2007

Microsoft has acquiredMedstory, a vertical search engine for health information. This is an interesting development in a few ways – but in terms of Web tech trends, because it’s another sign of the rise of vertical search engines. We’ve written before about how VSE such as Retrevo are beginning to make their presence felt, alongside … Read more

While this week’s poll is about Google’s Web Office bid, we mustn’t forget that a few small Web Office vendors have been in this space longer than Google and have built up a loyal and strong user base. One such company is ThinkFree, which I’ve profiled before on ZDNet. Today ThinkFree announced they’d reached 250,000 … Read more

There was a lot of talk last week about Google Apps Premier, the Google-supported package of web-based office products. Many people spoke about it as if it was a rival to Microsoft Office. While Google Apps Premier is clearly targeted at small business, there’s a feeling that it’s also more than suitable for enterprises. Indeed … Read more

sphereit start Written by Rudy De Waele and edited by Richard MacManus. Note: this is a Mobile Web focused excerpt from Rudy’s complete wrapup of the 3GSM World Congress, held recently in Barcelona. One of the things I realized during the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards is the increasing globalization of innovation. Innovation is happening everywhere … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Top Web News The launch of Google Apps Premier Edition was the big news this week. In our view, this represented a significant (but not earth-shattering) step forward for Google – in its bid to create a web-based Office Suite. Some comments from … Read more

I’m participating in the Radar Relay, a group blogging effort being run by Under The Radar in preparation for the upcoming Office 2.0 event on March 23 in Silicon Valley (I will be a judge at the conference). So in this post I’ll be highlighting some of the office 2.0 news that came out this … Read more

Following on from the New York Times Reader last year, made with Microsoft’s rich presentation technology WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), three more big media companies have released Web/desktop News Readers built with WPF. Tim Sneath from Microsoft notes that the Daily Mail in the UK, forbes.com and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have all just announced WPF-powered … Read more

Feedburner has released an interesting new report on web-based RSS Readers, prompted by the recent introduction of Google Reader into its stats (incidentally, for some reason R/WW only increased by around 20% after Google Reader was added to Feedburner; whereas most other tech sites increased by 40+%). RSS Analytics plagued by unreliable stats Feedburner is … Read more

The big news tonight is that Google has released a premier edition of its Google Apps package (previously known as Google Apps For Your Domain). I’ve been following the Web Office trend for a long time and, like everyone, have been particularly obsessed with Google’s gradual progression towards a Web Office suite. Tonight is another … Read more

One of the mobile Web companies in Charles Knight’s 55 Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit was a beta product called Text2store. Charles categorized it as a Mobile Shopping Engine, alongside a similar service called Slifter. Text2store enables mobile users to sign up for shopping coupons and offers from their local shops. The service is officially … Read more

Disclosure: Central Desktop is a current sponsor. Today Web Office company Central Desktop announced a new online spreadsheets feature, via a collaboration with HongKong-based company Team and Concepts (TnC) Ltd and its EditGrid product. You may remember we profiled EditGrid last week and touted it as ‘better than Google Spreadsheets’. We said in that post … Read more

As David Lenehan reported today, Digg is the latest company to declare its support for OpenID – the decentralized single sign-on service. This follows on from recent announcements of support from Microsoft and AOL. And as Techcrunch noted, Yahoo, LiveJournal, and Wikipedia are some other organizations that had previously announced their support. It’s clear that … Read more

In October 2005 I reviewed a potentially disruptive search engine called ePrécis, from Syntactica. Unfortunately it got shut down by Google (they “nearly put us out of business”, said Syntactica President Henry Neils). But there was some heavy duty linguistic theory behind ePrécis and the good news is that now Syntactica is back with a … Read more

div for entry content including hero Last month we reported that automated text-to-voice service Talkr was put up for sale, by founder Chris Brooks. Well Talkr has just been acquired – by a company who found out it was for sale via Read/WriteWeb! The buyer is LiveOnTheNet, a Huntsville-based digital media company which is developing … Read more

New Zealand’s biggest newspaper, The New Zealand Herald, has run an article about me in Monday morning’s paper. It’s on the back page of the Business section and is entitled Kiwi blogger logs on to make a living. This is the first time I’ve had any mainstream media coverage, so I admit it is quite … Read more