2007

Today I was invited to TVNZ’s headquarters in Auckland, along with several other local bloggers, to check out their new web-based television on demand service – called TVNZ ondemand and due to be launched later this month. It will have a mix of free (ad supported) and premium content; the latter may only be viewed … Read more

MyStrands, a music discovery and social networking site that covers the PC, mobile and physical worlds (see our profile in January), has released an interesting new recommendations feature. It uses the MyStrands Public APIs (called OpenStrands) to link their social music recommendations to Wikipedia information. Essentially it’s a mashup of MyStrands music recommendations with artist … Read more

OpenID has gained two more high profile Internet company supporters. WordPress announced their support today and also Chris Messina did a bit of snooping and discovered that 37Signals support is nigh. These two organizations join Digg, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, MediaWiki, and others in their support of OpenID. There are still gaps – e.g. even … Read more

Not content with re-making the Netscape.com portal into a Digg clone, the Netscape 2.0 crew are at it again – this time with a new version of My.Netscape. Tomorrow (Tuesday US time) it will release “a Beta of the next generation My.Netscape”. The Netscape blog states: “My.Netscape will retain its identity as a personalized homepage, … Read more

Red Herring is reporting that AOL founders Steve Case and Ted Leonsis have invested $5.5-million, as a second round investment, into widget syndication platform Clearspring. Alex profiled ClearSpring back in November and other widget platforms we’ve covered before on Read/WriteWeb include Snipperoo, Widgetbox, Fox’s SpringWidgets and MuseStorm. In a recent post, VC Brad Feld says … Read more

After a two-month pilot, Yahoo’s Mixd mobile service has closed down. Mixd first came to light in November last year. It was a group mobile messaging tool for the youth market and had an experimental, trendy design. Currently the Mixd page has some farewell text on it and a pointer to the much more conservative … Read more

The title of this week’s poll is taken straight from Matthew Ingram’s post about USA Today’s re-design. The new-look USA Today incorporates many of the social networking features that have become popular over the last year or so. Or as the editor of USA Today put it: “the real change is in the approach, not … Read more

sphereit start The Library House blog has done a geographic analysis of Charles Knight’s Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list. After a bit of Web research, Library House was able to find out where 94 of the 100 search engines in our list are located. The result is that the US, and California in particular, … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Top Web News The main Web tech news this week was Adobe’s unveiling of Apollo, their next-generation web development platform which integrates the desktop with the Web. R/WW covered the news in this post, followed by Jay Fortner’s analysis of how it will … Read more

Recently I was contacted by the publishers of YeeYan, a website that translates articles from english language blogs into Chinese. They asked for my permission to translate some of Read/WriteWeb’s best posts into Chinese, so that people in China can read and comment on them. One of the founders, known as “thunder”, told me their … Read more

In New Zealand this week, two new Web portals were announced: Yahoo!Xtra and the launch of msn.co.nz on 1 March 2007. The background, briefly, is that both of these new portals take over from previous market leader site “XtraMSN”. Essentially what has happened in the NZ market is that Xtra (New Zealand’s leading ISP and … Read more

There’s been lots of talk recently about desktop/web platforms. Last week we mentioned more News Reader desktop apps powered by Microsoft’s WPF platform, and of course this week Adobe has featured twice on R/WW due to its unveiling of Apollo. We’ve also profiled smaller companies in the past – e.g. Laszlo and Morfik. The latter … Read more

One of the missing ingredients in Google’s growing Web Office suite is a CRM component. While there is little sign yet of Google providing CRM, a small startup called Etelos has done just that. Etelos has launched a new product called CRMforGoogle, which is a web-based CRM tool that integrates very nicely with Google’s personalized … Read more

Today Adobe is holding an event called Engage, where it is explaining its Apollo web development platform for tech bloggers, developers and others in the Web industry. John Dowdell from Adobe has a useful page of links. The coverage is quite diverse, from Tim O’Reilly commenting on the user experience aspects, to David Berlind on … Read more

Revision3, the online TV network founded last year by Digg’s Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, David Prager of TechTV, and others, has announced a new underground music show on Revision3. The show is called XLR8R TV (pronounced “accelerator” TV) and is being produced by XLR8R magazine, a San Francisco music publication since 1993. The magazine … Read more