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
Ultrastar is a music fan site management company, started by David Bowie in the late 90’s. They create and manage sites for a range of pop music acts – such as The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Sting, INXS and about 9 other acts. They emailed me today to tell me … Read more
Holotof is a network of “advertising creatives”, which enables businesses to come and pitch them work – in the form of ad projects and campaigns. The idea then is that creatives submit ideas for the pitch and the client chooses the best one to work with. The site was launched in May this year by … Read more
While in San Francisco earlier this month, I met up with Laszlo’s Founder and CTO, David Temkin, along with CMO Kent Libbey. Laszlo has an open source Ajax application development platform called OpenLaszlo – which has been used for external apps like Pandora (online radio and music sharing) and ishares.com (Barclays sharemarket app). OpenLaszlo was … Read more
Lloyd Sakazaki has written a good overview of recent trends in global websites. It is based on Alexa data, a stats source which comes under regular fire for its faults (most recently ex-Netscape boss Jason Calacanis took aim). Nevertheless, there are some interesting underlying trends in the Seeking Alpha article. Not new trends, but well … Read more
Interesting podcast interview by Gizbuzz, with Jen Mazzon and Sam Schillace of the Google Docs and Spreadsheets team (both ex-Writely). They start off by saying that D&S is aimed at “people who need to collaborate and share their stuff online”. To the question of whether people are using it instead of desktop apps (such as … Read more
Our post this week about GoogleOS led to some vigorous and fascinating discussion in Read/WriteWeb. 87 mostly thoughtful comments were left here, plus many more on Slashdot and Digg. To get a final, more succinct, picture of whether R/WW readers expect to see a GoogleOS – here is a poll for you. I hope there … Read more
Written by Dejan Bizinger, a web manager at Serbian media company B92.net, and edited by Richard MacManus Serbia is a country located in Southeast Europe with around 9 million people. Around 1.5 million Serbians use the Internet and the majority of them are still dial-up users. The main reasons for the small broadband penetration are … Read more
I know, a predictable (almost tabloid-y) blog headline. But in this case, there really is some interesting back and forth going on between Microsoft and Google currently – especially with regards to office software. Firstly Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote an article for The Economist, in which he takes aim at Microsoft with this: “In … Read more
On my ZDNet blog last night I took a look at the evolving world of Web Office widgets. I noted that the personalized start page Pageflakes has just introduced a couple of new office “flakes” – a Calendar Flake and a Notepad Flake. They also have an existing Mail Flake, as well as flakes for … Read more
Along with the increasing internationalization of the Web, comes the language challenge. China is obviously a key Web and business market going forward, so there is currently a lot of interest in learning Mandarin. As one solution to this, Ken Carroll recently contacted me to tell me about ChinesePod – the site he co-founded a … Read more
The BBC wonders if British mobile operator 3 has “discovered the holy grail of the mobile phone industry”, simply by bundling some mobile web services together and making it flat rate pricing. Mobile Web expert Ajit Jaokar is very bullish on this news. 3’s new package is called X-Series and here’s what’s in it: Skype … Read more
Today Silicon Valley company Fabrik launched its myfabrik online storage and file-sharing service, after a 4 month beta period. It’s also releasing a new service called myfabrik lite, that lets users share large multimedia files (up to 1GB at a time). The aim with the Lite product is twofold: as a solution to sending huge … Read more
While I was in San Francisco I sat down to talk to Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic Inc – the company set up to leverage the popular open source blogging tool WordPress. One of their main projects is WordPress.com, described as “a more limited version of WordPress that is hosted and completely maintained.” It’s pretty … Read more
In the latest in Read/WriteWeb’s coverage of international Web markets, we explore Hungary – a central European country of 10 million people. The information in this post was supplied by Hírbehozó, a professional journalist for online media company Index.hu. Hírbehozó told me there are not too many startups in Hungary. The big companies like Sanoma … Read more
The big news over the weekend is the publication of an internal memo by Yahoo senior VP Brad Garlinghouse, dubbed the ‘Peanut Butter Manifesto’. The crux of it is that Garlinghouse says Yahoo as a company is unfocused and has too many product lines that cross over. Here is how he described it: “I’ve heard … Read more