2010

Every year ReadWriteWeb selects the top 10 products or developments across a range of categories. We kick off the 2010 ‘Best Of’ series with our selection of the top 10 Semantic Web products and implementations of the year. This year we’ve chosen 5 products by semantically charged startups and 5 implementations by large organizations. The … Read more

Over December we’ve reviewed the top Web products and developments of 2010. Now it’s time to look ahead to 2011. The ReadWriteWeb team is always thinking about what’s next, so in our final series of 2010 we attempt to predict the big stories of 2011. Predictions are of course a tricky business. The braver the … Read more

Looking back on the year in Web technology, we can see that several product categories have evolved significantly over 2010. We’ve already written about App Stores and eReaders. Another market that progressed in 2010 was Internet TV. Among the developments: Apple announced a major overhaul of Apple TV, Google launched its Android-powered Google TV platform … Read more

The rise of Facebook as a truly mainstream social network was a big story this year. An interesting question is, how much of Facebook’s success was directly related to its loosening of privacy controls at the end of 2009? That move created both a backlash and a huge bump in users as 2010 unfolded. The … Read more

eBook sales almost doubled over 2010 and now make up 9% of total consumer book sales, according to the Association of American Publishers. This growth was fueled by intense competition amongst eReader manufacturers over 2010. Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook and others attempted to undercut each other throughout the year. Further, the … Read more

At the end of every year, ReadWriteWeb reviews the progress (or otherwise) of big Internet organizations and names one of them our ‘Best BigCo.’ We started this tradition in 2004, making this the 7th year. In 2009 it was Google, thanks to Chrome, Android and other advancements. In 2008 we chose Apple, due largely to … Read more

In 2010, we’ve seen the rise of so-called “social shopping” services. They rely heavily on technologies such as social networking, crowdsourcing and smart phone scanners. Here we present five of the main social shopping developments of 2010. This kicks off a series of posts that will be published over November and December, looking back on … Read more

Yesterday we selected our Best LittleCo of 2010, the light blogging service Tumblr. In this post we select a company that we think has the potential to be Best LittleCo of 2011. Next year we’re expecting a lot from data-centric companies and one in particular. This company provides a platform for developers to create location-aware … Read more

Every year since 2004, ReadWriteWeb has selected a best ‘little company.’ In past years we’ve given this honor to Flickr, 37Signals, YouTube (in 2006, the year it was acquired by Google), Twitter (in 2007, before it went mainstream), Zoho, and Aardvark. As you can see, many of these companies have gone onto much bigger things. … Read more

Internet of Things (IoT) is a term for when everyday ordinary objects are connected to the Internet via microchips. The technologies include sensors, RFID and smartphone standards like NFC. The use cases are still evolving, but over 2010 we saw large organizations like HP and IBM build out impressive platforms for the Internet of Things. … Read more

This month ReadWriteWeb is publishing a series of top 10 lists of the best products of 2010, each based on a specific category. This post is a little different, in that it’s my own personal top 10 list of my favorite products of 2010. I’m not claiming these are the best products of the year, … Read more

One of the more subtle trends of 2010 has been the way that our reading habits have changed, due to a convergence of other Web trends: mobile apps, real-time Web (mostly Twitter), and social networking as a way to track news (mostly Facebook). In the previous era of the Web, the so-called Web 2.0, RSS … Read more

The Mobile Web has been a huge trend in 2010 and one output of that has been the emergence of app stores. It started of course with Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and then iPad. Then we saw other app stores come onto the scene: Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace … Read more

One of the big themes of 2010 has been the increased simplicity of posting content to the Web. Whether it’s Facebooking with your family, tweeting with your online buddies, or sharing a favorite video, photo or quote on Tumblr. All of these activities have given millions of people an opportunity to add their voice to … Read more

This week the Web’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, published an article in Scientific American promoting open standards and net neutrality. In the article, he takes aim at Facebook for being a “walled garden.” He claims that Facebook and other social networks are “walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web.” … Read more