iBARCODE: Real-Time Price Search Engine Launches

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

Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009

2009 has been a turning point for the Internet of Things, when real world objects (such as lights, cars and packages) get connected to the Internet. This trend has added a significant amount of new data to the Web, so for that reason alone it is an important development. Having said that, many of the … Read more

What is The Memex? Xerox Presents Trailmeme

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

Weekly Wrapup: Best Web Products 2009, Part 1

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

FedEx Joins the Internet of Things With SenseAware

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

Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009

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

Introducing ReadWriteWeb’s New COO: Sean Ammirati

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

Totally Virtual: How ReadWriteWeb Operates

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

Your Favorite Mobile Apps of 2009 (Reader Survey)

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

The Most Influential Websites in the World: Wikipedia #1, Twitter #4 With a Bullet

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

Mint Data Shows Online Retail Rebounding

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