The big news of the week was Google launching its FriendFeed clone, Google Buzz - read on for our extensive coverage and analysis of this news. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web, Internet of Things and Augmented Reality.
New! We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format.
We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.
The big news of the week was Facebook getting faster - read on for our extensive coverage and analysis of this news. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web, Internet of Things and Augmented Reality.
New! We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format.
We're really excited to announce the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app! As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.
The big news of the week was the keenly awaited announcement of Apple's new tablet, called the iPad. Read on for our extensive coverage and analysis of this news. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web, Internet of Things and Augmented Reality.
New! We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week (in this case, iPad). Let us know your thoughts on the new format.
We're really excited to announce the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app! As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we continue our analysis of Facebook's sweeping new privacy policies (plus tell you how to protect yourself), explore how mobile phones and sensors are mixing, look at the launch of the U.K. government's data.gov website, present our categorized list of the leading topic tracking tools, and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteStart (our daily resource for entrepreneurs) and ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products).
Also read on for details about the newly released printed edition of our current premium report, about the Real-Time Web.
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At the request of the librarian community and people that just like paper, we have made The Real-Time Web and its Future report available in print.
For those of you that prefer it digitally, you can still download it.
Facebook changed the world by helping 350 million people publish their thoughts, feelings, comments, photos, videos and shared links much more easily than ever before. It's the King of social networking.
The network grew with a big promise of privacy at the center of what it offered: your information was by default visible only to people you approved as friends. In December that changed, in a fundamental way. We offer in this post a summary of the changes that were made and key highlights from the debate that's raging around the world about privacy, public information and Facebook.
Another key technology in the Internet of Things - where everyday objects are endowed with Internet connectivity - is sensors. In fact we've seen the most activity so far in the Internet of Things from sensor data. So in this post we explore how mobile phones and sensors are mixing; and what to expect in 2010.
A new website dedicated to making non-personal data held by the U.K. government available for software developers has launched with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Data.gov.uk is being slammed with traffic but six months after the U.S. government opened its Data.gov site the U.K. site already has more than three times as much data than the U.S. site offers today.
At launch, Data.gov.uk has nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. The U.S. site, Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets today.
So why do users keep expecting to consume it, reuse it, share it and store it without paying for it?
Someone, somewhere ends up putting out money for everything you do online, every piece of news you read, every Web app you use. It takes professionals and hardware across a gigantic industry to make these things work. In terms of overhead alone, content costs a lot. So why do some users always kick and scream at the first suggestion of paid content? Do you think content is worth paying for, and if so, what are you personally willing to pay?
When New Zealand-based entrepreneur Rod Drury began researching his market he could hardly believe what he was seeing. As seen in Drury's comments last week on the state of the online finance ecosystem, only a handful of players like Saasu and MYOB were targeting small business clients. While Drury saw that a number of cloud-based personal finance companies like Mint were gaining traction with users, small businesses had been stuck with the same tired desktop accounting software they'd been using for the last ten years. Drury built Xero with the intent to help small businesses manage their accounts in the cloud.
Settled in the 1830s along the banks of the Colorado River and named for the Father of Texas Stephen F. Austin, the city of Austin is known for its thriving music scene and as the home of the University of Texas (UT) Longhorns. But in the past few decades, the Texas capital has built up a reputation of a different sort.
With companies headquartered in Austin like Dell and Freescale Semiconductor, a spin-off of Motorola, the city has become a hotbed of information technology hardware and software. In the mid 1990s, Austin was put on the map by software companies like Motive, Vignette and Tivoli, the latter of which was quickly scooped up by IBM in 1996.
William Shatner opened the IBM Lotusphere event this week, after which IBM launched Project Vulcan. This is a geek dream come true: a full-on collaboration environment with an open API and a name right out of Star Trek fame.
Project Vulcan isn't set for developer release until the second half of this year, but its potential as an all-encompassing cloud-based collaboration service is causing many to compare it to Google Wave.
