Times Reader is an upcoming new
application from The New York Times and Microsoft, which lets users read the NY Times
electronically using advanced screen reading technology from Microsoft. The app is due to
be launched as a free beta soon - an article about it is now available at the NY Times' First Look Blog.
I got the chance to check out a prototype of Times Reader at the recent Microsoft TechEd conference in Auckland. Arik Cohen, a Program Manager on the Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly known as "Avalon") team, showed me how Times Reader works. I have screenshots taken from a screencast that Arik Cohen prepared after TechEd, but first a little detail about Times Reader - courtesy of the First Look Blog.
Times Reader was unveiled by Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Gates in Seattle on April 28th this year. It will work online or offline - in a way that is said to be "an interesting mix of the print and Web reading experience." Windows XP or the current beta version of Windows Vista is a requirement to run Times Reader, because it uses the new Windows Presentation Foundation technology. However it will eventually run on the Mac, Linux and mobile devices - once Microsoft's "Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere" initiative is up and running on those platforms.
In the demo Arik showed me on his Tablet, I saw Times Reader resize and reflow content (including images) to best fit the screen or the reader's tastes. I was impressed with the slickness and smoothness of the re-sizing - it definitely will make reading text on a screen a lot easier. Another interesting thing is that the advertising is automatically re-sized according to the dimensions of the page - which is a great feature for media companies like the Times, because they can now assure advertisers that their ads will be optimally presented in Times Reader at all times.
You can also highlight text, add a note and then email it to someone. Plus you can organize your notes/annotations by topic. These features alone will be very useful to travelers who like to take notes on what they're reading (I do this all the time).
Another very cool feature is that when you do a search, the page automatically loads relevant Times articles below the search box - like it's a custom newspaper page forming before your very eyes.
All in all, I came away from the demo very impressed by Times Reader. I can see this being used a lot by Tablet-wielding professionals.
Here are some screenshots of Times Reader in action:
Frontpage of NY Times on Times Reader
Sports article on Andre Agassi at this week's US Open
Just kidding... but now that I have your attention, here are some interesting Web Tech tidbits:
So the theme of this little mashup post (with a misleading title) is that online shopping, widgets, Web Office and structured data are beginning to churn out some interesting developments in the Web world. Watch these spaces...
I recently had the pleasure of
talking to Opera's Chief Technology Officer
Håkon Wium Lie. We spoke about Microsoft's latest web browser IE7 and Håkon
was harshly critical of it, as well as Microsoft's past history with CSS and web
standards. Bear in mind that Opera competes with IE and also that Håkon has a
distinguished career in CSS, dating back to his days in the W3C. I've posted the
discussion onto ZDNet, but
here's a summary...
Håkon told me that Microsoft is "doing a paint job on their Pinto", referring to Microsoft's renewed development and bug-fixing efforts in IE7. The Ford Pinto is a car from the 70's that has become a symbol for a 'cheap economy car' or 'cheapness'. It also has a reputation for being unsafe! Which tells you all you need to know about what Håkon thinks of IE.
Håkon's reaction to my interview with Microsoft's Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager for IE, was also scathing. Chris' position was that IE7 will increasingly support CSS standards over time. Håkon acknowledges Microsoft's current efforts in fixing bugs, but his real beef with IE7 is that it's not adding many features:
"The new functionality that they've put in, which was specified [in CSS] in the 90's, is still not there. We can't do generated content, for example. We can't do CSS tables. We can't do counters. And these are features that other browsers put in years ago."
He also doesn't think "the underlying machinery" of IE is worth all the effort. In particular their formatting engine "isn't up to speed", according to him.
There are more details of my discussion with Håkon in my ZDNet blog.
Also on the flip side, check out my review and
accompanying Image Gallery
of the latest version of IE7 - Release Candidate 1. I
concluded that IE7, with its focus on security and fixing rendering issues, is "a safe
and sound browser, with solid if unspectacular features". My guess is that Håkon
disagrees with that assessment! And I have to add that Opera has a fantastic set of
features, which I will be exploring soon.
What do you think about IE7? Is it a good enough browser for Mom and Pop? Or is it a Ford Pinto?
