2007

The BBC reports that EMI Group has agreed to be bought by private equity firm Terra Firma for £3.2bn including debt, which is around US$6.3B. The deal isn’t confirmed yet, because it is subject to shareholder approval. As BBC noted, EMI’s sales have been in decline of late – the company reported a £260m loss … Read more

USAToday has an article today discussing the recent trend for startups to sell themselves on eBay. USAToday starts off with a joke: “What do Beanie Babies, Pez Dispensers and troubled Internet companies have in common? They’re all for sale on eBay.” eBay has become known as a quick and easy way to sell your startup, … Read more

Phil Wainewright has a compelling article on his ZDNet blog, arguing that the recent acquisitions of online advertising companies by the bigcos (Google, Microsoft, et al) is evidence that the current era of the Web is in a bubble. He notes: “Today, we’re starting to understand that the Internet is going to fundamentally alter the … Read more

I’m pleased to announce the first network blog to launch under the Read/WriteWeb banner – last100. We have more network blogs launching soon, all with the aim of leveraging Read/WriteWeb’s reputation for quality news and analysis about Web technology. last100 will provide news, reviews and industry analysis on products and services related to the digital … Read more

Thank you to our sponsors, for supporting Read/WriteWeb and helping us grow. Keep an eye out for some news on that front later tonight… Wild Apricot offers Web-based Membership Management Software for clubs, associations and other non-profits. Zoho is a leading Web Office suite, which continues to add to and enhance its impressive product range. … Read more

As noted in the Weekly Wrapup, one of the 2 big news announcements this past week was Google rolling out “Universal Search”, where they integrate search results from across their properties (news, video, etc) into the main search. (the other big news was Microsoft acquiring aQuantive). Read/WriteWeb has two analysis pieces on the Google news … Read more

The R/WW Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by: Another busy week of Web Tech. And you may’ve noticed a new daily voice on Read/WriteWeb – Josh Catone is now a lead writer here, so welcome aboard Josh! OK, here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to … Read more

Over the past few years, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s star has been waning. Ever since the web 2.0 trend started to become popular (around 2004 till now), Nielsen’s ‘keep it simple’ design philosophy has failed to ignite the new generation of designers. But it’s not the ‘keep it simple’ philosophy in general that is … Read more

WordPerfect Lightning, the beta Web/desktop hybrid “content aggregator” launched by Corel in late February, will announce tomorrow morning an integration with popular blog platform WordPress. There will also be new features added to the product itself. Corel is best known for its set of budget office applications, such as WordPerfect, Paint Shop Pro and CorelDraw. … Read more

Back in January, Alex Iskold reviewed a number of ‘web previews’ tools – including Browster, Cooliris, Snap and Sphere. A couple of others are iReader and Blogrovr, although the latter is more about delivering content than previewing it. We’ve reviewed several of these web previews products before – e.g. see our post about iReader. Essentially … Read more

We’re midway through the week and this week’s poll has thrown up some interesting results so far. We asked: among the big Internet companies/orgs, whose web app deployment platform do you like best? Frankly I was expecting Adobe and Microsoft to top the poll, as Apollo and Silverlight have gotten a great deal of attention … Read more

Tonight meebo is launching Meebo Rooms, a rich media chat room product that users can put on their blogs and websites. They can be private or public chat rooms, and can feature video content from sources such as youtube and NBC. Earlier today I spoke to Seth Sternberg, CEO and co-founder of meebo, about the … Read more

This week’s poll is based on our current feature post, Understanding Apollo. In that post, I attempted to provide an overview of Apollo for non-developers. At the end, I looked at the high level of how the big Internet companies are deploying web apps nowadays. Here’s what I wrote: It is a fiercely competitive market, … Read more

During my recent visit to the US, I popped into the Adobe office in San Francisco to find out more about Apollo – the company’s new RIA (Rich Internet Application) runtime and development platform. I sat down with Mike Chambers – Apollo Senior Product Manager, developer relations – to figure out what Apollo is all … Read more

Forrester has just released a new report on Enterprise RSS. Specifically it tackles the issue of information overload in the corporate environment, now that RSS feeds are an important source of information in the workplace. Also it covers how IT departments are becoming more interested in enterprise RSS solutions, particularly from 3 vendors who seem … Read more