Once upon a time, Wolfram Alpha tried to charge $50 for its iPhone app while, at the same time, offering a free iPhone-optimized mobile site. Then, the company shut down the mobile site of its “computational knowledge engine” altogether. Now, however, Wolfram is reversing this strategy and is not just bringing back a new and improved version of its mobile site, but the company also just announced that it will reduce the price of its iPhone app to $1.99 on Saturday and will issue a refund to every customer who bought the app at the full price.

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A New Policy for Wolfram Alpha

According to Wolfram Alpha’s newly minted managing director Barak Berkowitz, the team’s “number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone.” This, obviously, is a complete reversal of Wolfram’s earlier policy, but we are very happy to see this new direction the team is taking.

Refunds for Those Who Bought $50 App

While Wolfram always argued that the app was worth $50, not too many people thought so. The current version only has 24 reviews in the App Store. Wolfram will obviously take a loss on the refunds as Apple won’t return the 30% cut it took from all the sales, but the Wolfram Alpha team clearly feels that this is the right thing to do. We can only guess how much money Wolfram made from the $50 app, but chances are that, starting Saturday, the company will sell more than enough $1.99 apps to make up for the price difference. If you bought the app at the full price (or $19.99 during the holiday sale), you can go to this site and ask for a refund.

To get a refund, users will have to supply their phone’s or iPod touch’s UDID, a screenshot of their UDID on the iTunes summary and account details page, as well a copy of their receipt from Apple.

You can find our full review of the iPhone app here.

New Mobile Site

The new mobile site feels faster than the original page, but at least in the version we tested just before the official launch, result pages seemed to be formatted for a screen somewhat larger than the iPhone. We assume, however, that this is just a glitch and that the company will fix this shortly. Unlike the native app, the mobile site obviously also doesn’t offer the specially formatted virtual keyboards for entering formulas (something Wolfram used as the main reason to charge extra for the iPhone app).

More To Come

According to today’s announcement, the company also plans to expand on this strategy of making the service more accessible in the next few months, though the announcement didn’t offer any further details. According to Schoeller Porter, Wolfram|Alpha’s architect, “the new iPhone and iPod touch app price, and the refund offer are just the beginnings of a wider strategic move toward ubiquity.”

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Today Google introduced two new elements to its popular advertising system, a Search Funnel and something it is calling Ad Innovations.

The company’s VP of product management, Susan Wojcicki, described the Search Funnel as a “set of reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion.”

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The idea is that users of the Sales Funnel will, over time, tighten and focus their use of Google Ads to such a degree that they will be able to sell a grommet to an Albanian from outer space.

“The data you see in Search Funnels can help you understand how users search for your products before converting so that you can optimize these conversion paths.”

Ad Innovations is a specialist website Google has set up to “work closely with advertisers on what comes next.” They intend to use the space to debut ad-tech ideas and solicit user feedback.

Photo by Danny Sullivan.

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Today, YouTube migrated its user videos over to a new design. The design was available before now, and has been in development for months, but today was the day all the videos got their Sunday go-to-meeting clothes on.

In a January post, Julian Frumar, a YouTube user experience designer, commented on YouTube’s blog that the old design could appear “cluttered and a little overwhelming.” (Julian, by the way, is up for an Understatement of the Year Award.)

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In the intervening months, YouTube has experimented with a cleaner design that made “the video the star.”

Other changes besides the focus on the video include a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system to replace the 1-5 scale, a finessed up-next video list, an easier-to-find subscription button and integrated video and text comments.

Is it a hit so far? Er. Nuh-uh.

On today’s YouTube blog post announcing the change, there were… comments – hundreds of them as invested users chimed in. And the chimes sounded pretty discordant. As of this posting, the word “suck” was used 14 times, “terrible” and “shit” tied at nine times each, the word “crap” six times and “bad” five times.

Lies, damned lies and statistics? Maybe. Representative comments included the following: “Looks like crap, keep up the horrible work.”

Firefox Twitter sentiment analysis gave the changes a 15-12 positive-negative rating. But TwitterFeel disagreed, with real-time analysis overwhelmingly negative.

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The New York Times’ new Doc Viewer 2.0 is, depending on what you value, either a pasted-on ornament of no real use to a typical news consumer, or it’s an open-source, crowd-sourcing game changer.

