Today’s big news is that Amazon’s S3 online storage service has experienced significant downtime. Allen Stern, who hosts his blog’s images on S3, reported that the downtime lasted3.5 over 6 hours. Startups that use S3 for their storage, such as SmugMug, have also reported problems. Back in February this same thing happened. At the time … Read more

It’s time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we continued our ongoing analysis of the iPhone 3G and its accompanying App Store, we looked closely at a Gmail update to its contact management system, covered the US launch of Microsoft Live Mesh, and reported on a developer revolt with … Read more

As mentioned earlier this week, ReadWriteWeb is partnering with a couple of conferences this year and one of them is DEMOfall 08, the long-running launchpad for startups. DEMOfall 08 is on September 7-9 in San Diego. They’re just announced the sessions, including a “head-to-head” between tech reporters Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of All Things … Read more

Today online music service last.fmreleased the new design they’ve been working on since May. At first glance it looks quite different to the Facebook-like UI that we saw in the beta in June. However as we noted in our review of the beta last month, the beta UI was much criticized – so the fresh … Read more

There are a lot of tech conferences these days and we at ReadWriteWeb get many emails asking us to promote them. We’ve happily done so in the past, but there are now too many events to keep up with. So this year we’ve decided to partner with a couple of conferences in particular: Defrag and … Read more

Today we did our fourth RWW Live podcast, which we’re running fortnightly on the TalkShoe platform. Today we devoted the whole episode to the iPhone, with a segue at one point into Foocamp (Marshall went to that). Participants in today’s RWW Live were: ReadWriteTalk host Sean Ammirati, Steve O’Hear from our network blog last100, myself, … Read more

This week’s prediction is about (what else) the iPhone. We’re asking: How many total units of the iPhone will Apple sell in 2008?. For background, Apple sold 2.3 million units in Q1 2008 and 1.7 million units in Q2 2008. Today Apple announced it’s already sold 1 million 3G units. In 2007 Steve Jobs said … Read more

It’s time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. It was a very busy week on the product side, and not surprisingly it was dominated by the release of Apple’s 3G iPhone and the accompanying App Store. Also this week Google launched a virtual world, Yahoo opened up its index and search engine to … Read more

This week we announced a new feature for our community: ReadWriteWeb Predictions, a Predictions Center that we hope will enable you to tap into the collective intelligence of RWW readers. The first prediction is about the battle for users and mind-share that has emerged this year between Twitter and FriendFeed. Here are the results, along … Read more

While the US waits agonizingly for their 3G iPhones to arrive, some of us have been playing with our new toys 🙂 There’s been a lot of excitement over the App Store today, and on first inspection there are some outstanding iPhone apps available. Right now the top 5 apps are: Sega’s Super Monkey Ball, … Read more

Here’s another new feature we’re launching: ReadWriteWeb Companies. It’s a company index, powered by TradeVibes. Now whenever we write a review of a startup, you may see a RWW Companies widget at the end of the post – with lots of contextual info about the startup (funding, people, competitors, news, and more). It’s a nice … Read more

Yesterday we reported on the outlandish iphone 3G pricing plans of Vodafone New Zealand, which is charging up to $250 per month for data plans and $1129 local currency for the 16 GB phone by itself – a far cry from the $199 Steve Jobs was promoting last month. But Vodafone NZ is not the … Read more

New Zealand will be the first country in the world to get the Apple iPhone 3G, because of the country’s position on the international dateline. Vodafone NZ is the carrier which is offering the iPhone, but its pricing plans – released today – have attracted a storm of criticism. Vodafone NZ has decided to charge … Read more

Today we’re announcing a new feature for our community: ReadWriteWeb Predictions, a Predictions Center powered by Predictify. We hope it will enable you to tap into the collective intelligence of RWW readers, to assess web technology trends and keep one step ahead of the news. The first prediction is about the battle for users and … Read more

We’ve reached the halfway point of 2008, so time for a half-year assessment of the Internet bigcos. Below is a poll, asking for your picks for best bigcos so far in ’08. We did a similar poll last July – and Facebook just edged out Google for the RWW popular vote. At the end of … Read more