading practitioners. Confirmed Speakers: Toni Schneider, Automattic (WordPress); Matt Brezina, Xobni; Aaron Levie, Box.net; Phil Libin, Evernote; Tom Conrad, Pandora; Drew Houston, Dropbox; Ranjith Kumaran, YouSendIt; Ben Chestnut, Mailchimp; Lance Walley, Chargify; Isaac Hall, Recurly; and Lincoln Murphy, Sixteen Ventures. March 29, 2010: Portland, Oregon Social Fresh Portland The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom lines. Over the course of the day, you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Intel, Ford, Comcast, Nike and many more, as well as keynote Peter Shankman. Register now and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off. 4 April 2010: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania ConnectNow TEDx CMU is an independently organized TEDx event that will be held on April 4th, 2010 at Carnegie Mellon University and will feature a full day of talks by prominent speakers as well as recorded videos from past TEDTalks. Confirmed speakers include Jonathan Fields (author, blogger and entrepreneur), Stacey Monk (founder of Epic Change, a startup nonprofit), Chase Jarvis (photographer, director and social artist) and Nathan Martin (CEO of Deeplocal, an innovation studio in Pittsburgh). The theme of the event is "Fearless", and we are inviting speakers from cross-disciplinary backgrounds to talk about their experiences, and tell us a little about what inspires them to be fearless in the pursuit of goals. We hope to spark discussions and foster connections between participants, encouraging aspiring individuals to follow their dreams and make a difference. The event is free to attend, and the application deadline is March 21, 2010. For more information about the event, visit tedxcmu.com or email info@tedxcmu.com. You can also find TEDx CMU on Facebook or follow us on Twitter . 7 – 9 April 2010: Sydney, Australia ConnectNow ConnectNow brings together international specialists and thought leaders in social media, emerging technologies and their intersection with business. Learn how the realtime web, location based services, augmented reality, ubiquitous computing and personalised services are changing marketing and communications. Understand the importance of trust in relationship marketing and what is "social currency". For more info email info@connectnow.net.au . 13 – 15 April 2010: Dallas, Texas PubCon South PubCon , the premier search and social media conference, features the industry's biggest names and key players shaping the future of the Web. PubCon South will include cutting-edge panel sessions exploring tracks dedicated to search, social media and affiliate marketing, an intensive professional search and social media training program, and some of the world's top keynote speakers. PubCon South at Dallas will also hold a one-day, two-track slate of intensive educational training programs led by some of the industry's most respected search professionals. The event takes place at the Richardson Conference and Civic Center. Register here . 16 April 2010: Mountain View, California Under the Radar: Cloud Under the Radar: Cloud is must-attend event for dealmakers and heads of IT from large enterprises, SMBs, service providers, carriers and media companies who are responsible for helping their companies leverage new technology and innovation in the fast-evolving IT ecosystem. Join us for the 15th Under the Radar conference, featuring a hand-picked selection of the world's most innovative cloud startups among 350 top tech, media, telcom and finance executives. For ticket and more information, visit http://undertheradarblog.com . 16 – 17 April 2010: Royal Oak, Michigan FutureMidwest FutureMidwest is the region's largest technology and knowledge conference. Founded by Adrian Pittman, Jordan Wolfe and Zach Lipson, FutureMidwest is the fusion of two successful conferences held in Michigan in 2009 - the Module Midwest Digital Conference and TechNow. Both conferences highlighted how technology and digital tools have dramatically changed the way we do business and the effect this transition has had on companies. FutureMidwest kicks things up a notch with presentations, group breakout sessions, relationship-building opportunities and influencers who are taking action to redefine business in the digital age. Register here . April 19, 2010: St. Louis Missouri Social Fresh St. Louis The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom lines. Over the course of the day you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Ford, Best Buy, Scottrade, Hardees, CMT and many more. Register now and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off. 19 – 21 April 2010: San Francisco, California DrupalCon DrupalCon is the premier conference focused on Drupal, the award-winning open source content management framework that is galvanizing social publishing and web development today. For a registration fee of $195, attendees get three full days of sessions led by the best and brightest Drupal experts. Drupal has been downloaded over 2 million times since its inception, and project growth has doubled annually for several years. Drupal is used to deliver a wide variety of application types including blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, and web content publishing and management. 