Those of you who read John Milan’s insightful article on R/WW about the coming convergence of Web apps and desktop apps, will be interested in a new development by Blake Ross – famous in the Web world for co-founding Firefox. Blake has an intriguing new startup called Parakey, which is going to be a WebOS … Read more

Reality Digital is an online video and social networking platform for business websites, for example those with a media and entertainment focus. Crudely put, Reality Digital enables businesses to set up their own branded YouTube. They view their competition as being the likes of VideoEgg, VidaVee, BlipTV – which are all video publishing platforms with … Read more

Last.fm, one of my favorite online music recommendation and listening services, today announced a website relaunch. The London-based company has added four new features: Events system (e.g. concerts), Free MP3s, Flash player radio, and a Taste-o-meter. Last.fm hopes these new features, plus the re-design, will make it easier to find and share music – as … Read more

In other acquisition news today, Techcrunch reported that Cond√© Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, has acquired Boston-based Reddit. I pinged Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian about this and he confirmed to me that they have been acquired, “for an undisclosed sum”. Reddit is another to have been extensively profiled by Read/WriteWeb. Back in July … Read more

News this morning that JotSpot, a favorite Web Office contender of mine, has been acquired by Google. I’ve spoken to co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus several times over the past year or so and have found him to be one of the most eloquent people on the topic of Web Office. Here’s what he wrote … Read more

US analytics firm Compete, a company formed in 2000 by Bill Gross of Overture fame, has quietly released a new search engine and at the same time opened up some of its analytics data to the public. What’s more, there is an e-commerce component that displays special shopping deals next to search results. I spoke … Read more

As if we needed any further proof that the online video market is white hot right now, the founders of Skype have now set their sites on a Web TV service – according to this Yahoo News story. After creating the file-swapping service KaZaA and then VoIP software Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom plan … Read more

Metacafe, a YouTube-like video sharing site originally from Israel, has just gone live with a revenue sharing program called Producer Rewards. The payments are on a sliding scale and based on ‘views’. Payments start at 20,000 views ($100) and go up from there – e.g. 2 million views is $10,000. Videos must also have a … Read more

“Why on earth does the world need another search engine?”, asks the new Live Search promotional site. In addition to that website, as John Battelle’s Searchblog reports, Microsoft has launched a campaign for Live Search with digital and print ads in major newspapers – New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times/PI, SF Chronicle, USAPicture … Read more

Dominating the Web Tech world this week was the release of the Firefox 2.0 browser. Read/WriteWeb covered the launch extensively – including an interview with Chris Beard (Mozilla Vice President of Products), a product review of the new browser, a review of the Firefox 2 Recommended Add-ons and a post on how Mozilla plans to … Read more

The Pluck RSS Reader is shutting down, according to a message posted on the Pluck website: “All versions of Pluck’s RSS readers for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Pluck’s web edition will be discontinued on 1/5/2007. The RSS Readers have served our community of end users well for several years, but with Pluck’s focus in other … Read more

Tamago recently launched a peer-to-peer commerce system that enables people to sell digital media directly to customers. It’s designed for semi-professional and amateur people who publish music, videos, photos, e-books, etc. to earn royalties whenever their creative content is downloaded. Meanwhile the buyers can also earn commissions, for distributing media to others. Tamago was founded … Read more

Last week I spoke to Jeremy Jaech, CEO and president of Trumba, whose team is building an innovative online event calendaring system aimed at enterprises. Jeremy Jaech was also the founder of both Visio and PageMaker – two of the Internet’s early successful desktop publishing systems. It’s basically the same engineering team from both Visio … Read more

There’s an interesting rumor doing the rounds about Google doing a re-org of their advertising business. Jeff Molander wrote: “Three of my most credible resources, including DM News’s Giselle Abramovich, are indicating plans for a significant re-organization at Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). […] On the re-org, says Ms. Abramovich, “What this means is that there would … Read more

Transclick is a mobile enterprise application that translates text in email, SMS and IM. The software has been around for a while (see this CNNMoney.com article from March 2005), but is now starting to make waves as a business productivity tool. RIM Blackberry just announced Transclick as the winner of its BlackBerry Developer Productivity Tools … Read more