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Most of the Investors are recognizing the transformative power of payment billing and billing using social network strategies, growing to billion dollar industries.

After rumors that PayPal has been an investment of $ 16 million in Tradeshift, after a few week later a subscription billing provider Zuora announced that it has received $ 20 million in a Series C round of funding.

It is expected that industry after industry moves to the Subscription Economy: Business Enterprises and consumers to immediately buy the outright to subscription to huge libraries of products and solutions.

Many companies are rethinking their core products and value propositions as services and investing rapidly in subscription revenue models, including:

• Cloud computing is disrupting the $3.4 trillion technology industry as enterprises move to elastic compute clouds that are enabled by subscription billing’s ability to meter, price, and bill cloud services.
• App marketplaces, led by Microsoft, Google, saleforce.com, Apple, PayPal and others, are creating more opportunities for developers to offer software-as-a-service.
• The media industry recognizes it needs to monetize online content, and it requires billing to create promotions and bundles of digital and physical content that push out to multiple devices and platforms.
• Online consumer service providers are using subscriptions to innovate the pricing and packaging of premium, try-before-you-buy, and cross-sell service models that best meet consumer demand.
• Telecom and wireless technologies in WiMax, satellite, geo-location and 4G are creating a new wave of telecom services and service providers which are being enabled by subscription billing.

It’s interesting to watch how this is going to develop in Europe towards and after the 2013 e-invoicing liberalization.

Web Economy will change its face, as Computers will do a lot of the time-consuming work that people still do today, because  Information in a Web 3.0 world will be much easier to access.

It’s like saying “the economy needs jobs”—100 percent correct, but 99 percent useless as a guide to what we should do next. Our political and business leaders talk a lot about innovation being our economic savior, but what can we do with such platitudes? Where will we find long-term solutions to the problems of the economy?

I’m up to the innovation challenge. I’m just a small entrepreneur, but the technology I work in offers some real and specific opportunities for economic improvement. It’s broadly called Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web, and it’s the next generation of the Internet. Each of the earlier Web generations was pretty transformative, and this next version will be too.

Web 3.0 is a smarter Web, giving computers better ways to share information. This has enormous benefits for people who need to search for information, automate processes and transactions, and make logical connections between similar concepts and things. Information in a Web 3.0 world will be much easier to access, because computers will do a lot of the time-consuming work that people still do today.

Here are specific suggestions for ways that Web 3.0 innovation can have a positive effect on the economy:

1. In health care reform, Web 3.0 is an ideal technology for creating electronic medical records (EMRs), by merging the personal information that exists in disparate databases all over the health care system.

2. Data.gov is a comprehensive database of government information from a vast array of sources, all powered by semantic, Web 3.0 technologies. This transparency provides incentives for reducing government waste and improving the accountability of government agencies, procurement processes and contract awards.

3. In biotechnology, Web 3.0 provides tools that cut years of research down to days. New information is incorporated into the R&D process, drawing connections between related concepts and visualizing the results in graphs of merged information. Seeing these connections enables researchers to make better predictions about the spread of diseases, calculate a patient’s response to treatments and assess the risk of drug side effects.

4. In the financial sector, money will be saved through advanced fraud monitoring systems that are made possible through the real-time linking of financial accounts, transaction data and customer information. This can scale globally, so regulators and analysts can understand the risks of portfolio structures and counterparty transactions, preventing future financial crises.

5. Sustainability decisions need the right information quickly, and that information must be based on science and fact. One Web 3.0 solution links a pesticide database to a database of organisms and one of weather patterns, to fully understand the balance of positive and negative consequences of our environmental choices.

6. Open Energy Information (OpenEI) is a collaboration designed to share energy data, tools, models and knowledge. Web 3.0 technologies are used to share energy- related information and accelerate innovation, development and deployment of clean energy systems.

7. The Open Floor Plan Display/Exchange project is using Web 3.0 to provide interactive real-time data about building plans that will be used by emergency services, law enforcement and risk analysts to improve building safety.

8. Personal data lockers will form an identity ecosystem based on Web 3.0. You will be able to configure who gets access to your locker and in what context, depending on your role, intent and location. Applications will understand the relationships between people, services and objects.

9. Web 3.0 will deliver better customer experience because service providers will understand what the customer needs in real time and will take the optimal action. The results will include massive time savings, better customer retention, more effective up-selling and improvements in satisfaction. In summary, Web 3.0 represents a Web in which information is much better linked and more efficiently utilized, with the economy continuing to benefit on a greater scale.

