Tech analyst, AI & the web
I founded the tech blog ReadWriteWeb in April 2003 and ran it until October 2012. During my time running the business, it was well known for its cutting edge content (“What’s next on the Web”) and its influential global audience. At its peak, RWW was ranked among the top ten blogs in the world by Technorati.
This category contains all of the articles I personally wrote for RWW, now archived on ricmac.org for easier browsing and search. If you’d like to explore the original context, you can also view a year-by-year archive with links to the Wayback Machine
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
Today Salesforce.com announced a new product called Salesforce ContentExchange, a content management product for unstructured data such as email and html. They also publicly announced the acquisition of Koral, a web 2.0 content collaboration platform that was at DEMO07 earlier this year (see Zoli Erdos’ review). Koral is a key enabling technology for Salesforce ContentExchange. … Read more
Today Central Desktop launched the Spring 2007 Release of its collaboration platform. Of most interest in this release is that Central Desktop is introducing “a turnkey Intranet” for its enterprise subscribers. Key features of the turnkey intranet include easy setup (without coding or “wikifying” it), a company directory and calendar, password protection for documents, Office … Read more
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email: Top Web News The week started off with a flurry of April Fools jokes, blog style. Techcrunch got in a day early and fooled a … Read more
A quick thanks to our readers and sponsors, for supporting Read/WriteWeb’s mission to deliver in-depth news and analysis on Web Technology. Also of course thanks to our excellent writers! Our sponsors are: Wild Apricot offers web 2.0 products for non-profits – one of their largest user segments is professional associations. Probably the most popular area … Read more
In another excellent example of small Web Office vendors teaming up, Web Office suite provider ThinkFree has just launched a WordPress Viewer Plugin enabling WordPress bloggers to embed MS Office docs, spreadsheets, and presentations into their websites. This allows readers of those blogs to view office docs inside the browser – i.e. they don’t need … Read more
This week Optaros released a free survey report entitled ‘How Will Enterprises Deliver Next Generation Internet Applications?’. Over 400 senior decision makers responded to the survey, which looked at how enterprises will deliver the next-generation of Internet applications. A little background on Optaros: it describes itself as “an assembler of Next Generation Internet applications (NGI) … Read more
Ozon.ru, which claims to be Russia’s largest e-commerce store for books, audio and video, software, multimedia games, electronic and digital goods, received $18 million in funding this week from Index Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures (the venture arm of one of Germany’s largest publishing companies) and Cisco. The money will help develop Ozon.ru’s logistics system, expand its … Read more
Read/WriteWeb has 3 passes to Web 2.0 Expo to give away, same as Techcrunch. I have to admit Mr Arrington came up with a pretty cunning means to give away their 3 passes – he’s asking for readers to “attack any post published on TechCrunch”. This will not only give him constructive feedback, but will … Read more
By the end of this week, the Thunderbird 2.0 Release Candidate will be launched. Thunderbird is Mozilla’s open source desktop email client, similar to Microsoft Outlook in features. However with the 2.0 release, Thunderbird takes on more Web functionality from the Firefox browser (more on that below). Thunderbird is cross-platform and it works on Mac, … Read more
Peepel.com today announced the Beta launch of its Online Office Suite, entering a competitive market alongside existing vendors like Zoho, ThinkFree, Zimbra – not to mention Google’s growing Web Office suite. Peepel claims to differentiate itself by being “the only competitor offering a true multiple windows system in an online desktop.” Users can open as … Read more
In an attempt to go beyond page views and visits, today web stats company Compete introduced “Attention metrics”. The reason is that interactive Web page technologies such as Ajax and Flash – not to mention online video – are making simple page views and visits increasingly outdated. With Ajax for example, information on a webpage … Read more
Slashdot is running a story stating that Morfik, an Ajax development platform we covered recently on Read/WriteWeb, has filed a patent dated September 2005 for the compiling of high-level languages into AJAX apps. The timing of the news is interesting, because Morfik is just about to release its version 1.0 – after 8 or more … Read more
The big news today is that EMI Music announced a new higher quality DRM-free music download offering. It is a premium service, covering EMI’s entire digital catalogue, and will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms. Steve Jobs of Apple was there at the announcement, to emphasize that iTunes supports the … Read more
This week’s poll is a companion to a thought-provoking post co-written by Emre Sokullu and Charles Knight. The post is a review of alt search engine Quintura, which differentiates itself with clustering technology. But there is a larger question: can search engines such as Quintura, that rely on UI innovation, really be competitive with Google? … Read more