26 April 2010: San Francisco, California Future of Money and Technology Summit The Future of Money & Technology Summit will bring together the best and brightest thinkers around money, including visionaries, entrepreneurial business people, developers, press, investors, authors, solution/service providers, and organizations who work where cash and commerce collide. We meet to discuss the evolving ecosystem around money in a proactive, conducive to dealmaking environment. Featured speakers include Jolie O'Dell from ReadWriteWeb, as well as representatives from Wells Fargo Bank, Kiva, SharesPost, Jambool, Founders Fund, Outright.com, SoftTech VC, and many more. Use discount code "rww" to get 10% off registration . 7 May 2010: Mountain View, California ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 will be an exploration of the latest Mobile development trends - both the technology and the emerging business applications. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of Mobile with the brightest in the industry, your peers! As in our last Summit, The Real-Time Web, the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit is an unconference. An unconference is a participant driven conference where the agenda is created on the day, in real-time and discussions are lead by conference participants. Read about the history of unconferences . We will have two main tracks at this Summit - Development and Business - so the Summit will be of interest to managers, marketers, developers, innovators, entrepreneurs and thought leaders alike. Here's a sample of some of the topics we'll explore in both of these tracks. Geo-location services - what can you do using location as a platform ? Commerce & Marketing - as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel? Content, Publishing & Recommendations - the technologies and best practices. Mobile Social Networking - how to tap into communities on mobile devices. Internet of Things - the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data. Augmented Reality - the technology and business applications of AR. Native App vs. Browser Based - Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian. Click here to register now , or to become a sponsor , or to help shape the conference . 11 May 2010: San Francisco, California FinovateSpring FinovateSpring 2010 will again showcase the most cutting-edge financial and banking technology innovations to Silicon Valley and the world. With Finovate's signature mix of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) from handpicked companies and intimate networking time with their executives, this conference packs a ton of unique value into a single day. Come see the cutting edge of banking and financial technology and network with hundreds of the leading financial executives, venture capitalists, press, industry analysts, bloggers and fintech entrepreneurs. Early bird registration rates are available. May 17 2010: San Francisco, California SF MusicTech Summit The SF MusicTech Summit will bring together 700-plus visionaries in the music/technology space - the best and brightest entrepreneurs, developers, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce. We meet to discuss the evolving music, business and technology ecosystem in a proactive, conducive-to-dealmaking environment. Enter the discount code "rww" to get 10% off . 25 – 27 May 2010: Denver, Colorado Glue Glue is the only conference devoted solely to exploring the problem-sets facing architects, developers and IT professionals in a "post-cloud" world. Glue focuses on the APIs and protocols (Twitter, Facebook, Websockets, PubSubHubBub, XMPP), formats and standards (RDF/Linked Data, JSON, Microformats, HTML5), platforms and providers (Amazon, Rackspace, Google App Engine, Salesforce.com, Eucalyptus), Identity Protocols (OAuth/WRAP, SAML, OpenID, SPML) emerging NoSQL data models (Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, HBase), and other mechanisms that are building the post-cloud world. ReadWriteCloud will be blogging live from Gluecon and CloudCamp, and ReadWriteWeb's Alex Williams will be moderating the "Managing Complexity in the Cloud" session. Please join us May 25-27 in Denver, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb readers can receive 10% off of registration by using the code "RWW12". 15 – 16 June 2010: New York City Corporate Social Media Summit The Corporate Social Media Summit is a two day conference focused exclusively on how big businesses can take advantage of social media to enhance their marketing/comms strategy. Featuring: Practical and relevant insights from peers who have already used social media successfully 20-plus corporate speakers (including PepsiCo, Whole Foods, Dell, McDonald's, General Motors, Citi, Johnson & Johnson), Best practice, benchmarks and practical next steps you can use to take advantage of social media in your business A tightly-focused agenda with 14 in-depth, practical workshops giving you knowledge on only the most critical business issues surrounding corporate use of social media Save $400 if you quote RWW400 when booking. Book here . 