Richard MacManus

A new “3D community” has just been launched, with the unusual name of Teapotters. The name comes from 3D pioneer Martin Newell, who created the first free 3D model in 1974 – a teapot model. The site Teapotters.com aims to popularize 3D displays and sharing across the Web – websites, social networks, blogs and more … Read more

sphereit start In my previous post, I noted how the new Gmail/Google Docs & Spreadsheet integration feature threatens Microsoft. There’s also some high level discussion going on in the tech sphere about how Microsoft’s continued loss of search market share and confusion over the Live branding means they are losing the “web war”. Infamous Dot … Read more

On Monday Google released a relatively minor, but useful, feature. It’s worth examining a bit more closely, because it’s yet another signal that Google is quietly pecking away at Microsoft’s lunch in office software. Now I know that Microsoft Office has a lot of advanced functionality that the online office apps don’t have, but hear … Read more

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus I was reading a Time magazine article online today, entitled Marketing to your mind. This article was very provocative and I enjoyed reading it. But after I was done, something else caught my attention. I was surprised to see a row of ‘web 2.0’ buttons at … Read more

VoIP company SIPphone is at DEMO today, where it is launching Gizmo Call – an online service that makes VoIP phone calls possible from any web browser. It works via a Flash plugin, which enables users to make calls simply by typing a phone number into a text-field in a browser. Users can also use … Read more

Mission Research, a vendor of contact management solutions for the nonprofit sector, has launched a product today at DEMO aimed at the SOHO market. The product is called SalesWorks and is similar to Salesforce.com, in that it’s used to manage contacts or sales leads. In fact it’s being billed as “a Salesforce.com for the SOHO … Read more

Disclosure: Zoho is a sponsor of R/WW. At DEMO today Zoho, the Web Office suite company, will announce an interesting new preview product called Zoho Notebook. I was given a run-through of the product by Raju Vegesna. The obvious competitors to Zoho Notebook are Microsoft’s OneNote application and Google Notebook. This new offering by Zoho … Read more

Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus With the consumer release today of Microsoft Office 2007, it’s a good time to look at the online office space – and what, if anything, Microsoft will do to address this growing market. In 2007 we expect to see good progress in the adoption of Internet-based … Read more

Imagini Friends is an unusual new social network, that calculates your “VisualDNA” and uses it to find other people that match your choices. It’s an application of Imagini, the technology – which aims to understand the emotional preferences of consumers, using VisualDNA. This can be used for marketing and advertising purposes, as well as social … Read more

New Zealand is the first country to experience the worldwide consumer launch of Windows Vista on 30 January, due to its position on the timeline. New Zealanders get the opportunity to buy Windows Vista in retail stores a few hours before Australians, 13 hours before the UK and a day ahead of Americans. The 2007 … Read more

In this week’s R/WW poll, we’re asking whether you ever fake your Web identity – or even just part of it. Note that this doesn’t count times when you are anonymous on the Web (such as almost all snarky blog comments). We’re specifically asking about the times when you use an identity – e.g. online … Read more

It’s Saturday morning for me, Friday afternoon in Silicon Valley. Before I go off to the horse races this afternoon (because you needed to know that), here’s a quick re-cap of the past week on Read/WriteWeb and in the Web world in general. I’ll also highlight some of the great comments we got this week … Read more

The Mobile Web isn’t just about the Googles and Yahoos of this world muscling in to the lucrative mobile content market. The existing mobile network operators and handset manufacturers are also busy adjusting to the Internet, to defend their turf and just maybe get a jump on their competitors. On 31 January Vodafone will launch … Read more

Amazon has just released a new Wikipedia clone, called Amapedia. It’s described as “a community for sharing information about the products you like the most.” So far Amapedia has had no promotion from Amazon, but it was discovered today by Rogers Cadenhead. Anyone with an Amazon.Com account can edit the site. Regarding the name, Amapedia … Read more

The latest Read/WriteWeb poll has highlighted some interesting trends. We asked what type of RSS Reader do you use the most? Here are the results so far, from nearly 900 respondents: 1. Web-based (e.g. Bloglines, Google Reader, Rojo) 55% (495 votes) 2. Desktop (e.g. FeedDemon, NetNewsWire) 18% (160 votes) 3. Start page (e.g. Netvibes, Pageflakes) … Read more