At The Next Web Conference 2009 we are going to give 24 (early stage and often unfunded) startups the chance to show their new service on main stage to our highly web-savvy audience in The Next Web Rising Sun Start-up Rally.

We are proud to present this unique event together with SUN Microsystems and their SUN Startup Essentials program.

In the past our conference proved to be a great launch pad for startups. For the startup rally only the best startups are selected and get the opportunity to boost their profile at no costs. Submission closes on March 15th which gives you only 10 days to get prepared!

Also would you like to attend NextWeb ? Here is a chance now to gain a special Sun Startup Essential discount of 150 euros, reducing the price to 600 Euros. Sign up for Sun Startup Essentials using the reference NextWeb now.

TweetMeme is simple in concept: aggregate the number of times a certain blog URL, picture, video, or sound file is linked to on Twitter and rank them in order. The site is clean, fast and easy to use. But what it didn't have before was a way to make any money.

That has now changed with its latest update, which adds a 'Sponsored tweet' area in the upper-right corner of the page. According to the TweetMeme blog post, sponsors can 'promote' a story link as frequently as every 24 hours to appear in the box. These sponsored links also appear in the RSS feed (appropriately denoted), increasing the likelihood of folks clicking on them.

To celebrate the launch of the Doodle API, we challenge the Doodle community to develop useful and innovative extensions for Doodle using the API. The contest ends April 14 2009 24:00 CET.

Prizes

• 1st: A trip to Zurich including a meet-up with the Doodle team and some of our friends at Sun Microsystems. We'll cover the trip to Zurich and 5 overnight stays.
• 2nd: One Conference Pass for the 2009 JavaOne Conference
• 3rd: One Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

Decision Process

The Doodle team will pre-select the nominees based on the following criteria: Use of the Doodle API, utility, originality, ease-of-use, quality/reliability, appeal, design. A jury will determine the 3 winners from these nominees.

Jury

• Suhas Gopinath, Young Global Leader, Founder and CEO, Globals Inc.
• Alexander Hüsing, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, deutsche-startups.de
• Manuel Jaffrin, EMEA Business Development Manager, Sun Microsystems
• Oliver Reichenstein, Founder and CEO, Information Architects
• Gina Trapani, Founding Editor, Smarterware, Lifehacker

API documentation

The Doodle API is RESTful and uses OAuth for authentication and authorization. (You can of course also use our front-end API for the poll wizard and the fact that every Doodle poll generates an Atom feed.)

SIGN UP HERE NOW

Who is James Gosling ?

So if you are a Java fan, you know the answer to that question and you are probably now thinking I want to meet the man, so where and what do I need to sell ?

You have to be a member of Sun Startup Essentials programme, aimed at helping young companies Start smart and Scale hard...as part of this you get special invites to meet thought leaders in person, this is limited to 50 members from across Europe only.

If you would like to sign up and express your interest in attending, please REGISTER INTEREST and do so now, quickly.

The session will consist of James presenting his thoughts, then an open QA session, a chance to take pictures and talk to him freely, this is not a large event, its a small VIP only meeting with James in person.

So the biggest PHP conference is happening this week in London, with 500 attendess and some great speakers lined up, you would be mad to miss it.....

So if you want to know more details, its on Friday this week, in London, go HERE to get details on the speakers and venue.

Through our partnership with the organisers, Sun Startup Essentials and MySQL have negotiated a ticket discount for members, if you would like a ticket for the event, at a reduced rate then sign up HERE now, this is a time limited offer and we hope to see you there.

Startup Essentials is proud to be a sponsor of the mini seedcamp tour and seedcamp week, if you are based in the following cities then sign up to attend the seedcamp events now.

Mini Seedcamp 2009 events:

The first event especially for the Twitter development community will take place on the evening of Tuesday 24th March at Sun Microsystem’s Customer Briefing Centre in London. The event will be developer centric with the content best suited to people who are already developing applications on top of Twitter or who intend to start building a Twitter application in the near future.

A full programme for the evening will be announced soon. The Twitter Developer Nest is inspired by the hugely successful Facebook Developer Garage: London, it’s our intention to evolve the event in a similar style but with a few Twitter-esque differences.

