Richard MacManus

My NZ 2.0 buddy Ben Nolan is selling one of his web apps, bubbletwo, on eBay. There he is pictured on the left, pretending he’s zooming down the Silicon Valley highways in a Ferarri (which may yet happen if he sells his mapping startup zoomin.co.nz). Ben whipped up bubbletwo recently and he describes it as … Read more

I’ve long been suspicious of some of the stats that certain companies and bloggers push. We all know by now that industry stats tool alexa.com must be taken with a grain of salt, but until today I hadn’t realised the extent of how a site’s own measured traffic can be exaggerated. You see recently I’ve … Read more

Google has acquired what I chose as the ‘best of breed’ Web-based word processing app in my recent ZDNet post Web Office Suite [news via TechCrunch] The Writely blog is rightly chuffed: “…everyone told us it was crazy to try and give people a way to access their documents from anywhere — not to mention … Read more

Today I spoke to JotSpot co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus about their latest product release, pre-packaged “wiki applications”. We also discussed the Web Office, which I will post about separately on ZDNet. JotSpot’s latest product is a prebuilt wiki. Basically it’s a wiki with set templates and functionality, making it easy for people to use … Read more

Yahoo has announced four new APIs for its Developer Network: Photos, Calendar, MyWeb and Shopping. The Shopping 2.0 API is available now, while the Photos, Calendar and MyWeb read/write APIs will be available soon [updated – thanks Jeffrey]. While they’ll be free to use for non commercial purposes, Ash Patel (Yahoo chief product officer) tells … Read more

The Register investigates. [via] Full whiteboard image here I knew Google was up to something big. It’s always the quiet ones you need to watch… Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

Live.com, Microsoft’s personalized start page, has just been upgraded with some impressive new features. Live.com program manager Sanaz Ahari sent me details of the release this evening. It was good timing, because earlier today I’d been using the old Live.com and having trouble! The new features are: Pages – you can have multiple pages for … Read more

TechCrunch has obtained screenshots of the as yet unreleased Google Calendar, called CL2. The leak came via Google’s closed beta of about 200 participants. Apparently CL2 is a long way away from launch, but there are some meaty details in Mike’s post. CL2 looks to be a very strong product from Google (which has by … Read more

Microsoft has just released (or is about to) a series of new products: Windows Live Search Beta, Windows Live Toolbar Beta and the next version of Live.com. Details on my ZDNet blog. One thing of personal interest to me is that a former Read/WriteWeb sponsor, web research product Onfolio, has been acquired by Microsoft and … Read more

ETech 2006 has started and it’s the one conference this year which people kept telling me I should be at (but oddly, no one offered to pay my airfare…). Oh well, luckily I have my finger on the blogosphere pulse and so I’m going to post updates of my virtual findings over the next few … Read more

Ian Rogers of Yahoo Music gave an interesting talk at BarcampLA entitled Media 2.0 Physics. I encourage you to pore over his presentation and notes. I liked the part about Yahoo and original content: “So Should Yahoo! be in the (Original) Content Business? Like HBO before us, Yahoo! should only create content in two cases: … Read more

– 37Signals publish a PDF book (“DIY publishing: There’s a new sheriff in town.” — suggestion to 37Signals: create a product that enables other authors to DIY publish…) – Kottke on DIY book publishing (37Signals profit margin will probably be much higher than any royalties they would’ve got from a publishing company) – eBay’s Jason … Read more

The big news in my part of the world today is that trademe.co.nz, a virtual clone of eBay that has risen to dominance in the eBay-less New Zealand market, has been sold to Aussie media company Fairfax for a staggering NZ$700 million [news via Dave]. Mr Barren thinks Fairfax would’ve been attracted by the 15.6 … Read more

Robert Scoble swears off tech.memeorandum for a week, due to excessive snark in the Sunday edition: “…it‚Äôs the little things in life that make you smarter. The little things don‚Äôt show up on Memeorandum. They do show up on RSS. Which is why I‚Äôm still subscribed to 847 smart people‚Äôs feeds.” I don‚Äôt think the … Read more

The Google Analyst Day presentation makes for interesting reading. Thanks to Greg Linden for providing the early analysis and text from the now withdrawn powerpoint presentation (only available now as a 10MB PDF – sans the ppt notes unfortunately). Greg provided the notes to slide 19, which are fascinating for those of us interested in … Read more