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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Any hiring decisions you make at the early stages of a business are important, but finding the right people with the right technical skills is particularly crucial . To that end, serial entrepreneur and CD Baby founder Derek Sivers recently wrote a guide – “How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen” – on his blog. Sponsor Sivers’s post is a step-by-step guide to advertising and hiring, but it also serves as a good model for planning ideas and tackling achievable project milestones. Version 1.0 The most important point, perhaps: make sure to crystallize your idea, then simplify it down to a succinct assignment that a programmer can undertake. Sivers urges you to “Dream the big dream of everything your site/service/company might be some day, and write it all down. But then think of the bare minimum that would make you happy, and people would find useful.” Sivers says to use this Version 1.0, broken down into even smaller milestones, in order to advertising for programming help. Hire for Milestone 1 of Version 1.0 “Write down every thing you know this Version 1.0 needs to do. Every click. Every action. A long list of small simple things,” says Sivers. To find a programmer you like, take the first milestone in your walkthrough, and treat it as a complete project. Advertise this as if it was a “start-to-finish project that sounds like a day’s work, and mentions nothing else.” He suggests not only posting the advertisement on multiple freelance sites, but also hiring multiple programmers for the initial milestone. And then continue in a longer term working relationship with the one that works out the best. Next Steps for Hiring a Programmer Sivers describes these eight steps in designing a project’s specs, then finding the right programmer for the job: 1. Reduce your big idea to “Version 1.0″. 2. Write a simple overview of what it does. 3. Write a detailed walk-through of every click. 4. Break it up into milestones. 5. Make your first milestone a stand-alone project. 6. Post it on a freelance website. 7. Hire one from each. 8. Continue with the one you like best. In addition to this overview, Silver’s guide contains lots of important tips, such as how to quickly remove spammers from the responses you receive on the job boards, and how to clarify between getting source code and a functioning product on a development server. What tips would you add – as an entrepreneur looking to hire or as a programmer looking for work? Discuss

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Whether or not you believe that venture capital is broken , the necessity of funding startups still exists. One alternative to traditional funding models is “crowdfunding” – crowdsourcing the fundraising process. Like crowdsourcing, crowdfunding is based on the idea of the ” wisdom of crowds .” And crowdfunding contends that “the crowd” can be a better source for financial support than traditional funding avenues. As these traditional avenues are often criticized for being based on “who you know” as much as “what you do,” crowdfunding promises fundraising that is more transparent, more collaborative, more accessible, and more global. Sponsor This Innovation Series is brought to you by Lexus . Disrupting the Relationship Between Investor and Entrepreneur But as it is a different funding model, crowdfunding means a different sort of relationship between the investor and the entrepreneur. With many (but not all) crowdfunding sites, startups retain full ownership of their projects. Investors receive credit on the website, and sometimes a thank-you gift (a commemorative t-shirt, a free subscription or software copy, and the like). But there are no stock certificates, no seat on the Board of Directors, no equity. While crowdfunding does provide entrepreneurs with needed funding, startups who raise money this way might miss out on some of other things that investors bring to the table, including business advice and connections. But arguably this is a vicious circle: In order to get that investor backing and to take advantage of investors’ connections, you often need pretty strong connections in the first place. According to John Rooney, CEO for the startup Jakaya , which is seeking funding for its collaboration tool via IndieGoGo , finding investors can be very challenging for those outside the tech world’s “inner circles.” Crowdfunding, with Due Diligence GrowVC is one crowdfunding site that aims to foster both the startup and the investor community. GrowVC is run on a subscription-based model, where subscribers make the decisions about what gets funded. Unlike some of the other crowdfunding services, GrowVC does due diligence on the companies that are listed there. And this diligence is often pointed to as a flaw of the crowdfunding process. While a startup might be able to raise money using crowdfunding sites, these services do not necessite that these companies have a business plan or a viable product. This is among the criticisms lobbed at what is perhaps crowdfunding’s most well known success story, the Diaspora Project . Although Diaspora was able to raise well over its initial $10,000 goal – it’s actually raised more than $200,000 – this is still no guarantee that Diaspora can build a viable alternative to Facebook. And while Diaspora certainly capitalized on the anti-Facebook sentiment, arguably its project would have not received such a positive response had it not been for the press coverage they’ve received. Several other alternatives to Facebook, for example – many of which actually have a product – also appear on crowdfunding sites, but have received neither the press nor the money that Diaspora has. “Fund us if you believe in us,” says Jakaya’s John Rooney. And while “believing in a startup” is a prerequisite before any investor writes a check, crowdfunding does offer a chance for startups to expand that investor base outside the traditional investment circles. And as there can’t possibly be as many VC managers as there are good ideas, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Discuss

