Planning to attend CES - the world's largest consumer electronics show? If so, you are cordially invited to join us at an exclusive private party SAY Media is throwing at the brand new venue, 1Oak at The Mirage.

This is a private event so you must be on the list AND have a CES delegate badge to get in. RSVP to CESParty@saymedia.com with the code "RWW VIP" to make sure you are on the list. Hope to see you in Vegas!

From instagram's departure from a check-in model (ala Foursquare), to YouTube's online video dating histories, this infographic should remind you that no matter what you are building, be ready to change directions if necessary.

Today marks the beginning of the annual Web 2.0 Summit at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. This year's theme is The Data Frame. "We live in a world clothed in data," the introduction says, "and as we interact with it, we create more - data is not only the Web's core resource, it is at once both renewable and boundless." That's what Web 2.0 attendees will be talking about in the halls of the Palace Hotel. ReadWriteWeb is on the scene to loop you into this conversation. Here's what to expect:

The Data Frame: Who's Here & What's Happening?

The common theme at Web 2.0 this year is how the key players are leveraging the vast amounts of data on the Web. "Everybody's talking about how to leverage data and turn it into actionable information," organizer John Battelle told InformationWeek. Here's the summit's big vision statement:

"At the 2011 edition of Web 2.0 Summit, we'll use data as a framing device to understand the state of the Web. We know that those who best leverage data will win. So who's winning, and how? Who's behind? In each of our key points of control such as location, mobile platforms, gaming, content, social - who is innovating, and where are the opportunities? What new classes of services and platforms are emerging, and what difficult policy questions loom? And what of the consumer - will users become their own "point of control," and start to understand the power of their own data?"

We'll be here to report out on our conversations, and fortunately lots of the big events at the summit will be streamed live.

You can watch the whole show right here:

Check out the live stream schedule to see which events you can watch. We'd love to hear your reactions to any of these events. Share them in comments on the site or by mentioning Richard or me on Google Plus.

Here are the highlights I'm most excited about, which means I'm likely to blog about them:

Monday
I can't wait to hear from Tony Conrad, whose current venture at About.me was acquired by AOL. About.me is a free service to make a personal splash page aggregating all your various Internet presences. It's pretty Web 2.5, if you ask me. His Pivot session is from 3:40 to 3:45.

Right after that, there are High Order Bit sessions with Sean Parker and Christopher Poole - A.K.A. moot, founder of 4chan - who are both sure to be sensational.

Tonight at the dinner, we'll hear from Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter. That won't be streamed live, but we'll be sure to report back.

Tuesday
Anyone interested in commerce or gaming will have lots to watch on Tuesday (see schedule for details).

Personally, I'm looking forward to hearing from Dennis Crowley of foursquare. Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, and Jane McGonical, author of Reality Is Broken, are sure to have an interesting chat about gaming.

Tim Westergren, founder and chief strategy officer at Pandora will talk to Adam Lashinsky of Fortune Magazine. And I'm very curious to hear Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer speak at the end of the day.

Wednesday
The last day has a jam-packed schedule. Here's who I'm going to at least try to see:

Mike McCue of Flipboard, Susan Wojcicki from Google will be my morning, and I'll be speaking to Rod Smith (now program director David Barnes) from IBM about emerging Internet technologies. At RWW, we're big fans of bit.ly's Hilary Mason, who also speaks Wednesday.

MC Hammer himself goes on at 11:25. Don't miss that.

The biggest session for me, though, will be Vic Gundotra and John Battelle at 2:00. Gundotra is Google's SVP of engineering, and he's one of the key people behind Google Plus.

To see what else is happening at the summit, check out the full event schedule.

Want to get a sense of what Web 2.0 is like? Here's a great video from last year of Mary Meeker (Morgan Stanley) talking about Internet trends:

Web 2.0: Seven Years Since An Update

The term "Web 2.0" was coined in 2004 at the inaugural conference of the same name. It was meant to connote life after the Dot Com collapse. In 2005, Tim O'Reilly published "What is Web 2.0," a seminal document about the technologies and trends that would shape what happened next. But no one can predict the future. While the broad strokes still feel right, there are examples of Web 2.0 in O'Reilly's paper that don't work anymore, and there are new platforms he couldn't have anticipated.

