Planet Broadband Mechanics

I found this interesting: "Japan's online social scene isn't so social" (AP). I'm no expert, but from what I've seen from my partner and her family, this is totally believable -- Japanese *really* value their privacy. I'm forever hearing scary Japanese news stories that can't be helping -- kids being bullied at school because of something their mother said on her blog, people being murdered by people they've just met or who live nearby.

Comment

When Kennedy and Nixon debated for the Presidency in 1960, 70 million people watched the first Presidential debate ever broadcast live on TV.

And not a single viewer could post a comment.

These days things are different. Tonight far fewer people probably watched the Current.tv and Twitter collaborative broadcast of Obain v. McCain. Scores of them participated with 140 character quips in real time, though. It worked very well, Current did a great job; you can get some idea from the 1 minute of video embedded below.

The commentary from viewers was some times pointless and at other times impressively insightful. It was democratic - or at least as democratic as live streaming online video, a Twitter account and being in-the-know can be.

Was it on par with the first live televised Presidential debate? It may not have been, but we're less able to be awestruck today than we were in 1960. John McCain, incidentally, was 24 years old and just out of flight school at the time. He must have felt the impact of TV full force. Obama, incidentally, was conceived a month later.

Is live online video plus viewer input a real game changer in the Presidential debate viewer experience?
( polls)While many websites streamed live video, the Current/Twitter broadcast certainly wasn't watched by as many people as the first televised Presidential debate. But new these new media are expected to ripple out over the world just as far at television has.

Was tonight's live online video plus Twitter coverage of the debates a meaningful game changer? Participate in our poll to share your opinion.

The technology worked well. Tweets were repeated and browsers had to be refreshed (Kulabyte, the most effective live streaming service we've seen yet, apparently was not used) but it was a very engaging experience. It was a debate unlike any other in the history of the world. It was much better than watching it on TV.

It was a little anti-climactic and it was effective. That's a good place for technology to be these days. We won't feel the same watching talking heads banter without viewer commentary ever again.

Discuss

A team of leading bloggers from the early days of AOL-acquired Weblogs Inc. has come together again to build their ideal blogging software and raise a new network of blogs to challenge top sites in personal electronics, eco-awareness and other niches yet to be announced. Calling themselves Crowd Fusion, the company is lead by Weblogs Inc. co-founder Brian Alvey and has raised $3 million in venture capital from investors like Netscape and Ning co-founder Marc Andreeson and Ross Levinsohn, one of the key players in the Fox acquisition of MySpace.

The company's first site launched this week and we got a look at the blog software powering it - both are beautiful.

Obsessable

Called Obsessable, Crowd Fusion's first site focuses on personal electronics. Features Editor (and former Producer at AOL's Engadget) Barb Dybwad says the site "covers personal technology and consumer electronics from the point of view of experts writing for people who may not be. This is consumer tech without the snark, where you don't have to be a member of the techier-than-thou club to be a part of the community."

The site looks great; it's a combination of news, reviews, feature columns, aggregated links from off-site and special pages called "Comparators." These Comparators are AJAX comparison charts of features across multiple products in the same sector and the pages are really well designed. See, for example, this chart comparing the specs of the T-Mobile Google Phone to six other leading phones.

Obsessable is just the first of a large number of big sites the company aims at launching. November will see a TreeHugger competitor in the eco market and as many as 7 other verticals will be tackled in the next year. All the sites will have a heavy database component to them, as Obsessable does with its product Comparator. The company's aim is to be bigger than existing blog market leaders by being more accessible and leveraging super-efficient blogging software to publish more content faster.

The Blogging Platform

The Crowd Fusion blogging platform was built by CEO Brian Alvey and CTO Craig Wood. It is the foundation of the company. Alvey was Jason Calacanis's less obnoxious co-founder at Weblogs. He built the BlogSmith platform that now powers AOL properties including gossip mega-site TMZ, Engadget and many others. With Crowd Fusion, Alvey and team have tried to take the lessons they've learned as some of the most experienced high-scale blog publishers on the web and build an even better publishing system.

What's so special about it? The system has a built-in RSS reader that team leaders seed with subscriptions (writers can add more at will), it's easy to push related links from other blogs out onto the published site and the system allows for the management of multiple responsibilities for posts like finding and sizing images, copy editing and more. Obsessable says it is aggregating about 1,000 topical links each day from around the web. It's all pretty involved but we couldn't help but be jealous of the publishing interface.

The company has 12 people working in Corporate and Tech departments and so far has around 10 freelance writers covering gadget news on Obsessable. It describes itself as "a new web publishing platform, built to solve the pain points of publishers at scale." That platform will not be available for licensing for some time.

Will a heavy duty publishing system help this new company challenge some of the biggest blogs on the web? The team involved certainly improves the odds.

Images of the Crowd Fusion publishing tool, click for full-size versions and continue below for more.

The Team

In addition to successful and well connected backers, Crowd Fusion is made up of a real dream-team of blogging industry trailblazers. Joining founding CEO Alvey, the Chief Operating Officer from Weblogs Inc. Judith Meskill is COO of the new company after under a year at Johnson&Johnson;'s site BabyCenter. Meskill knows how to build up blogs fast and orchestrate a large number of freelance writers. She's been working on Crowd Fusion since the beginning of the year.

CTO Craig Wood is a Search Engine Optimization specialist from fast-growing firm Did-it, a friend of Alvey's for 20 years and a former member of the BlogSmith team. CMO Steve Friedman worked on advertising at Weblogs Inc. and will be an essential asset to the team as good ad sales is much easier said than done.

The team member that really raised our eyebrows the most was Barb Dybwad, Obsessable's Features Editor, past Producer at Engadget and key player in the launch of several of AOL's biggest gaming sites. Dybwad's departure from AOL was a major loss for the company. A widely admired, long-term member of the tech blogosphere, Dybwad was highly sought after by top blogs for years. That she didn't leave AOL until the old team could get back together again is telling.

Crowd Fusion brings together a powerful cast with the publishing technology they've long made plans for. A time of looming economic crisis may not be ideal to launch a blog network, but incumbent leaders in topical online publishing certainly have some new competition to watch out for.

Discuss

According to the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, 93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85 percent believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers. Cone, a Boston-based consulting firm, also found that men are far more likely to interact with a company through social media than women are. 56% of consumers believe that a company is providing them with a better service by interacting with them on social media sites.

The numbers in this study are bit higher than those we have seen before (we assume that Cone uses a relatively broad definition of 'social media'), though the general trends do fall in line with the latest data from Universal McCann we wrote about last week.

As Michael Chin points out on the KickApps blog, social media first changed how we interacted with friends, family, and customers. Now, as consumers are getting more familiar with these tools, they also expect them to be a way to interact with companies - and based on this data from Cone, they want this to be a two-way conversation.

Here are some other interesting data points from the study:

• 60% of Americans regularly interact with companies on a social media site
• 43% of consumers say that companies should use social networks to solve the consumers' problems
• 41% believe that companies should use social media tools to solicit feedback on products and services
• Men are more likely to use social media tools to interact with a company than women (33% vs. 17%)
• 33% of younger consumers (18-34) and those with household incomes over $75,000 believe that companies should try to market to them through social networks

It would be nice to see Cone break these numbers down a bit more. What types of social media sites, for example, do users prefer? Are there any specific categories of companies and brands that they want to see on these sites? How exactly do they want to be marketed to? What do they think about implications for their privacy?

What is clear, however, is that social media is quickly becoming an important means for companies to reach consumers - and that consumer are also quickly changing their expectations about how, when, and where they want to be marketed to. As more users are embracing social media (and often to the detriment of traditional media), companies have no choice but to follow them.

Discuss

Blogging is a fast medium, that's one of its advantages over traditional media. There are bloggers who specialize in reporting fast about breaking news on a wide variety of topics. Most of those bloggers use Google's RSS publishing technology FeedBurner as a middleman to deliver their posts to subscribers and capture analytics.

If FeedBurner decides to take its sweet time in delivering the news, that's bad for bloggers. Unfortunately, that's what's happening right now. We've been seeing delays of up to 20 minutes between posting to our site and our posts appearing in our FeedBurner feeds. That's a pretty serious problem and we're not alone in experiencing it.

Bloggers who contact FeedBurner to complain are being told that the service is changing ping servers, something they are going to announce once all the kinks are worked out. The new ping server URL is http://ping.feedburner.google.com - so if you want to let your readers know about posts hot off the presses, that's where you want your blogging software to send the news instead of the old ping URL. You can ping both servers and the new ping server is just for the feeds that have migrated to the Google Feedproxy servers, but that could well be you.

If you're still pinging the old URL, and you probably are, we're guessing that FeedBurner isn't even noticing. The service checks all indexed blogs for new posts automatically every 30 minutes so that's probably how your posts are getting noticed at all. FeedBurner says both ping servers are still operating but we only noticed the issue after seeing lengthy delays in updating.

The Consequences We Face

We love FeedBurner for all it does for us, but this is pretty irresponsible on their part. We've noticed that our posts are being seen late by Techmeme, subscribers are getting them later and when other bloggers do a blogsearch for a breaking news topic to see who else has covered it - we're not there. It's bad news. Meanwhile the FeedBurner blog hasn't been updated in 4 months.

In response to an inquiry about the issue, Steve Olechowski, Business Product Manager at AdSense (Adsense now being the raison d'être for our beloved publishing tool) told us, "there's nothing secret here, we're just trying to make sure everything works as expected for publishers before we get a deluge of emails about issues we already know about." That seems like a pretty snide response to a common part of customer service - getting emails about issues you already know about.

We're pinging the new server now and we hope that will work. We suggest you update your software as well and we hope that FeedBurner will be more sympathetic to the needs of the bloggers they exist to serve in the future.

Discuss

Being able to access your files from anywhere and from any computer is one of the great conveniences of the always-on Internet. Online file storage has been around for quite a while, but the latest generation of services are so cheap and easy to use that there is almost no reason not to back some of your files up into the cloud. Most online storage providers also give you the ability to then share these files with your friends and colleagues. We selected the services on this list because they have a good track record of keeping your data safe while providing you easy access to your files from wherever you are.

Box.net

Box.net has been around for quite a while, but is still one of our favorite places to store documents online. Thanks to its integration with numerous online services, including Gmail, Zoho, picnick, and Scribd, box.net can not only store all your documents, but can also function as the hub of your virtual office.

One other nice feature of box.net is that you can share your files and folders with 'collaborators,' which makes it a good service to exchange files within a small business or among friends.

The storage limit for the free accounts is 1GB, which is plenty if you mostly exchange text documents or spreadsheets. Paid accounts start at $7.95 a month and include more advanced features, including 5GB of storage, a versioning system, mobile access, and 24/7 phone support.

Live Mesh

The online storage component of Live Mesh is only one part of Micorsoft's latest venture into cloud computing, but it is also one of its most compelling features at this point. Live Mesh gives you 5GB of online storage and an online desktop that looks a lot like Windows Vista. You can upload any type of file to Live Mesh, but you cannot edit any of your files through the online desktop. In the future, though, we expect Microsoft to start adding more of these features.

One of the main reasons we like Mesh is because it constantly watches for changes in the folders you are synchronizing to it and updates them automatically. In addition, you can share folders with friends, allowing you to collaborate on projects.

Live Mesh works on both Windows PCs and Macs.

DropBox

Few online storage services integrate with your desktop as well as DropBox, which only recently opened up to the public after an extensive beta test. While you do have to install a small program on your machine to run DropBox, it is well worth it. Besides setting up a folder on your machine, which automatically syncs with DropBox, you can also set DropBox up to then sync that folder with other machines, similar to Live Mesh. DropBox lets you upload any type of file, as long as it is smaller than 350MB. DropBox uses Amazon's S3 service as its storage solution and provides its users with 2GB of free storage. For $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, you can buy 50GB of storage.

One of our favorite features of DropBox is that it preserves every revision of every file. You can also easily share folders with your friends or colleagues.

DropBox supports Windows XP and Vista, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Oosah

Oosah's main selling point is simple: you get a whopping 1 terabyte of storage for media files. One restriction of Oosah is that you can't use it for text documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, which seems a bit weird, given that those types of files are generally small.

One interesting aspect of Oosah is that it accepts RAW image files from most camera manufacturers, though it automatically converts them into JPGs. You can also connect to your Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube accounts and view your images and videos from those services in one central place. Oosah also gives you Media RSS feeds and even a podcast feed for your audio files.

While we love Oosah for its general ease of use, the one aspect we really did not enjoy was the fact that uploading files seems to be unnecessarily hard. Oosah does not provide any desktop clients and while you can use the web based uploader to select multiple files, uploading multiple directories at a time is not an option.

JungleDisk

JungleDisk is the only service in this list that is not available for free - and technically, it is not even an online storage service. Instead, it provides a frontend to Amazon's S3 storage service. JungleDisk costs $20 and after that, you pay Amazon for the storage and transfer of your files. JungleDisk also lets you map your Amazon S3 storage space as a network drive on your computer, so that you can just drag and drop files back and forth between your online storage and your local desktop.

JungleDisk is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Other Services

Online storage is a competitive market. The best services integrate fully with your desktop and allow you to effortlessly upload and download files. They also provide you with an online desktop to access files from any computers and are stable and dependable. A service that does not fulfill these basic requirements is going to have a hard time convincing users to use and trust it.

There are, of course, a large number of other online storage services that we did not include in this list. BOXSTr, for example, is a great application, but it constantly bothers you with ads and attempts to sell you their premium service. AOL's Xdrive is a great service, too, but we have heard too many rumors that AOL is trying to sell the service or that they will simply close it to be able to recommend it anymore.

The one company that is suspiciously missing from this list is Google. While you can upload your documents to Google Docs, the company that has made cloud computing a household name does not have a dedicated file storage service. While rumors about the existence of a 'GDrive' have regularly appeared in the tech blogosphere over the last few year, users still have to rely on hacks like the GMail Drive shell extension to store their files on Google's servers.

What Did We Miss?

Do you have a favorite service that we did not list? Let us know in the comments.

Logo courtesy of Flickr user blakespot.

Discuss

Just in time for tonight's first presidential debate (which, as we just learned, will indeed take place), Twitter has launched an election themed site that tracks all the political tweets on the service. Twitter regularly determines a set of 'Hot Election Topics' and displays every tweet that fits into these categories in a automatically updating stream. While this is definitely a compelling way to use Twitter, we can't help but wonder if Twitter will bring some of the features of this site to other parts of the service.

Politweets, of course, has been providing a similar service for quite a while already, but its scope is limited to just filtering out tweets with the candidates' names in it. Twitter, on the other hand, uses a constantly changing set of keywords, which makes it far more dynamic.

Automatic Updates and Memetracking

The most compelling feature of Twitter's election site is actually quite simple: the automatically updating stream. That's one feature we have always missed on our regular Twitter homepages and also one of the most compelling reason to use a desktop client instead of Twitter's site.

The value of a service like this is often not so much in the content of a single tweet, but in the aggregation and real-time view of the discussion. Even Twitter's Summize-based search does not update automatically. We have started to use Monitter to track Twitter conversations when there is a breaking news story because it updates automatically.

In addition, as Josh Catone points out, Twitter sits on a goldmine of similar information that it is not putting to good use yet. Now that they have this infrastructure in place, Twitter could easily create similar sites for other events, or even allow its users to create their own Twitter-based memetrackers in the future.

Discuss

This is the third part in a multi-part series about integrating the internet with the real world through barcode scanning technology.

In the first two articles we looked at the history of scanning barcodes with your mobile phone, newspaper print ads, and a new effort to bring barcodes to web printouts. Now we'll look at other uses of the technology including scanning products in store, scanning broadcast media, and even exchanging contact information with others through the use of barcodes.

Up until now, we've focused on scanning barcodes printed on paper, but that's not the only place where the mobile barcode scanning technology is being used. The ultimate goal for barcodes is to have them everywhere, from t-shirts to stickers to TV. Let look at what innovations are happening in these areas today.

Things You Can Do Today

To get you excited about the promise of what barcoding can bring, we'll take a look at what you can do with barcodes today as well as some of the industry trends. Since barcoding is still new to the U.S., this may be old news to some of our international visitors, but bear with us...we're trying to catch up here!

1) Tag The World With Wikis

Instead of waiting for someone else to provide barcodes for you to scan, you can get involved with Semapedia instead. Semapedia.org is a non-profit project whose goal is to connect the physical world with relevant knowledge from Wikipedia. The community is encouraged to create 2D barcodes (QR Codes) and then venture out into the real world and attach them to objects. Any URL from Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikibooks, and Wikisource can be used. While we love this innovative idea, a quick look at their map showed very few places where these codes have been used.

2) Exchange Contact Data With Your iPhone / Cameraphone

In Japan, you'll find QR codes everywhere including business cards, id cards, magazines, newspapers, flyers, posters, stickers, food products,puzzles, web sites, billboards,and more. (Thanks for the links, David Harper!) But here in the U.S. it seems we're still struggling to get the trend started. So why not let iPhone users lead the way? If you have an iPhone, there is one app that lets you exchange contact data with others through the use of barcodes - just like the Japanese do! The app is called QRContact (iTunes link) and it generates a contact's details as a barcode. To use it, you simply click on the "Address Book" button to select the person in your address book whose details you want to turn into a barcode. Of course, that means you'll have to enter your own information in your contacts in order to exchange the info with others.  The recipient would then only need a barcode reader application installed on their device in order to read the code and add the info to their address book. Do a search in iTunes for "barcode" and you'll find a few free readers to choose from that will do the trick.

3) Get Nerdy With Patches and Pillows

In an email from self-described "barcode nerd" John Young, we learned of all sorts of fun barcoded-related projects. He began by making a barcoded needlepoint pillow featuring a 2D barcode that linked to the Wikipedia page for pillow. After getting a little exposure on both BoingBoing and the NYT, he decided to extend the project and is now selling needlepoint canvases with custom QR Codes on them. You can find them here on Etsy: http://nerdlepoint.etsy.com.

After having so much fun with that, John decided to explore other wearables. Since so many people were already making and selling QR Code t-shirts (see our review of Japanese co. C-Shirt, too, if you're interested in how wearables work), he decided to venture into the world of patches instead. He launched the site http://p8tch.com where he sells velcro-backed "commando nerd patches." The system lets you change the target of your QR Code sort of like how TinyURL operates, so your patch can read something different whenever you want.

