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
Yesterday we wrote about Mary Meeker’s annual overview of Internet trends at the Web 2.0 Summit. In this post we do a deeper dive into the Web themes that Meeker explored. In particular we’ll analyze mobile social networking, compare 2009 to previous years and look at the impact of Apple and Facebook on current trends. … Read more
Every year at the Web 2.0 Summit Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker does a fast and in-depth presentation of internet trends. The report is available here. Once again mobile is a big trend this year, with Apple’s market share expected to “Surprise on Upside Near-Term.” Overall the key message was that financial markets have rebounded … Read more
We’re at the 6th annual Web 2.0 conference, now known as the Web 2.0 Summit. John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly opened the event. O’Reilly spoke about being at another transition point for the Web. They have termed this “web squared”, a.k.a. “web meets world.” O’Reilly said that in the current era “we’re starting to instrument … Read more
As part of the lead-up to our inaugural event this Thursday 15th October, The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, we’re pleased to announce our list of the top 100 Real-Time Web companies. A couple of weeks ago we posted our top 50. Thanks to the comments on that post and messages we received in the days … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we continue the build-up to our first event: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. You can register here for the low price of $270. Also this week we analyzed applications from … Read more
Yesterday we analyzed some of the applications being built with Pachube, an open source platform enabling developers to connect sensor data to the Web. We at ReadWriteWeb think that Pachube is an excellent example of one of our Top 5 Trends of 2009: Internet of Things. So we’re exploring Pachube in-depth in a 3-part series. … Read more
Last week we reported that Pachube, an open source platform enabling developers to connect sensor data to the Web, had released a real-time notifications feature. We at ReadWriteWeb think that Pachube is an excellent example of one of our Top 5 Trends of 2009: Internet of Things. So we’re going to explore Pachube in-depth in … Read more
We’re very pleased to announce the launch of ReadWriteWeb’s third country channel: ReadWriteWeb Brazil. It joins our existing two country channels, France and China. ReadWriteWeb Brazil is written in the Portuguese language, one of the world’s major languages with up to 230 million native speakers. Brazil has by far the largest online population in Latin … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we continue the build-up to our first event: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. You can register here for the low price of $195. Also this week we published a list … Read more
Earlier this year we profiled Pachube, (pronounced “PATCH-bay”), a service which stores and shares real-time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments. The uses for Pachube are only beginning to be discovered in 2009, but for example it could in future power automation of lighting and alarm systems in your home. The Internet of … Read more
Last week YouTube blogged that it is considering moving away from the familiar 5-star system of reviews. According to YouTube product manager Shiva Rajaraman, the stars system is being used bluntly by the majority of YouTube users – most give videos a perfect 5 star rating. Rajaraman noted that “when it comes to ratings it’s … Read more
As part of our lead-up to The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, which is just over two weeks away, in this post we’re listing 50 leading companies of the Real-Time Web. Like any list, it is bound to be missing some worthy companies – so we invite you to list more in the comments. Our aim … Read more
This post is sponsored by IBM’s A Smarter Planet blog, where it has also been cross-posted. In recent posts we’ve looked at three of the world’s leading RFID-powered Smart Cards: Japan’s cutting edge Suica Card, London’s Oyster Card and Hong Kong’s long-running Octopus Card. The most conservative of those three, the Oyster card, can only … Read more
Last week we took a poll asking for your favorite ‘light’ blogging service. These are blogging services that make it very easy for you to share content and media. While old-school blogging service Blogger.com got the most votes in our poll, newer slicker services such as Tumblr, Soup.io and the recently trendy Posterous are popular … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we announce our first event: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. It’s a 1-day event that will bring together some of the smartest minds doing real-time work for an industry-changing, face-to-face … Read more