With
all this talk of the Web as
a platform, it's worth taking a closer look at what web apps are using Firefox as their platform. Firefox is regarded
as the best Web browser in terms of extensions - i.e. small browser add-ons which modify
or add to existing functionality. It has hundreds of add-ons, which can be downloaded from here. But which are
the best 'web 2.0' add-ons for Firefox? And I'm using the term 'web 2.0' very broadly
here, to mean any add-on that has a social Web aspect to it.
Based on Mozilla's list of recommended extensions, AdaptiveBlue's Alex Iskold and I have generated a top 10 list of Firefox Web 2.0 add-ons. As always, let us know your own favorite add-ons in the comments.
Browster
Browster is a very cool add-on that enhances your
browsing experience - for example mousing over a link gives you a preview of the website.
It enables you to speed up your browsing experience and can save a lot of clicks in the
long run. It does this by automatically pre-fetching links. It's a free add-on for both
IE and Firefox - and hopes to make a profit by putting ads in the pop-up previews.
Answers
Answers is an add-on that promises to "instantly deliver the information you are looking for". It comes from answers.com, which is a popular online dictionary and Wikipedia syndication site. Alex says this is a "perfect example of smart integration with a service in the browser". The Answers add-on works like this:
"Just point at any word, hold the Alt key and click. Upon letting go, an AnswerTip in the form of a pop-up "information bubble" appears on the screen explaining the term."
blueorganizer
The blueorganizer smart browsing extension for Firefox
is developed by Alex's company adaptiveblue. This extension drives productivity by
building smarts and semantics into the browser. The blueorganizer integrates with many
popular sites and services - including Amazon, Flickr, YouTube, iTunes, Odeo and Netflix.
It utilizes Amazon's S3 storage service, as well as being run from the Firefox browser -
so it is using the Web as a platform in many ways. SolutionWatch has
a great review of blueorganizer, if you want to find out more.
delicious
The del.icio.us extension for Firefox allows you to easily bookmark webpages in del.icio.us, from within the Firefox browser. It integrates with the Firefox toolbar and provides extra options such as right-click menu and highlight text to add notes.
Recently a new personalized start page product was announced, Webwag. In the comments to my post about Webwag, several people expressed their view that start pages are not a viable business. Personally I think start pages have plenty of opportunities to make money, despite (and sometimes because of) competition from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.
The first point to make is that - unlike the big Internet companies - start pages like Netvibes, Pageflakes and Webwag are independent. This means they can act as a platform for a wider range of businesses than the big Internet companies - whose main purpose is to be a platform for their own portal products.
In practical terms, what this means is that the small start pages can make partnerships with other small businesses and startups. A recent example of this is Pageflakes teaming up with Zixxo to offer local coupons. As the Pageflakes blog put it:
"...businesses can create and manage their coupons with Zixxo and they syndicate them out to local consumers through partner websites. All Pageflakes users can now add the Zixxo Flake to their personal page and search for local coupons, specials and discounts."
Pageflakes has also recently buddied up with Odeo Podcasts, Rapleaf Reputations, Correios Package Tracking and others.
Netvibes also has a raft of partner modules - including for eBay, Digg, Meebo and Alexa.
So we're seeing a number of these 'partnerships' happening in the start page space and it'll only increase over time. While there's nothing stopping the big companies (Google, MS, Y!) doing the same, in reality their major priority is to promote their own proprietary product range. For example, why would Google Personalized Page promote Zixxo's coupons when they have their own Google Local coupons?
Pageflakes homepage
If you consider the trend towards a world of widgets and gadgets (mini web applications), you begin to see the potential to make real money from an independent platform. As I wrote in a June article entitled The Future of Personalized Start Pages, the likes of Pageflakes and Netvibes "are building up to a near future where gadgets/widgets will be much more plentiful and functional. Basically these start pages are expecting the world of web services to blossom in the next few years, which is my expectation too."
The big Internet companies stand to gain a lot from this too - e.g. in my recent interview with GM Windows Live George Moore, he said that Windows Live is being built on their gadget architecture. Microsoft expects to see gadgets being used across many different devices. Moore said:
"The gadget architecture can actually render to any number of different technologies. It can render to DHTML, to Avalon, etc. So it would be up to the gadget author to detect if they're running on a Vista machine, if they choose."
