Richard MacManus

This week I spoke to Hakia founder and CEO Dr. Riza C. Berkan and COO Melek Pulatkonak. Hakia is one of the more promising Alt Search Engines around, with a focus on natural language processing methods to try and deliver ‘meaningful’ search results. Alex Iskold profiled Hakia for R/WW at the beginning of December and … Read more

Our current poll asks which ‘personalized homepage’ do you use? After a false start, the current results are very interesting. Google Personalized Homepage is most popular with 31%, followed by two of the innovative startups – Pageflakes 21% and Netvibes 20%. Interesting that two of the bigcos are lagging – My Yahoo 6% and Live.com … Read more

The big news today is News Corporation and NBC Universal launching what they claim will be “the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled”, with AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! as the site’s initial distribution partners. It will launch this summer (US). The benefits obviously work both ways – News Corp and NBC get 4 … Read more

One of the big pieces of news this week was Google announcing their CPA (Cost-Per-Action) product, or as they’re calling it – PPA (Pay-Per-Action). There are good analysis posts about the news from Techcrunch and Microsoft’s Don Dodge. It’s been expected for some time now that Google will move into CPA, as a lot of … Read more

Forrester Research has just released two reports concerning ‘web 2.0’ in the enterprise. Forrester recently surveyed 119 CIOs on the topic and their answers illustrate what IT honchos want’ and don’t want’ from social software technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging. According to the report entitled CIOs Want Suites … Read more

Earlier this week we gave away a free ticket to Office 2.0 and today we have a a free ticket to next week’s ETech to offer as a prize. ETech is O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference and it’ll be held next week, March 26-29, in San Diego. An important note about the prize – the Etech … Read more

NOTE: Please see important update about this week’s R/WW Poll below, on the topic of Personalized Homepages. We had to re-set it and so are asking for you to re-submit your vote. Today Google launched 6 new themes for its Google Personalized Homepage. The themes to choose from include: a beach, a city, a sweet … Read more

We had an awesome response to our caption contest on Monday – over 80 comments! The Under The Radar folks and myself had a tough choice deciding… but the winner of the free ticket to the Under The Radar Office 2.0 conference, to be held this Friday March 23 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain … Read more

Allth.at was one of the 100 top alternative search engines in Charles Knight’s February list. It’s a search agent that allows you to define a search topic, then refine it with the use of filters, and finally subscribe to it via email or RSS. It’s similar in many respects to PubSub, the now defunct ‘future … Read more

One of the more innovative web apps around has just gotten another big injection of funds, and a new CEO to boot. Zopa describes itself as a “marketplace for Social Lending”, where people lend and borrow money with each other – sidestepping the middleman, i.e. banks. They recently advertised for jobs in their new America … Read more

Disclosure: Userplane is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb Userplane, the provider of community web apps that was acquired by AOL in August last year, is today releasing Userplane Userlist – a Flash-based instant messaging app that you can integrate into web sites. Basically Userlist enables users on a site to view other users’ online status and … Read more

On Tuesday Yahoo will significantly expand the reach of their new mobile search product, Yahoo! oneSearch, by making it the default mobile Yahoo homepage at http://m.yahoo.com for US users. In effect this brings oneSearch, which Yahoo launched in January 2007, to the Mobile Web masses. The US masses anyway – it will be rolled out … Read more

Update: Unfortunately we have had to re-set the poll, 12 hours after it went live, due to some suspicious voting behavior. We have now blocking repeat voters by Cookie and IP address (previously it was only cookie). We apologize for the inconvenience, but please cast your vote again. With the release of Netvibes’ latest version, … Read more

Read/WriteWeb has 1 free ticket to give away for the Under The Radar Office 2.0 conference, to be held on March 23 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View. More details at the Under The Radar blog. The free ticket will be presented to the winner of this caption contest. To enter, simply provide a … Read more

Netvibes, one of the leading ‘personalized homepage’ products on the market, today officially released its new version – nicknamed the “Coriander Edition”. This edition has been under discussion for the past month on the Netvibes blog, but today it is being officially launched. Incidentally Netvibes is now using the term “super-personalized homepage” to describe itself … Read more