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
The Internet of Things, when objects in the real world are connected to the Internet, is adding a whole lot more data to the Web. The fascinating question is how that data will be used, by existing businesses and new startups yet to emerge. Take the food industry for example. With sensors, QR codes and … Read more
The latest comScore Top 50 Properties (U.S.) statistics make sobering reading for AOL, the former king of the portals in the 90s and early part of this century. While AOL is the number 5 ranked U.S. web property, with 104 million monthly unique visitors, it’s now well adrift of the top 4: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft … Read more
Recently we spoke to Groupon CTO Ken Pelletier, who has overseen the technical team since the company was founded in 2007. Groupon was gone on to become perhaps the most successful social shopping service on the Web. In our interview, we discovered that Pelletier has specific views on how to develop a web product. So … Read more
Last week I was a judge at the Consumer Electronics Association’s i-Stage competition, where 8 innovative startups competed to win a spot in January’s CES trade show. All of the products presented were forward-looking, none more so than the winner: AutoBot. Developed by Louisville, Kentucky company Mavizon Technologies, AutoBot is a car appliance that allows … Read more
Social shopping has been a big trend over the past year and there have been few more successful startups in this domain than Groupon. It’s a relatively simple concept: offer daily shopping deals to groups of consumers. The details are a little more complicated, in that a deal only eventuates if a pre-set number of … Read more
This year check-in apps have moved beyond location, to encompass every thing from checking into movies, books, songs and (yes) even food. Foodspotting launched last November and has quickly built up a passionate following of foodies. It enables users to make and find food recommendations, in particular through photos and quick ratings of food items. … Read more
CiviGuard is a new mobile-based solution for emergency communications. At heart it’s an alerts and notification system, with messages distributed via text messages, an HTML5 web app, push notifications and social media services like Twitter. The product was developed by 3 students of Singularity University: Zubin Wadia, Shawna Pandya and Timothy Coleman. It was inspired … Read more
Yesterday we published an interview with the founder of Instapaper, Marco Arment. In this post on ReadWriteHack, we look at Arment’s product development philosophy. And he knows what he’s talking about. Instapaper, a cross-platform app that saves web pages for reading later, is the second popular web service that Marco Arment has developed. He was … Read more
A common theme of our product innovation series has been exploring applications that take advantage of new devices – and the user experience patterns that evolve out of that. Instapaper is perfect example of this. It started out as a web application, then embraced smart phones, and now it’s being used by many iPad owners. … Read more
One of the leading trends this year has been check-in apps. Typically mobile apps, they allow you to announce that you’re at a place or doing something. The excitement started with the location check-in apps: Brightkite, Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude and others. But over the past year the practice of “checking in” has expanded to … Read more
We Are Hunted is just one of a number of web upstarts hoping to displace Billboard as the chart of record for music. What makes We Are Hunted slightly different is that it not only produces the requisite daily and weekly music charts, it releases a set of research reports every 6 months. It recently … Read more
The advent of the iPad has triggered a new round of innovation in the startup community. And few startups have utilized the iPad’s touchscreen UI to create a unique user experience more than Flipboard, a magazine reading application built specifically for the iPad. As part of our continuing product innovation interview series, I spoke with … Read more
As different Internet-connected devices become scattered around your home – laptop, smartphone, iPad, netbook, Internet TV box, and more – it’s useful to have apps that connect them together and sync data when necessary. Below we look at 5 products that do this. Ultimately, they help you take control of your multiple devices! Some of … Read more
Caterina Fake was one of the co-founders of Flickr, an iconic web 2.0 online photo service that was sold to Yahoo. Her latest product is Hunch, a service that started out as a Q&A service but is now being positioned as a personalization service. It’s basically a recommendation engine that shows you movies you want … Read more
The Magazine Publishers of America was established in 1919 and is the leading industry association for magazine publishers. However, it’s just announced a curious name change. It will still be known by the acronym MPA, but is officially dropping two of the words from that acronym: “publishers” and “America.” Henceforth, the trade group will be … Read more