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Our readers know ReadWriteWeb as the blog that’s ahead of the technology curve. Our sponsors know us as that, too. Once a week we introduce our sponsors to our readers and let them know a little more about who they are and what they do. You can say thanks to the companies that make ReadWriteWeb happen by tweeting them (see the link below each sponsor) or following them using our Twitter list. Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? Our readers are smart, tech-savvy decision makers; 40% have a graduate degree or PhD, and over 45% play a key role in information technology purchasing decisions. More than 1 million people on Twitter follow us to stay abreast of the latest Web technology trends from around the globe. To find out more about our sponsor packages, visit our advertising page or email our COO . Sponsor 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 . Thank Tableau on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. 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. Thank Crowd Science on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. 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. Thank the Medill School of Journalism on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. 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 . Thank Mashery on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. 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. Thank Rackspace on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. 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 . Thank Sproutbox on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. 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 . Thank Clickatell on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. .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 . Thank Conduit on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. 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. 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’s? Drop us a line and let’s talk. Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support! Discuss

Featured Guest: Morten Hansen, professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and author of “Collaboration.” Copyright 2010 Harvard Business School Publishing

The leading social networking site in China, renren.com, started out as a blatant Facebook clone – but it now has tens of millions of users. Despite obvious similarities to Facebook, there is one significant difference from the U.S. in how Renren and other Chinese SNS are used. The bread and butter of these sites is social games using virtual items. Indeed, Farmville originated in China! In this first post of a series, we outline the most popular social network sites in China. In follow-up posts, we’ll look at Twitter clones, online video, and censorship. This series is based on a discussion I had with Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based expert on China’s Internet. Sponsor Kaiser Kuo is a Chinese-American who lives in Beijing. He currently works for one of China’s leading online video services, Youku.com, as a consultant on International Business. Previously he was Group Director, Digital Strategy at Ogilvy & Mather China. There are 3 social networking sites that are clearly in the lead in China, according to Kaiser Kuo. Renren.com is the leading social network. It began as a Facebook clone called Xiaonei.com – which means ‘on campus’ in Chinese. In August 2009 it changed its name to Renren , which means ‘everybody.’ Renren had 70 million registered users at that point. The site is owned by Oak Pacific Interactive and has had over $400M pumped into it by investors Softbank. The site was founded in December 2005, shortly after Facebook began to ramp up. Its founder Wang Xing later founded Fanfou, a popular Twitter clone (see our next post in this series). Xiaonei.com was literally a Facebook clone when it started, sporting the same shade of blue and the same layout. ReadWriteWeb guest writer Gang Lu wrote on this blog in June 2008 that Xiaonei.com “was like a simplified version of Facebook in Chinese when it was first launched.” He noted that it had “the same layout, same color scheme and even a very similar logo,” which he said “made people wonder if there was an official connection with Facebook.” Kaixin001.com is another very popular social network. Kaiser said that its users are mostly “white collar middle class” and typically come from a “first tier city.” Kaiser noted that Kaixin001.com is extremely popular among people who work for multinational companies, ad agencies and other white collar companies. Accordingly, the site is valuable because of its relatively wealthy user base. The third social network that is very popular in China is 51.com , which Kaiser said is mostly used by people who live in “lower tier cities” and even rural areas. He noted that it has a “lower brow offering.” Each of these three hugely popular social networks in China has its own niche; from the mainstream Renren, to the more prestigious Kaixin001, to the populist 51.com. In our next post in this series, we check out China’s Twitter clones . Discuss

