· Campaigners say landlords already have upper hand
· Treasury says proposals will provide more housing

Thousands of first time buyers will be priced out of the housing market if the Treasury presses ahead with plans to offer new tax breaks to buy-to-let investors, campaigners warn today.

The sharp rise in buy-to-let mortgages during the housing boom was blamed for inflating prices and creating a shortage of starter homes for people trying to get on to the property ladder.

After the Council for Mortgage Lenders (CML) reported a sharp drop in the number of first-time buyers entering the market since the credit crunch began, PricedOut, a lobby group, said the government risked exacerbating the unfair advantage already enjoyed by buy-to-let landlords.

The Treasury published a consultation paper in February which included plans to boost the supply of private rented housing. One key proposal was for professional investors to pay stamp duty separately on each home, even when they buy a large portfolio of properties, reducing their total bill.

PricedOut, which campaigns on behalf of first-time buyers who are not able to enter the property market, says the proposal is grossly unfair to first-time buyers and would make their struggle to buy a house even more difficult.

William Griffith, spokesman for PricedOut, said: "The large tax breaks that buy-to-let currently enjoys mean that they can always outbid first-time buyers. It is astonishing that the government is seeking to further entrench this disparity in the housing market. High house prices and buy-to-let speculation have been behind a large growth in wealth inequality and have caused increased financial instability."

PricedOut calculates that high house prices, driven in part by the rise in buy-to-let, have displaced an estimated 1.2 million new households away from owner-occupation, and led to about 1.4m fewer first-time buyer mortgages since 1999.

A recent report by the Council for Mortgage Lenders (CML) found that levels of owner occupation were at their lowest since the 1980s.

A Treasury source said the proposal was aimed at increasing housing supply, but PricedOut argued that instead, buy-to-let investment has created a net loss in the supply of houses available to first-time buyers and other owner-occupiers.

In the last six years, 647,300 homes have been bought up by buy-to-let investors when otherwise they might have become available to other buyers.

"The public face several years of higher taxes and spending cuts – it is frankly baffling that the government is trying to give further tax breaks to a sector that helped get us into our current economic mess," said Griffith.

"Unless we want future home ownership to be a preserve of the wealthy few, we need the government to tax property speculators more, not less. Removing buy-to-let tax breaks would be a very popular and practical way for the chancellor to start addressing the deficit."

Mortgage figures from the CML released last week showed that first time buyers were once again struggling to enter the property market. The number of loans for the first-time buyer market plunged 54% in the month to January to stand at 11,300. The CML said this reflected the fact that a high proportion would usually be buying homes costing between £125,000 and £175,000, on which stamp duty was reintroduced at the end of last year.

Jonathan Moore, director of Easyroommate.co.uk, said: "First-time buyers were struggling to raise the huge deposits needed by lenders before the end of the stamp duty holiday. That's only got worse. Without help from the bank of mum and dad, many just can't borrow enough to get a flat. Thousands of young people are being forced to ... squirrel cash away for more than a decade."

• Housing market
• Mortgage lending figures
• Buying to let
• Property
• Mortgages
• Economic policy
• Housing

Kathryn Hopkinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Whether the bloggers like it or not, it’s looking like the iPad is a hit. Initial estimates show that over 120,000 iPads were pre-ordered on friday, according to Investor Village. Some estimates showed roughly 50,000 devices ordered in the first two hours.

The numbers say some very interesting things about exactly which iPads were purchased as well. Approximately 69% of the pre-orders were for the Wifi version, with the remainder being for the 3G version of course. As far as what size iPads, the split was pretty even between the 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB versions. The real question is, will Apple be able to meet all the demand for the new device, or will there be some disappointed customers come April. Given these numbers and the estimates of how much money Apple is making per device, Steve is laughing all the way to the bank this weekend.

One item worth noting, this data is based off a sampling of 99 orders over 19.5 hours, so there is of course a margin for error. The data was compiled by Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity board which as of this time, is down.