With information-taming technologies like search engines already at a reader’s fingertips, there is debatable value in the Doc Viewer’s ability to annotate a story with “raw” information. However, the fact that the Doc Viewer’s code is due to be released on an open-source basis introduces an additional value to it. It is not just the back-end that a media source, of whatever size, will have access to, but the whole megillah.

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Want annotated source materials embedded in your kitty blog without having to churn code until the tears flow? You can do it.

This latest viewer by the New York Times is the latest iteration of a two year development process. The viewer allows reporters to augment stories by including evidentiary documentation and providing context to news stories. The viewer keys documents to words or phrases in the source story, allowing viewers to pursue the process to the depth they prefer. These “annotations” are similar to an old-fashioned “hot link” but with a new-fangled dynamic delivery.

Future versions will open up the annotation process to readers, instead of just the writers and editors. Additional features may include an embeddable version for blogs, a search-friendly version without JavaScript, variable image file type control and the ability to create custom annotation shapes. The open-source software behind Version 2.0 will be released “in the very, very near future,” according to the newspaper, and will be available on the Times’ Github page.

The key criticism to this undertaking, of course, is: so what?

BayNewswer quoted Aron Pilhofer, the paper’s editor for interactive newsroom technologies, as “recognizing that news organizations are slowly but gradually becoming more and more like technology companies.” They are, that is, more likely to triumph if they leverage a wider distribution of invested community members.

Alan McLean, interface engineer at the Times, says his focus is on the Doc Viewer as a reporting tool.

“Fundamentally what we are trying to do here is get as many tools in the belts of reporters as we can to assist them in telling stories online,” he told RWW. “Seeing it as a publishing platform is somewhat limited. It really depends on the kind of content that is being published.”

However, Chris Heisel, in a post on an earlier version of this viewer, said, “In a world where I can easily find more infor­ma­tion than I can ever pos­si­bly use does the public really need more access to raw infor­ma­tion.”

We read news in a politically and socially polarized environment. The most common charge against the NY Times – this most mainstream of MSM – is bias, that there is nothing more than a writer’s unexamined feelings or political secret sauce to support the angle of a given story. With foundational documents appended to the story itself, the reasonableness of the reporter’s approach should prove easier to determine.

But that is posited on the not-altogether-likely notion that reason and reality will overpower the desire to froth.

The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

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At 1:00 a.m. on Sunday morning I was doing routine maintenance on my personal Amazon Web Services account and instead found myself looking at something I had no right to be seeing: A database with 800,000 user accounts to the e-card site CardMaster.com. Along with that were the database passwords and back end of a major U.S. Public Broadcasting Service news show website (Gwen Ifill’s Washington Week), including daily updates from panelists on the stories they cover.

I wish I wasn’t the person to find this. I founded one of Amazon’s earliest dashboards. My consultancy is on Amazon’s European Customer Advisory Board. But this highlights a significant issue in the cloud today: There is a whole new user profile acting as developer and administrator. We are becoming empowered with amazing tools – and being given enough rope to really hang ourselves.

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Guest author Jonathan Siegel is a serial entrepreneur and founder of the cloud applications consultancy ELCTech.com as well as a handful of cloud startups. Jonathan’s book, Electric Connections, is due out in June of this year.

I am an early adopter, business builder and owner of a cloud consultancy. On Sunday morning I went to clear out my personal Amazon Web Services account of excess files after seeing huge usage numbers from a report by CloudSplit. For those technically inclined, I was clearing out my S3 buckets and moving the few files that I wanted to save into an EBS disk instead.

My EBS disk ran out of space and I went to use a feature called EBS Snapshots. Snapshots are like a tape backup of your EBS disk drive. That’s when I noticed something odd: My EBS Snapshot account was filled with hundreds of snapshots, when I knew I had only made a handful. I wondered, Why do I have access to these backups? Were these backups made by my teammates? Shared snapshots from Amazon? Or something else…

What I saw were backups of Enron emails, a genomics database and then two made my stomach turn – a database for 800,000 user accounts to CardMaster.com and the database and site files for the Washington Week website. Yeah, the Enron emails are a non sequitur and the genomics database was likely meant to be public. But the other two, there’s no way they were intended for the public, yet here they were – marked as public and available to me or any other Amazon cloud user.