A ReadWriteWeb Guide As a tech conference strongly linked to an epic music festival, SXSW Interactive is the perfect place for music and tech geeks to converge. Musicians, get ready to nerd out and learn how to sell your wares and increase your fanbase online. And geeks, get ready to let your love for music show. Perhaps with a little cooperation and cross-discipline interaction, this whole “music on the Internet” thing will work out, after all. Check out these ten parties, panels and events sure to delight the most musical of geeks – and the most geeky of musicians. Sponsor This is part of a series of ReadWriteWeb guides to SXSW Interactive 2010. If this guide isn’t your cup of tea, be sure to check back for more information soon! Online Tastemakers: Death or Rebirth of Music Curation? “Free infinite music has fragmented across every digital nook and cranny, making it hard for consumers to keep up with new quality artists online. A new breed of tastemakers are cropping up with innovative twists. Are they helping or hurting? Is online music curation dying or evolving?” With Anya Grundmann of NPR Music, Chris MacDonald of IndieFeed Networks/LibsynPRO, John Hammond of The MuseBox and Christopher Weingarten of Rolling Stone. TechKaraoke If music is your bag, head to this second-generation event at Six Lounge for more than five hours of punk, rock and metal karaoke with a live band. There will also be dancing with DJ Johnny Bravvo in the Tap Room next door and the mellow tunes of The James Moran Band on the upstairs patio. Music 2010: Playlists, Networks, Radio & Numbers You Need “Technology has opened floodgates to a sea of music marketing resources and overabundance of data generated by behaviors and transactions. What are the most important numbers & what do they mean? What numbers are missing? Examine complex human interactions with music online: learn to define & synthesize data generated by music consumption.” With publicist Ariel Hyatt and Corey Denis of Not Shocking. Emo’s This legendary rock club in Austin is home to many a SXSW event – not least of which is the Pastries & Pasties burlesque/cupcake extravaganza on Friday night of SXSWi. But this venue will also be hosting dozens of bands and DJs in its dual-stage, open air-cum-indoor setup throughout the rest of the conference. In a town known for its music clubs, it says a lot that locals consider Emo’s one of the best. Artists, Labels Embrace Virtual Worlds “Music labels (Atlantic Records, EMI, Sony BMG) and musicians (Rob Thomas, Ice-T, New Found Glory) are embracing virtual worlds by creating branded stores and virtual merchandise that engage their fans and promote and sell music and memorabilia. Learn how virtual worlds are changing the music industry and creating new revenue streams and promotion opportunities.” With Lee Clancy of Imvu. Music Licensing for Emerging Media: Apps, Widgets, Viral Videos “In the era of apps, widgets, streaming sites, viral videos and mashups, developers are constantly pushing the boundaries of music licensing. This panel opens a lively debate between the major labels and publishers who control the songs, the music supervisors who negotiate the rights and fees, and the music and media startups that are navigating uncharted territory.” With Adam Blumenthal of Curious Sense, Joel Johnson of Gizmodo, Randy Shefer of Sony, Robin Raj of Citizen Group and Annie Lin of The Rights Workshop. Xephyra: An alternative world music and video mythos Strap on your Suspension of Criticism helmets; it’s alternative performance art time! “Award-winning artists Chad Salvata and Jo Beth Henderson have created the newest ethos adventure, Xephyra, an alternative world music and video mythos. This non-traditional performance is presented with video images and live music. The extraordinary vocals are performed in an imaginary language of a mythic tribal island world. Xephyra, a warrior of the Blue Orchid tribe, journeys on her quest to find her husband, Warrior, who has not returned from the Island Wars. Along the way, she is joined by Terra, a sea siren. They are hunted by monster birds, battle shark mermaids, and slay the kaleidoscope octopus. Will they find Warrior and return safely home?” Hoek’s Pizza If you’re a metalhead in search of a snack and a beer or a music fan in search of some once-in-a-lifetime novelty… and a beer, be sure to hit up Hoek’s Heavy Metal Pizza. The music – generally, death/black/very heavy metal of a Gojira/Arch Enemy caliber – is loud, but this joint is the kind of place that definitely keeps Austin weird. We also hear there’s a stage on the back patio, and good movies are generally playing inside, as well. As one reviewer said, “I get scared sometimes when I walk into this place, but I like that.” Video Games, the New, New Media For Music “Video Games have become the New, New Media. Music, and products are featured as prominently in the virtual world of games as they are in films and commercials. Artists are seizing this opportunity to expose their music to an attentive new audience through means that were unthinkable only a few years ago. The user experience creates a unique bond between gamer and artist which is changing the way fans relate to music. The games themselves are being marketed in new and exciting ways too, utilizing, creatively, every possible new media resource.” With Mark Roemer of The Ant Farm, Doug McCracken of Activision Blizzard and Matt Drenik of Lions. Ukulele for Geeks: Secrets of the Pentatonic Scales “At first glance the fretboard of a ukulele (or guitar) looks incomprehensible, but with the magic of pentatonic scales – ancient, nearly universal 5-note patterns, you can “crack the code” and hack the fretboard and start jamming along with your favorite tunes or musician friends in no time. You don’t need to know the names of the notes or what key a song is. Just find the little dippers and start messing around with patterns. I’ll explain the concepts and demonstrate the techniques, which are completely self taught.” With Christian Crumlish of Yahoo. Bonus Round! SXSW Music Yes, you read that right: We’re calling the Music portion of SXSW a must-do for any music-loving attendee of SXSW Interactive. Here’s why. Each year, a few Music folks come to Austin early, and a few Interactive folks stay late – but those folks are few, indeed. There’s a wonderful opportunity here for our very different crowds to mingle, to make the Web better for musicians and make the experience of music better for online and mobile platforms, and it all begins with conversations. Also, even two days of SXSW Music will provide you with enough shows, parties and coincidental meetups to leave you seeing the world through rose-colored glasses for months afterward. So book another day at your hotel and scalp a wristband – you’ll never regret it. Those are our SXSW Interaction recommendations for music fans and musicians of all stripes. If you’ve got suggestions or feedback, let us know in the comments! See you in Austin, folks! Discuss

