2006

Yesterday Yahoo! held their Analyst Day – the 188-page slide presentation is here (12MB). There’s too much in the preso for any one mind to fully comprehend, but here are the things that stood out for me… Yahoo’s Big Bets for the Next 5 Years See slide 16: 1. Next Generation Experience –> a.k.a. a … Read more

Google has just released its Ajax toolkit, called Google Web Toolkit: “Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language.” Also an interesting rumor is swirling around that Google either partnered with, … Read more

Eric Weaver has come up with a very useful list of web/media conferences for this year, something which I was looking for a couple of weeks ago but couldn’t find. I’m travelling to Silicon Valley again in June and will be attending Supernova, Bloggcon and maybe Gnomedex. I’m looking forward to my next trip to … Read more

Feedburner has been running ads in feeds for a little while now. They have a slick self-service system for publishers to select which ads run in their feeds, which personally I’ve been happy with (it allows me to delete any ‘offers’ of ads with a $1 CPM gross – there are surprisingly a lot of … Read more

The world’s most visited webpage, Yahoo.com, has just had a major re-design (available for now at yahoo.com/preview) and Read/WriteWeb has the inside story. As well as the first in-depth look at the new yahoo.com, I have for you an exclusive podcast interview with Yahoo! Chief Product Officer Ash Patel and Vice President of Front Doors … Read more

Tim Bray in a post entitled What Matters: “Every day that goes by I believe more and more that the only important new thing is that the Net is read-write. Everything that matters follows from that.” I came across this the same day that I noticed a newround of ‘defining web 2.0’ posts popping up … Read more

There’s been a lot of talk recently about Josh Kopelman’s post, in which he wrote: “As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are … Read more

I just noticed that MSN has a new project called MSN Originals, in which MSN will partner with content creators to deliver a “new generation of storytelling online”. It’s described as: “MSN Originals will expand the ways that top brands can tell their stories beyond standard media through in-content integration, and even have a seat … Read more

DataMashups.com is the latest Ajax-based web app development service to be released. It’s a hosted service for developers and offers an integrated development environment “to rapidly create mashups and web applications with limited or no need for server side code”. The service is based on the open source AppliBuilder – a AJAX builder tool. The … Read more

Stowe Boyd and Mike Arrington reported today that AOL’s new social networking product AIM Pages is now live. I’m told by my sources that it’s still in the testing phase, nevertheless it *is* live on the Web. There is a lot more functionality to come though. For example PaidContent wrote recently: “Unlike walled-garden Classic AOL, … Read more

Pageflakes, one of the little startups in the ‘personalized start page’ market, has come out with a page publishing feature that nicely connects with my post the other day: Web 2.0 market segment mashups. In that post I noted that we’re seeing a lot of market segment cross-over nowadays, in terms of functionality and feature … Read more

Late last week it was surprisingly revealed that Microsoft now aims to be a media company, rather than a software company. This was in the context of Microsoft’s launch of its adCenter product, a direct competitor to Google’s Adsense and Adwords. But there it was in black and white, in a Microsoft press release: “”Ad-supported … Read more

As a Web (2.0) consultant and analyst (about me), I track a variety of market segments and products. Luckily for me, nowadays I don’t have to do as much grunt work on gathering high level product data as I used to. There are a plethora of product lists and data about web 2.0 companies on … Read more

Mike Riversdale asked an interesting question in the comments of my previous post: “What, in your (and others) opinion, is the difference (if any) between the “online desktop” (A) (I’m thinking Netvibes and the like) and the “Personal Content Network” (B).” Actually I’m seeing a lot of crossover and cross-pollination in the market segments I’m … Read more

In part 3 of my look at mc aggregators [here are parts 1 and 2], I get stuck into Suprglu. In this post I ask the question: how sticky is this site? But enough puns, let’s get down to business. SuprGlu, a production of New York design studio Iridesco, is another product that enables users … Read more