So widgets/gadgets are ramping up to be a key part of the Web platform going forward, which all the start pages (big and small) are ideally placed to leverage. And the smaller start pages have certainly not shied away from building up their platforms. Pageflakes now has 100 "flakes" (i.e. widgets) and recently introduced more customization options. Likewise, Netvibes is putting in a lot of work on their module ecosystem.
Netvibes Ecosystem
Another option for small start pages is to white label their technology - i.e. offer it to other organizations as a customizable start page. I can see a lot of potential demand from corporates and media companies to use a start page, with their own branding, so that employees and/or customers may create their own 'portal' experience. Similar to what Reddit is doing in the social news space.
Webwag CEO Franck Poisson said that affiliate marketing is a key aspect of their start page, a la what Netvibes is doing with Kelkoo. And as e-consultancy recently wrote, there is potential for start pages to move into 'social shopping'. This could mean building on the partnerships mentioned above and ensuring that start pages get a cut of whatever is sold via a merchant's widget on their page.
New start page, Webwag
This is one of the more interesting areas for small start pages to explore, particularly given the relative weakness of the big Internet companies outside of the US and english-speaking countries. It's interesting to note that the small start pages I've mentioned in this post are all based in Europe - Pageflakes in Germany, Netvibes in France and Webwag in France too.
Netvibes is in the process of making their service much more international:
"At netvibes, we are actively working to make our service available to everyone in every language. In fact, we have already built a collaborative tool for the translation of any content on netvibes. The service, now in beta, enabled us to successfully translate the site into Spanish and Japanese."
Similarly, Pageflakes has recently localized to China, Brazil and Germany.
So catering to the international markets is a key way that the small start pages can do business - because as I've discovered while doing my series on international web apps, localization matters and it's something the big Internet companies aren't necessarily good at.
Pageflakes CEO Christoph Janz told me that "personalized startpages like Pageflakes have a business model that is similar to 'old school' portals: build a large customer base and monetize it via advertising, e-commerce commissions and lead generation." And Christoph believes the independence of small start pages will enable them to "connect thousands of providers with millions of consumers of digital content, services and applications."
Which is to say: there are opportunities aplenty for smart start pages and I think the early entrants Netvibes and Pageflakes are particularly well-placed to take advantage of them. I'll be interested to see what Webwag brings to the table, plus it wouldn't surprise me to see more entrants to this market (e.g. it's not a stretch for the likes of Suprglu or 43Things to consider doing a start page).
Of course the big 3 will likely take a huge chunk of the start pages market, but in my view there are more than enough opportunities for the smaller players.
Turkey is next in this R/WW series
on top international Web apps. It's the 9th country I've profiled so far - the others
have been Germany,
Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain and China. For the following information on Turkey, I
have Emre Sokullu to thank (also Honor Gunday for info on his web apps). Emre is an open
source enthusiast from Istanbul, whose projects include GROU.PS, Turkix and SimpleKDE. He was over in Silicon Valley recently and not
only did he attend the TechCrunch party,
he also visited the Googleplex and ate
quasedillas "just 10 m. away from Sergey Brin"! But I digress...
Turkey is a nation of over 70M and straddles Europe and Asia. In terms of Web apps Emre said that Turkey, like Israel, has a number of growing web 2.0 companies - and "almost all of them are local clones of some proven [international] ideas". But he says that his own app, Grou.ps, "is an exception there." Interestingly, there are no exact Flickr and del.icio.us clones in Turkey. Emre thinks the reason is that photo sharing is not popular enough in his country and StumbleUpon (see below) is more than enough for link sharing/storing.
Amongst the international web apps, Gmail, Meebo, Blogger and StumbleUpon are very popular in Turkey.
Emre said that in previous years the Turkish Web market was dominated by large Turkish media enterprises. Only a few independent ventures have since become big successes. However, in the current era of the Web there are many independent ventures. Emre said that while most of these Turkish 'web 2.0' apps have not gotten popular yet, they are promising.
