In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we review the action from the Mobile World Congress, find out why many people blacked out their social networking profiles this week, continue our series on recommendation engines, analyze Yahoo’s progress in search innovation, look into the Internet in cars, and more. Also check out the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb’s new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.
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Web Trends
The Next Node on the Net: Your Car!
A new radio system developed in Australia is transforming the vehicles on the street into nodes on a network. The technology, designed by scientists at the University of Southern Australia’s Institute for Telecommunications Research, is an application called “Dedicated Short Range Communications” (DSRC). Using a combination of GPS and Wi-Fi, cars can communicate their location data to a central office, but it also enables them to communicate with each other.
Social Network Downtime in 2008: LinkedIn Up – Twitter Down
According to a new report (PDF) from uptime monitoring service Pingdom, Facebook and MySpace, the two largest players in the social networking market, had very little downtime in 2008. Twitter, whose iconic Fail Whale adorned the service far too often at the beginning of the year, got its act together and was only down for 12 minutes in December. LinkedIn, on the other hand, saw an increased rate of outages in the course of the year.
How to Reach Baby Boomers with Social Media
A new report from Forrester Research revealed some surprising information: apparently Baby Boomers aren’t exactly the technology Luddites that people think they are. In fact, more than 60 percent of those in this generational group actively consume socially created content like blogs, videos, podcasts, and forums. What’s more, the percentage of those participating is on the rise.
Vint Cerf: Despite Its Age, The Internet is Still Filled with Problems
Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google and widely recognized as one of the “Fathers of the Internet”, said that the issues facing the Internet today are as complex as they were pre-Internet. Speaking at the SMX Conference in Santa Clara, Cerf discussed his concerns about the current state of the Internet and gave us a glimpse into his hopes for its future.
Black Out Your Twitter Photo: NZ Copyright Law Protest Goes Viral
Social networks are making it increasingly easy to organize and propagate protests. One that caught our eye this week was the New Zealand Internet Blackout, which is using a variety of Internet services to protest against a new law in New Zealand – the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A’. This law may have major implications for Internet users in NZ, because it calls for internet disconnection “based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny.” This law is due to come into effect in New Zealand on February 28th. The Blackout is in force on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and various websites/blogs.
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
A Word from Our Sponsors
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Jobwire
Who’s Hiring in Tech? 2009 Numbers So Far
It may be dismal economic times, but some companies are continuing to make new hires in tech and new media. That’s what we track on our Jobwire site and below you’ll find aggregate hiring numbers for the first 6 weeks of the new year. We last covered aggregate stats in the middle of December and the new numbers are similar to what we saw then. IT and software companies are hiring more than anyone else, but marketing firms are now hiring more than publishing and social media companies, a switch since our last report.
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Web Products
Mobile News: Yahoo Mobile, Skype on Cell Phones, Second Android Phone, and More
This week, the mobile computing world revolved around the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Among some of the highlights were the announcement of the second Android phone, as well as Yahoo’s new mobile initiative, and the announcement of a partnership between Nokia and Skype that will bring Skype’s VOIP client to Nokia’s high-end N97 phone.
Would You Pay $200 for an Android App? Android Market Preps Priced Applications
The Android Market was designed to be the one-stop shop for all G-1 users to download applications for their mobile handsets. As such, it had a great deal in common with the Apple iTunes App Store – save for one specific feature: the ability for developers to charge for their apps. Now, even that feature will be common between the two application stores as the Android Market prepares to release support for priced applications.
Yahoo! Search Turns 5, Has Tech to Show For It
It was 5 years ago today that Yahoo! stopped using Google to power its searches and started using its own search technology, the company wrote today in a blog post. Everyone knows that things aren’t looking good for Yahoo! in business terms, and the company’s search and advertising market shares look even worse. But you know what deserves some celebration on this 5th birthday? The search team’s work on some really cool search related technologies.
Yahoo! Search Monkey, BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) and Delicious are three big wins for the Yahoo! search team – even if no one has yet figured out how to turn them into money. That’s not the only reason why we’re all here on the web is it? Isn’t it largely for love of innovation? Yahoo! in general, including the search team, deserve applause for their embrace of innovation.
Facebook Launches Facebook Bill of Rights, Reverts to Previous Terms of Use
If you read any tech publication this week, you couldn’t have helped but encounter the brouhaha over Facebook’s revised Terms of Use. Now, Facebook has decided to return to its previous Terms – dated September 23, 2008 – until it can better determine how to proceed. To help ensure they don’t make the same mistakes again, they’ve also started the “Facebook Bill of Rights,” a Facebook group formed specifically to allow people “to give input and suggestions on Facebook’s Terms of Use.”
ATG Recommendations Aims to Predict Your Next Purchase
In this latest instalment in our series on recommendation engines, we looked at ATG – an e-commerce services vendor which, among other things, provides recommendations technology to retailers such as Tommy Hilfiger and BetterWorldBooks. ATG has a similar “blended” approach to recommendations as richrelevance, whom we profiled last week – in other words it uses a mix of personalization and wisdom of the crowds. ATG’s current approach to recommendations is heavily influenced by a product it acquired in January 2008, CleverSet. We spoke to ATG this week, to find out more about their recommendations product and what makes it stand out in (what we’re discovering) is a crowded market for recommendation technologies.
See other posts in ReadWriteWeb’s special series on Recommendation Engines
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
Enterprise
Don’t Forget About Security on the PC
Security in the cloud is a hot topic. But when we interviewed Peter Bell, General Partner at Highland Capital Partners, he went out of his way to emphasize the need for security on the PC. He was “sticking to the script,” as Highland has a number of investments in this area, which we’ll review. Nevertheless, his basic point is valid. There is little point for the data centers that serve your SaaS applications to have excellent security if your PC leaks like a sieve. To all Mac-heads, good choice, but most people still use PCs!
Email us if you’re interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb’s Enterprise Channel.
SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL
That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
