ReadWriteWeb

We've been keeping an eye on real-time search company Collecta for a while now, and we've been consistently impressed with their product.

The startup has been making headlines throughout 2009 and is wrapping up the year with a bang. This morning, they announced a partnership with MySpace. The resulting utility is part pulse check, part search engine, and all fun. It also serves as an automatically refreshing reminder that this social network is far from dead yet, especially where entertainment properties are concerned.

The National Venture Capital Association released its annual survey of VC predictions for next year this morning and it doesn't look good for small startup companies. Though most VCs said they expected more money to be invested next year, most predicted a contraction in the number of firms available to invest, a decrease in seed and early-stage funding and an emphasis on large sums invested in more established companies seeking further growth.

That's not good for early-stage innovation, something the association acknowledges in its published report.

Our startup-minded readers may remember Mike Trotzke, our good friend who, with a little help from his good friends Marc Guyer and Brad Wisler, founded a startup incubator called SproutBox earlier this year.

One of the latest sprouts to emerge from the box is Squad, Trotzke's gift to developers everywhere - and we mean everywhere! This web-based environment allows distributed teams to collaborate in real time, opening, editing and sharing code from anywhere with an Internet connection.

Y Combinator's getting pretty fancy with their very detailed Request for Startups idea, which was somewhat like their "Startups We'd Like to Fund" post of yesteryear. Basically, rather than suffer through the dissatisfaction of loving the apps they're with, the good folks at the aforementioned accelerator program decided to give developers a little insight on what their startup wishlist might look like.

Never ones to be outdone, we at ReadWriteWeb have labored intensely and discussed among ourselves to produce this app wishlist. We can't offer funding, but it would make us picky little Internet geeks terribly happy if someone developed any of the six apps listed below. You know, while we're waiting for the flying cars and food replicators.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Israelis were considered gurus in technology, research, and innovation. While the dot-com boom infused the offices of San Francisco with color, creativity, hope, and foosball tables, Israelis were hard at work in a fairly strict environment creating and developing digital infrastructure, inventing new approaches to network security, and leading the field in hardware-oriented projects.

There was a myth that Israelis were not very good at creating consumer-facing products. Notwithstanding their creation of ICQ, Israelis were known as engineers and researchers who did well within the confines of a lab but not so well when reaching out to end consumers. Over the last couple of years, though, the high-tech industry in Israel has gone through dramatic changes.

Pandora is one of the Internet's slow and steady success stories.

After years of work and more than $20 million dollars invested, the company is finally looking at the light of the end of the tunnel: Turning a profit. In this exclusive interview with founder Tim Westergren after a town hall meetup in Richmond, Virginia, we discuss the company's close call with bankruptcy in 2007, their ad-based revenue model, their roadmap for adding new features and an open API, and their incorporation into a variety of hardware devices.

No ambitious young person wants to wait until graduation to start working on projects, developing ideas, and building teams. As a case in point, consider how many success stories from the dotcom and Web 2.0 eras have begun with brilliant twenty-somethings dropping out of college to pursue their passions.

Speaking directly to this concern (or phenomenon, depending on your perspective), two students at the New York University Stern School of Business and a former MySpace IT director have started FledgeWing, a new social network that aims to connect aspiring student entrepreneurs with one another as well as with mentors, investors, and industry professionals.

By now, we are all familiar with Mark Zuckerberg's success story. The explosive international growth of Facebook to over 200 million users continues to land the young founder and CEO in top news stories worldwide. Recently, Time Magazine named Zuckerberg one of the world's most influential people of 2008, and Fast Company named Facebook number 15 in its list of the world's 50 most innovative companies of 2009. At just 23 years of age, Zuckerberg even briefly made Forbes' 400 richest Americans list, temporarily giving him the title of World's Youngest Billionaire.

However we have heard very few stories about Zuckerberg and the inspiration behind Facebook during the period prior to February 4th, 2004, the day he launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. In this post we tell that story.

"Now is the time for people who care, who want to invent, who have skills in specific scientific and information technology areas, to get out there and add to the productivity of the economy," Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft said during the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture at Stanford University last week.

"The question is," he continued, "will you have the passion and the tenacity and the interest to really start something that's important?"

When we first reviewed Posterous, we called it a 'minimalist blogging service.' All you have to do to start blogging and sharing content on the service is to send an email to post AT posterous.com and it will automatically set up a blog for you. Now, however, Posterous is expanding its service and slightly changing its direction by adding a bookmarklet that puts it on a direct collision course with tumblr, the popular microblogging site.