If Napster is Web Music 2.0, what's iTunes Match? SEO might be Web 2.0, but Google Panda is already in version 2.5. Overall, O'Reilly made a pretty good list, but important parts of the "Web as a Platform" have already evolved beyond what Web 2.0 anticipated.

We have adjusted our understanding of Web 2.0 over the years, and the conference this week will be full of discussions of how the notion has grown and changed, and maybe whether it's time to release a new version.

What about the term Web 2.0 itself? Is it still useful to us seven years on? Enter our contest and tell us what the term Web 2.0 means to you.

Follow Richard [@ricmacnz] and Jon [@JonMwords] on Twitter to catch their live updates from Web 2.0. The event's hashtag is #w2s. If you're at the conference, you can also contact Jon on iMessage using jon at readwriteweb dot com.

OSCON, O'Reilly's annual convention devoted to everything open source, kicked off in Portland, Oregon this morning. The day will finish with OSCON Ignite. Ignite is the event series, born and bred by geeks, where speakers are limited to five minutes and 20, auto-advancing slides. Tonight's session tites include The Bad Touch, Barehanded Music Making and The Diabolical Developer. Full lists of sessions is below along with the video stream.

Photo by Khosrow on flickr

And now, this rapidly growing user base will have their very own conference: MyGreatFest, the world's first convention for the jailbreaking community.

Jailbreaking, once the domain of hackers and the tech elite, has rapidly become a force to be reckoned with. It attracts a much wider crowd these days, thanks to easy-to-use tools put out by both individual hackers and teams of hackers. Some, like the recently launched JailbreakMe.com, don't even involve software downloads. All a user has to do on with JailbreakMe.com is open its URL on their mobile device to begin the jailbreaking process.

The benefits to jailbreaking are plentiful. Although the activity has been associated with application piracy in the past, many jailbreakers simply want access to the apps that Apple rejected or wouldn't permit in the App Store. In the past, these have included things like mobile hotspot tools, themes, widgets, replacements or upgrades to core apps, changes to the device's default functionality and other such tweaks. But more importantly, jailbreakers have a sense of control over their devices, and a sense of ownership.

If there's something a device doesn't do that you wish it would, there's probably a jailbreak "app for that."

Even Apple itself seems to be warming up to the jailbreaking community of late. The company recently hired well-known jailbreak app developer Peter Hajas, whose "Mobile Notifier" app appears to have served as the inspiration for iOS 5's new notifications center. Does that mean the jailbreaking scene will now be the testing ground for new iOS features? Considering the wide range of innovations that emerge there, we hope so.

MyGreatFest: The First Ever Jailbreakers' Convention

For those who have watched the community from the sidelines, following well-known personalities like @saurik or @P0sixninja on Twitter, the new jailbreaking conference MyGreatFest will put them up close and personal with their favorite hacking idols. And for fellow hackers, who often jockey for position among their peers, as hackers tend to do, it will offer a venue where they can show off their skills, maybe even get into a coding grudge match in front of a live audience. Meanwhile, fans who really want to meet the hackers one-on-one will have the opportunity to buy tickets to a VIP area where they can "have lunch" with the developers, or just hang out and chat.

There will also be a series of presentations from big names in the jailbreaking community, where they will tackle subjects like the piracy problem, and whether or not DRM (digital rights management) should be included in the jailbreaking tools provided to mainstream users. In addition, the event will offer Q&A sessions, giveaways, vendor booths and everything else you would expect from a traditional conference.

First Official iOS 5 Jailbreak May be Revealed at MyGreatFest

And there may be one more big event at the upcoming show: the first official iOS 5 jailbreak, says MyGreatFest organizer Craig Fox. Although the beta of the OS has already been jailbroken, until the commercial release, there's no way to know if the exploits used will still be available when the new iPhone launches.

However, there's a good chance the next iPhone will arrive before the conference's start date of September 17th, 2011 in London. Fox says that if that's the case, it's very likely we'll see the new iPhone jailbroken right there at the event.

Interestingly enough, Fox (pictured, right) isn't a developer, hacker or event planner by trade - he's a carpenter. Cearly, a jailbreaking enthusiast, too. It's a testament to him that he's been able to pull this event off at all, much less attract the big-name developers as both speakers and attendees.

