2009

Two years ago social news site Newsvine was acquired by MSNBC, the Microsoft/NBC joint venture. The site had launched publicly in March 2006 and was considered to be one of the best designed new breed of ‘web 2.0’ news sites. Features include user-generated content, reputation, voting, comments, friends lists, tags, and more. At the time … Read more

A new report by ChangeWave Research provides yet more evidence of the surge in consumer interest in smartphones; and of Apple’s iPhone in particular. Last week we reported statistics from AdMob stating that smartphones are now edging out feature phones as the device of choice for consumers. In the race for the highly lucrative consumer … Read more

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we analyze how Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks the Web will evolve, review Hulu’s latest plans to make money, investigate use cases for Google Wave, ask why VCs aren’t investing in Augmented Reality, review the latest Mobile … Read more

Yesterday we looked at how Google Wave (a new product that is part email, part IM, part something entirely new) is being used as an educational tool. In this post we explore if and how Wave is being used by the artistic community. This topic was suggested by Cory Huff, a commenter on the first … Read more

Google Wave is a much hyped new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform. It was announced at the end of May, released as a ‘Preview’ product shortly after and 100,000 more invites were made available at the end of September. Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of … Read more

Brizzly wants to be to microblogging what Blogger.com was to blogging five years ago. Currently, Brizzly offers a user-friendly browser-based interface for Twitter and Facebook. The Facebook integration went live today and more social media applications will be added as the product evolves. Brizzly was founded by Jason Shellen, one of the original developers of … Read more

Today at the IBM Information on Demand event, IBM will demo a new app that will bring the Internet of Things to the iPhone. The as yet unreleased iPhone app is called Breadcrumbs and it will give consumers access to information about grocery food items. The app will be able to scan barcodes and deliver … Read more

This post is sponsored by IBM’s A Smarter Planet blog. Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Media ran a panel called Humans As Sensors. With him were four organizations doing innovative applications using sensors: Markus Tripp (Mobilizy), Deborah Estrin (Computer Science Department, UCLA), Sharon Biggar (Path Intelligence), Di-Ann Eisnor (Waze). Each … Read more

Yesterday we wrote about Mary Meeker’s annual overview of Internet trends at the Web 2.0 Summit. In this post we do a deeper dive into the Web themes that Meeker explored. In particular we’ll analyze mobile social networking, compare 2009 to previous years and look at the impact of Apple and Facebook on current trends. … Read more

Every year at the Web 2.0 Summit Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker does a fast and in-depth presentation of internet trends. The report is available here. Once again mobile is a big trend this year, with Apple’s market share expected to “Surprise on Upside Near-Term.” Overall the key message was that financial markets have rebounded … Read more

We’re at the 6th annual Web 2.0 conference, now known as the Web 2.0 Summit. John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly opened the event. O’Reilly spoke about being at another transition point for the Web. They have termed this “web squared”, a.k.a. “web meets world.” O’Reilly said that in the current era “we’re starting to instrument … Read more

As part of the lead-up to our inaugural event this Thursday 15th October, The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, we’re pleased to announce our list of the top 100 Real-Time Web companies. A couple of weeks ago we posted our top 50. Thanks to the comments on that post and messages we received in the days … Read more

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we continue the build-up to our first event: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. You can register here for the low price of $270. Also this week we analyzed applications from … Read more

Yesterday we analyzed some of the applications being built with Pachube, an open source platform enabling developers to connect sensor data to the Web. We at ReadWriteWeb think that Pachube is an excellent example of one of our Top 5 Trends of 2009: Internet of Things. So we’re exploring Pachube in-depth in a 3-part series. … Read more

Last week we reported that Pachube, an open source platform enabling developers to connect sensor data to the Web, had released a real-time notifications feature. We at ReadWriteWeb think that Pachube is an excellent example of one of our Top 5 Trends of 2009: Internet of Things. So we’re going to explore Pachube in-depth in … Read more