Richard MacManus

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Top Web News The main Web tech news this week was Adobe’s unveiling of Apollo, their next-generation web development platform which integrates the desktop with the Web. R/WW covered the news in this post, followed by Jay Fortner’s analysis of how it will … Read more

Recently I was contacted by the publishers of YeeYan, a website that translates articles from english language blogs into Chinese. They asked for my permission to translate some of Read/WriteWeb’s best posts into Chinese, so that people in China can read and comment on them. One of the founders, known as “thunder”, told me their … Read more

In New Zealand this week, two new Web portals were announced: Yahoo!Xtra and the launch of msn.co.nz on 1 March 2007. The background, briefly, is that both of these new portals take over from previous market leader site “XtraMSN”. Essentially what has happened in the NZ market is that Xtra (New Zealand’s leading ISP and … Read more

There’s been lots of talk recently about desktop/web platforms. Last week we mentioned more News Reader desktop apps powered by Microsoft’s WPF platform, and of course this week Adobe has featured twice on R/WW due to its unveiling of Apollo. We’ve also profiled smaller companies in the past – e.g. Laszlo and Morfik. The latter … Read more

One of the missing ingredients in Google’s growing Web Office suite is a CRM component. While there is little sign yet of Google providing CRM, a small startup called Etelos has done just that. Etelos has launched a new product called CRMforGoogle, which is a web-based CRM tool that integrates very nicely with Google’s personalized … Read more

Today Adobe is holding an event called Engage, where it is explaining its Apollo web development platform for tech bloggers, developers and others in the Web industry. John Dowdell from Adobe has a useful page of links. The coverage is quite diverse, from Tim O’Reilly commenting on the user experience aspects, to David Berlind on … Read more

Revision3, the online TV network founded last year by Digg’s Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, David Prager of TechTV, and others, has announced a new underground music show on Revision3. The show is called XLR8R TV (pronounced “accelerator” TV) and is being produced by XLR8R magazine, a San Francisco music publication since 1993. The magazine … Read more

Microsoft has acquiredMedstory, a vertical search engine for health information. This is an interesting development in a few ways – but in terms of Web tech trends, because it’s another sign of the rise of vertical search engines. We’ve written before about how VSE such as Retrevo are beginning to make their presence felt, alongside … Read more

While this week’s poll is about Google’s Web Office bid, we mustn’t forget that a few small Web Office vendors have been in this space longer than Google and have built up a loyal and strong user base. One such company is ThinkFree, which I’ve profiled before on ZDNet. Today ThinkFree announced they’d reached 250,000 … Read more

There was a lot of talk last week about Google Apps Premier, the Google-supported package of web-based office products. Many people spoke about it as if it was a rival to Microsoft Office. While Google Apps Premier is clearly targeted at small business, there’s a feeling that it’s also more than suitable for enterprises. Indeed … Read more

sphereit start Written by Rudy De Waele and edited by Richard MacManus. Note: this is a Mobile Web focused excerpt from Rudy’s complete wrapup of the 3GSM World Congress, held recently in Barcelona. One of the things I realized during the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards is the increasing globalization of innovation. Innovation is happening everywhere … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Top Web News The launch of Google Apps Premier Edition was the big news this week. In our view, this represented a significant (but not earth-shattering) step forward for Google – in its bid to create a web-based Office Suite. Some comments from … Read more

I’m participating in the Radar Relay, a group blogging effort being run by Under The Radar in preparation for the upcoming Office 2.0 event on March 23 in Silicon Valley (I will be a judge at the conference). So in this post I’ll be highlighting some of the office 2.0 news that came out this … Read more

Following on from the New York Times Reader last year, made with Microsoft’s rich presentation technology WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), three more big media companies have released Web/desktop News Readers built with WPF. Tim Sneath from Microsoft notes that the Daily Mail in the UK, forbes.com and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have all just announced WPF-powered … Read more

Feedburner has released an interesting new report on web-based RSS Readers, prompted by the recent introduction of Google Reader into its stats (incidentally, for some reason R/WW only increased by around 20% after Google Reader was added to Feedburner; whereas most other tech sites increased by 40+%). RSS Analytics plagued by unreliable stats Feedburner is … Read more