ReadWriteWeb

Every year since 2004, ReadWriteWeb has selected a best ‘little company.’ In past years we’ve given this honor to Flickr, 37Signals, YouTube (in 2006, the year it was acquired by Google), Twitter (in 2007, before it went mainstream), Zoho, and Aardvark. As you can see, many of these companies have gone onto much bigger things. … Read more

Internet of Things (IoT) is a term for when everyday ordinary objects are connected to the Internet via microchips. The technologies include sensors, RFID and smartphone standards like NFC. The use cases are still evolving, but over 2010 we saw large organizations like HP and IBM build out impressive platforms for the Internet of Things. … Read more

This month ReadWriteWeb is publishing a series of top 10 lists of the best products of 2010, each based on a specific category. This post is a little different, in that it’s my own personal top 10 list of my favorite products of 2010. I’m not claiming these are the best products of the year, … Read more

One of the more subtle trends of 2010 has been the way that our reading habits have changed, due to a convergence of other Web trends: mobile apps, real-time Web (mostly Twitter), and social networking as a way to track news (mostly Facebook). In the previous era of the Web, the so-called Web 2.0, RSS … Read more

The Mobile Web has been a huge trend in 2010 and one output of that has been the emergence of app stores. It started of course with Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and then iPad. Then we saw other app stores come onto the scene: Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace … Read more

One of the big themes of 2010 has been the increased simplicity of posting content to the Web. Whether it’s Facebooking with your family, tweeting with your online buddies, or sharing a favorite video, photo or quote on Tumblr. All of these activities have given millions of people an opportunity to add their voice to … Read more

This week the Web’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, published an article in Scientific American promoting open standards and net neutrality. In the article, he takes aim at Facebook for being a “walled garden.” He claims that Facebook and other social networks are “walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web.” … Read more

2010 has been a watershed year for the next version of HTML, the markup language that all web pages are written in. The reason for the emerging popularity of HTML5 strikes at the heart of a company by the name of Adobe: interactivity. Adobe’s near ubiquitous Flash technology has been the default way to add … Read more

The Web has always rewarded quantity more than quality, but over 2010 this truism became even more pronounced with the growth of Content Farms. These are companies which create thousands of pieces of content per day. Much of it is in the form of how-to articles and is often referred to as “evergreen” informational content, … Read more

Yesterday we published an overview of social shopping in 2010, one of the year’s top trends. Social shopping is a form of e-commerce in which you can share and access information about retail products through your friends or other users. Social shopping products often have a crowdsourcing component too, enabling you to get the best … Read more

How do people use web apps in this new, device-saturated era of the Web? In Part 3 of our interview with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, we look at the usage patterns of its users. One interesting data point is that 80% of Evernote users say they use the product both at home and at work. … Read more

In Part 1 of our interview with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, we explored the history of Evernote – including its link to the Apple Newton. In Part 2, we look ahead to the future of Evernote. The company has ambitious plans to be your secondary brain. Literally. As Libin told me, “You will just have … Read more

Evernote is a smart phone app that epitomizes the modern day web service. It is used over a variety of devices, it syncs easily between those devices, it augments your daily life in ways not possible before the mobile web, it can be used equally at work or home. In an interview with Evernote CEO … Read more

As the Internet of Things slowly becomes a commercial reality, led by industries such as food and logistics, the underlying technologies (RFID, sensors, QR codes and more) become less important than what is done with the data. As Bo Begole, Principal Scientist and Manager of Ubiquitous Computing at PARC, put it to me recently: “the … Read more

On a trip to Silicon Valley last month, I had the pleasure of visiting the famous PARC campus (Palo Alto Research Center, formally Xerox PARC). One of the people I spoke to was Bo Begole, Principal Scientist and Manager of PARC’s Ubiquitous Computing Area. Begole showed me an app that brings the concept of ‘ubicomp’ … Read more