4) Scan Products In The Store (Coming Soon, Perhaps)

A company looking to take mobile barcode reading mainstream in the real world is StoreXperience. This m-commerce platform allows consumers to capture 2D barcodes from products. Consumers could then see product information, including local availability and customized offers right on their mobile handsets. StoreXperience isn't just limited to 2D barcodes, though. Their technology also supports RFID tags and soon 1D barcodes, too. Unfortunately, although StoreXperience has built a platform they aren't in any noteworthy stores as of today. We're disappointed that you can't actually use this technology yet, but we're keeping our eye on it.

5) Find A House?

John Young (see above) is now investigating the use of barcodes for real estate. He thinks it would be great if there was something (besides an infotube) which potential buyers could read while they're standing right there at the house. How about a mobile web-page linked by a barcode? To learn how to make your own barcode to do this too, keep reading...

6) Get Your Own Reader And Make Your Own Codes

Yesterday we mentioned the NeoReader, but as some pointed out, NeoMedia hasn't always played nice in this space. There are other readers you can use if you would rather support efforts of a more open nature. For example, the Kaywa Reader (go to http://reader.kaywa.com to see if your phone is supported); Google's zxing reader which was designed for Android but supposedly works on iPhone, too;  i-nigma; QuickMark; upcode; or, for Nokia phones, there's an entire web site devoted to barcodes at http://mobilecodes.nokia.com. You can also try semacode, connexto, or scanzoom. These last three may be helpful to owners of older Nokia phones that can't use the reader provided on the nokia.com site. In the EU only, you can try the reader from activeprint.org. The Japanese apparently don't need our help, but if you want to see what one of their readers looks like, check out camreader. Then prepare to be very jealous: in Japan, they can scan the barcodes of everyday objects to be taken to the mobile version of the Japanese Amazon.com for that product.

But here in the U.S. and other parts of the pre-barcoded world, you may wonder what good is it to have a reader if you don't have any codes. Maybe it's time for us to generate our own codes and let the business world catch up with our own innovation! Right now there are numerous sites that let you generate your own codes. What you choose to do with those codes is up to you. Make t-shirts, stickers, flyers, posters, or anything else you want. Try the Kaywa QR-code generator, Nokia Mobile Codes, Winksite (which can also generate codes for RSS feeds), Denso-Wave creators, DataMatrix generator by IDAutomation, QR Code Generator by NFC Games, viooli, or even the Firefox plugin Mobile Barcoder.

OK, Barcodes Are Cool, But Here's What You Should Be Worried About

If you're not much of a do-it-yourselfer, there's a good chance the technology will come to you. Earlier this month, CTIA announced a "Camera-Phone Based Barcode Scanning White Paper" (PDF) during a keynote event where they also demoed the technology. In the paper, they endorse two bar code formats: the open standard Data Matrix and the proprietary EZ Code. CTIA Vice-President of Wireless Internet Development Mark Desautels predicted that handsets using the technology will be widely available in 12-18 months.

On the surface, that sounds like good news: if you just wait, barcoding will come to you, right? As it turns out, it's not quite that simple. The proprietary EZ Code isn't read by anything except ScanLife by Scanbuy, so essentially, CTIA just endorsed one company's product. It's worth noting that Scanbuy was on the team defining the standard, Correction: Scanbuy was working with several carriers in a CTIA-initiated trial that contributed to the results of the white paper (as well as explaining to carrier executives how it should work), too. Opinion: Conflict of interest much?

The other standard supported by CTIA, DataMatrix, is an open standard and is free. Well, except for having to go through the Scanbuy gateway for processing. What that means is that in the indirect DataMatrix model, you ca't embed a URL in the barcode that resolves directly by DNS to a web address. Instead, the codes are given an ID number and these IDs are sent to a gateway for processing - a sort of man-in-the-middle (and potential bottleneck) who monitors the "clicks."

That's why the barcoding advocates here in the U.S. want you to support the open QR Code format. This is the more popular format internationally and is used in other countries like Japan, Australia, UK, and elsewhere. Thanks to its open format and freely available readers, innovation has flourished.

There are plenty of companies ready for this technology when it arrives. For example, CEO Ron Feldman of the text messaging reminder service Kwiry tells us that they plan to implement 2D/Mobile Bar Code input support when a critical mass of phones/consumers are actually capable of using this technology. Hopefully, that's only a matter of time.

Photo Credit: QR Scanning: PSD; QRCode Future: avlxyz

See also: The Scannable World, Part 1: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners
The Scannable World, Part 2: Scanning Your Web Printouts

Discuss

We live in an age when success of innovation is mixed with unprecedented failures. On one hand we're reinventing the web, fighting for a greener future and building genomix. On the other there are housing bubbles, credit crises and war.

The technology patent crisis is important to our future. For decades the patent law served its purpose. Inventors used copyrights, trademarks and patents to protect their work and launch their innovations. But today's technology intellectual property system is a failure - unable to keep up with the speed of innovation, it's fallen apart.

The result? We live in an age of open source ideas. We freely borrow and build on each other's solutions. At first glance this may seem fine, but there are important consequences that may change the way we innovate. What happens when a big company copies a startup? What happens when dozens of startups copy each other?

In this post we work through these and other questions, in attempting to understand where intellectual property in technology is heading.

The Good Old Patents

The word patent comes from Latin and means to lay open. Patents were established as the means by which inventors disclose their products to the public. In a typical process the inventor would write down the steps, or the algorithm, for the creation and send it to the patent office for consideration.

Once granted, the patent serves as a protection for the invention. Legally, no one is allowed to copy the invention; instead, they're required to license it and typically pay royalties.

The patent is granted for a limited, usually lengthy, period of time. After the patent expires, the innovation becomes essentially public and now can be used by anyone. So the protection that inventors enjoy comes at a cost, for they eventually have to give up their invention.

Previously, when facing the choice between disclosing an invention or not, people did so more often than not. The reason: the time span the patent held was sufficient to make money because of the exclusivity guaranteed by the patent.

The system worked quite well when the world was slower, but the recent acceleration changed everything. With time to market being much shorter, the patent system instantly become ridiculous and obsolete.

The Patent Crisis

Here's a simple scenario. A startup produces an innovative idea and works with a patent lawyer to file a patent. This takes a considerable amount of time (a few months at least) and a substantial amount of money ($25K+). But the startup does it anyway and after the patent is filed, people feel comforted that their idea is safe.

Right? Of course not! Not even close. Any patent filed today will take 4-6 years to approve. In the current era where a week is a long time and a year is an eternity, the time to process a patent is unbearably long. Because of this gap, filing a patent appears useless. While you can threaten based on a pending patent, people are unlikely to take it seriously.

Litigating software patents in court is expensive and often unsuccessful. The problem is that with software you can do things slightly differently and the patent becomes unenforceble. This is because lawmakers ensure patent claims are as narrow as possible. For example, if someone implements just a piece of the whole system differently, the court is unlikely to rule in your favor.

The Age of Shameless Stealing

The problem is that while your patent is pending, competitors can copy your ideas and build on them. By the time your patent is granted, competitors can already win the market, be profitable, or even exit out of business.

The mismatch between the time it takes to get the patent and time it takes to copy the innovation encourages the copycats. Today's software industry is flooded with clones.

There are dozens of me too! startups for each major technology area. All the startups are borrowing ideas, UI elements and functionality from each other. And because of the powerful technology at our disposal copying is so easy. Someone said to me once: Oh we don't want to use your technology, my dev guys can whip out something like this in a couple of days.

Sadly, the age of open source ideas is actually the age of shameless stealing.

Who Wins?

Startups copy each other, but the problem doesn't stop there. It gets worse when web giants copy startups. Once your idea gets incorporated into a big company's offering, things get tough.

A recent example is new Google browser Chrome. No doubt, it's a spectacular piece of software - elegant, simple, probably the browser of the future. A lot of the ideas in Chrome are not original, but taken from other browsers and add-ons.

Is this fair? Not really. But in today's tech world, the word fair has been replaced with the phrase fair game. Luckily for startups, most big companies are not good at execution, so it isn't that easy for them to copy. But when and if a large company comes out with a clone, the match is unfair.

Resources and distribution certainly matter when it comes to tech adoption, so the patent situation is strongly in favor of big companies. They can observe the market, see what ideas take off, and cherry pick what they see as interesting.

Who Really Wins

Perhaps the biggest irony in this patent debacle is that it benefits customers. Previously a patent would create a lock, a barrier to entry, while today innovation occurs with greater speed.

Because patents are irrelevant, companies small and large relentlessly go after each other, raising the bar, coming up with better products. At the end of the day this benefits the users.

We're observing an evolutionary dynamic where companies are battling for viewers. This is a street fight where the gloves are off and big money is at stake. Companies are pushing each other to deliver better software faster. In the meantime, users are enjoying the new elegant tools as well as the fight itself.

The Future of Technology Innovation

Where is all this heading? What is the future of innovation and intellectual property around it?

The status quo doesn't make sense. The laws need to be useful, and current patent laws are obsolete and inadequate. Is there a middle ground between old patents and no laws at all? Brad Feld, who has written a lot on this topic over the past years, thinks the answer is no:

"After wrestling with software patents for 15 years, I've concluded there simply is no middle ground. If we continue on the path we're on, patents will increase in their overall expense to the system. Everyone will feel compelled to apply for as many (and as broad) patents as possible, if only for defensive reasons."

In a related post, Fred Wilson writes a cliche of the week: Patents are like nuclear bombs, you just got to have some. He continues:

"I have never seen patents make a business, but I have seen lack of patents hurt a business on many occasions. IP battles are like the cold war. Those who have patents can keep others honest because nobody wants to start a war that might end in everyone's destruction. But those who have no patents are sitting ducks and don't have the weapons to keep others honest. My advice to entrepreneurs is always file a bunch of patents. But don't expect they'll ever do more than keep others at bay."

It doesn't seem satisfactory either way. To not have patents at all means that at the end of the day big companies will always absorb all the best innovation for free. Filing patents just for the sake of having weapons that you're likely never to use seems costly and wasteful.

Is there a middle ground? What would you like to see happen in the future with software intellectual property?

Discuss

While Muxtape's Justin Ouellette just posted a dire story about the shutdown of the popular mixtape service and his dealings with the music industry, Favtape has updated its service dramatically.

Muxtape will effectively remain closed for the general public and will only return as a music hosting service for bands. Favtape, on the other hand, now looks like Muxtape on steroids, with embeddable playlists, album art, integrated YouTube search, a shuffle mode, and the ability to create tapes based on your last.fm and Pandora bookmarks.

Favtape: Muxtape on Steroids

While Favtape once started out as a simple Muxtape clone, this new release goes far beyond Muxtape's feature set. One of the most important differences with Muxtape is that you do not have to upload any songs to create a mixtape. Instead, Favtape lets you search for your music and add it to your playlists. To do this, Favtape makes use of SeeqPod's APIs.

Favtape does not host any of the songs itself, but solely relies on SeeqPod's index for its music. SeeqPod indexes MP3s anywhere on the Internet, which surely leaves some doors open for copyright infringement claims by the RIAA. As Ars Technica reports, SeeqPod has already been sued by the RIAA for exactly this business model of providing a 'playable search engine.' If SeeqPod shuts down, Favtape will be left without any music to play.

From a user's perspective, however, Favtape is everything one could wish for in a mixtape service, including a list of the top songs on iTunes and Last.fm, as well as iPhone support and the ability to share your tapes by email or as a Twitter message. Favtape also includes numerous social features and lets you vote for tapes you like.

While we are sad to see the Muxtape we once loved disappear, it is great to see other services jumping into the breach and building upon Muxtape's foundation. It's probably not the perfect streaming music service, but it comes pretty close. Now we just have to hope that it will not be shut down too soon.

Mixtape from http://favtape.com/frederic/RWW Test

Discuss

Yesterday we wrote about a new Pew study that found that only 11% of people in the US who use the internet at work are using it to read blogs. We've seen other studies that put this number much higher, but Pew's is probably the most objective.

It's really a shame that more people aren't reading blogs at work, and we don't just say that because we'd like the increased readership. If you're not reading blogs at work, you may not be doing your job as well as you could be. Below we discuss three advantages to reading blogs on the job and offer examples of the kinds of blogs that people could benefit from reading in three different non-tech professions.

We recognize that the single biggest barrier to feeling justified in reading blogs on the clock may be that most people simply don't know how to find the best blogs that are relevant to their work. For that we refer you to our recent post Comparing Six Ways to Find the Best Blogs on Any Topic and we discuss specific tactics you can use below.

Think there's not blogs you should be reading on your particular job? We tested our theory in the second half of this post by finding the top blogs for Human Resources professionals, Physical Therapists and Fire Inspectors. We found good work blogs for them all!

The Advantages of Reading Blogs on the Job

Staying Up to the Moment on News

You may think you don't need to be any more up to date on the news in your field than traditional media already makes you - but those who hold that belief do so to their own strategic detriment. While blogs may suffer from looser editorial standards and fewer resources for in-depth research than traditional media does - those disadvantages are often less important than might be assumed. Meanwhile, blogs have a major advantage in terms of speed. Blogs write about things first and people who read blogs thus know things first. That creates what's called First Mover Advantage.

The Wikipedia entry on First Mover Advantage is an interesting collection of academic findings on the topic. Much of it comes from a study by MB Lieberman and DB Montgomery twenty years ago in 1987. To summarize: Being the first to know about important information allows you to do things like secure resources for which the cost will increase once the news increasing their value is more widely known. It allows you to position yourself as the incumbent party responsible for certain tasks, after which point others are unlikely to take the risk of looking elsewhere if you've already got that base covered. Knowing important information first, consistently, puts you in a position of leadership and opens doors for opportunities in general.

Admittedly this is an extrapolation to reference first mover advantage in the context of individual work performance, as it tends to be studied in reference to the performance of entire businesses. Even that research has come under question - Pieter A. Van der Werf and John F. Mahon argued a decade ago, for example, that studies supporting the existence of first mover advantage depended on particular research methodology and worked only when market share was measured instead of other criteria like profitability or survival. They argued that more objective study found no first mover advantage superior to random statistical chance.

All that said, we find the concepts articulated by Lieberman and Montgomery about first mover advantage to be compelling and valid in our experience.

Tools to Use

Reading blogs is great for first mover advantage, but if you'd like to take things to the next level - check out the various instant alert services online like Zaptxt, Pingie, Alerts.com and others.

Knowing What People are Talking About

The ClueTrain Manifesto famously said almost 10 years ago that "markets are conversations." What does that mean? That business in the age of the internet is done properly through communicative input and output. Reading blogs at work is an important part of that conversation.

The ClueTrain framed its insight largely in language of fear, that businesses who don't get a clue risk watching the train leave them behind at the station. The benefits of listening to what people are saying online can be articulated in a positive sense, though, as well.

Peter G.P. Walters recently published an article titled "Adding value in global B2B supply chains: Strategic directions and the role of the Internet as a driver of competitive advantage." In that article Walters explains that the "disintermediation" [bringing together for direct communication] effect of the internet in business creates new "opportunities for intermediaries [in a supply chain] to generate incremental value for other channel members." In other words: the internet lets us know more about each others' needs and thus see opportunities to fill them. Very few things are as helpful in learning about how people are doing business as the easy publishing of blogs and blog comments.

Are blogs representative of market needs in general? They may or may not be, but at the very least they will point you directly to particular business opportunities among their writers and readers. In as much as blogs tend to write about the world at large, we do think they are a good place to find an orientation with regards to larger emerging market trends.

Tools to Use

There are a lot of different ways to pay attention to what people are talking about in your industry's blogs. Some people subscribe to blog search for keywords instead of subscribing to individual blogs. Many good RSS readers allow you to create "smart folders" containing only the posts from your subscriptions that contain certain keywords. Our favorite method? A service called AideRSS will show you just the most talked about posts on any blog.

Reference Resources

While many allege that bloggers cannot be trusted further than we can be thrown, in practice there are many fields in which professionalism and blogging are no longer opposites. In search results, in mainstream media and in other places where bloggers used not to be welcome - we now are referenced as working experts on our respective topics. That's more true in some fields than in others, but the point is that there is a whole lot of useful information to be found in the archives of leading blogs.

Tools to Use

We've said it before and we'll say it again: few simple services on the web today are as powerfully useful as Google's Custom Search Engines (CSEs). Make a list, give it a name and Google will give you a link you can visit to search only inside the websites you put on your list. Here at RWW we use CSEs built from lists of top blogs in various niche topics all the time. We love them. They are timely, thorough and super efficient.

Topical Blogs

But I Work in Field XYZ - Are There Blogs I Should Read?

Yes. There almost definitely are. As we mentioned above, we've written here before about a number of ways to find the top blogs on any topic. Just to test our own theory, we used those methods to find some top blogs in three different fields outside of technology. Here's what we found.

If you work in Human Resources then you've got it made. There are a huge number of great looking HR blogs on the web, particularly when it comes to employment law.

We found active community and useful looking information on the KnowHR blog, which specializes in discussing issues regarding HR communication. The Employment Law Post is home to a number of popular HR blogs as well.

We'll stop there for now but there are a whole lot more to discover in the Technorati index of HR blogs. Give it a look and pay attention to each blog's "authority," that's the number of other blogs have linked to that one in the past 6 months.

If you are a Physical Therapist there is a smaller field of expert blogs but there are still plenty of options. We found the NPA Think Tank by looking at links tagged physicaltherapist+blog on Delicious. We found the much-commented on blog for MyPhsyicalTherapyspace by looking at the most popular blogs linking to the American Physical Therapists Association webpage via Ask.com's blogsearch. PT practitioners would likely benefit as well from watching the weekly summaries of the best posts from around the medical blogosphere in a years-old series called Grand Rounds. We found that fabulous looking resource via the Health section of blog and news aggregator AllTop.

What if your job is to be a Fire Inspector? Surely you should be checking fire-extinguishers, wandering around industrial facilities and making lists of needed repairs at work - not reading blogs, right?

Well, it turns out that there are some blogs out there for you, too. This was the most obscure corner of the blogosphere we looked at, admittedly, but we still found some good looking blogs on the topic. Inspector911 is appreciated enough to get comments on almost every post on the site. The blog at Fire-professionals doesn't get many comments but does a great job of collecting and commenting on fire-industry news from around the web. We found it by doing a Google Blogsearch for Inspector911.com and found the it via a link. Similar coverage is provided by ConstructionInformer, a blog about construction news around the world.

Finally, if you're a fire inspector then you probably pay attention to the International Code Council. They don't have a blog, but they do have daily news and issue regular news releases. Neither section of their site offers subscription so we scraped an RSS feed using Dapper.net and then ran that feed through Feedburner. Thus you can now subscribe to ICC News Releases in the same RSS reader that you read your fire inspector blogs in.