Just a few years ago, the economic prediction for new nuclear reactors looked bright. The scene of growing electricity demand, probable caps on carbon-dioxide emissions and government loan guarantees encouraged companies to tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that they wanted to build 28 new reactors.

The economic slouch, which has driven down demand and the price of rival energy sources, and the failure of Congress to pass climate legislation, has changed all that, at least for now.

Constellation Energy’s announcement on Saturday that it had reached an impasse with the federal government over the fee for a loan guarantee on a new reactor in Maryland is a sign of how much the landscape has been transformed.

Essentially, the Energy Department argued that Constellation’s project is so risky that the company must pay a high fee or provide other assurances of repayment if it wants the taxpayers to guarantee its construction loans. Constellation said the government’s demand was “unreasonably burdensome.”

The government is hardly the only one to question the economics of nuclear power right now. The would-be builders of seven reactors around the country have deferred their projects in the last few months.

J. Scott Peterson, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade group, said the “pause” in nuclear building plans mirrors delays in other industrial projects. “It’s principally because of the economic situation,” he said.

South Carolina Electric & Gas of Cayce plans to move forward on its planned expansion of the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station in Fairfield County without a government loan. But its project partner, state-owned Santee Cooper, is reviewing whether to move forward because of lower energy revenue in the wake of the recession.

SCE&G has declined to speculate on what would happen if Santee Cooper reduces its 45 percent stake in the $9.8 billion expansion, though several other utilities, including Duke Energy and Progress Energy, have expressed interest.

A drop in energy demand is a major factor driving the cautious stance of both the industry and the government. Power demand dropped by more than 4 percent between 2007 and 2009. So far, it seems that demand in 2010 will be higher than last year, but not as high as 2007. These are big changes for an industry that is accustomed to growth on the order of 1 to 3 percent a year. With slack demand, there is less urgency to build new plants.

The plunge in natural gas prices has also made nuclear power far less competitive.

A return to strong economic growth would push up the demand for electricity and for natural gas, but even then, natural gas prices may remain low because a technology called hydraulic fracturing has vastly increased the estimate of recoverable reserves.

Also weighing on the nuclear industry is the refusal of Congress to pass climate change legislation that would put a price of some sort on carbon-dioxide emissions. Since nuclear power produces no carbon emissions, it would gain a competitive edge against coal and natural gas if a bill were passed. But while such legislation once seemed likely, sharp divisions in Congress and concerns about the tottering economy have stalled its prospects.

MAYBE IT’S a celebration of the new €380 million convention centre in Dublin. Maybe it’s a sign of an industry that’s bucking the general economic gloom. Or maybe it’s exactly the opposite – that people are underemployed and have plenty of time on their hands. Whatever the reason, over the last year there has been an explosion in conferences and networking events taking place in the technology sector.

If a smart economy is built on the amount of talking a country can do about it, China, Singapore and even the US had better watch out. The Irish are coming and we mean business.

While the quantity of events on offer may have increased rapidly, the quality has not. Most of these conferences charge €300 or €400 for attendance, feature one or two star turns from the international speaker circuit and the usual suspects from Ireland making thinly disguised sales pitches for their companies, and seem designed to keep local event organisers in business.

A more welcome trend in recent years is the “unconference”, events where the attendees actually give the presentations and do most of the organising. They are predominantly attended by bright young web things who wouldn’t be seen dead hanging out with the suits at the paying events. As a result, they have much more energy about them.

Preferably they have a name that ends with camp (Bizcamp, Barcamp etc), take place at the weekend (because there are no boundaries between work and private lives), and involve a healthy dose of socialising (ditto).

Is it any wonder that someone recently joked on Twitter that they were thinking of organising a camp whose theme would be how to organise a camp?

With so many events taking place, it begs the question as to whether some in technology ever do any work or just spend their days updating contacts databases and sending LinkedIn invites to people met at conferences.

The irony is that technology was supposed to make the need for such meetings go away. Video conferencing technology may be ubiquitous and extremely useful in certain scenarios but, let’s face it, you can’t beat the chance meetings, overheard conversations and strengthening of professional relationships that come with face-to-face dealings at an actual conference.

I’m not suggesting that all conferences are a waste of time – just the eight-hour-death-by PowerPoint sessions that leave you vowing never to leave the office again. Meeting peers, discussing issues in your industry and hearing from acknowledged experts can be valuable. A day spent at a well-organised conference with speakers and attendees who challenge the norms is a day well spent.

