Here at ReadWriteWeb, we work hard to provide you with the smartest Internet news and reviews each and every day. The sponsors that give us the opportunity to spend our time writing are companies that appreciate the thoughtfulness of the whole community here, including our readers. Once a week we like to 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 joining our crew of supporting companies? 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. You can email us for more info.
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 Calais: semantic web API Smartypig: social savings accounts Web 3.0 Conference: knock-out speakers Rackspace: cloud computing experts Direct Media Exchange: meta ad network for websites FreshBooks: online invoicing SocialText: workplace collaboration Wild Apricot: membership management Quintura: visual search Eurekester: custom topic portals Our Hosts and Blogging Software: Media Temple and SixApart
Wild Apricot
WildApricot enables clubs, associations and communities to automate and streamline administrative tasks, using their online membership management software.
The company has a really active and well written blog with interesting entries like Will Digg Make a Category 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.
Smartypig
Smartypig is an FDIC-insured social savings-account service. This summer we reported on a survey that found that 48% of young people online wanted to use Web 2.0 banking tools – this could be your chance. SmartyPig said this week that its accounts will soon integrate with Mint, Wesabe and Yodlee and a SmartyPig Mobile App is soon to follow.
Last week Smartypig announced a new partnership that will bring Smartypig’s service to the 6 million customers of the Australia New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ).
See for yourself how smart this pig is at http://Smartypig.com.
Calais
Calais, powered by Thomson Reuters, brings state-of-the-art semantic functionality into your blog, content management system, site or application. It’s one of the most important and exciting initiatives in the semantic web and we’ve written about it a number of times. Over 6,000 developers have already registered with Calais and the service is doing more than 1 million transactions a day. We wrote about the launch of Calais’ easiest-to-use service yet, called SemanticProxy, at the end of September.
Above: Tagaroo WordPress Plugin, just one of many semantic apps you can find in the Calais app gallery.
Pipes lovers – did you know that Calais Pipes Service allows Yahoo! Pipes users to enrich their RSS feeds with semantic metadata? That’s just one of many things you can do with Calais.
Check out the incredible work being done at Calais and let us know what you think.
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.
Web 3.0 Conference
The Web 3.0 Conference is for the builders of the next generation Web: designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, business strategists, and venture capitalists. It was on at the end of last week and we had several posts covering the event, from our roving conference reporter Lidija Davis:
Who Will Control Your Data in the Web 3.0 World?The Future of Web 3.0 According to Yahoo!Semantic Web: Making Advertising More Relevant to Consumers
If you’re dubious about the validity of the concept, don’t take our word for it, check out this particularly good blog post last week about Web 3.0 by Hank Williams.
Even though the conference has concluded, the site is a great place to see who’s who in pushing the envelope.
Rackspace
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting. The company is hosting two events this month, a conference on Cloud Computing and the Rackspace Customer Conference 2008.
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 helped double ad revenues for.
FreshBooks
FreshBooks offers professional online invoicing. The company says you can save time, get paid faster and look more professional by streamlining your invoicing with FreshBooks.
One of the things we like the most about FreshBooks is their benchmarking feature, aggregate data that lets you compare your business to similar businesses. The company released an interesting report based on its small business data earlier this month.
You can take a quick tour of the FreshBooks features at http://freshbooks.com.
SocialText
SocialText provides an enterprise wiki platform for organizations who want to accelerate knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, or build online communities.
SocialText offers a long list of products and is a great source of information for people interested in changing how they do business. You might appreciate co-founder Ross Mayfield’s recent article in Forbes about best practices for dealing with e-mail overload.
Check out what SocialText has to offer at http://SocialText.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.
Eurekester
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. That’s where we live, virtually, though our staff lives physically all over the world. Some of live in the Southern United States, some of us in Oregon, others in New Zealand. Wherever we are though, 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!