Tracking topics on the Web can be a painful process, due to the amount of noise and difficulty of filtering it. So to help you out, we've selected and categorized the leading topic tracking tools. This is based on the discussion that arose from our earlier post about topic feeds, which are RSS feeds for keywords or phrases.
During the process of analyzing these topic tracking tools, we discovered - to our surprise - that not many of these services output results as RSS. Some of the leading apps in this field require users to visit their service. With that in mind, here is our full list and analysis.
In December, Facebook made a series of bold and controversial changes regarding the nature of its users' privacy on the social networking site. The company once known for protecting privacy to the point of exclusivity (it began its days as a network for college kids only - no one else even had access), now seemingly wants to compete with more open social networks like the microblogging media darling Twitter.
Those of you who edited your privacy settings prior to December's change have nothing to worry about - that is, assuming you elected to keep your personalized settings when prompted by Facebook's "transition tool." The tool, a dialog box explaining the changes, appeared at the top of Facebook homepages this past month with its own selection of recommended settings. Unfortunately, most Facebook users likely opted for the recommended settings without really understanding what they were agreeing to. If you did so, you may now be surprised to find that you inadvertently gave Facebook the right to publicize your private information including status updates, photos, and shared links.
Want to change things back? Read on to find out how.
After news about the landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson first broke on Twitter in January 2009, the microblogging service quickly captured the imagination of a new group of potential users. Throughout the first months of 2009, Twitter grew at a rapid pace, peaking at a growth rate of 13% in March 2009.
Now, however, according to the latest data from HubSpot, Twitter's growth is slowing dramatically. In October 2009, Twitter's growth rate had fallen to 3.5%. On a positive note, though, the average active user on Twitter today is more engaged than six months ago.
It looks like Microsoft has moved to the "sticks and stones" method for handling public relations gaffes. As we reported earlier this week, France joined Germany in suggesting that its citizens switch from Internet Explorer to, well, anything else. Now, Microsoft's UK security chief, Cliff Evans, has responded by saying that switching to other browsers will only open you up to more security vulnerabilities than staying with Internet Explorer.
That's saying a lot for the browser implicated in the Great Google Caper of 2010; and we have multiple security experts who have said a lot on why it just isn't true.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze and challenge Facebook's sweeping new privacy policies, explore what would happen if RFID chips are integrated into the next generation iPhone, present our hands-on review of Google's new smartphone the Nexus One, and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteStart (our daily resource for entrepreneurs) and ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products).
Also read on for details about the newly released printed edition of our current premium report, about the Real-Time Web.
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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience this week that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.
In a six-minute interview, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook's privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world's largest social network - and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.
Has society become less private or is it Facebook that's pushing people in that direction? Is privacy online just an illusion anyway? Below are some thoughts, based primarily on the pro-privacy reactions to Zuckerberg's statements from many of our readers this weekend. Though there is a lot to be said for analysis of public data (more on that later), I believe that Facebook is making a big mistake by moving away from its origins based on privacy for user data.
We began a series called Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things this week, starting with a look at barcode scanning. We wrote that smartphones are increasingly being deployed as readers for barcodes - in particular via apps available on iPhone and Android. However, RFID tags are more functional and flexible than barcodes. While barcodes are cheaper and getting traction in the U.S. with the QR format, the potential for RFID tags is even greater. Apple knows this and if rumors are to believed, RFID will be integrated into the iPhone 4G later this year.
Last week we analyzed how the Web is transforming personal finance. This week we took a broader look at the world of online finance, from personal to small business tools. To get an understanding of the online finance space, we spoke to the founder and CEO of one of the most promising startups in online finance, Rod Drury from Xero. Rod told us that he sees four types of markets in online finance: 1) Personal Finance (e.g. Mint, Wesabe, Yodlee); 2)
Small Business Accounting (e.g. Xero, Kashflow); 3)
Cloud ERP (e.g. Netsuite, Salesforce); and 4)
ERP (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle).
