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
Augmented Reality (AR) is when virtual graphics and/or data are overlaid onto real world objects. Many of you have seen this portrayed in movies such as Minority Report and The Matrix. It still seems a bit far fetched in 2009, yet there are apps that are beginning to make it a reality. One is Wikitude, … Read more
I’ve been following a fascinating 3-part series of posts this week by Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures. The series aimed to tie together 3 big trends, all based around structured data: 1) the still nascent “Web 3.0” concept, 2) the relatively new kid on the structured Web block, Linked Data, and 3) the long-running … Read more
Today marks another step forward for Google in pushing its web office suite Google Apps into large enterprises. Valeo, a leading automotive supplier company, is deploying Google Apps to 30,000 of its employees. Overall, business is good for Google Apps. Google noted in the annoucement that “more than a million businesses” are now using the … Read more
Yesterday at Google’s Searchology event, which we live-blogged, the search market leader announced two significant features to its search product: Search Options and Rich Snippets. It also previewed a new fact-finding search product called Google Squared. The first two features are already live on google.com and they’ve notably extended Google’s core search product. As we … Read more
In the evolving Web, where mobile web growth is exploding and therefore the mobile experience matters as much as the desktop one, it is becoming increasingly important for websites to ensure that their mobile site performs well. According to a new mobile web performance benchmark produced by Gomez (a web application performance management firm) and … Read more
CoScripter is a Firefox plug-in created by IBM Research, with the aim of automating web processes. CoScripter is described as a “system for recording, automating, and sharing processes performed in a web browser such as printing photos online, requesting a vacation hold for postal mail, or checking flight arrival times.” In effect it is a … Read more
Earlier today we wrote about the new version of the Times Reader desktop app, notable for swapping out Microsoft’s Silverlight technology for Adobe’s AIR platform – a significant win for Adobe over its RIA (Rich Internet Apps) rival. The New York Times has followed up by debuting another online news reading product. This one is … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we analyze the Real Time Web, interview the founder of a venture tech firm, report on a new and larger version of Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader, look at a cloud computing product for the mobile phone, review a promising … Read more
Pachube was one of 5 Internet of Things services that we profiled in February. Pachube, (pronounced “PATCH-bay” according to the New York Times) lets you tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments both physical and virtual. In a recent monumental blog post by Tish Shute, Pachube founder, Usman Haque, … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at how and why Google is making public data searchable, provide a succinct update on the state of the Web, review Facebook’s latest efforts to open some of its data, question why Facebook is trying to be … Read more
Forrester is set to release a new report about Web Office, which ReadWriteWeb got a sneak peak at. The report offers new data on office productivity innovation and cloud productivity suite adoption. The full data will be presented at Forrester’s IT Forum, to be held in Las Vegas May 19-22, 2009. The data shows that … Read more
We’d like to welcome a new daily writer to our team of Web enthusiasts: Jolie O’Dell. Jolie is a journalist, blogger, and video blogger. In the past, she has worked on newspapers, on magazines, for book publishers, for serial entrepreneurs, on startup teams, at advertising and marketing agencies, and for enterprise blogs and websites. Jolie … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at the state of the smartphone industry, study new stats showing Facebook’s international market penetration, review ‘The Oprah Effect’ on Twitter, check out a new product called Google Me, analyze the closure of Web 1.0 icon GeoCities, … Read more
Yahoo has announced that its website creation service GeoCities, which it acquired for $4.5 billion in 1999, will close later this year. Existing customers are being encouraged to “upgrade” to Yahoo! Web Hosting, which offers a site-building service and a personalized web address. The closing of GeoCities is the end of an era. Last June, … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at the latest in social media monitoring tools, investigate how cloud computing is being used in scientific research projects, review some future Firefox concepts, check out the latest iPhone app usage stats, report on eBay selling off … Read more