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
Read/WriteWeb’s Web 2.0 Summit coverage sponsored by Yahoo! At last year’s Web 2.0 Conference, Mary Meeker of MorganStanley outlined how mobile and Asia were set for big growth. At this year’s Summit, Meeker focused on video and monetizing that. Mary speaks at a million miles per hour and data points go past faster than one … Read more
Read/WriteWeb’s Web 2.0 Summit coverage sponsored by Yahoo! Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen is talking to Tim O’Reilly on stage now. Bruce says that before the Macromedia acquisition, Adobe was a peripheral player on the Web – so the acquisition brought them back into the heart and soul of the Web. He talks about the importance … Read more
Read/WriteWeb’s Web 2.0 Summit coverage sponsored by Yahoo! Day 2 at the Web 2.0 Summit and Jeff Bezos is on stage, talking about S3 and EC2. He says “we’re a small company with big ideas”, but they’ve been surprised at the level of interest in these services. He thinks people are excited because they can … Read more
Read/WriteWeb’s Web 2.0 Summit coverage sponsored by Yahoo! The Launchpad at the Web 2.0 Summit is a popular event, the venue is packed. 13 companies have 5 minutes each. Here are some quick impressionistic views of how it went…. In the chair is a music-based video game, where people can interact with music – e.g. … Read more
Read/WriteWeb’s Web 2.0 Summit coverage sponsored by Yahoo! I’m at a session at the Web 2.0 Summit called ‘Breaking Free: Working with Real Time Data, Online, Offline, and Outside of the Browser’. The speaker is Christophe Coenraets, a Senior Technical Evangelist from Adobe. He starts off by saying that Adobe is looking for a “high … Read more
Tonight I sat down with Microsoft executives Steve Berkowitz (Senior Vice President, Online Services Group) and Christopher Payne (Corporate Vice President, Live Search) to talk about their new 3D version of Virtual Earth. Microsoft is positioning Virtual Earth as “the beginning of the 3D Web”, a quote I heard from Steve Lawler (General Manager, Virtual … Read more
This WidgetsLive panel featured Adam Sah from Google Personalized Homepage, Sanaz Ahari from Microsoft’s Live.com, and Tariq Krim from Netvibes. After the usual product intros, the panel got more interesting with conversations steered by Niall Kennedy (the moderator). Niall started by asking about monetization. Sanaz said that being a homepage for Microsoft properties is key … Read more
I’m here at Widgets Live in San Francisco, where Dan Strauss and Don Synstelien from Fox Interactive Media are onstage talking about their new widget platform called SpringWidgets. The defining feature of this product is that it works on both the desktop (like Konfabulator) and in the browser (like Google widgets). However the desktop part … Read more
Tomorrow morning I’m traveling to San Francisco for next week’s Web 2.0 Conference. I attended it last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. Read/WriteWeb’s coverage of the 2005 conference is here – and needless to say I’ll be pumping out the posts again this year. In association with the conference, a new Web 2.0 report has … Read more
This morning I participated in a conference call by MIT and the University of Southampton in Britain, announcing an initiative called Web Science. Tim Berners-Lee is leading the program, which is essentially about formalizing a new kind of scientific discipline called Web Science. The goal is to understand the deeper structure of the social Web … Read more
Those of you who read John Milan’s insightful article on R/WW about the coming convergence of Web apps and desktop apps, will be interested in a new development by Blake Ross – famous in the Web world for co-founding Firefox. Blake has an intriguing new startup called Parakey, which is going to be a WebOS … Read more
Reality Digital is an online video and social networking platform for business websites, for example those with a media and entertainment focus. Crudely put, Reality Digital enables businesses to set up their own branded YouTube. They view their competition as being the likes of VideoEgg, VidaVee, BlipTV – which are all video publishing platforms with … Read more
Last.fm, one of my favorite online music recommendation and listening services, today announced a website relaunch. The London-based company has added four new features: Events system (e.g. concerts), Free MP3s, Flash player radio, and a Taste-o-meter. Last.fm hopes these new features, plus the re-design, will make it easier to find and share music – as … Read more
In other acquisition news today, Techcrunch reported that Cond√© Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, has acquired Boston-based Reddit. I pinged Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian about this and he confirmed to me that they have been acquired, “for an undisclosed sum”. Reddit is another to have been extensively profiled by Read/WriteWeb. Back in July … Read more
News this morning that JotSpot, a favorite Web Office contender of mine, has been acquired by Google. I’ve spoken to co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus several times over the past year or so and have found him to be one of the most eloquent people on the topic of Web Office. Here’s what he wrote … Read more