Editor's note: This story is part of ReadWriteWeb's Online Finance series, a weekly, three-month long look at how the Internet has transformed finance.
According to an independent analysis performed by investment-watching blog 24/7 Wall St., Apple's iTunes App Store has lost $450 million due to iPhone app piracy since it opened for business back in July of 2008. Although that number sounds high, they note it is small in comparison to the overall size of the App Store marketplace. However, our sources say that the real number is closer to $15-$20 million instead.
Presentation company Slideshare recently released its list of "5 Social Media Secrets for 2010". While these secrets certainly sound like great suggestions, we thought we'd connect them to some concrete tactics and resources that you can use to improve your social media strategy.
With tourists flocking to the Boston to walk the cobblestone streets of the Freedom Trail and visit various historical landmarks, Boston is often thought of for its ties to the American Revolution. But Boston is also the birthplace of a revolution of a different sort. In 1946, Georges Doriot, a professor at the Harvard Business School, founded the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) in Boston - one of the very first venture capital firms.
VMware's acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo this week points to a new form of partnership in the tech word. It's one that could define the big winners in the battle for a major piece of the enterprise market. By packaging Zimbra's popular, open-source collaboration software, VMware can provide a service that combines virtualization technology with email and calendar applications. It is similar to Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard's alliance announced today that will package Microsoft technology on HP servers.
In the immediate aftermath of a 7.0 earthquake that caused an unbelievable amount of destruction to Haiti's capital, Google has been asked by relief organizations and users to show images of what's actually happening on the ground. In partnership with geospatial imagery company GeoEye, Google released a new layer for Google Earth showing post-earthquake devastation.
Less than a week ago, Google introduced its own Android phone, the Nexus One. Over the weekend, we got a chance to take the phone through its paces and while we aren't quite ready to give up our iPhone yet, the Nexus One is a formidable challenger. In terms of features, the Nexus One is already on par with the iPhone platform and beats it in many areas. When it comes to the overall user experience, the iPhone is still a step ahead of the Android platform - but that could easily change in the near future.
EMusic, the popular subscription-based music service, this week announced that it has signed a deal with Warner Music - the world's third-largest music company. This is eMusic's second deal with a major record label. In its early days, eMusic mostly focused on featuring music from independent labels. Since the middle of 2009, however, eMusic has worked on expanding its reach by bringing more mainstream music to its catalog.
In our continuing obsession with all things Facebook, we looked at a new feature that was announced by the social networking behemoth that will further enmesh the site into our every waking breath: replying to comments through email. Before now, email notifications from Facebook contained a link that you had to follow, which logged you into Facebook where you could reply. You'll now notice that the email contains a line reading "New Feature: Reply to this email to comment on this link."
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we report on a new "superphone" launched by Google, take a look at how the Web is transforming personal finance, give you 5 reasons why RSS Readers still rock, get a first look at the new startup of ex-Facebook CTO Adam D'Angelo, analyze the trends that emerged from this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (our daily resource for entrepreneurs).
Also read on for details of the newly released printed edition of our current premium report, about the Real-Time Web.
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At the request of the librarian community and people that just like paper, we have made The Real-Time Web and its Future report available in print.
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Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Today, free online tools like Mint, moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track financial information. So you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before.
Editor's note: This story is part of ReadWriteWeb's Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati.
Recently we wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. We noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments. What we learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers.
Recently, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How did we know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told us. Nozzl Media unveiled this week a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records.
The 2010 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) saw a big trend emerge: web applications being ported to consumer electronics, from the technology inside cars to Web-enabled TVs. Earlier this week we noted that online music service Pandora will be made available in cars, courtesy of a new Pioneer device that will begin selling in March. Other evidence of this trend can be found in Ford's announcement of a new in-car system and Samsung's latest Internet-connected TV.
The Nexus One is another smart phone that we will inevitably see inside the walls of the enterprise. Smart phones seem to have a way of being used for all kinds of work activities. So, what are the pros and cons of using the Nexus One in the enterprise?
