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Web 2.0 Expo Giveaway

Web 2.0 Expo Giveaway

Read/WriteWeb has 3 passes to Web
2.0 Expo to give away, same as Techcrunch. I have to admit Mr Arrington came up with a pretty
cunning means to give away their 3 passes – he’s asking for readers to
“attack any post published on TechCrunch”. This will not only give him
constructive feedback, but will increase page views too (as people…

The 85 Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit

The 85 Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit

Back in February, I came across a Kronus 55 piece Home Repair Tool Kit in a Radio Shack ad – all for just $29.99. This inspired me to assemble the first ever 55 Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit here on Read/WriteWeb; and my Tool Kit was absolutely free!
Well, it happened again. Walking through the local Sears store, there right in front of me was the…

IT Opens Up and Lives On The Web

IT Opens Up and Lives On The Web

A new report from the Leading Edge Forum proposes a new course for Enterprise IT – abandon the notion of creating the perfect intranet and instead live on the web.
In May of 2003 Nicholas Carr put forth the argument that IT Doesn’t Matter. In case there was any lingering doubt about Mr. Carr’s views of Information Technology departments in the…

Outlook for Search in China

Outlook for Search in China

Written by Aydin Senkut, an ex-Google senior manager who is currently an angel investor for his company Felicis Ventures. During Aydin’s 6 years with Google, he managed their international expansion – including launching Google’s first 10 international sites.

Today China boasts over 105 million Internet users, not to mention 350M mobile users…

The Future of RSS

The Future of RSS

There is little doubt that RSS is a disruptive, game-changing technology. The so called Really Simple Syndication (previously also called Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary), has powered a fundamentally new way to deliver and consume web content. Before RSS, users had to visit individual web sites to find out what was new. Today, news is…

Peepel: New Web Office Suite

Peepel: New Web Office Suite

Peepel.com today announced the Beta launch of its Online Office Suite, entering a competitive market alongside existing vendors like Zoho, ThinkFree, Zimbra – not to mention Google’s growing Web Office suite.
Peepel claims to differentiate itself by being “the only competitor offering a true multiple windows system in an online desktop.” Users can…

P2P: Potential Future Applications

P2P: Potential Future Applications

Written by Can Erten and edited by Richard MacManus. This is the second in a 2-part series exploring the world of P2P on the Web. Part 1 was a general introduction to P2P, along with some real-world applications of P2P. Part 2 (this post) discusses future applications.
As we mentioned in Part 1, broadband speeds are ever increasing and so the…

Compete Introduces Attention Statistics

Compete Introduces Attention Statistics

In an attempt to go beyond page views and visits, today web stats company Compete introduced “Attention metrics”. The reason is that interactive Web page technologies such as Ajax and Flash – not to mention online video – are making simple page views and visits increasingly outdated. With Ajax for example, information on a webpage can be updated…

Morfik Patents AJAX Compiler – Playing Games With Google

Morfik Patents AJAX Compiler – Playing Games With Google

Slashdot is running a story stating that Morfik, an Ajax development platform we covered recently on Read/WriteWeb, has filed a patent dated September 2005 for the compiling of high-level languages into AJAX apps. The timing of the news is interesting, because Morfik is just about to release its version 1.0 – after 8 or more years of…

EMI Music DRM-free: What It Means For The Online Music Industry

EMI Music DRM-free: What It Means For The Online Music Industry

The big news today is that EMI Music announced a new higher quality DRM-free music download offering. It is a premium service, covering EMI’s entire digital catalogue, and will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms. Steve Jobs of Apple was there at the announcement, to emphasize that iTunes supports the move…

Quintura – Are UI Innovations Enough?

Quintura – Are UI Innovations Enough?

Written by Emre Sokullu, with contributions by Charles Knight

Quintura is a clustering search engine, one of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines chosen by Charles Knight. Quintura, like many other alt search engines, is focusing on user interface (UI) innovations – see our previous categorization of search engines here. The company recently…

Poll: Will UI innovations really be competitive with Google?

Poll: Will UI innovations really be competitive with Google?

This week’s poll is a companion to a thought-provoking post co-written by Emre Sokullu and Charles Knight. The post is a review of alt search engine Quintura, which differentiates itself with clustering technology. But there is a larger question: can search engines such as Quintura, that rely on UI innovation, really be competitive with…

Your Guide to Online TV Guides: 10 Services Compared

Your Guide to Online TV Guides: 10 Services Compared

Following last year’s backlash over Yahoo!’s re-design of their TV section, and in particular their television listings feature, many users felt left out in the cold. I was one of them. Having previously relied on the Yahoo! online television guide to know what was on the boob tube, I was annoyed when a simple and easy-to-use product was…

HiPiHi – A Virtual World Born in China

HiPiHi – A Virtual World Born in China

Even
though SecondLife has attracted a lot of attention in
China and the first millionaire from SecondLife
is Chinese, this western virtual world has still not been officially
launched in China. But the rapidly growing Chinese Internet apparently could not wait for
it. Last week a Chinese virtual world was launched, named HiPiHi.
It’s a…

The End of an Era?

The End of an Era?

Like many other web 2.0 geeks, today I woke up to Mike Arrington’s elaborate April Fools joke that Techcrunch has acquired infamous dot com site F**kedCompany.com. It actually is 1 April where I live, but it wasn’t until I had finished reading the article that I realised it was probably an April Fools joke (thanks to a timely IM from Steve…

Weekly Wrapup, 26-30 March 2007

Weekly Wrapup, 26-30 March 2007

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb.
Analysis Posts
This week Charles Knight released the March edition of his Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. As usual the list provoked a flurry of comments, with the Search Engine of the Month KoolTorch coming under a bit of scrutiny (mostly for being IE-only). But I think everyone…

Desktop On Demand – New WebOS Launches

Desktop On Demand – New WebOS Launches

Desktop On Demand (DOD) is the latest WebOS to come onto the market. It is a free “online desktop service” that lets you access your desktop remotely. DOD comes with 1GB of free disk space, with extra space available for a fee. DOD is aiming to go beyond simply being a virtual desktop – it wants to be “a wide ranging and powerful remote…