Just a short while ago Jeffery Veen, of Adaptive Path, MeasureMap and Google fame, announced a new conference called, simply, Start. According to the website, Start is a “one-day conference in San Francisco designed for smart, talented Web people to take hold of their ideas, follow their dreams, and start their own companies.” The speakers list is impressive, but eclipsed by the amazing price: $200, with full understanding that you might not want to tell your boss about it.

I’m sure it’ll fill up fast, so register soon and work out the travel and work-compensation side later. (I’m doing just that.)

Dave Greiner at Freshview tells me that they have put together A Guide to CSS Support in Email . If you are sending out newsletters via email (like we do with our Digital Web Magazine Newsletter) you may want to note this handy resource. The guide covers both desktop clients as well as web based email clients.

We’ve put together this CSS support in email clients guide to save you the time and trouble of figuring it out for yourself. With 21 different sets of results, all the major email systems are covered, both desktop applications and webmail.

While your on this site you may want to check out their blog, lots of great tips and articles for creating newsletters and dealing with bugs in email clients.

Digital Web is happy to welcome Dave Goldenberg to our considerable list of contributors. Dave asks (and immediately answers) a continually relevant question: Why Do Web Startups Die? Lack of Alphalpha. What is “alphaalpha”, you ask? Dave explains it as the “frantic time between the Product Requirements Document and the alpha release”. See what Dave prescribes for getting past early challenges with your startup.

For those with a publicly available website, the ongoing battle is getting your website in front of your users. Given the prevalence of search engines, human and search engine findability is key. Digital Web’s Editor in Chief, Matthew Pennell, reviews Aarron Walter’s new book, Building Findable Websites.

One of the most eagerly-anticipated UK conferences is back for a fourth year. This year dConstruct takes a timely look at “Designing The Social Web”, with such social network luminaries as Daniel Burka, Matt Biddulph, and Joshua Porter. The one-day event is again preceded by two days’ worth of exclusive masterclass workshops given by the conference speakers.

Tickets go on sale June 24th.

Hot on the heels of the recent PHP benchmarking site comes some CSS performance tests (part 1, part 2). The results are interesting, with descendant selectors rendering significantly slower in Safari and IE than classes — classitis FTW, apparently…

After our short break, Digital Web is happy to be back with a double-issue to start off your June on the right design/development foot (feet?). First, Christian Heilmann returns with a guide to improving your data solutions and organization with Free Your Embedded Data With SearchMonkey. Get your data and applications in line with SearchMonkey.

Also, we’re happy to have Ben Chestnut back as well, with a solid review of ScreenFlow, an effective screencasting and editing tool. Screencasts are rapidly proving their value as video becomes an internet staple—get ready to make your own screencast with this quick primer of techniques.

Lastly, Digital Web’s all-volunteer staff is sad so bid adieu to Jessica Neuman Beck. Jessica’s full-time job, CouldBe Studios is taking off, and she needs her time back. While we’re sorry to say goodbye, burgeoning business is hardly something to lament. All the best, Jessica, and thank you again.

PHP Bench is a brilliantly useful site for any PHP developers out there. Chris Vincent’s simple one-pager compares various ways to accomplish common tasks — loops, output, etc. — and displays live benchmark speed comparisons. Bookmark and return next time you’re wondering if foreach is really the best tool for the job (hint: it isn’t).

Via Ajaxian comes word of a new way to test in different versions of Internet Explorer. IETester is a separate browser that allows you to select the rendering engine to use with each tab you open. My quick and dirty testing seems to indicate that it’s doing what it promises, so if you’ve never got on well with the old multiple IE solutions, this just might be the silver bullet you’ve been waiting for.

It’s currently only an alpha release, but definitely one to keep an eye on.

Google have released their AJAX Libraries API and now host all the major JavaScript libraries (jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, mootools, and Dojo) on their own servers. What does this mean for you? Well, you can now load your favorite library direct from Google’s ultra-fast servers, either directly or using their new google.loader API; but more importantly the more people that adopt this approach, the higher the likelihood that your site visitors will have the library ready-cached when they arrive, saving you valuable download time and speeding up your site or app.

There are, of course, caveats – Derek Allard discusses some of the potential negative implications for both private sites and CMS developers.