How Did This Happen?

Amazon is the largest and longest running public cloud computing platform. It has pushed the boundaries of technology infrastructure for us users. In fact, it has given us tools that are more powerful than anything we previously had available in our own small datacenters. This is great, because before we needed to hire trained Cisco or NetApp administrators in order to do basic tasks as our websites scaled. This was expensive and added another step – a delay – to our deployments. Amazon’s infrastructure commoditizes much of this technology into simple Web calls; paste some XML to Amazon and your website gets a full incremental backup to live-networked NAS. But as Stan Lee has warned us: With great power comes great responsibility.

By giving programmers control of the network and storage, we’ve empowered developers to take on system administration chores. This power has come too quickly or is being digested too lightly – as my discovery has shown.

In the case of PBS’s Washington Week there was quick acceptance of the issue. “It was human error and nothing personal was exposed,” said Kevin Dando, PBS’s Director of Digital Communications. “Although we weren’t aware of the issue initially, it was easily corrected. Because of Amazon’s strong audit capabilities we could pinpoint the error and fix it quickly.”

Despite numerous attempts we were unable to reach CardMaster.com.

This highlights a deeper issue in the cloud today: Despite what you may think, cloud security is not sexy. We are seeing products that address the baseline needs of cloud functionality, like Amazon’s dashboard and the support sites for the cloud. They focus on the sexy: deploying mobile apps, auto-scaling, grid processing and other buzz-word-friendly features. But the dirty truth is that the cloud has a whole new user profile acting as administrator and needs a new set of tools and expectation management to ensure that little mistakes make little problems and not big ones.

Remember: This is not something that Amazon did wrong. This is an intentional switch thrown by Amazon’s users that allowed their data to be public to any other Amazon user. The users did not mean to hit that switch and it’s unclear whether those users would have found this issue without my notification.

This is the switch in Amazon’s Web Console. It can be more subtle when packaged deep within cloud-assisting tools:

And Why Me?

A spokesperson for Amazon pointed out that snapshots were private by default and users must choose to share them. According to Amazon, “users understand this feature very well as this is no different than users explicitly choosing to share their data by any means.” However, as we’ve seen, users are obviously making their data inadvertently public. Amazon said they were updating their documentation “to provide more explicit guidance on this feature,” and that they would be “reaching out to the few who may be unknowingly sharing their snapshots.”

The question, though, is: Is it too easy to accidentally make your data public – and whose role is it to play data cop?

This leads to me, at 1 a.m., and finding security leakage with Amazon’s cloud customers while doing unrelated housekeeping. Look, I’m anything but an IT Security guy; I’ve got enough on my plate to worry about. For god’s sakes, I have 6 kids! Moreover, I’m an outspoken supporter for moving companies to the cloud – and I exclusively recommend Amazon’s cloud because of its reliability and features. Why is it me that finds this security issue – one that has been open since January of this year if the Snapshot dates are accurate.

This tells me that there is a pattern about to be replayed: That the users on the cloud today are a motley crew. That we need more supervision and hand-holding – whether we like it or not. That powerful services like CloudKick and CloudSplit need to be encouraged to add security as a top-priority feature. And we need to budget for their services and embrace their boring, yet hyper-important role as perimeter guard and security inspector.

If I were to try to keep this security problem in the bag – and avoid alerting the community – I would be fostering a sense of complacency that is antithetical to the marketplace needs. The cloud is so young that when we find a problem we need to admit it and find real, workable solutions. Since the cloud represents new ways of doing things, it gives us new ways of getting in trouble, and we need a lively forum for nipping these issues in the bud and laying a framework for ongoing success.

What Now?

If you are on Amazon’s cloud, I can’t stress enough that you need to immediately go to your AWS Management Console. Check at a minimum that your Snapshots, for every Region, are marked PUBLIC only if you mean them to be available to ALL other Amazon Web Services users. I’ve already checked mine. If you find data that you did not intend to make public, you need to engage your security team to remove the snapshots from the public and mitigate any data exposure.

Hopefully this gets chalked on the wall as a lesson learned – and we continue our march to the cloud with a deeper appreciation of our security support needs. This isn’t about calling people out. I work in the cloud and am passionate about its development. These mistakes could very well have been ones I made – or any other cloud user. To move the cloud forward we need to encourage a dialog about our new found power, new paradigms and new needs in the cloud.