Conclusion: You Should Read Blogs At Work

That short survey of various non-tech occupations and the blogs that serve them left us comfortable saying that there really are good blogs for you to read at work no matter what you do for a living. We hope the links above are helpful for you to find good blogs about your work.

It's clear, by the numbers and in our anecdotal experience, that very few people who use the internet at work are using it to read blogs. We expect that to change, but for now we'll just argue here on our blog that it would be a very good idea for people to do so. It's an essential daily act of professional development. So get back to work and read some more blogs!

Title pic: "untitled" by Eye of Einstien

Discuss

Google has just released a mini-site explaining "the facts" about the contentious advertising deal it announced with Yahoo in June. The deal will go live in early October, according to a report on SearchEngineLand, so the mini-site is an attempt to outline how it will work - and why consumers, publishers, competitors (and the US government) have nothing to fear from it.

In a presentation up on the mini-site, which we've embedded below, Google states that one of the benefits of this arrangement is that "Yahoo! remains a vibrant and innovative presence on the Internet". Which is putting Yahoo!'s position rather bluntly. The crux of the deal though is that Yahoo! will be able to better monetize the 'long tail' of their search, using Google's near invincible Adsense.

Here are the main points, according to Google:

* This is a non-exclusive deal that will strengthen Yahoo!.
* Ad prices will continue to be set by competitive auction.
* The deal is win-win for consumers, advertisers and publishers: more and better ads.

That the deal will strengthen Yahoo! is, unfortunately for Yahoo!, not the contentious point of this arrangement. Indeed we at ReadWriteWeb have first hand experience of why Yahoo! needs this deal. We recently switched back from Yahoo Publisher Network (their attempt at an Adsense alternative) back to Adsense, precisely because the YPN long tail results were so poor. It's no coincidence that our CPC ads, which display as a backup to our CPM ads, have gotten much more relevant and contextual since we switched back. Unfortunately that told us a lot about the state of YPN.

Let's be frank, Google has got Yahoo by the short and curlies with this deal - and the presentation below isn't afraid to give it another twist.

The contentious part of the deal is whether it gives Google a dominant position in the online advertising industry, and therefore will it be bad for consumers and competitors (specifically Microsoft). The closest the mini-site comes to addressing this is slide 10, which has a list of things that the deal is apparently not:

What the deal is NOT

* Not a merger
* Does not remove a competitor from the playing field
* Does not prevent Yahoo! from making similar deals with others
* Does not increase Google's share of search traffic
* Does not let Google set prices for advertisers
* Does not give Google any equity stake in Yahoo!

It remains to be seen whether American antitrust authorities are convinced by these arguments, or not.

Another point of contention is that Google, once again, makes no mention of the percentage of ad revenue they take. In other words: if there is not enough competition in the market for Adsense, then publishers could end up getting a lower share of the revenue from Adsense as a result. Which is a valid concern for publishers and not one that the slideshow addresses adequately.

One interesting side-benefit of the deal is that it will also enable interoperability between Yahoo IM and Google Talk. This benefits Google more than Yahoo, given that Yahoo is one of the market leaders in IM and Google is not.

Here is the full presentation. Let us know in the comments what you think:

Discuss

I created a Top 10 Blog list for SixApart’s Blogs.com list of Top 10 lists site.  It’s called “Marc Canter’s Top 10 List of Open Social Networking Blogs”  :-)  I just love playing kingmaker. NOT. Apologies to all the homeboys and homegrrls who DIDN’T make it onto my list.  I’m right between Popular Stock blogs and Tasty Vegan blogs.

This notion of Kevin Lynch (Adobe)  talking about open source is comical.  Where can I download the source code to Photoshop or Flash?

MySpace Music is like a feature that Cyworld has had for several years.  They allow you to offer playlists of music to listen to, coupled to your MySpace page.  This creates HUGE amounts of stickiness and is a viable busienss model as well!

Do not piss of Dave Letterman

When you piss of Warren Buffet then he’s not gonna forget.

Steve Gillmor and I did a Gillmor Gang about Portable Contacts and Y! OS.

Become a Schlepper

The program for LeWeb8 is live now.  I’ll be doing a panel with the BigCos - and we’ll be trying to find some Love for each other (Google, MySpace, Facebook, SixApart) and their customers.  I’m sure we’ll find it - we just gotta all make sure to wear condoms.

This is the second post in a multi-part series about integrating the internet with the real world.

In "The Scannable World: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners," we introduced the concept of using your phone to scan barcoded objects in the real world. We also touched on some of the history surrounding this technology. One of the issues with barcoded ads today is where you find them: newspapers, arguably a dying medium whose subscriber base isn't necessarily composed of cutting-edge early adopters. So how can barcodes make their way to the people who actually use the web and other modern technologies? One company thinks they have the answer.

Enter Neomedia

Neomedia is ready for the barcode trend to take off. They've been around for a decade and have had the technology for reading barcodes with mobile phones in place for years. Now, thanks to the ubiquity of modern mobile phones, they are poised for success if this trend ever takes off. Their barcode scanning software lets you access mobile web content by scanning ads from print, packaging, billboards, and even broadcast media.

The Printed Out Web

No matter how tech savvy you are, there are still times when you simply must print out something from the web. Driving directions are a great example. Now imagine that your printout looked something like this (see below) - directions at the top with a scannable ad for a hotel at the bottom of the page:

That printout isn't a prototype, but a real ad available today from RandMcNally.com. The ad is made possible through NeoMedia's partnership with Format Dynamics, a company that works with web publishers and advertisers to help transform web pages into readable printouts which can then be monetized with ads. The company's "Clean Print" technology is a real-time dynamic reformatting engine that harvests a page's content and then produces a printed page in a coherent format without odd line breaks, cut off images, etc. Clean Print will also work no matter how the end user decides to print - whether "Ctrl + P" is pressed or a print button is used, the results are the same.

Any site using Clean Print technology can now include barcoded ads alongside their content. This is great for driving directions, but also for articles that tend to be printed out and shared, such as those from online news sites. (Don't believe it? Just look at the uproar over the RWW print button, for example). Below is an example of what that looks like. The article is from The Orange County Register's site and the ad is for Crocs footwear.

Since the partnership between NeoMedia and Format Dynamics is still brand new, there aren't many other examples just yet. But Format Dynamics is already serving ads and reformatting the printed web pages of approximately 80 web publishers, including Rand McNally, CareerBuilder, the San Jose Mercury News, the Denver Post, the Houston Chronicle, and a few others. In time, NeoMedia will extend their barcode offering to more of these clients.

How To Scan: NeoMedia's NeoReader

NeoReader is the barcode scanning software. It's not a separate piece of hardware, but software that runs on your phone. NeoReader currently works on iPhone, Java, Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. The only missing platform is Android, but the company plans to include that at a later time. Even without Android, the company has managed to cover most of the smartphone market as well as many of today's standard phones via their Java offering. (You can see a full manufacturer's list here).

To download the application, just go to get.neoreader.com from your handset's web browser and follow the instructions. If your handset is not supported, you can still access the NeoReader program. Just bookmark the URL get.neoreader.com/go. This web page will let you enter keywords and barcodes in order to access the same content available to users of the mobile application. iPhone users can simply download the NeoReader application from the iTunes App Store.

Android has been announced but it isn't actually out yet, so we can't compare NeoReader to Android's barcode scanning apps like CompareEverywhere or GoCart. On the iPhone, though, NeoReader is not the only barcode reading app currently available - there are several to choose from. In function and feature set, the difference between most of those apps and NeoReader is minimal. Like many of those other iPhone apps, NeoReader also lets you build your own barcode if you so desire. You can create a barcode for any URL just by going to http://www.neoreader.com/code.html and entering in the URL you want to convert.

Make a Barcode:

The real difference between NeoReader simply comes down to the fact that NeoMedia is a business that's trying to make barcode scanning a reality...it's not an app put out by an independent developer. NeoReader already has a handful of sites where it can be used and over the coming weeks they will be able to add to their list as their partnership with Format Dynamics deepens.

Is This The Answer?

With the rising popularity of camera phones, smartphones, and better web browsers for surfing the "real" internet at higher 3G speeds, there's an improved chance for a technology like barcoded ads to take off. However, for it to really become truly successful a lot of advertisers and big-name companies will have to get on board and consistently offer barcoded ads for an extended period of time - not just try it once and then give up, claiming them a failure. In today's uncertain economy, the number of advertisers willing to take this chance may be low.

NeoMedia's partnership with Format Dynamics means they are able to offer a good selection of web sites where you can find the technology in use. That's a good start at least, but ultimately the technology will come down to consumers' willingness to interact with the real world in this virtual manner. The expectation behind this whole barcoded ad platform is that people will see the advertisement and then take an extra step to learn more about the product or service. Is that even how today's consumers interact with ads? In our media-saturated culture, most consumers run from ads, not the other way around.

Will adding barcodes make viewing ads a more engaging experience or will consumers continue to ignore ads like they do today? That's a hard question to answer with a technology so new and untested, but it's possible that, if done well, barcode scanning could work. The trick may be to provide an added value to the customer who takes the time to scan. That added value could be a discount, a free gift with purchase, or something else of a compelling nature to the potential customer. That could make barcode scanning the coupon clipping of the 21st century...and that might actually work. Scan to save. We would do it. Would you?

See also: The Scannable World, Part 1: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners
The Scannable World, Part 3: Barcode Scanning In The Real World

Discuss

Iterend, a new blog search and discovery engine, is entering a highly competitive market. It competes with Technorati, Google's Blog Search, Sphere, Icerocket, and many other smaller players. Iterend is trying to differentiate itself from the competition by putting a stronger focus on tracking memes, clustering results, and using tag clouds for navigation. While we mostly like Iterend's design and feature set, the search engine itself is not very useful yet, as the crawler is extremely slow and the index often only reflects stories that are more than 20 hours old.

Tag Cloud and Top Stories

Iterend indexes about 250,000 blogs. Once you log in, you are greeted by a very large tag cloud on the left side of the screen and a list of the top stories of the past 24 hours on the right. It is not quite clear how Iterend determines this list, but it simply seems to look at how often a story was linked to. Currently, this list is dominated by political stories.

The tag cloud is a bit overwhelming at first. To see all of it, you have to scroll down and it includes over 250 keywords.

Search

The search engine itself relies heavily on tag clouds as well. For every search, Iterend displays two tag clouds that allow you to drill down deeper into your search: one for related phrases and one for related categories.

If you search for "McCain," for example, Iterend will suggest searching for "Obama" or "Sarah Palin." This actually works quite well and allows you to filter your searches quickly and effortlessly. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for every search.

Verdict

Iterend has a lot of potential. However, the company needs to make sure that its index is more up to date. Today, most blog search engines index a post within minutes after it is posted, so having a 20 hour delay simply takes away any reason to even start using this service - unless you are looking for old news.

Invites

Iterend gave us 1000 invites for our readers. Just follow this link and give it a try.

Discuss

Fabrication-on-demand service Ponoko launched a powerful new feature called Photomake today; now anyone can upload a photo of a drawn image and Ponoko will create a physical object based on that photo alone. This whole company is really fun but Photomake turns it into a generally accessible tool for those of us who aren't designers.

After uploading a photo of a drawing, users pick which of a list of materials they'd like their design created with and then Ponoko provides a cost for fabrication. The items aren't cheap but the experience looks fantastic. Check out the video demonstration below.

Ponoko is a relatively new startup, it launched this year, but according to a longer profile today on VentureBeat "sales are up 111 percent in the last month." How much does it cost? Making an attractive four bottle wine rack will run you $100, for example. Complexity and materials are the primary determinants of price.

It's hard not to love this sort of service. The read-write web is one thing, but when this same ethic spills out into tangible objects, it really gets the imagination stirring.

Discuss

Online study group community Cramster announced today that the company has raised a $3 million investment and after checking out the site, we can see why. This active, full featured and well design service looks really compelling for students and has a solid business model.

Members can participate in forums about homework, get quick answers to questions 24 hours a day and access explanations of problems from more than 200 of the most popular text books in 7 subject areas. There are free and paid membership levels at $10 per month and users deemed helpful by others can receive financial rewards like gift certificates.

The site has already got a very active community, with thousands of questions and answers posted on the boards. Subject quizzes can be generated automatically for practice, there are lecture notes and videos posted on the site as well. Support for scientific notation and images looks strong. We are very impressed.

Limitations

We did have a hard time viewing the videos. The topics are also limited to math and science, but we can see how that makes sense. The highest rated user on the site is one who has never asked a question, only answered thousands of other peoples' questions, and claims to be a monkey.

Joseph Weisenthal at PaidContent, who found the funding announcement first, thinks that study groups are best appreciated for being distracted from studying with social activity. That might be the case for many people, but there is clearly also a lot of interest in getting help to hard math and science problems on Cramster already.

All in all, the service looks great. With $3 million more in the bank, we expect to start seeing Cramster around a lot more. We wrote last month about 10 great apps for college students - we can certainly foresee this one making that list next year.

Discuss

When we first introduced you to Elgg two years ago, it was a new social networking platform whose focus was on e-learning. Since that time, the software has been rewritten and it has moved away from being strictly for educational use only. Today, the award-winning Elgg is one of the top open source social networking platforms available on the internet.

A little over a month ago, Elgg 1.0 was introduced to the world. In this newest release, several years in the making, the software has been improved from the inside out. It has a more attractive UI and design, for starters. But under the hood you'll find more changes like better plugin support, RSS and OpenDD views, and a new database schema.

We may have said that the next social networks would be powered by blogging CMS platforms like WordPress and Movable Type, but what we're really seeing is a shift towards making all web platforms more open and social experiences.

To that end, Elgg can help form the basis of a new generation of social networks. But their platform goes beyond just delivering a solution for the next web 2.0 hangout or social site, although that it a popular use for their software. The Enterprise 2.0 movement is also aided by Elgg as companies wanting to build and customize their own intranet-based social networks have begun to adopt the platform as well.

The Interview

We recently had the opportunity to follow up on our original interview with one of Elgg's founders, David Tosh. We talked about where Elgg stands today and what plans they have for the future.

How would you describe Elgg to someone who didn't know what it is?

Elgg is an open source social networking engine started by Ben Werdmuller and myself back in 2004. Elgg can be used by developers as a starting point from which to build out their own social applications (it handles common back-end functionality and has an extensive programming API), and out of the box as a useful social utility. This year, it was voted by a panel on InfoWorld as the best open source social networking platform 2008.

What's new with Elgg since we first spoke?

We have completely rewritten the Elgg core. This was necessary in order to future-proof the project, improve scalability and allow for greater customization. Over the past four years, we have found that one size really does not fit all, so we had to make sure Elgg was flexible enough to handle new demands being thrown at it, both now and in the future. The era of the monolithic social network is coming to a close; we want to make it easy for people to add social functionality into all kinds of applications.

Why did you move away from being a platform focused on education?

Although we've always had an educational base, a lot of users from other fields began picking up on Elgg. As a result, we were securing contracts to build custom networks on Elgg for groups that were not part of the educational circle, and feeding those developments back into the product. Gradually, interest in Elgg became greater outside of education, so we adapted to that change.

How does Elgg compare to its commercial competition?

With its new architecture and open standards at its core, we feel it is best placed to handle changing expectations in the social arena. It's a very competitive space, but a lot of products have just bolted social features on top of their existing systems - Elgg has social functionality built into the core and was designed from the ground up to support it. That allows us to create deeper features, and also plan ahead for new kinds of social applications. As the types of social applications and uses for them grow, we feel our approach will pay dividends.

Some employers are letting employees use Facebook at work now. Do you worry that will affect the number of potential customers for your product?

Not really. If anything, I think this increases the potential and opportunity. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc play an important role in bringing the concept of social technology to new audiences. For groups like us, who provide niche services, this is great. For example, companies try out Facebook and then start releasing that they want to improve their internal communications to be more Facebook-like; we can help them with that.

Why should someone consider Elgg for their network?

I think there are three main reasons: simplicity, extensibility and openness. The basic version of Elgg is deliberately very simple and clean. Our architecture allows you to easily extend Elgg's functionality to meet your specific requirements. Lastly, we fully embrace open standards such as OpenDD, FOAF, RSS, Open Social and OpenID, allowing you to interact with other applications.

Who is using Elgg today?

Elgg users range from sports networks to corporate companies, university intranets to school districts. There is a wide cross section picking up the software and applying it to their own niche. Increasingly, companies are also using Elgg to build social sites for their clients; we're keen to promote and support this.

What's in store for Elgg's future?

We have a couple of things in the pipeline:

• Firstly, we're going to launch an Elgg supporter scheme. This will give companies who are providing Elgg-related services the chance to form closer links with the core project.
• We are working on a new mobile intranet platform, powered by Elgg, that allows users to share status updates, photos, documents and media via MMS, SMS, email or the web. It also handles simple notes and shared tasks.
• We decided we needed a system within Curverider to improve our communication while on the move, and built it for our own use; it's been so successful that we thought other companies and organizations might find it useful as well. So far, the reaction from people we've shown it to has been extremely positive.
• All Elgg-powered services have the Open Data Definition built into their core, which allows for full import and export of users, content and connections as well as the ability to syndicate friends' activity in a distributed way.
• Lastly, we have just announced an advisory board that is packed with experts with excellent track records, in order to ensure Elgg and Elgg-powered services continue to develop and grow.

Discuss

This week we're looking at how religious organizations are using Web technology. Today's post looks at a blog that aims to "challenge misconceptions and stereotypical perceptions about Islam and Muslims worldwide". The site is Inside Islam and we caught up with lead blogger Kaitlin Foley today to find out more. For the previous posts in our series, check out our reviews of LifeChurch.tv (a Christian church) and Shalom Hartman Institute (a Jewish institute).

Inside Islam is a collaboration between University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin Public Radio. It is using 'new media' to improve communications between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Heavy Metal Islam

The blog's focus is clearly illustrated with the most recent post at time of writing: Mark LeVine and Heavy Metal Islam: The Fight Over What Islam Means. The post explains the story of scholar and professional musician Mark LeVine, who traveled across the Middle East "playing with and studying heavy metal bands in the area after the September 11 attacks in 2001." According to Foley's post, Mark LeVine's work uses "the universal language of music to articulate the diversity of Islam in contemporary times."

The post finishes with a selection of links to various media - Flickr, podcasts, the Heavy Metal Islam homepage, LeVine's blog, links to audio. There's also mention of a radio broadcast LeVine will be doing this Thursday, on 'Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders' - which is a radio program by one of the organizations behind the blog, Wisconsin Public Radio.

