There's increasing concern in China and worldwide about the detention of leading Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei. Reports first surfaced on Sunday U.S. that Weiwei had been detained by China authorities, while at the Beijing Airport on his way to Hong Kong. Weiwei is a prolific Twitter user, but...
Here we are at the opening for Sugar CRM's Sugarcon event. The theme is openness and the social world.This is a defining event for Sugar as the service is moving deeper into the enterprise with IBM as a partner. IBM is investing heavily in Sugar CRM. A total of six...
Like a prism to a ray of sunlight, stream-hacking startup Mediasift CEO Nick Halstead took the stage today with Twitter's Ryan Sarver at the Data 2.0 conference to announce Twitter's second data resales channel partnership. Halstead's service will allow customers to parse the full Twitter fire hose along any of...
Twitter hasn't replaced the telephone for customer support yet, but the list of companies using it as a customer support channel is growing. Social media has given the customer an unprecedented soap box for venting about companies that do them wrong. Forrester talks about this as an "empowering" of the...
It was two short, short years ago that the Obama administration thrilled data and transparency wonks by launching Data.gov, USASpending.gov and a number of other ambitious sites. But as Marshall Kirkpatrick reported in our top story this week, Congress is now planning to eliminate the sites' funding. There's a push...
We cover virtualization often, including many case studies on how various organizations are using it. But new data from SpiceWorks gives a higher-level view of who is using virtualization by breaking it down by verticals. SpiceWorks examined data from "100,000 companies in Spiceworks of comparable size in over 100 countries"...
Google is now offering its Page Speed service, which just released a Chrome extension last week, as a browser-agnostic Web service called Page Speed Online. Just enter a URL and get the results. It also has a new feature offering suggestions for mobile optimization.According to the Page Speed FAQ, "Page...
This morning, Salesforce.com announced its intent to acquire social media monitoring company Radian6, a market leader in the social analytics space, for $276 million. Radian6 boasts half the Fortune 100 as customers, including AAA, Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, Pepsico, and UPS. Last month Salesforce.com announced Radian6 for Salesforce, a...
Several years ago, before the Web had become as ever-present as it is now, Wal-Mart was the shining example of a future where inanimate objects communicated, aka the Internet of Things. The company had a plan to implement RFID tags to better optimize its supply chain. The problem? The RFID...
One of the fun things about being a leader in IT is the opportunity to see new technology and explain it to others for the first time. We love to see people's eyes get big and excited when some new wizardry is introduced and we're the first one to explain...
Intuit built a NFC-enabled version of its GoPayment mobile payment processing system over two years ago, says Omar Green, the company's Director of Strategic Mobile Initiatives. The NFC version was built during developers 10% unstructured time - the time employees are given to work on unassigned projects they're interested in...
A large number of entrepreneurs and investors are betting that the Internet is going to disrupt financial services just like it's disrupted so many other industries. Stripe is one of those, it's a stealthy startup aimed to make online payments super simple. It's being built by three Irishmen in Silicon...
On Thursday we interviewed the much-talked-about CEO of Color, Bill Nguyen, and the story ended up being our top post of the week. Color is the location-based photo-sharing app that raised $41 million before it even launched. That price tag - along with the underwhelming first impression the app makes...
How important is Twitter in the political revolutions sweeping the Middle East? That was the topic of discussion on stage at the CTIA mobile and wireless convention today in Orlando, Florida and two very different, very strong opinions were voiced."I don't think anyone in their right mind would say that...
Social CRM, as a concept, has been around for five or six years now, according to Paul Greenberg and Estaban Kolsky, two analysts interviewed on the subject by Dennis Howlett. But we're only just now starting to understand the concept, and it may be several years before we have any...
The demand for text mining tools, services like Instapaper and Readability, and Web scraping have increased the importance of extracting article text from HTML pages. Computer science student Toma Kova?i? wrote an overview of text extraction algorithms. He also a big list of resources for hackers working with text extraction,...
This week's top story was Marshall Kirkpatrick's revelation that Google has plans to launch a new social network. Does it exist? Does it not exist? Google tried to shoot down the story (which is what companies with sekret projects usually do) but Marshall's analysis and reportage paint a fairly comprehensive...
CPUsage provides developers with a SETI@home-style grid computing platform. CPUsage offers computer owners rewards in exchange for access to their unused CPU resources. It then licenses those resources to customers for CPU intensive applications such as scientific analysis and graphic rendering. All the data stored on users' computers is encrypted.CPUsage...
Of the approximately 6,000 languages alive in the world today, 60 percent or more are said to be dying out. The majority of the world's languages are, in fact, "minority" languages, used in the shadow of a more politically powerful tongue. On St. Patrick's Day, Prof. Kevin Scannell of St....
At the end of SXSW Interactive, I was interviewed by WebBeat.TV's Pelpina Trip. We discussed what was, in my view, the main trend of the event: group messaging. The ReadWriteWeb team tested a couple of these products, Beluga and GroupMe. We ended up using Beluga for the duration of SXSW,...
Explore the latest in tech with our Tech News. We cut through the noise for concise, relevant updates, keeping you informed about the rapidly evolving tech landscape with curated content that separates signal from noise.
Explore tech impact in In-Depth Stories. Narrative data journalism offers comprehensive analyses, revealing stories behind data. Understand industry trends for a deeper perspective on tech's intricate relationships with society.
Empower decisions with Expert Reviews, merging industry expertise and insightful analysis. Delve into tech intricacies, get the best deals, and stay ahead with our trustworthy guide to navigating the ever-changing tech market.