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When you think of startup incubators, you think of the more well known organizations helping companies in cities like Boulder, San Francisco, New York or Austin, but one incubator is looking to change that assumption. Based at the VT KnowledgeWorks Business Acceleration Center in Blacksburg, VA, DayOne Ventures is a program aimed at tapping the talent coming from Virginia Tech to help local startups get off the ground.

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With fewer than 40,000 residents, Blacksburg is less than half the size of startup hub Boulder, CO, but the city’s ties to Virginia Tech make it a fertile spot for its budding startup community. DayOne Ventures is taking advantage of the growing buzz in the area with its highly concentrated experience which will accept just 3 companies to participate this summer.

Those selected will benefit from up to $16,000 in seed funding, free office space, Internet access and hosting, legal assistance with incorporating their company and setting up stock plans, and mentorship from an panel of experienced entrepreneurs. DayOne co-founder and mentor Bill Boebel has prior experience himself with starting a company in Blacksburg; in 1999 he and a pair of co-founders created Webmail.us, an enterprise email solution.

“It was really awesome doing our startup down in Blacksburg because of the low cost of doing it. We were able to fail three times before we figured out the right idea,” Boebel told ReadWriteWeb. “The cost of failing in Blacksburg is a lot lower than the cost of failing in Silicon Valley.”

Eventually, Boebel and his co-founders molded Webmail.us into a profitable company which was later acquired by Rackspace in 2007. The Rackspace presence in Blacksburg remains to this day and is a reminder of the city’s most successful Internet startup. Now as an experienced entrepreneur, Boebel and others are teaming together to provide local startups (or those that choose to relocate for the program) with the mentorship and resources to get started.

TechStars and Y Combinator aren’t necessarily everyone’s cup of tea; DayOne, one the other hand, brings a bit of small town flavor to the already close-knit startup culture – a flavor that could produce some interesting results with their exclusive incubator. Applications for the 10-week program are open now, so if you’re in the Blacksburg area or wouldn’t mind relocating for the summer, be sure to look into the DayOne Ventures program.

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Cloudkick is a cloud monitoring start-up that helps system admins manage cloud servers. Today, the company announced it is getting physical, bringing its cloud monitoring capabilities to internally hosted servers and virtual machines.

The company has had a lot of success in helping companies who startup in the cloud and start to achieve scale. It already has a host of hot startup companies including Posterous, Bump Technologies, and Urban Airship. Through listening to users, the company decided to offer local server support to merge its view of all server assets for these organizations.

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What is CloudKick?

Cloudkick enables a company to manage internally hosted servers and run the Cloudkick’s agent and report into the same console as your cloud computing infrastructure from AWS, RackSpace, SliceHost and others. When installed, the CloudKick agent will respond to status checks from the Cloudkick monitoring solution, which itself is a distributed cloud application. Cloudkick supports a host of cloud provider solutions and shares a report of feature.

We met with the company at their offices in San Francisco. Upon entry to the warehouse, called “The Farm” near the Mission District, we realized that was a true technology startup, founded by system administrators trying to make their jobs easier. The team participated in Y-Combinator and has received an initial capital infusion by Avalon Ventures.

The Cloudkick system offers consolidated server reports and shows server events by polling registered clients in cloud (and now data centers) and piping them to Cloudkick’s multi-tentant event aggregator.

The tools are modeled after administrative tools like Cacti, Nagios, and Munin, but are delivered on on top of an agent-driven real time view of the underlying assets of server infrastructure.

When checking out the demonstration, we also noted that the browser is updated in real-time as events are polled. This keeps the information fresh without having to re-check and brings the best of browser based real-time communication to system administrations.

Cloudkick’s implementation is simple and elegant. The young company is demonstrating product leadership by living the mantra of simplicity and utility.

Here’s a sample of the graphs from CloudKick’s feature inventory.

Monitoring Every Server

The goal of this release is to bring servers from the datacenter to power of cloud monitoring. It allows a larger and larger region of infrastructure to rely on outside controls to monitor it’s health and well being.

