Our inaugural meetup will be held in the city with the highest concentration of ReadWriteWeb writers, Portland, Oregon, on October 13 at the Green Dragon. Richard MacManus, our esteemed Founder and Editor in Chief, will even be there, all the way from New Zealand, so if you're in the area, please do stop in and say hello. Click here to RSVP, we'd love to see you there!

Please bring your cameras because we'll be posting the pics from the event to the ReadWriteWeb Facebook page and a few will go out via our Twitter account (@RWW).

Can't make it to Portland? Join us for our first Worldwide ReadWriteWeb Meetup Day (say that fast 5 times) on November 15, 2011. Just search for your city and join your local ReadWriteWeb meetup group. Suggest a location and meetup!

There are already a number of meetups set for November 10 in cities around the world, including Savannah, GA; Cambridge, MA, St. Louis, MO and Wellington, New Zealand.

The good people at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon found themselves in just such a situation and have leveraged an interesting new mobile publishing platform in order to capture some of the value of place-based digital content in order to share it with their patrons.

The new Portland Art Museum iPhone app is built on top of a platform called Meridian, by a company called Spotlight Mobile. The platform provides content and venue owners a super-simple graphic user interface to upload digital assets, input text and other information and then click to associate those assets with a very particular place in a particular room on a map.

While publishing, users are encouraged to recite with a dramatic flair and a magician's voice the words, "art history, from around the world...get into this phone!" (Just kidding - but it is something magical, is it not?)

As you might imagine, the app lets you select your location or key in an exhibit number and then enjoy the digital assets on your phone, in some cases a video or audio lecture about a particular piece of art - in other cases simply more text content than is displayed off-line. The museum will roll out a new section of the app for the historic auto show beginning today. Spotlight says that Android versions of its apps will be launching in the coming weeks.

A user's location isn't automatically detected in this app, though Spotlight Mobile says that it does just that at the American Natural History Museum in New York through a technology partnership with CISCO.

In addition to media assets, the app also offers maps and will soon offer dynamic directions to get from one part of a venue to another.

The best part of all this of course is the Content Management System. Just as blogging democratized the world of text publishing beyond the technical elite who practiced it first online, and sites like Flickr and YouTube made media publishing easy - Meridian falls into the same class of technologies by making it drop-dead simple for anyone to publish their content in an app format and tie it to very specific places. That's very cool.

The question this raises, then, is: so how much content can I as a patron get about the art I'm standing in front of? Unfortunately, in the case of the Portland Art Museum - not very much. Art snobs often turn their nose up at the Portland collection (I live in Portland and think they are wrong - I like it quite a bit) but this technology snob (?) has to say that the mobile offering is far too sparse today. If the dream is of standing in front of any piece in the museum and learning more about it, of peeking through your phone into another dimension where the art's history and context stand clearly visible around it - that remains a dream for now. How many pieces in the Portland Art Museum's permanent collection have media available on this app? I hesitate to even say it explicitly, but it's...eleven. Ouch.

Of course anyone else who's jumped into the new world of democratized publishing online knows that when it's said these technologies make it easy - that just means it's easy to click a button and have content go live. That doesn't make it any easier to find the time, inspiration and skill to actually produce the content that will then be published.

I used to stand in front of works of art at the museum and suspect that the museum itself had a whole treasure trove of additional information about what I was looking at, beyond what was posted on the wall. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe they do and it's just not in a friendly format.

The end result is an experience that's promising but for now a little disappointing. Hopefully a lot more content will be created and published over time. I suspect there is a lot more information about much of this art out on the internet - perhaps if there was a way to efficiently vet and build on it then all of this would be made easier.

Such is one of the key challenges of our time, though. Now that anyone can publish - what will you say? How will you do it? Placing that challenge of media transformation and newfound ease in the context of mobile and specific location, especially for venerable institutions like art museums, is a very interesting prospect.

More Hyperlocal Bing Services Coming Soon

As Tiedt told is, the food cart site, which was developed by a single programmer at Microsoft, is a good example of the services that Microsoft hopes to create in the future. Portland is currently a test market for Microsoft and given that the city is known for its food and music scene, it makes sense for the company to launch a food oriented service, as well as sponsoring Alpha Broadcasting's new Bing Lounge for live performances (Bing will showcase these performances on its entertainment site). For other cities, Tiedt said that she could envision similar sites and partnerships, though Microsoft doesn't currently have any specific plans to announce. She did point out, however, that Microsoft looks at these services as a way to distinguish itself from its competitors.

30 consecutive hours of music, variety acts, podcasts and other entertainment will raise money for local charity organizations. Will it work? Portland has a deep community of geeks and connections all around the web, so perhaps this group will be able to keep people entertained around the clock.

