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
ReadWriteWeb has been running a special series on recommendation engines and this episode of RWW Live is part of that. The show features 3 exciting and very knowledgeable guests: Jesús Pindado, Strands Vice President, Business Solutions; Yosi Glick, Jinni CEO & Co-Founder; and David Selinger, richrelevance CEO & Co-Founder, who previously led the R&D arm … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we continue our series on recommendation technologies, outline 10 ways that social media will change in 2009, look at 8 mobile technologies to watch in 2009-10, review the state of blog search, and more. Also we note the highlights … Read more
Earlier this week we posted a Guide to Recommender Systems, as part of our series on recommendation technologies. In this post we look at some of the challenges in building or deploying a recommender system. And yes, Napoleon Dynamite is one of them. This week an event called Recked was held in Amsterdam, aimed at … Read more
Expert System is a perhaps little known “semantic intelligence” company; but it has 15 years of experience in the tech industry, 115+ employees and is bringing in a very solid $12 Million a year in revenues from over 100 corporate and government clients (at 40% growth over the past two years). The Italian company’s core … Read more
One of the longest-running requests for Google’s web mail service Gmail has been for offline functionality. Now, finally, Gmail users will be able to type up those emails inside an airplane. Google has just announced offline Gmail support via Gmail Labs – to start with for consumers and businesses using Google Apps, but regular Gmail … Read more
Noovo is a full-on lifestreaming / blogging / bookmarking / everything (except social network) app that launched out of private beta last week. It calls itself a “social discovery engine”; and recommendations technology is part of the overall package. The company Noovo is based in Slovenia, has been around for a long time and counts … Read more
We’re running a special series on recommendation technologies and in this post we look at the different approaches – including a look at how Amazon and Google use recommendations. The Wikipedia entry defines “recommender systems” as “a specific type of information filtering (IF) technique that attempts to present information items (movies, music, books, news, images, … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we take a special look at how President Obama’s inauguration was covered, analyzed and celebrated via the Internet. Also this week we began a new series on recommendation technologies, starting with the Netflix Prize; and we asked some hard … Read more
We’re currently running a series of posts about recommendation technologies and in the comments of our last post about the Netflix Prize, a company called Jinni made itself known. Jinni is a kind of ‘Pandora for movies’, because it aims to recommend movies and tv shows to you based on its Movie Genome (aping Pandora’s … Read more
We’re starting a new series here on ReadWriteWeb about recommendation engines. We identified recommendations as one of 5 trends to watch at the start of 2008; and that’s even more so at the beginning of 2009. We also have a page dedicated to recommendation technologies in our stock presentation entitled What’s Next on the Web?. … Read more
In the second RWW Live of 2009, we go in-depth about a web standard that made big strides in 2008 and is being increasingly adopted by Internet companies big and small: OpenID. At the end of December, the OpenID Foundation announced its new Board – and we have several of those board members on the … Read more
New York-based Peachtree Media Advisors has just released its annual report summarizing mergers, acquisitions and amounts of capital raised in the online media market last year. The report is available as a PDF download (2MB). In 2008 there were were 707 merger, acquisition and capital raise transactions in the online sector of media – which … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at Google’s product line adjustments, explain why you should jailbreak your iPhone, analyze the world of Enterprise RSS, and tell you how to build a Social Media ‘cheat sheet’ for virtually any topic. Also we review the … Read more
Thomson Reuters is today launching the latest version of its Calais web service and open API, Calais 4.0. Calais is a toolkit of products that enables publishers to incorporate semantic functionality within their properties – enabling them to categorize content as people, places, companies, facts, events, and more. Calais 4.0 is perhaps the most significant … Read more
Welcome to the first Weekly Wrapup of 2009 – and a very happy new year to all of our readers! First up we look back at our top web products of 2008, then we look forward to 2009 with our annual Web Predictions. In product news this week, Apple announced it will remove DRM from … Read more