Incidentally, if you want a 1-line explanation of what Heavy Metal Islam is, this quote at the top of the HMI homepage - attributed to one of the founders of the Moroccan heavy-metal scene, Reda Zine - sums it up: "We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal."

The trailer for a documentary called Heavy Metal in Baghdad, via InsideIslam

How Inside Islam Started

We asked Kaitlin Foley to tell us more about Inside Islam and how it got started. A recent graduate of University of Wisconsin-Madison, Foley has a degree in International Studies and Political Science. She focused on Islamic studies for her degree and so the blog is kind of an extension of that. She explained:

"The project as a whole is a product of University of Wisconsin-Madison, of which me, the blogger, and the pubic radio shows are only part of... in the end, we hope to have a wealth of resources that people around the world can access about Islam and Muslim culture worldwide. This includes digital stories, blogs, YouTube videos, music, and all other types of popular content on the web."

Foley told us that the response to the blog has been "positive from the Muslim community online." She said that it "seems to be an issue people are really concerned about and want to talk about in a new way." The Internet, said Foley, "is a way to talk about political, cultural and global issues in a democratic way." The blog's goal is to "create a dialogue and raise some debates about hot issues in a meaningful way."

The blog is closely linked to the radio show 'Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders', mentioned above. The first radio show to be broadcast is on tomorrow, about Heavy Metal Islam. The second show is October 30 on the topic of Muslims and social media.

The final question we asked Kaitlin Foley was: are you a Muslim yourself? She replied that she's not, although she said a couple of her supervisors are. She explained further that "even though I'm not Muslim, I think Islam is a big concern for anyone with a T.V. or internet access and [it's] an important way people understand the world."

Islam on the Web

Inside Islam is an interesting use case for a blog - it's using a two-way medium, along with new media tools like podcasting and Flickr, to open up discussion on a religion that, in this day and age, can be easily misunderstood.

For context, we must point out that Islam is already a popular topic in the blogosphere. We noted in a post in November that trend charts showed more Web activity about Islam than about Christianity. There is indeed an Alltop category for Muslims, which has a lot of blogs in it. Not to mention there are some web 2.0 blogs that cover the Middle East, including ArabCrunch and IslamCrunch.

Let us know in the comments about other religious organizations or independent sites using the Web in innovative ways.

Top photo: Mark LeVine

See also:
Religion and Web Technology, Part 1: LifeChurch.tv
Religion and Web Technology, Part 2: Shalom Hartman Institute

Discuss

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, always a source of fascinating survey results, has come out with a new one about technology and work. The latest is titled "Networked Workers: Most workers use the internet or email at their jobs, but they say these technologies are a mixed blessing for them."

The gist of the analysis is that people who use the internet at work also use it to do work at home; it makes them more efficient but also increases the demands on their time. Any of us who live that kind of life could have told you that - but what we find more interesting is the surprisingly low number of people who say they use certain technologies at work.

Greg Sterling at the excellent blog SearchEngineLand pulls out some of the most salient data points from the survey and we'll excerpt further from his post below. We question both the definition of "networked worker" in the survey and Sterling's perspective on it, though.

Specifically, the Pew study focuses on "networked workers" - defined as anyone who uses the internet or email at their work. At all. Can you guess what percentage of employed US adults say they use the internet or email at their work? Only 62%. Even that number includes people who make only the most rudimentary use of the most simple tools, however. A look at the details indicates that anything beyond the simplest tools (like the browser) is still a real fringe case.

The big take-aways from the above for us? That only 18% of people who use the internet at work use IM, only 10% report using social networks like Facebook, LInkedIn or MySpace and a mere 11% report reading blogs at work.

Only 1 out of 10 people who use the internet at work read blogs about their work; that seems like a real loss of opportunity for them.

If you or someone you love falls outside of these categories - please take our word for it - those are really useful tools! You can communicate really well (instantly, in fact) using IM and there's a whole lot of valuable information on blogs in any field. As for social networks, you'll see the value in those after you get comfortable with IM and blogs.

If you use the internet every day at work but never use IM and never read blogs on your field, you're not really using the internet - or you may as well not be. There's no shame in that, but that's how it is. To be fair, the 60% of respondents who use the internet at work probably includes a lot of people who feel pretty advanced for doing so at all after years of working without it.

Combine these numbers, though, with another reputable survey from last year that found that 11% of US respondents "said they were very or somewhat likely to...implant a device into your brain that enabled you to use your mind to access the internet if it could be done safely." An internet brain implant is a terrible idea, but they should definitely not be given to anyone who's never read a blog at work.

It's even crazier when you look at the chart above. Add the left-most numbers in this chart up and you'll see that 60% of these people use the internet at least once every day at work. But they don't read blogs, use IM or find contacts, answers or other resources on social networks.

Greg Sterling at SearchEngineLand says these numbers are probably low because people don't report accurately how much they use these tools at work - but Pew studies are really well done, they are anonymous and there's no reason to think them inaccurate as far as we can tell.

What Does it All Mean?

The survey and some early analysis of this survey point to the encroachment of work machines into our personal lives. As professional internet users, we'd point instead to the apparently huge gap between early adopter activities and the rest of the "networked world."

This is why Common Craft can make an entire business out of licensing 5 minute videos of stick figures explaining how Google Reader and LInkedIn work. That stuff is like a bright beam of light breaking through the clouds of the modern workplace. It's an important light to look at, too. Though business can clearly be done without meaningful use of the internet (obviously) - competition will likely only grow more intense.

As geek photographer and friend of RWW Aaron Hockley said on Twitter this morning "Social media search feeds. If you're not using them, you're losing business to someone who is." Those who are using them have lots of business to take, too, because almost 90% of people in the US who use the internet at work aren't even reading blogs.

Discuss

How come we don’t have prime misters like this?  Japan has got itself a new prime minster - and McCain is crying that he can’t stay focused.  Waaaaah!

And now McCain is crying like a baby. And this is what Barack said about that:

 

So there you have it.

Micromessaging at the crossroads

Congrats to the former TagWorld folks for getting fully bought out by MTVN.
 
And congrats to the MySpace music guys for finally getting EMI on board.

Special congrats to iLike and their playlists via APIs.  ’Bout time!  now lets find some commonality between last.fm, Pandora and MusicBrainz!

Meanwhile Melissa Gira Grant seems to miss teh point - suave Don Draper is all about image.  That’s what Yahoo paid for - and they got YOU Melissa to write about it!  :-)  See!  it worked!

Twine - the new blogroll

I wonder what Cisco is gonna do with Jabber.  The human network?

NYTimePeople - it was just a matter of time

PeopleJar, PixelPipe, Amazee, OutShout, Pringo, PulsarBox mobile,

The long awaited MySpace Music service is launching tonight around 9pm PST. (It's the old site at that link right now.) We just got off the phone with the company for a briefing and we liked what we saw. It's going to be a very big deal.

Users will be able to assemble playlists from a huge catalog of songs from all four major labels and from independent distributor The Orchard, full length songs are all streamable for free, users will be able to purchase DRM-free MP3s through a close integration with the AmazonMP3 service and developers will have a gradually increasing amount of access to user activity data from the Music section. Screen shots below.

The Interface

The MySpace Music interface looks quite nice, with drag and drop playlist creation, dynamically re-populating players and a pop-up player that plays music when you leave a page. There are a lot of nice little touches.

One of the most interesting might be that when you're listening to an artist in the music player, you see a feed of their most recent profile activity right next to it. MySpace says this means "you can be a part of their lives and they of yours!" That might be an insultingly condescending way to describe it, but the feature is cool.

Below: Search and playlist building.

Below: The player.

The Business

There's been some question about who will run MySpace Music and sure enough, the project is launching without a CEO. The company gave us a typically disingenuous PR explanation that they "are being really picky" about selecting one.

That's inconsequential for users, though, isn't it? Brand advertisers paying for all this streaming music is great news for us. MySpace wouldn't go into any details about anything financial but said they had "a very close relationship with Amazon." Who knows what that means? Maybe that AmazonMP3 really hopes to ride MySpace's coat tails to market dominance and thus gave them a good break.

What About the Competition?

We've written extensively about competition in the streaming music space but we asked MySpace about Imeem in particular. SVP of Product Strategy Steve Pearman said "it's hard to build community around content alone" (probably news to Imeem) and pointed out that MySpace could be considered the world's second largest provider of email service behind Hotmail.

Apparently the point is that MySpace is a huge full-service stop where people are already gathering. We buy that and we think MySpace Music will be a strong player. This author intends to try it out at length, if for no other reason than to get away from the PR agents crawling all over Facebook. We've written about what the perfect streaming music service might look like - we wonder how close this will come.

Check it out for yourself later tonight and let us know what you think.

Discuss

Browser vendor Opera, which is a stronger player in the mobile browser market than it is on the desktop, has just released more data on of the state of the Mobile Web. The latest report tells us that usage of the mobile Web continues to grow in terms of unique users and page views. What's more, 'long tail' sites are showing up well in the data too, which is a sure sign the Mobile Web is gaining traction in key growth markets like the U.S. and China.

The company states that in August, their mobile browser Opera Mini (our coverage) was used by approximately 17.3 million users, who viewed more than 4.1 billion pages - about 242 pages per user, per month.

The user numbers represent a 9.1% month-on-month increase from July and more than 357% compared to August 2007. Over 12 million sites were accessed in August. As with the PC web, there is a Long Tail effect - 87 sites generating more than half of the 4.1 billion global page views. Opera concludes that "mobile Web users spend a significant amount of time browsing the Long Tail of the Web in addition to the most popular online destinations."

Looking at the U.S. market, the report states that the top 100 sites (in terms of page views) generated 48% of that country's total page views via Opera Mini. However that figure varies quite a lot internationally - it is 57% in the U.K., 52% in India, 38% in South Africa and 76% in both Indonesia and China. Indeed in China the top 11 sites generated over half of Opera Mini's page views. In Indonesia it's pretty much a one-site show, with Friendster "generating over half of that country's Opera Mini traffic all by itself in the month of August."

The top 10 sites in the U.S. (in terms of number of unique users) has stayed fairly stable. Here is the top 10 U.S. list for August:

1. google.com
2. myspace.com
3. facebook.com
4. wikipedia.org
5. yahoo.com
6. nytimes.com
7. gamejump.com
8. accuweather.com (up from 9)
9. youtube.com (down from 8)
10. my.opera.com

As a point of comparison, the top 10 english language websites ranked by Alexa at time of writing is:

1. Yahoo!
2. Google
3. YouTube
4. Windows Live
5. Microsoft Network (MSN)
6. Myspace
7. Facebook
8. Blogger.com
9. Orkut
10. RapidShare

It's a little surprising to us that Yahoo is only ranked number 5 in the Mobile Web in the US. Although with MySpace and Facebook number 2 and 3 respectively, that shows that social networking on your mobile is one of the top use cases for using the Mobile Web (after searching on Google).

See also our earlier analysis of Opera's demographic data about Mobile Web.

Discuss

CAPTCHAs, those pesky challenge-response tests that many web sites use to determine whether you are human or a spambot, are an annoyance to many users. According to a report in Science (subscription required), users now solve about 100 million CAPTCHAs a day. ReCAPTCHA, a project based at Carnegie Mellon University, has found an ingenious way to harness all this work and, according to the findings published in Science this week, CAPTCHAs could be used to transcribe printed texts at the rate of 160 books a day.

The current implementation of reCAPTCHA is being used by over 40,000 web sites. The basic idea behind reCAPTCHA is that optical character recognition (OCR), even though it is constantly improving, is still unable to cope with texts where the print has faded or a page is slightly damaged. While humans can transcribe a text with about 99% accuracy, OCR software often doesn't get beyond 80% when dealing with a slightly damaged text.

reCAPTCHA combines traditional OCR with an approach similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Every text is analyzed by two different OCR programs and whenever those two program disagree on a word, it is marked as 'suspicious.' Those suspicious words are then fed into reCAPTCHA, which creates a CAPTCHA with both the suspicious word and a known control word. Once a certain number of users have solved the suspicious word with the same result, it becomes a control word itself.

Overall, reCAPTCHA achieves an accuracy of 99.1%, which is on par with the accuracy achieved by having two humans type the text and then verify the results.

While it is mostly a proof of concept right now, reCAPTCHA's developers calculate that the system can be used to transcribe the equivalent of 160 books a day.

The most fascinating aspect of this idea is that it turns mental energy, which would otherwise be wasted, into something useful. Other projects like fold.it, which turns protein folding into a game, or Google's Image Labeler take a similar approach, but the user has to actively decide to play a game. reCAPTCHA, on the other hand, turns a chore into a useful project.

Discuss

Social news site Digg is announcing today that it has raised another $28 million from existing investors, bringing its sum total raised to more than $40 million. Remember when people used to tell stories about Digg rejecting VC money as too much in its early days? Those times are long gone.

The paradigm that Digg has popularized, letting users vote on which stories should be on the site's front page, is now found in any number of other places. From the programming geeks at StackOverflow, Reddit and Hacker News to the customer service requests at Dell Ideastorm, Uservoice and elsewhere - "it's like Digg for..." is now a commonly used phrase. No where, though, has Digg itself faced a bigger challenge than in Yahoo's new site Buzz.

Digg's Plans For the Money

In its announcement today Digg said it was going to use the new infusion of cash to double its staff to 150, expand internationally with local sections and languages and offer publishers new analytic services. The New York Times got an exclusive interview about the announcement and it's publishers of that scale that Digg will undoubtedly be focusing on with many of its new features. Very large content publishers will probably be willing to pay for services telling them which of their content "is popular with Digg readers," the rest of us little people know that about our content pretty easily!

Can Digg localize effectively? It's easier said than done and requires more than just translated language in an interface. This is something that Yahoo! is very well practiced in.

The Buzz Challenge

Yahoo! Buzz is a site that works much like Digg but sends selected stories to the front page of Yahoo.com, one of (if not the most) visited websites in the world. In April, traffic analysts Comscore reported that Buzz had already passed Digg in traffic. Digg now says it sees 30 million visitors per month.

Can Digg continue growing in the face of such a challenge? Raising a big pile of money isn't a bad idea at all right now. Digg will need to promote itself, to localize intelligently and to continue growing outside of its initial tech-focused subject areas in order to stay on a path of growth.

We like Digg a lot and we're excited to see what it does with this money. Acquisition of the company would have been interesting, but CEO Jay Adelson says very few suitors could maintain a position of neutrality with regard to their own content if they bought Digg. Google presumably could, but apparently that sale fell through.

For now we'll wait and watch as this trailblazing company tries to stay at the front of the parade that it made popular in the first place.

Discuss

Seventeen years ago today Nirvana released their widely loved album Nevermind and many of us in our 30s today were thinking about college. In between the less accessible era of nihilistic punk music and the post-engagement fluff of the Emo genre, Nirvana heralded a brief period when popular music acknowledged to kids that the world was in bad shape but that we weren't alone in feeling that way.

If it had been available then, I would have used the website GreenReportcard, just launched today by the Sustainable Endowment Institute, in my college hunt.

The GreenReportCard site lets you compare more than 300 US colleges and universities in terms of ecological sustainability. Each school is given a letter grade for administrative commitment to the issue, food and transportation policy and transparency with its endowment, or the money it invests in the market in between using it to fund construction and other major projects. The grades are determined by independent research and surveys.

The site is very usable and includes the option of posting personalized comparisons to social networking sites. The service could certainly be more read-write based but it is a great example of a large organization making effective online use of its database.

Users can line up any number of schools to compare, though with a list of 300 schools tracked you're quite likely to find some gaps. Above are comparisons of the school I wanted to go to during that first Nirvana era (Macalester College, I wanted to study cultural anthropology) and the school I eventually graduated from (the University of Oregon, in political science).

I knew that the University of Oregon had a good reputation for recycling, green building, etc. but hadn't thought about its lack of transparency with its endowment as an ecological issue. A huge portion of the school's money comes from Nike founder Phil Knight, who's allegedly helping fund an Orwellian super-soldier research program that combines the jewel encrusted football facilities, nanotech research and a hyper-corporate urban planning regime. That's the word on the street, not information available from GreenReportCard, unfortunately. Apparently, Macallester College's money from the Readers Digest Foundation is used in a similarly non-transparent way. Who knew?

Hopefully the next generation of college students can find out this kind of information ahead of time using this new website. Don't forget, kids, to listen to Nevermind while perusing it. You don't have to listen to Emo - and you don't have to pick your colleges uninformed.

Discuss

With all the hype surrounding the iPhone and Google Android, users may have forgotten about one of the best mobile browsers available for Windows Mobile and Symbian owners. We're talking about Skyfire, the award winning mobile browser that we can't get enough of! Skyfire gives mobile users one of the best web browsing experiences to-date. It's also one of our picks for must have windows mobile applications. Today, Skyfire users can get a great update that breathes new life into this mobile browser. Here's a look at what's new with Skyfire.

What's New

If you've been waiting a lifetime to get off Skyfire's waiting list, you don't have to wait any longer. With the release of version 0.8 of Skyfire, the application is now available to all Windows Mobile users with compatible devices. So what's new with the app itself?

• New Super Bar that combines search and URL entry into one bar
• Skyfire can now be set as the default browser
• New search bar on the Homescreen
• New start page redesign
• Faster start-up and page loading times
• Share a link via SMS
• Invite friends to download Skyfire via SMS
• Save an image
• Download files

One of the most popular capabilities that Skyfire has over Safari on the iPhone is the ability to play flash videos. This means you can browse popular video sites such as Youtube and Vimeo, or music sites such as Last.FM and Imeem, to play media clips on the go. Playback speed and quality has noticeably improved in the latest Skyfire update. With videos, the mobile browser's playback quality would suffer significantly when zooming into a video while it was playing. In our tests of the latest update, this bug seems to have been fixed and playback quality stayed the same when zooming in and out.

What we think will be a really popular new feature is Skyfire's ability to download files. You may be thinking that you can't download anything outside of a Word or PDF file. Well, you're wrong. We were able to download .mp3 files, Gmail attachments, .CAB files and more to our Windows Mobile handset. Skyfire lets you choose where to save a file and presents you with a progress view of your download. However, you won't be able to do anything else while the file is downloading.

Two Big Problems

We encountered a major bug that we feel users of Skyfire should be aware of. Before the update, if Skyfire lost service we would simply have to quit the application and restart it. In this update, Skyfire attempts to reconnect instead of dropping the connection completely. However, we never got the browser to reconnect. Instead, a continuous loop of reconnection attempts occured and we eventually had to exit the browser and restart it.

Another big problem with Skyfire is that there is still no option to import your Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE) bookmarks. We deemed this to be a high-priority feature in our initial review of Skyfire. For new users, this will be very important and could be a deal breaker for those who live in their mobile browsers and have one too many bookmarks.

Even Better Than Before

Skyfire users will not be disappointed with the latest update. In fact, we feel the small changes that have been made will make the browsing experience with Skyfire even better! Symbian users can expect an update very soon, though Blackberry and Palm devices still aren't supported by Skyfire.

Discuss

Google's 10th anniversary seems to be driving the company towards more introspection and philanthropy. Today, Google announced Project 10^100, through which the company is soliciting ideas for projects that have the potential to change the world and help as many people as possible. Google will select the 100 best ideas submitted to the project and then ask users to vote on which ones to fund. These votes will determine the 20 finalists and a group of judges will then choose the five best ideas from this pool. Google has committed $10 million to fund these ideas.

Google uses the Hippo Water Roller and First Mile Solutions as examples for projects it would be interested in funding. These projects provide innovative solutions to large problems - bringing water to rural communities in Africa and providing Internet access to remote, unconnected areas. Google is deliberately not setting any strict rules for submissions to Project 10^100, but the company does explain its selection criteria: reach, depth, attainability, efficiency, and longevity.

Google is definitely using its 10th anniversary to enhance the visibility of its philanthropic efforts. Google has lately been using its official blog to talk about its energy and health initiatives. Just yesterday, Google wrote about its Predict and Prevent initiative, a project that is looking at novel ways to detect the threat of a pandemic before it can turn into a crisis.

Submissions for Project 10^100 are due by October 20.

Discuss

Glubble is about to release a major update to its parental control plugin for Firefox, which we first reviewed in 2007. This new version takes Glubble far beyond its origins and introduces a wealth of social networking features. Every family now gets a homepage on Glubble.com, which includes a Twitter-like instant messenger, photo albums, and an event calendar. Glubble represents a natural evolution for parental control software towards a more social approach, and after testing it extensively, we have come away impressed with its functionality and ease of use. Glubble for Families will launch on September 25.

Installing Glubble is as easy as installing any Firefox extension. For those who do not use Firefox yet, Glubble will also provide a version of Firefox 3 with Glubble for Families already pre-installed. After the installation, you can set up accounts for your children, as well as other family members or friends. Typically, these friends should be adults, as they get the ability to moderate content for the children in your network.

Parental Controls

The parental controls in Glubble function on two levels. First, parents have the ability to unlock certain sites for their children. Glubble already includes a large selection of pre-screened sites, but parents can also add other sites individually. If a child tries to access a locked site, it can request access through a simple form and the parent is immediately notified and can then approve or deny the request.

Glubble monitors your children's Google searches and filters out any inappropriate content. Glubble also keeps a record of all the sites your children visit.

When a child uses Glubble, it is presented with a full-screen Firefox skin that blocks access to the rest of the desktop. From there, children can browse the web, post to the family wall, or chat with family members.

New Features: Message Wall, Calendar, Photo Album

One of the most interesting new features in this version is the 'family wall,' which is similar to the message wall in Facebook. Families can also use a shared event calendar to keep their schedules organized.

The new Glubble for Families also includes a shared photo album. Photos are uploaded through a simple web interface. These albums will not replace a full-featured online photo gallery, but they give you the option to easily share one or two pictures with your family. Whenever you upload a new photo, a new message is posted on the family wall and all your family members are notified.

Verdict

Glubble is a great way for parents to keep their children's online activities under control. We really enjoyed using the new features and we especially liked the fact that every family now gets an internet accessible homepage, which allows family members to stay in contact while keeping children safely away from some of the darker sides of the Internet.

If you used Glubble before, you will notice that the layout and theme has changed dramatically. Personally, we prefer the simpler and more colorful theme of the Glubble Family Edition, but given the wealth of new features, a new theme was probably necessary to accommodate all the new functions.

Discuss

A new personal web scout called Yotify just launched into public beta today. This service lets you track anything on the internet and only reports back when it has results for you to review. Your Yotify "scouts," as the searches are called, can be shared with others via email, Facebook, FriendFeed, or even directly with the other Yotify members you befriend on the site. But don't worry, this isn't yet another social network designed to waste more of your time. Instead, it's just the opposite: Yotify utilizes the power of the social web to save you time and give you your life back...you know, the one away from the computer?

What You Can Do With Yotify

Yotify lets you track any number of things from hotel room rates to sports scores or even the latest videos on YouTube. The list of things you can track is practically endless. To help you find the scout you need, the different types are organized into broad categories which include shopping, fun, travel, classifieds, and news and blogs.

Saving Money

When it comes to product searches, Yotify is very smart. It doesn't just look at keywords, but also lets you know what the current best price is and then lets you select a checkbox to have the service alert you if the price drops below a certain point. You can also optionally check to be alerted when there are new product reviews available. The shopping section features scouts for common searches like digital cameras and laptops, but the shortcuts section lets you create more specific searches for a keyword, like a product ID or model number.

Staying Informed

The News and Blogs section lets you search a handful of sites, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The Huffington Post among others, but most people won't be satisfied with the small selection provided and will need to turn to the shortcuts section instead. From here, you can track any site's RSS feed, or for sites without RSS, you can search the blog itself just by entering its URL. You can also track changes to search results as well as track vanity search results for your name.

The shortcuts section includes a few other useful scouts, too, including one which lets you track a profile on LinkedIn, another to track local events (provided by Eventful), one for eBay auctions, and even one that tracks your FriendFeed.

Asking For Help

The social aspect of Yotify comes into play under the "Ask Friends" section. Here, you can share your scouts on Facebook and FriendFeed and get responses. Using either option will post your query directly to those social networks and when people reply you'll be informed via email. If you want to share a scout with select friends only, that can be done under the "Edit Scout" section where you can enter in individual email addresses instead. You can also share the scout with your friends on Yotify.

How It Compares

In a lot of ways, Yotify is reminiscent of the newly launched Alerts.com, a service which differentiates itself by letting you receive updates via SMS, email, voice, or IM. In a lot of ways, those various contact options from Alerts.com makes that service the more useful of the two, especially since a lot of our information overload today begins with email, which is currently the only way to receive Yotify updates. However, Yotify's options for sharing your scouts with friends give it a unique twist as do the various options for fine-tuning your searches.

Still, we definitely like the new direction Yotify is going with their service. Instead of adding to our social media burden by creating yet another place to "hang out" online, they're using the network of connections we've already built to make their service more useful to us. Our lives are busy enough, so we hope this is the start of a new trend of smart social apps.

Discuss

Part 1: Will Barcodes Bridge The Gap Between Reality And The Net?

One of the promises of the mobile web was the possibility of being able to integrate the internet with the real world. One of the ways to accomplish this task is through the use of barcodes. The idea is that you take a picture of the barcode with your camera phone and you're then delivered to a mobile web site. This could effectively make anything - whether a poster, an ad, or an object - a virtual part of the world wide web. Although this technology has been available for years, it's only now with the birth of the smartphone, or more precisely, the next-gen smartphone, that the potential for this type of integration may finally be realized.

The Real Smartphones Have Arrived

Smartphones have been around for years, but even though every business worker had a Blackberry glued to their hip, it wasn't until the iPhone that the true potential of smartphones was realized. These are no longer phones, but tiny, portable computers we fill with our favorite applications. The iPhone paved the way for the next generation of these "computer phones," but it isn't your only choice - Google has now entered the game. Yesterday, we saw the launch of the iPhone's first competitor, the T-Mobile G1. Around the corner both RIM and Windows Mobile are preparing their new phones and OS's, too.

Now that we have new, usable, app-friendly, and yes, downright fun, mini computers in our pockets, will we began to interact with the real world in different ways? There is that possibility. And one of (supposed) future trends for the mobile web is the scanning of barcodes to interact with real-world objects.

Failures and New Attempts

In 2000, an internet technology startup, Digital Convergence, saw their :CueCat barcodes appear in newspapers and magazines all over the U.S. Unfortunately, this company required a separate piece of hardware in order to read the barcodes, so, as you may have gathered, the technology didn't quite take off as no one wanted to carry around yet another device for the sole purpose of scanning ads.

Then, at the beginning of this year, Google attempted to revitalize the barcode again. This time, through their Print Ads service. Advertisers can choose to include barcodes that will appear in newspapers and are readable with any camera phone. The Print Ad publisher network from Google provides access to 800 newspapers, representing nearly 70% of all U.S. paid circulation. Although thousands of advertisers have Google Print Ads, the barcodes themselves haven't hit mainstream usage yet. When asked about conversion rates for barcode "clickthoughs" or the percentage of advertisers using and renewing this service, Google won't disclose any details. If the program were a raging success, there's no doubt that those numbers would be happily shared as proof of the technology's potential.

But we can't blame Google for wanting to keep quiet about the barcodes and their lack of adoption. This is still very much an emerging technology where success is largely unproven. And in our unstable economy, advertisers may be hesitant to use such a risky and unproven option for their ads.

Newspapers May Be The Wrong Medium

It's possible that the failure of the barcode to gain traction could be simply a case of marketing to the wrong demographic. Let's be honest, the people who still take a daily newspaper instead of getting their news via the TV or web aren't, in general, likely to be the most cutting-edge technology enthusiasts. So, the question remains: how can you get the attention of hippest web users when your scannable barcodes are on paper, not screens? And once you have early adopter involvement, how can this technology go mainstream?

In part two of this post, continued tomorrow, we'll look at a company that thinks they may have that answer...stay tuned.

Discuss

Fifteen percent ownership of Russian email, news and blog portal Mail.ru was purchased this summer for $300 million, according to new reports today from Russian journalists citing sources close to the deal. That puts the full value of the company at a whopping $2 billion, 30% more than Google paid for YouTube.

The shares were bought by internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, which now controls 50.6% of Mail.ru. You can see a clumsily Google-translated version of the site's "blogs" section here.

According to the Quintura blog, the site is the most popular web property in Russia with 14.7 million monthly visitors. Search engine Quintura provides the most exhaustive English language coverage of the internet industry in Russia on its blog. [disclosure: Quintura is a RWW sponsor]

Context

Traffic analysts Quantcast estimate the site sees almost one million visitors each month from the US. For context, Facebook says it sees 100 million unique visitors per month from around the world.

Another 32% of Mail.ru is owned by South African conglomerate Naspers, the same company that we reported acquired African social media aggregator Afrigator earlier this month. Naspers says that Mail.ru generated $56 million in revenue last year, meaning presumably that it's either growing revenues quickly and/or is now drastically over-valued. 40X annual revenue is the kind of valuation that people make fun of Silicon Valley for.

The moral of the story here is that there is huge internet activity all around the world and not just in Silicon Valley. Many of our international readers are fully aware of that but even we need occasional comments or multi-billion dollar valuations in order to remember.

Discuss

Google's search advertising is the best cash cow ever invented for the Internet. None of the well funded alternative search engine contenders are able to put a dent into that dominance. But all of Google's other experimentation, all that frenzied innovation from their assembled brains trust, seems to be hitting headwinds. A tiny Indian company called Zoho is giving them a run for their money in Web Office and the latest report indicates that Knol is not even making a dent into Wikipedia. YouTube monetization is also hitting hurdles. We look at why all of this should matter to Google.

Rounding Errors and Confidence

All these experiments are mere rounding errors in Google's financial results. So why does it matter? Confidence matters to Google. More importantly, the fear of Google matters. It is important to them that every initiative has the early adopters jumping on board and declaring the space that Google has just entered to be "game over" for the existing players. Then VCs won't back anybody in that space.

This game worked for Microsoft for decades. But the market is bigger and savvier today and the Internet just looks too darned big for any single firm to dominate.

The Bigger Game - Creating More Content for Search

One explanation for Google's almost anarchic experimentation is that revenue from those products don't matter. They just want more "search fodder" to feed their cash cow. That makes sense. Zoho is committed to being ad free, as is Wikipedia. They have different reasons for being ad free, but that is not what matters.

If Google doesn't dominate web office, they will only be offering advertising on those who cannot afford to pay Zoho their really low price - which sounds like advertising to the sub, sub prime market. If Knol cannot get content up to Wikipedia standards, advertisers will have to associate with sub, sub prime content.

That does not look like the strategy of a winner.

What About Chrome?

Chrome showed Google's brand power in the market. A pretty geeky story (better performance and sandbox security for plug-ins) got tremendous traction in the media and prompted people who had never even made the jump from Explorer to Firefox to look at Chrome.

But it is very hard to see any strategic advantage for Google in splintering the browser market even further. Surely their interest lies in making sure Firefox gains against Explorer? Why not simply continue helping Mozilla?

This looks like an engineering project (yes, a very cool engineering project) that got out to market with a "oh, well, why not, seems a shame to throw it away" rationale.

Has Boredom Become an Issue Inside the Googleplex?

It is almost as if Google is bored. The cash just keeps rolling in. How do they exercise those amazing minds? This is not an uncommon problem. My first job was with a small publishing company in London that had one amazing cash cow and lots of "loss leaders". I naively asked one of the owners why he did this, why not just have the cash cow? He thought for a while and said "well, what would I do every day?"

YouTube, Now That's a Biggie, Right?

Well yes, it is the dominant online video sharing site. However as an advertising business YouTube still has big problems and may still be losing money. At Web 2.0 I asked many people "how would you monetize YouTube?" and a surprising number came up with the solution of getting people to pay to upload. It sounds plausible, small amounts from millions of uploads might add up. But that is totally contrary to Google's mantra of free content funded by advertising and it would allow a "free to upload" competitor to potentially disrupt the market.

Is The Sum Bigger Than the Parts?

Google looks increasingly like a giant private equity firm with lots of unrelated businesses betting on one making it big.

About one year ago, an internal document by Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, said that Yahoo was spreading its resources too thinly, like peanut butter on a slice of bread.

Is Google doing the same? Albeit with a cash cow that is massively better than Yahoo's?

What do you think? Is Google spreading itself too thin?

Discuss

The New York Times announced today that it will syndicate ReadWriteWeb content, as part of a re-designed Technology section on its website. Over the coming weeks you will see ReadWriteWeb content incorporated into the Technology section front.

This is great news for us, because it brings our brand of web technology news, reviews and analysis to a much wider audience. It also means that the innovative and often little known startups we write about daily get a chance to be seen in a mainstream publication. The New York Times has a reputation for quality and in-depth journalism, attributes that we strive for on ReadWriteWeb - so we're excited about this partnership.

This is also further vindication that blogs are increasingly being accepted as mainstream news and analysis providers. Indeed the NYT is beefing up its own tech blog, Bits - it's being "more prominently displayed, highlighting its role as the main spot to find breaking tech news and analysis on NYTimes.com."

Along with ReadWriteWeb, The New York Times will also syndicate content from our friends at VentureBeat and GigaOm. The New York Times re-design is now live, although syndicated content won't go live until October.

Andy Plesser from Beet.TV had the scoop on this story, along with a video interview with Vindu Goel, deputy technology editor at The New York Times.

I want to especially thank Bernard Lunn, ReadWriteWeb's Business Development Manager, for getting this deal. We at ReadWriteWeb are proud to have our growing brand associated with the prestigious New York Times - maybe now our families and friends will understand what we do for a living ;-)

Discuss

Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform Wordpress, has acquired IntenseDebate, a blog commenting plugin that works on almost every blogging platform. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. This is the third major acquisition for Automattic after buying Gravatar in 2007 and BuddyPress in early 2008. Automattic promises that IntenseDebate will remain platform agnostic, just like Aksimet, Automattic's comment spam blocker.

More Than Just Comments

It is noteworthy that IntenseDebate's infrastructure goes far beyond being a simple commenting system. The service also includes profiles for commenters and spam control, which should integrate very well with Wordpress' own products.

A few of us here at RWW have used IntenseDebate in the past. Even though we liked the service overall, we found the reply by email function a bit lacking and undependable at times. Also, the plugin does not degrade well when commenting on a mobile device, though this is a typical problem with commenting plugins.

One feature we really like about IntenseDebate is that it supports OpenID, even though we called the actual integration "a bit clumsy" in an earlier review. IntenseDebate also stands out because it allows you to easily switch away from the service whenever you want to. You can just export your data and import it back into your native blogging software's comments database.

What About the Competition?

IntenseDebate's direct competitors include JS-Kit, SezWho, and Disqus, all of which have a very similar feature set. It will be interesting to see how these companies react to this news, especially because Automattic has also announced that WordPress 2.7 will implement some of IntenseDebate's features, including reply by email and threaded comments. Automattic's WordPress.com already hosts millions of blogs, and integrating IntenseDebate there might just make it the de facto standard for blog comments.

Hat tip to VentureBeat for alerting us to this news.

Discuss

I’ve been catching up - since returning from Europe and one of the biggest things that happened while I was away was the launch of Y! OS.  There’s a great interview putting it all into perspective at theSocialWeb.tv with Cody Simms, the marketing manager of Y! OS at Yahoo.

One of the things that Chris Messina said which really resonates is that it’s time for vendors to show the benefits of being open.

We (as users) complain allot and make demands (as we should) but only until vendors (like Yahoo, Amazon, Google, etc.) can show that being open not only satisfies user’s demands, but it also can have bottom line ramifications, prop up a brand and give vendor’s the ablity to participate in our ‘open mesh’ of the future.

John McCrea also brings up that by utilizing open technologies developers can bring their products to market faster, standing on the shoulders of others by propagating their apps and services with user’s social graphs - in a timely manner.  

How coolio is it that a generation of social prodfucts can now socialize - faster!

This is key key stuff folks.  The open web goes mainstream!

Thank you Yahoo - for doing the right thing!

And I can’t wait to hear more about OpenSocial templates!

Today, Google, T-Mobile, and HTC came together to introduce the first phone running the Google mobile OS, Android, at a press conference held this morning in New York City. The overall message was one that focused on openness. But will the future of the mobile internet be driven by open platforms? That's what Google is betting on with Android, but more importantly, it's what T-Mobile is hoping will stop the flood of customers leaving their service for AT&T;'s iPhone. To entice customers away from the iPhone, we now have the G1, a slick alternative with a touchscreen and an app store of its own. The companies want you to believe the G1 is just as good, if not better, thanks to the real QWERTY keyboard and the open nature of the Google OS. Now that we have all the facts, are you convinced?