Yonja.com is headquartered in the USA. It is a MySpace clone and is the leading player in the Turkish market - it currently claims 2.6M members. Emre told me the Yonja team uses the popularity of their portal to promote their other new ventures - like meqan.com, 7inci.com, metroliste.com.
Google's social network Orkut gets a special mention from Emre, even though it's
not Turkish. It was however built by a Turkish Google engineer - Orkut Buyukkokten, originally from the Turkish
city of Konyahas and who went on to obtain a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford
University. In Turkish, Orkut means "the
holy meeting place."
Lately there's been an increasing buzz about Web Office, something which I've been writing about for some time now. Red Herring magazine wrote an article with the provocative headline 17 MS Office Killers. While it would be quite a story if Microsoft did get usurped by a Web-based Office, the reality is that Microsoft will - over time - move their Office suite online. Or at the least end up with a hybrid desktop/Web suite.
As Don
Dodge noted, Microsoft has already made a start with Office Live. So nothing is going
to 'kill' Microsoft Office, at least not in the next 5-10 years.
There are however viable alternatives to Microsoft Office springing up. Red Herring identified ThinkFree, Zoho and gOffice (not affiliated with Google) as 3 likely candidates to create a Web Office suite. Personally I think you can add Zimbra, JotSpot, Goowy and Google itself to that list - even though each of them has work to do yet to get to a full suite. However Aaron Ricadela from InformationWeek makes a good case for Google Office - he says it's on the way.
I'll be profiling all of them on Read/WriteWeb over the next couple of months. In the meantime here's a quick overview of some of the leading Web Office contenders right now...
You can't go past the Mountain View upstarts as the most likely to challenge Microsoft. Already they have Writely, a spreadsheet, Calendar, email and a few other Suite products under their wing. There are signs that Google is bringing it all together - the latest being the release of Google Apps for Your Domain (another poorly named Google product!). This offers private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools to small businesses. Om Malik is unimpressed, noting the potential privacy implications.
I liked Om's summary of the Web Office in a previous post: "Web Office should not be about replacing the old, but inventing the new web apps that solve some specific problems." Exactly! Dan Farber also has some interesting views on a Google office.
For my own views on what should make up a Web Office, check out Analysis: Google Spreadsheet and Web Office and Why you need a Web Office. Heck you may as well browse through my Web Office category on ZDNet! ;-)
Zoho is certainly building up its suite of products quite
nicely. Recently it released Zoho Projects, an online project management tool. But
rather than being directly competitive with Microsoft, if anything Zoho Project is taking
aim at 37Signals. When I wrote a post entitled Web Office Suite: best of breed
products in February, I identified Basecamp
as the best-of-breed online project management tool. I said at the time that Basecamp
"continues to set the pace. It features message boards, to-do lists, simple scheduling,
collaborative writing, and file sharing."
Marshall at TechCrunch did a good review of Zoho Projects and this quote sums up the main differentiator: "The Zoho team told me that if Basecamp targets “the less is more crowd,” ZohoProjects will be feature rich."
Zoho will also soon release a single sign-on feature, so that the full range of Zoho products can be used more like a Web Office suite. Currently they're separate, although Zoho does have a product called Zoho Virtual Office, which is described as "groupware" and has things like email, IM and calendar.
See also my coverage of ZohoShow and ZohoWriter. I certainly think Zoho has all the pieces now, so it's just a matter of hooking them all together and continuing to improve each product offering.
ThinkFree is a Korean company which has also an
impressive web-based Suite of products. ThinkFree bills itself as the "World's Best Web
Based Office Suite". When I
interviewed ThinkFree CEO TJ Kang in early May, he compared ThinkFree favorably with
Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice (a desktop product). TJ Kang said they were more compatible
with MS Office than OpenOffice - "especially with the spreadsheet and presentation". See
also my follow-up post. In
summary, I think ThinkFree is a solid Web Office suite offering - and like Zoho will
continue to improve in functionality over time.
I recently
wrote about Zimbra in my web mail overview. Currently
they have a mini-suite of Web Office products. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite has
email, contacts, group calendaring, word processing and spreadsheets. The latter two were
added recently, as part of the
launch of Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 4.0. So Zimbra is continuing to bulk up
their Web Office Suite credentials.