One feature we we intrigued by with Cloudkick was the ability to tag and filter groups of hosts, and to then set rules across them. For example, tagging all servers “web apps” allows a rule to quickly set custom rules for checking up time.

The company offers an API for its services and uses 2-legged OAuth for API authentication. OAuth is “an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.”. The company also offers a proxy service that streamlines and secures the connections for hosts that will connect to the Cloudkick services.

Cloudkick is a cloud company monitoring clouds and shows us in many ways the architecture of the future. In one of the blog posts from company, they share “love affair with cassandra” and how multi-master database technology is an enabler for co-location of server assets in infrastructure clouds.

Where does Cloudkick go from here?

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Without a doubt, location-based services and social networks are one of the hottest topics on the Internet right now. Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and many others are vying for users, but strong privacy concerns are still holding back the mainstream adoption of these kinds of services. Rally Up for the iPhone is a new location-based social network that puts a very strong emphasis on privacy and also features some innovative new concepts.

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Focus on Privacy

While Rally Up (iTunes link) allows you to friend anybody who is a member of the service, it features some nifty privacy settings, which are represented by a slider on every friend’s profile. You can choose between four different privacy settings. These range from not sharing information with this person to just seeing this friend’s update but not sharing information with them, to giving the contact the full firehose of settings with and without push notifications. The idea here is that you only give your real friends full access to all of your updates, while still giving you the option to follow anybody else on the service – though these users can obviously also choose to not share any information with you. Your own home’s location is always private and never shared on the service.

Just like Gowalla and Foursquare, Rally Up features badges, but the emphasis of the service is more on connecting you to your real friends. Because of this, the Rally Up team also decided not to allow users to syndicate their location feed on Twitter. You can, however, choose to share your location with your Facebook friends. The assumption here, we assume, is that your Facebook friends are more likely to be your “real” friends and that Facebook will keep this data private.

Instead of connecting to Twitter, Rally Up emphasizes private microblogging on the service itself. Rally Up allows you to send short text messages to your friends, but you can also attach photos to any location.

I’m On My Way

Besides focusing on privacy, Rally Up also included some interesting innovations in its service that aren’t available in most of the current crop of popular location-based services yet.

While most services only allow you to check in once you have arrived at a location, Rally Up also allows you to send out a notification when you are on your way to a venue. You can also set up temporary locations, which is quite useful when you go to a party at somebody’s house, for example.

The app, which, by the way, is very well designed, doesn’t focus so much on venues as on connecting people. This is a nice departure from quite a few of the location-based social networks we have recently seen.

Overall, Rally Up represents a very nifty take on the location-based social networking model and we especially like the company’s focus on privacy.

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Update: YouTube is reportedly making the new design live on all YouTube video pages today.

Original Article: YouTube has unveiled a new version of its video pages. They are not rolled out as the default at this point, but users can opt-in to view them in the new format (they can easily opt out as well).

"In the coming weeks, we’ll be eager to hear what the community thinks and, as with many things in this newly designed user experience, we’ll incorporate their feedback in future iterations," a representative for YouTube tells WebProNews.

"YouTube is about creating and watching the world’s biggest video collection; therefore, the design should make the video the star," says YouTube. "To that end, the new look is more subdued, stripped down and simple than before. The design should help ease users into advanced features, while providing power users with all the functionality they want."

Here is a look at the design before and after (respectively):

The new page includes a "next up" video list. Other videos in the queue on the right side of the page will be based on information about how you found the video. If you get to the video through search, the rest of the search results will end up on the video page. If you arrive on a video from a playlist or recommendation, that will also be reflected in the queue.

More specific info about the video is featured under the video, with the description and stats in one place. A new expand capability is included to reduce clutter. Actions like sharing, rating, saving or flagging a video are also now all grouped in one button bar.

YouTube has replaced the five-star rating system with a like/dislike system. According to the company people pretty much just used the one star and five star options anyway. "Liking" a video will save it to your favorites.

The new design comes with some new size and quality controls in the player. "When you pick the size, we’ll serve you the ideal quality," says YouTube. "For those of you hungry for more control, you can pick the specific video quality (for example, SD, HD or 1080p) in an associated drop-down menu. We’ll warn you when we think there may be a better quality choice, but the control is in your hands."

Users will be able to search for other videos while a video is still playing, and the results will show on that same page. That will be a very nice addition.

