2006

Read/WriteWeb’s Web 2.0 Summit coverage sponsored by Yahoo! I’m at a session at the Web 2.0 Summit called ‘Breaking Free: Working with Real Time Data, Online, Offline, and Outside of the Browser’. The speaker is Christophe Coenraets, a Senior Technical Evangelist from Adobe. He starts off by saying that Adobe is looking for a “high … Read more

Tonight I sat down with Microsoft executives Steve Berkowitz (Senior Vice President, Online Services Group) and Christopher Payne (Corporate Vice President, Live Search) to talk about their new 3D version of Virtual Earth. Microsoft is positioning Virtual Earth as “the beginning of the 3D Web”, a quote I heard from Steve Lawler (General Manager, Virtual … Read more

This WidgetsLive panel featured Adam Sah from Google Personalized Homepage, Sanaz Ahari from Microsoft’s Live.com, and Tariq Krim from Netvibes. After the usual product intros, the panel got more interesting with conversations steered by Niall Kennedy (the moderator). Niall started by asking about monetization. Sanaz said that being a homepage for Microsoft properties is key … Read more

I’m here at Widgets Live in San Francisco, where Dan Strauss and Don Synstelien from Fox Interactive Media are onstage talking about their new widget platform called SpringWidgets. The defining feature of this product is that it works on both the desktop (like Konfabulator) and in the browser (like Google widgets). However the desktop part … Read more

Tomorrow morning I’m traveling to San Francisco for next week’s Web 2.0 Conference. I attended it last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. Read/WriteWeb’s coverage of the 2005 conference is here – and needless to say I’ll be pumping out the posts again this year. In association with the conference, a new Web 2.0 report has … Read more

This morning I participated in a conference call by MIT and the University of Southampton in Britain, announcing an initiative called Web Science. Tim Berners-Lee is leading the program, which is essentially about formalizing a new kind of scientific discipline called Web Science. The goal is to understand the deeper structure of the social Web … Read more

Those of you who read John Milan’s insightful article on R/WW about the coming convergence of Web apps and desktop apps, will be interested in a new development by Blake Ross – famous in the Web world for co-founding Firefox. Blake has an intriguing new startup called Parakey, which is going to be a WebOS … Read more

Reality Digital is an online video and social networking platform for business websites, for example those with a media and entertainment focus. Crudely put, Reality Digital enables businesses to set up their own branded YouTube. They view their competition as being the likes of VideoEgg, VidaVee, BlipTV – which are all video publishing platforms with … Read more

Last.fm, one of my favorite online music recommendation and listening services, today announced a website relaunch. The London-based company has added four new features: Events system (e.g. concerts), Free MP3s, Flash player radio, and a Taste-o-meter. Last.fm hopes these new features, plus the re-design, will make it easier to find and share music – as … Read more

In other acquisition news today, Techcrunch reported that Cond√© Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, has acquired Boston-based Reddit. I pinged Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian about this and he confirmed to me that they have been acquired, “for an undisclosed sum”. Reddit is another to have been extensively profiled by Read/WriteWeb. Back in July … Read more

News this morning that JotSpot, a favorite Web Office contender of mine, has been acquired by Google. I’ve spoken to co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus several times over the past year or so and have found him to be one of the most eloquent people on the topic of Web Office. Here’s what he wrote … Read more

US analytics firm Compete, a company formed in 2000 by Bill Gross of Overture fame, has quietly released a new search engine and at the same time opened up some of its analytics data to the public. What’s more, there is an e-commerce component that displays special shopping deals next to search results. I spoke … Read more

As if we needed any further proof that the online video market is white hot right now, the founders of Skype have now set their sites on a Web TV service – according to this Yahoo News story. After creating the file-swapping service KaZaA and then VoIP software Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom plan … Read more

Metacafe, a YouTube-like video sharing site originally from Israel, has just gone live with a revenue sharing program called Producer Rewards. The payments are on a sliding scale and based on ‘views’. Payments start at 20,000 views ($100) and go up from there – e.g. 2 million views is $10,000. Videos must also have a … Read more

“Why on earth does the world need another search engine?”, asks the new Live Search promotional site. In addition to that website, as John Battelle’s Searchblog reports, Microsoft has launched a campaign for Live Search with digital and print ads in major newspapers – New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times/PI, SF Chronicle, USAPicture … Read more