Richard MacManus

Last week at X06, an Xbox event in Barcelona, New Zealand movie director Peter Jackson announced a new games development studio called Wingnut Interactive – an offshoot of his highly successful movie production company Wingnut. The new venture will develop a “Halo series” for the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. Full details haven’t emerged yet, … Read more

Alex Iskold was at DEMOfall last week, but not only to live-blog the event and do interviews for Read/WriteWeb 🙂 He was also promoting his own product blueorganizer, so I thought it’s only fair to turn the tables and interview him about DEMO – particularly as blueorganizer was regarded as one of DEMO’s highlights by … Read more

I’ve been hearing whispers that Google will integrate their social network Orkut with the mobile social networking app they acquired last year, Dodgeball. While it’s not rocket science to make the connection between the two products (both are social networking), the reasons to join the two are becoming more compelling… Here are some of them: … Read more

I guess this is a sign of the times – a site dedicated to gaming digg, called User/Submitter. But there’s no reason such a site couldn’t exist for del.icio.us, or stumbleupon, or netscape – or any site that relies on voting. Needless to say, I hope this site gets squashed ASAP – it’s at the … Read more

Another busy week in web tech. Alex Iskold was at DEMOfall06 in San Diego – where emerging technology companies showed their wares – and live-blogged much of the action for Read/WriteWeb. A full list of his posts is here, but I thought I’d mention some of my favorites: BuzzLogic – a hot new social influence … Read more

Hot on the heels of the well-received Google Reader re-design, I received a tip tonight (thanks Mike Rundle) that Bloglines has also done a slight re-design. On their blog they note: “You might have noticed a few fancy little changes we’ve made to your feed tree on the left pane today. You’ll like them even … Read more

Google Reader, Google’s web-based RSS Aggregator, has had a re-design and I am impressed. It now has a look n’ feel very much like Gmail, which I believe is a pointer to this product being prepped for mainstream promotion – and/or merged with Gmail. Probably a bit of both, as a standalone RSS Reader is … Read more

It’s been a busy day on Read/WriteWeb, with Alex Iskold managing to find time to file multiple reports from DEMOfall 2006 in San Diego. Here are his posts from today: Widgetbox: A Chat With CEO Ed Anuff USBCell does away with chargers Lirix innovates in music advertising BuzzLogic innovates in social influence space RingCube launches … Read more

We hear a lot about digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us as traffic drivers for media websites and blogs. But one site that doesn’t get enough props in this regard is StumbleUpon. In our recent Social Bookmarking Faceoff, we noted that StumbleUpon has the largest user base with 1,271,345 users. Its main rival in the space, del.icio.us, … Read more

Back in June I spoke about the corporate blogging project that I co-run with The Rights Marketing Company. Called Micro Media Corp, it’s a corporate blogging and podcasting program that aims to give business people insights into the Web 2.0 and New Media worlds. Our first major customer is British Telecom and we’re currently in … Read more

Lately there has been a lot of talk about new VoIP services that work without needing to be on your computer. Tonight two announcements were made: 1) Jajah Mobile, which claims to take the computer out of the Jajah equation. Now you can make Jajah calls directly from your existing mobile phone. 2) Rebtel, a … Read more

Google is making some bold moves to bring structured data into the mainstream search box. And in the process, it appears to be running over the top of microformats, the Web community’s open standards for structured data. Not to mention the challenge this will ultimately represent to eBay. According to a PC Advisor report, Google … Read more

Newly appointed Futurist-in-residence at the New York Times, Michael Rogers, spoke with Patrick Phillips from iwantmedia.com. I was particularly interested in what Rogers had to say about Times Reader, the hybrid web/desktop app built with Microsoft technology that aims to give a paper-like reading experience to the screen. He said that he doesn’t see paper … Read more

Pew has released its analysis of how the Internet will evolve over the next 14 or so years (2020). I’m inclined to agree with Om Malik that the conclusions about the technology are rather obvious: “a global, low-cost network will be thriving in 2020”, which will bring about a “‘flattening’ of the world”. You don’t … Read more

A new documentary on Silicon Valley premieres today on DVD. It was directed by my friend Steve O’Hear, who I met over the Web earlier this year and now work with on my corporate blogging project called Micro Media Corp. ‘In Search of the Valley’ is a movie which tells the story of three friends’ … Read more