Home Weekly Wrapup: Best BigCo & Products ’08, Social Media Predictions ’09, And More…

Weekly Wrapup: Best BigCo & Products ’08, Social Media Predictions ’09, And More…

It’s time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the product side, we continued our Best Products 2008 series with 5 more lists – covering Mobile Web, Enterprise, ‘Real World’, Digital Lifestyle, and Alternative Search Engines. We also named our Best BigCo of the Year, the fifth year we’ve done this. On the trends side, it’s that time of year when we start thinking about what will pan out in 2009. So we brought you our picks for social media in ’09, as well as our analysis of predictions from leading marketing geeks. Last but not least, check out the latest Jobwire stats – our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by EasyDate Affiliate Network:

Web Products

Best BigCo of 2008: Apple

Every year we do a review of the top Internet companies, to identify the ones we think had the biggest impact. Today we’re announcing the Best BigCo of 2008 and next week we’ll announce Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company – all selected by the ReadWriteWeb writers.

In 2007 the Best BigCo went to Facebook, due to the launch and subsequent impact of its development platform. Google won Best BigCo of 2006 and 2004. In between, in 2005, Yahoo! won the award. This year we’ve chosen Apple, which almost single-handedly brought the Mobile Web to life in 2008.

Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008

Enterprise adoption of cloud computing, SaaS, and social media (whatever you want to call it) is accelerating. This is a healthy market, in which vendors are doing well in a tough economy. As we near the end of a year that will go down in history with the words “meltdown,” “panic,” “crisis,” and “depression” attached, it is time to celebrate the winners in this market, enterprise-focused web products that are already doing well and poised for even greater success in 2009. And if these products excite you, we invite you to subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Enterprise Channel.

We’ve now published 9 of these year-end lists. Here are the other 8:

A Firefox Add-On for App Addicts: App Discover

When you visit a web site how do you know you’re getting the best experience for you? That’s the question the new Firefox add-on App Discover aims to solve. Once installed, the app could alert you if there were any enhancements (Greasemonkey, Firefox add-ons) or applications (Adobe AIR, Appcelerator Titanium, Fluid, Mozilla Prism) that work with the web site you’re visiting.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS 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.
  • Pro Opinion allows you to get paid to take surveys.
  • WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
  • Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
  • Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
  • Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
  • VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
  • Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
  • Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
  • DEMO09 is the launchpad for emerging technology.
  • MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
  • SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.


RWW Jobwire

Here’s Who’s Getting Hired Right Now in Tech

Marketing and social networking companies are hiring developers and community managers.

One of the things we’re most excited about at Jobwire, in addition to the individual stories about peoples’ exciting new jobs, is the aggregate data that’s becoming available as we report on more and more new hires. In this post we published two pie charts illustrating hiring trends over the past 6 weeks, split up by job title and company sector. Some of the numbers are not what we expected.

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB’S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Trends

Social Media in 2009: Our Predictions and Desires

Over the past year, we’ve been inundated with social media. We’ve seen Twittergomainstream, lifestreaming take over blogging, and we’ve tried what felt like a milliondifferent applications. We’ve joined then abandoned new services recklessly, leaving our accounts to wither away on platforms long forgotten. What more could we possibly do in 2009?

For the entrepreneurs still looking to get our attention with the latest social media toys, their pitch may no longer be “come try this, it’s new,” but instead, “come try this, it helps.” Because if there’s anything we learned from 2008, it’s that social media overload is not sustainable.

Read the full post to find out our Social Media Wish List…

Top Marketing Geeks Make Their Predictions for 2009

Will 2009 be the big year for corporate transparency, for a global conversation – perhaps for bargain basement online marketing tactics instead of old-school huge commercial campaigns?

Peter Kim, a former Forrester analyst now working on stealth enterprise software company, recently polled 14 of the most high-profile thinkers about social media marketing and asked them what they expected to see 2009 bring. The end product was an attractive 23 page PDF that we’ve embedded in our post, but we thought we’d pull out some of the thoughts we found most interesting for all you skimmers out there.

The iPhone is Apple’s Netbook: Almost Half of All Traffic from WiFi Networks

According to the latest report from AdMob, 42% of all requests from iPhones to Admob’s partners worldwide are coming in over WiFi instead of through the networks of mobile operators. This puts the iPhone in a league of its own, given that on average, AdMob is only seeing about 10-20% of all requests from Wifi capable phones actually coming in from WiFi networks. From T-Mobile’s Android phone, for example, only about 10% of all requests were made on WiFi.

Favorite Podcasts of the ReadWriteWeb Community

Podcasting has had its challenges over the past couple of years and we even once questioned whether it would survive! But at heart we at ReadWriteWeb love listening to podcasts, nearly as much as we love reading blogs. So we decided to find out the favorite podcasts of our readers and writers. We put the call out on Twitter and got a great response. The results are in this post, together with the favorites of the ReadWriteWeb authors.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

About ReadWrite’s Editorial Process

The ReadWrite Editorial policy involves closely monitoring the tech industry for major developments, new product launches, AI breakthroughs, video game releases and other newsworthy events. Editors assign relevant stories to staff writers or freelance contributors with expertise in each particular topic area. Before publication, articles go through a rigorous round of editing for accuracy, clarity, and to ensure adherence to ReadWrite's style guidelines.

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