ReadWriteWeb

We’re starting to see a lot of startups either shutting down, fading away or being put up for sale. The latest is Talkr, an automated text-to-voice service that we actually use here on Read/WriteWeb. At the bottom of each R/WW post, you’ll see an Audio link – click on that to hear a computer-generated female … Read more

I’ve been following usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s annual Best Intranets column for as long as I can remember. This year Nielsen specifically mentions web 2.0, albeit in a very condescending way. The summary is just the start: “This year’s winners emphasized an editorial approach to news on the homepage. They also took a pragmatic approach … Read more

James Corbett has an interesting post speculating that Google Reader might become a ‘read/write’ app over the course of 2007. Says James: “The addition of support for tagging and link blogging were the warning shots but the coming months will see Reader evolve into a fully fledged Reader/Writer (let’s call it ReWriter). Google ReWriter is … Read more

sphereit start Greg Linden just posted on his blog that Findory, the personalized news service he created and has been running for the past 3 years, is to slowly “fade away”. In other words, he’s not going to put any more effort into developing it or the business. However findory.com will continue to be a … Read more

Todd Bishop at Seattle P-I newspaper has published a telling tag cloud view of Bill Gates’ speech at CES earlier this week. Notes Bishop: “Putting our fancy new gizmo to work, we fed the text of Bill Gates’ Sunday night Consumer Electronics Show keynote into the tag-cloud generator, and added the results to our scrolling … Read more

OK so Jobs didn’t use the word “ain’t”. But in a Newsweek interview with Steven Levy, Jobs put the kibosh on any talk about the iPhone opening up its platform for third party developers: ‘You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,’? meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum … Read more

Ever wondered what a MySpace-like social network site, which are seemingly a dime a dozen these days, is worth on the open market? Well the developers of ShoutCentral.com, which claims to have “over 1,000 users”, has just sold their SNS for $13,800 on eBay. The sellers were originally after $15k, so it was close to … Read more

Ugenie, a comparison shopping service that we profiled in November, has released a new textbook service. You may remember that Ugenie’s defining feature is the the ability to group items into a ‘bundle’ and find the best price for that bundle – i.e. find the best price for multiple items across multiple merchants. This takes … Read more

There’s one industry which has continued to flourish, whether it be web 1.0 or 2.0 or anything in between. And that’s the domain name market. The Domain Name Values Weekly site polled 30 domain name experts to find out their Top 20 Domain Transactions of 2006. The main criteria wasn’t most money paid, but best … Read more

The NY Times has an interesting article about how many office workers forward work email into their web email accounts (Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, etc). Employers are worried about the security implications, as well as legal issues. It’s a classic case of web 2.0 consumer apps infiltrating the enterprise (the consumerization of the enterprise, as … Read more

HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task and it’s the term for a small job at Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s AI task management service. According to Wikipedia‘s definition, “Mturk enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.” The payments are micro, but the idea is that … Read more

Mozilla has published a wiki page detailing its plans for the next version of Firefox, codenamed “Gran Paradiso”. The target release date is sometime in the third quarter this year and it hopes to release a major version of Firefox every year. While Firefox is still aiming for a broad mainstream audience, Mozilla recognizes that … Read more

GoodSearch is a Yahoo-powered search engine that gives away half its advertising revenues to charities and schools designated by its users. It works like a normal search engine – it’s not only powered by Yahoo, but looks almost identical too. The only difference is whenever you click on ads (located on the right, and top … Read more

Enterprise RSS software company Attensa has announced a partnership with The Real Time Matrix Corp, which develops search and filtering technology. The partnership aims to help enterprise users create focused search channels – essentially topic feeds. Craig Barnes, Attensa CEO, calls this an “RSS Tuner”, which is a nice term signifying that they are trying … Read more

CNET’s huge cadre of editors has published a Best of CES 2007 article. There aren’t many Internet apps in the selection, but Microsoft comes out smelling of roses. They won the Peoples Voice award with ‘Ford Sync powered by Microsoft’ (an in-car communications and entertainment system). Ford Sync is for connecting up devices such as … Read more