2011

A new iPad app launched this month called Planetary. It visualizes your music collection using the solar system as a metaphor and it’s visually stunning. It also seems gimmicky, at first glance. The concept is that stars are music artists, planets are albums and moons orbiting a planet are the album tracks. You can browse … Read more

Today YouTube launched a new music video chart, called the YouTube 100. It’s a popularity index that measures “song traffic” for official music videos and user-uploaded videos. YouTube 100 has similarities to other online music charts, such as Ultimate Chart, MTV’s Music Meter and We Are Hunted. However there are two main differences between the … Read more

Today Google announced a new netbook offering, called Chromebook. It’s being touted as a new kind of computer that offers “nothing but the web.” A chromebook will look like a laptop, only it won’t have any software programs or storage space. The only thing it has is a web browser, from which you will be … Read more

Microsoft is acquiring Skype for a reported $8.5 billion in cash. There has been a lot of speculation about what this might mean for Skype, the leading Internet telephone and chat service with around 663 million registered users. For consumers, there are two key aspects to this deal which will potentially take Skype to the … Read more

TweetDeck, the leading third party Twitter client, has been acquired by Twitter – according to Techcrunch. As of writing, neither Twitter or TweetDeck have confirmed the deal. If it does go through, it will spell the end of TweetDeck’s grand plan to become the central hub for social networks. In other words, the Holy Grail … Read more

It’s now over a month since influential Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained by China’s government. In what New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg called a “bittersweet honor,” Ai Weiwei’s latest art exhibition opened today in NYC. The 12-piece outdoor public sculpture, entitled Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, is supplemented by a special Tumblr blog, Twitter … Read more

NPR music podcast All Songs Considered just released a show about breaking up with your favorite bands. It got me thinking about favorite web apps or services that I’ve broken up with. So in the tradition of Internet era music, I’m going to directly rip NPR’s idea and breakup categories. In this post I tearfully … Read more

Yesterday we compared the recent launch of new photo and video sharing app Color to the arrival of Twitter five years ago. Like Twitter, Color is an innovative app that has intrigued early adopters and has the potential to catch on in a big way. It’s also popularizing a new buzzword: proximity. Yesterday we looked … Read more

Love it or loath it, the smartphone app Color is one of the most innovative Web products to have launched this year. It has a user experience that is as unique and different as Twitter was 5 years ago. This has led to confusion about how to use Color and questions about its value. In … Read more

As television continues to adapt to the Web, expect to see new forms of content emerge that are a hybrid of traditional TV and the latest Web technologies. Last week, television news network Al Jazeera launched a new TV show and website. Called The Stream, it’s an indication of where mainstream TV news is heading. … Read more

ReadWriteWeb is expanding our enterprise presence and so we’re looking to hire an editor for our enterprise channels. The person we’re after will already be a thought leader in the ‘enterprise 2.0’ space and will have experience leading a writing team. The position is Enterprise Channels Editor and will be responsible for ReadWriteEnterprise, ReadWriteCloud and … Read more

Today, April 20, marks the 8th birthday of ReadWriteWeb. Like a self-titled debut album, the first post on April 20, 2003 was simply titled: The Read/Write Web. It began: “The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it.” … Read more

Microsoft’s motion sensing technology for Xbox, Kinect, has experienced rapid take-up and interest. Last week Microsoft announced a non-commercial Kinect software development kit for Windows, given widespread interest in using the technology outside of the Xbox. But an open source community had already sprung up in November, to enable non-gaming Kinect projects. OpenKinect is working … Read more

One of the enduring themes of technology is convergence, when different products evolve to do similar tasks. The smartphone is the prime example of convergence in this era, bringing together voice and data (web) applications. Plus, in recent times, high quality photography and video. However, we’ve entered an age where we have multiple Internet-connected devices … Read more