2009

German company apnoti.com has today launched what it claims is the world’s first mobile price search engine with integrated barcode scanner. It’s an iPhone app called iBARCODE, which enables users to scan product barcodes and find the best prices. It currently only works in the U.S., U.K, Germany and France. To scan, the user simply … Read more

Jack Herrick knows a bit about Demand Media, one of the top 20 web properties in the U.S. and the subject of several ReadWriteWeb articles about sites that are pumping thousands of pieces of content into the Web every day. Herrick sold the business he founded, eHow, to Demand Media in 2006. eHow is one … Read more

Last week Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt wrote a guest article for the Wall St Journal, discussing the need for new forms of newspaper publishing to replace the old print paradigm. Another not-so-new paradigm, but one more suited to the networked computer age we live in today, is Vannevar Bush‘s 1945 pre-hypertext concept the … Read more

Favrd, a site which aggregated the most popular starred tweets, has closed down. The site was a favorite of Twitter humorists, people who use Twitter mainly to express their wit. Favrd was the first of its kind to repurpose Twitter favorites (stars) into an aggregation site, where users could see who had “faved” their tweets, … Read more

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – the first and still the best weekly newsletter for tech news and reviews – we present our end-of-year series profiling the best web products of 2009. We tell you our picks for Best Mobile Apps, Best Consumer Apps, Best Semantic Web Apps, and more. Also in this … Read more

International courier giant Fedex has just released a new tracking device and web service for packages. Called SenseAware, it keeps tabs on the temperature, location and other vital signs of a package – including when it’s opened and whether it was tampered with along the way. Fedex is running a trial period of about a … Read more

2009 has seen a lot of Semantic Web and structured data activity. Much of it has been driven by Linked Data, a W3C project which gained momentum this year. According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, Linked Data is a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself. We’ve gone … Read more

I’m pleased to announce a new executive appointment to ReadWriteWeb, our new Chief Operating Officer Sean Ammirati. Based in Pittsburgh, PA, Sean has been an occasional writer on ReadWriteWeb since March 2007 and hosted our podcast show ReadWriteTalk. Prior to becoming ReadWriteWeb’s COO, Sean was Co-Founder & CEO at venture-backed startup mSpoke. He’s also been … Read more

Recently I was the keynote speaker at the Unlimited Potential W2W (Wellington to the World) event in Wellington, New Zealand. The topic of my presentation was running a virtual company. In the presentation, written by our Marketing Manager Elyssa Pallai, I spoke about the unique nature of ReadWriteWeb’s virtual business model and culture. Watch the … Read more

Last week we surveyed you, the ReadWriteWeb community, about your favorite mobile applications. We asked for your top five mobile apps and ended up with nearly 200 different mobile apps in the post and comments! Today we reveal the full results, including the most popular mobile apps of our tech-savvy readers. Earlier today our resident … Read more

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we analyze a list of the most influential websites in the world, look back on the past decade of e-commerce, suggest a list of products that Twitter might like to acquire, review a collection of Thanksgiving web … Read more

A year ago we polled you, the ReadWriteWeb community, on your favorite mobile apps. It’s become an annual tradition to run this survey, so in this post we’re collecting your top 5 lists for 2009. To get you inspired, the ReadWriteWeb team have listed their personal favorites below. We first ran this poll in November … Read more

A year ago we profiled an oddly-named service called ://URLFAN, which we concluded was a good ‘Influence Index’ for the Web. ://URLFAN ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. Unlike analytics services like Alexa or Compete, ://URLFAN doesn’t measure website traffic. It’s similar to Technorati, only ://URLFAN ranks all websites and not just blogs. … Read more

Last night we wrote about Forrester’s prediction that online holiday retail sales will grow 8% this year to $44.7 billion. comScore had similar numbers about the growth of online retail – toy web sites grew 9% in October, as did the retail apparel segment. Online personal finance service Mint.com has joined the festive statistics parade, … Read more