Weekly Wrapup, 2-6 June 2008

Here are some of the highlights from the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we analyzed Adobe’s new Web Office suite, investigated a worrying exodus of sellers from eBay, looked some more at Yahoo’s Search Monkey, and showed you 6 tools to save links with. On the trends side we explored the latest Web happenings in Asia, provided an overview of I.T. 2.0, analyzed the exploding popularity of online video, and checked out the readiness of banking customers to use Web gadgets.

Web Products

Adobe Launches Online Office Suite and New Flash-Enabled Acrobat 9

Back in March, we said that Adobe was slowly building an online empire. This week, that news turned out to be true. Adobe launched their version of an online office suite at Acrobat.com, complete with word processor (Buzzword), web conferencing/whiteboard app (ConnectNow), online file sharing (Share), file storage, (My Files), and PDF converter. To complement this launch, Adobe also announced a brand-new version of Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat 9, the biggest release since the initial one that introduced Acrobat to the world. The remarkable change in this new version is that Adobe is now incorporating Flash into the PDF experience.

Trouble at eBay

“I think [fixed prices] will disappear online, simply because it is possible – cheap and easy – to vary prices online.” That was MIT Media Lab’s Patti Maes in 1999, at a time when eBay’s business was booming and auctions were seen as the future of ecommerce. Flash forward 9 years, and BusinessWeek this week called online auctions a dying breed, Nick Carr is wondering if auctions were a fad. Indeed, the fixed price (“Buy it Now” only) format is beginning to dominate eBay, and the company has taken recent steps push fixed price even harder. But the death knell of the online auction format is not eBay’s biggest problem — no, that would be the small exodus of sellers from the site.

Yahoo! Pushes Search Results Customization to Users

Yahoo!’s SearchMonkey platform got a little more public this week with the unveiling of the Search Gallery — the platform’s official application repository. The gallery has already been open to developers and curious bloggers for a couple of weeks, but Yahoo! is now pushing it to the public at large via a “Customize” drop down menu on all search results. In addition, starting this week developers can share applications via external links even if they haven’t yet been approved for inclusion in the official gallery.

6 Great Tools to Save Links for Later

Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. This seems to be especially true when you take on a lot of projects. Between blogging, researching, emailing, and real life, reading all of your feeds isn’t something we can do all the time. Sometimes, we see something that we’d love to save it for later without cluttering up our bookmarks. Here are 6 tools to get the job done.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

OpenWeb Asia: Opening the Asian Web to the World

Everyone working on the web around the world would like to connect with people in Asia, but it’s not easy to do. That dynamic and populous region is often focused inward and it’s made inaccessible to outsiders because there is so little information about what goes on there available in the web’s dominant language, English. OpenWeb Asia is a new project that aims to change those trends.

See also: C-Shirt: Remixable T-shirts by Mobile Phone and Nico Nico Douga and the Simulation of Real Time (two Japanese web apps that Marshall checked out during his recent trip to Japan)

I.T. 2.0: How Changing Technology is Having Big Impacts on Business

In case you haven’t heard yet – the I.T. world is changing. The rise of social computing technologies, generally branded as “Web 2.0” and including things like wikis, blogs, social networking, RSS, and more are slowly making their way into the business world. This new movement is called Enterprise 2.0, and it’s no small shift. They’re even having a conference about it next week. But the change encompasses more than just the introduction of new, social software into the formerly stodgy business world – it also includes the movement of server software from in-house data centers to the cloud, the rise of a mobile workforce, the rebirth of thin client computing, a self-provisioning user base, and more.

The Numbers Are In, Live Video Online Is Blowing Up

Live video broadcasting service Ustream.tv announced this week that live feeds on the company’s website and distributed video players got a combined 10 million unique viewers last month. That’s a major validation of live streaming video on the web. When YouTube Live launches later this year, this medium is only going to get bigger.

Survey: 48% of Bank Customers Want Web 2.0 Gadgets

WorkLight, a startup that offers enterprise 2.0 products, recently did a survey among Facebook users to find out their willingness to use Web 2.0 tools for secure banking. The survey was conducted among 1000 Facebook users between the ages of 18-34. The fact that the survey was conducted among Facebook users gives it a bias towards tech-savvy people. However there are some surprising findings.