You can follow the event on Twitter at @30hourday.

• A minimum of $1 million. We don't want $50,000 financing being called Series A. Sorry, no grade inflation here.
• Lead Institutional VC. There are plenty of other very good types of financing. We celebrate bootstrappers in our Gritty Entrepreneurs series. Angels are wonderful, and we all love friends and family. But this series is about the classic VC fund, the core of the start-up financing world. We only report the lead VC because that is what matters: with a good lead there is never a shortage of followers.
• Reported data. We need to see the dollar amount and the lead VC publicly reported. No "unreported sum" or "undisclosed investors." If you want to be stealthy, you don't need any visibility, which is fine.
• Web technology only. We are seeing a lot in alternative energy, biotech, and other sectors, which is all very interesting, but not what we do at ReadWriteWeb.
• Series A only. We recognize that getting Series B or C financing is important as well, but it is hard to see from public data whether these are really positive events or not. During a downturn, many of them, sadly, will be down rounds that protect VC capital but, because of onerous preference terms, often leave the entrepreneurs with very little. We don't want to celebrate something only to find it is viewed as negative by the participants. But everybody can celebrate a Series A: it speaks of optimism, new trends, and a go-for-it spirit.

The Heroes And their Partners

We believe that entrepreneurs are the heroes, but we also really want to celebrate their partners, the VC guys who have the guts to go against the trend and back them during tough times. All VCs talk the talk, which is that this is a great time for investing. We want to report on the ones who actually walk the walk as well. There is only one way to get into this list: close a Series A round and wire the money.

We want to use this to learn about changes in the VC business and so that entrepreneurs can see who is actually doing deals today.

Our A-Team Series Starts in October

October 2008 was a unique month for anybody in the business world. The word that kept dropping from the lips of even the most experienced been-there, done-that kind of person was "unprecedented." These are not normal times. And October was certainly not a normal month.

So, the October list was pretty short. We have heard plenty of stories from entrepreneurs about deals that were agreed on and in the final legal phase but that got pulled in September and October. We did not track September because the worst and final phase of the crash kicked in mid-September, and deals were still being done in the early days of September. So, October was the first full month of the new reality.

We count from the date when the deal was announced. But we recognize that the contract may have been signed some weeks before then.

Enough Preamble. What Deals Were Done?

Oops! Using our strict criteria, only one deal was done in October. We saw some that came close. We saw a seed round of $225,000 for a game company called Kirkland North from a venture fund called Harrison Meta Capital. We saw a Series B for $4.5 million coming from RRE Ventures to our good friends at Adaptive Blue. We saw an Israeli company called CogniSafe getting an undisclosed seed round from 21 VCs.

The one deal that squeaked into October was Zimbio with a $6.8 million Series A from DFJ and Menlo Ventures. The deal was announced on September 30th. So it is entirely possible (indeed probable) that this contract was signed before our official Meltdown Day. But the deal got done, and that is what matters.

Zimbio has very few facts on its "About Us" page. TradeVibes at least has a CEO listed; so we tracked down Anthony Mamone, and the data was sparse, not even a LinkedIn profile. All we found was a sketchy profile on Link Silicon Valley.

A Special Cheer for Syncplicity and True Ventures

The deal that kicked off the A-Team series and gave us the idea for it was the one with Syncplicity with its $2.35 million Series A funding from True Ventures. So we went to meet Leonard Chung, CEO, at True Venture's offices in San Francisco. True Venture's open-plan offices on Pier 38 do not look like classic VC, and that is probably the point. Phil Black of True Ventures made the point that ever-increasing fund sizes were taking VC away from its entrepreneurial start-up roots.

Then we noticed that our friends at GigaOm have their offices right next door. No coincidence as it happens, True Ventures was the lead investor in their Series A funding. So, True Ventures is a founding member of our A-Team. Take your best venture to them!

We have not had time to fully review Syncplicity yet. We promise to do so soon. So, in the meantime, we will fall back on the journalistic standby, quoting from its site:

"Everyday sync, backup, and sharing as simple as can be. The only all-in-one service that makes sure your files are everywhere you need them."

That is a crowded space. But so was search when Google entered the market. Getting an A round done in today's market makes one think they must have done something right, so we will check them out and urge you to do the same.

Good News from a November Sneak Peek

Here is the good news. Taking a sneak peek at November, around the middle of the month, we already see quite a few Series A deals that meet all of our criteria. We will tell all in our A-Team report in early December.

Who did we miss in October? (No spam please; look at the qualifying rules above.)