29 – 30 June 2010: London Cloud Computing World Forum The 2nd annual Cloud Computing World Forum is the perfect event to learn and discuss the development, integration, adoption and future of cloud computing and SaaS. Building on the success of the 2009 show, this two day conference and free-to-attend exhibition will provide a focused platform for the global cloud and SaaS industry. Show highlights include: Co-located with CloudCamp London Co-located with Green IT conference Free-to-attend exhibition with seminar and scenario theatre Free-to-attend evening awards presentation Hear from leading case studies on how they have integrated cloud computing and SaaS into their working practices Learn from the key players offering cloud and SaaS services Evening networking party for all attendees 5 October 2010: New York City FinovateFall FinovateFall will return to Manhattan on Tuesday, October 5 to showcase dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology from established leaders and hot young companies. The Fall event is the original and largest Finovate and features a single day packed with our special blend of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) and intimate networking time with top executives from the innovative demoing companies. FinovateFall is a unique chance to see the future of finance and banking before your competition and find the edge you need in today's market. Early bird registration rates are available. Download this entire events calendar in iCal format. Discuss
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ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, 13 March 2010
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This week we added one of the most exciting events of the year to the calendar: the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 . Sure, we're a little biased, but we think the conference is the place this year to learn about mobile development trends. We hope to see you in Mountain View on May 7. How do you like your events calendar? As a world map ? As an iCal (and Google Calendar-importable) file? You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. Know of something cool taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us . Sponsor 11 March 2010: Los Angeles, California Los Angeles VC and Angel Event At FundingPost 's next event, a panel of investors who will focus on early-stage venture investing. We will be discussing trends in early-stage investing, sectors that these Angels and VCs look at, things that are most important to them when they are considering an investment and the best and worst things an entrepreneur can do to get their attention. Entrepreneur summaries will be given to the investor speakers and attendees - all of the investors will get your company description and contact info! Additionally, there will be an optional pitching workshop lunch where we will completely deconstruct your elevator pitch, and work with you on formulating a clean and concise elevator pitch giving the important information that investors need to hear to make an educated decision on your company! Then you get to give your new elevator pitch in person to the panel of investors during the event! Click here for more information . 11 March 2010 Positioning Roundtable During this weekly 60-minute online session, entrepreneurs are invited to pitch Sramana Mitra - entrepreneur, strategy consultant, Forbes columnist and author of Entrepreneur Journeys - their business ideas in a three-minute presentation. She will review the material in real time and provide feedback on each pitch, as well as address specific positioning questions from the entrepreneur. Afterwards, she will take questions about positioning from other participants. The session is open to 1,000 people to attend, but only the first five who sign up to pitch Sramana will have the opportunity to discuss their businesses. 12 – 16 March 2010: Austin, Texas SXSW Interactive An incubator of cutting-edge technologies, the SXSW Interactive Festival offers five days of captivating keynote presentations, panel sessions, book readings, Salons and Core Conversations that provide hands-on training as well as big-picture analysis. In addition to the business opportunities at the Trade Show and Exhibition and the hands-on gaming fun at the ScreenBurn Arcade, SXSW Interactive provides an array of exciting evening events including the SXSW Web Awards Ceremony. More to the point, coming to SXSW Interactive is a great way to recharge your creativity. The variety of programming offered at SXSW Interactive means that the event focuses as much on creativity as it does on technology. This focus is augmented by SXSW Film, which runs concurrently with SXSW Interactive and SXSW Music. Moreover, a full slate of parties and receptions during the evening hours help to accelerate the social aspect of the event. For more information, visit sxsw.com , or for a handy survival guide click here . 