Sign up HERE now 

Easy: not only are their DBAs smart but, thanks to MySQL Enterprise Platinum they have "Virtual DBA Assistants" that help them manage servers in a scale out environment. The MySQL Enterprise Monitor proactively monitors all MySQL servers using a set of MySQL provided expert advisors, to identify and alert DBAs of problems, security vulnerabilities and tuning opportunities so they can be acted upon well in advance of a problem or outage occurring.

The consultative support in MySQL Enterprise Platinum means that Facebook DBAs can also talk to MySQL Engineers for advice on how to properly design and tune MySQL servers, schemas, queries, and replication set-ups to maximize performance and availability. It really is like having more staff but without the cost of hiring. So MySQL not only helps Facebook scale their platform technical, we help them scale their DBA staff and finances at the same time.

So are you a startup ? Do you want access to those same engineers and the same resources to scale and grow without trawling around through contacts to get the right person, then find out they havent got the skills ?

Contact Stewart.Townsend@sun.com  to find out how in Startup Essentials  you can expand your DBA resources team by trying MySQL Enterprise for yourself at Startup prices.

Howdy Sun Startup Essentialees!

My name's Sophie Cox and me and my brother Charlie are the founders of Worldeka.com. Worldeka is a collaborative platform for social change aimed at charities, NGO's, activists and policy makers. We believe the Internet is making the world smaller and giving us a real opportunity to make change, as President Obama says, "As the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself"

As this is a blog for startups I thought we'd talk a bit about the current economic environment and its relevance to the startup scene.

I know many of you are worried about the economy but it's often said, and well worth remembering, that there's no good time to start a business. It's an indisputably hard time right now but there are some benefits; recruitment is a key one, great people previously gobbled up by the city are suddenly becoming err available, and the kinda folk who would never get involved in something as risky as a startup are realizing everything's risky so they might as well! Another benefit is startups are suited to the current environment - companies need to be innovative, agile and adaptable, all things small dynamic new business have in shedloads! Most importantly I feel to survive in an inhospitable climate you need support, and the startup scene right now (often supported by SSE!) is legendary!

Your network is your powerhouse, word of mouth and recommendation is the most strident form of marketing, skill exchange is an essential commodity for small business and friendship, well that's the most important. Your community can encourage you and support you when you are unsure or despondent; a text from a friend on the scene saying they were just talking about you to someone cool, a write-up on someone's blog, a few drinks when you're a bit broke, these are the things that keep you going when your not sure if its all going to be worth it.

So our advice, don't freakout! Focus on the stuff your great at and find easy then help other people do it, find exceptional people that can help you with the stuff you find tricky and most importantly get out there, find your local groups and conferences, get involved with your scene, cos ultimately not everything is about money but it is always about the people.

Would you like access to Worldeka ? Special Beta Invite code for Startups available now -

Private beta code SSE992

• Location: London, UK
• Venue: Sun, Regis House, 45 King William Street, EC4R 9AN
• Date: April 14th 2009
• Presenters:
• Tom White (Cloudera): Practical MapReduce
• Michael Stack (Powerset): Apache HBase
• Isabel Drost (ASF): Introducing Apache Mahout
• Iadh Ounis and Craig Macdonald (University of Glasgow): Terrier
• Paolo Castagna (HP): "Having Fun with PageRank and MapReduce"

10.00 - 10.15: Arriving and chatting
10.15 - 11.15: Practical MapReduce (Tom White, Cloudera)
11.15 - 12.15: Introducing Apache Mahout (Isabel Drost, ASF)
12.15 - 13.15: Lunch
13.15 - 14.15: Terrier (Iadh Ounis and Craig Macdonald, University of Glasgow)
14.15 - 15.15: Having Fun with PageRank and MapReduce (Paolo Castagna, HP)
15.15 - 16.15: Apache HBase (Michael Stack, Powerset)
16.15 - 17.00: General chat, perhaps lightning talks (powered by Sun beer)
17.00 - 00.00: Discussions continues at a nearby pub (suggestions welcome in the comments)

This is the second HUGUK meeting and if you would like to attend then sign up here now