Richard MacManus

While in San Francisco earlier this month, I met up with Laszlo’s Founder and CTO, David Temkin, along with CMO Kent Libbey. Laszlo has an open source Ajax application development platform called OpenLaszlo – which has been used for external apps like Pandora (online radio and music sharing) and ishares.com (Barclays sharemarket app). OpenLaszlo was … Read more

Lloyd Sakazaki has written a good overview of recent trends in global websites. It is based on Alexa data, a stats source which comes under regular fire for its faults (most recently ex-Netscape boss Jason Calacanis took aim). Nevertheless, there are some interesting underlying trends in the Seeking Alpha article. Not new trends, but well … Read more

Interesting podcast interview by Gizbuzz, with Jen Mazzon and Sam Schillace of the Google Docs and Spreadsheets team (both ex-Writely). They start off by saying that D&S is aimed at “people who need to collaborate and share their stuff online”. To the question of whether people are using it instead of desktop apps (such as … Read more

Our post this week about GoogleOS led to some vigorous and fascinating discussion in Read/WriteWeb. 87 mostly thoughtful comments were left here, plus many more on Slashdot and Digg. To get a final, more succinct, picture of whether R/WW readers expect to see a GoogleOS – here is a poll for you. I hope there … Read more

Written by Dejan Bizinger, a web manager at Serbian media company B92.net, and edited by Richard MacManus Serbia is a country located in Southeast Europe with around 9 million people. Around 1.5 million Serbians use the Internet and the majority of them are still dial-up users. The main reasons for the small broadband penetration are … Read more

I know, a predictable (almost tabloid-y) blog headline. But in this case, there really is some interesting back and forth going on between Microsoft and Google currently – especially with regards to office software. Firstly Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote an article for The Economist, in which he takes aim at Microsoft with this: “In … Read more

On my ZDNet blog last night I took a look at the evolving world of Web Office widgets. I noted that the personalized start page Pageflakes has just introduced a couple of new office “flakes” – a Calendar Flake and a Notepad Flake. They also have an existing Mail Flake, as well as flakes for … Read more

Along with the increasing internationalization of the Web, comes the language challenge. China is obviously a key Web and business market going forward, so there is currently a lot of interest in learning Mandarin. As one solution to this, Ken Carroll recently contacted me to tell me about ChinesePod – the site he co-founded a … Read more

The BBC wonders if British mobile operator 3 has “discovered the holy grail of the mobile phone industry”, simply by bundling some mobile web services together and making it flat rate pricing. Mobile Web expert Ajit Jaokar is very bullish on this news. 3’s new package is called X-Series and here’s what’s in it: Skype … Read more

Today Silicon Valley company Fabrik launched its myfabrik online storage and file-sharing service, after a 4 month beta period. It’s also releasing a new service called myfabrik lite, that lets users share large multimedia files (up to 1GB at a time). The aim with the Lite product is twofold: as a solution to sending huge … Read more

While I was in San Francisco I sat down to talk to Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic Inc – the company set up to leverage the popular open source blogging tool WordPress. One of their main projects is WordPress.com, described as “a more limited version of WordPress that is hosted and completely maintained.” It’s pretty … Read more

In the latest in Read/WriteWeb’s coverage of international Web markets, we explore Hungary – a central European country of 10 million people. The information in this post was supplied by Hírbehozó, a professional journalist for online media company Index.hu. Hírbehozó told me there are not too many startups in Hungary. The big companies like Sanoma … Read more

The big news over the weekend is the publication of an internal memo by Yahoo senior VP Brad Garlinghouse, dubbed the ‘Peanut Butter Manifesto’. The crux of it is that Garlinghouse says Yahoo as a company is unfocused and has too many product lines that cross over. Here is how he described it: “I’ve heard … Read more

Bambi Francisco from MarketWatch has an interesting interview with Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media. Rosenblatt was chairman of MySpace at the time it was sold to News Corp and it appears as if he’s aiming just as big with Demand Media. According to MarketWatch: “Rosenblatt has raised more than $200 million in the past few … Read more

Bill Gates spoke yesterday at the TechNet event at Stanford University. Here are his thoughts on what changes IT will make in society over the next 10 years: “Changes are now coming faster than ever. We’ll be seeing more and more students using tablets instead of stacks of books in schools and in online learning. … Read more