15 – 16 March 2010: London, England 2nd Annual Social Networking World Forum — London The 2nd Annual Social Networking World Forum takes place at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. The two-day event features four dedicated conference streams: Social Networking World Forum Enterprise social media Social TV World Forum Mobile Social Networking Forum The event features key speakers from global brands, organizations, social networking publishers and developers, pioneering social media leaders, top agencies, content producers, and more. Full workshop program within exhibition area Evening networking reception Pre-show online meeting planner for delegates Free pass for exhibition only 22 – 26 March 2010: New York City Search Engine Strategies New York Conference & Expo Go beyond search at Search Engine Strategies New York . Learn the newest trends, strategic action plans, and technology that industry leaders are employing today. Our experts will trace the natural evolution of search exploring topics such as: digital asset optimization, mobile application development, transition from search to discovery and more.Book your pass today. Enter RWW15 to save 15% off the registration. Sessions include: Digital Asset Optimization Deep Dive Into Analytics Augmented Reality: It's a Brave New World Bringing SEO In-House: The Pros and Cons Advanced B2B Search Marketing Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues 23 March 2010: San Francisco, California S.F. Beta 4.0 After a long winter's hiatus, S.F. Beta is back, for its forth year straight! Join hundreds of founders, investors, developers, and technologists for a lively evening of demos, drinks, conversation, and new connections. Early bird tickets are available, and they're going fast. Register now for discounted admission. As always, we feature startup demos all night. This time around, the theme is Search & Discovery. If you're building the next Google (or the next Google acquisition), we want you here! Email cperry@sfbeta.com for more info. 26 March 2010: San Francisco, California Freemium Summit The first Freemium Summit is a one day event focused on exploring what it takes to succeed under the freemium business model. Across all segments of the media landscape, entrepreneurs and executives are pioneering models that combine a free offering with a premium, paid offering. This hybrid business model is one of the most exciting areas of business model innovation impacting the world of media and the Freemium Summit will explore the most important topics on the minds of leading practitioners. Confirmed Speakers: Toni Schneider, Automattic (WordPress); Matt Brezina, Xobni; Aaron Levie, Box.net; Phil Libin, Evernote; Tom Conrad, Pandora; Drew Houston, Dropbox; Ranjith Kumaran, YouSendIt; Ben Chestnut, Mailchimp; Lance Walley, Chargify; Isaac Hall, Recurly; and Lincoln Murphy, Sixteen Ventures. March 29, 2010: Portland, Oregon Social Fresh Portland The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom lines. Over the course of the day, you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Intel, Ford, Comcast, Nike and many more, as well as keynote Peter Shankman. Register now and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off. 7 – 9 April 2010: Sydney, Australia ConnectNow ConnectNow brings together international specialists and thought leaders in social media, emerging technologies and their intersection with business. Learn how the realtime web, location based services, augmented reality, ubiquitous computing and personalised services are changing marketing and communications. Understand the importance of trust in relationship marketing and what is "social currency". For more info email info@connectnow.net.au . 13 – 15 April 2010: Dallas, Texas PubCon South PubCon , the premier search and social media conference, features the industry's biggest names and key players shaping the future of the Web. PubCon South will include cutting-edge panel sessions exploring tracks dedicated to search, social media and affiliate marketing, an intensive professional search and social media training program, and some of the world's top keynote speakers. PubCon South at Dallas will also hold a one-day, two-track slate of intensive educational training programs led by some of the industry's most respected search professionals. The event takes place at the Richardson Conference and Civic Center. Register here . 16 April 2010: Mountain View, California Under the Radar: Cloud Under the Radar: Cloud is must-attend event for dealmakers and heads of IT from large enterprises, SMBs, service providers, carriers and media companies who are responsible for helping their companies leverage new technology and innovation in the fast-evolving IT ecosystem. Join us for the 15th Under the Radar conference, featuring a hand-picked selection of the world's most innovative cloud startups among 350 top tech, media, telcom and finance executives. For ticket and more information, visit http://undertheradarblog.com . 