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

Today at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007), Microsoft and Adobe have gone tit for tat with product launches that directly target one another. Our previous post covered Adobe’s launch of a new Internet video solution, that competes with Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. And Microsoft has fired right back, unveiling Microsoft Silverlight – … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that due to recent travel and the start of the Web 2.0 Expo, this week’s Wrapup is later and shorter than usual. Top Web News The big news this week came right at the very end of the week – just after … Read more

In a move predicted by R/WW’s Sean Ammirati and The New York Times a week or so ago, one of the big Internet companies has acquired online advertising system DoubleClick. And the buyer is none other than Web 2.0’s big spender, Google! According to the press release just out: “The acquisition will combine DoubleClick’s expertise … Read more

Properazzi is a property search engine, based in Barcelona, Spain. The service only launched in March 2007, but already it claims to have the largest database of property listings in Europe – 1.8 million property listings in 45 countries, in multiple languages and currencies. The company is funded by Mangrove Capital Partners. Today Properazzi announced … Read more

In a timely follow-up to Alex Iskold’s thought-provoking piece on Google being The Ultimate Money Making Machine, Hitwise has released stats today that reinforce Google’s dominance in the search engine market – at least in the USA, the leading market still. Hitwise says that Google accounted for 64 percent of all US searches in the … Read more

Last week we ran a contest giving away 3 tickets to the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco next week, worth $1,500 each. To enter, all you had to do was define Web 3.0. We got a lot of awesome definitions and it was extremely tough to pick out 3 winners. About 15 entries … Read more

Martha Stewart’s company today officially unveiled the latest version of its marthastewart.com website. They are positioning it as “the most authoritative lifestyle destination on the Internet” and it’s aiming for a market of an estimated 102 million women online. I was immediately curious to look at the new site, because back in July 2005 I … Read more

Techcrunch is reporting that China-based web browser Maxthon has sold a minority stake to Google, rumored to be around $1 million. More importantly Techcrunch is “also hearing that this investment is part of a ‘much larger strategic deal’? between the two companies.” Maxthon is a powerful tabbed, fully customizable and 100% free Internet browser built … Read more