Also, there is more prominent placement of channel/subscriber information, a new "see more videos" feature, and a change in channel banner placement. YouTube says that you may notice an absence of the "more from [your channel]" feature, but this is only temporary. It will be back.

Right now, YouTube is just letting users opt-in for the new design by clicking this link, but says the opt-in process will be made more accessible soon. If you have opted in, but wish to revert back to the old style, there is an opt-out link at the top of the new video page.
 

Related Articles:

> Will YouTube Be the Place to Rent Movies?

> YouTube To Experiment With Live Sports Coverage

> Google Gets Patent For YouTube Gaming

Mplayit, a Facebook-based mobile app store, just released some interesting new data about people’s willingness to pay for mobile apps. According to Mplayit’s report, about one-third of users across all the major mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry) are interested in paid apps. iPhone users are the most willing to pay for some of their apps (57%), followed by BlackBerry users (33%). Android users are the least likely to be interested in paid apps (16%).

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While only a third of BlackBerry users are willing to pay for apps, it’s worth noting that, with a median price of $5.99, they are willing to pay the most for their apps. iPhone users only want to pay around $1.99 and the average Android user is willing to pay up to $2.72. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that these are just average prices and people’s willingness to pay definitely depends on the quality of the applications.

As we noted earlier this month, the average price for iPhone apps continues to fall, but the average price for the most popular iPhone apps is around $2.43 in the U.S. – which – judging from Mplayit’s data – indicates that most users would like to pay less than $2 for their apps, but are more than willing to pay extra for the best and most popular apps.

Bonus: Percentage of Games in the Top App Stores

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Microsoft is announcing two new features to Bing Maps today – an integration with Oodle to show rental property listings and another integration with Foursquare to visualize check-ins, tips and a variety of other data.

Although the two seem only related by the map visualization aspect, they might be useful hand in hand to find that new apartment that’s close to where everything (or nothing) is going on.

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First, the Oodle map application, called Oodle Rentals, is similar to other mashups we’ve seen using Google Maps and Craigslist, such as HousingMaps. Hopefully Oodle Rentals doesn’t have the same downfall, however, wherein rental agencies simply post listings with a zip code and no actual address, meaning you have 300 pins smack dab in the center of down and not where they really are.

The application shows a listing of appropriate properties in a sidebar, allowing you to filter by criteria like pets, bedrooms, bathroom, rent and so on. As you move the map around, the available and appropriate properties appear on the map.

As for “foursquare Everywhere”, Foursquare data is pulled in, allowing visualization of check-ins, tips, badges and mayor “coronations” worldwide. So after you’ve found the perfect place to rent using Oodle Rentals, you can switch over to “foursquare Everywhere” and see where the happening night clubs, coffee shops, restaurants and various other venues are in the area.

We have to say, we’re fans of anything that suddenly offers a better visualization of what would otherwise be data we’d have to correlate on our own. Who wants to look through rental listings and then switch over and look it all up in a map? That’s so 2000, not 2010. Now, if they would just get to offering a SimCity style view of map filtering, so we could see crime rates, traffic, pollution, noise, all aggregated together with rental listings and check-in data, then we’d be talking.

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Early bird registration for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 ends today! This is your last chance to save $100. Register now!

The ReadWriteWeb Mobile 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.

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As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the ‘unconference’ format. We discovered in October that the unconference is a perfect complement to our brand, because it encourages a high quality two-way dialog. Not only that, but the knowledge and ideas that came out of our Real-Time Web Summit were practical and useful – we got a lot of great feedback about that.

As with our previous event, the Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin, who in my 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 helping sponsor this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information on the sponsor options.

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!

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The Freemium Summit, an event focused on discussing the ever popular business model and how new companies can best take advantage of it, was held last Friday in San Francisco, and since then, interesting stats and bits of information have been popping up on blogs and news sites. New business models have been a hot topic of discussion lately as we’ve debated both the benefits of freemium and it’s possible replacement model, subscriptions. For any company taking its first steps into the freemium model, it takes careful consideration when deciding how to structure a freemium model, from how much to charge, to which services to charge for.