[via Brainstorm Tech]

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Skip to info about: Tableau : Data visualization | Crowd Science: Demographic data | Medill School of Journalism: Digital journalism programs | Mashery: API management services | Rackspace: Cloud computing experts | Sproutbox: Start-up investors | Aplus.net: Web hosting | Clickatell: SMS provider | .Me: Domain Registrar | Conduit: Customized components | MyDomain.com: Domain registrar | Toopia: Our iPhone app developer

Tableau

Tableau Public is a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data to the web in interesting and compelling graphs. Download Tableau Public and in minutes, you can create interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables from virtually any data and embed them on your website or blog in minutes. Anyone can do it. You don't need to be a programmer or hire one - no language to learn, no plug-ins, no API. Your blog or website will stand out with colorful, interactive data visualizations. Bloggers using Tableau Public are averaging 3 times more reader comments.

And, once on the web, anyone can interact with your graph and the data. They can re-embed your work, download the data, or create their own visualizations. Check out our gallery to see some of the cool graphs bloggers have created. Or learn how in our 5 minute video.

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Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

Sign up to get demographic data from Crowd Science.

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Medill School of Journalism

The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University offers programs that combine the enduring skills and values of journalism with new techniques and knowledge that are essential to thrive in a digital world. You might have a passion for creating finely crafted prose, or for telling stories using visual tools. Maybe you are invigorated by the possibilities of interactive publishing, or by videography for the small screen. Maybe you are an experienced professional looking to renew and retool your multimedia skills. You can find your niche in Medill's graduate journalism program.

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Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

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Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. Rackspace Cloud Hosting offers a suite of services which combines a scalable web and application hosting platform (Cloud Sites) with a cloud storage solution (Cloud Files) and on demand server instances (Cloud Servers). The addition of SliceHost a popular cloud computing and hosting provider and JungleDisk, a favorite online backup service that supports Cloud files, makes the Rackspace Cloud a powerful cloud hosting solution.

Explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

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Sproutbox

SproutBox is an elite team of product developers, creatives, and business experts that invest their talent full-time in start-ups. SproutBox's new approach to venture capital has helped launch several successful companies including: CheddarGetter, a subscription billing and analytics tool; ScheduleThing, an online scheduling and reservations app; and Squad, a web-based collaborative code editor.

To apply for start-up funding or find out more information visit sproutbox.com.

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Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Thank Aplus.net on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Clickatell

Clickatell has over 22,000 customers utilizing our service from small mom & pop outfits to large Fortune 500 companies including Avaya, Oracle, Shell, Barclays, BP, CNN, BBC and more. Here's why you should trust us to mobilize your business: Our SMS gateway offers you wider coverage than any other SMS provider delivering messages to 600 network operators in 200 countries. Our gateway is not limited to SMS text messaging. You can also send a number of other message types including Ringtones, VCards, Binary, EMS, Unicode, Flash SMS, WAP Push, and more.

Clickatell offers you direct connectivity to its core SMS gateway platform via a number of APIs (application programming interfaces) including; HTTP (internet post), SMPP, FTP, XML, SMTP (email to SMS), SOAP and COM Object. Each API has full documentation with sample code where applicable. Learn more about Clickatell here.

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.Me

.Me is a Top Level Domain of a small, south-east European country of Montenegro, which restored its independence in 21st century. Due to its unforgettable meaning and truly personal tone, most of the registration restrictions have been cancelled. Some of the prominent tech and advertising savvies recognized TLD's potential and grabbed their .Me domain name. In less than 20 months 360.000 domains were registered by people from 200 different countries.ME is perfect for "yourname.me" blog or "yourname@surname.me" email address.

It is also widely used as a call-to-action domain (notify.me, retwt.me) and as a social (YouAnd.Me) or community network (Missouri.Me, Oklahoma.Me). One may also choose to send a cool personal message (WillSheMarry.Me). In addition, some of the biggest companies recognized its branding potential and started using .ME for various purposes. Check out Facebook (Fb.Me), Wordpress (Wp.Me), USA Today (USAT.Me), Universal Pictures (Despicable.Me) or Zappos.com (Zapp.Me). It seems that some countries are luckier than others when it comes to domain names. Are you lucky enough to grab your own .ME?