Officials from all three companies took turns introducing various aspects about the new phone, now officially being called the "T-Mobile G1 With Google." Sergey Brin and Larry Page from Google even made a surprise appearance to talk about Android's importance. After some initial introductions and setup, they showed the phone and its features in a promotional video. What we learned from that video is listed below:

Features Demoed In The Promo Video:

• Touchscreen - You can swipe across the screen, use a long press to access more features, drag-and-drop
• Music - one-click ordering from Amazon confirmed
• Music player is built in - one long press lets you access more features, like song options
• Gtalk IM included
• Address book can take you right into Google Maps
• Google Maps: Directions/Traffic View/Street View; can do panning in Street View thanks to the touch screen
• In "Compass Mode" the scene moves as you do
• In the web browser, there are onscreen controls to zoom in
• You can open multiple web pages in Google's browser
• There's a search button on keyboard
• A long press lets you share a link (URL) from within the web browser
• For apps, there's the Android Market, complete with user ratings and OTA downloads
• Pacman!

Q&A From The Press

Q: Status of T-Mobile's 3G network?
A: Will be in 22 markets by commercial launch data (October 22nd) and by mid-November it will be in 27 markets

Q: Will the phone be available in Europe?
A: There are 30 million U.S. customers and 100 million customers in the European market, so yes, it will come to Europe. It will be in the UK in early November and will be across Europe by 1st Quarter, 2009

Q: Can you use the phone as tethered modem?
A: NO

Q: Can you buy just a data plan only?
A: NO

Q: Can you view office documents?
A: You can read Word, PDF, and Excel docs

Q: Will it work with Microsoft Exchange?
A: There is no Exchange compatibility, but this is an excellent opportunity for a 3rd party developer.

Q: Can the phone be unlocked and used on other networks?
A: No, the phone is SIM-locked

Q: Is email push?
A: Gmail is push/IMAP supported

Q: Will there be a desktop app?
A: NO

Q: Does the phone work over Wi-Fi?
A: Yes

Q: What's the marketing plan?
A: Google and T-Mobile are working together to produce both TV and in-channel marketing which will debut in October. It will be the biggest campaign ever for a mobile device.

Q: Is the browser Chrome?
A: No, it is Web-Kit, which is "Chrome-like"

Q: Who's the target demographic?
A: The phone has mass appeal, there's something for everyone, but it's more of a consumer device.

Q: Will it work with iTunes?
A: It supports standard music formats like AAC, WMA, MP3, but not anything wrapped in DRM.

Pricing and Availability

The phone is less expensive than the iPhone! It's only $179.

Existing T-Mobile customers can order online on a micro-site and have shipped to their homes. October 22nd is the commercial launch date when it will be available in stores. There will be 2 plans. One is $25 for unlimited web and some messaging; the other is $35 for unlimited web and unlimited messaging. (In addition to whatever voice plan is selected).

The Open Platform

From the Google blog post about Android, we learn that there's now a new version of the SDK: Android 1.0 SDK R1. With this SDK, Android developers can tap into the hardware and software capabilities of the device, allowing them the ability to "develop more freely," Google says. This is just the opposite of what Apple allows with iPhone, a device so locked down there's not even a copy-and-paste function.

Developers will be able to distribute their apps through the Android Store, a place that will deliver the apps over-the-air to the handset, but where developers won't face the same kind of restrictions as they do with Apple. There won't be Android apps being blocked, pulled, or killed, from what it sounds like. And thanks to the Android Developer Challenge, there are already more than 1,700 applications available for the phone as of now.

Today's launch of Android on T-Mobile is only the beginning. By the end of the year, the Open Handset Alliance will open source the entire Android platform, which will allow Android to run on any wireless carrier or handset.

Note: Stay tuned. We'll update this post with some more video and images shortly.

See more Android images in the slideshow below:

New Android Videos:

Promo Video:

Discuss

While it has great potential, the Semantic Web has failed to live up to its promises so far. Part of the problem, as Thomson Reuters sees it, is that developers will not add a lot of semantic features to their products until publishers start publishing more semantic data. Reuters' OpenCalais represents one way around this problem. But starting today, Reuters' newest project SemanticProxy will give developers an easier way to extract semantic data from any web site.

Even though SemanticProxy is geared towards developers, Reuters has created a demo site that you can try out on the web by just copying and pasting the URL of any web page into a simple form. We tested it with articles on CNN, Wikipedia, and a number of blogs, and it always returned a highly relevant set of results (as long as the page was not excessively long). The service is optimized for performance on 30 of the world's largest news sites, but it also works just as well for other sites.

For a news story, for example, SemanticProxy will identify politicians, cities, countries, etc. that are mentioned in the article. Once parsed, the service returns the semantic metadata of the page in three possible formats: RDF, MicroFormats, or standard HTML.

As the name implies, SemanticProxy acts as a proxy and aggressively caches all its data, which should make it easy for a developer to scale a project that relies on this service.

Catalyst

SemanticProxy is part of Reuters' attempt to jump-start the semantic web. As Tom Tague, the leader of the Calais initiative at Reuters, points out, SemanticProxy can hopefully act as a catalyst and get more developers to look at semantic data, which, in return, will give more developers a reason to publish this data themselves.

Disclosure: Calais is a RWW sponsor

Discuss

From Medialets, the company that was first to launch with an ad platform that was like "doubeclick for iPhone apps," has just announced a new version of their analytics tool for mobile apps. Previously available only to iPhone developers, the company is now bringing their analytics program to Android developers, too.

Now, no matter what next-gen platform you want to develop for, iPhone, Android, or "whatever comes next," says the company, you can stay on top of your business with one easy-to-use tool.

Mobile Apps Are Making Money

Apple may be monkeying around with some developers and restricting certain highly anticipated apps from inclusion in their store, but that's not going to stop the overall land rush to develop for the iPhone. Why? Success stories like that of Trism, a popular puzzle game that raked in $250K over the course of two months, prove there is potential for huge success on this platform. It's nothing like the mobile market has ever seen.

And today, we receive yet another next-generation platform designed to compete with iPhone: Google's Android, a mobile OS with applications of its own. Even before this platform became publicly available, Google had developers competing to win cash prizes by building the most promising apps for the upcoming OS. With winning prize amounts in the range of $100,000 - $275,000, these were "quit-your-day-job" numbers.

If Building Mobile Apps Is Big Business, Then We Need Big Business Tools

When someone gives up months of their time to build an application or makes the decision to build a business around an application, there's a real need for tools that can help measure an app's success (or, perhaps, the lack thereof). What developers need is a way to track all the information about their application - from downloads to daily users as well as historical changes.

Did everyone download the application right away but never really used it more than a few times? How many people installed the latest update? Are ads generating any revenue? How do I compare to my competitors? Is my app doing better on iPhone or Android?These are the types of questions a developer needs to know the answers to. Once they have answers, they can then make informed business decisions like whether they should add more employees, adjust app prices, etc.

Looking at the screenshot below, you can see the types of answers the Medialets analytics program provides. Active users, average daily users, sessions, average sessions, ad revenue, app store ranking, metrics, historical changes, and much more are easily visible in the program's well-designed UI.

In addition to those basic metrics, developers can also gain insight as to how users interact with the application itself. This is done via custom app events, which are basically small triggers written into the application itself. They can be anything about the application that a developer would want to track; for example: how many people beat the first level of a game? How many people clicked the link that provides the directions in the location-aware app? These triggers let developers receive the kind of feedback that console game developers would only get after hours on end of monitoring focus group users as they interact with a game.

Why Medialets?

Medialets isn't the only company out there that can help iPhone developers analyze and monetize their applications. However, they're already five to six times bigger than their nearest competitor, Pinch Media, having managed to sign up around 200 developers within their first sixty days. Those developers are building some of the top-rated applications out there, too.

But size alone is not the key difference between Medialets and Pinch Media (or others like them). The key difference is in their focus. Where those other companies are iPhone-only, Medialets is building tools for iPhone, Android, and whatever platform comes next. For today's app developers who don't want to be tied to just one mobile OS, they can now choose to have the same consistent tool set available no matter where their applications are installed.

Developers can sign up for the beta of this new analytics program at http://www.medialets.com/android.

Discuss

This week we're looking at how religious organizations are using Web technology. Yesterday we reviewed LifeChurch.tv, an innovative Christian website. Today we check out what the Shalom Hartman Institute, from Jerusalem in Israel, is doing on the Web. Alan Abbey, the Website Manager of Shalom Hartman Institute, told us about his site in the comments to our previous post.

Hartman, wrote Abbey, is "a wide-ranging Jewish educational and leadership training institute". The Institute trains and ordains rabbis and runs religious high schools for boys and girls in Jerusalem, among other things.

Abbey told us that he has done "a significant amount of research into the Jewish world's usage of Web 2.0 features". And it is clear from Abbey's presence on the site that he is working hard at putting that Web theory into practice.

Features

Alan Abbey listed the following Web initiatives for his organization:

• Weekly postings of original, Op-Ed length essays by the leaders and scholars on topics of interest to the Jewish/Israeli worlds. "We include "talkbacks" (reader comments) on our articles, some of which draw large responses", said Abbey.
• Educational material, including complete course syllabuses.
• Stream and host video lectures from the scholars and leaders, both onsite and offsite. Abbey said that they're using "Blip.tv for full-length videos, YouTube for short ones (we were named 2nd most-viewed Israeli non-profit on YouTube), and Jewish video sites Yideoz.com and JewTube.com for additional distribution (although both sites have their technical issues)."
• Video-enabled distance learning to rabbis, teachers and community leaders in North America. Abbey told us that they are "transitioning this fall to online video via Ustream.tv and/or Mogulus.com." As a matter of interest, LifeChurch.tv also uses Mogulus.
• A blog running on wordpress.com, "to allow us to use some Hebrew, to enhance search, and to give a less formal view of our activities." Abbey said that they're also building sites for some of their leading individuals.
• Hartman is developing an iTunes podcast, both audio and video versions.
• Abbey says that they are "working on enhancing the Wikipedia entries others have created."
• The Institute is developing a Facebook strategy. As of now, Abbey uses his own Facebook page to promote the Institute's content and videos. He's also created a Facebook group for a group of North American rabbis studying with them. "I regularly place our material on related Jewish/Israeli FB groups", said Abbey, "as well as promote through Twitter." He noted that several of their groups use Google or Yahoo groups too, which he wants to formalize some more.

One of the challenges that Abbey notes, is getting their users to participate in social networking on the Web. Abbey puts this down to their audience being "older than the standard online audience", but he thinks they are "slowly making headway."

Analysis

As with LifeChurch.tv, Hartman is making particularly good use of online video. Whereas an apparently well-funded LifeChurch effectively built their own online tv service, Hartman makes use of Blip.tv and YouTube and other third party providers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, indeed it's often a good move because you can tap into existing communities. Alan Abbey wrote in a recent post that "more than 25,000 people have viewed Hartman Institute videos since we began posting them on the Web, and that's not counting the thousands who have seen them on our website's Digital Lectures channel".

Overall Hartman's web presence makes good use of current trends such as online video, RSS and blogging. They are making progress with other trends, such as social networking and online education. It has to be noted that the web design is relatively no-frills, but that can be gradually worked on over time.

It's pleasing to see the Op-Eds sometimes attracting large comments. This indicates that the move towards individual sites for leaders will pay off in the long run, provided those sites are more like blogs than static websites. Similarly, we encourage Hartman to continue to explore ways to entice their users and students to participate on the site - whether it be in writing, video, photos, or any other creative online activity.

Finally, with Alan Abbey leading Hartman's web efforts, the Institute has a passionate web advocate. You really can't ask for more in any organization! Well done Alan and keep up the great work.

In the comments, we'd love to find out about other religious organizations and the web activities they're doing. Don't be shy about promoting your own sites, or those you know of in your particular faith.

Discuss

Last week, we covered how Zoho is defying conventional wisdom in the Web Office market. But is being unconventional all it takes for a bootstrapped start-up to take on both Microsoft and Google, in head to head evaluations by giant enterprises such as GE? Far from it. Whenever you see a surprising 'overnight sensation', you will usually find years of hard work and careful execution.

In Part 2 of this story, we reveal some of Zoho's cookbook.

Jason Fried's Advice - Follow the Chefs

At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, Jason Fried of 37 Signals, another company that has done well by defying conventional wisdom, advised entrepreneurs to "follow the chefs". He meant that great Chefs give away their recipes. That just makes you want to come to their restaurants even more. Particularly if the recipe looks complex. And Zoho's looks complex.

So I hope they won't mind me giving out the recipe they revealed when I met with Raju Vegesna, one of their founders, last week. I noted 3 major ingredients:

1. New ways of competing for talent

2. A related cash cow business

3. Pragmatic, non dogmatic approach to winning business

New Ways of Competing for Talent

If I had to select one "secret sauce" in Zoho's recipe, it would be how they recruit. Zoho (with parent company, Adventnet) has 700 developers. All the developers are in India, specifically Chennai.

India is a ridiculously competitive market for developer talent currently. I see parallels with Silicon Valley in 1999, when average developers got inflated expectations and inflated paychecks. Attrition is problem # 1.

Developers see their career path as managing other developers. Your mojo is based on how many people you manage. Managing 1,000 makes you ten times better than managing 100 and so on. This is the reverse of America where a developer will drop custom service work as soon as it is possible to work on a product.

This is a terrible environment for a product company to compete for talent. How does Zoho compete for talent in this market?

1. Hire from school. Yes, school, not college. So they don't compete to hire from final year of College or in the even more hot market of developers with a few years experience. Great code is typically written by young people - which explains a lot of the "college drop out makes $ billions" stories in America.

2. Pay one year of college fees. This is a salary, not a loan, with no strings attached. According to Raju, 90% join Zoho at the end of that year, but there is no obligation. This gives Zoho an edge with the brightest at school as they have an unusual offer.

Zoho's philosophy is that 4 years college when you are young is not right for many people. Better to have life-long learning but get real world experience early and get some cash while you are at it. This gets a big "yes" from parents paying college fees!

Zoho have their own Zoho University. This is not uncommon for big employers in India. It is a necessary complement to hiring early.

Related cash cow

Zoho has a related cash cow business that enable them to fund Zoho. This is not unlike Google. Microsoft's problem is that their cash cow - Office - is the one that both Google and Zoho are going after. That gives them one nasty Innovator's Dilemma.

Zoho's initial cash cow business is selling network management tools. This has been profitable for 12 years. Zoho itself is due to be profitable next year.

The network management tools business is doing the same as Zoho - products at least as good as the competition for a fraction of the price. This business also gives Zoho a capability for running large data centers, which is a core competency for a SaaS business.

Pragmatic, Non Dogmatic Approach to Winning Business

By all accounts, Zoho won GE's business in head to head competition with Google. GE wanted to cut cost and enable collaboration, which meant Microsoft was less of a contender. Google was the obvious "you never got fired for choosing" winner. Why did GE choose Zoho? There are two likely reasons:

1. Zoho allowed GE to run the software in their own data centers. GE has the economies of scale to run their own data centers and clearly prize the control that this enables. Zoho specified the hardware, but GE bought it and deployed it. Is a "Zoho Appliance" far behind?

2. Visual Basic Scripts in Spreadsheets. Current tech orthodoxy frowns on VB, but if you have thousands of existing Excel spreadsheets running VB that would be a show-stopper.

Discuss

There's more user unrest in the community of popular social news site Digg, after the all-time number 3 ranked user Zaibatsu, a.k.a. Reg Saddler, was banned for alleged multiple violations of the Digg Terms of Use. That decision is "final and irreversible", according to an email Saddler got from Digg today. JD Rucker of Social News Watch interviewed Saddler to discuss the ban - we have the exclusive audio below.

ReadWriteWeb also contacted Digg to find out their side of the story - we have Digg's response below too.

So why was Saddler banned? It wasn't associated with the recent bannings of other digg users over using Greasemonkey scripts. Rather the ban was handed down after Saddler submitted a website which was, in the words of an email Saddler received from Digg, "spam and a solicitation of products and/or services".

Digg's Response

We sought a response from Digg on the banning, since Zaibatsu was a high ranking user who had seemingly put in a lot of effort and work into the community.

Digg's Sr. Director of Marketing & Communications, Beth Murphy, responded that "this user has been banned for multiple violations of the Digg Terms of Use over period of time and not just a single incidence."

So Digg's position is clearly that Zaibatsu has a history of TOS violations, not just the latest one.

What Got Zaibatsu Kicked Out

We don't know the previous violations, and Digg wouldn't discuss details because they told us they're "unable to comment on the specifics of this or any case given that we try to protect the privacy of our users".

Nevertheless, let's look at what the final straw regarding Zaibatsu was. The digg submissions in question, and there were two of them, were photos of a female digger. Although these submissions are no longer on Digg, the following titles give you a good idea of the content:

http://digg.com/celebrity/She_s_Hot_and_a_Digger_Nuf_Said_PIC
http://digg.com/people/A_Cute_Female_Digger_I_Know_A_Few_Of_Them_But_Wow_PIC

After learning of his ban after those submissions, Saddler told Digg that "I didn't know that a picture of a female digger was against the TOS. I didn't even know that she was selling something on the site."

In the audio below, Saddler says that he initially linked to just pictures, but consequently the site owner re-directed the pictures to "some sales crap".

JD Rucker told us that the site in question, Jackiesjungle, "has been submitted to Digg before - 133 times. All of the previous submissions have come from the site owner, Jackie Castellanos, and her boyfriend, Isaiah Irizarry."

But Rucker claims that those two people have not been banned, so he wonders whether Zaibatsu is being singled out?

Digg Community Reaction

It's difficult to know what the wider Digg community thinks, but Zaibatsu is friends with a lot of other diggers and those diggers obviously want to see him back.

A user named Bianconeri4ever said:

"It's a thorny issue to be honest. In a perfect world the whole issue would have been resolved between Digg and Zaibatsu privately. It's just the timing of the ban was very unfortunate. In the light of the 80+ users banned, unbanning Zaibatsu would put Digg in a very bad light, that there are some users who are above the law, even if the banning of the 80 and the banning of Zaibatsu are two separate issues. It's a real shame because Zaibatsu's is a great guy, he is very helpful with beginners and loves the Digg community."

Another prominent digger, MrBabyMan a.k.a. Andrew Sorcini (by most accounts the number 1 ranked digger of all-time), was cautious in his response. He's been under pressure from other members of the Digg community all year - a story we told you about back in May. In any case Sorcini had this to say regarding Zaibatsu's predicament:

"A mistake was made, but it wasn't Reg's intention to link to a marketing site. Anyone who knows Reg knows that. It's unfortunate that he's not part of the Digg community and hopefully his state of banning will be brief and he'll be reinstated soon."

You Decide...

