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
IBM has announced an online “radiology theatre” product, currently at the prototype stage, which allows teams of medical experts to “simultaneously discuss and review patients’ medical test data using a Web browser.” The project is being run in collaboration with the Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Boston and is built on IBM’s next-generation browser platform … Read more
At ETech today members of the InSTEDD team spoke about how they have been building SMS and mapping applications, in the Mekong Delta in the jungles of South East Asia. InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters) was organized in 2006-2007 and aims to harness technology to help with early warning, prevention and response … Read more
Nick Bilton from The New York Times R&D Labs was at ETech today, talking about how NYT is preparing for the future of news delivery. His presentation explored how “sensors in every part of our lives [are] helping us aggregate smart content that is relevant to the device we are using”. Bilton said that New … Read more
Mike Kuniavsky from ThingM Corporation spoke this morning at ETech about merging machine-readable identification with pervasive networking. Kuniavsky said that when a digital representation of an object is accessed through a unique ID, it is the object’s “information shadow”. Nowadays, he said, these information shadows are attached to just about everything. One of the consequences … Read more
Tim O’Reilly spoke tonight at ETech in San Jose, on a theme he has been talking about for the past 6 months or so: working on things that matter in the web world. In this talk though he went into a lot of actual examples, as well as strategies people can deploy to work on … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we look into Facebook’s homepages, check out Yahoo’s answer to Facebook Connect, review the new iPhone version of Amazon’s eReader Kindle, analyze the ‘Smarter Web’ trend that came out of the DEMO conference this year, and more. Also we … Read more
Loomia is a content recommendations service, used on sites such as the Wall Street Journal and PC World. We’ve profiled Loomia’s Facebook app before, which tracks what you and your Facebook friends are reading on Loomia-supported sites and then shows you what content is most popular among your social circle. Loomia has recently started to … Read more
The latest episode of RWW Live, today at 3.30pm PST, will be focused on online travel applications. We have executives from 4 great travel startups on the call: TripIt, Yapta, Dopplr and PlanetEye. In the show we’ll be discussing how the Web is changing the way people travel for work and fun. It promises to … Read more
In this latest installment in our series on recommendation engines, we look at MyBuys – a company purely focused on providing recommendations services to retail websites. We’ve noted in previous posts in this series that each recommendations vendor has a different approach. What distinguishes MyBuys is that it takes a services approach and is not … Read more
We’d like to welcome a new daily writer to our team of Web enthusiasts: Phil Glockner. Phil lives near Austin, Texas, and has been a part of the tech community there for over 10 years. He started his blog, Scribkin, after attending SXSW Interactive 2008. He’s also been a contributer to Louis Gray‘s excellent blog. … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we look into Facebook’s controversial new “principles”, check out the latest OpenID trends, cover Amazon’s public data initiative, analyze Wikipedia’s possible future as a development platform, investigate the future of ‘touch’ apps, and more. Also we cover the highlights … Read more
US retailer Sears today announced the beta launch of ServiceLive.com, an online marketplace specifically for home improvements and repairs. The goal of ServiceLive.com is to connect Sears customers online with local service providers. The core of ServiceLive is an auction system, in which users can name their price for doing home improvement or repair work, … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we review the action from the Mobile World Congress, find out why many people blacked out their social networking profiles this week, continue our series on recommendation engines, analyze Yahoo’s progress in search innovation, look into the Internet in … Read more
Earlier this week we ran a competition to win a free ticket to Google I/O, Google’s conference for web developers being held May 27 – 28, 2009 in San Francisco. We had 10 tickets to give away and so we asked you to give us your feature requests for current Google products, or if the … Read more
Ben Goodger, who leads the UI team of Google Chrome, presented today at the Webstock conference about browsers. He said that Google decided to build Chrome simply because “browsers suck”. Existing browsers were too slow (especially with javascript heavy apps), there are too many crashes, too easy to get pwned (security issues), and UIs were … Read more