In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed.
Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn't the first place you'd think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like Demand Media and Docstoc call Southern California home, it's not surprising that the community is emerging as one of the country's hottest startup hubs.
Google held a press event this week to showcase the new Nexus One, which it described as "Where Web Meets Phone." Google calls this a new category of phones - the "super phones." The Nexus One apparently "pushes the limits of what is possible on a mobile phone today." Google will sell the phone in its own web store. Check out our live blog coverage for more details.
The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December's stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption. In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests.
Adam D'Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company's first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora. Built by D'Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself "A continually improving collection of questions and answers."
Starting this spring, you won't need to gather the whole family around a 15-inch laptop screen to talk with cousin Joe on the other side of the country. As a matter of fact, you won't even need to get up off the sofa after the evening news, because Skype is coming to the big screen - the big TV screen, that is. Skype announced this week that they have been working with LG and Panasonic to embed Skype in Internet-connected widescreen HDTVs.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze a list of the most influential websites in the world, look back on the past decade of e-commerce, suggest a list of products that Twitter might like to acquire, review a collection of Thanksgiving web apps, and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).
Also read on for a special offer on our next premium report, which we're releasing this Monday!
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A year ago we profiled an oddly-named service called ://URLFAN, which we concluded was a good 'Influence Index' for the Web. ://URLFAN ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. Unlike analytics services like Alexa or Compete, ://URLFAN doesn't measure website traffic. It's similar to Technorati, only ://URLFAN ranks all websites and not just blogs. So, which websites are currently ranked the most influential on the Web?
In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. Amazon.com and eBay have continued to dominate the online retail market in the United States. However advances in recommendations technology, together with the emergence of social media and mobile commerce, have combined to change the way e-commerce is transacted. In a follow-up post, we looked at current statistics for online retail.
According to a statement made this week by Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone, the company is interested in acquiring more companies to expand upon their current core set of features. The ecosystem of Twitter applications has exploded and now includes hundreds if not thousands of apps powered by or integrated with Twitter's service. But which of these apps deserve to become an official company offering?
Firefox gets distributed social networking and identity management. The good people who work on the revolutionary, open-sourced, and occasionally maligned browser have been hard at work on making cross-site navigation and portable IDs a solvable problem. A discrete button to the left of the URL that can tell users whether or not they are logged in to a particular site and allow them to log in without further navigation.
When you look at Enterprise 2.0, you can see the hype pretty clearly - but what is not so evident is how social computing efforts are faring within corporations and large organizations. That's what's striking about the report from the 2.0 Adoption Council. The group did a web survey of its 100 members, with 77 responding. That may seem like a small number to use for any quantifiable conclusion about the state of Enterprise 2.0. But the people who responded lead or help lead Enterprise 2.0 efforts at some of the largest organizations in the world.
Between Skype, chat, texts, push news notifications and three screens of scrolling feeds, it's easy to get distracted while writing an email or post. If you've misspelled names, forgotten words or hit send prematurely on numerous occasions, then you probably just need to slow down. Rather than resorting to a life in the woods of hermit-like solitude, you could just take a few moments to think with Ommwriter.
Thanksgiving is generally a horrible day for air travel, but tradition and the sweet smell of Thanksgiving turkey still makes millions of Americans forget the potential horror of being stuck in an airport. If you are one of them, or even if you are just heading to the airport to pick somebody up, here are some mobile applications and web sites than can help you make your Thanksgiving travel less stressful.
BNO News, the news wire service famous for publishing breaking news stories through its @BreakingNews Twitter feed, announced that it plans to launch a new news wire service early next year. In order to focus on this project, the BNO team will hand over the management of the @BreakingNews feed to MSNBC.com. According to BNO News, MSNBC will provide 24/7 breaking news headlines via BNO's Twitter feed.