But attend enough events in a single industry and you start to see the same faces cropping up in the audience and, even more worryingly, on the speaker panels. Fortunately there are signs that some event organisers are willing to break the mould.

The Dublin Web Summit, which takes place at the end of the month, is an event that has quickly risen to the top of the pile since it first elbowed its way on to a crowded calendar a year ago. Its organisers have managed to attract top-class speakers to these shores such as Craig Newmark, founder of classifieds service Craigslist; Matt Mullenweg, the man behind popular blogging platform WordPress; Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia; Wired editor-at-large Ben Hammersley; and Michael Birch, founder of once-dominant social network Bebo.

More importantly, it has managed to get local web developers, business people, investors and advisers to give up time and money to attend events generating that much-maligned phrase – “a buzz”.

This month’s event features the strongest line-up yet. Keynote speeches will be delivered by Chad Hurley, founder and chief executive of YouTube; Jack Dorsey, creator and chairman of Twitter; and Niklas Zennstrom, founder and former chief executive of Skype.

The Irish contingent is represented by people who spend more time growing their business than their public profile. These include Paddy Holahan from mobile software firm NewBay; Greg Turley of CarTrawler one of the world’s largest online distributors of car rental; and Fred Karlsson from classifieds.

Not content with the success of the Dublin Web Summit, organiser Paddy Cosgrave has undertaken an even more ambitious event, Founders, which will take place the weekend after the summit. An invite-only low-key gathering of 100 founders of some of the most innovative tech companies around the world, you could think of it as a Davos for geeks.

In addition to the tech “rock stars”, Founders will feature contributions from the wider world of business and politics, including Mary Robinson, Bob Geldof, Peter Sutherland and Taoiseach Brian Cowen.

Exclusivity doesn’t always fit well with the Irish psyche. Our gut response to an event that’s invite only is often Groucho Marx’s quip he wouldn’t care to join a club that would have him as a member. But an event drawing founders of leading tech firms to Dublin where they meet the entrepreneurs behind Ireland’s most promising start-ups and see what we have to offer has to be applauded.

America seems obsessed with the notion of “net neutrality”, the idea that the web be free of all restrictions… “On content, sites, platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached,” and “on the modes of communication.”

Google clearly wanted a wide open market for a wireless Internet, and was open to paying a premium for higher speeds on wired infrastructures. Verizon, like all ISPs was looking for incentives to continue to build out their Internet infrastructure. But the agreement between Google and Verizon is only the beginning.

Since Google, a user, and Verizon, an Internet provider, reached an agreement in principle, according to the Washington Post, in “hope [it] could be used as a model for legislation aimed at preventing telephone or cable companies from delaying or blocking Internet traffic,” every politician, every user, every provider, and consumer group has weighed in. The debate over net neutrality has dominated discussion in Washington DC, Congress the FCC and all our media including this newspaper.

Congress and the FCC have yet to hash out their version of a compromise, and sooner or later the FCC has to declare all such distribution service as “telecommunications” so as to assure fairness, and to assert jurisdiction as a regulator.

There is a lot of money exchanging hands in the process in Congress, and the Senate wants its share. Even Senator Al Franken, eyeing the pot of gold on the side of those arguing for the status quo, was the first to say “net neutrality, is the First Amendment issue of our time.”

Hillary Clinton, wisely, has made development and operation of the Internet a matter of foreign policy. And as secretary of state she can make the arguments clearly and convincingly but only if they make sense. Other countries do not share our “free enterprise ” model and have no qualms about regulation.

While the issue of regulation of the web and the end of the so-called “open Internet” has become a matter of national importance, we should settle this latest issue quickly and make our view of the future of the Internet something we can not only be proud of but also argue for in foreign markets.

When it comes to Internet access, speeds vary greatly around the world, as does the cost for basic access. In Japan, Korea and Finland, Internet speeds are blazing fast and cheap compared to those less fortunate users in other countries.

But the idea of different rates for different speeds is on the minds of lawmakers in Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, and elsewhere in the world. Countries like Italy have already moved to hold Google and its executives personally liable for text, photographs or videos made available on YouTube, thus posing a significant challenge to the company’s business model, along with those of other Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter.