The London event is only the beginning, Fox tells us. By October, he will be ready to announce the dates of future events here in the U.S., as he plans to bring MyGreatFest to both coasts by 2013, starting sometime in spring 2012 with an event in the San Francisco Bay area.

In the meantime, despite the distance, the first jailbreakers' convention has attracted a wide audience of attendees. Tickets have have been sold all over Europe, North America and even India and Singapore. For those who can't make it, sessions will be both livestreamed and posted to YouTube.

The conference has a very grassroots feel, which is makes sense, given that jailbreaking itself is very much a grassroots movement. But now that jailbreaking has its own convention, Apple is stealing jailbreak app developers and the jailbreaking user base is numbering in the millions, this activity is rapidly losing its niche status in favor of mainstream success.

Still, that's not necessarily a bad thing, if you ask us.

For more info on the event, check out MyGreatFest.net.

The Web is buzzing about Apple's World Wide Developer Conference. Of the topics to be discussed at the keynote, Apple's newest product - iCloud - is drawing the most attention. In that vein, a German music-streaming startup called Simfy has filed a lawsuit against Apple for allegedly withholding approval of its iPad application because it is a potential competitor to the iCloud streaming service.

Simfy offers an on-demand streaming service, much like European counterpart Spotify, and operates in Germany, Austria and Switzerland with plans to expand. Given Spotify's troubles to reach the U.S. shores, do not expect Simfy to be leaving the Rheinland any time soon.

Simfy has an iPhone/iPod version of the app available in Europe. That brings up an interesting question: Apple developers sign an agreement that explicitly says they will abide by the rules, guidelines and practices of Apple App Store approval. If Apple denies a claim for any reason, is there legal recourse? Antitrust is a heavy charge and The Bundeskartellamt is the German equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission as it oversees competition between businesses in Germany.

Apple has had a couple issues with app developers over approvals. In the music streaming department, Apple yanked Grooveshark after complaints from a music label in the United Kingdom. Yet, Pandroa, MOG and Rdio all exist happily in the App Store and do well.

Whenever people ask what I'm excited about in technology these days, I sheepishly answer "mobile location". Somehow it feels like it isn't edgy enough or it doesn't have the multiple word power of something like "mobile social photo sharing," but it sure feels like the future to me.

Next week, I won't be alone as the Where 2.0 conference - in its 7th year - brings the best and brightest in location technologies to San Francisco. I got a chance to speak with Brady Forrest, co-chair for the conference, about what we could expect this year.

"Now, getting a user's location is just plumbing," said Forrest. "The next wave is about context and what's happening around the user."

According to Forrest, the hot topics at this year's Where 2.0 are going to be crowdsourcing, context and open places, with proximity edging its way in as the trend to keep an eye on in 2011. If you do a quick run-through of the panels at this year's three-day-long location-centric event, indeed these words pop up all over the place.

First, it was about maps and accessing data. Next, it was offering information around that data. Now, it's offering information around that data but also around ideas like "known strangers" - such as the person your ride the bus with, or eat at the same restaurant as, three times a week. Through proximity, apps will begin to offer a new layer of context, and thereby a new layer of interpersonal interaction.

"The wave right now is context - 'How do I tell people more about themselves?'" explained Forrester. But what's next? "Proximity is the next thing," he said, citing companies like Color, NeuAer and Foursquare.

Color approaches context through gathering location data and quickly pairing nearby users. NeuAer deals with proximity according to wifi or bluetooth signals and allows users to create predetermined responses - such as dropping a pin on a Google Map when they turn off their bluetooth enabled car. Foursquare, on the other hand, still has the check-in to work with and can deal with proximity by way of willing users intentionally submitting their location as they go about their day.

If you're attending Where 2.0 next week, this is where I plan on being - there's a good smattering of events in there for you location fiends and I hope to find some good stories to bring back to you. In the meantime, let us know - what gets you excited in the mobile location space?

I went to SXSW in Austin this month, but once again I struggled to attend as many panels and sessions as I'd wanted to. So I decided to use the Web to find out what I missed, content wise, at SXSW. Here's what I found.

Presentations, Notes & Write-ups

To track presentations, Slideshare is a great place to go. Most (if not all) of the slideshows linked by Lanyrd came from Slideshare.

One of the most compelling features of this year's SXSW sessions was the live cartooning done by digital agency Ogilvy. On its Ogilvy Notes web site, all of the "visual notes" from SXSWi have been collected at one place. It'd be wonderful if visual notes became commonplace at conferences, as they're a handy way to get a quick summary of a panel or keynote.

Here's a visual note from a session I went to at SXSW, Jeffrey Zeldman's Awesome Design Panel:

For write-ups of sessions, you can't go past a good ol' Google search. I searched for "Zeldman panel SXSW 2011" and found this great summary by Guardian staffer Paul MacInnes, on a special Tumblr blog. Indeed the Guardian had stellar coverage from SXSW, with a posse of Tumblr blogs tracking the event. See also ReadWriteWeb's coverage from SXSW.

Audio & Video

Conferences these days often record panels and (if we're lucky) put up the audio on their websites, either during the event or after. Many of the SXSW sessions were recorded and are available as audio on the official SXSW website. For example, here is the full audio from Zeldman's session. The audio player unfortunately doesn't have a download option.

A suggestion for large conference organizers: create podcasts for each stream, so that people can subscribe to them. I'd love to subscribe to a 'media' podcast from SXSW, so I can hear media-focused panels at my leisure on my iPod.

Video from SXSW is scattered all around the Web. There are specialist video programs, like WebBeat.tv - who interviewed me during the event. SXSW has a YouTube channel, but there's not much coverage on it. Fortunately for me, there is some video of one panel that I wanted to see but couldn't: Rebooting Iceland: Crowdsourcing Innovation in Uncertain Times. But generally, you'll have to search the Web and hope that someone took video of the session you're after.

Social Media Coverage

Finally, of course, there is social media coverage from conferences. Twitter and Facebook are great tools to use during the event, but even after the event you can review conferences using services like Storify. ReadWriteWeb's Community Manager Seamus Condron did a virtual scrapbook of SXSW, using Storify. It pulled together coverage from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and other social services.

Overall, tracking conference coverage from afar or after the event isn't a one-stop shop experience. Lanyrd is the closest it comes to having one online destination, but you'll likely want to get your Google search on to compliment that.

Let us know in the comments if you have found other ways to get at the meat of conferences, virtually.

Nearly 50 companies have presented  over the past two days at Jason Calcanis' LAUNCH conference. We've seen everything from well-established companies like StackOverflow launch a job-finder service for its existing members to companies sign $100,000 deals on stage.

Now, it has come to an end and, like most things, a winner (or 13) has to be declared. Here's who came out on top.

40 companies were initially chosen to present on stage and a number of other companies were picked by judges to come up from the "Launch Pad". Now, 13 winners will be chosen with five coming from the "Launch 1.0" group, which consists of brand new companies, and five from the "Launch 2.0" group, which consists of existing companies introducing new products.

Here are the winners:

• Most Likely to Be Acquired in the Next 100 Days: Shoefitr
• Best Design (Launch Pad): Pen.io
• Best Technology (Launch Pad): Fluid Info
• Best Business (Launch Pad): Gripe Line
• Best Overall (Launch Pad): Green Goose
• Best Technology (Launch 2.0): Disconnect
• Best Design (Launch 2.0): Hipmunk
• Best Overall (Launch 2.0): Stack Overflow
• Best Presentation (Launch 1.0): LifeProof Cases
• Best Business Model (Launch 1.0): Volta
• Best Design (Launch 1.0): Cabana
• Best Technology (Launch 1.0): NeuAer
• Best Overall (Launch 1.0): Room 77

Beyond awards, it was also announced that Green Goose closed a $500k round and more than a dozen deals were signed over the past two days.

While the grand jury may have spoken, there's one award we have to give away ourselves: the best presentation at a conference ever. Meet Domo.

Here's the challenge: use any open social media API, like from Flickr or Facebook, mash it up with any of the APIs from the five genealogy companies that offer them to create something which "demonstrates increased value to family historians."

Fast and Dirty

RootsTech itself is pretty much the first of its kind, quickly arranged and feeling its way along. So its sponsors, Family Search, put the word out with only 48 hours to spare, a sort of bar camp or hackathon approach.

