In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we analyze why Amazon spent nearly a billion dollars to purchase online shoe shop Zappos, explain why IBM is an early leader in the Internet of Things, investigate whether the Google Chrome OS will finally deliver us the mythical GDrive, look at why Barnes & Noble is a worthy challenger to Amazon’s eBook empire, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0’ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).
Note: this week ReadWriteWeb released our second premium report: our Q2 2009 VC Funding Report. Full details below…
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Purchase The ReadWriteWeb Q2 2009 VC Funding Report
Our Second Premium Report for Businesses
We’re excited to announce the availability of ReadWriteWeb’s Q2 2009 VC Funding Report, our second premium report powered by data from ChubbyBrain. We have been tracking early-stage investment in Internet, mobile and SaaS since the financial crisis in September 2008 and we believe that this report is unlike anything else you’ve seen. Investors, bankers and advisers involved in the funding of digital innovation will get the facts on the deal-by-deal basis that they need to make decisions.
Our Report gives you the facts on 240 deals closed in April, May and June – who invested, in what company, how much they invested and when. Read on to see what’s included in the guide and how to purchase it.
Web Trends
Getting the Goods: The New Amazon/Zappos Supply Chain Story
Beloved online shoe retailer Zappos this week announced it will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon, in exchange for almost a billion dollars worth of Amazon stock. Both of these companies are interesting because they have mastered making the connection between a quality online experience and physical delivery of tangible goods offline. Is this just a story of a big online shopping mall buying up a hot little online shoe store? Taking a closer look at the offline supply chain of each company indicates that there may be more to this deal.
The Wearable Internet Will Blow Mobile Phones Away
Earlier this year at the TED conference, Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group showcased a wearable computing system that allows users to display and interact with the Web on any surface – including the human body. The video shows the system’s main developer, Pranav Mistry, taking photographs with his hand, summoning up Amazon review data onto the cover of a physical book, and more. Look out mobile phones, because in a decade’s time wearable systems may be the primary means of accessing the Web.
IBM and The Internet of Things
In the Web world, you know that a trend has major traction when IBM is all over it. Like any large Internet company, Big Blue is careful about which trends it latches onto. However in the case of Internet of Things, IBM is proving itself to be an unusually early adopter. We recently spoke to Andy Stanford-Clark, a Master Inventor and Distinguished Engineer at IBM, who has hooked his house up to Twitter and is driving other Internet of Things initiatives at IBM.
New Study Finds Correlation Between Social Media and Financial Success
A new study released by enterprise wiki provider Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group shows that the brands most engaged in social media are also experiencing higher financial success rates than those of their non-engaged peers. To determine this relationship, the study focused on 100 companies from the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands survey and the various social media platforms they used like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, and forums.
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
A Word from Our Sponsors
We’d like to thank ReadWriteWeb’s sponsors, without whom we couldn’t bring you all these stories every week!
- Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
- WeeBiz, a business community where you can find and share new business opportunities.
- Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
- SiSense, Analytics, Reports and Filters
- Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
- Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
- hakia is a semantic search engine.
- Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
- Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
- Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
- Wix, stunning Flash Websites for Free
- MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
- SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.
ReadWriteEnterprise
Our channel devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0’ and using social software inside organizations. Sponsored by Socialtext.
New Zoho CRM Aims to Undercut Salesforce.com
With improvements to email integration and a new marketing campaign, SaaS productivity vendor Zoho is aiming its sights openly at Salesforce.com, the dominant Web-based CRM today. The “Zwitch to Zoho” name might be cheesy marketing, but the cheaper subscription price is no joke. If you want more than 5 users, Salesforce.com will cost you $65/user/month. As of this week, Zoho is offering an unlimited use CRM subscription for just $12.
ReadWriteStart
Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.
Three Steps to Building an Online Brand
This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.
The three steps to building an online brand are:
1. Look good,
2. Get noticed,
3. Build trust.
In the long run, only the last one matters. Enron’s logo was just fine, and it got noticed, but on that last count, well…
SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL
Web Products
How One iPhone App Could Save Public Radio
Some newspapers scrambling to survive the internet condemn websites like Google News and the Huffington Post. Aggregators, they say, need to pay for the right to point to a newspaper’s site. Public radio stations, on the other hand, face competition from the internet as well and are just as competitive between themselves as they are collaborative. Somehow, they’ve responded differently to new media. There may be no better example of that than an iPhone application built by several large public radio organizations and called Public Radio Player.
Will Google Chrome OS Bring Us the Mythical GDrive?
Last week, Google announced some interface changes to their Google Docs service that are designed to make finding your files easier. The changes are relatively minor – the “shared with” list has gone away, there’s a new “Sharing” menu, and you now have the ability to save your searches – but that hasn’t stopped some bloggers from theorizing that the shiny new UI is bringing us one step closer to the often theorized, yet never realized, “Google Drive” service, aka “your hard drive in the cloud.”
Can Barnes & Noble Challenge Amazon’s eBook Empire?
Barnes & Noble, the beleaguered online bookstore, opened its eBook store this week. It also announced that it has partnered with Plastic Logic, which is expected to release a highly anticipated Kindle competitor soon. Given that B&N seems to have all of the necessary pieces in place, we think that the the company can challenge Amazon – especially given that it offers a larger selection of books and plans to offer a device that is more open than Amazon’s Kindle.
Free Alternatives to Photoshop With All the Bells, Whistles, Filters, & Layers
Let’s face it: If cropping was all you needed to do, you’d just use MS Paint. Photoshop, Adobe’s industry standard for image editing, costs a whopping $600. But when you need tools such as layers, filters, and other effects, 101-level apps such as Picnik and Picasa just don’t cut it. So we’ve rounded up and road-tested seven free resources that pack the punch of Photoshop’s bells and whistles without the price.
Seven e-Learning and Teaching Resources
While the down economy continues to hurt funding to our schools, more and more teachers are looking to web-based services to help educate their students. Whether it’s through open resource projects like CK-12, virtual classrooms like those in Second Life, or through the repurposing of tools like Twitter, millions of teachers are finding innovative resources to engage their students. If you’re a teacher, here are seven great tools to get you started.
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