And in South Korea last year, Google blocked users of the local version of its YouTube video service from uploading material after the government imposed rules requiring contributors to register with their real names. Why? Because South Korea has made such regulation a matter of first importance.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is already talking about even tougher measures against file sharing, calling for tests of technology that filters unlicensed music and movies from the Internet.

France enacted a law allowing Internet connections to be cut off if a user is pirating copyrighted material. Germany has rejected that approach, but Britain is watching the outcomes of the law with interest.

And Australian Internet service providers suggest that they could soon have the most restrictive Internet regime in the Western world because of proposals pending in their legislature.

There are over 3000 Internet police in China regulating what is accessible, restricting access to web sites they deem politically incorrect, or contrary to public order.

China as we know has already forced Google to move its operations to Hong Kong and China’s Communist leaders have long tried to balance their desire for a thriving Internet and the economic growth it promotes with their demands for political control.

Secretary Clinton paid tribute to the power of the Internet both for opening new forums for the exchange of ideas and for fostering social and economic development. “In this context,” she said, “the Internet can serve as a great equalizer. By providing people with access to knowledge and potential markets, networks can create opportunity where none exists.”

She cannot do it until we have decided how we want the Internet to serve us, and what rules should be put in place to serve not just America but the world in a rapidly changing new global economy.

It was a miniscule number of voters in just one slice of the US political spectrum, but a weekend straw poll gives insight into how Republican hopefuls stack up for the 2012 presidential race.

On Saturday, at least, social conservatives within the GOP favored Rep. Mike Pence. The Indiana lawmaker won 24 percent of the 723 votes cast, just ahead of last year’s winner, Mike Huckabee, who drew 22 percent. Farther back in the back were Mitt Romney (13 percent), Newt Gingrich (10 percent), and Sarah Palin (7 percent).

“I am a Christian, a conservative and a Republican – in that order,” Pence told some 2,000 people at the two-day Values Voter Summit in Washington, an annual affair whose lead sponsor is the conservative Family Research Council, for whom social issues are a prominent focus. Those at the summit named abortion, government spending, and the repeal of President Obama’s health care reform as their top issues.

Depending upon how those tea leaves are read, there can be two conclusions: That this socially conservative GOP base is not exactly in line with the tea party insurgency shaking up the political scene. (Many libertarians are pro-choice on abortion.) Or that looking at the list of recent winners in Republican primaries – most recently Christine O’Donnell in Delaware – social conservatives can easily ride the tea party wave.

O’Donnell was one of the main stars at the event, having just beat establishment favorite Rep. Michael Castle in the Republican primary to fill the US senate seat vacated by Vice President Joe Biden.

To thunderous applause and multiple standing ovations, she said of the conservative insurgency’s skeptics and critics, “They don’t get it. We’re not trying to take back our country. We are our country.”

Sarah Palin, to whom O’Donnell has been likened in style, may have been down in the straw poll because she was not there. Instead, she was the keynote speaker at the Iowa Republican Party’s “Ronald Reagan Dinner,” where she made teasing jokes about running in 2012.

In his speech to social conservatives, Romney emphasized the economy.

“Since the Obama stimulus was passed, 127,000 government jobs have been created, but more than 2.4 million private sector jobs have been lost,” he said. “There are now nearly 15 million Americans that are out of work: if they stood in a single unemployment line, it would stretch from the coast of California to Washington D.C. and then back again! If that’s their vaunted ‘recovery summer,’ heaven help us from their recovery winter!”

Two years before the next presidential election, stressing the economy is a political calculation and campaign strategy favored by the Republican establishment.

“Any issue that takes peoples eye off of unemployment, job creation, economic growth, taxes, spending, deficits, debts is taking your eye off the ball,” Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, chair of the Republican Governors Association, said at a recent Monitor-sponsored breakfast for reporters.

But to those who say the GOP needs to downplay social issues in the 2010 and 2012 elections, conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly says, “That’s not only wrong, that’s dumb because we need the social conservatives as well as the fiscal conservatives to take those seats in November.”

Europe will increase its IT outsourcing spending over the remainder of 2010, leading to a possible surge in recruitment for IT professionals, a new survey has revealed.

IT research firm Gartner surveyed 206 organisations across Europe and discovered that 53 per cent of firms plan to increase their outsourcing in 2010, while 40 per cent plan to up their external IT services spending.

Of the firms that have an IT budget of less than €1 million (£82 million), 14.7 per cent said that they would increase their outsourcing, up from 6.1 per cent in 2009.

