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Skip to info about... Strands: recommendations Mashery: API management services Rackspace: cloud computing experts DEMO09: launchpad for innovative products 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

DEMO09

DEMO09 is on March 1-3, 2009, at Desert Springs. With more than 20,000 technologies reviewed and 1,500 companies selected to launch on the DEMO stage over the past 19 years, DEMO remains one of the best places to launch your new product. The show is made up of 70 six-minute presentations in two days and you'll see a lot of innovative products unveiled for the first time. In the past four years, DEMO companies have raised well over $2.5 billion dollars in the months/years following their debut at DEMO.

You can register for DEMO09 here.

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.

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