This week's RWW Live podcast show was on the topic of how startups can navigate through the choppy waters of the current economy. We've already posted today on a two year old life-story repository startup called Dandelife, which is struggling - although we were able to draw some lessons from that. But it's also good to look at the startups that continue to battle away. Our podcast guests were two examples of that - BrightKite and Zoho. Both were recognized by ReadWriteWeb in our annual end of the year awards: Zoho won 'Best Little Co' and BrightKite won 'Most Promising Little Co'. In the podcast they had some excellent advice for startups, so in this post we review some of those tips; and we invite you to add your own tips in the comments.

Two year old life-story repository Dandelife seemed to have everything going for it. It launched to praise from some of the biggest tech blogs on the web, it built a wildly loyal user base and its company advisory board was stocked with some of the biggest names in social media. Apparently that hasn't been enough, though. Last night Dandelife founder Kelly Abbott announced that the software will be made open source this year, acknowledging that the company hasn't grown or made money and that he made some important mistakes from the start.

It's an interesting story that other entrepreneurs can learn from and Abbott has done a real service in opening up honestly about what's going on at Dandelife.

In the first RWW Live of 2009, we tackle an issue that is of vital importance to all startups right now - how to navigate through the choppy waters of the current economy. Join the ReadWriteWeb authors and special guests on our live podcast show. Our guests are entrepreneurs from BrightKite and Zoho, two startups that were recognized by ReadWriteWeb in our annual end of the year awards: Zoho won 'Best Little Co' and BrightKite won 'Most Promising Little Co'.

A red colored iPhone has been on the rumor mill for some time, but today French blogger Steve Hemmerstoffer sent us some photos of one. He told us via email that the source was anonymous. We've heard already this year about a pink iPhone hitting eBay, which Engadget thinks was the result of "some OEM in Asia whipping up custom colors." We're a little skeptical too of these red iphone photos, but with Macworld nearly upon us...who knows? And it would make sense for Apple to release a red iPhone for the Product (RED) campaign.

Startup aficionado Dave McClure has formally joined VC firm the Founders Fund as an angel investor, according to an update he made to his LinkedIn profile this week. The Founders Fund was created by former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel in 2005 and is described by author Sarah Lacy as having an ethos "rooted in giving founders better terms and getting out of their way."

Founders Fund has invested in some of the most high profile startups in the market, including Facebook and Slide.com. We covered the move in depth over on Jobwire, our site reporting on new hires in tech.

Vator.tv, a social media site for entrepreneurs, announced a micro-blogging service for startups today that allows these companies to update their followers about the latest developments at their companies. This micro-blogging service works similar to Twitter, though the character limit has been raised from 140 to 280. Currently, only ten companies are using this feature during the alpha program, as Vator.tv was worried about potential scalability issues. These ten companies are Occipital, Nimbuzz, Blippr, Indaba Music, Crispy Gamer, Wize, Ignighter, Famplosion, Vayyoo, and Buzzd. Vator.tv expects to roll out a larger beta program within the next month.

Editor's note: we're currently running a series of posts from our long-term sponsors, focused on use cases and business advice. We hope you find these posts useful and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Use of hosted software as a service (SaaS) is growing like crazy, and most products are constantly evolving. What is the best strategy for a tech startup: share its product road map (i.e. its development plans) with the outside world, or keep its cards close to the chest?

Editor's note: we're currently running a series of 'Sponsor Posts', focused on use cases and business stories. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Wild Apricot is a young technology company out of Toronto, Canada. We provide Software-as-as-Service for associations, clubs, and non-profit organizations. This is our story of an investment round that fell through due to economic conditions.

We love this story. Back in July we wrote about the inspiring experience of Peldi Guilizzoni, a lone software developer who'd built a web design mock-up tool called Balsamiq and who was opening up his financial records on his blog to show everyone how things were going. We'd been following his progress since before he launched, but just 6 weeks after Balsamiq hit the market at roughly $79 per license, we wrote that Peldi had already made $10k in revenue.

That was a cute story, but now it's been just 5 months and today Peldi reports that he's just cleared $100,000 in sales of the four variations of his product. Talk about a simple tool coming along at just the right time! It's cool software, too.

Microsoft today announced that it will give away software and services to qualifying software startups as part of its newly announced BizSpark initiative. To qualify for this program, a startup has to be privately held, in business for under three years, and generate less than $1 million per year in revenue. Once accepted into BizSpark, enrollment is free, but the startups will have to pay a nominal fee of $100 when they leave the program.