Claudio Da Rold, vice president and analyst at Gartner, commented: “Organisations in Europe are expecting – or are in need of – growth, but they are also still highly cautious.”

“Regardless of the future direction of the economy, European businesses and their service providers need to optimize their multisourced environments, while increasingly adopting industrialized IT services,” he added.

Gerry McLaughlin from ITContractor.com recently claimed that IT services are too crucial to cut, despite firms experiencing further cost reductions.

Last weekend, Spain won the 2010 World Cup. For the month leading up to the final, Googlers joined the world in cheering for their favorite teams. Around our campus, games were watched on computer screens and on cafe video screens. Code went unwritten. Emails went unanswered.

Throughout the world, real life also slowed during World Cup matches. Which teams had the most loyal fans? Which game captured the attention of world the most? To answer these questions, we looked at counts of queries using Google. People search using Google day and night—except for football fans when a game is on.

These graphs show the volume of Google queries for some of the World Cup matches:

On June 15, as Brazil played its first game against North Korea, the volume of queries from Brazil, shown using a red line, plummeted when the match began, spiked during halftime, fell again and then quickly rose after the match finished.

Queries from Spain during its June 25 game against Chile also decreased during the game, except during halftime. After some post-game querying, Spaniards went to sleep and queries dropped again.

To measure which country has the most loyal fans, we computed the proportional drop in queries during each of its team’s matches compared with normal query volume. Brazil topped the charts with queries from that country dropping by half during its football games. Football powerhouse and third-place winner Germany came in second, followed by the Netherlands and South Korea.

In fourth place, South Koreans were remarkably loyal even though some games began at 3:30am Seoul time. Japan, Australia and New Zealand, also affected by time-zone differences, expressed much less interest. A few countries searched more, not less. But only Honduras and North Korea increased significantly.

During the knockout rounds, each match’s losing team is eliminated from the tournament. As fewer and fewer teams remain, we expected increased worldwide interest in each remaining game. Unsurprisingly, worldwide queries slowed the most during the final game between the Netherlands and Spain, but the round-of-16 Germany v. England game had the second largest query decrease. Semi-finals and quarter-finals were all popular except for semi-final Uruguay v. Netherlands, during which queries actually increased.

In Latin American countries, search volume dropped more steeply leading into and out of matches while, in Europe, searches ramped down and up more gradually. Of course, for games that went into extra time and penalty shootouts the drops deepened the longer the match went on, including Paraguay v. Japan, Netherlands v. Spain, and Uruguay v. Ghana as seen here:

Finally, no blog post about the World Cup would be complete without a look at what did drive people to search—after the final match, of course. Although he won neither the Golden Boot (for the most World Cup goals) nor the Golden Ball (for best player) last weekend, Spain’s David Villa is winning in search compared to the recipients of those two honors—Germany’s Thomas Müller and Uruguay’s Diego Forlán—and Dutch midfielder Wesley Sneijder. All of these men competed for the Golden Boot with five goals apiece.

Similar to when Carlos Puyol headed in the single goal that put Spain in the final, people flocked to the web to search for information on Andres Iniesta, the “quiet man” who scored the one goal that led his country to its first World Cup championships. They were also interested in Dani Jarque, a Spanish footballer who died last fall and whose name was emblazoned on Iniesta’s undershirt, which he displayed after his goal. And after the match, searches for keeper Iker Casillas skyrocketed to a higher peak than any other popular footballer—including household names like Ronaldo, Villa and Messi—reached during the Cup. Sometimes, it seems, goalies get the last word.

As numerous World Cup games have shown in recent weeks, watching Web video in the workplace can be a recipe for disaster.

And with YouTube being one of the Web’s most popular destinations for watching video online, the Google-owned site is, not surprisingly, also a potential source of pain for network administrators looking to rein in their employees’ runaway bandwidth consumption.

That problem may be poised to get even more acute for enterprise IT, considering that YouTube is looking for ways to increase its viewership to more closely rival TV usage patterns. Datamation has a look at the implications.

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SAN BRUNO, Calif. — Google’s YouTube is nowhere near as popular as television, but the popular video sharing site is working hard to change that with a new method for video viewing and discovery.

While YouTube is focused on consumers, there’s no question the site is a popular destination for office workers looking for a distraction or simply clicking through a “You’ve got to see this” e-mail message from a friend with a link to some oddball YouTube video. But if a new YouTube service proves popular, enterprises could see a significant uptick in the time employees spend on the service, potentially impacting productivity.