Thank .Me for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Conduit

Conduit enables Web publishers to distribute their offerings both directly and through its global network of 220,000 publishers and their 100 million users. The Conduit platform is a powerful marketing tool that allows you to offer the best of your site through a custom App or Community Toolbar, send desktop alerts to your users, and much more.

The Conduit platform opens a new world of content sharing. Your site visitors can add your content right to their browser by clicking on a branded 2go button that you place on your site. You can also share your content in the Conduit Marketplace, where all the publishers and users in the Conduit network can grab it.

The platform has been adopted by major brands such as Fox News, iWin, Major League Baseball, TechCrunch, and Travelocity, as well as thousands of small and medium organizations in 120 countries.

If you would like to Conduit your website, go to www.conduit.com.

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MyDomain.com

MyDomain is a leading ICANN-accredited provider of domain name registration and online business solutions. For over 10 years, MyDomain has offered low-cost domain names and free domain services including complete DNS management. Today, sub-$10 domains without the constant upsells you'll find at some competitors are the norm at MyDomain. MyDomain's complete range of solutions include Web hosting and VPS hosting, email, SSL Certificates and more.

Toopia

Nicolas Koenig is the developer who made our beautiful iPhone app a reality. He runs an iPhone development shop from the Netherlands called Toopia. Toopia also created the Thermometer iPhone app, which enables your iPhone or iPod touch to get the current temperature based on your location. The RWW app lets you read us on the go, follow us on Twitter, share stories on Facebook and Twitter, and browse at your leasure using Read it Later and Instapaper. Download the ReadWriteWeb iPhone application here.

Thank Toopia on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

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http://store.windowsphonethoughts.c...Multiple-Views)

"Pocket Stock Monitor features an easy-to-use portfolio manager, four advanced stock information views, stock charts, stock price alarms, detailed stock quote information, profit/loss and portfolio value calculations and an automatic quote fetch timer. Best in class user interface coupled with multiple stock data viewing options. Access to latest company news, multiple color schemes and large, easy to read text used for price information make Pocket Stock Monitor a must-have for everyone interested in becoming a more sophisticated investor."

Now that we're seeing some sanity coming back to equity and bond markets worldwide, software like PocketX Stock Monitor becomes more interesting and useful (and less a source of anxiety and heart attacks) - unless of course you've been shorting stocks. Version 5.9 adds some finger-friendly enhancements to the UI, as well as adding support for WM6.5.x which covers a whole slew of devices including the HTC HD2 and Touch Pro 2, Samsung Omnia II, and Sony-Ericsson's Xperia X2. I do wish they had better international exchange coverage, but you can't have everything. You can try out a demo or purchase the software for $24.95 through our affiliate link. PocketX Stock Monitor 5.9 is a free upgrade for registered users if you purchased Stock Monitor within the past year; otherwise an upgrade costs $17.95.

· Rhone Group bids for 40% stake in Liverpool
· Under-pressure owners may be forced to accept

Liverpool are in talks with a private-equity firm, the Rhone Group, over a £118.5m deal to buy a controlling share of the club and halve their debts.

It is understood the investment group wants a 40% stake at Anfield, which would considerably strengthen the club's financial position.

The Rhone Group's bid would give it the controlling interest, with the current joint-owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett reducing their shareholdings to 30% apiece.

Hicks and Gillett were last year told to cut £100m from the club's £237m debts. The Royal Bank of Scotland gave the club a deadline of this summer to pay up.

The club's chief executive, Christian Purslow, has been working to find investors and says he wants a deal by Easter.

The offer from the Rhone Group – which is the first real result of Purslow's search – would be used to slash the club's debt by half. That would make Liverpool a more attractive option for further outside investment.

It would also improve the club's credit-worthiness, which could lead to work finally beginning on the long-awaited new stadium in Stanley Park.

Details of the offer were received by Liverpool yesterday and the matter has yet to be discussed by the board.

There have been suggestions that the Hicks and Gillett are looking for a better price, but with the clock ticking it may yet prove viable.