16 – 17 April 2010: Royal Oak, Michigan FutureMidwest FutureMidwest is the region's largest technology and knowledge conference. Founded by Adrian Pittman, Jordan Wolfe and Zach Lipson, FutureMidwest is the fusion of two successful conferences held in Michigan in 2009 - the Module Midwest Digital Conference and TechNow. Both conferences highlighted how technology and digital tools have dramatically changed the way we do business and the effect this transition has had on companies. FutureMidwest kicks things up a notch with presentations, group breakout sessions, relationship-building opportunities and influencers who are taking action to redefine business in the digital age. Register here . April 19, 2010: St. Louis Missouri Social Fresh St. Louis The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom lines. Over the course of the day you'll hear from 35 speakers from companies like Ford, Best Buy, Scottrade, Hardees, CMT and many more. Register now and use coupon code RWW15 for 15% off. 19 – 21 April 2010: San Francisco, California DrupalCon DrupalCon is the premier conference focused on Drupal, the award-winning open source content management framework that is galvanizing social publishing and web development today. For a registration fee of $195, attendees get three full days of sessions led by the best and brightest Drupal experts. Drupal has been downloaded over 2 million times since its inception, and project growth has doubled annually for several years. Drupal is used to deliver a wide variety of application types including blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, and web content publishing and management. 26 April 2010: San Francisco, California Future of Money and Technology Summit The Future of Money & Technology Summit will bring together the best and brightest thinkers around money, including visionaries, entrepreneurial business people, developers, press, investors, authors, solution/service providers, and organizations who work where cash and commerce collide. We meet to discuss the evolving ecosystem around money in a proactive, conducive to dealmaking environment. Featured speakers include Jolie O'Dell from ReadWriteWeb, as well as representatives from Wells Fargo Bank, Kiva, SharesPost, Jambool, Founders Fund, Outright.com, SoftTech VC, and many more. Use discount code "rww" to get 10% off registration . 7 May 2010: Mountain View, California ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 will be an exploration of the latest Mobile development trends - both the technology and the emerging business applications. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of Mobile with the brightest in the industry, your peers! As in our last Summit, The Real-Time Web, the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit is an unconference. An unconference is a participant driven conference where the agenda is created on the day, in real-time and discussions are lead by conference participants. Read about the history of unconferences . We will have two main tracks at this Summit - Development and Business - so the Summit will be of interest to managers, marketers, developers, innovators, entrepreneurs and thought leaders alike. Here's a sample of some of the topics we'll explore in both of these tracks. Geo-location services - what can you do using location as a platform ? Commerce & Marketing - as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel? Content, Publishing & Recommendations - the technologies and best practices. Mobile Social Networking - how to tap into communities on mobile devices. Internet of Things - the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data. Augmented Reality - the technology and business applications of AR. Native App vs. Browser Based - Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian. Click here to register now , or to become a sponsor , or to help shape the conference . 11 May 2010: San Francisco, California FinovateSpring FinovateSpring 2010 will again showcase the most cutting-edge financial and banking technology innovations to Silicon Valley and the world. With Finovate's signature mix of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) from handpicked companies and intimate networking time with their executives, this conference packs a ton of unique value into a single day. Come see the cutting edge of banking and financial technology and network with hundreds of the leading financial executives, venture capitalists, press, industry analysts, bloggers and fintech entrepreneurs. Early bird registration rates are available. May 17 2010: San Francisco, California SF MusicTech Summit The SF MusicTech Summit will bring together 700-plus visionaries in the music/technology space - the best and brightest entrepreneurs, developers, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce. We meet to discuss the evolving music, business and technology ecosystem in a proactive, conducive-to-dealmaking environment. Enter the discount code "rww" to get 10% off . 