2007

Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus With the consumer release today of Microsoft Office 2007, it’s a good time to look at the online office space – and what, if anything, Microsoft will do to address this growing market. In 2007 we expect to see good progress in the adoption of Internet-based … Read more

Imagini Friends is an unusual new social network, that calculates your “VisualDNA” and uses it to find other people that match your choices. It’s an application of Imagini, the technology – which aims to understand the emotional preferences of consumers, using VisualDNA. This can be used for marketing and advertising purposes, as well as social … Read more

New Zealand is the first country to experience the worldwide consumer launch of Windows Vista on 30 January, due to its position on the timeline. New Zealanders get the opportunity to buy Windows Vista in retail stores a few hours before Australians, 13 hours before the UK and a day ahead of Americans. The 2007 … Read more

In this week’s R/WW poll, we’re asking whether you ever fake your Web identity – or even just part of it. Note that this doesn’t count times when you are anonymous on the Web (such as almost all snarky blog comments). We’re specifically asking about the times when you use an identity – e.g. online … Read more

It’s Saturday morning for me, Friday afternoon in Silicon Valley. Before I go off to the horse races this afternoon (because you needed to know that), here’s a quick re-cap of the past week on Read/WriteWeb and in the Web world in general. I’ll also highlight some of the great comments we got this week … Read more

The Mobile Web isn’t just about the Googles and Yahoos of this world muscling in to the lucrative mobile content market. The existing mobile network operators and handset manufacturers are also busy adjusting to the Internet, to defend their turf and just maybe get a jump on their competitors. On 31 January Vodafone will launch … Read more

Amazon has just released a new Wikipedia clone, called Amapedia. It’s described as “a community for sharing information about the products you like the most.” So far Amapedia has had no promotion from Amazon, but it was discovered today by Rogers Cadenhead. Anyone with an Amazon.Com account can edit the site. Regarding the name, Amapedia … Read more

The latest Read/WriteWeb poll has highlighted some interesting trends. We asked what type of RSS Reader do you use the most? Here are the results so far, from nearly 900 respondents: 1. Web-based (e.g. Bloglines, Google Reader, Rojo) 55% (495 votes) 2. Desktop (e.g. FeedDemon, NetNewsWire) 18% (160 votes) 3. Start page (e.g. Netvibes, Pageflakes) … Read more

sphereit start Compete (a R/WW sponsor) has released data that shows MySpace and Yahoo are the top websites in terms of average time spent on them by users. The data is for US users only. Here are the figures from Compete, expressed as % of total time spent online in the US in Dec 06: … Read more

Red Swoosh is a P2P desktop client which appears to compete against the BitTorrent client. It’s a very promising technology in a Web world increasingly filled with video and other large multimedia files. Red Swoosh is a desktop client (Windows only) that enables users to download and stream files from each other, rather than from … Read more

Disclosure: Zoho is a sponsor of R/WW. Late last week, Web Office provider Zoho and online storage company Omnidrive announced a partnership, allowing users to edit a Zoho office document and save directly into Omnidrive. Also, both Omnidrive and Zoho released APIs. The news has already been covered in-depth elsewhere – e.g. TechCrunch and Zoli’s … Read more

IBM has just released a new product called Many Eyes, a “shared visualization and discovery” service. We talked about the usefulness or otherwise of 3D graphics on the Web earlier this week (and most people agree that 3D is becoming increasingly relevant), so this is I suppose another rich way to present data and content … Read more

Written by Gang Lu and edited by Richard MacManus There are many so-called Chinese YouTubes fighting it out on the Chinese web2.0 battleground, but one that caught our attention is Mojiti.com, launched in November 2006. What makes Mojiti special in this market is that it offers users a fresh experience: videos are not just available … Read more

Nevermind Mobile Web 2.0, you’ve got to admire Irishman Pat Phelan’s 2 recent mobile services: AllFreeCalls.net and now Roam4Free. The former is a complicated workaround that makes it possible for USA residents to call an Iowa-based phone number and from there make free international calls. Unfortunately I can’t take advantage of this, as I’m not … Read more

In Chennai, India, a DEMO-like event called Proto.in was held this week to showcase 30 new technology companies. As of now there is no information on the official blog about the presenting companies, but organizer Vijay Anand sent me a list of the companies along with descriptions. The event wasn’t just for web 2.0 type … Read more