VentureBeat

Web 2.0 Summit, co-hosted by O’Reilly Media and CMP, kicks off this Wednesday at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. A who’s who list of Web 2.0 digerati will converge for three days of deal making, partying and more deal making.

If you didn’t have the budget to nab one of the $3,595 tickets for the event, fret not - VentureBeat reporters will be on hand to bring you frontline dispatches.

In preparation for the event, here’s a quick preview of what’s expected during the week, which includes some product launches by MadeIt, Userplane, Radar and Nokia.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Marissa Mayer and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer will all be speaking — and ears will be perked for the latest on reported acquisition talks between Microsoft and Facebook, and Google’s response to this.

EBay’s Meg Whitman will be speaking Thursday, right before her company’s Q3 earnings announcement the same day. Friday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about eBay’s struggle to juice its slowing growth rates. We also hope the moderator asks her questions about the departure of Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom, and about eBay’s associated $900 million write down. Speaking of Mr. Zennstrom, the Skype founder curiously disappeared from Web 2.0 Summit’s list of speakers sometime over the last few days. As recently as last Wednesday according to the Google cache, Zennstrom was listed as a speaker at the conference, where he was to participate in a session entitled, “Show Me.” Oops. Today, all references to Zennstrom are removed from O’Reilly’s conference agenda.

Wednesday evening, MySpace will host a dinner with News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdock and MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe. We hope he speaks about his pending acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, and how he sees his new media properties meshing with his old media properties.

Several companies are expected to show off their latest Web 2.0 wares.

Thursday night, at a party promoted here, MadeIt.com, a new Web 2.0 online invitations site, will make its public beta debut. MadeIt.com plans to take on market leader Evite.com by adding social networking features to “keep the party going” after the party’s over, such as online photo sharing, video sharing, slideshows, story sharing, message boards and widgets. The company was founded by CEO Stephen Weir and his advisor, Jonny Hendriksen. Weir tells VentureBeat the company has been self-funded to date with about $80,000 in capital. The company is looking to do a seed round of up to $300,000 in the next three months to get to proof of concept stage, at which point it may seek a Series A. However, it enters a very crowded sector, filled with the likes of Socializr, Renkoo, Skobee, MingleNow and the related events sites such as Going.com.

On Wednesday morning at an invitation-only breakfast, cell phone maker Nokia says it will introduce a new N series handheld computer that promises to marry the mobility of a multimedia device with the Internet (yes, this is frustratingly vague, but we don’t know anything else). Other handheld computers in N Series family combine many of the features of an Apple iPhone - such as Internet browsing, photos, videos, games and maps, without the phone part.

Userplane, which provides hosted communications applications such as chat, messaging and voice recording for online communities, plans to announce Userplane Feeds, a collection of free APIs so that developers can build the applications into their own sites.

On Friday, Radar Networks’ CEO Nova Spivack, who in a previous life founded EarthWeb, will unveil and name the company’s first Semantic Web application, most likely an online personal data organizer, according to a July feature in the recently shuttered Business 2.0 magazine. The San Francisco company, which is backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Leapfrog Ventures and angel investors, has been in stealth for a few years, yet has been been aggressively promoting its business, technology and ideas for the Semantic Web for quite a while (this is one of those “pseudo stealth” companies, promoting itself in public relations pitches to media outlets, even as it feigns secrecy). Friday’s anticipated announcement will also mark the start of the private beta for the not-so-secret service. In addition to naming its first product, the company says it will announce a strategic partnership. Stay tuned for later this week when VentureBeat’s Chris Morrison reports on Radar Networks’ product launch and tells us if the company’s first Semantic Web application is ready for prime time.

We’ve noticed a couple passes listed for sale on Craigslist here and here, or you can always crash the conference and join the unofficial Web 2.0 Summit LobbyCon unconference in the lobby of the Palace hotel.

Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He’s founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker

Ever wondered what happened to the promise of the ebook?

In the ‘90s, when the Internet took hold in a big way, publishers half-heartedly looked to ebooks — electronic versions books as a way to boost sales.

The efforts generally failed, due to poor reading devices, customer reluctance to pay full retail prices for digital versions, and overly cumbersome DRM and competing document standards that restricted ebook portability from one reading device to another.

Even today, while annual ebook revenues are growing, at $54 million they account for only a miniscule two-tenths of one percent of overall publisher revenues according to estimates from the American Association of Publishers.

Some of the barriers to ebook adoption are slowly falling by the wayside, but improvements are still necessary for ebooks to go primetime. New ebook reading devices such as the Sony Reader or the ILiad (at left) from iRex Technologies are beginning to visually approximate the paper based reading experience, though they still fail to match the readability of paper.

Onerous copyright issues continues to hamper ebook growth. While there are signs that the music industry is beginning to relax their stance on strict digital rights management (DRM), the publishing industry has been slower.

Such questions were at the heart of the three-day O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in San Jose earlier this week — where 450 book publishing industry executives and technologists showed up.

The first news out of the conference came from O’Reilly Media itself, which announced it allows customers of over 700 titles of their computer reference books to buy individual chapters online for $3.99 each — reflecting a new strategy of atomization that is taking hold in the industry. O’Reilly is one of the first major publishers to offer book content free of DRM.

Whether or not digital books become the savior or the bane of the traditional publishing industry, one thing is for certain: The traditional book publishing industry has suffered from moribund sales over the last few years as it was forced to compete for consumers’ shortening attention spans amid a proliferation of new, alternative information and entertainment sources such as 500+ cable channels, user-generated Internet content (photos, videos, blogs) and video games.

The American Association of Publishers says the $24 billion book publishing industry said sales dropped last year.

As the overall market for computer books has stagnated, O’Reilly has seen sales of its own computer titles moderate as well. The changing market conditions prompted O’Reilly to begin experimenting with digital publishing in 2001.

Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He’s founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker