In case your RSS Reader got the better of you over the working week, here’s a snapshot of last week’s Read/WriteWeb posts. The big web tech stories were Times Reader, Zune, Yahoo Mail Beta, iTV. Here are summaries of all our posts this week:
New York Times Reader Launches – NY Times releases the beta of its new desktop app, promising a better Web reading experience. Built with Microsoft WPF technology.
Netvibes Claims 5 Million Users – despite Netvibe’s 5M user base (is that return users?), we’re still a way off start pages being mainstream tools.
Zune – Social Networking Differentiates It From iPod – while the new Microsoft iPod-like device will offer social music sharing via WiFi, questions remain over its DRM.
Yahoo! Mail Beta Release – Exclusive Podcast With Ethan Diamond – Yahoo opens up the beta for its Ajax-powered web email, which has desktop-like user experience and great features such as calendar and RSS Reader integration.
Apple’s iPod Success Won’t Be Repeated With iTV – 30 people commented on this, most of them making good cases for Apple succeeding with iTV.
The Web VC Chart – Alex Iskold’s well-researched and beautifully designed chart of Web VC investments. Keep the comments coming in, because we’re going to do an update real soon on the chart.
Poll: Do Personalized Start Pages have a viable future? – 52% say yes, 46% no and 2% don’t know what start pages are.
VCs on Web Technology: Judy Gibbons from Accel – this is well worth a read if you’re a budding entrepreneur in the Web space. Judy has 25 years experience in the computer industry, so her advice should be noted.
What New Web Technology Has Apple Unveiled? – a wrap of Apple’s announcements this week, including movies on iTunes and an as-yet unreleased device (currently named iTV) that will enable you to view video content on your television.
Sharpcast’s Desktop/Web Synchronization – Soon For All Types Of Files – this is what Next Generation Web Technology is all about; solving a big pain point (synching files/data between PC, mobile and other devices) and making it all seem easy.
Smartpox: Bar Codes For The Web – Read/WriteWeb was the first publication to cover the oddly named Smartpox, which offers barcoding technology to connect the online and offline worlds.
Top Web Apps in Brazil – continuing our very popular series on international Web markets, we discovered that Brazil Internet users are very community-minded and social. And yes, a lot of them use Orkut.
World Internet Penetration Now 16% – Asia Growing Fast! – China and Asia in general are making great progress in Internet penetration. Despite the US and countries such as my own being above 65% penetration, much of the world is closer to 10-15% or lower.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)