When Bing debuted a feature called Cashback, the product was intended to save users money while they shopped from online retailers. As we told you last month when discussing the program's early successes, Cashback works by giving users a certain amount of money back every time they search for an item and then buy it from a participating store. But some users have found the opposite to be true.
This week AOL revealed a sneak peek at a new branding campaign for their soon-to-be standalone content-focused business. The rebranding effort will officially launch on December 10th when AOL begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company from Time Warner, its current owner. The new logos feature a lowercase "aol" on top of various colorful images that range from an orange goldfish to a green scribble. Are the new logos any good?
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze a new breed of content site that is rapidly gaining momentum, look into recent statistics showing that Gen Y is using Twitter more, compare five recommendation services for iPhone apps, review the new-look MSN, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).
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Two companies that produce massive quantities of new content every day, Answers.com and Demand Media, are rapidly moving up the list of top U.S. web properties, as measured by comScore. Answers.com has risen from #26 to #13 in just two months, and Demand Media has risen from #24 to #15 in the same time period. Is the fact that these sites produce so much content, and are quickly gaining in popularity as a result, cause for concern about the future of the Web?
Facebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.
This week, Amazon sent out emails to their Amazon Associates members touting the latest addition to the company's affiliate program: a new feature called "Share with Twitter." According to the email, participants can generate "tweetable" links to any Amazon product after first logging into their Associates account. After updating Twitter, any person who clicks through on the link and makes a purchase will earn the participant referral fees payable through the Associates program.
Recently, a consortium of type designers and web designers have gathered around a new font format specification called Web Open Font Format (WOFF). The format would allow more typefaces to appear across the web and to be readable by both humans and search engines. With support from Mozilla announced with the release of Firefox 3.6, the question of web fonts might be satisfactorily resolved in the near future.
At the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week, Andrew McAfee made a few points about the approach to enterprise technology and how it might be changed. McAffee, of the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, is considered the father of Enterprise 2.0. His views reflect how Enterprise 2.0 is evolving but still with a fair degree of resistance for its adoption.
At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, we witnessed some of the enterprise community's brightest new stars. Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad offered early-stage companies a chance to shine. In a gong-show like presentation series, the four finalists took to the stage to battle it out for the title of best newcomer.
The iPhone App Store is a blessing and a curse. It's one of the best things about the mobile platform, but it's so popular that finding great new apps to download can be a real challenge. Where there's a monetizable pain-point, services will flower! Enter a variety of new iPhone app recommendation services that aim to point you toward your next download and pocket the affiliate fees for paid apps.
Below we've posted a chart comparing the features of 5 new services for iPhone app discovery.
Microsoft announced this week a radical redesign of its MSN homepage. Today's MSN homepage for the US market is a busy mix of ads, hundreds of links and some customizable local news and weather widgets. The redesign, MSN's first major redesign since 2004, puts a new emphasis on search, local news, video and integration with social networks. The new page features more white space, a tabbed design and a new MSN logo.
Ben Behrouzi came from the shadowy Lead Generation business, but some people in that field said he played too dirty. Now he's got a real-time search engine that just came out of beta today, called Leapfish, and he says the company will already report $10 million in revenue this year despite having barely launched to the public. This is a strange story, so consider suspending your disbelief so you can see what Leapfish has to offer.
After waiting for two months for PayPal to release its much-anticipated platform, the day finally arrived for PayPal X. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's announcement in late July and this week, at San Francisco's Concourse Exhibition Center, developers and press people waited with baited breath to see what was earlier described as a "platform as ubiquitous as the electrical outlet."
Ribbit announced this week the launch of Ribbit Mobile. Ribbit Mobile is a cloud-based VoIP telephony service that brings together web-based calling, smart call routing and voicemail transcriptions. It is hard to look at Ribbit Mobile without comparing it to Google Voice. Just like Google Voice, Ribbit gives users a new phone number or they can use call forwarding. Ribbit Mobile also has quite a few features that Google doesn't offer, including the ability to make calls from within the browser.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze how Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks the Web will evolve, review Hulu's latest plans to make money, investigate use cases for Google Wave, ask why VCs aren't investing in Augmented Reality, review the latest Mobile Web statistics, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.
