2011

Today the community behind open source blogging platform, WordPress, released its latest version: 3.2. It features a design refresh and speed improvements. That’s all par for the course for a software update these days. What actually caught my attention was a slightly gimmicky thing called Distraction Free Writing (or DFW). As the name suggests, what … Read more

Just as popular consumer Web apps eventually find their way into the enterprise (Yammer anyone?), the health sector is increasingly taking its cue from the world of Web apps. The Seattle product design firm Artefact, whose future camera concept caught the attention of our readers in April, recently designed a prototype patient care app for … Read more

Last week at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit, our COO Sean Ammirati spoke to Betaworks CEO John Borthwick. Betaworks has funded and incubated a number of companies in the real-time Web market, such as TweetDeck, Bit.ly and Chartbeat. Betaworks is an unusual organization: part holding company, part investment firm, part incubator. In his conversation with Sean, … Read more

As media consumption devices evolve, so too does the form content takes on those devices. A great example is a new iPad and iPhone app called The Atavist, which is changing the way nonfiction stories are created and sold. Co-founder Evan Ratliff told the audience at the AdAge Creativity and Technology conference yesterday that The … Read more

One of the highlights of Internet Week New York, the annual Internet festival in NYC, has been the Digital Archaeology exhibit. It charts the evolution of websites and web design over the past 20 years: from the first ever website in 1991, the CERN site by the Web’s inventor Tim Berners-Lee, to the highly interactive … Read more

Last week the Web’s three leading search companies – Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! – announced a new structured data collaboration called Schema.org. It includes more than 100 new types of website markup for content like movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more. The stated aim of Schema.org is to “improve the display of … Read more

Today at the D9 conference, Microsoft unveiled the latest version of its Windows operating system. Code-named Windows 8, in a surprise move Microsoft is incorporating touchscreen technology into the Windows UI. Windows 8 will be used across a wide range of computing devices – PCs, laptops, tablets and more. One OS for all of those … Read more

Today a new social game called VinPass launched. It’s an application for wine lovers to “share wine reviews, win badges and earn real rewards.” VinPass uses the ‘check-in’ paradigm popularized by location-based social network Foursquare and extended into other areas by the likes of GetGlue (entertainment) and Foodspotting (food). In a nutshell, you check-in to … Read more

The current Internet era is characterized by multiple devices, including mobile phones, tablets, Internet TVs, netbooks, laptops, and of course the good old PC. One of the key services needed in this multi-device online world is reliable synchronization. Yet faulty or not-quite-optimal sync is one of the problems I experience the most these days. Just … Read more

Can ‘things’ be social? That’s been one of the most contentious questions around the Internet of Things (when real world objects are connected to the Internet). Several startups have tried to do this, including StickyBits, TalesofThings and Itizen. I’ve been skeptical of these efforts in the past, but a new product called ThingLink is taking … Read more

5 sessions you don’t want to miss: Calacanis vs. Denton, danah boyd on the impact of teen sexting, W3C CEO on open platforms, mobile payments panel, a behind-the-scenes look at The Onion. Our biggest event yet, the two-day 2WAY Summit in New York City on 13-14 June, is a little over two weeks away. The … Read more

The latest report from web usability guru Jakob Nielsen is about iPad usability. It’s the second such report from Nielsen Norman Group and it features in-depth analysis about how people are using iPads. As is usual with Nielsen reports, it also lustily lists all the design flaws that his users found – such as touchable … Read more

Over the past couple of years we’ve been growing our ReadWriteWeb channels. These are subsites of ReadWriteWeb that are targeted at a specific audience. We now have six channels: ReadWriteEnterprise, ReadWriteCloud, ReadWriteHack, ReadWriteBiz, ReadWriteStart and ReadWriteMobile. As our channels have grown, the opportunity has arisen for an experienced editorial manager to join our team. Today, … Read more

eYeka, a crowdsourcing company that specializes in “online co-creation” of products, has published some intriguing concepts for future smartphones. eYeka’s community came up with the following list of requirements for a next generation smartphone: a minimalistic, non-complicated design; more features (which may clash with the previous requirement); a design which feels like an extension of … Read more

Paulo Coelho is one of the most successful fiction writers today and he actively uses social media to engage with his readers. For the past 25 years the Brazilian author has written many inspirational books, which have garnered him a huge fan base all around the world. I recently discovered Coelho’s writing and have been … Read more