The conference is geared toward sharing pragmatic advice for startups, given by fellow entrepreneurs within the Seattle business community, to help bring good business models and strategies out into the open. In the spirit of honesty and cooperation, The Naked Truth is free to attend, and exhibits panelists who will share actual metrics and revenue models from their businesses, providing real-world insight rather than PR and punditry, a truly a unique and refreshing approach.

Each year’s panel has a theme; this year’s was “Show Me The Money,” focusing on how internet consumer businesses generate revenue via ads, transactions, subscriptions and affiliate programs. On hand to speak were entrepreneurs from restaurant recommendation service Urbanspoon, image editing service Picnik, online real estate brokerage Redfin, and video slideshow maker Animoto, to compare revenue models for Internet consumer companies. In keeping with the panel's title, the entrepreneurs are committed to provide "the naked truth" about how their revenue models really work.

Video coverage of the event, organized by Redfin, can be found here.

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman revealed that his company just turned profitable and TechCrunch's Michale Arrington's managed to get a little more information from him off the record.

Since I was sitting next to him on the panel, I asked him off microphone what revenues were. He said the run rate is around $15 million. 2007 revenues were $5 million, 2006 revenues were $1 million.

The Seattle-based real estate startup represents buyers and sellers in residental real estate transactions for a fraction of the long-standing industry rates that take 5-6% of the sale price of a home and split it between buy and sell-side agents.

On the buy side Redfin reimburses 50% of the fee they receive back to the buyer. On the sell side they charge a $5,000-$7,000 flat fee. As a comparision, the normal agent cut on Million dollar house are up to $60,000 - so the savings are huge.

Great news for Redfin. Very bad news for the traditional real esate industry.

Redfin is 75 employees strong, has served over 3,000 customers to date and has secured $20 Million to date in financing from Madrona, Vulcan, DFJ, and BEV.

Remember in high school when being mean to people made you more popular? Fortunately the internet was built by people who weren’t at all popular in high school so the same rules don’t apply. To build up your social media reputation you’ll need to be accountable, genuine and nice to people.

Why? Well, because the Internet isn’t a zero sum game. Collective intelligence, collaborative projects, sharing tools – the more people cooperate the more everyone benefits. Also, have you seen how much there is on the internet? You aren’t the only show in town. If you’re a jerk people won’t waste their valuable time on you.

Google is the new resume. That stuff on the internet? Yeah, it stays around forever. You want to start an online brawl with someone? Sure, maybe it’ll get you a spike in traffic, but people will be able to search it for years to come. Do you really want to be known for throwing a tantrum? Leave that to celebrities who can’t spell.

Pack some serious Whuffie. Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The currency of choice on the Internet isn’t money it’s social capital. To earn it you need to put in some serious interaction time with people. Throwing more money at social media doesn’t usually work; you have to walk the talk. Want to know more about this? Tara Hunt wrote a book, and you can pre-order it RIGHT HERE.

Give more than you take. This is different than giving away your product for free. This is being a part of a community, bringing something to the table and sharing it without expecting anything in return. Amber Naslund gets it and shares ten ways to give it away on her blog.

Be authentic (or what’s with the “almost everyone” part). Being nice is cool. Being fake-PR-ish is not. A part of being awesome is being honest. If you don’t like something, you can say so, just don’t be rude about it. Authenticity is one of the things that helps people really connect with you. While you are aspiring to be the nicest person ever make sure your personality is still shining through.

That's about to change - well, kind of. We're opening up the content gates and looking for the best How-to content out there with a couple of rules.

• Contributors must reside in one of our 13 network cities.
• Article content must be original and should include links and images.
• Posts must be non-promotional however we will attach your Techvibes directory business card to your post.
• Only one How-to blog post will be published per day.

So if you've been sitting on a great How-to blog post idea and want to get it out to the Techvibes audience, be sure to submit it now. Here's an example of the type of topics that we're looking for:

• How to find the right VC for your business
• How to build an iPhone App
• How to choose a Web Development company

Blog posts can be emailed to me directly. First come, first served.

Casual Connect Seattle 2009

So, if you're in the Seattle area and interested in checking out the conference AND able to blog about 3-4 of the sessions here on Techvibes, fire me a note and I'll get you set up with a press pass. You'll have access to all sessions, lectures, parties & networking (valued at $450).

