Frederic Lardinois Frederic Lardinois is a Writer for ReadWriteWeb, joining the team in June 2008. He lives in Portland, Oregon, USA. You can contact Frederic at frederic@readwriteweb.com.
LeWeb 2010 Mozilla in 2011: Focus on Performance, Video, Identity & App Stores Yesterday, we also had a chance to interview Mozilla's chairperson Mitchell Baker at LeWeb in Paris. During this discussion, we talked about Mozilla's plans for the coming year, which involve a renewed focus on speed, app stores for the Web and open audio and video in the browser. We also touched upon Mozilla's vision for giving users the ability… Frederic Lardinois View comments
LeWeb 2010 Evernote Gets Down to Business: Launches Sponsored Accounts for Schools and Companies Evernote just announced the launch of sponsored business accounts for organizations and businesses. These new account types will give schools, businesses and other organizations the option to pay for their members' and employees' accounts. As the company's CEO Phil Libin just told us during an interview at LeWeb in Paris, the majority of the tools… Frederic Lardinois View comments
LeWeb 2010 Twitter: We Need to Create a Better Consumption Experience for Our Users Jason Goldman, Twitter's vice president of product, just joined TechCrunch's MG Siegler on stage at this year's LeWeb in Paris. During this interview, he noted that Twitter will ramp up its integration with third-party apps in the near future and roll out more partnerships shortly. Asked about Twitter's product plans for the future, Goldman noted… Social Frederic Lardinois View comments
LeWeb 2010 Facebook: We Spend More Time and Resources Thinking About Privacy Than Any Other Company in the World During his keynote interview TechCrunch's editor Michael Arrington at LeWeb10 in Paris this morning, Facebook's director for the company's developer network Ethan Beard noted that "no other company in the world currently spends us much time and resources on privacy as Facebook." He also categorically denied the existence of a Facebook phone. Frederic Lardinois View comments
Location Location-Based Cola Wars: Pepsi, Coke, Foursquare and SCVNGR Even though many location-based social networks continue to struggle to find mainstream adoption, more and more big brands are hopping on the bandwagon now and are experimenting with how to best use these services for their purposes. Disney and Gowalla announced a partnership yesterday and Foursquare announced a deal with Pepsi and Safeway's Vons… Frederic Lardinois View comments
Apple Low Volume and No Retweets: Ping Is Not Going Viral on Twitter Last week, Apple launched a partnership with Twitter that allows the users of its Ping social network to send their likes to their Twitter streams. Using Microsoft's Archivist, we tapped into the Twitter firehose over the last few days and took a look at how Ping is doing on Twitter. Before the launch of this integration, there was a lot of talk… Social Frederic Lardinois View comments
E-Books Amazon Enables E-Book Gifting for Kindle Just ahead of the holiday shopping season, Amazon has enabled a new feature in its Kindle store: e-book gift giving. Amazon's customers will now be able to give Kindle books to anybody with an e-mail address, whether they are existing Kindle users or not. According to Amazon, the Kindle store is "the first major bookstore to offer eBook gifting… Frederic Lardinois View comments
Google Google Faces More Resistance in Germany as Street View Expands to More Cities The arrival of Google Street View in Germany has not been without controversy. Indeed, thousands of Germans decided to opt out of the program and asked Google to blur their houses. Faced with the issues, Google decided to roll this service out slowly in Germany, starting with one small town two weeks ago. Today, however, Google is bringing Street… Frederic Lardinois View comments
Location Can Gowalla's Disney Deal Help Location Check-Ins go Mainstream? Location-based social check-in apps were the hot topic earlier this year, but things have markedly cooled down in this segment. Facebook's Places product threatens all of the smaller competitors like Foursquare and Gowalla, which never quite managed to get mainstream traction. Things have been especially quiet around Gowalla, but the company just… Mobile Frederic Lardinois View comments
News 250,000 Sensors to Fight Internet Traffic Jams RIPE NCC, the regional Internet registry for Europe, the Middle East and some parts of Central Asia is planning to install up to 250,000 sensors that can measure Internet speeds and help engineers to predict and diagnose online traffic jams. Instead of building small, separate, private infrastructures to measure online traffic, RIPE proposes to… Frederic Lardinois View comments