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There’s only one week left until the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 , so we invite you to register now . Be a part of high-value, intimate conversations with people working throughout the world of mobile, from garage developers to industry luminaries. The summit will take place May 7, 2010 , in Mountain View, California and will be an exploration of the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. We are looking forward to some amazing discussion and debate about mobile with participants like : Sponsor Deb Schultz of Altimeter group Patrick Chanezon, Don Dodge & Bob Meese of Google Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless Scott Raney and Tom Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures Adam Blum of Rhomobile Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Brent Simmons of Newsgator Technologies Patrick Burns of DASH7 Alliance As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the “unconference” format. Laura Fittion, founder of oneforty.com , had these thoughts about ReadWriteWeb’s last summit: “There were a lot of investors there and it was a great dialogue between startups and investors. The unconference format was great because it got away from the bogus who-is in the real-time Web, and made it who-wants-to-be. You didn’t have to be big and influential to get your ideas across – if it was a good idea then it got heard. It wasn’t just Twitter, it was many things real time, defined pretty expansively.” How Unconferences Work What’s an unconference all about? Here’s the idea: Convene an incredible group of people, frame the discussion, ask important questions, then guide participants in building an agenda for the day to maximize the value of the event and minimize hot air. Martin Källström, CEO of the real-time blog and feed tracking service Twingly brought his team over from Sweden for our last event. ” Last year we happened across one of Kaliya Hamlin’s unconference events,” he told us. “We spent a couple of hours there and it was an amazing experience. The unconference format is an amazing way for things to happen; it gets everyone to lower their defenses. By opening peoples’ minds to ‘this is about whatever we want it to be about”, they look at how they can create value. ” Or, as Google’s Brett Slatkin said when using the elite FooCamp events as a way to explain the unconference format: “Foo-style [unconferencing is] always way better than talks.” As with our previous event, the Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin , who in our opinion is the best in the business at this style of event. We’re using the same venue too, the beautiful Computer History Museum. Mobile was one of our top five trends last year and continues to undergo explosive growth , so our aim with this event is to help you navigate the opportunities. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of mobile! Because it will be you – the attendees – who ultimately set the agenda. You can begin adding your suggestions now. We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business . 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. If you’re a company in the mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages. And a big thank-you to our current event sponsors: CallFire , WorldMate , Alcatel-Lucent and Ipevo . The ReadWriteWeb team is excited about our second event and we can’t wait to discuss the opportunities in Mobile with you on May 7. You can find banners and logos to link to our event here , if you’re so inclined. We hope to see you on May 7! Discuss

As part of my ongoing Online Strategy Roundtables , I met yesterday with four new entrepreneurs, all at the early stage of validating who their customers are and building their businesses. Entrepreneurs who are just starting out need to ask themselves some hard questions in order to develop a crisp go to market strategy. I pulled together a list of such questions that you can find here and in my Positioning book to help you “Clarify Your Story”. Up first was Martin Calle and his company OraQuel . Martin worked for years on product development for companies like Procter & Gamble and FritoLay, but eventually wanted to create a product that would be his own. Sponsor i> Guest author Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy . She has a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys , Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction , and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available from Amazon. Her new book Vision India 2020 was recently released. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative. /p> After researching what type a product would be best to get behind, Martin came across research showing a strong correlation between gum disease and heart disease, and came up with a heart-smart oral care product. Since large retailer stores won’t work with a “little guy” in this category, he has started to approach social media groups like mommy bloggers and TwitterMoms to try to build up a grassroots following. I believe Martin’s product does answer a real need, but he has positioned this as a product just for kids. I think he will get better pickup if he positions this as a product for the entire family – a much larger segment of the market. Martin will need to do some controlled experiments to validate whether or not my hunch is correct, and then move forward with his social media PR campaign. Nick Quay presented for BluNami , a mobile marketing company that has developed a technology to help clients connect to Bluetooth users in a certain proximity. Nick and his team have been working with a wide variety of clients looking to use their technology a many different ways, from a city using it to make emergency announcements to restaurants offering deals to lure in customers. (As soon as I hear anyone is trying to work with a government entity, especially a startup venture, I immediately want them to stop wasting their time there. Unless they are paying you upfront as some type of consulting situation, most startups need their cash flow and can not sustain the government’s slow 12-24 month sales cycles.) Like many entrepreneurs with a versatile technology, Nick is trying to do too many things right now – the old “spray and pray.” While there may be many different segments interested in the product, each requires a unique go-to-market strategy. The best way to scale this business is to figure out what is the best value proposition and the easiest segment to sell to, and then focus time and energy on that while continuing to bootstrap your way to profitability. Later there may be time and money for exploring other avenues. Frederic Guitton gave a nice presentation for ActivSalesAgent , a business that combines its software with call centers as a way to help convert visitors on client websites into better qualified sales leads. This business is further down the road of validation than the others, and is profitable. As I questioned him about price point, Frederic was ready with metrics to show that what they are doing is indeed working. We discussed how using solid statistical information along with references from early customers is the best was to convert potential customers into clients – and those reference accounts do not need to be the biggest clients. Small business references work just as well. That’s how Salesforce.com did it. I think this business has legs, but urged Frederic to be open to doing some type of offshore chat centers down the road because I think reducing costs will become a bigger issue as this business continues to scale. Then Linda Muncy, who is just starting out, presented her business idea. She is hired to provide photo-related entertainment at events. Guests are creatively photographed and given the image in some form as a giveaway. She has started reproducing the images onsite on a material similar to Skinit so guests can attach the image to their handhelds, laptops, etc. She would like to develop a product kit so other event planners can do this as well. Linda has yet to truly validate her product and service. I always tell entrepreneurs to validate your idea before building any product. I think Linda will be amazed by what she learns after calling 100 event planners to get their feedback. This may only be a small business, but that is perfectly okay – as long as it is profitable. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million ( 1M/1M ). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. If you are an entrepreneur working on an idea or an early stage business, I am also very interested in hearing what you are looking for from 1M/1M. Please weigh in here . We are crowdsourcing the design of 1M/1M, and requests that have come up include Receivables Financing as a way to bridge to a validated business without giving up precious equity, I would love to hear your thoughts. i> You can find the recording of this roundtable session here . Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here . You can register for the next roundtable here . /p> em> Photo by Svilen Milev . /p> Discuss