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Two of our favorite topics to geek out over here at ReadWriteWeb are the real-time Web and the Internet of Things . Today, we (like everyone else across the Internet, it seems) ran into a rather nifty looking website that merges those two realms rather successfully using open data from the London and U.K. train systems. The live train map for the London Underground is a nearly real-time Google Maps mashup that shows the various trains of the London Underground as they move about their subterranean travels. Sponsor The real-time Web , put simply, is a set of technologies that allows the information we see on the Internet to change as quickly (or nearly so) as what it represents in the real world or online. It’s the weather forecast , your friends’ status updates on Facebook and the pitch-by-pitch tracking of an afternoon’s game . As for the Internet of Things, it is the connection of the Internet to everyday objects. In this case, it’s data on every train in the London subway system as provided by the London Data Store , an open-data effort with the Greater London Authority. The train map, created by Matthew Somerville , takes data from the Transport for London API and plots it out on a Google Map. On it, yellow pinpoints represent train stations, and the plethora of slowly moving red pinpoints represent an army of trains. Clicking on a red pin identifies which train you’re looking at, the station it just left and where and when it is expected to arrive. We asked Somerville how real time the page really it, and he explained that while “the API itself appears to be pretty-much real-time” the page itself was put together in a few quick hours and currently requires a user refresh to keep truly up to date. With a bit more coding, he explained, the page could be just as real time as the API itself, which he presumes uses the same information as the platform indicators for telling when trains are arriving. As with many real-time technologies, the map shows a very real future for the merging of the real-time Web with the Internet of Things. Soon enough, the objects we interact with on a daily basis – whether trains, planes or our refrigerators – will interact back with us, in real-time. While Somerville acknowledges a number of faults in the current incarnation, he also notes that the source code for the project is available for download on GitHub. The code for this project is based on his previous mapping of all the trains in the U.K. Discuss

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Wednesday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the winners of its annual Knight News Challenge , a contest funding innovative ideas for disseminating news and information to local communities with digital technologies. 12 entrants were awarded a grand total of $2.74 million , the largest share, $400k, going to Eric Rodenbeck and his data visualization project CityTracking. Sponsor “We can use the Knight News Challenge to experiment with ways to learn how to think in different ways about information sharing so we might discover the future of news.” – Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation President. Rodenbeck, a San Francisco-based designer and entrepreneur, hopes his project will ease the process of creating captivating visualizations of municipal data for local journalists and bloggers. “CityTracking will allow users to create embeddable data visualizations that are appealing enough to spread virally and that are as easy to share as photos and videos,” says the Knight Foundation description. Data visualization initiatives fared well at this year’s challenge, as a second entry, Tilemapping, was granted $74,000 from the foundation. Other popular categories included projects aimed at finding new ways to engage readers, as well as those geared toward determining new methods for funding journalism at the local level (see video below). The foundation hopes that by funding these ideas they will help spur innovation and aid digital journalism take its first strides in the Internet age. “The free flow of shared information is essential for communities to function in a democracy. More each day, that information flows through and because of digital technology,” said Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen. “Until someone figures out the next big thing we can use the Knight News Challenge to experiment with ways to learn how to think in different ways about information sharing so we might discover the future of news.” The announcement of this year’s winners was made at the Future of News and Civic Media conference at MIT – an event featuring previous challenge winners. Since beginning four years ago, the challenge has received over 10,000 applications and has doled out $23 million to 50 winning projects. Possibly the most well known past Knight News Challenge winner is Spot.us – a platform for community funded journalism. Discuss

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