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
US analytics firm Compete, a company formed in 2000 by Bill Gross of Overture fame, has quietly released a new search engine and at the same time opened up some of its analytics data to the public. What’s more, there is an e-commerce component that displays special shopping deals next to search results. I spoke … Read more
As if we needed any further proof that the online video market is white hot right now, the founders of Skype have now set their sites on a Web TV service – according to this Yahoo News story. After creating the file-swapping service KaZaA and then VoIP software Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom plan … Read more
Metacafe, a YouTube-like video sharing site originally from Israel, has just gone live with a revenue sharing program called Producer Rewards. The payments are on a sliding scale and based on ‘views’. Payments start at 20,000 views ($100) and go up from there – e.g. 2 million views is $10,000. Videos must also have a … Read more
“Why on earth does the world need another search engine?”, asks the new Live Search promotional site. In addition to that website, as John Battelle’s Searchblog reports, Microsoft has launched a campaign for Live Search with digital and print ads in major newspapers – New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times/PI, SF Chronicle, USAPicture … Read more
Dominating the Web Tech world this week was the release of the Firefox 2.0 browser. Read/WriteWeb covered the launch extensively – including an interview with Chris Beard (Mozilla Vice President of Products), a product review of the new browser, a review of the Firefox 2 Recommended Add-ons and a post on how Mozilla plans to … Read more
The Pluck RSS Reader is shutting down, according to a message posted on the Pluck website: “All versions of Pluck’s RSS readers for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Pluck’s web edition will be discontinued on 1/5/2007. The RSS Readers have served our community of end users well for several years, but with Pluck’s focus in other … Read more
Tamago recently launched a peer-to-peer commerce system that enables people to sell digital media directly to customers. It’s designed for semi-professional and amateur people who publish music, videos, photos, e-books, etc. to earn royalties whenever their creative content is downloaded. Meanwhile the buyers can also earn commissions, for distributing media to others. Tamago was founded … Read more
Last week I spoke to Jeremy Jaech, CEO and president of Trumba, whose team is building an innovative online event calendaring system aimed at enterprises. Jeremy Jaech was also the founder of both Visio and PageMaker – two of the Internet’s early successful desktop publishing systems. It’s basically the same engineering team from both Visio … Read more
There’s an interesting rumor doing the rounds about Google doing a re-org of their advertising business. Jeff Molander wrote: “Three of my most credible resources, including DM News’s Giselle Abramovich, are indicating plans for a significant re-organization at Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). […] On the re-org, says Ms. Abramovich, “What this means is that there would … Read more
Transclick is a mobile enterprise application that translates text in email, SMS and IM. The software has been around for a while (see this CNNMoney.com article from March 2005), but is now starting to make waves as a business productivity tool. RIM Blackberry just announced Transclick as the winner of its BlackBerry Developer Productivity Tools … Read more
Disclosure: Read/WriteWeb will be going live shortly with a custom Eurekster search box. One of the big pieces of news this week has been Google’s new Custom Search Engine. It’s noticeable not because it’s an innovative product, but more because Google is most definitely a follower and not a leader when it comes to custom … Read more
The moment has arrived, Mozilla has pushed the go-live button on Firefox 2. The new final 2.0 version of the browser is now available for everyone to download. Read/WriteWeb has been actively covering the launch, most recently with a pre-launch interview with Chris Beard – Mozilla Vice President of Products. We’ve also reviewed the product … Read more
This afternoon Firefox 2 will be officially launched. In anticipation of the unveiling, here is an in-depth interview with Chris Beard (Mozilla Vice President of Products). Subjects discussed in the interview include the growing enterprise usage of Firefox, the importance of user experience and security, Mozilla’s theory behind Web feeds and why they haven’t included … Read more
Following hot on the heels of the Microsoft-powered NY Times Reader, Adobe has released Adobe Digital Editions Beta – a Rich Internet Application (RIA) for digital publishing and reading. The product enables users to acquire, read, and manage content such as eBooks and other digital publications. This market is ramping up quickly in late 2006, … Read more
freenigma is a Firefox plug-in that offers e-mail encryption to a whole range of Web email systems – including Gmail, Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail/MSN. It is a product of Germany-based freiheit.com. freenigma came out of public beta at the end of September and is now open to all – but you still have to enter your … Read more