2006

Already there’s some great discussion happening regarding Ebrahim Ezzy’s post on Read/WriteWeb entitled Webified Desktop Apps vs Browser-based Apps. As I noted in the intro to that post, in some ways Ebrahim’s views contradict my own. I’m a big fan of the concept of the browser as a ‘lowest common denominator’ platform for the Web. … Read more

In a ZDNet Image Gallery, I’ve gone through 7 products that may become part of a future Google Web Office. Right now, Google doesn’t have a full web-based office suite on the market – but this year they’ve gradually been compiling Web Office parts. For example if you click on “all my services” in the … Read more

Over the next couple of months on Read/WriteWeb, I’ll be profiling the main Web Office suite candidates – such as Zoho, ThinkFree, gOffice, Zimbra, JotSpot, Goowy and Morfik. Plus of course Microsoft’s Office Live and Google’s current jigsaw puzzle of Web Office apps. Today I’m starting with Zimbra. Zimbra is an open source Web Office … Read more

Google has an upcoming Personalized Start Page for Enterprise, according to some sleuthing done by Garrett Rogers and Scott Smith at Google Blogoscoped. Here’s an example Dell start page and the official help page. The Personalized Start Page will be one of the options available in the beta Apps For Your Domain service. Currently email, … Read more

According to stats compiled by vnunet.com, China will overtake the US next year to become the world’s largest broadband internet market: “The number of broadband subscribers in China is growing at a staggering 79 per cent annually, and will reach 79 million in 2007, consulting firm Ovum predicted in research released today. Recent estimates from … Read more

Brad Neuberg has announced the release of HyperScope 1.0, a Web app based on tech legend Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 NLS/Augment (oNLine System). Engelbart and team have been working on Hyperscope since March this year, in a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Its aim is to rebuild portions of Douglas Engelbart’s NLS system on … Read more

As well as being reigning world football champions, Italy has a number of world class web apps. Yes, Italy is the 10th country to be profiled in Read/WriteWeb’s Top International Web Apps series. The others so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China and Turkey. For this post I have … Read more

Read/WriteWeb is growing. Last month was a record month in traffic, by a long shot. And after over 4 years of blogging, last month was also the first month I’ve managed to earn enough from R/WW to ‘pay’ for the time I spend writing and editing it. So R/WW is now a professional publication in … Read more

With the messy demise of PubSub, I’ve been looking for a decent keyword and topic subscription service to replace it. ZapTXT could very well meet my requirements, except for the odd fact that it doesn’t output in RSS (more on that below). You can currently only receive alerts as an email, IM or SMS. Other … Read more

There are a plethora of bookmarking sites out there and only a few of them have become very successful – del.icio.us and Stumbleupon are two that spring to mind. Trailfire is a bit different from your average bookmarking site, because they don’t just allow you to share bookmarks – they make it easy for you … Read more

Times Reader is an upcoming new application from The New York Times and Microsoft, which lets users read the NY Times electronically using advanced screen reading technology from Microsoft. The app is due to be launched as a free beta soon – an article about it is now available at the NY Times’ First Look … Read more

Just kidding… but now that I have your attention, here are some interesting Web Tech tidbits: Amazon aStore is a new product from Amazon that enables you “to build a dedicated shopping area that can be embedded within, or linked to from, your website.” Mitch Ratcliffe and Nick Carr have examples and good thoughts on … Read more

I recently had the pleasure of talking to Opera‘s Chief Technology Officer Håkon Wium Lie. We spoke about Microsoft’s latest web browser IE7 and Håkon was harshly critical of it, as well as Microsoft’s past history with CSS and web standards. Bear in mind that Opera competes with IE and also that Håkon has a … Read more

With all this talk of the Web as a platform, it’s worth taking a closer look at what web apps are using Firefox as their platform. Firefox is regarded as the best Web browser in terms of extensions – i.e. small browser add-ons which modify or add to existing functionality. It has hundreds of add-ons, … Read more

Recently a new personalized start page product was announced, Webwag. In the comments to my post about Webwag, several people expressed their view that start pages are not a viable business. Personally I think start pages have plenty of opportunities to make money, despite (and sometimes because of) competition from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. An … Read more