In the coming weeks, the Events Guide will be turning into a jet-setting tour of the international tech scene. Next week is London with the Cloud Computing World Forum . Then comes Marseilles, France ( Lift France ), Melbourne, Australia ( Digital Sport Summit ) and Singapore ( Social Media World Forum Asia ). You can import individual events in the Events Guide into Google Calendar using the link beside each entry, or download the entire thing as an iCal file (which is importable into Google Calendar, Outlook, Windows Live Calendar, etc.) or even view it as a world map . Know of something cool taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us . Sponsor 29 – 30 June 2010: London Cloud Computing World Forum The 2nd annual Cloud Computing World Forum is the perfect event to learn and discuss the development, integration, adoption and future of cloud computing and SaaS. Building on the success of the 2009 show, this two day conference and free-to-attend exhibition will provide a focused platform for the global cloud and SaaS industry. Show highlights include: Co-located with CloudCamp London Co-located with Green IT conference Free-to-attend exhibition with seminar and scenario theatre Free-to-attend evening awards presentation Hear from leading case studies on how they have integrated cloud computing and SaaS into their working practices Learn from the key players offering cloud and SaaS services Evening networking party for all attendees 5 – 7 July 2010: Marseilles, France Lift France ‘10 Lift France gathers pioneers from all over the world to explore how the technologies and concepts of the Web are changing the real world. Through a combination of workshops, inspiring talks, and innovative demos, Lift offers a chance to anticipate the major shifts ahead, and meet the people who drive them. Together we will explore 4 major topics: “Web Squared”, Making Sense of the World through Shared Data “Fab Labs”, Reinventing Manufacturing People Hacks”, Distributing Control and Knowledge “Privacy Revisited”, Protect and Project Speakers include Sam Pitroda, advisor to India’s PM on innovation; Alma Whitten, Google’s privacy lead; Haakon Karlsen, Fab Labs Foundation; Michael Cross, FreeOurData.org ; Amit Zoran, MIT Smart Cities Lab; Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, French minister for the Digital Economy; Geoff Mulgan, the Young Foundation. 6 July 2010: Online The Influencer Project ThoughtLead presents The Influencer Project : 60 speakers. 60 minutes. 60 different ways to increase your influence online. We’re pretty sure it’s the shortest marketing conference ever. You’ll learn from new media luminaries like Robert Scoble, Anne Holland, Tony Hsieh, David Meeman Scott, Gary Vaynerchuk, John Jantsch, Ann Handley, Brian Solis, Read Write Web’s own Marshall Kirkpatrick, and many more. Sponsored by HubSpot and available via webcast and phone, the conference takes places July 6, at 6 p.m. Eastern (GMT – 4:00). Registration is free, and comes with the MP3 recording and PDF transcript of the event. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to become the 60th speaker with ThoughtLead’s “Influence in 140 Characters.” To learn more and register, click here . 7 July 2010: Melbourne, Australia Digital Sport Summit Digital Sport Summit is Australia’s premier sport and digital media event. Hear from social media pioneers who are changing the face of Australian sport. Learn how social media and mobile technology is taking fan engagement to a whole new level. Speakers on the day will cover a variety of topics including: iPhone application development for sport Convincing management of the case for social media How to monetize social media Fantasy sports Social media from an athlete’s perspective With speakers representing Essendon Football Club, Cricket Victoria, Herald Sun, Football Federation Australia and more. Digital Sport Summit will take place at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. 22 – 23 September 2010: Singapore Social Media World Forum Asia Social Media World Forum Asia is back for 2010. The event will be taking place at the larger venue – The Suntec Conference Centre – before the F1 Singapore night race. Two days of interactive and engaging conference featuring leading key figure keynotes, brand case studies, topical Q&A and debates, exhibition hall, workshops and networking. Speakers include: Blake Chandlee, VP & Commercial Director, EMEA, Facebook Nicki Kenyon, Vice President, Digital Marketing APMEA, MasterCard Reynold D’Silva, Global Brand Marketing Manager, Unilever Pooja Arora, Brand Manager, P&G Thomas Crampton, Asia-Pacific Director, 360 Digital Influence, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide Lito S. German, Marketing Director, BMW Group Asia Ranjeet-Shandu Singh, Digital Project Manager, Ogilvy One Singapore Derek Yeo, Head of Marketing, Tiger Airways 5 October 2010: New York City FinovateFall FinovateFall will return to Manhattan on Tuesday, October 5 to showcase dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology from established leaders and hot young companies. The Fall event is the original and largest Finovate and features a single day packed with our special blend of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) and intimate networking time with top executives from the innovative demoing companies. FinovateFall is a unique chance to see the future of finance and banking before your competition and find the edge you need in today’s market. Early bird registration rates are available. 