The Rhone Group was founded in 1995, has its headquarters in New York with other offices in London and Paris, and describes itself as "one of the world's leading mid-market private-equity firms".

• Liverpool
• Business

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

One of the big trends at this year's Game Developer's Conference is social gaming, thanks to wild success stories like Facebook-powered Farmville. While many see social gaming as the next big thing, Will Wright -- famed creator of SimCity, The Sims and Spore -- warned GDC attendees that expectations for the genre are unrealistic. "What people tend to do is apply a power curve to this," Wright explained using the above diagram. "And so when you make an extrapolation based upon that, you're really way off, when in fact, what we were really looking at was an S-curve."

"It gets a lot of attention, of course, because investors, when they're looking to invest in something, they're looking to invest in the steep part of this curve. And so that's why there's so much business interest in this sort of platform," Wright hypothesized.

But don't think your mom is going to suddenly lose interest in raising animals on her virtual farm any time soon. In fact, while the genre may not explode, it will ultimately represent a large percentage of the overall games business. "It's not that I don't think social games are going to be big ... I can imagine them doing about the quarter of the market, really." That's good news for Facebook, which is still looking for its Mario, its "iconic" game.

Will Wright predicts social games will grow to 25 percent of market originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 23:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the big trends at this year's Game Developer's Conference is social gaming, thanks to wild success stories like Facebook-powered Farmville. While many see social gaming as the next big thing, Will Wright -- famed creator of SimCity, The Sims and Spore -- warned GDC attendees that expectations for the genre are unrealistic. "What people tend to do is apply a power curve to this," Wright explained using the above diagram. "And so when you make an extrapolation based upon that, you're really way off, when in fact, what we were really looking at was an S-curve."

"It gets a lot of attention, of course, because investors, when they're looking to invest in something, they're looking to invest in the steep part of this curve. And so that's why there's so much business interest in this sort of platform," Wright hypothesized.

But don't think your mom is going to suddenly lose interest in raising animals on her virtual farm any time soon. In fact, while the genre may not explode, it will ultimately represent a large percentage of the overall games business. "It's not that I don't think social games are going to be big ... I can imagine them doing about the quarter of the market, really." That's good news for Facebook, which is still looking for its Mario, its "iconic" game.

Will Wright predicts social games will grow to 25 percent of market originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 23:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

This is the biggest ego battle in history. It looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Today, such warmth is in short supply. One well-connected Silicon Valley investor, who did not want to be identified talking about the Google-Apple feud, says he is stunned by the level of rancor he's witnessed. "It's World War III. Amazing animosity is motivating two of the most powerful people in the industry," he says. "This is emotional. This is the biggest ego battle in history. It's incendiary."

The competition between Apple and Google has reached "incendiary" levels that aren't likely to cool down anytime soon, a detailed story from within the two companies has shown. While signs of the split have become increasingly public, a Bay Area investor claims that the two sides, particularly Apple, are getting "emotional" as it becomes a personal battle between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his Google equivalent, Eric Schmidt. At Apple, Jobs' infamous attack on Google at a post-iPad town hall has been followed by repeated shots at Android in d...

The competition between Apple and Google has reached "incendiary" levels that aren't likely to cool down anytime soon, a detailed story from within the two companies has shown. While signs of the split have become increasingly public, a Bay Area investor claims that the two sides, particularly Apple, are getting "emotional" as it becomes a personal battle between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his Google equivalent, Eric Schmidt. At Apple, Jobs' infamous attack on Google at a post-iPad town hall has been followed by repeated shots at Android in d...

There are a lot of great venture capitalists who started out as entrepreneurs like Vinod Khosla or Josh Kopelman.  Going the other way, however, seems to be a bit tougher.  In fact, I don’t really know anyone who has successfully gone the other way. 

Many entrepreneurs turned VCs wind up going back, but to start out on the investment side and then successfully launch a company seems to happen much less frequently.  There are exceptions to everything, of course, but as someone who started out in venture and investing (GM pension, then Union Square Ventures) and then started a company that failed (Path 101), I learned a ton about what it really takes to drive a successful business forward—skills and a mindset that doesn’t necessarily square with the way venture investors think of the world.

