At ReadWriteWeb our mission is to explore the very latest web technology products and trends. We like to test out all the new web apps and spot the trends before others, and we're fortunate to have a great group of sponsors who support this goal. So once a week we write a post about them; here's who they are, what they do and what they've been up to lately. We hope you'll pay them a visit as a way to show your appreciation for their sponsorship of this site.

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a particularly sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages which we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

Ready to learn more about the smart companies that are supporting this site you love to read? Read on...

Skip to info about... Strands: recommendations Mashery: API management services Rackspace: cloud computing experts Direct Media Exchange: meta ad network for websites Crowd Science: demographic data Wild Apricot: membership management Pro Opinion: paid surveys Quintura: visual search Eurekster: custom topic portals Our Hosts and Blogging Software: Media Temple and SixApart

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. In the recent 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.

Strands

Strands has created a social recommender engine that is able to provide real-time recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices. Recently the company announced the 5 finalists in its Strands $100K Call for Recommender Start-Ups and the companies they unearthed look pretty interesting. Also Strands recently added personalization to music.strands.tv. As Atlanta-based creative strategy consultant Vincent Hunt said on Twitter: "If you are not on @strands... All I can say is... You are MISSIN it!! HOT"

Check their new Strands Business Solutions to add recommendations to your site.

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.

You can sign up to get demographic data by clicking here.

Direct Media Exchange

Direct Media Exchange is a simple solution for managing ad networks that allows publishers to make more money from their websites. You can find a number of case studies on their site describing publishers that they've helped double ad revenues for. An example is a case study of FreeOnlineGames.com, one of the UK's top five SMS websites. This site used Direct Media Exchange to to auction their ad impressions to the highest bidder - which resulted in doubled revenue and CPM within three months.

You can check out Direct Media Exchange's advertising solution here.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. In October Rackspace announced two major acquisitions: SliceHost and JungleDisk. Slicehost is a popular cloud computing and hosting provider with about 15,000 users, while JungleDisk is one of our favorite online backup services. JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it now also supports Rackspace's cloud storage solution. At the same time, Rackspace also announced a new suite of services, Rackspace Cloud Hosting, which combines a hosting platform (CloudSites) with a cloud storage solution (CloudFS), and, in the long run, a tight integration with Slicehost's services.

Click here to explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Pro Opinion

Pro Opinion is a research panel where you can earn some money for participating. If you join up, you can then share your views and opinions by answering survey questions from marketing research and Fortune 500 companies. Pro Opinion is being positioned as a fun way to learn about and influence the products and services you use every day. By participating in surveys, you earn "Opinion Points", which can be redeemed for cash.

Click here to find out how you can earn money by doing surveys.

Wild Apricot

WildApricot enables clubs, associations and communities to automate and streamline administrative tasks, using their online membership management software.

The company has an active and well written blog, focusing on issues and trends in web technologies that help your organization achieve more with less. Example posts include Show, Don't Tell: Google Earth Outreach for Nonprofits and How to Learn More About Your Website Audience.

Wild Apricot gets lots of love in the social media; book sales pro Ann Kingman, for example, says she has "been very happy with Wild Apricot in the past few months we've been using it. Great customer support."

See for yourself what Wild Apricot can do at http://wildapricot.com.

Quintura

Quintura is a visual-based search engine, which we are now using to power ReadWriteWeb's main search. Check it out here. If you haven't tried it before, you should - it's a very interesting way to explore search results.

Quintura can power visual search on your site for free. This company is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners, the same VCs that provided early funding to Skype.

Eurekster

Eurekster is developer of the swicki that we use on RWW, a custom social search portal on the topic of your choice (in our case web tech), powered by the community.

People build swickis on all kinds of topics, some people build a lot of them. Alex Holmes, for example, builds really nice looking swickis on topics like the 2008 Election, Ocean Animals and Home Buying.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

ReadWriteWeb is hosted by Media Temple and is published using SixApart's MovableType.

If you've ever wondered what RWW looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the MovableType publishing interface - that's it on the left. We recently upgraded to MT 4.23, which is the latest version. We got onto this release as soon as it was available - in fact our contacts at Six Apart emailed the actual code to us before it was up on their website. That's customer service for you!

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb? Drop us a line and let's talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!