15 – 16 June 2010: New York City Corporate Social Media Summit The Corporate Social Media Summit is a two day conference focused exclusively on how big businesses can take advantage of social media to enhance their marketing/comms strategy. Featuring: Practical and relevant insights from peers who have already used social media successfully 20-plus corporate speakers (including PepsiCo, Whole Foods, Dell, McDonald's, General Motors, Citi, Johnson & Johnson), Best practice, benchmarks and practical next steps you can use to take advantage of social media in your business A tightly-focused agenda with 14 in-depth, practical workshops giving you knowledge on only the most critical business issues surrounding corporate use of social media Save $400 if you quote RWW400 when booking. Book here . 29 – 30 June 2010: London Cloud Computing World Forum The 2nd annual Cloud Computing World Forum is the perfect event to learn and discuss the development, integration, adoption and future of cloud computing and SaaS. Building on the success of the 2009 show, this two day conference and free-to-attend exhibition will provide a focused platform for the global cloud and SaaS industry. Show highlights include: Co-located with CloudCamp London Co-located with Green IT conference Free-to-attend exhibition with seminar and scenario theatre Free-to-attend evening awards presentation Hear from leading case studies on how they have integrated cloud computing and SaaS into their working practices Learn from the key players offering cloud and SaaS services Evening networking party for all attendees 5 October 2010: New York City FinovateFall FinovateFall will return to Manhattan on Tuesday, October 5 to showcase dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology from established leaders and hot young companies. The Fall event is the original and largest Finovate and features a single day packed with our special blend of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) and intimate networking time with top executives from the innovative demoing companies. FinovateFall is a unique chance to see the future of finance and banking before your competition and find the edge you need in today's market. Early bird registration rates are available. Download this entire events calendar in iCal format. Discuss
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ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, 6 March 2010
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If there was a real-time tag cloud for the RSA conference this year, three words would be in big bold letters: Security (of course), Cloud, and Virtualization. Paul Congdon, from HP's ProCurve Networking group gave us a view into the not-so-distant future where servers, like good house guests, knock before entering. In this case, it's the link they request, and to get it they will properly announce themselves and their intentions to allow the host to prepare to accommodate them. This capability is a linchpin in removing the process bottleneck in provisioning new services in the data center. For most organizations, the network is manually configured. To keep up with the movement of the provisioning of virtual machines, the network needs to enable "plug and play". Sponsor Complexity Means Controls The network is in a unique postion as a "pipe" as well as a "control" where it needs to know what communications go where and plays the role of traffic cop. This means opening ports between servers, controlling traffic and setting monitors to make sure traffic is optimized. When things change, configuration does as well, especially when a new service is requested. Today, this is controlled by human processes and controls to keep the network up to date with the applications and servers that host them. In the future, there is the opportunity to move forward in auto-configuration or even smarter handshakes. In essence, to oversee this process a directory or resources or inventory would exist that allows the network to "know" what is in place within it. This is a new control point for the data center, and is a resource to the network. Solutions in Protocols 802.1.x is technology that has been used in WiFi connections. One reason it was useful in that context is that it's expected that the link drops and reconnects frequently and so is seen as an opportunity for the physical link as well. The potential upgrades to 802.1 would enable a richer dialog between the server as it starts up its networking process. This would allow the server to announce itself and its requirements (e.g. encryption) and allow the network to respond to these appropriately (e.g. set encryption key). This process can become a big win for configuration management where now, the server can come up in the network and be provisioned according to the policy. All of this reminds us of the benefits of a company like Apple. Having the unique opportunity to control the model from end to end means have the ability to make better tools. We wonder if natural evolution will get multi-vendor shops a solution for all of their IT assets. What will it take to get to a model-driven data center? Photo credit: orinrobertjohn Discuss
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Reinventing the Handshake: Polite Servers and Smart Networks Lead to Active Security
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