Dominating the Web Tech world this week was the release of the Firefox 2.0 browser. Read/WriteWeb covered the launch extensively – including an interview with Chris Beard (Mozilla Vice President of Products), a product review of the new browser, a review of the Firefox 2 Recommended Add-ons and a post on how Mozilla plans to market Firefox 2. We also published what turned out to be a somewhat controversial Web Browser Faceoff – the comments got a bit fiery (pun intended)!
Digital Readers
Another interesting launch this week was the Adobe Digital Editions Beta. As we noted in our post, the digital reading market is hotting up in late 2006 – Adobe’s product follows on from the recent launch of the Microsoft-powered NY Times Reader, plus Sony recently released a beta of its much anticipated Sony Reader. While it may not be as sexy as the battle of the music players (iPod, Zune, etc), the digital reader market may well be be just as big and profitable in a few years.
Innovative Web Startups
Here at R/WW we are especially interested in truly innovative web products, that potentially meet a mass market need. I’m currently reading a book called The Google Story, by David Vise (I’ve already read John Battelle’s book on the same subject), and it’s fascinating to think that in the late nineties Google was building a highly innovative product – yet they struggled to find a market for it, because portals were all the rage then and search was viewed as almost a commodity at the time.
I’m not suggesting that we’ve discovered the ‘next Google’, but I always look for web technologies and products that are truly innovative and could be disruptive. Examples from this week included:
- freenigma: Encryption For Web-Based E-mail
- Transclick: Mobile Translation For Borderless Business
- Trumba: Interconnecting Online Events and Calendars
- Tamago: The Only P2P eCommerce Market
You may not have heard about any of the above products yet, but keep an eye on them because they’re all solving real-world problems in a unique way.
Other highlights
We continued our popular International Web Apps series, with a look at Sweden’s top web businesses. Once again, the comments are just as informative as the post (written by Bjorn Fant).
Speaking of Google, we wrote about Eurekster’s Reaction To Google’s Eureka! Moment. More positively about the Mountain View company that everyone loves to buzz about, there was an interesting Google re-org rumor doing the rounds. Google will have one global account director per large account and they will push different types of ads (CPC, CPM, CPA, etc) over all media channels – search, mobile, video, audio, etc. I heard even more whispers that this is in fact going to happen, after we published our post.
To end the week, there was news about Pluck shutting down its RSS Reader. Our theory is that this makes consumer RSS Readers a dead market, which most people seemed to agree with.
That’s a wrap for another week! Roll on the new week…
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)