Speaking of Seattle and blogging, we're still on the lookout for a Seattle Community Manager and the Casual Connect correspondent assignment might be a great way to take the relationship for a test-drive.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system targeted at Netbooks. The system is extremely simple consisting of just a web browser, essentially. In the age of web apps a lot of our time is spent in the browser and our reliance on desktop-based applications has almost vanished for some. This is who the Chrome OS is made for.

Application developers will be able to develop for the operating system quite easily using available web technologies, similar to the Palm Pre's WebOS, such as html, css and javascript. All Chrome OS applications will also be able to run in any modern web browser across any operating system.

One thing many people are worried about is the ability to do work while not connected. A lot of the day people are connected, but what about when you're in the country, or on a plane? With technologies such as Google Gears and upcoming advancements in HTML5, almost all aspects of desktop computing will be covered. You will be able to work while offline and sync up later once you are connected.

Google Chrome OS is currently in development and the source code should be released later this year for all you developers to tinker with. The full version of the OS should be shipped sometime in the second half of next year.

Luckily, Rohit Bhargava summed up the report consisely with his 10 standout conclusions for those of you that don't have the time to dig deeper into Sysomos' report:

1. 21% (One Fifth) of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. These are the percentage of Twitter accounts that have never posted a single tweet. They may either be registered simply to hold a username for later use, or be experimental accounts started up but never used.
2. Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers. In a finding perhaps consistent with the newness of the tool as well as the fact that many people may currently have an account simply to start experimenting with the tool, Sysomos found the vast majority of Twitter users have an extremely low followership.
3. March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter. During these months, Ashton Kutcher launched his quest to get to 1 million followers faster than CNN, Oprah started using Twitter, and the steady flow of new users to the site continued. For many, it offered a safer and easier way to get their feet wet with social media, 140 characters at a time.
4. 150 followers is the magic number. In a particularly interesting data point from the survey, Sysomos found that Twitter users tended to "follow back" all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically, which seems to indicate that this number may be the crossover point where people shift from using Twitter for more personal use to using it more for "lifecasting" their thoughts and actions to a community of people who they feel varying levels of connection to.
5. A small minority creates most of the activity. A steep curve of a small minority of actively engaged content creators generating most of the activity on a site is common among social networks, but it is steeper and more pronounced on Twitter. 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%. This seems to suggest that the site has managed to engage a mass audience beyond those who typically engage with social media.
6. Half of all Twitter users are not "active." If you take a general description of being "active" on Twitter to mean that you have posted a tweet at some point in the last 7 days (1 week), then the survey learned that 50.4% of all Twitter users fit this category. If you remove the 21% from point #1, this leaves about 30% of users who have an account and have tweeted before, but happen to be inactive now.
7. Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. One of the most useful data points from the report is that it clears up the common question of which day of the week is the best day to tweet something. Sysomos found that Tuesday stood out as the most popular day for tweets and retweets, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
8. APIs have been the key to Twitter's growth & utility. In terms of tools that people are using for Twitter, Sysomos found that more than half (55%) of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others. This may, in part, be due to Twitter's notorious reputation of failing/crashing, but also is a credit to all the third party applications that have been built on top of Twitter and do their fair share to bring new users to the service.
9. English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.
10. Twitter is being led by the social media geeks. This particular finding should likely come as no surprise, but 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers. These individuals are more likely to post updates every day (sometimes more than once per day) and also use Twitter more actively for direct communication.

Among the guest speakers will be Michael Jones, the chief technologist or Google Earth and Google Maps, Alex Miller, the founder and President of ESRI Canada, David Boloker, the CTO for Emerging Internet Technologies for IBM Software Groups, and  Dr. John Stutz, the founder of the Tellus Institute. A full list of speakers and topics is available here. Geoweb 2009’s main focus will be on 3d cityscapes, and will address not only global challenges but the unique challenges of Vancouver and Whistler as the ramp up to the 2010 Winter Games.

On the Entrepreneur side are three local founder entrepreneurs - Jonathan Sposato of Picnik, Brad Jefferson of Animoto, and Ethan Lowry of UrbanSpoon. On the expert side are TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, the New York Times Damon Darlin, and Wilson of Union Square Ventures.

The entrepreneurs are going to talk about the ways they make money and the experts will provide color commentary. Event moderator Glenn Kelman will be responsible for keeping things moving and keeping Arrington in line.

The Naked Truth takes place on Thursday, July 9th 6:00pm - 9:30 at the Olympic Sculpture Park Pavilion. Unfortunately the event is sold out but there is a wait list here so get your name on it if you're interested.