Weekly Wrapup, 19-23 March 2007

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb, with the results of our poll at the end. Top Web News Much of the discussion in the blogosphere this week revolved around two pieces of big news. Firstly Google announced that it is beta testing a new CPA (Cost Per Action) online … Read more

Winner of ETech Caption Contest

We had a great response to the ETech Caption Contest, with the winner receiving a free ticket to O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference next week – March 26-29, in San Diego. And the winner is… [drum roll] Kevin Jones, with this caption: “You navigated through Vista’s new security and accessed MySpace! Good job!” Congratulations Kevin, you’ve … Read more

Hakia Takes On Google With Semantic Technologies

This week I spoke to Hakia founder and CEO Dr. Riza C. Berkan and COO Melek Pulatkonak. Hakia is one of the more promising Alt Search Engines around, with a focus on natural language processing methods to try and deliver ‘meaningful’ search results. Alex Iskold profiled Hakia for R/WW at the beginning of December and … Read more

Last chance to vote for your favorite Personalized Homepage

Our current poll asks which ‘personalized homepage’ do you use? After a false start, the current results are very interesting. Google Personalized Homepage is most popular with 31%, followed by two of the innovative startups – Pageflakes 21% and Netvibes 20%. Interesting that two of the bigcos are lagging – My Yahoo 6% and Live.com … Read more

Big Internet Companies (Except Google) Brought Into Line – Thoughts on News Corp/NBC Online Video Deal

The big news today is News Corporation and NBC Universal launching what they claim will be “the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled”, with AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! as the site’s initial distribution partners. It will launch this summer (US). The benefits obviously work both ways – News Corp and NBC get 4 … Read more

CIOs Spurn Web 2.0 Startups – Enterprises Want Suites and Large, Incumbent Software Vendors

Forrester Research has just released two reports concerning ‘web 2.0’ in the enterprise. Forrester recently surveyed 119 CIOs on the topic and their answers illustrate what IT honchos want’ and don’t want’ from social software technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging. According to the report entitled CIOs Want Suites … Read more

Caption Contest: ETech Ticket Giveaway

Earlier this week we gave away a free ticket to Office 2.0 and today we have a a free ticket to next week’s ETech to offer as a prize. ETech is O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference and it’ll be held next week, March 26-29, in San Diego. An important note about the prize – the Etech … Read more

Google Gives Personalized Homepage “Personality”

NOTE: Please see important update about this week’s R/WW Poll below, on the topic of Personalized Homepages. We had to re-set it and so are asking for you to re-submit your vote. Today Google launched 6 new themes for its Google Personalized Homepage. The themes to choose from include: a beach, a city, a sweet … Read more

Winner of Office 2.0 Caption Contest

We had an awesome response to our caption contest on Monday – over 80 comments! The Under The Radar folks and myself had a tough choice deciding… but the winner of the free ticket to the Under The Radar Office 2.0 conference, to be held this Friday March 23 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain … Read more

Allth.at Launches Innovative Search Agents App

Allth.at was one of the 100 top alternative search engines in Charles Knight’s February list. It’s a search agent that allows you to define a search topic, then refine it with the use of filters, and finally subscribe to it via email or RSS. It’s similar in many respects to PubSub, the now defunct ‘future … Read more

P2P Lender Zopa Gets $13M Funding – Expands into US

One of the more innovative web apps around has just gotten another big injection of funds, and a new CEO to boot. Zopa describes itself as a “marketplace for Social Lending”, where people lend and borrow money with each other – sidestepping the middleman, i.e. banks. They recently advertised for jobs in their new America … Read more

Userplane Releases Userlist – IM for Websites a Trend to Watch

Disclosure: Userplane is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb Userplane, the provider of community web apps that was acquired by AOL in August last year, is today releasing Userplane Userlist – a Flash-based instant messaging app that you can integrate into web sites. Basically Userlist enables users on a site to view other users’ online status and … Read more

Exclusive: Yahoo oneSearch Launches on US Mobile Web

On Tuesday Yahoo will significantly expand the reach of their new mobile search product, Yahoo! oneSearch, by making it the default mobile Yahoo homepage at http://m.yahoo.com for US users. In effect this brings oneSearch, which Yahoo launched in January 2007, to the Mobile Web masses. The US masses anyway – it will be rolled out … Read more

Poll: Which Personalized Homepage Do You Use?

Update: Unfortunately we have had to re-set the poll, 12 hours after it went live, due to some suspicious voting behavior. We have now blocking repeat voters by Cookie and IP address (previously it was only cookie). We apologize for the inconvenience, but please cast your vote again. With the release of Netvibes’ latest version, … Read more