29 – 30 March 2011: London Social Media World Forum Europe Social Media World Forum Europe : Two days of interactive & engaging conference featuring leading key figure keynotes, brand case studies, topical Q&A and debates, exhibition hall, workshops and networking. Social Media World Forum Europe is continuing to evolve and deliver an event which is second to none, ensuring our audience receive the maximum potential from attending our shows. New for 2011 we have introduced interactive panel discussions, live streamed debate sessions, collaborative learning, break-out group discussions, open Q&A portions in every session, open workshops, with group discussions and interactive zones within the exhibition hall. We have introduced the Online Marketing Toolbox Workshops, educating in all elements of the online marketing mix, such as SEO, Paid Search, Affiliate, Mobile & Apps. The perfect toolbox to complete your online marketing strategy. Download this entire events calendar in iCal format. Discuss

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Is your app awesome but undiscovered? If so, the BlackBerry Developer Challenge could be your ticket to digital tech fame. Nearly $1.5 million in prizes are up for grabs for the developer who can create the next great BlackBerry Super App, one that creates a personalized, must-have user experience. The best part is that prizes are geared toward helping winners build success and recognition for their product. This includes marketing and promotional programs, featured placement on BlackBerry App World, and developer services from leading industry partners. Sponsor This post is brought to you by BlackBerry. Now that your ears have perked up, here are the details: Your Super App will be judged on six characteristics, including the ability to run in the background, integrate with native BlackBerry apps, provide useful notifications and alerts, and more. You can enter if your app fits into one of the following seven categories: Productivity, Fun & Games, Knowledge, Sharing, Navigate & Explore, Multi-Media, or In The Know. If you’re sure you have a Super App in your possession, entering the contest is the easy part. Either click here , fill out a registration form, or if you’re accepted into App World during the submission period, you’ll receive an invitation to apply. Make sure you enter by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on September 6, 2010. Additional details about the Super App Challenge, as well as the official rules, can be found on the BlackBerry Super App website . Discuss

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Almost one year ago we started a post series that presented three different webs that are all made for machines. Now it is time to connect those webs and look at examples of how they can be used. To recap, first we looked at the Web of Data , which contains open, structured data sets consisting of factual knowledge that are linked. Second was the Web of Identities , which is like the Web of Data, but for people data. Its ability protect one’s privacy and to cope with data volatility differentiates it from the Web of Data. In the Web of Identities, it’s people’s social graphs that link one identity to another. Sponsor “The openness and availability of data, people data and services pave the way to an interoperating ecosystem… ” Third was the Web of Services , which makes services accessible and processable. Their semantic annotation makes them a part of this series of webs. Machines can be taught to autonomously detect, apply and replace a service, or even link them by chaining or orchestrating them to solve bigger problems or to achieve redundancy or scalability. For the last several years, mashups have shown us that through APIs, amateur programmers and startups have the ability to access data and services and thereby create appealing new services at low cost and at a low entry barrier. Often, the interfaces are proprietary and lack a standardization so that mashup services are hardwired to data and service sources. If one puzzle piece fails, the whole service fails. Usually there are no fall-back mechanisms to automatically replace a data or service source on failure. The three webs form the basis for tomorrow’s mashup generation. All webs follow basic Web principles , such as modularization, de-centrality and simplicity, and provide accessibility and detectability. The openness and availability of data, people data and services pave the way to an interoperating ecosystem of companies serving the fragments of tomorrow’s services. The following scenarios all utilize all three webs. Just like Richard MacManus asked ” What would you build with a Web of Data? ” this time we ask: What would you build given all these webs? Feel free to contribute your own ideas in the comments section! Here are my app ideas. Pretty Social Recommendations Bob addresses a service that provides social recommendations, which is based on the webs. He queries “recommend books about Berlin for my mother for Christmas” . The service analyzes his query and splits it to a chain of subtasks, which it starts to process. From the Web of Data, the service gathers general (common sense) knowledge about the terms used in the query. Like this, the service learns that a book is an purchasable item, that Berlin is a city in Germany, and so forth. The service also semantically understands “books about Berlin” and queries the Web of Data for books covering Berlin or authors born or living in Berlin. This initial book list must be filtered using individual and contextual parameters now: Given permission from Bob, his identity provider (IDP) is called to return his mother’s Web ID (a Web ID is a standardized identifier linking to the user’s profile at the IDP of trust) from his social graph. The mother’s IDP is called to access data about the the topic fields, books , and, Berlin , she is interested in. The IDP returns a set of information the mother granted access to her family. The data contains general interests, some book purchases, reviews, comments, ratings and some attention data that was recorded observing her reading articles online. The service continues by querying the mother’s closest friends’ IDPs to see if one of them liked or recommends books about Berlin, since friends’ recommendations are the most valuable. The service now searches and calls a ranking service from the Web of Services that can handle books, personal interests and recommendations as input criteria and returns a ranked list of books. In order to find the best deals for the remaining books, the service now compares and bargains prices at several book stores via the Web of Services limiting to those that guarantee a delivery before December 24. Finally, the list of books is augmented with prices from different stores and then presented to Bob. Bob selects a book and pays with a checkout service from the Web of Services. Next page: Mass Customization Mass Customization Alice recently graduated from a university. She knows that she needs an insurance package but has no idea what it should consist of. She’s heard of an intelligent insurance packaging brokerage system which she visits using her browser. She logs into the system with the Web ID she got from her IDP. From the Web of Identities, and with her permission, the system initiates a profile lookup to gather information needed for the components of the insurance package. This saves her precious time. It queries for information like private address, marriage status, age and gender. Since it can’t find her current income, it prompts her directly. From the Web of Data, the system now queries for her neighborhood’s crime statistics for risk estimates. The system then looks up insurance services it can find on the Web of Services. It configures the services with the knowledge gathered, selects the best offers and combines them to a personalized insurance package. The package consists of products from different insurers from around the globe. She signs the contracts through the broker and logs out with the satisfaction that she now is neither under- nor over-insured. Further Application Areas The webs can also be used to filter the real-time Web to individual and context-relevant content. Easy-to-use activity stream queries that are above the level of a single social platform become feasible like “filter by private friends nearby” or “filter by business contacts living in Wellington talking about the real-time Web” . How about a pinch of sentiment analysis: “filter by my boss but only if he is really upset” or “filter by brand XY but only if the community is getting nasty” . Without a doubt these data and services sources can help to improve lots of existing services at low cost, including augmented reality or location-based services. Valuable knowledge can be provided for locations found on the Web of Data, friends can be displayed if they agreed to expose their location to the querying person via the Web of Identities, and so forth. These are only a handful of thoughts for a whole new era of applications fueled by an open, linked and semantic basis for data and service sources. What applications can you think of? Or do you find all this creepy? Discuss

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Despite the rollback on some of Facebook’s heavily-debated privacy changes , the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary still has questions for Facebook’s CEO. On Friday, Representative John Conyers (D-MI) sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter requesting additional information on Facebook’s privacy activities. “(W)e would appreciate a detailed explanation of the information about Facebook users that your company has provided to third parties without the knowledge of the account holders — particularly in circumstances in which the user did not expressly opt for this type of information sharing.” Sponsor Conyers goes on to say: “Please explain your prior policies with respect to user consent for information sharing, and with whom any information was shared. Also, please detail how the new policies Facebook is adopting differ from past practices, including whether the burden is on the user to opt in or opt out of the relevant privacy settings.” The blog Inside Facebook interprets the Judiciary Committee’s interest like this. “The first sentence of the excerpt, above, appears to be about the nature of how Instant Personalization works, along with an allusion to the more general changes that Facebook made to General Information in recent months. The second sentence appears to be about those general changes. The final sentence appears to ask if the new changes impact Instant Personalization’s opt-out setting.” Because of its popularity and its sweeping changes to a default public status for all users, Facebook has definitely assumed center focus in the discussion on online privacy. But other issues, like use of private information in online advertising, has also assumed importance enough to attract the attention of the Congress . If nothing else, the continued interest in Facebook by the U.S. government indicates that regardless of users’ feelings, Congress isn’t done with it yet. Discuss