It’s not every day that a business shuts down but declares itself a success in helping kick off an unstoppable movement to change the world. Community mapping service Platial announced this week that it is turning off its servers and asking users to move their content onto the servers of other providers. Just short of 5 years old, Platial raised some venture capital, bought other small companies and made a name for itself, but in the end wasn’t able to build a business. Co-founder Di-Ann Eisnor defiantly says that Platial changed the world anyway. Cartography used to be an elite practice of drawing borders around resources and power. Platial helped transform it into an accessible practice for millions of people to share how they have experienced the world around them. Sponsor In the late 90’s Di-Ann Eisnor was the founder and CEO of Eisnor Inc., an “alternative” marketing agency that helped companies launch and grew to 60 employees with $15 million in annual revenue. In 2000 she sold that company to Omnicon . Then she traveled the world and did independent marketing work for large companies and small cultural institutions. In 2004, Eisnor co-founded Platial in Portland, Oregon with Jake Olsen and Jason Wilson. The company’s pre-launch website described the project as “a rapidly developing application and community pivoting on the anchors of user annotation, layerability, collaborative mapping, social networking and real world publishing.” The three founders said they were taking advice from people like Clay Shirky , Anselm Hook and Arturo Duran . In addition to an email list you could sign up to learn when the product was available, the Platial website was filled with a tag cloud linking to Delicious pages of community bookmarks on topics like folksonomy , groupmaps and where2.0 . Platial put itself right in the middle of those heady times. We were all going to describe, categorize and display our world on our terms. Blogger had just been bought by Google the year before and WordPress had just launched. Delicious and Flickr had just gone live and would be acquired by Yahoo a year after Platial’s founding. These were revolutionary tools, like tiny virtual Gutenberg dynamos, the number of publishers and amount of content and data published exploded. People were telling their stories through blog posts, they were posting their photos and using Platial and Frappr, which Platial later acquired, they were making maps. They made maps about the history of Palo Alto, California. About the reconstruction of New Orleans. About the companies that make London, England the arms trade capital of the world. In the end Platial held 5 million user-created maps. For perspective, the field of cartography began roughly 1500 years ago. Only 1,000 European maps of the world are known to still exist from the years 500 through 1600. Platial’s properties saw users make that many maps every eight hours, on average. Now people are making maps all over the web, including on Google’s MyMaps service. Eisnor says Platial was particularly innovative among map making services. But it wasn’t able to build a sustainable business. Eisnor says the business model was always local advertising but local advertising didn’t arrive in time. The company’s 500,000 map widgets embedded in blogs around the web never brought in more than a pittance in revenues. Delivering those widgets cost thousands of dollars per month. The company had a half a million iPhone app users to serve after being featured by Apple. The small staff worked without pay for the last 18 months. Several acquisition conversations fell through. This weekend co-founder Jason Wilson put up a post on the company blog titled Geographic Euthanasia: The End of Platial As We Know It . Eisnor says she has very mixed feelings about the elephant in the middle of the room, Google. “Without them we would be going out of business and there would be no where to send the data.” “They started MyMaps two years after us. They executed really well. We didn’t pull it off… In terms of telling stories, I don’t know that there’s a business in [user created maps]. Google’s [map making effort] doesn’t have to be sustainable, it has an infinite amount of money. But Google is allowing people to tell their stories and is not in danger of having to shut down peoples’ maps. Plus they are very active in places like Africa where it’s even more important and hard to get people to contribute. “Never mind that we used their maps. We took the movement further than they could have.” Eisnor works at Waze now, a company that’s building real time street maps through shared driving data. It’s not the same, it’s an attempt to disrupt an established market instead of an effort to create a new user behavior, Eisnor says. Neither are the numerous location based check-in networks the same as what Platial was doing, they aren’t really about telling a story. The market’s enthusiasm for user generated mapping may be contracting after a few years of initial excitement, but make no mistake: there is a big new way for people to publish the way we see the world now. That’s important and it will never disappear. Platial says it was all about “AutoBioGeography, Place Memory, Location Awareness.” Those are important concepts that were changed by this ambitious little startup, whether it survived as a business or not. You can stay abreast of future projects the Platial team develops on the side on its Twitter account and keep up with the work and thoughts of Di-Ann Eisnor , Jason Wilson and Jake Olsen . Discuss