Unfortunately, the developers who did attend did not seem comfortable with that quick-fire development approach. One dev in the audience stated in no uncertain terms that 48 hours was not enough time to produce anything functional. However, as Jim Ericson, the Family Search marketing manager in charge of the challenge, said they "didn't want to pull developers out of the sessions." It showed.

Out of the 45 or so developers who came to the initial challenge session, only six or seven individuals or teams signed up and today, only three came to the session. Of those three, only two had functional mashups and, frankly, neither were worth covering in any detail.

One was a mashup that pulled down genealogical information onto your desktop from Twitter, but the hashtag gymnastics were pretty awkward and the question stuck out: why pull information onto your desktop at all given the increasing primacy of the cloud. Even if you did want to do so, wouldn't an RSS feed and right-click save-as be easier? The other presentation felt like a commercial for the developer's software company. If there was a mashup in there somewhere, I couldn't find it.

The Take Away

For me, the take-away from this challenge was a renewed realization that if you want developers to take an interest in your industry, in your conference, in your passion, especially if it is one that is under the normal developer radar, you need to court the community. You need to get out in the community and make yourself known. You need to invite and entice. You need to vet the participants. You need thought leaders to act as attractants for other developers. You need to get the word out. And you need to sacrifice session attendance if you want a lot of quality developers to jump in headfirst.

The baby boomer generation is growing by the day and its members are moving into genealogical activities. Developers who are already in the genealogy space, or who get in soon, and who create appealing applications that make family historian's work easier or more efficient, will see their users grow. But next time, RootsTech will need to make them a priority.

Programmer photo by Cory Doctorow | BarCamp photo via Wikimedia Commons

Editor's disclosure: RootsTech covered Mr. Hopkins' airfare and hotel.

Verkler is not your average genealogist (whatever that is). His background is not spending sleepless nights knee-deep in 18th century census records. He's a graduate of MIT and spent most of his career in Silicon Valley, at companies including Oracle, Sales.com and push technology company inCommon, which he founded.

Microfilm to the Cloud

Family Search's experience with state-of-the-art tech ranges back to the late 1930s when they were the first archive to start using microfilm.

"Other archives were thinking about using microfilm, but we wanted to take copies of records and given them to others so they didn't need to come to the where the records were stored. We used microfilm as a transfer medium and we wound up writing a whole bunch of the standards on microfilm production in the Seventies because we'd been doing it for thirty years at that time."

Verkler says Family Search's activities with current tech fall into three "buckets," social genealogy, digitization and community.

Family Search is currently building a social tool that allows family historians to work on augmenting the same document or sets of documents without overwriting one another or creating duplicate records. The digitization is ongoing. The community is twofold, online and offline.

The organization has a wiki which is growing, capturing the knowledge and process savvy of historians around the world and acting as a kind of virtual training group for other historians. The goal of this wiki is to act as a definitive and yet dynamic guide to best practices.

Crowdsourcing and Data Viability

A great deal of the digitization work at Family Search is volunteer-driven. For a non-profit, even one funded by a group as large as the LDS church, facing the task of putting billions of documents into an electronic storage medium and then sharing those documents online is an overwhelming task. A volunteer cadre of tens of thousands of people is integral to that task.

What was unexpected to me about this organization was how virtual they already are. Most of the 3.3 billion records they already hold from sources around the U.S. and the world are not the originals, but copies.

"The orginal documents may come from a little church somewhere in Europe. They're not going to give us those documents and we don't want them."

But they do want to capture images of those records so the information lives on. In fact, a key concept at Family Search is the notion of data viability.

"(As a high-tech executive) I used to think in terms of the software as primary and data as interchangeable. Now I think exactly the opposite. The information in the records must survive even as the machinery and the software that reads it changes."

The information that originally existed in documents and letters and ledgers was transfered to photographs, then to microfilm, then to computer tape, to floppies, then PCs and then to thumb-drives and now the cloud. The data remains the same, regardless of the method of capturing it. And now as original data is born digitally, that must also be preserved for a future whose data reading protocols beggar our contemporary imagination. That, according to Verkler, is the future of genealogy. Data preservation.

Editor's disclosure: RootsTech covered Mr. Hopkins' airfare and hotel.

