Google is making some bold moves to bring structured data into the mainstream search box. And in the process, it appears to be running over the top of microformats, the Web community’s open standards for structured data. Not to mention the challenge this will ultimately represent to eBay.
According to a PC
Advisor report, Google plans to…
Newly appointed Futurist-in-residence at the New York Times, Michael Rogers, spoke with Patrick Phillips
from iwantmedia.com. I was particularly interested in what Rogers had to say about Times Reader,
the hybrid web/desktop app built with Microsoft technology that aims to give a paper-like
reading experience to the screen. He said that he…
Pew has released its analysis
of how the Internet will evolve over the next 14 or so years (2020). I’m inclined to
agree with
Om Malik that the conclusions about the technology are rather obvious: “a global,
low-cost network will be thriving in 2020”, which will bring about a “‘flattening’ of the
world”. You don’t need to be Stanley Kubrick to…
Lately there has been a lot of talk about new VoIP services that work without
needing to be on your computer. Tonight two announcements were made:
1) Jajah Mobile, which
claims to take the computer out of the Jajah equation. Now you can make Jajah
calls directly from your existing mobile phone.
2) Rebtel, a VoIP company which offers
unlimited…
A new documentary on Silicon
Valley premieres today on DVD. It was directed by my friend Steve O’Hear,
who I met over the Web earlier this year and now work with on my corporate
blogging project called Micro Media Corp. ‘In Search of the Valley’ is a movie
which tells the story of three friends’ personal journey in September of 2004
into the psyche…
Another busy week of Web Tech news and analysis. Here is what we covered on
Read/WriteWeb during the week (number of comments in brackets)…
OneWebDay: In Celebration
Of The Web (2) – looks like this didn’t take off in a big way, judging by the lack of
blogosphere love for it. I still think it’s a great idea though, a day to celebrate…
For some great weekend reading, check out
this Fortune magazine article that gets inside the great Google brain. Some extracts
that I enjoyed…
“What emerges from months of interviews with employees ranging from
fresh-out-of-college hires to the CEO is that Google firmly believes it has a
framework for figuring out the future. It should…
Today is the first OneWebDay, a global
awareness event to “create, maintain, advance and promote a global day to celebrate
online life.” It was founded by Susan Crawford, associate professor at the Cardozo School
of Law in New York City. Some big Web names have been lined up in support – including Sir
Tim Berners-Lee and Craig Newmark of…
We’ve seen a lot of action in the ‘personalized start page’ space on the consumer
side, but relatively little development in business web ‘start pages’. Salesforce.com has
an interesting feature in its upcoming Winter ’07 release that may change that. Called
the Business Web Desktop,
it’s basically an Ajax-powered web homepage for Salesforce…
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by
Richard MacManus.
With all this buzz around the potential
Yahoo! acqusition of Facebook for $1Billion, we think it’s time to do the social networking
faceoff.
Arguably of all services in the new social era, the social network sites hold most
promise. The reason for this is that these community-driven sites…
In the clearest sign yet that
the big guns are preparing to step up the battle for Web Office, Microsoft
has said it is considering releasing a version of Microsoft Works (the poor cousin of
Microsoft Office) as a web suite. The desktop version of Works retails for $50 and
includes a calendar, word processor, spreadsheets, Web Browser and…
In August
AOL acquired online communications startup Userplane – which runs a suite of chat, IM, A/V
Recorder, search and presence tools. AOL is in the midst of a big shift in businenss
models – from closed ‘walled garden’, to a more open, web services-driven portal
offering. For example AOL is to end its reliance on dial-up subscription fees and…
The WSJ is reporting that US Social Networking site Facebook is in serious talks to sell itself to Yahoo, for an amount that may be as high as $1 billion. According to the WSJ, this is a return to the acquisition talks which Facebook has held over the past year with Yahoo – as well as Microsoft and Viacom.
If this deal goes through (and strange it…
Blog
network 9rules has developed a custom-built search engine for its members’ content. I’ve always
admired 9rules’ philosophy (note: R/WW used to be a member), because they’re all about
original content and design. Now they’re trying to make it easier for others to discover
all that great content, with a search interface that only searches…
Next in our
series on international Web markets is Japan. The information for this post was provided
by Benjamin Joffe (CEO of Plus Eight Star Ltd) and
Masashi Kobayashi (partner of Globis Capital Partners – one of
the largest Venture Capital firms in Japan). We start off with an overview of the market,
then list the main web companies in Japan…
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by
Richard MacManus.
The social bookmarking market is in a steady state with two dominant players – del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. The rest of the pack, including Yahoo
MyWeb, appears to be substantially behind. Will they catch up? In this post we attempt to
answer that question.
We also take a look at how social…
Next in our
series on international Web markets is France. Other countries profiled so far have been
Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy and Brazil. France
has the 9th highest number of Internet users in the world, with 26.8 million. It has an
Internet penetration of 44%, putting it below countries…
3Tera, a company based in California, has announced what
it calls a breakthrough technology – “disposable infrastructure”. This technology is the
foundation of their product AppLogic,
which they say is the “first grid operating system that runs and scales existing web
applications.” It almost takes a Comp Sci PhD from Stanford to read 3Tera’s…
Google’s Carl Sjogreen gave a talk at the Future of Web Apps conference
about how they built Google Calendar. Rakesh Agrawal
took extensive notes, as did Tim
Bonnemann.
What I love about Google is they consistently think ‘Web Native’ when developing web
applications. My favorite example of
that is Gmail, which changed the whole paradigm of web…
Interesting
NY Times profile of Baidu, China’s main search
engine and currently the 4th biggest website in the world. It has a market value of $3
billion, but “some analysts” question whether Baidu can keep out competition from Google
and Yahoo:
“While Baidu continues to gain market share in China — and does so with a Web
site that the…
