ReadWriteWeb

The scientific and academic research tool Mendeley has announced a contest aimed at encouraging developers to build apps on top of Mendeley's open database. That database includes over 70 million research papers, usage statistics, reader demographics, social tags and related research recommendations. The winning app will receive a grand prize of $10,001.

Describing itself as a Last.fm of sorts for academic research, Mendeley isn't simply a bibliographic management tool as it is able to glean information from aggregated data to help track trending research topics.

Innovations in communications software and websites can be quite exciting. After the dust dies down, however, it's really not clear how much more information has been made available, how many more people can communicate, how much more thinking has been enabled.

London-based Mendeley is offering an open API and making a vast catalog of academic publications searchable, which, well, might make the cut.

We're happy to report that energy is high for the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th; in addition to a strong Silicon Valley presence, companies are coming from around the world to participate.

We want to take a moment to highlight five international companies that will be at the Summit. We really appreciate the distance they are traveling to help make this event an important one. You can learn about more highlighted participants signed up so far on this page and you can sign up to join us here.