2010

2010 has been a watershed year for the next version of HTML, the markup language that all web pages are written in. The reason for the emerging popularity of HTML5 strikes at the heart of a company by the name of Adobe: interactivity. Adobe’s near ubiquitous Flash technology has been the default way to add … Read more

The Web has always rewarded quantity more than quality, but over 2010 this truism became even more pronounced with the growth of Content Farms. These are companies which create thousands of pieces of content per day. Much of it is in the form of how-to articles and is often referred to as “evergreen” informational content, … Read more

Yesterday we published an overview of social shopping in 2010, one of the year’s top trends. Social shopping is a form of e-commerce in which you can share and access information about retail products through your friends or other users. Social shopping products often have a crowdsourcing component too, enabling you to get the best … Read more

How do people use web apps in this new, device-saturated era of the Web? In Part 3 of our interview with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, we look at the usage patterns of its users. One interesting data point is that 80% of Evernote users say they use the product both at home and at work. … Read more

In Part 1 of our interview with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, we explored the history of Evernote – including its link to the Apple Newton. In Part 2, we look ahead to the future of Evernote. The company has ambitious plans to be your secondary brain. Literally. As Libin told me, “You will just have … Read more

Evernote is a smart phone app that epitomizes the modern day web service. It is used over a variety of devices, it syncs easily between those devices, it augments your daily life in ways not possible before the mobile web, it can be used equally at work or home. In an interview with Evernote CEO … Read more

As the Internet of Things slowly becomes a commercial reality, led by industries such as food and logistics, the underlying technologies (RFID, sensors, QR codes and more) become less important than what is done with the data. As Bo Begole, Principal Scientist and Manager of Ubiquitous Computing at PARC, put it to me recently: “the … Read more

On a trip to Silicon Valley last month, I had the pleasure of visiting the famous PARC campus (Palo Alto Research Center, formally Xerox PARC). One of the people I spoke to was Bo Begole, Principal Scientist and Manager of PARC’s Ubiquitous Computing Area. Begole showed me an app that brings the concept of ‘ubicomp’ … Read more

The Internet of Things, when objects in the real world are connected to the Internet, is adding a whole lot more data to the Web. The fascinating question is how that data will be used, by existing businesses and new startups yet to emerge. Take the food industry for example. With sensors, QR codes and … Read more

The latest comScore Top 50 Properties (U.S.) statistics make sobering reading for AOL, the former king of the portals in the 90s and early part of this century. While AOL is the number 5 ranked U.S. web property, with 104 million monthly unique visitors, it’s now well adrift of the top 4: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft … Read more

Recently we spoke to Groupon CTO Ken Pelletier, who has overseen the technical team since the company was founded in 2007. Groupon was gone on to become perhaps the most successful social shopping service on the Web. In our interview, we discovered that Pelletier has specific views on how to develop a web product. So … Read more

Last week I was a judge at the Consumer Electronics Association’s i-Stage competition, where 8 innovative startups competed to win a spot in January’s CES trade show. All of the products presented were forward-looking, none more so than the winner: AutoBot. Developed by Louisville, Kentucky company Mavizon Technologies, AutoBot is a car appliance that allows … Read more

Social shopping has been a big trend over the past year and there have been few more successful startups in this domain than Groupon. It’s a relatively simple concept: offer daily shopping deals to groups of consumers. The details are a little more complicated, in that a deal only eventuates if a pre-set number of … Read more

This year check-in apps have moved beyond location, to encompass every thing from checking into movies, books, songs and (yes) even food. Foodspotting launched last November and has quickly built up a passionate following of foodies. It enables users to make and find food recommendations, in particular through photos and quick ratings of food items. … Read more

CiviGuard is a new mobile-based solution for emergency communications. At heart it’s an alerts and notification system, with messages distributed via text messages, an HTML5 web app, push notifications and social media services like Twitter. The product was developed by 3 students of Singularity University: Zubin Wadia, Shawna Pandya and Timothy Coleman. It was inspired … Read more