Richard MacManus

Today Central Desktop launched the Spring 2007 Release of its collaboration platform. Of most interest in this release is that Central Desktop is introducing “a turnkey Intranet” for its enterprise subscribers. Key features of the turnkey intranet include easy setup (without coding or “wikifying” it), a company directory and calendar, password protection for documents, Office … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email: Top Web News The week started off with a flurry of April Fools jokes, blog style. Techcrunch got in a day early and fooled a … Read more

A quick thanks to our readers and sponsors, for supporting Read/WriteWeb’s mission to deliver in-depth news and analysis on Web Technology. Also of course thanks to our excellent writers! Our sponsors are: Wild Apricot offers web 2.0 products for non-profits – one of their largest user segments is professional associations. Probably the most popular area … Read more

In another excellent example of small Web Office vendors teaming up, Web Office suite provider ThinkFree has just launched a WordPress Viewer Plugin enabling WordPress bloggers to embed MS Office docs, spreadsheets, and presentations into their websites. This allows readers of those blogs to view office docs inside the browser – i.e. they don’t need … Read more

This week Optaros released a free survey report entitled ‘How Will Enterprises Deliver Next Generation Internet Applications?’. Over 400 senior decision makers responded to the survey, which looked at how enterprises will deliver the next-generation of Internet applications. A little background on Optaros: it describes itself as “an assembler of Next Generation Internet applications (NGI) … Read more

Ozon.ru, which claims to be Russia’s largest e-commerce store for books, audio and video, software, multimedia games, electronic and digital goods, received $18 million in funding this week from Index Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures (the venture arm of one of Germany’s largest publishing companies) and Cisco. The money will help develop Ozon.ru’s logistics system, expand its … Read more

Read/WriteWeb has 3 passes to Web 2.0 Expo to give away, same as Techcrunch. I have to admit Mr Arrington came up with a pretty cunning means to give away their 3 passes – he’s asking for readers to “attack any post published on TechCrunch”. This will not only give him constructive feedback, but will … Read more

By the end of this week, the Thunderbird 2.0 Release Candidate will be launched. Thunderbird is Mozilla’s open source desktop email client, similar to Microsoft Outlook in features. However with the 2.0 release, Thunderbird takes on more Web functionality from the Firefox browser (more on that below). Thunderbird is cross-platform and it works on Mac, … Read more

Peepel.com today announced the Beta launch of its Online Office Suite, entering a competitive market alongside existing vendors like Zoho, ThinkFree, Zimbra – not to mention Google’s growing Web Office suite. Peepel claims to differentiate itself by being “the only competitor offering a true multiple windows system in an online desktop.” Users can open as … Read more

In an attempt to go beyond page views and visits, today web stats company Compete introduced “Attention metrics”. The reason is that interactive Web page technologies such as Ajax and Flash – not to mention online video – are making simple page views and visits increasingly outdated. With Ajax for example, information on a webpage … Read more

Slashdot is running a story stating that Morfik, an Ajax development platform we covered recently on Read/WriteWeb, has filed a patent dated September 2005 for the compiling of high-level languages into AJAX apps. The timing of the news is interesting, because Morfik is just about to release its version 1.0 – after 8 or more … Read more

The big news today is that EMI Music announced a new higher quality DRM-free music download offering. It is a premium service, covering EMI’s entire digital catalogue, and will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms. Steve Jobs of Apple was there at the announcement, to emphasize that iTunes supports the … Read more

This week’s poll is a companion to a thought-provoking post co-written by Emre Sokullu and Charles Knight. The post is a review of alt search engine Quintura, which differentiates itself with clustering technology. But there is a larger question: can search engines such as Quintura, that rely on UI innovation, really be competitive with Google? … Read more

Google always has good April Fools jokes and this year is no exception…. More info here. Classic. Who needs a Web Office after all… But wait there’s more, Google has also ‘launched’ Project teaspoon. A.K.A. TiSP, which stands for “Toilet Internet Service Provider”. It’s described: “Introducing Google TiSP (BETA), our new FREE in-home wireless broadband … Read more

Like many other web 2.0 geeks, today I woke up to Mike Arrington’s elaborate April Fools joke that Techcrunch has acquired infamous dot com site F**kedCompany.com. It actually is 1 April where I live, but it wasn’t until I had finished reading the article that I realised it was probably an April Fools joke (thanks … Read more