As noted in our coverage of Ray Ozzie’s MIX keynote this morning, Microsoft has released a number of significant upgrades to its Silverlight product. Silverlight is essentially a competitor to Adobe’s Flash, in that enables developers to create interactive web apps. It’s officially described as “a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of … Read more

I was fortunate enough to be invited to a blogger lunch with Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and General Manager of Client and Web Platform & Tools Scott Guthrie. The discussion was mostly developer focused, but right at the end I managed to get a question in about Microsoft’s strategy for IE and live.com. … Read more

I’m at the MIX conference in Las Vegas, courtesy of Microsoft New Zealand. Ray Ozzie has just completed his keynote speech, in which he delivered a more refined version of his ‘integrated Web/Desktop’ vision. He talked about how the best solutions are “integrated solutions”, meaning integrated Web, desktop and mobile. He talked about RIAs and … Read more

I’m on holiday all this week and during that time Josh Catone will be Guest Editor of Read/WriteWeb. You may remember Josh from such posts as Internet Killed The Television Star and Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One. Josh is a talented writer, as well as being co-founder of the web’s largest community … Read more

Yesterday, 20 April, was the 4th anniversary of Read/WriteWeb’s first official post (although I first tinkered with blogging in March 2002). It’s amazing how much has happened in the last 4 years. A common question I get when I meet industry people is: how did you start R/WW? The short version is I started writing … Read more

Post Web 2.0 Expo, time to get back to work and thank our sponsors. Also of course thanks to our readers and writers! Read/WriteWeb’s sponsors are: Wild Apricot is bringing web 2.0 to non-profits. It offers membership database, event and website management for non-profits, clubs and associations. Zoho is a leading Web Office suite. I … Read more

Just as it’s become the custom for Tim O’Reilly to open the Web 2.0 conference keynotes with a fireside chat with Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, and then later for John Battelle to interview a Google exec (it used to be Sergey Brin, but now Eric Schmidt has taken over that task), it’s becoming Read/WriteWeb’s custom … Read more

Yesterday in the Web 2.0 Expo booths, I checked out Bungee Labs – an ambitious new on-demand, web-based development environment that enables developers to build and deploy web apps that utilize the large variety of APIs and web services out on the Internet. The platform is very broad, but if I had to boil it … Read more

Today at Web 2.0 Expo Google CEO Eric Schmidt publicly announced that Google will add a presentations product to its Web Office range of apps, thus completing a Web Office suite and ending (many) months of speculation. It was soon confirmed by the official Google blog, where the Google Docs & Spreadsheets team informed us … Read more

Tim Westergren, founder of Internet radio station Pandora, has sent out a letter to an unknown number of people asking for help about licensing fees. Specifically this relates to “a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora.” We don’t know … Read more

Schmidt starts off by announcing a presentation feature for Docs & Spreadsheets. John Battelle points out that this completes the Office suite, so he asks is it now a competitor to MS? Schmidt says no, because it doesn’t have the same or all of MS Office’s functionality. He says Google D&S is a collaborative, web … Read more

Bill Tancer from Hitwise and Dafe Sifry from Technorati are on stage now, discussing data about the participatory web. The first slide from Bill shows a 668% growth in web 2.0 over the last year, based on the top participatory sites combined (in US), like Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. The next chart is similar, showing just … Read more

While I’ve been doing the conference equivalent of a headless chicken (running about, trying to remember who I’m supposed to meet next and where), the following bits of news have come out: Techcrunch20 Mike Arrington announced his new conference with Jason Calacanis, Techcrunch20. The format is twenty new startups from around the world will announce … Read more

The keynote speeches kicked off at the Expo this afternoon. Tim O’Reilly started out by describing the latest thinking about Web 2.0. Dan Farber nicely summarized it in this post, quoting O’Reilly as saying: “It’s about building the global computing network and harnessing all the collective intelligence of all the people who are connected’¶.We are … Read more

The Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco officially kicked off yesterday, with some workshops. The first impression I got when I walked into the conference venue was how large the event is – a perception confirmed when I bumped into Anil Dash later that day, who remarked that it was the biggest Web conference … Read more