The theme of our upcoming Real-Time Web Summit in New York City is use cases for the Real-Time Web. In the run-up to our June 11 event, we’ll publish a series of posts exploring use cases across a variety of industries – finance, enterprise, science, education, and more. We aim to show just how much potential there is for real-time technologies in the real world.
By now most of you will be familiar with the technology of the Real-Time Web. It’s about immediacy of content, presence information, efficiency and responsiveness. Twitter and Facebook have become the poster children for the Real-Time Web, however there’s much more to it than those two products. To prove that, here’s a list of five other use cases for the Real-Time Web.
This post only scratches the surface. On 11th June in New York City, we’ll host a day of quality, practical discussions about how to deploy real-time technologies in your industry. To be a part of this unique event, we invite you to register now for the Real-Time Web Summit NYC.
1. Finance
Last October, we pointed to a company called Kaazing. It uses HTML5 Websockets to push bits of financial data to web interfaces for banks. As Marshall Kirkpatrick explained, many of those banks had previously been using locally installed software in order to maintain secure persistent connections with a data source. Kaazing moves that to the browser and it claims to be able to handle “very large” numbers of users and message volumes, all in real-time.
2. Enterprise
Integration with business intelligence technologies is one use case for real-time technologies in the enterprise, wrote ReadWriteEnterprise editor Alex Williams in December. An example is Socialcast. Last October it launched Social Business Intelligence (SBI), an analytics platform for activity streams in the enterprise. With SBI, the activity stream is aggregated and then analyzed by management to better understand community dynamics.
3. Education
Although Google Wave has struggled to gain momentum since its launch last year, one area where it may yet have an impact is in education. Last October, we looked at how Wave might be deployed as a real-time collaborative note-taking tool.
Some early users reported that Google Wave combines some of the best features from different collaborative applications, but with a real-time twist. It was noted that while Google Docs can be used to share notes and collaborate on assignments, with Google Wave students can do this in real-time. This could be important in education for things like note taking, asking questions (a.k.a. a backchannel) and collaborative projects.
4. Science
One of the companies we profiled in our premium report on the Real-Time Web last year was Mendeley, a service for organizing scientific research papers. It includes social features such as offering recommendations of research and other scientists you might like. The company told report author Marshall Kirkpatrick that Mendeley is like Last.fm or iTunes for scientific research. Indeed, its backers include co-founders of Last.fm and Skype.
How it works: Mendeley tracks reading and citation activity in real-time to provide recommendations and trending data. It has a particular focus on implicit data – like opening a document several times, or sharing it.
5. Publishing
If you’re not doing real-time updates in online publishing these days, then your chances of survival are slim. There’s no shortage of applications for real-time technology in publishing, but a recent example comes from TIME magazine. It launched NewsFeed earlier this month, a new subset that offers Time.com’s readers fast updates about trending topics. NewsFeed’s team of editors told us on launch that it plans to post about 20 updates per day, with topics ranging from politics, breaking news, sports, tech and entertainment. Time Magazine is using WordPress as its publishing platform and the site’s comments are powered by JS-Kit’s Echo commenting platform.
There are people from TIME Magazine attending our Real-Time Web Summit in NYC, so you’ll be able to ask them directly how the new site works.
Want to Find Out More Use Cases? Register for the RWW Real-Time Summit NYC!
We’ll explore many more use cases for real-time technology at
our upcoming Summit in New York
, on 11th June. To participate, we invite you to
. The current price of $395 only lasts until Wednesday, 26th May, after which it will increase.
If you’re a company in the Real-Time Web market and want to showcase your product, contact our COO Sean Ammirati for information regarding sponsorship and our ‘speed geeking’ sessions (which gives you a chance to demo your product).
In the meantime, be sure to follow our content series about Real-Time Web use cases here on ReadWriteWeb – there are more to come!
