Richard MacManus

The big news tonight is that Google has released a premier edition of its Google Apps package (previously known as Google Apps For Your Domain). I’ve been following the Web Office trend for a long time and, like everyone, have been particularly obsessed with Google’s gradual progression towards a Web Office suite. Tonight is another … Read more

One of the mobile Web companies in Charles Knight’s 55 Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit was a beta product called Text2store. Charles categorized it as a Mobile Shopping Engine, alongside a similar service called Slifter. Text2store enables mobile users to sign up for shopping coupons and offers from their local shops. The service is officially … Read more

Disclosure: Central Desktop is a current sponsor. Today Web Office company Central Desktop announced a new online spreadsheets feature, via a collaboration with HongKong-based company Team and Concepts (TnC) Ltd and its EditGrid product. You may remember we profiled EditGrid last week and touted it as ‘better than Google Spreadsheets’. We said in that post … Read more

As David Lenehan reported today, Digg is the latest company to declare its support for OpenID – the decentralized single sign-on service. This follows on from recent announcements of support from Microsoft and AOL. And as Techcrunch noted, Yahoo, LiveJournal, and Wikipedia are some other organizations that had previously announced their support. It’s clear that … Read more

In October 2005 I reviewed a potentially disruptive search engine called ePrécis, from Syntactica. Unfortunately it got shut down by Google (they “nearly put us out of business”, said Syntactica President Henry Neils). But there was some heavy duty linguistic theory behind ePrécis and the good news is that now Syntactica is back with a … Read more

div for entry content including hero Last month we reported that automated text-to-voice service Talkr was put up for sale, by founder Chris Brooks. Well Talkr has just been acquired – by a company who found out it was for sale via Read/WriteWeb! The buyer is LiveOnTheNet, a Huntsville-based digital media company which is developing … Read more

New Zealand’s biggest newspaper, The New Zealand Herald, has run an article about me in Monday morning’s paper. It’s on the back page of the Business section and is entitled Kiwi blogger logs on to make a living. This is the first time I’ve had any mainstream media coverage, so I admit it is quite … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Top Web News It was a relatively quiet week in Web news. There were various mobile announcements from the 3GSM conference in Spain and some product releases (e.g. MS Soapbox). Also Google acquired video game advertising company Adscape. Perhaps the most interesting news … Read more

Saul Klein, the former Skype global marketing VP who joined VC firm Index Ventures this week, has a great post on his blog about the European startup scene. I spoke to Saul earlier this week and I will write up a post about that conversation next week. But for now, check out Saul’s post – … Read more

This morning Dell unveiled a couple of community-focused sites, essentially jumping into the web 2.0 waters with a splash. They’ve released a digg-like community site called IdeaStorm and a video sharing site called StudioDell. It’s all part of Dell’s “Digital Media plan” and the new products are designed to increase the interaction between Dell and … Read more

– Yahoo implements digg-style voting across some of its products; two opposing headlines pretty much sum this story up… Yahoo Anecdotal’s headline: It takes two to Tango (suggesting interaction between Y! developers and their users); digg’s headline: Yahoo Shamelessly Rips Off Digg and Brags About It. The first digg commenter on the story wittily notes: … Read more

While YouTube and online video is all the rage currently, I often wonder if there’s anything on these video websites other than mentos-coke explosions and bad singing. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy YouTube as much as the next person – but I am also a bit artsy-fartsy, so I like to see artistic stuff … Read more

– The Mozilla Manifesto; rather generic new manifesto. It reminds us of an old Jeff Bezos quote… when someone asked him ‘What do u think about Google’s moto – don’t be evil?’ Bezos is said to have replied: ‘I assumed this was obvious’. We couldn’t track down the exact quote, so please leave a comment … Read more

Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet has done an excellent analysis of Microsoft’s Windows Live brand. Her conclusions are quite damning of Microsoft’s marketing department: “Problem No. 1: Live isn’t a consistently applied term: Sometimes it refers to services (like Windows Live Messenger), sometimes to desktop applications (a k a Windows Live Search Preview), and sometimes … Read more

The oddly-named 1dawg is the latest of hundreds of hopefuls to ride the online video wave. 1dawg’s differentiating factor is that it provides a free video conversion service to a variety of mobile devices. It’s a seemingly minor thing to do, but in the current era mobile devices often use incompatible media formats – and … Read more