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
68% of New Zealand’s Internet traffic is to online auction site TradeMe, CEO Sam Morgan and Development Manager Rowan Simpson told me when I visited their Wellington office last Thursday. TradeMe is New Zealand’s version of eBay, even down to the color scheme. But it’s more than just an auction site now – over the … Read more
Today George Moore, GM of Windows Live, announced the Windows Live Contacts Gadget beta at the Microsoft TechEd 2006 conference, in Auckland New Zealand (I’m here at the conference courtesy of Microsoft NZ). Live Contacts provides programmatic access to a user’s contact list, providing secure access to 400+ M active users with 12B contact records. … Read more
This week I interviewed Microsoft’s Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager for IE, to address the issue of Web standards compliance and IE7. There has been controversy about this lately, sparked by a Slashdot thread last week that claimed IE7 was basically non-compliant with CSS standards. I then repeated those claims on my ZDNet blog, … Read more
Next in my series on top international Web apps is Spain. The previous countries profiled were Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom and Russia. The information in this post comes from two people: Eduardo Perez Orue from the Spanish Virtual Desktop product EyeOS, plus a R/WW reader named Carlos (sorry I didn’t get his last … Read more
This week there has been a slew of news about social networks and big companies ramping up their social software features. Here’s a quick summary of the latest news and some thoughts below. Apple Making Huge Social Software Push – Josh Porter digs into Apple releases to find a Wiki Server, iCal Calendar Sharing, iChat … Read more
Webmail.us has just released the fourth generation of its Web Email platform, replacing its legacy software with an AJAX framework. They’re promising their users “a markedly faster, better performing experience” with its new Ajax version. Webmail.us provides email hosting services to more than 23,000 small-medium businesses and is one of a number of smaller, niche … Read more
One of the more ambitious and innovative Web apps I’ve heard of recently is InnovAlarm, a Web-based platform for security, safety and health monitoring services. Although their website has little information about the product, InnovAlarm CTO David Albert sent me more details. He told me their aim is “to ‘Skype’ the security monitoring and home … Read more
While the pros and cons of P2P networks on the Web are still being debated, there are a number of private invite-only P2P networks (aka darknets) out there which enable users to get quality-approved media and software. They are decentralized, secret and almost certainly not very legal in their media-sharing activities. Many of them use … Read more
I’m really enjoying writing my series on international Web apps and I’ve gotten some great feedback that others are enjoying it too. The previous post about Russian Web apps has gotten the most interest so far, including from some people in Russia who took issue with it. The comments on my post are informative, but … Read more
US Web stats company Compete has some interesting analysis on how Social Networking sites compare to portals. From a sample size of around 2 million US people, Compete concludes that social networking sites are quickly approaching the traffic level of the big portals like Google and Yahoo. Their key findings: 1. In June, 2 out … Read more
Today I interviewed Geoffrey Arone, the co-founder of social Web browser Flock.com. Flock recently released its official beta, which they call version 0.7. They’re currently positioning their product as a mainstream browser which enables people to share and create online. Flock is specifically targeting people who use social networking media tools like MySpace and YouTube. … Read more
Next in my series on top Web apps in international markets is Russia. To remind you of the previous countries profiled: Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea and United Kingdom. Other country profiles coming soon include Spain, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand (if I can rustle up enough web apps from the NZ2.0 mailing list!), Latvia, China (I … Read more
Last night I published the first part of my interview with two senior Sun Microsystems engineers, Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). The interview was to celebrate the 15th birthday of the Web this week. Several commenters on the Slashdot thread about my post said they’d prefer to get the … Read more
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web, today I interviewed two distinguished people from Sun Microsystems – Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). Sun of course was one of the key Web companies from the 90’s and is still going strong today, under the leadership of Jonathan … Read more
While I’ve been busy profiling international “web 2.0” startups and products, Techcrunch has put together a video documentary that explores web 2.0 in Silicon Valley. This seems to be aimed at mainstream business people, telling them what this web 2.0 thing is all about – and positioning the Techcrunch brand at the center of it. … Read more