Richard MacManus

Today Microsoft re-announced their on-demand CRM solution, Microsoft Dynamics CRM – including a new software-as-a-service offering called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live. According to salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, once again Redmond is reacting to the success of service-based companies like salesforce.com and Google. In an internal email, Benioff riffs on the state of the online business … Read more

First the obligatory disclaimer: I work as a part-time freelancer for Broadband Mechanics, the creators of PeopleAggregator. I’ve actually done analysis and writing work on the PeopleAggregator project itself. So bear in mind that I’m heavily biased 🙂 Even so, I think it’s in my Read/WriteWeb remit to take a high-level look at the concept … Read more

The NY Times reports that old media won out over new media when it came to World Cup coverage. The Times notes that television and newspapers benefited from the World Cup, but seems to overlook (or at least downplay) that Internet services did well too. While the Times article stated that live video feeds were … Read more

Over the past couple of days I’ve gotten 170 comments (and still going!) on a post I wrote last week entitled Netscape Community Backlash. I’ve actually gotten more comments than the official Netscape story on this topic. The general gist of the feedback is that existing Netscape users dislike the new digg-like Netscape and want … Read more

The latest issue of Wired magazine has a useful profile of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which Wired has elevated to number 9 in its latest Wired 40 list (it didn’t even make the list last year). The article focuses on News Corp’s $580 million acquisition of MySpace last year, which has not only shown dividends … Read more

Interesting article from PingMag, detailing the most popular web apps and services in Japan. The highlights… – SNS: “In Japan, social networking is represented mainly by Mixi, with GREE following a distant second.” – Video: “To my knowledge there is no direct competitor to YouTube in Japan but there is an interesting little mashup* from … Read more

My third trip to the US is almost over, as I’m flying back to good old NZ tomorrow. I thought I’d write a quick post about my experiences from this trip. In particular about the 3 conferences I went to: Supernova, BloggerCon and Gnomedex. In reverse chronological order… Gnomedex The most enjoyable conference for me … Read more

I’ve been tracking the release of the new Digg-style community news site Netscape.com, because there is a lot of backlash within the Netscape community about it. A story called Netscape’s Blunder!!! was number 1 on Netscape.com for a while and the latest post on the homepage is entitled A Request by the Netscape Community to … Read more

The new digg-like Netscape has gone out of beta and is now on the main netscape.com domain. I’m currently seeing some great comments coming through on my initial post about the new Netscape. Seems like the existing Netscape user base is not overly impressed – and remember there were some 811 million page views per … Read more

The trouble with business trips is they play havoc with my blogging rhythms, so I’ve not been able to post much ‘professional’ content while I’ve been in the valley. But if you’ll bear with me, I’ve got some great stuff coming up. Including a re-design of Read/WriteWeb which I hope to go-live with soon. In … Read more

The latest comScore stats for May 2006 show how fast social networking sites are growing, but YouTube in particular is displaying spectacular growth. As comScore noted in its monthly report: “There seems to be no end in sight when it comes to the popularity of social networking sites. Myspace.com surpassed the 50 million unique visitor-mark … Read more

At the Supernova conference last week I had the pleasure of interviewing two of Yahoo’s rising stars, VP of Product Strategy Bradley Horowitz and leader of the Technology Development Group Caterina Fake (one of the co-founders of Flickr). They are both part of what is loosely termed an R&D team, which other Yahoo business units … Read more

This is a personal/work post, to explain one of my current projects Micro Media Corporation. It’s a corporate blogging and podcasting program that aims to give business people insights into the Web20 and new media worlds. We’re currently looking for more contributers for the blogging and podcasting, so if you’re interested – please read on. … Read more

Earlier this week I noted that widget services are really ramping up now. Indeed over the past couple of days I’ve noticed lots of action in the burgeoning widgets industry, plus some excellent commentary. At the Connected Innovators program at Supernova last night PostApp revealed the high level of WidgetBox, its “web widget marketplace”. It’s … Read more

This post was written by Ryan Stewart, a Read/WriteWeb guest blogger. Note that Adobe’s use of the terms ‘Read/Write Web’ and ‘kiwi’ is not associated with this blog. There is an interesting project going on over at Adobe that aims to combine the power of Flex 2 with the potential of the Read/Write Web. The … Read more