Hackers, designers, and young entrepreneurs gathered Wednesday in a conference hall usually reserved for dignitaries and diplomats at the United Nations in New York. The occasion? A kick-off for World Entrepreneurship Day, an event conceived of by college junior Lauren Amarante and her mentor Troy Byrd last year when they realized recognized days existed to honor everything from toilets (Nov. 19) to turtles (May 23) to tin cans (Jan. 19), but none existed to celebrate the people who make the U.S. economy tick. Now that the second Friday of April is officially World Entrepreneurship Day , we thought we’d mark the occasion by sharing some of the take-aways from the speeches and panel discussions by the successful entrepreneurs who gathered at the U.N. for the WED conference .

The popular location-based services Foursquare and Gowalla were launched at the 2009 SXSW, and one year later, many proclaimed the 2010 SXSW to be the year of “location, location, location” . With almost 350,000 Foursquare check-ins during one day of the event, and with numerous location-based services launching before, during, and after SXSW, the buzz among early adopters surrounding location-based social networking seems to show no signs of abating. Sponsor In a provocative (and NSFW) blog post this weekend, entrepreneur and developer Dave McClure takes both location-based social networks and their early adopters to task, arguing that “the current method of check-ins is a classic case of early-adopter lust for shiny objects, & has not a damn thing to do with long-term sustainable mainstream consumer behavior.” Dismissing the lure of the game-mechanics that many of these platforms utilize – the idea of collecting badges, points, and/or mayorships – McClure contends that until LBS start offering some sort of simple monetary incentive, mainstream users will not be compelled to check-in. Whether or not you agree with McClure’s pronouncements and predictions about location-based social networks, his comments about “early-adopter lust for shiny objects” are worth considering. Although conventional wisdom posits that early adopters provide a solid target market for startups, there are some drawbacks in responding focusing solely on those who “lust for shiny objects.” Early adopters’ enthusiasm may not always be a good indication of future growth and sustainability. Although early adopters are often willing to provide feedback on a product’s development, that feedback might not be the information necessary to woo a larger market. Early adopters’ feedback on existing features and push for new features might not necessarily be the feedback necessary for features that mainstream users would want or need. The push for special stamps and badges from Gowalla and Foursquare might excite early adopters, for example, but mainstream users may not find this a compelling reason to adopt a service. The lure of other social networks, such as Facebook, is in part that “everyone is there.” The question remains how to make the move from just the early adopters to “everyone” being there. Nevertheless, early adopters can be terrific champions of a product, actively promoting it to their friends. Early adopters are a small, but vocal group. Ignore them at your peril. And focus exclusively on them at your peril. Discuss

SAS introduced a social media analytics program today that will compete against the major metrics players such as Radian 6 and WebTrends . The new service shows once again how blogs and social networks are deeply influencing marketing, customer support and product groups within the enterprise. The SAS Social Media analytics service is different than many of the social technologies we look at in our coverage. It’s a hosted service that SAS builds for the client. The client develops the parameters for what they want to analyze. Rules are established that then server as the framework. Results are viewed through a web page that SAS sets up for the client. Sponsor Most of the services we see are delivered as a SaaS solution. For example, Salesforce.com went live recently with Chatter that integrates Twitter, Facebook and other services. But SAS is a company with analytics at its core. It will take about a year for the company to build up the IP, the data, for specific market verticals. After that time, down, the road, it’s a service that could be delivered from the cloud. But the learning behavior may be its key differentiator. Mark Chaves, product manager, SAS, said the service can be optimized to learn, based on inputs. For example, the sentiment analysis can be changed to reflect what has been learned. With most services, the sentiment analysis parameters are defined within the application and can not be altered. The service reminds us a lot of what we see emerging in data analytics for the enterprise. The SAS service imports data from internal and external sources. It can archive and analyze more than two years of information from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, discussion forums, blogs and other sources. It is designed to provide a form of predictive analytics that can be applied, for example, to develop marketing strategies such as brand development. Some of the other features include: Analyzes structured and unstructured data from internal and external sources. Quantifies influence, forecast future volume of social media conversations, and then predict their impact on the business. Multiple language support. Web-based dashboard. SAS Social Media Analytics platform shows how deep social technologies are filtering into the enterprise. It’s important to identify data from social networks as additional data points that when integrated can provide insights, for instance, into campaigns and CRM environments. The SAS offering reflects the DNA of the company. The focus is on data analytics. That seems like a logical approach. Social networks are producing data at an exponential rate. The SAS offering reflects how it is becoming more of a science to analyze the information from these networks and how its outcomes affect the entire enterprise. Disclosure: SAS paid for a train ticket and hotel room for Alex Williams to attend the the SAS Users Conference in Seattle.] Discuss