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
Webmail.us, a business web email service, has just been acquired by leading web hosting company Rackspace for an undisclosed sum. We last covered Webmail.us in August last year as part of an overview of the web email market. At that point Webmail.us provided email hosting services to more than 23,000 small-medium businesses. Currently, over a … Read more
Microsoft has today announced a new online office service called Office Live Workspace, plus re-named its Office Live service to Office Live Small Business. Both moves are attempts to complement Microsoft Office, its dominant desktop office suite – rather than replace functionality present in MS Office. Office Live Workspace will allow users to store, access … Read more
I’ve been away the last half of this week, so this Wrapup is a condensed version. If you’re in catch-up mode like me, here are 10 of our best posts from the past week: Products & News Surprise: MSN Has Built the Video Site of the Future Web Apps Hit the Mainstream FeedHub Launches – … Read more
A quick note that we have a couple of sponsor slots available for October. Read/WriteWeb is currently the 24th ranked blog in the world according to Technorati and is one of the leading web 2.0 blogs. We’re also among the 25 Largest Tech Business Websites, according to eBizMBA. Read/WriteWeb is read by early adopters, analysts, … Read more
Check out the Read/WriteWeb Job Board, for cool jobs in Web technology and new media. Here is a sample of what’s currently available: Nincha is looking for a part-time/freelance PHP developer to develop a prototype for a web startup/application/idea. New Interactive from New York is looking for a Senior Web Designer. Nature Publishing Group is … Read more
Our post a few weeks ago, 10 Future Web Trends, received a lot of excellent feedback. The most interesting was from people offering alternative future web trends to the ones we had chosen. In fact there were some grumblings that our 10 picks were not futuristic enough – so in this post let’s see if … Read more
We cover the trend of Web Office closely here on Read/WriteWeb. Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Zoho, ThinkFree, Zimbra – these are some of the leading vendors of web-based office software. And last week came the big news that Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo! for $350M (read our analysis of why), so the market for this software … Read more
Personalization startup mSpoke is launching a new product to mashup and personalize RSS feeds today at DEMO [disclosure: Read/WriteTalk host Sean Ammirati works for mSpoke]. The product is called FeedHub and it creates an “individualized RSS feed” that aims to filter relevant posts from a set of feed sources. Like similar products we’ve profiled before … Read more
Mobile Web expert Rudy De Waele has posted slides of a presentation he did last week in London, at the Mobile Web 2.0 Conference. This is the best and most comprehensive overview of Mobile Web startups and product ecosystem that I’ve yet seen. I particularly liked the following slide, categorizing the main players: Check out … Read more
A big thank you to our sponsors for supporting Read/WriteWeb. Wild Apricot offers Web-based Membership Software for clubs, associations and other non-profits. They recently released widgets, enabling users to embed online member directory, event registration etc. into any website. Wine Library TV is one of my favorite video blogs. Being a “Red Man” myself, I … Read more
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email. Web News Yahoo! Drops $350m on Zimbra; an Open Source, Enterprise RIA The big news this week was Yahoo! buying open-source enterprise office vendor Zimbra … Read more
On the latest edition of our podcast show, Read/WriteTalk, Sean Ammirati sat down with Salim Ismail, the head of Yahoo’s Brickhouse. In this role, Salim is exposed to hundreds of proposals from Yahoo employees each month for products to be developed. One of the most interesting trends these days is “e-commerce 2.0” and Sean asked … Read more
This week Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo! for a staggering $350M. It seems like only yesterday that Zimbra was the buzz of the 2005 Web Conference. But in two years, Zimbra has grown from a small ‘cool features’ startup to a company worth $350M. But why did Yahoo buy a Web Office collaboration suite? Last … Read more
It’s been a busy couple of days, with the announcement of Zimbra being acquired by Yahoo! for $350M, Google launching its much anticipated Presentations app, and Mozilla launching a new organization to focus on email innovation. Also the TechCrunch40 conference has commanded much attention (see R/WW’s coverage of the 8 sessions). Now it’s time to … Read more
Google has tonight announced its much anticipated Powerpoint competitor. It has been added to Google Docs – the new, simpler name for “Google Docs & Spreadsheets”. With the new Presentations feature, users can create “simple web-based presentations”. A quick glance at the functionality shows it is similar to the other Google Docs features (word processing … Read more