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
Pew has released its analysis of how the Internet will evolve over the next 14 or so years (2020). I’m inclined to agree with Om Malik that the conclusions about the technology are rather obvious: “a global, low-cost network will be thriving in 2020”, which will bring about a “‘flattening’ of the world”. You don’t … Read more
A new documentary on Silicon Valley premieres today on DVD. It was directed by my friend Steve O’Hear, who I met over the Web earlier this year and now work with on my corporate blogging project called Micro Media Corp. ‘In Search of the Valley’ is a movie which tells the story of three friends’ … Read more
Another busy week of Web Tech news and analysis. Here is what we covered on Read/WriteWeb during the week (number of comments in brackets)… OneWebDay: In Celebration Of The Web (2) – looks like this didn’t take off in a big way, judging by the lack of blogosphere love for it. I still think it’s … Read more
For some great weekend reading, check out this Fortune magazine article that gets inside the great Google brain. Some extracts that I enjoyed… “What emerges from months of interviews with employees ranging from fresh-out-of-college hires to the CEO is that Google firmly believes it has a framework for figuring out the future. It should come … Read more
Today is the first OneWebDay, a global awareness event to “create, maintain, advance and promote a global day to celebrate online life.” It was founded by Susan Crawford, associate professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Some big Web names have been lined up in support – including Sir Tim Berners-Lee … Read more
In the clearest sign yet that the big guns are preparing to step up the battle for Web Office, Microsoft has said it is considering releasing a version of Microsoft Works (the poor cousin of Microsoft Office) as a web suite. The desktop version of Works retails for $50 and includes a calendar, word processor, … Read more
We’ve seen a lot of action in the ‘personalized start page’ space on the consumer side, but relatively little development in business web ‘start pages’. Salesforce.com has an interesting feature in its upcoming Winter ’07 release that may change that. Called the Business Web Desktop, it’s basically an Ajax-powered web homepage for Salesforce apps. The … Read more
The WSJ is reporting that US Social Networking site Facebook is in serious talks to sell itself to Yahoo, for an amount that may be as high as $1 billion. According to the WSJ, this is a return to the acquisition talks which Facebook has held over the past year with Yahoo – as well … Read more
In August AOL acquired online communications startup Userplane – which runs a suite of chat, IM, A/V Recorder, search and presence tools. AOL is in the midst of a big shift in businenss models – from closed ‘walled garden’, to a more open, web services-driven portal offering. For example AOL is to end its reliance … Read more
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. DEMO conference – the premier launchpad for new technologies – has unveiled its list of companies selected to launch at DEMOfall ’06. For the past sixteen years this event, produced by Chris Shipley, has attracted premier journalists, venture capitalists and corporate executives. The demo has been … Read more
Next in our series on international Web markets is Japan. The information for this post was provided by Benjamin Joffe (CEO of Plus Eight Star Ltd) and Masashi Kobayashi (partner of Globis Capital Partners – one of the largest Venture Capital firms in Japan). We start off with an overview of the market, then list … Read more
Blog network 9rules has developed a custom-built search engine for its members’ content. I’ve always admired 9rules’ philosophy (note: R/WW used to be a member), because they’re all about original content and design. Now they’re trying to make it easier for others to discover all that great content, with a search interface that only searches … Read more
3Tera, a company based in California, has announced what it calls a breakthrough technology – “disposable infrastructure”. This technology is the foundation of their product AppLogic, which they say is the “first grid operating system that runs and scales existing web applications.” It almost takes a Comp Sci PhD from Stanford to read 3Tera’s press … Read more
Next in our series on international Web markets is France. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy and Brazil. France has the 9th highest number of Internet users in the world, with 26.8 million. It has an Internet penetration of 44%, putting it below … Read more
Google’s Carl Sjogreen gave a talk at the Future of Web Apps conference about how they built Google Calendar. Rakesh Agrawal took extensive notes, as did Tim Bonnemann. What I love about Google is they consistently think ‘Web Native’ when developing web applications. My favorite example of that is Gmail, which changed the whole paradigm … Read more