Mobile ad firm AdMob has revealed the dramatic changes the mobile industry has seen in their latest Mobile Metrics Report. It was only a year ago that the Motorola RAZR scored as the number one phone in America. One year later and half of the top ten are touchscreen devices, six include Wi-Fi capabilities, and six have mobile application stores. And as you would expect, this new crop of super-powered phones are making heavy use of the mobile web.
Some people believe that Augmented Reality (AR), the class of technologies that place images or data on top of other views of the physical world, could be the web browser of the future. AR has rocketed out of the research labs and is catching mass market interest fast - e.g. mobile phones displaying restaurant reviews when you look through your phone's camera. Why then are VCs not investing more in Augmented Reality? Here are three reasons why we think investment in this sector has been slow so far.
This week Facebook published a developer roadmap outlining upcoming relevant changes and a rough timeline for each. Changes include developer access to user emails, more prominent app displays on user profiles, all-new homepage dashboards for apps and games, and improvements to Open Graph and Analytics APIs. Read on for details and screenshots of the new faces of Facebook apps.
We have looked at Calendaring many times (such as in our round-up of 10 players). In our own work, we have started working with both Tungle and Doodle. To understand more about why this market is strategically interesting, we recently spoke with Yori Nelken, CEO of Timebridge (see our previous coverage here).
If hardcore hackers had any doubts whether the real-time web was a legitimate development environment, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham is dispelling them. In an interview with Graham, ReadWriteWeb learned that the entrepreneur-turned-investor issued a "Request for Startups" (RFS) asking for ideas from companies utilizing Twitter and Justin.tv's live video API. Groups who are accepted to Y-Combinator and fall under these categories will be given "priority access" to Twitter and Justin.tv.
Google Wave is a much hyped new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform. It was announced at the end of May, released as a 'Preview' product shortly after and 100,000 more invites were made available at the end of September. Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of thousands of people, how are people using it now? What use cases are being discovered? We started this series by looking at the education sector.
Everyone is looking to Hulu as the future of Internet TV. A joint venture between several major networks, Hulu delivers free, ad-supported programming via online streams - an untested model for long-term profitability, at least when it comes to television. While consumers have been enjoying the service since its launch in 2007, recent statements by a News Corp exec have people wondering: can Hulu make the ad-supported model work? Or does the company have other plans?
This week Google announced the launch of Google Music. This new service is powered by Lala and MySpace's iLike. Other partners include Gracenote, iMeem, Pandora and Rhapsody. Google has also partnered with the major music labels: EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music. Through Lala and iLike, Google will also be able to feature music from a large number of independent labels.
Social Search went live in Google Labs this week. Google announced that it was working on this Social Search feature at the Web 2.0 Summit last week. Social Search taps into a user's social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user's own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. According to Google, Social Search will enhance the search experience on Google by providing users with more personally relevant search results.
Brizzly wants to be to microblogging what Blogger.com was to blogging five years ago. Currently, Brizzly offers a user-friendly browser-based interface for Twitter and Facebook. The Facebook integration went live this weekand more social media applications will be added as the product evolves. Brizzly shares much of the same philosophy as Blogger. It's simple to use and aims to make microblogging easy to understand and use by a mainstream audience.
Currently Brizzly is in private beta, but ReadWriteWeb has scored 2000 invites for our readers to test it out! (see the post for the code).
Also this week we analyzed applications from The Internet of Things, looked into a new class of tools that surface influencers from Twitter data, questioned whether 'app addiction' is real, reviewed the latest eBook trends, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).
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In conjunction with the Summit, we'll be releasing our second original premium research report in October. Registration is still open for the The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, we hope to see you there!
If there's a hard-to-reach person you want to meet, one of the best ways to do so is through their friends. A new class of tools intended to surface influencers and the people they are influenced by, is focusing on Twitter. Could analysis of individual behavior on Twitter become a valuable tool for business development and marketing? A growing number of startup companies are making a case that it could.