Read the rest of this story »

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(...)

I was reading Alan Mutter's spot-on Andreessen’s not-so-hot idea for publishers and once again ran across some comments of the "newspapers need to set up separate online operations and give them freedom" variety.

Here's the problem: It's been done, over and over. It's being done right now. It's happening in ways you don't see, and I promise you won't like the outcome.

Let's take the biggest, and least visible, part first.

For years, investors have been pulling their money out of newspaper stocks and putting it elsewhere. Much of it has gone into pure-play Internet companies like Google. That's about as separate and independent as you're going to get. Not what you meant? Like I said, you aren't liking that outcome if you find yourself working for the Bugville Daily Bugle and it's owned by a capital-starved corporation that's laying people off in order to survive. But it's how capitalism works. Money seeks returns.

The Hearst family heavily bankrolled the startup of cable broadband services back when hardly anybody believed in it. The Tribune Company, before it got itself taken over by a real estate flipper, was a key investor in America Online, which transformed online services from a niche business focused on geeks to an experience for everybody. About.com is owned by the New York Times. Cars.com, Apartments.com, HomeGain.com and HomeFinder.com are owned by a group of five newspaper companies. There are many other examples.

But if you're advocating a separate online department for the Bugville Daily Bugle, then of course that's not what you meant. It is, however, how investors and corporations look at the problem.

Then there were the separate "online division" efforts, some of them set up in vain hope of cashing in on the IPO craze. Cox Interactive, where I worked at the turn of the century, ran all the local operations for all of Cox's TV, radio, newspaper and cable Internet markets. Newhouse did something similar with Advance Internet. Knight-Ridder Digital took the local sites away from KR's newspapers.

Nobody at the Bugville Daily Bugle was happy about that. When these spinoff efforts failed and newspapers regained control of their Web operations, the usual result was a brief power struggle and a settling of vendettas, ending in the unemployment of most or all of the online staffers.

There were many cases in which local newspapers set up internal online groups that operated independently. Several years ago, a Borrell report showed a strong correlation between that organizational form and revenue performance. But it's not as simple as that. Correlation is not causation. I would argue that the organizations that used that structure had an intent that was missing from most of the newspaper industry at that time. They simply intended for their Web operations to succeed. The rest of the industry didn't really give a rat, and it showed.

But something very important has happened at most newspapers in the last few years. It started, I think, when investor Bruce Sherman kicked the legs out from under Knight-Ridder's chair. And it accelerated when the economy came crashing down. There's been a great awakening in America's newsrooms -- and a huge turnover in personnel who weren't willing or able to wake up. There are exceptions, but the newspapers I deal with are, on the whole, very different beasts than they were in the slumber years.

We don't have the luxury of hiring everyone we want, or even need. Local advertisers have radically cut their spending because they're in economic pain, too. This isn't about the "failure of newspapers." It's about the failure of banking. We have to live with the results of that.

For most U.S. daily newspapers today, confronting the world with everybody playing on the same team, using all the tools that are available makes far more sense than splitting what's left of the staff in two pieces, telling each team to ignore the other one, and then bitching about a lack of cooperation.

With Statsweeper, you can watch thousands, even millions of data sets. Bond yields, shipping volumes, world trade. Spotting emerging economic trends in America, China and everywhere in between. The kind of game-changing events Bloomberg won't be talking about until months from now, when it's too late to act.     Here's the best part. Keeping your finger on the faintest beats of the global financial pulse doesn't require weeks, days or even hours of your time. All it takes is a few minutes a day. Let us explain how this unique system works.     We mentioned that no human being can monitor all of the world's financial data. You could literally work 24-7 and barely scratch the surface. A smart investor working round the clock would catch a few blips on the radar. But still miss most of the important happenings.     Statsweeper dramatically expands investors' viewfinder by using automated technology to capture and analyze financial data around the world, in near real-time. Every hour, the system uploads thousands of data points from sources like the U.S. Department of Treasury, Chinese shipping authorities, and commodities trading houses.