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When it comes to savvy, proven, and incredibly successful tech investors, Ron Conway is among the top of the list. He has a gift or an uncanny sense of shrewdness, or a fusion of both, to identify real opportunities that will transform into successful exits and also fuel and inspire aggressive innovation in the process.

At the Real-Time Stream event in Redwood City, California organized by TechCrunch, industry pioneers and pundits discussed the state and future of the Real-Time Web also referred to as the “now” Web.

To help entrepreneurs, startups, and industry leaders monetize this tremendous opportunity, Ron Conway offered his vision for the Top 10 ways to profit from Twitter and the real-time Web:

10. Lead generation
9. Coupons
8. Analytics, analyzing the data
7. Enterprise CRM
6. Payments
5. Commerce
4. User-authentication, verifying accounts
3. Syndication of new ads
2. Advertising – Context and display ads
1. Acquiring followers

According to Conway, if you add these up, initial estimates equate to roughly $5 billion. In comparison to traditional monetization in search, Google earns about $20 billion in ads per year.

To view additional pictures from the Real-Time Stream event, please visit my album on Flickr.

To see pictures from the 4th annual TechCrunch August Capital summer party, please visit this album on Flickr.

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Read more from Brian Solis:

Blog: PR 2.0
Book: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
Social Map: The Conversation Prism

We haven’t quite figured out what realtime means when it comes to search, recommendations or other queries on data pools. But we’ll soon find out. Another realtime service called Cognitive Match has raised its first round of funding from Dawn Capital, according to TechCrunch UK. While the financial details of the funding have not been revealed, the funding amount for the London-based startup is around £1 million.

The team behind Cognitive Match is well versed in search and data mining, with founder and CEO Alex Kelleher having previously co-founded an analytics company called Touch Clarity, which was acquired by Omniture nearly two years ago.

With a combination of artificial intelligence, math, psychology and a semantic approach to data mining, Cognitive Match appears to be moving towards the next generation of realtime content-matching. What kind of content? product offers, blog search, advertising and just about everything else that the word “content” encompasses when it comes to the Web.

So far we’ve seen some rather specific search tools utilizing realtime methods, such as OneRiot’s Twitter search engine or FriendFeed’s realtime format for sharing users’ feeds. While we’re seeing the realtime approach broaden to include more of the Internet, Cognitive Match is going beyond basic search with its particular tactics.

That means that Cognitive Search could readily be used for a wide range of recommendations, ad placement, and more. Just as Google revolutionized and then monetized web search, Cognitive Search aims to set new standards for optimizing profits when it comes to responding to a given query in nearly every aspect of Internet content. In realtime, of course.

It’s this sense of immediacy that’s dazzling the web world right now, in part thanks to the constant content push made able by microblogging platforms, mobile access an the overall shrinking of the globe’s technology gap. What we’re left with is a mass of data that’s difficult to infiltrate, and a growing necessity for strong filters that still won’t make us work. Just give us what we need, give us the most recent data on what we need, and appeal to our need for instant gratification.