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ZDNet writer Tom Foremski recently published an article on his blog “IMHO” about some lessons he learned during a discussion with a handful of freemium startup executives that could be useful to a startup looking to adopt the popular business model. The execs, all from companies in Emergence Capital’s portfolio, were from Yammer, YouSendIt, SurveyMonkey, InsideView and Echosign, and provided some key tips for getting into freemium.

Foremski provides us with ten points he gathered from the discussion, and at the top of the list is a wise suggestion: “Don’t try and guess how your users interact with your service, and which features to offer, perform multiple tests of usability, features, and pricing. Intuition is the starting point but test it out against multiple variants.”

This lesson points to the fact that no matter how you plan your site, or how you intend people to use it, they will undoubtedly find alternative uses and features for the site that you either hadn’t thought of or hadn’t though were as important as other parts. If your company is launching out of the gate with a freemium model in place, be sure to carefully review feedback and statistics from your users and don’t be afraid to mix up the model if things aren’t working right.

Others might choose to launch without the model in place to see which features are more popular, or to see what customers want that the site doesn’t yet offer. Either way, it may be best to beta test the model before releasing it in order to gauge your customers’ reaction. Also remember that customer reactions to changes tend to be a little extreme at first, so take them with a grain of salt, but engage them and find out what their feelings are.

Another thought to consider that Foremski points out is that most companies offering a freemium service can often find themselves profitable even if only a few percent of their users are premium subscribers. Pandora CTO Tom Conrad recently revealed that less than 2% of the service’s users are paid subscribers, but that they are expected to bring in 15% of the company’s revenues this year. Foremski says to look at the glass as half empty (or mostly empty) waiting to be filled with new customers.

“For some businesses as few as 4 per cent of premium users can create a profitable business, you then have 96 per cent of upside — users that you can potentially convert,” he says.

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Fennec, the mobile version of the Firefox web browser, is now available in an early build designed for Android handsets thanks to a fan-compiled download posted on an Android developers forum. And by early, we mean unofficial, pre-alpha, device-specific and downright buggy. But for anyone interested in mobile browser developments, this port is an interesting sneak peek into the future of Firefox’s mobile plans.

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Fennec for Droid

German developer Martin Schirr’s version of Fennec is ideal for Droid users because it requires a hardware-based keyboard. Without support for touch input or multi-touch, it won’t work on all flavors of the Google Android mobile operating system.

It’s also a hefty download – 41 MB in size. And it freezes upon first boot. Plus, it’s slow and prone to crashes and bugs. But that’s what pre-alpha means – especially a pre-alpha that wasn’t released by the Mozilla organization itself.

So what can you do with the Android version of Fennec? Well, you can test out its features, like tabbed browsing, tab synchronization between desktop and mobile and browser add-ons. Right now, there aren’t too many add-ons available, but given the stage of development, that’s not surprising.

Fennec: Slow to Launch?

We first heard of Mozilla’s plans to bring Fennec to Android back in June of last year when Google announced a change in how software can run on Android. After the release of a new Android NDK that used C/C++ programming languages – the same as Firefox – Mozilla began to consider the possibilities of bringing the Fennec browser to the Google-branded mobile platform.

In October, Mozilla CEO John Lilly re-confirmed the organization’s plans to build an Android version, while touting its many features like support for “Javascript, CSS, Flash, SVG, video and audio.” It would be “the first mobile browser to support add-ons,” he said.

Now it’s nearly 9 months later and there’s still not a usable version of the browser for Android devices – just pre-alpha builds like this. Should we be concerned? Should Mozilla?

While waiting for a real version of Fennec, the popularity of Webkit-based browsers continues to grow, Opera gains mobile ground (especially on feature phones), and last month, Microsoft announced a new mobile OS launching by year-end, Windows Phone 7 Series. This OS will include an updated version of Internet Explorer Mobile that offers multi-touch gesture support and tabbed browsing, among other features.

Mozilla is expected to release a working build of Fennec around the same time, but depending on the exact launch dates, they may not get to claim “first” anymore – at least among the top web browsers out there. (Third-party apps already deliver tabbed browsing on various mobile devices). That being said, support for Mozilla is still strong. And once functional, it may have a lot more to offer than its competitors.

In the meantime, intrepid Android geeks will be definitely be interested in giving this new fan-compiled Fennec build a look. However, general Android users should probably stay away for now – this version is by no means meant for daily use.

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