Do you jokingly refer to yourself as an "app addict?" That is, are you someone so obsessed with your mobile phone applications that you've filled numerous screens full of apps? USA Today recently asked: "What is app addiction doing to people's health? What indeed, we wonder. How about nothing at all?
There can be little doubt that eBook and eReaders are having a breakout year. This week, Forrester Research moved its original projection of 2 million US eReader sales in 2009 up 50%. They argue that sales are growing much faster than expected because of falling prices, better retail distribution, and the media buzz that currently surrounds eBooks and eReaders.
A Forrester study reports that real-time collaboration has stalled in the enterprise, due in most part to the lack of adoption in technologies such as web conferencing and instant messaging. That may be true with existing technologies but it is important to note the new generation of applications that extend real-time collaboration tools. The report covers devices, productivity, mobility, collaboration, intranet portals, and Web 2.0.
Morpheus describes itself as "a gang of serial entrepreneurs and around 40 startup founders" who are "trying to make a small contribution towards India's startup revolution." The venture aims to fill the gap in early-stage financing with a decidedly hands-on approach. We spoke recently with Indus Kaitan, a Valley entrepreneur who returned to India as a Morpheus partner. Read on and listen to find out more about the early-stage scene in India.
Recently, some Gmail usersspotted a new feature in which small favicons were appearing next to certain email messages in the inbox view. The icons only appear next to commercially sent emails such as those delivered by Netflix. They indicate which messages include what Google is calling "enhanced content" - that is, real-time updates from companies contained within the body of the email messages themselves.
Facebook announced this week that it is tracking what it calls Gross National Happiness, based on an analysis of the positive and negative words people use when updating their Facebook status. The new index is interesting, but it's also a frustrating example of just how much value Facebook is withholding by not allowing everyone access to the anonymous, aggregated activity and conversation of more than 300 million people.
Last week, we noticed some downtime for location-based web service and TechStars grad Brightkite. We emailed founder Brady Becker and learned that soon, his team would be rolling out a second version of the site. Read on for a glimpse of what the site now looks and feels like, as well as an exhaustive list of new features and improvements.
This week at the MAX 2009 Conference, Adobe previewed Flash Professional CS5 and announced that the new release will let Flash developers export their files as iPhone apps. In the past, developers have had to create separate iPhone apps and web-based tools. The significance of this announcement is that development time for thousands of Flash-based gaming and music companies will be cut significantly.
The big news of the week was Google launching its FriendFeed clone, Google Buzz - read on for our extensive coverage and analysis of this news. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web, Internet of Things and Augmented Reality.
We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.
Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.
Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. 
Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, IS dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. 
Our channel 
Our channel 
Our channel 
Facebook changed the world by helping 350 million people publish their thoughts, feelings, comments, photos, videos and shared links much more easily than ever before. It's the King of social networking.
Last week in our 
A new website dedicated to making non-personal data held by the U.K. government available for software developers has launched with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. 
So why do users keep expecting to consume it, reuse it, share it and store it without paying for it?
When New Zealand-based entrepreneur Rod Drury began researching his market he could hardly believe what he was seeing. As seen in Drury's comments last week on the 
Settled in the 1830s along the banks of the Colorado River and named for the Father of Texas Stephen F. Austin, the city of Austin is known for its thriving music scene and as the home of the University of Texas (UT) Longhorns. But in the past few decades, the Texas capital has built up a reputation of a different sort.