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The launch of the “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha was one of the most anticipated product launches of early 2009. Since then, it’s been rather quiet around Wolfram Alpha, even though the company continues to add new features and data on a regular basis. Today, we had a chance to talk to Wolfram Research’s founder Stephen Wolfram about the first year and the company’s plans for the future. Sponsor Looking Back As Wolfram told us, the most basic question he tried to answer when the company started development was simply to see if it was even possible to take all this data and make it computable. Now, a year later, his answer to that question is an emphatic “yes.” Wolfram, however, also acknowledged that right after the launch the user experience for first-time users wasn’t necessarily ideal, as Wolfram Alpha didn’t yet have data for a lot of knowledge domains. The choice at that point, he said, was to either delay the launch and get more data, or to release Wolfram Alpha and be able to learn how its users would use it, and then enhance the experience over time. Wolfram says that today, most users are aware of the difference between a search engine and Wolfram Alpha, and the experience for first-time users has become far better. He stressed that the team (which consists of about 200 employees and 500 volunteers) is currently adding new data at an increasing pace. That’s gotten easier as the team has learned how to import information from a large variety of knowledge domains and sub-specialties. Getting the Data is Just 5% of the Work Unlike Google , Wolfram thinks that the Web “isn’t useful for getting raw data.” Indeed, whenever the Wolfram Alpha team experimented with this, the data simply wasn’t up to par. Instead, the company will continue to mostly work with data from primary sources. Getting this data, however, is only 5% of the work. The real difficulty is to understand how to compute this data and to understand how people talk about this data: What kind of questions do they ask? What are the alternate names for a specific chemical element? In addition, the Wolfram Alpha team and volunteers also check for anomalies in the data they receive. If there are major outliers, the team will track down more information to verify the original source. Sadly, though, not all data is free and Wolfram Alpha has to pay if it wants to include some databases. To make Wolfram a viable business and still offer this data, the team is considering a subscription plan that will give paying users access to deeper datasets from subscription databases. Challenge: Bringing Wolfram Alpha to More Users The question now, however, is how to get more users and how to bring Wolfram Alpha to more users through more channels. As we noted earlier this year, the company’s newly minted managing director Barak Berkowitz thinks that the team’s “number-one priority is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone.” To get to this point, they will soon release more and better tools for third-party developers who want to use the company’s APIs to integrate Wolfram Alpha’s functionality in their own sites and services. It’s also worth noting that Wolfram Alpha now offers an appliance that companies can install behind their firewall to curate and compute their own data. Looking Ahead: Analyzing Your Own Data, More Knowledge Domains, Programming with Natural Language Queries Besides looking back, we also asked Wolfram about his plans for the future. In answering this question, he stressed that this new approach to computing is just getting started and it usually takes him about 10 years to develop his projects before he fully understands what’s possible once this new paradigm has arrived. For the near future, however, Wolfram hopes that Wolfram Alpha’s users will be able to upload their own data and perform complex computations on this data and use Wolfram Alpha to find correlations within Alpha’s vast database. The usage scenarios for this could include anything from analyzing sales data to doing personal analytics on data from devices like the Fitbit . In addition to uploading data, Wolfram Alpha will soon make it easier for users to download data to use in presentations. Wolfram also wants to bring Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica closer together. One development that Wolfram is especially excited about is using Wolfram Alpha’s ability to understand and compute natural language queries in order to create Mathematica programs. By building on this capability, Mathematica users may soon be able to write and manipulate their code using natural language queries just like in Wolfram Alpha. Obviously, the team behind Wolfram Alpha will also continue to add more data across an every-growing number of knowledge domains. Today, for example, the team is launching real-time space weather data, 12 complete genomes and local maps, as well as numerous other knowledge domains related to math, biology, physics and geography. Discuss

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