In my full review of Zimbra back in April, I was impressed that Zimbra is packed full of features. They have mashups and things like "Search Builder" and an RSS reader.
There is much more to explore on this topic, and more companies to mention, so over time I'll be investigating Web Office further on R/WW. For now it seems like Google is the one to watch, plus the reactions of Microsoft to that threat. But don't discount the small players, like Zoho and ThinkFree. There is a lot of innovation happening in this space, so it's not all about the big companies battling it out for dominance.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
In this post, we survey a range of client applications which utilize the new web platform. This is a follow-up to our Web Platform Primer post a few days ago, in which we explained the building blocks of the new Web infrastructure:
The Web Computing Platform
Essentially the building blocks are foundational services from Internet companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft - which combine to form a Web development platform. Indeed a couple of days we saw Amazon add to the platform with a limited beta 'Compute' service, called Elastic Compute Cloud. All of these services facilitate a new breed of software: smart desktop and browser applications that use the Web Platform as their backbone.
In this category there is Amazon S3 and openomy. Amazon S3 has a wide variety of clients using it. Firstly, there are personal backup applications like Jungle Disk and Elephant Drive. Another common use case for S3 is storing large media files - the Amazon S3 success stories page features MediaSilo video storage and SmugMug on-line photo sharing. A webtop application called YouOS is also using Amazon S3 to store user information. Finally, there are two other applications listed in the success stories section: MyOwnDB, which allows users to define and store their personal information in the form database tables; and the blueorganizer smart browser extension for Firefox, developed by my [Alex's] company adaptiveblue.
The only example app using the openomy site is a very basic RSS application, built using Ruby on Rails.
Despite all the
broohaha over whether Spaces is the biggest blog
service on the planet, it's apparent that Windows
Live is making an impact on the Web. After being around for less than a year,
Alexa now ranks Live.com (and all its sub-domains) as the 10th biggest property on the
Web. And yet it doesn't seem to be affecting MSN.com's traffic that much. MSN is still
the 2nd ranked property on the Web, behind Yahoo.com and ahead of Google.
Here is the relative ranking for the live.com sub-domains:
- login.live.com 59%
- mail.live.com 20%
- spaces.live.com 15%
- get.live.com 2%
- live.com 1%
- ideas.live.com 1%
- help.live.com 1%
- Other websites 1%
The login.live.com domain is essentially Microsoft Passport - and note that when you sign into certain MSN properties, it'll re-direct through the login.live.com domain. That goes some way to explain why live.com is doing so well, but not at the expense of msn.com.
Here is the Alexa comparison chart between MSN and Live.com:
The gap is closing, but more due to Live.com's growth rather than MSN losing traffic. However as George Moore, GM for the Windows Live Developer Platform, told me earlier this week - Windows Live rollout is due for completion at the end of this year:
"Well actually you're starting to see a number of the websites losing the beta designation and the trend looks alright. I can't say the specific date when everything's going to be out of beta, but certainly it's going to be this year - ahead of Vista."
So Live.com is well and truly on track to become Microsoft's main Web property. While MSN isn't losing much ground currently, once all the current Live products go out of beta and replace the MSN versions (e.g. Live Mail for Hotmail) - expect Windows Live to take MSN's place at number 2.
Amazon
has just released
a companion product to its online storage solution S3.
With a name almost as surreal as Mechanical
Turk (which is Amazon's collective intelligence service), the new 'compute'
service is called Amazon
Elastic Compute Cloud. It all sounds like a Terry Gilliam movie, but it is
Amazon at its innovative best once again. Here's the official blurb:
"Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud."
For the tech skinny, check out Sergey Schetinin's write-up.
Interestingly Alex Iskold predicted a compute service from Amazon in a R/WW post just a couple of days ago!! If you haven't yet read Alex's Web Platform Primer - what's available via API?, then I thoroughly recommend it. He really captures the high level of why products like Amazon EC2 are increasingly important in today's Web landscape.
Note that Amazon EC2 is currently "a limited beta", available only to "a select group of developers [...] who have been making Amazon Web Services requests in the past month." Thanks Sergey and Alex for the heads-up (they both got the email announcement).
