2009

Cross Reality: When Sensors Meet Virtual Reality

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During my recent visit to MIT in Boston I met with Joseph Paradiso, Associate Professor and Director of the Responsive Environments Group at MIT Media Laboratory. He showed me some demos of what his lab is up to, focusing mostly on what is termed “Cross Reality”. This is when sensor/actuator networks meet online virtual worlds. … Read more

Siri: Virtual Personal Assistant Prepares For Debut

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Siri has been getting a lot of hype over the past year. It’s an as yet unreleased product that aims to be a “Virtual Personal Assistant” (VPA). At the recent SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with two of the founders of Siri: Dag Kittlaus (CEO) and Tom Gruber (CTO). I was informed … Read more

Editor’s Pick: 10 Things We’re Dying to Know About Chrome OS

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As founding editor of ReadWriteWeb, every weekend I’ll pick out 2-3 posts from the past week which I thought were particularly good and worth highlighting. The biggest news last week was probably the announcement of Google Chrome OS (excellently covered by Frederic Lardinois), which many people saw as the much-anticipated ‘Google OS.’ On further analysis … Read more

Editor’s Pick: Does Twitter Deserve a Nobel Peace Prize

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As founding editor of ReadWriteWeb, every weekend I’ll pick out 2-3 posts from the past week which I thought were particularly good and worth highlighting. Last week Marshall Kirkpatrick, RWW’s lead writer and VP Content Development, wrote an intriguing analysis of the impact Twitter has had on our culture. The basis of the post was … Read more

Editor’s Pick: Six Reasons to Stick with Your Startup

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We’re starting a new feature on ReadWriteWeb, called ‘Editor’s Picks.’ As founding editor of the site, every weekend I’ll pick out 2-3 posts from the past week which I thought were particularly good and worth highlighting. We’ll start with a post by Jolie O’Dell in our ReadWriteStart channel, which is a subsite devoted to early … Read more

Weekly Wrapup: Tim Berners-Lee Interview, Google Chrome OS, Social Network Stats, And More…

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In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we feature an in-depth interview with the inventor of the Web Tim Berners-Lee. We also cover and analyze the surprise announcement of a Chrome OS (Google’s new operating system for netbooks), investigate a raft of new statistics from social … Read more

Web-Connected Light Sensors With Pachube & Arduino

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Two of the more interesting products in the ‘Internet of Things,’ a.k.a. real world objects connected to the Internet, are Pachube and Arduino. We profiled Pachube (pronounced “patch-bay”) in May; it’s an open source platform enabling you to connect sensor data to the Web. Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform, which we briefly profiled … Read more

Wolfram|Alpha: The Use Cases

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At the recent SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with Wolfram|Alpha‘s Russell Foltz-Smith. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine,” a nerdy and unfortunately not very intuitive description. Because it’s hard to grok, most people have categorized Wolfram|Alpha as a new type of search engine. The site got a lot of press … Read more

Digital Media M&A;: Mobile & Analytics Deals Up, Social Media Down

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Peachtree Media Advisors has just released their latest report on digital media mergers and acquisitions. We posted their 2008 report back in January, and this is a mid-year 2009 update to that. According to Peachtree, there were 342 digital media transactions in the first half of 2009, which was 12.3% below the number of transactions … Read more

The State of the Market in Semantic Technologies

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Tom Tague from Thomson Reuters’ OpenCalais team did a keynote speech today at SemTech in San Jose. His presentation was a wonderful wrapup of current semantic technology trends, and what we can expect over the next few years. To open, he said that where we are now in the evolution of the Web is content … Read more