We get the feeling that there is more to this story than we have managed to unearth. Clearly Digg feels that Zaibatsu has violated their terms multiple times and it appears they've simply had enough. But Zaibatsu, a.k.a Reg Saddler, is vigorously defending himself in the latest case - and he has a fair amount of support from JD Rucker and other Digg users.

Here is the audio discussion between JD Rucker and Reg Saddler, which gives you more background from Saddler's point of view:

Download MP3

What do you think? Is Digg within their right to ban a user under these circumstances, or should a top digger who has put so much time and effort into the community be given another chance? Or perhaps it's too late - Saddler says in the audio that he's off to Digg competitor Mixx!

UPDATE: Zaibatsu writes in a comment here: "Everything changes now. I'm cashing in. Now that I am not hampered by the Digg TOS, I am free to build the company that has been inside me all along."

Discuss

YouTube is a great source of live music performances and other audio treasures. Music companies get upset that their tunes are used without permission in lip sync and other types of videos on the site. Where they see conflict, others see opportunity.

We've seen a number of new services lately that focus on the audio in YouTube videos, but the most enjoyable one so far is Mixtube - a mixtape maker for YouTube audio. It's based on the metaphor and interface of the now "sleeping" Muxtape.

The sound quality on YouTube is often not so hot but we appreciate the opportunity to do things like set up an auto-advancing playlist of Dar Williams live performances. There's all kinds of nice little interface touches here, making it a really easy site to use.

We expect the site will be operable indefinitely, as YouTube rarely comes down on derivative services. Thanks to Andy Baio for finding this one.

Discuss

Technorati says blogging is mainstream, we think the numbers indicate otherwise.

Blog search engine and ad network Technorati released its 5th annual State of the Blogosphere report and the numbers are quite interesting. Technorati says its findings indicate that blogging is now mainstream. We're not so sure. Although reading blogs is becoming increasingly mainstream, is writing them?

Popularity of Blogging

In 2004, the first year Technorati issued a State of the Blogosphere report, the company said it was tracking 4 million blogs. By October of 2005 that number had risen to 19.6 million and between 2% and 8% of new blogs created each day were judged to be fake or spam blogs. In April of 2007 that number was up to 70 million blogs that the company had effectively indexed and today the number is up to to 133 million total blogs indexed since the company started indexing blogs. So the number nearly doubled in the last year.

Of those 133 million blogs that Technorati has indexed - guess how many of them have been posted to in the last 7 days? 1.1% of them, or 1.5 million total.

Just for context, 1.6 million people in the US have defaulted on their mortgages last year. In 2005 there were 1.6 million people around the world who could speak Esperanto. 1.6 million people went to the Minnesota State Fair last year.

Is blogging mainstream? Globally, fewer people are posting to their blogs each week than go to the Minnesota State Fair or speak Esperanto. Maybe the impact of blogging on media is comparable to the economic impact of an equivalent number of people defaulting on their mortgages, but that would be a pretty drastic statement to make.

Trying to blog (as 130 million+ people have in the past 6 years) may be somewhat mainstream, but actually blogging does not seem to be so yet.

Demographically - Is This Representative?

What's the stereotype of a blogger in mainstream media? They (we) are underemployed, marginally educated loners with tiny rabid audiences. How do the results of Technorati's survey of bloggers work out relative to that? Add disproportionately well-off and you'd hit the nail on the head.

Only 56% of bloggers in the US report that they have a full time job. 74% of them are college graduates and 51% have an annual household income of over $75,000. We're not sure how that works, but the old trope of living in mom and dad's basement doesn't seem an entirely unrealistic explanation.

The average number of monthly unique visitors reported by these bloggers? In the US it's only 18,000. That means 600 people per day. 600 people reading your thoughts each day is pretty fabulous for the vast majority of people on the planet, but as media goes it's not very mainstream. Especially if there are only a million and a half people doing it.

Blogging Appears to Be Slowing Down

This year's report finds that there are on average 900,000 blog posts created every 24 hours. In last year's report that number was 1.5 million and in 2006 it was 1.3 million. 2005's report from Technorati didn't include this number and 2004's report put it at 400,000 posts per day.

2004: 400,000 blog posts per day.
2005: ?
2006: 1.3 million blog posts per day
2007: 1.5 million blog posts per day
2008: 900,000 blog posts per day

Technorati says it has culled a large number of spam blogs out of its index this year, but it's focused extensively on spam blogs every year. The evidence seems fairly clear - blogging is slowing down.

Is Any of This Something to Be Ashamed of?

No! The fact that publishing is opening up to millions more people around the world is a beautiful thing. The fact that many of them report being well-to-do and underemployed at the same time is something to take into consideration but not a repudiation of the medium. The fact that only 1.5 million blogs around the world are updated as often as once a week does indicate that none of this has really stuck with large numbers of people, however.

Reading blogs is becoming increasingly mainstream and the line between a blog and another kind of website is growing increasingly blurred. Writing full length blog posts even as regularly as once a week is hard, though. We expect that microblogging may become more popular than blogging, if it hasn't already! From updating your status message on Facebook or MySpace, to posting 140 word updates on lunch or politics on Twitter to offering truncated public religious testimonials on a site like Gospelr (Twitter for Christians) - there are a whole lot of people already microblogging, if you will.

Our boss, RWW Founding Editor Richard MacManus, contributed this quote to the Technorati report: "The future of blogs will have arrived when you check your favorite blog for sports news in the morning, instead of your local paper." That's a whole different matter, though, than the writing of blogs becoming mainstream. Blogging may become centralized, profesionalized and increasingly scarce - just like other forms of media have, perhaps to a lesser degree.

Those Are Our Thoughts, What Are Yours?

The Technorati State of the Blogosphere is an incredible service and the data the company comes up with is very much appreciated. We hope you'll take a look at it and share some of your thoughts.

Our analysis above is centered almost entirely on the US portion of the numbers, as well. We'd love to read some thoughts from our international readers about the differences in numbers between US bloggers and those in Europe and Asia. African and Latin American bloggers and blog readers - we'd love to know how the lay of the land looks in your neck of the woods relative to these numbers as well.

We love blogs and we love blogging. Even if we don't believe that blog writing is mainstream yet, or maybe that it ever will be, we appreciate the opportunity to look at this cultural force in a quantitative way.

Discuss

We're live now in the latest episode of RWW Live, our podcast show. You can tune into the show, and interact with us via the chat, by clicking here. You can also use the Calliflower Facebook app to tune in and participate.

This week's topic is Data Portability, the ongoing campaign for open data across the Web. We have an amazing group of Data Portability leaders lined up for this call: Chris Saad (Co-founder, DataPortability.org), Daniela Barbosa (Chair, DataPortability.org), Eran Hammer-Lahav (Open Standards Evangelist, Yahoo), and Angus Logan (Technical Product Manager for Windows Live Platform, Microsoft).

When Daniela was named Chair of the Data Portability Working Group in August, we posted an introduction to the organization. It makes for good background reading, and/or you can check out the video below.

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut on Vimeo.

Before the call starts, we're interested in what questions you have for the panelists. Please leave a comment on this post and one of the RWW crew on the call (Sean, Marshall and myself) will do our best to ask your question.

UPDATE: the show is now finished, here is the audio:

Download MP3

Discuss

Microsoft Research has hired social network researcher danah boyd, probably the most high profile academic in the world focused on the emerging web and its social consequences.

Who is danah boyd? (She spells her own name with lower case letters.) You may have seen her when she hit the international spotlight for writing about the shift from MySpace to Facebook. She wrote that her research leads her to conclude that "The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other 'good' kids are now going to Facebook. ...MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, 'burnouts,' 'alternative kids,' 'art fags,' punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm."

That paper was very controversial and widely misunderstood. It also argued what many people may were thinking quietly, though often not within a context sympathetic with underprivileged youth.

None the less, that was only one of boyd's many writings on the subject of youth and social networking. Youth and social networking is a nexus point for one of the most significant cultural changes of our era and as the leading expert on the topic, boyd's work warrants the attention it gets. If Microsoft is going to be relevant to the next generation of computer users, who better to pay attention to than the leading expert on how the next generation is using social networks?

Boyd's new position will be at Microsoft Research's newest facility, in Boston, which was just opened this summer. You can read boyd's discussion of her new position in a blog post she wrote last night.

What Boyd Writes About

In addition to topics like socio-economic class and social networks, boyd also writes, for example, about early social networks like Friendster acting as "tools for scaling up social networks rooted in proximate social relations and--equally significantly--for representing this dynamic to the community in new ways."

Her recent work in general might best be described with these lines from Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life:

While particular systems may come and go, how youth engage through social network sites today provides long-lasting insights into identity formation, status negotiation, and peer-to-peer sociality...I argue that social network sites are a type of networked public with four properties that are not typically present in face-to-face public life: persistence, searchability, exact copyability, and invisible audiences. These properties fundamentally alter social dynamics, complicating the ways in which people interact. I conclude by reflecting on the social developments that have prompted youth to seek out networked publics, and considering the changing role that publics have in young people's lives.

Boyd's Fascinating Gigs

Boyd is currently a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She's also on the Board of Advisors of LiveJournal, along with Lawrence Lessig and Esther Dyson.

Previously boyd worked as a researcher at Yahoo! and did a year long internship at Google studying the ethnography of blogging at Blogger.

Now she'll join Microsoft Research New England in January. She says she'll be directing her own research, publishing frequently and doing pure, interdisciplinary science instead of focusing directly on the Microsoft bottom line. We hope that Microsoft can prioritize long term analysis and support more inspiring work by this trailblazing researcher.

Cartoon of boyd by Marc Scheff

Discuss

Spore was one of the most anticipated PC games of the year and launched to great hype. While most reviewers weren't too ecstatic about the game itself, it was Electronic Arts' attempt to stop piracy with an overly restrictive DRM scheme that got Spore a lot of its post-launch coverage. Shortly after its release, irate users started to flood Spore's Amazon page with negative reviews. Most of these users complained about the DRM scheme that only allowed the game to be registered on three computers and only allowed for one user account per license. Now, according to the BBC, Electronic Arts has given in and extended the number of possible installations and users to five.

According to Electronic Arts, less than half of one percent of users ever tried to run the game on more than three machines, so being able to play on five different machines should alleviate the DRM problem for virtually all users.

Pirates Still Don't Care

While this is probably a smart move by Electronic Arts, it is important to realize that these protests were not just triggered by the details of the DRM scheme, but by the fact that the game was DRMed to begin with. If you downloaded a pirated version of the game, you never had to think about the DRM anyway because your cracked copy was always DRM free. In the end, schemes like this do nothing to deter piracy and only punish legitimate buyers. Pirates will always find a way around these schemes anyway.

Discuss

New Dev Suite Lets LongJump Work With Other Apps

When LongJump first launched, the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) model was only just taking off. Since then, we've seen Google launch their App Engine and more services than ever are taking advantage of Amazon's EC2. Today, the Sunnyvale, California-based PaaS provider, LongJump, tries to one-up those big-name sites with the launch of their new LongJump Development Suite, a tool set that helps developers extend the power of LongJump by allowing interoperability with other systems and applications.

Using LongJump's PaaS platform, building a new application is entirely code free. Instead, LongJump offers customizable and reusable "building blocks" like objects, scripts, component extensions, business logic, data policies, and workflows, all of which can all be used to easily build what would otherwise be a complex application if coded.

While this ease-of-use made LongJump ideal for enterprise I.T. teams looking for fast and easy ways to build and deploy apps, allowing those apps to interoperate with data from other applications and systems was not possible until now.

About The LongJump Development Suite

With the new LongJump Development Suite, an I.T. department can build the app they need, then use the included visual browser-based UI for data and process modeling. Alternately, they could instead choose to hand of the integration of the app with another system or application to a developer (or team of developers). Finding a developer to work with LongJump shouldn't be an issue since the suite provided is a Java-based development environment complete with a plug-in to the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment), something that's used by 69% of Java developers today. LongJump also provides a set of service integration points using SOAP and RESTful APIs to connect to other external systems.

Why LongJump?

Unlike both Google and Amazon, the focus with LongJump is on application creation, not just the delivery. When you build on Google or Amazon, you still need to know how to build - you need to know code. LongJump is focused on letting anyone build without code. They aren't the only ones thinking this is the next big trend for the web, either. Earlier this year, for example, we covered an app called Iceberg whose aim was to allow anyone to become a developer.

Will this trend take off? For enterprise I.T. organizations, their bottom-line focus is usually money and time. If PaaS offerings like these mean custom apps can be built quickly and easily without needing to hire outside dev teams, there's a good chance for their success. However, they do have to fight with a number of already decent solutions out there. Thanks to the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 movement, there are already a slew of business applications built and ready to go. These apps might not be perfect but are often they are often "good enough," and that's proven to be a good way to get in the door of the enterprise...just ask Google Docs.

Discuss

Today, socialmedian, the social news web site which we've described as a "less noisy FriendFeed" launched a new set of features called "Replize." Now socialmedian users can track conversations on the service, much in the same way that users can track responses to a question on Twitter, all it takes is the use of @username.

Socialmedian has also announced Flickr integration which allows you to include your uploaded photos on Flickr in your news stream.

Socialmedian's New "Replize"

Today's launch of Replize on socialmedian allows users to write comments on the shared articles and include @username to address those comments to any specific user or users. The @username can also be located anywhere within the comment - not just the beginning. So for example, someone writing a comment to me would insert @sarahintampa in the comment, and socialmedian would be able to then direct that comment to me.

Comments are brought to your attention through a new "Replize" tab which allows you to quickly view all the discussions that include you. Your personal news feed will also highlight when someone includes you in a discussion. In case you aren't logged in to socialmedian at the time, you can choose to receive these replies via email as well.

Here's how it works.

1. To send a replize to any user on socialmedian, all you need to do is include @username for any username(s) anywhere in the comments field. If you click the "reply" link next to a comment the service pre-populates the other person's @username. You can include several people in a replize, e.g. @jasongoldberg @sarahintampa @joebob. The replize will be sent to all.
2. The service then highlights the replize to those users in their homepage News Feed. Users can also be notified by email whenever they have a replize.
3. Theres's also a "Replize" tab on the homepage so that users can easily view all their replize in one place, and so they can quickly see all the stories they have been included in discussions.li>

Flickr Integration

In addition to the Replize option, socialmedian has also enabled Flickr integration as of today. Any photo you upload to Flickr is now also included on socialmedian, too. To connect your Flickr to socialmedian, go to Add Something > Site > Flickr. You can choose to add all of your Flickr photos and favorites, or only those matching certain tags (keywords).

Is @username Becoming A New Standard?

The @username trend for responding to another user on a service took off with the launch of Twitter. On that microblogging, mini-conversations service, responding to another user's tweet begins with a response in the format of @username your response. The format spread to the other microblogging services and then became unofficially integrated with FriendFeed as well.

On FriendFeed, users were working around the lack of threaded discussions by using the format @username to show which user they were responding to in the comments. Eventually, the FriendFeed team picked up on the trend and allowed those comments to be piped back through Twitter. However, the users hadn't really been after Twitter integration (though we now love it), they had just adopted the format that made the most sense for responding to another user: @username.

OK, so we know that @username isn't becoming a standard in the technical sense of the word. This isn't being ratified by some organization and made official. What we're wondering is whether we'll start to see the trend take off in more services in the future now that so many people in Web 2.0 land are familiar with the format.

If so, would that a good thing? Yes, it probably would. Although initially getting people on board with this new methodology will, at first, mean a bigger learning curve for the uninitiated, having a familiar way to respond to users on social media services could make @username the next www. or username@email.com. For the new users of Web 2.0, it puts a familiar context around the unfamiliar task of interacting with others on the these "new-fangled" social services. That could then lead to easier moves to even more services in the future.

Did we just read too much into a small upgrade to socialmedian? Perhaps. But it would be great if this began the next big trend for social media sites.

Discuss

The tech and mobile industries are buzzing about the impending release of the first Google Android handset. We've been waiting since February to find out whether an official Android handset will see the light of day. But after numerous setbacks, a device that will carry Android is finally here. Better known as the HTC Dream or G1, the device is set to be available on the T-Mobile network as early as next week, priced at $199.

We'd like your help in predicting the following: Will T-mobile or AT&T; adjust their entry price point (either up or down) for the HTC Dream and the iPhone respectively in 2008? Let us know by casting your vote at RWW Predictions.

Fast Facts

• The $199 price point for both phones is only available with a contract
• Android is the first complete, open, and free mobile platform.
• HTC targets 600000 Dream handset sales this year
• Analysts predict Apple will sell 13 million iPhone units in 2008
• Google Chrome browser is confirmed to come to Android

Check out a video of the Android OS just below and be sure to read up on our top 10 picks of Android apps we hope to use.

Discuss

This week, as part of our ongoing Mainstream Web Watch series, we'll be looking into how religious groups are using Web technologies. As early adopters in the tech industry, many of us have near spiritual experiences about our favorite products - as Rob Cottingham highlighted in his RWW cartoon over the weekend! But let's look at how actual religions are deploying web technologies to spread their respective gospels.

In this post we'll look at a Christian church, LifeChurch, which is using the Web in an extensive way. In upcoming posts we'll cover other religions, such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. Note that we're going to keep a tight focus on the technology - rather than what is being preached with the technology.

The first site we're looking at was suggested by a RWW commenter on Rob's cartoon, David Mackey from IT news aggregator Informed Networker. He pointed out LifeChurch TV, a sophisticated rich media site that aims to preach Christianity over the Internet. LifeChurch.tv describes itself as a "multi-site church" that provides video coverage to "enable all of our twelve locations to be connected as one".

LifeChurch.tv is a production of the Life Church, a Christian "megachurch" that formed in 1996 in Edmond, Oklahoma. It appears that the church started its tv operations in 2001, then in April 2006 the LifeChurch.tv "Internet Campus" was launched. This provided weekly live, interactive church broadcasts over the Internet, for anyone in the world to tune into. The website also began offering "online LifeGroups" (small collaborative networks). At the same time a sub-site called LifeChurch.tv Open started, with the aim of offering free content to other churches.

Last but not least, in April 2007, LifeChurch opened a presence in SecondLife. Andrea Useem attended one of the virtual world services, but wasn't overly impressed. "I was looking forward to chatting with people in the cavernous but furnished church lobby", she wrote, "[but] unfortunately, the 15 or so people who attended the service disappeared quickly, and I found myself as I usually am in Second Life -- wandering around by myself." (thanks Marcello for the link)

Praise Be Web 2.0

The LifeChurch websites today are an impressive and well designed collection of content, tools and online video. The main Internet Campus site features a blog which has many 'web 2.0' features: a variety of RSS feeds, embedded video widgets, 'share this' links, live prayer and help options, and connections to Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Vimeo. Also the blog has a number of international translations via the Wordpress plugin Nothing2Hide - e.g. the Korean version.

