Home Weekly Wrapup, 11-15 August 2008

Weekly Wrapup, 11-15 August 2008

It’s the weekend, so time to review the week’s web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we looked at rising music social network Imeem, reported on Yahoo’s Fire Eagle project, checked in on the latest Web Office developments, and covered some new iPhone apps. On the trends side we looked into the latest online Olympics stats, explored the relationship between tech and PR, analyzed the iPhone App Store, and advised you how to set up a company.

Web Products

Imeem Taking Off – Before MySpace Music Has Even Launched

Music-based social networking site Imeem is getting a lot of the right kind of press currently, based on strong traffic growth and key deals with record labels. We last wrote about Imeem in March, when they launched a developer platform that enabled read/write access to user information and more. As we explained then, Imeem is a site where users can listen to licensed streaming music, as well as upload music and blog about it – all for free. Now, Imeem is the third-largest social network in the United States after MySpace and Facebook; and it’s now the No. 1 streaming music site in the US.

The Fire Eagle Has Landed: Yahoo Opens Its Location Platform to All

Yahoo announced that the close beta period for its location platform Fire Eagle has ended and that the service is now open for everybody. We wrote about Fire Eagle extensively when the beta was first announced. Since then, a number of high-profile services, including Brightkite, Movable Type, Dopplr, and Pownce have implemented Fire Eagle through the numerous APIs Yahoo provides for accessing the service.

Wiki Editing Just Got Easier: Atlassian Confluence Releases Office Connector

Atlassian Confluence, makers of one of the most popular enterprise wiki solutions, announced this week a Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration in their latest release, Confluence 2.9. With these new tools, users no longer have to know the technicalities of wiki markup or even how to use the included rich-text WYSIWYG editor in order to make changes to the wiki – they can simply open up a Microsoft Office document instead. Also, with the addition of the SharePoint connector, Microsoft’s well-known collaboration and document sharing platform gets a big dose of Enterprise 2.0 goodness, which is sure to please the end users. However, Confluence makes I.T. happy too, thanks to their inclusion of tools – like LDAP integration and administratively controlled permissions – that are designed just for the needs of the enterprise.

See also: The Semantic Desktop? SDS Brings Semantics To Excel

Google Should Buy eXpresso

Like a lot of people, Bernard Lunn had problems with Google Apps this week. Sure, Google “feels his pain” but they also lost his confidence. And confidence is a delicate thing. What crashed was Spreadsheet. That has always been the weakest component for Google and the strongest for Microsoft. Excel rocks, its just a tad behind the times on collaboration. But in this post we explain how Google could still win the spreadsheet game by buying eXpress Corp.

Livestreaming From Qik and Flixwagon Comes to the iPhone

It’s no secret that the iPhone lacks video recording capabilities, which has served as a huge roadblock for companies and services that would like to introduce services that take advantage of video capabilities. For users that love to livestream or lifestream from their iPhones this is also a huge drawback. Well worry no more iPhone heads because Qik and Flixwagon have both introduced their livestreaming apps to jailbroken iPhones!

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Olympics: Only 0.2% of Viewers Exclusively Watch Online

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Olympics are off to a good, but not amazing start on the Internet. Over the first three days, NBC’s online coverage drew an average of 4.7 million viewers per day, with the numbers steadily rising over the weekend. So far, Sunday was the most watched day, with 5.1 million total users and 3.42 million streams. According to the same article, only 0.2% of all viewers exclusively used the Internet to watch the Games, while 90% used the traditional TV coverage exclusively and 10% used both the Internet and TV.

Does Good Tech Need PR?

Behind the scenes of many tech blogs these days, there’s a rat race for attention, with PR agents struggling to overcome the noise of feeds, news sites and other agents in order to get coverage for their clients. Tiny web tech companies pay $5k, $10k or more per month for PR agents to work the media, old and new, in hopes that it will help them find wider audiences. Big companies spend far, far more on PR. Is that really necessary? Won’t great technologies find their own audiences when their undeniable value is discovered by one person and passed on to the world at large?

The App Store: Soon To Be A Billion Dollar Marketplace?

Anyone who has the iPhone or iPod Touch can tell you that one of the best things about owning the device is the ability to add apps from iTunes App Store. Although many of the apps that we talk about here are the free ones like the social networking apps, the instant messaging apps, and the blogging apps, it’s the paid apps that are making the store a financial success.

See also: How To Lifestream From Your iPhone

Data Portability Working Group Elects New Leadership

The high profile but heretofore loosely organized Data Portability Working Group announced this week that it has elected its first group of Steering Group officers. The Working Group strives to help user data become freed for secure re-use across different websites and services. The first chair of the Steering Group will be Daniela Barbosa, who is a Business Development Manager, at Synaptica, a Dow Jones company. Can the Data Portability Working Group overcome some early shakiness caused by the perception that it’s all hype and no substance? The group got big press when Microsoft, Google, Facebook and many other companies publicly joined up – but critics allege that press is all that’s been accomplished.

Startup, Inc – What You Need to Know Before Starting a Company

Often people start a company without any clear idea of what
a company is. Entrepreneurs closet themselves in the garage and start writing code.
While the modern tech world could not exist without obsession, artistic inspiration and crazy engineers,
there’s more to a startup than passion. In this post, we explore the basics
behind corporate entities, stock, financing, and the key non-technical infrastructure
every company
should have.

See also: 12 Unit Testing Tips for Software Engineers

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Live

Future of Blogging

The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, was on the topic of ‘The Future of Blogging’. It was based on a must-read post that Sarah Perez wrote last week and one I wrote a couple of weeks back. We had two special guests on the show this week: Aaron Brazelle of the Technosailor blog and Muhammed Saleem, an occasional contributor to RWW and a social media consultant.

Select RWW Live Episode 5

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

About ReadWrite’s Editorial Process

The ReadWrite Editorial policy involves closely monitoring the tech industry for major developments, new product launches, AI breakthroughs, video game releases and other newsworthy events. Editors assign relevant stories to staff writers or freelance contributors with expertise in each particular topic area. Before publication, articles go through a rigorous round of editing for accuracy, clarity, and to ensure adherence to ReadWrite's style guidelines.

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