What sets this conference apart is the average age, which can't have been below sixty, and the nature of the listeners, the overwhelming majority of whom are not developers or tech marketers, but genealogists.

Putting their technology where their conference is, RootsTech is streaming its keynotes online and the flood of family history bloggers are tweeting it with the #rootstech hashtag. Talks include the use of cloud computing in family research and use of media sharing sites to preserve individual family history.

Sessions move from very soft tech, like which genealogical websites to use for what, to very hard, including an examination of the the mobile web and "Bringing Distributed Version Control to Arbitrary Object Graphs."

Perhaps the most interesting undertaking is a programming contest. Programmers were invited to use the FamilySearch API to create a genealogical tool. The winners will receive a small cash prize.

Taking place in Salt Lake City, the conference is leveraging the Latter Day Saints' long-standing love-affair with family research. As far as genealogy goes, the church serves the function that Nike does in sports products in the Northwest, as a center-of-gravity and attractant. The area's genealogical libraries are legendary and were among the first targets of FamilySearch's move online beginning in 1989, 104 years after the company's beginning as the Genealogical Society of Utah. It currently has a vast database that includes over a billion names in its searchable database.

In the next day or two I'll examine the API contests' contestants and winners and talk to its CEO about the technological future of our families' pasts.

Salt Palace photo by Jingles the Pirate. Yep.

Editor's disclosure: RootsTech covered Mr. Hopkins' airfare and hotel.

How big is social media these days? Big enough to get its own week. This week is Social Media Week, if you hadn't heard, and its taking place in nine cities across the globe. It's a week-long extravaganza of free (or cheap) talks, roundtables, panels, happy hours and other events and we thought we would take a look and give our top five, must-attend events of the week.

Social Media Week is already in full swing, so if you're just getting started now, you've already missed out on a few must-see events, but there's still several days left, so fret not.

• Ignite San Francisco at Public Works: 6-10 p.m. Tuesday
  If you've never been to an Ignite event before, it works something like this: Someone gets on stage and they have five minutes to talk about something interesting with 20 slides that automatically change every 15 seconds.
• Social Media Club SF Game Night at 330 Ritch: 7- 10 p.m Tuesday (alternate)
  If board games, beer, and real-life social networking is your thing, then nevermind going to a talk, grab yourself a brewsky and get to know some folks over classic board games and NES standards like Contra, Excite Bike and more.
• A Discussion on Location-Based Social Apps at Madrone Studios: 5-6 p.m Wednesday
  Moderated by TechCrunch's MG Siegler, this event will dive into the idea of location-based social media, one of the hot topics of 2010 and sure to stick around for 2011. Speaking at the event will be Instagram's Kevin Systrom, Foodspotting's Alexa Andrzejewski and PicPlz's Dalton Caldwell.
• Why Community Managers Won't Exists in 5 Years (and why that's a good thing) at UserVoice: 5-8 p.m Thursday
  If you can get into this one, it's sure to be an interesting conversation. Though the job of the community manager may have been around since the days of BBSes, it's a relatively new job title and already, we're calling for its demise. This one is going to be lead by UserVoice community manager Evan Hamilton, who plans on arguing that his own position will be obsolete in five years. According to the event description, if you plan on hurling any rotten fruit, you'll have to bring your own.
• Snackers Lounge Daily Happy Hour at Library Bar: 5-8 p.m. Tuesday thru Thursday
  If you've had enough for the day and 5 p.m. is quitting time, head over to Library Bar to meet up with the rest of the social media mavens and grab some discounted drinks before continuing with your evening. Who can complain about discounted drinks, right? We're sure the discussion will revolve around the latest in hashtags, social media analytics and Twitter etiquette, among other topics.
• The Future of the Social Web at CBS Interactive: 3:30-4:15 Friday
  Moderated by Mashable's Ben Parr, the panel will consist of The Next Web's Hermoine Way, Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal and Edelman Digital VP of Social Media Michael Brito. What better way to end your week of social media filled fun than with predictions for the future?

For the full list of events, you can check out the social media channel on Plancast or look at the official listing on the Social Media Week website. Of course, like any list of events, we've likely either left something out, passed over a gem or missed out on something entirely, so if you know of some must-see events happening this week in San Francisco, let us know in the comments below...and maybe we'll see you there!