Example video

The Open site also has a blog, written by the church pastors. Its most recent post at time of writing is about a new initiative called LifeShare, which Pastor Bobby Gruenewald describes as a "7-day challenge for the church to move together online with purpose." He describes how they're using the Web to connect with people:

"We're doing this at a few different levels, ranging from simple steps like tweets and internet campus e-invites to more in-depth efforts like sharing online how God is working in your life and embedding video teaching on your blog. We're connecting daily through a live video stream to talk about next steps and pray together. LifeShare is open to anyone, anywhere, so feel free to join us by signing up here."

LifeChurch's Web Apps

What's really great to see is how LifeChurch is using best-in-class web apps to create each different aspect of their online presence - Twitter for real-time communication, Wufoo to create their online forms, Blip.tv for video teaching, Mogulus for live broadcasting, and so on.

But they're also building their own apps, for example the recently announced ChurchMetrics.com, which is a web app that helps churches "track attendance, giving, salvations, and baptisms." As yet the app hasn't been launched publicly, but it sounds like a great example of web analytics applied to the real world (which on this blog means beyond tech!).

The main web app that LifeChurch has released so far is YouVersion.com, a free online Bible which presents Christian Scripture in a variety of media formats, including pictures, video, journal entries, and blog posts. The beta of this app was launched in October 2007. And yes, there is an iPhone app version!

Conclusion

Overall we come away very impressed by how LifeChurch is utilizing the Internet. It is using a variety of web apps to achieve its purpose, and creating its own as well. The church's websites and apps are visually rich and sophisticated in features.

Most importantly, the web activities of LifeChurch are bringing its message to many more people than they would've reached without an online presence. It's a great example of the mainstream web, using many of the tools and trends we've preached here on ReadWriteWeb over the years!

Tell us in the comments about other religious organizations using the Web. We're going to explore a few examples this week, from Christianity as well as other religions.

Discuss

RWW is the Premiere Media Sponsor for the Defrag Conference, happening 3-4 November in Denver Colorado. You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $200 off of the early bird price.

Highlights from Defrag this year will include a discussion about Strategic Intuition, a presentation from Esther Dyson called 'The Quantification of Everything', a discussion about whether collaboration is changing how we consume and interact with analysis, and much more.

Other topics Defrag will be exploring include:

• Enterprise 2.0
• Online Collaboration
• The Implicit Web
• Collective Intelligence
• The Semantic Web
• Mash-ups
• Social Networking in the Enterprise
• Next-level Discovery

Discuss

iPhone users tend to get pretty excited when they see a number alert right over the App Store icon. This means that an app or two has been updated and is available for downloading. This week we've seen seen numerous great updates from some apps that we love.

Here are our picks of the top 4 app updates that brought great features and more stability to our iPhones this week.

eBay

Initially, the eBay application didn't provide very much for us to do. You could see information on the items you were selling, bidding on, and place a new bid. You could also search for new auctions, but that was about as good as it got. With the latest update eBay has added the option for advanced search refinement to provide users with better search results, along with an auto-complete feature with suggestions from the most popular related queries. Sellers can now see the number of users watching their auction. eBay has also added support for international search and language support. The app's responsiveness and speed has also improved significantly. The improvements in this update come closer to eliminating the need for iPhone users to head directly to the eBay site.

Pandora

Pandora has released v1.2 of their iPhone app and we're more than impressed. We were in love with the app from the beginning, but there were some kinks and quirks that needed to be worked out. Some of these issues have been addressed in v1.2. For example, streaming quality and connection over not only the 3G network, but also the weaker EDGE has improved significantly. Pandora has graciously provided the option for high quality streaming over 3G. Now users don't have to suffer EDGE quality when on the 3G network. Users can now view past bookmarked songs and create stations from them, share them, buy them in iTunes, or delete them. Overall station editing has improved with the option to include stations in your Quickmix. All in all, the options for this great app have been given a significant boost in the latest update.

Palringo

Palringo is one of the most stable multi-IM apps available in the App Store. The latest update for Palringo provides a significant list of new features and stability fixes. New features include:

• Unread private messages now saved on exit
• Progress bars for sending/receiving voice/photos
• Reduced network usage (now using compression so that logging in over EDGE/GPRS/3G should be noticeably faster)
• Support for Y! Japan
• Support for SSL/TLS on XMPP (Jabber/GTalk)
• Spam filtering for non-Palringo services such as MSN
• Ability to disable predictive input
• Ability to set the default status to Away/Busy when leaving Palringo (while the server keeps you connected)
• Remembers your status on all services (MSN/Yahoo/etc.)
• Added russian translation

The update also includes numerous fixes for adding GTalk and XMPP accounts, international character support, more accurate French and Polish translations, sending high-resolution photos, and the "invisible" button now works. We highly recommend trying out this app if you haven't already.

Snapture

Snapture is only available for jailbroken iPhones, but is one of the most fantastic camera apps available. Snapture provides more options for taking photos with your iPhone and has replaced the default camera app for many iPhone users. The latest update for Snapture includes support for firmware 2.1 along with three new color filters modes: red, blue, and green. Snapture is available in Cydia, though not Installer. You can download the free, but basic version of Snapture or you can pony up $7.99 to get the premium version and the newest beta features first.

QuickView from Snapture Labs on Vimeo.

Discuss

Back in July Apple released a handful of tools for enterprises looking to deploy iPhones to their organization. One of the tools released was the Web Configuration Utility for Windows and Mac OS. This allows enterprises to easily create, sign and distribute configuration profiles using a web browser.

Now, Apple has released another tool to extend the functionality, allowing enterprises to access logs and install apps on iPhones as well as configure them.

iPhone Configuration Utility 1.0 for Mac OS X

The iPhone Configuration Utility is available exclusively for enterprises running Mac OS X. Enterprises can use any of the three tools to create a configuration file and email or post the file to a web site. The file is in XML format and can be installed onto the company's iPhones with the following settings pre-configured:

• Device security policies
• VPN configuration information
• Wi-Fi settings, APN settings
• Exchange account settings
• Mail settings
• Certificates that permit iPhone and iPod touch devices to work with your enterprise systems

The difference between the tools is that the iPhone Configuration Web Utilities allow enterprises to create config files while the iPhone Configuration Utility for Max OS X allows enterprises to also access logs and install apps on iPhones.

Breaking Ground in the Enterprise Market

Unfortunately, Apple is choosing to limit their reach within enterprises by only allowing the Configuration Utility to work on enterprises running Mac OS X. There is a relatively small number of enterprises running their OS when compared with those running Windows operating systems. However, we're hopeful that Apple will soon release the same functionality for enterprises running Windows. All of these tools are available for free in the Enterprise Support section of the Apple's website. For more information on integrating iPhones within your enterprise, we recommend checking out the Enterprise Deployment Guide (Third Edition)(PDF).

Discuss

There are times when I wonder if there's something wrong with the fact that I anticipate, say, the next Macworld keynote or big Google announcement more than, say, my own birthday.

But then I get distracted by a cool new web application, and the feeling goes away.

More Noise to Signal

Top Apple image: SeenyaRita

Discuss

Video services are really taking off this year! Leaders in this arena include Seesmic, 12seconds.tv, Flixwagon, and Qik. Here at ReadWriteWeb we're fans of these services and keep an eye on innovative services looking to enter this particular space. So it should come as no surprise that we thought this next service was pretty neat. If you're a fan of SmugMug, video services, or emoticons then you're going to love Smirk.

Have Fun Being Narcissistic

Smirk is the perfect narcissistic video service and a ton of fun. The service allows you to create video emoticons directly from your webcam. Moods that you can create a video for range from bummed to awesome. The service hooks into your webcam to allow you to record a video or a mood for up to 3 seconds. Don't worry, you can rerecord a video if you make a mistake. You can also share your moods with friends via a url, GIF avatar, or an embed code. You can see the moods of other Smirk users by heading to the Smirk homepage and clicking on a video. Special effects for videos will be coming soon.

Great Start With Room for Improvement

Working your way around Smirk can be a bit confusing. The entire site is displayed in Flash. Because of this, when you rerecord any moods you may have to refresh the page a few times in order to see the correct video. Once you start recording for a mood you cannot delete the recording. You only have the option to rerecord the video, which we weren't really happy with.

What would be a great feature for Smirk to implement is to allow users to swap videos for various moods. We're also hoping there will be more moods in the future or the option for a custom mood that users can record and name. I'd love to have my own "awesomesauce" video emoticon.

Funny and Easy

All in all, Smirk is a fun and easy service. Signing up for Smirk was simple and quick, requiring only a username, email address, and password. Your video moods are your profile so no extra information is necessary. However, integration with Twitter and FriendFeed in the future would be a pretty neat. This way we can keep our friends up-to-date when we change videos. If you're looking for a fun and simple video service, we highly recommend giving Smirk a shot.

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Cropping, editing, resizing, and adding text to images are various actions that bloggers and photographers constantly perform. The most popular tools used to perform these actions range from high-performance products like Adobe Photoshop to the free-for-all Paint.NET and GIMP applications. However, the start-up times for these products can waste precious seconds if you only need to perform one action. Here are three great programs for Mac and Windows to resize images on the fly.

Resizr

Resizr is an online image resizer that does just about everything any desktop image resizer could do. Upload a JPEG file from your computer or provide a link to an image on the web and Resizr will do the heavy lifting. The service automatically keeps the image proportions. All you'll have to do is pick a maximum image width. Carry the easily accessible functionality of Resizr to every webpage you visit with their Firefox extension. We promise you won't regret it.

Shrink O'Matic for Windows and Linux

Shrink O'Matic is a great AIR app for quickly resizing any image. Simply drag and drop an image into the app and Shrink O'Matic will take care of the rest. Resize your images with custom size settings or by ratio. You can also save an image as the original file type or another. Since resizing is made to be quick and easy there are some limitations with this AIR app. For example, it only handles JPEG, PNG, and GIF files. Also, there are no other editing options. This app is all about resizing and does a great job of doing so. Since it's an AIR app, it should work on both Linux and Windows OS.

ResizeIt for Mac

This tiny Mac app may be small, but it packs quite the punch. ResizeIt is the perfect app for Mac users to quickly resize images and swap file types at any given time. Unlike the drag-and-drop interface of Shrink O'Matic, you're prompted to select your image upon opening ResizeIt. ResizeIt also allows you to rotate images, which Shrink O'Matic doesn't do. However, Windows users won't have to worry about this feature due to Windows built-in image editor. You can also create presets for common actions. Essentially, ResizeIt is a great on the fly image resizer for Mac users.

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We really wish Twitter would have implemented threaded replies into the service when it first launched. This would've made it much easier to track conversations across Twitter. Instead Twitter users have to rely on a host of conversation tracking services to fill the void that Twitter has left wide open. Summize, now Twitter Search, is one of the best services for tracking conversations on Twitter. While many tools exist, only a handful correctly deliver on their promise. Tweader is the latest Twitter conversation tracker to hit the market. However, it doesn't deliver on its promise correctly either.

Using Tweader

Tweader is very simple to use. All that is required is the ID of the message in the conversation you're trying to track. You can find the ID by clicking on the time-stamp of the message. Clicking on the time-stamp will take you the page of the twitter message. At the end of the url for the message will be 9 digits. This is the ID number of the message. Tweader will grab any part of the conversation that happens before the message that you entered. You can view the conversation in three different styles: regular, chatty, leftward. These styles provide a very basic styling that changes the background image behind each message.

Broken Promises

There are a host of problems with Tweader, which is why we feel it doesn't do what its designed to do in a way that's beneficial to users. As aforementioned, the service only tracks conversations that happen before the message you enter. Providing information of the entire conversation is what we call "tracking the conversation". Isn't that the purpose of the service? Why are we only receiving what comes before and not after? Secondly, Tweader is relying heavily on what Twitter says. Instead, the service should use semantic technology to gather context clues to provide better conversation results. If it had it might have provided the correct response for this conversation:

On the other hand, Twitter Search had no problem keeping track of the same conversation:

Words of Advice

Anyone can throw together a bunch of code that pulls the information that Twitter already provides. In doing so, you're creating a half-baked product. Creating something useful requires you to go the extra mile and provide what several other services are too lazy to provide. Tweader has a great user interface and it's dead simple to use. However, none of this matters because it doesn't correctly deliver on its promise. Tweader will be useful for those that don't "tweet" much. However, if you're an @ reply fanatic, stick with Twitter Search.

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It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. This week we surveyed the leading online banking products and 10 recommended photo sharing sites. We also checked out a new 'deep web' search tool and reported on Joost's move to the browser. Our prediction question this week was about the controversial 'Twitter for enterprise' app Yammer - check out the results below. On the trends side, we looked into a report about "super influencers", gave you some suggestions for quality social media consultants, reported on the latest Tim Berners-Lee foundation, and analyzed how the economy shake-ups this week affect the tech sector. Last but not least, we bring you the latest from our new Enterprise Channel.

Web Products

Banking 2.0: Money Management Moves to The Cloud

There was a time when managing finances from your computer meant you had to use desktop software. Today, that's no longer the case. There are now a number of applications that let you do your banking in the cloud, a trend we've dubbed "banking 2.0."

These sites aren't just simplified versions of our former desktop apps, either. Instead, they offer a number of features that take advantage of their "always on" status. Forget downloading updates and typing in your transactions line-by-line, these new banking 2.0 sites can offer you better insight into your financial situation with no additional effort on your part beyond just logging in.

Store, Tag and Print: 10 Great Photo Sharing Services

The photo sharing market is growing at a steady clip and new services are released regularly. In this round-up, we compare the features and usability of 10 of our favorite photo sharing sites. Two years ago, we published a similar list. So now seems a good time for us to revisit the topic.

Some of these sites focus more on mainstream users and photo-finishing, while others stand out because of their extensive social features. Note: we've included a full table of features for the services listed (see below).

Click here for the full-size version of this table.

Sometimes Google Isn't Enough: New Research Engine Searches "Deep Web"

What do you do when you need to research something on the web? You just google it, right? Using a web search engine like Google is usually fine for casual searches, but when you need to delve deep into a subject, it just won't do. What you really need is a research engine that explores the unindexed reaches of the Deep Web. For that, there's now Infovell, "the world's research engine."

Less than 0.2% of the web is indexed and some of the most valuable information lies beyond the search results returned from traditional engines. That's where a service like Infovell can help. This new subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) engine lets you explore content found on the Deep Web.

See also: Semantics + Google = SemantiFind

Finally: Joost Now Available on the Web

This week Joost announced that all of its content is now available directly on its website and not just through its desktop client. Joost was one of the most hyped-up companies on the web when the peer-to-peer streaming video service was still in stealth mode in 2006; and beta invites were rare and coveted. However, once users actually got a look at Joost, disillusion quickly set in. Joost's video quality was very high and it had signed up a wide range of content producers, but its downfall was its reliance on a desktop client. Users were already switching to viewing video on the web and having to start up a client just to watch video was simply too inconvenient.

RWW Predictions: Funding for Yammer

This week's prediction question focused on the winner of the TechCrunch50 event: Yammer. Yammer is a communications product that duplicates the functionality of Twitter, but with an enterprise twist. We certainly have our doubts about Yammer as an enterprise tool. However, we wanted to know your prediction for the financial future of Yammer. Will Yammer raise a round of funding in 2008 or 2009. If so, how much will they take? As at time of writing, here were the results:

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Are You a Super Influencer?

A new report from Universal McCann discusses the rise of "a new breed of super influencers" that has been created by "the tools of the social media revolution." Before we all don our superhero capes, let's look more closely at the findings of the report.

Entitled When did we start trusting strangers? How the internet turned us all into influencers, the premise is that influence was moved beyond "professional and top down" (mainstream media) and into Web-enabled peer to peer influence. But despite McCann calling this a "democratisation of influence", all influencers are not equal. There are "super influencers" who are "extremely heavy users of social media, particularly in terms of content creation." Are you one of these people? Let's check out what the characteristics are...

Seven Social Media Consultants That Deliver Tangible Value

Is social media nothing but snake oil? Sometimes it can seem that way. As economies shift and trends emerge, would-be experts start popping up like weeds. Really good social media experts are a treasure - and they're not always easy to find.

In this post we highlight seven social media consultants that consistently bring tangible value to the table. These folks aren't full of hot air - they use their blogs to offer clear examples, links, tutorials and other resources you can put to use. If the goods you can see for free are so solid, that's all the more reason to investigate paying for these peoples' services. We hope this list will help you get smarter and maybe save a whole lot of money and anguish.

Tim Berners Lee Launches World Wide Web Foundation - Will it Be Effective?

Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, announced this week the formation of a new organization dedicated to studying how the web works and expanding access to the billions of people who can't get online today. The World Wide Web Foundation kicked off with $5 million in support from media funders the Knight Foundation.

Can yet another organization really make a difference? Some observers seem to be suffering from Organization Fatigue, but we're interested to see what Berners Lee can do. A group dedicated to deep study of the web and the obstacles to its growth sounds like a great idea to us. Not everyone agrees.

How Decoupled is The Innovation Economy From Rest of The Economy?

What a week of market mayhem! How odd having that as the backdrop to the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. We have been sounding alerts about the economic backdrop to our world of innovation for nearly a year. Back in February we wrote that this is not our bubble. Since then, the news from the economy has gotten worse and nobody is suggesting it will get better any time soon. Reading the papers is pretty grim (unless you stick to Sports or Arts). Yet we contend that it is not grim in the 'innovation economy'. Here's why...

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

Report: Nearly 70% of Businesses Allow Social Media Usage

A new report about Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, by Awareness, Inc., shows that employers are increasingly allowing staff to use social media applications in working hours. Awareness puts the figure at 69 percent of businesses in 2008, up from 37 percent last year.

It's the latest in a string of reports this year - from Awareness, Forrester and others - which provide data about the growth of web 2.0 in the enterprise. It'll be a $4.6 Billion industry by 2013, according to Forrester. See more of Awareness' findings in this post.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

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

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The Web 3.0 Conference is for the builders of the next generation Web: designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, business strategists, and venture capitalists. It's on October 16 - 17, 2008 in Santa Clara, CA.

Talklets, from TEXTIC, is a Text to Speech system for your web pages or applications. Its API gives you the ability to convert text to speech, dynamically, on your website.

Compete Search Analytics is a way to build and optimize search marketing campaigns.

Direct Media Exchange is a simple solution for managing ad networks that allows publishers to make more money from their websites.

Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.

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