2006

In my search for innovative web and Internet applications, I noted the buzz around new P2P company Skyrider at the end of last week. While it’s hard to say whether Skyrider is truly innovative, seeing as they don’t actually have a product on the market yet (it’s due “in the fall”), they are making interesting … Read more

15 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee publicly released his WWW project onto the Internet. According to Wikipedia: “On August 6, 1991, he [TBL] posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.” As … Read more

With the launch of Microsoft’s blogging and social networking platform, Windows Live Spaces (formally MSN Spaces), there has been an increase in interest around gadgets – i.e. mini web apps. People can add gadgets into their Spaces site and Microsoft is starting to promote this feature heavily. Jay Fluegel of Microsoft has written a post … Read more

Next in my series on international web apps is Korea. I have Chang W. Kim, who runs a blog called Web 2.0 Asia, to thank for providing me with all the info. Korea is in many ways ahead of the curve in terms of the Internet. It has the highest household penetration of broadband internet … Read more

Mitch Kapor, famous for co-founding Lotus 1-2-3 in the 80’s and more recently the ambitious Personal Info Manager product Chandler (which is taking an awful long time to build – it’s still in alpha after 3-4 years) has a new startup project. That’s Mitch Kapor in the center of the photo btw, next to Bill … Read more

Tom Wolfe could write a novel about this…or at least a short story. Cartoon by Oliver Widder, via Nick Carr’s comments. Jason Calacanis also notes: “I think we have three of the top 20 DIGG users (and two from the top 10!). We also hired from Newsvine, delicious, and Reddit top users.” Finally here’s a … Read more

Widgets (aka gadgets, modules) are mini web apps that you can plug in to a webpage or site such as MySpace, or a personalized start page like Netvibes or live.com. Widgets are becoming more and more important on the Web, so I thought I’d spend a few posts looking more closely at them. Let’s start … Read more

The Diggtrends website has just done some stats relating to the Netscape owner’s offer to buy out digg’s top users. They found that the top 10 users contributed 1792 of the frontpage stories – i.e. 29.8%. The top 100 contributed 3324 stories, i.e. 55.28%. Nearly 30% of frontpage stories contributed by just 10 people is … Read more

This has turned into a very enjoyable series, profiling web products being built all over the world! The latest list is for Poland, courtesy of Sebastian Kwiecien – who runs a blog at web20.pl. Sebastian sent me a very detailed list of Polish web apps, including information about an intriguing social network integrated into Coca-Cola’s … Read more

Nisan Gabbay of Silicon Valley VC firm Sierra Ventures has started up an interesting new blog called Startup Review, which aims to profile Web startups from a business angle. Here’s how he put it in an email to me: “Startup Review will feature weekly, in-depth case studies on successful Internet start-ups. The companies profiled will … Read more

Business 2.0‘s latest print issue has a nice feature on Web 2.0 apps around the world. From Nooked in Ireland to Zoho Writer in India to Gnoos in Australia – it’s an excellent overview of some of the web action happening outside of Silicon Valley. The Business 2.0 article isn’t online yet, but you can … Read more

Following on from my post at the end of last week listing the top German web apps, R/WW reader Mark Schoondorp sent me a list of Dutch web apps. Mark himself is the designer of Wat vinden wij over (meaning ‘What do we think of” / ‘What is your opinion on’ / ‘what do we … Read more

So I promised to start profiling more innovative, boundary-pushing Web tools on R/WW. The problem with this strategy is that a lot of innovative tools are hard to grok – which means more work for me. What have I gotten myself into? 🙂 Recently Thomas Bate of British data visualisation company Visokio contacted me, to … Read more

RealNetworks had their Q2 2006 Earnings Conference Call on Thursday evening (PST) and the transcript from SeekingAlpha makes for interesting reading. The two main points that came out of it, from a product and market perspective, is that 1) RealNetworks is exhibiting very strong growth in the gaming market; and 2) they see Microsoft’s Zune … Read more

The text of Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s speech at Thursday’s Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2006, makes compelling reading. To me it sums up why we’ve moved far beyond the Web 2.0 trend and into something much deeper and richer. Web innovation, which is primarily what my blog explores, is no longer just about … Read more