William Shatner opened the IBM 
Tracking topics on the Web can be a painful process, due to the amount of noise and difficulty of filtering it. So to help you out, we've selected and categorized the leading topic tracking tools. This is based on the discussion that arose from our earlier post 
In December, Facebook made a series of 
After news about the landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson first broke on Twitter in January 2009, the microblogging service quickly 
It looks like Microsoft has moved to the "sticks and stones" method for handling public relations gaffes. As we reported earlier this week, 
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze and challenge Facebook's sweeping new privacy policies, explore what would happen if RFID chips are integrated into the next generation iPhone, present our hands-on review of Google's new smartphone the Nexus One, and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: 
We began a series called 
Last week we analyzed 
With tourists flocking to the Boston to walk the cobblestone streets of the Freedom Trail and visit various historical landmarks, Boston is often thought of for its ties to the American Revolution. But Boston is also the birthplace of a revolution of a different sort. In 1946, Georges Doriot, a professor at the Harvard Business School, founded the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) in Boston - one of the very first venture capital firms.
In the immediate aftermath of a 7.0 earthquake that caused an unbelievable amount of destruction to Haiti's capital, Google has been asked by relief organizations and users to show images of what's actually happening on the ground. In partnership with geospatial imagery company 
Less than a week ago, Google 
Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Today, free online tools like 
Recently we wrote about the 
Recently, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How did we know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company 
The 2010 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show (
In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed.
Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn't the first place you'd think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like 
Google held a press event this week to showcase the new
Adam D'Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company's first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, 
Starting this spring, you won't need to gather the whole family around a 15-inch laptop screen to talk with cousin Joe on the other side of the country. As a matter of fact, you won't even need to get up off the sofa after the evening news, because 
In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. 
According to a statement made this week by Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone, the company is interested in acquiring more companies to expand upon their current core set of features. The ecosystem of Twitter applications has exploded and now includes hundreds if not thousands of apps powered by or integrated with Twitter's service. But which of these apps deserve to become an official company offering?
Firefox gets distributed social networking and identity management. The good people who work on the revolutionary, open-sourced, and occasionally maligned browser have been hard at work on making cross-site navigation and portable IDs a solvable problem. A discrete button to the left of the URL that can tell users whether or not they are logged in to a particular site and allow them to log in without further navigation.
Thanksgiving is generally a horrible day for air travel, but tradition and the sweet smell of Thanksgiving turkey still makes millions of Americans forget the potential horror of being stuck in an airport. If you are one of them, or even if you are just heading to the airport to pick somebody up, here are some mobile applications and web sites than can help you make your Thanksgiving travel less stressful. 
Two years and a month after announcing that it would launch 
When Bing debuted a feature called 
This week 
Two companies that produce massive quantities of new content every day, 
Facebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: 
This week, 
Recently, a consortium of type designers and web designers have gathered around a new font format specification called Web Open Font Format (
Microsoft announced this week a radical redesign of its 
Ben Behrouzi came from the shadowy Lead Generation business, but 
After waiting for two months for PayPal to release its much-anticipated platform, the day finally arrived for 
Ribbit announced this week the launch of 
Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's 
Mobile ad firm 
Some people believe that Augmented Reality (AR), the class of technologies that place images or data on top of other views of the physical world, could be the web browser of the future. AR has rocketed out of the research labs and is catching mass market interest fast - e.g. mobile phones displaying restaurant reviews when you look through your phone's camera. Why then are VCs not investing more in Augmented Reality? Here are three reasons why we think investment in this sector has been slow so far.
This week Facebook published a 
We have looked at Calendaring many times (such as in our 
If hardcore hackers had any doubts whether the real-time web was a legitimate development environment, 
Everyone is looking to 
Google announced the launch of Google Music. This new service is powered by 
Last week we reported that 
If there's a hard-to-reach person you want to meet, one of the best ways to do so is through their friends. A new class of tools intended to surface influencers and the people they are influenced by, is focusing on Twitter. Could analysis of individual behavior on Twitter become a valuable tool for business development and marketing? A growing number of startup companies are making a case that it could.
There can be little doubt that eBook and eReaders are having a breakout year. This week, Forrester Research moved its original projection of 2 million US eReader sales in 2009 up 50%. They argue
Recently, 
Facebook 
Last week, we noticed some downtime for location-based web service and 
This week at the MAX 2009 Conference,