Next in our series on international Web markets is Japan. The information for this post was provided by Benjamin Joffe (CEO of Plus Eight Star Ltd) and Masashi Kobayashi (partner of Globis Capital Partners – one of the largest Venture Capital firms in Japan). We start off with an overview of the market, then list … Read more

Blog network 9rules has developed a custom-built search engine for its members’ content. I’ve always admired 9rules’ philosophy (note: R/WW used to be a member), because they’re all about original content and design. Now they’re trying to make it easier for others to discover all that great content, with a search interface that only searches … Read more

3Tera, a company based in California, has announced what it calls a breakthrough technology – “disposable infrastructure”. This technology is the foundation of their product AppLogic, which they say is the “first grid operating system that runs and scales existing web applications.” It almost takes a Comp Sci PhD from Stanford to read 3Tera’s press … Read more

Next in our series on international Web markets is France. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy and Brazil. France has the 9th highest number of Internet users in the world, with 26.8 million. It has an Internet penetration of 44%, putting it below … Read more

Google’s Carl Sjogreen gave a talk at the Future of Web Apps conference about how they built Google Calendar. Rakesh Agrawal took extensive notes, as did Tim Bonnemann. What I love about Google is they consistently think ‘Web Native’ when developing web applications. My favorite example of that is Gmail, which changed the whole paradigm … Read more

Interesting NY Times profile of Baidu, China’s main search engine and currently the 4th biggest website in the world. It has a market value of $3 billion, but “some analysts” question whether Baidu can keep out competition from Google and Yahoo: “While Baidu continues to gain market share in China — and does so with … Read more

In case your RSS Reader got the better of you over the working week, here’s a snapshot of last week’s Read/WriteWeb posts. The big web tech stories were Times Reader, Zune, Yahoo Mail Beta, iTV. Here are summaries of all our posts this week: New York Times Reader Launches – NY Times releases the beta … Read more

The next generation Times Reader desktop application, built by NY Times and Microsoft, has just gone live. At the end of August Read/WriteWeb published exclusive pre-launch screenshots of Times Reader, but now you can download the app and see for yourself. Note that it requires a Windows XP machine and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0. … Read more

Man about town Om Malik bumped into Netvibes CEO Tariq Krim at the The Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco. Tariq told Om that Netvibes now has 5 million users, so naturally he is very optimistic of its future. Currently on Read/WriteWeb we’re running a poll asking whether independent Personalized Start Pages (such … Read more

Microsoft has released details of its upcoming Zune product, an iPod-like device that is squarely aimed at challenging Apple’s dominance of the online music market. TechCrunch, Engadget and PaidContent have all the details, so I just want to focus on a couple of interesting Internet features of Zune. 1) Zune will have a social network … Read more

Today Yahoo is releasing the new Ajax-powered version of Yahoo Mail to all users in the US and across 18 international markets. Previously Yahoo Mail Beta (as it is known) was only available to a relatively small group of people. I spoke exclusively to Ethan Diamond, director of product management for the new Yahoo! Mail, … Read more

At yesterday’s Apple Showtime event, Steve Jobs announced upgrades to iPod/iTunes, the addition of movies to iTunes, and an upcoming product called iTV. Movies on iTunes had been predicted and much discussed before the event, so the real interest was in the iTV announcement – which is essentially Apple’s version of Media Center, the Microsoft … Read more

In our latest poll, we’re asking what you think of Personalized Start Pages as an ongoing business. Accel VC Judy Gibbons said in our interview that personalized start pages are under-hyped: “Personal home pages like PageFlakes & Netvibes […] represent the third generation of Internet usage: first portals because there was little content and it … Read more

This is the start of a new interview series on Read/WriteWeb, about venture capitalists (VCs) and their thoughts on ‘next generation web’. The aim is to find out what Web technology trends and products VCs are tracking – and at the same time provide some expert tips and advice for Web developers and entrepreneurs. In … Read more

It’s Apple Showtime today and as usual, plenty of great coverage to sort through. Here is a quick filter of the news, with a focus on Web-related announcements from Apple. iPod and iTunes forge ahead in online media The iPod now has 75.6% market share, according to Apple. The range of ‘devices’ it connects to … Read more