US analytics
firm Compete, a company formed in 2000 by Bill
Gross of Overture fame, has quietly released a new search engine and at the same time
opened up some of its analytics data to the public. What’s more, there is an e-commerce
component that displays special shopping deals next to search results. I spoke to Compete
CEO Don McLagan and…
Written by Vishal Sharma and
edited by Richard MacManus
Richard’s
intro: Australia is a country of 20.75 million people, 14,663,622 of whom are
Internet users according to a
Nielsen//NR report from August 2006. That gives Australia an Internet penetration of 70.7%,
which is about average for the Western world. Not as high as New Zealand’s though…
As if we needed any further proof that the online video market is white hot
right now, the founders of Skype have now set their sites on a Web TV service –
according to this
Yahoo News story. After creating the file-swapping service KaZaA and then
VoIP software Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom plan to launch an
advertising-supported Internet…
“Why on
earth does the world need another search engine?”, asks the new Live Search promotional site. In addition to that
website, as John Battelle’s
Searchblog reports, Microsoft has launched a campaign for Live Search with digital
and print ads in major newspapers – New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Seattle
Times/PI, SF Chronicle, USAPicture…
Metacafe, a YouTube-like video sharing site originally
from Israel, has just gone live with a revenue sharing program called Producer Rewards. The payments are
on a sliding scale and based on ‘views’. Payments start at 20,000 views ($100) and go up
from there – e.g. 2 million views is $10,000. Videos must also have a rating of 3.00 or
higher…
The Pluck RSS Reader is shutting down, according to a message posted on the Pluck website:
“All versions of Pluck’s RSS readers for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Pluck’s web
edition will be discontinued on 1/5/2007. The RSS Readers have served our community of
end users well for several years, but with Pluck’s focus in other business areas…
Tamago recently launched a peer-to-peer commerce
system that enables people to sell digital media directly to customers. It’s designed for
semi-professional and amateur people who publish music, videos, photos, e-books, etc. to
earn royalties whenever their creative content is downloaded. Meanwhile the buyers can
also earn commissions, for…
There’s an interesting rumor doing the rounds about Google doing a re-org of their
advertising business.
Jeff Molander wrote:
“Three of my most credible resources, including DM News’s Giselle
Abramovich, are indicating plans for a significant re-organization at Google (Nasdaq:
GOOG). […] On the re-org, says Ms. Abramovich,
“What…
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by
Richard MacManus.
The last few weeks have been packed with browser action and the two market leaders, Internet Explorer and Firefox, have launched major new versions. So
to round out our recent browser coverage, we present the Web Browser Faceoff – looking at
how all the main browsers compare with each…
Last week I
spoke to Jeremy Jaech, CEO and president of Trumba,
whose team is building an innovative online event calendaring system aimed at
enterprises. Jeremy Jaech was also the founder of both Visio and PageMaker
– two of the Internet’s early successful desktop publishing systems. It’s basically the same engineering team from both…
Transclick is a mobile enterprise application that
translates text in email, SMS and IM. The software has been around for a while (see
this CNNMoney.com article from March 2005), but is now starting to make waves as a
business productivity tool. RIM Blackberry just announced Transclick as the winner of its
BlackBerry
Developer Productivity Tools…
Disclosure: Read/WriteWeb will be going live shortly with a custom Eurekster search
box.
One of the big pieces of news this week has been Google’s new Custom Search Engine. It’s noticeable not because
it’s an innovative product, but more because Google is most definitely a follower
and not a leader when it comes to custom / social search. Not…
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by
Richard MacManus. Disclaimer: Alex’s company AdaptiveBlue has a product called The
blueorganizer, which was one of the twenty “Recommended add-ons” selected by Mozilla for
the Firefox 2 launch.
This week the spotlight is on Firefox as it launches its milestone 2.0 release. We’ve
covered the launch with a…
The moment has arrived, Mozilla has pushed the go-live button on Firefox 2.
The new final 2.0 version of the browser is now available for everyone to download.
Read/WriteWeb has been actively covering the launch, most recently with a pre-launch
interview with Chris Beard – Mozilla Vice President of Products. We’ve also reviewed the
product and…
This
afternoon Firefox 2 will be officially launched. In anticipation of the unveiling, here
is an in-depth interview with Chris Beard (Mozilla Vice President of Products). Subjects
discussed in the interview include the growing enterprise usage of Firefox, the
importance of user experience and security, Mozilla’s theory behind Web feeds and…
Following hot on the heels
of the Microsoft-powered
NY Times Reader, Adobe has released Adobe Digital Editions
Beta – a Rich Internet Application (RIA) for digital publishing and reading. The
product enables users to acquire, read, and manage content such as eBooks and other
digital publications. This market is ramping up quickly in late 2006, as…
freenigma is a Firefox plug-in that offers e-mail
encryption to a whole range of Web email systems – including Gmail, Yahoo!Mail and
Hotmail/MSN. It is a product of Germany-based freiheit.com. freenigma came out of public
beta at the end of September and is now open to all – but you still have to enter your
name and email address to receive “an…
Written by Bjorn Fant and edited by Richard
MacManus
Sweden is
a nation determined to be an international competitor in the IT arena. IT budgets in the
private and public sector add up to 5% of Sweden’s total National Growth Product; IT and
entrepreneurship are a huge part of the cultural agenda; and Swedish success stories like
Skype and…
I recently signed up to MyBlogLog, which is a kind of instant social
networking system for bloggers. It enables you to set up a community around your blog and
– optionally – add statistics. More details of MyBlogLog can be found
at Techcrunch and A
VC.
I’ve added a ‘Recent Readers’ widget to R/WW (see sidebar) and I encourage you to…
Disclaimer: I am testing out Trailfire as part of a consulting agreement.
Full details below.
At the
beginning of September I posted
about Trailfire, a unique social bookmarking
service that reminded me at the time of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 pre-hypertext
concept The Memex. Essentially what Trailfire does is enable you to place annotations on
any web…
