In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we continue the build-up to our first event: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. You can register here for the low price of $195.
Also this week we published a list of 50 leading Real-Time Web companies, looked at the release of 100,000 Google Wave invites, compared Twitter and Facebook game plans, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0’ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).
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Less Than 2 Weeks Till The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit
ReadWriteWeb’s very first event is coming soon: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. It’s a 1-day event that will bring together some of the smartest minds doing real-time work for an industry-changing, face-to-face conversation.
In conjunction with the Summit, we’ll be releasing our second original premium research report in October. Registration is now open for the The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, we hope to see you there!
Web Trends
Top 50 Real-Time Web Companies
As part of our lead-up to The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, this week we listed 50 leading companies of the Real-Time Web. Like any list, it is bound to be missing some worthy companies – so we invite you to add more in the comments. Our aim is to unveil the top100 Real-Time Web companies at our event.
Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action
The Real-Time Web – it’s more than just immediate delivery of Twitter messages to an always-on mobile device, disrupting the concentration that civilization is based on and bringing a rush to crazed social media addicts obsessed with the hottest new buzzwords. No, there are scores of companies building and selling systems today that deliver very real value via the real-time web.
We’ve interviewed 40 companies in the real-time web market in preparation for the forthcoming ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit and a companion research report. In this post are nine solid examples of real-time web technology that illustrate what it is and why it’s important – and one possible future scenario that’s important enough it has to be discussed as well.
What Early Birds Want to Know About the Real-Time Web
The real-time web is a broad and rich phenomenon emerging online. A wide variety of companies are building and using it in really diverse ways. Because this field is so new and is seeing such breadth of innovation, people have a lot of questions about it. In this post are some of our favorite questions that Early Bird registrants said that they want to tackle.
More Proof: Facebook for the Rich, MySpace for the Poor
Oh how the mighty have fallen. The one time king of social networks, MySpace, now has the honor of being the site where the less affluent members of the online population stake their claims by way of bedazzled profiles overrun with auto-playing videos and songs. Meanwhile, the upscale, financially solvent users have moved on – and by moved on, we mean to Facebook, of course. At least those are the findings of the latest social networking study done by American consumer behavior analysis firm Nielsen Claritas.
Kiva’s Causemopolitan on World Tour: Social Media for Social Good
It’s been a long and winding road for serial volunteer and social media philanthropist Sloane Berrent. Since her unplanned departure from an L.A.-based startup in 2008, Berrent has traveled through eight countries, documenting and publicizing the struggles of those in developing areas through her blog posts, tweets, images, videos, and her own presence at events at home and abroad. From post-Katrina New Orleans to a trash dump in Manila to a monastery in Burma, read on for her story of trying to achieve social good through social media.
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
ReadWriteEnterprise
Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0’ and using social software inside organizations.
Trading Scarcity: Is This the Killer App for the Real-Time Web?
Most platforms gain traction through a killer app. In the second generation of real time, that killer app was market data for financial traders. What will it be in the third generation? Today, the real-time Web is associated with social networking status updates via services such as Twitter and Facebook. But whether this will be the killer app for this generation is not clear. The killer app matters, because the winner at the platform layer will be the company that hosts it.
ReadWriteStart
Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.
TechStars Investor Day Hits a Home Run
With bleary eyes and bellies full of coffee, a roomful of investors, journalists and young entrepreneurs gathered this morning for the Bay Area TechStars Investor day. The Boulder and Boston-based startup incubator pulled out all the stops as 13 companies took to the stage to plead their case for funding. In this post are the summaries of each.
SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL
Web Products
100,000 Google Wave Preview Invites: Everything You Need to Know
Google officially announced this week that it will send out 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave. These accounts will go to developers who are already in the developers preview and users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com on a first-come, first-served basis. A select number of Google Apps users will also get access to Wave. Google first unveiled Wave in May and since then the team has focused almost exclusively on making the system more stable and scalable.
Twitter and Facebook Investment Terms and Game Plans
There is a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about the recent $100 million investment in Twitter at a $1 billion valuation, but most of it based on speculation. Twitter and Facebook are private companies. You cannot get the facts simply by typing a stock symbol into Yahoo Finance. Our mission at ReadWriteWeb is to add to the facts, not just the speculation. Rather than posting confidential information that someone has leaked to us, we prefer to start with publicly available data. We could not refrain from a bit of game theory speculation on how this could play out, and we invited a specialist in startup deals to add his speculation as well.
2 Billion Downloads Later, Apple’s App Store is Still Going Strong
Apple this week announced that a total of 2 billion apps have now been downloaded from the App Store. There are now over 85,000 apps in the store, up from 65,000 on July 14, and the number of developers has grown from 100,000 in July to around 125,000 today. iPhone and iPod touch users now download close to 6.6 million apps every day and this number continues to grow.
Google and Best Buy Partner on Mobile Applications
This week major electronics retailer Best Buy and internet powerhouse Google announced a partnership designed to help the retailer compete in the mobile sales arena. In addition to other Best Buy strategies for ramping up their mobile division, one key aspect to their multiphase plan involves collaborating with Google on a series of exclusive mobile applications, the first one being a shopping app that helps customers find the item they’re looking for within their nearest Best Buy store.
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.