Tamago recently launched a peer-to-peer commerce system that enables people to sell digital media directly to customers. It's designed for semi-professional and amateur people who publish music, videos, photos, e-books, etc. to earn royalties whenever their creative content is downloaded. Meanwhile the buyers can also earn commissions, for distributing media to others.
Tamago was founded in 2005 by Sony Music Executive Joel Floyd. On Joel's LinkedIn page, he is listed as being a past Principal Architect/Developer at Sony Music. Tamago is based in San Francisco.
Last week I
spoke to Jeremy Jaech, CEO and president of Trumba,
whose team is building an innovative online event calendaring system aimed at
enterprises. Jeremy Jaech was also the founder of both Visio and PageMaker
– two of the Internet’s early successful desktop publishing systems. It's basically the same engineering team from both Visio and PageMaker too, and Trumba has financial backing from Kleiner Perkins, August Capital and Oak Investment Partners.
So the stars are aligned on this web app, it seems, in terms of heavyweight developers
and VCs.
At first glance Trumba is hard to fathom. Perhaps being an enterprise application has something to do with that, as those tend to be more complex than most consumer web 2.0 apps. Trumba's latest product release, announced this week, is called Trumba Connect. It's a website calendaring and event marketing solution for companies. Included in this package are tools for publishing and promoting events online, plus connecting those events to personal calendars. It's a hosted service, with prices starting at $99.95 per month.
There's an interesting rumor doing the rounds about Google doing a re-org of their advertising business. Jeff Molander wrote:
"Three of my most credible resources, including DM News’s Giselle Abramovich, are indicating plans for a significant re-organization at Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). [...] On the re-org, says Ms. Abramovich,
“What this means is that there would be one global account director per account, that pulls in resources to sell as needed - PPC (pay-per-click), Print, Radio, Video, Display, etc.”
As of yet nobody can confirm with anyone at Google but the leaks are emanating from Google itself according to all three of my sources."
The significance of this is that it's similar to what Microsoft and IBM already do - extract maximum revenue for each customer (in this case, the larger advertisers on Google). This means Google will utilize different types of ads (CPC, CPM, CPA, etc) over all media channels - search, mobile, video, audio, etc.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
The last few weeks have been packed with browser action and the two market leaders, Internet Explorer and Firefox, have launched major new versions. So to round out our recent browser coverage, we present the Web Browser Faceoff - looking at how all the main browsers compare with each other in terms of features and innovation. We are basically looking for what is unique, interesting - and missing - in each browser.
Right now Microsoft still holds onto its huge market lead, but Firefox is gaining more ground every month. Probably more importantly, there are other major innovators in the browser space - such as the social browser Flock (a Read/WriteWeb sponsor) and the perennial innovator Opera. The Mac browser Safari of course has many passionate supporters, while new kid Maxthon is one to watch.
Regardless of who will prevail in the 'browser 2.0 wars', the users will win. While fighting each other, the browser makers innovate and simplify. They increase our productivity by integrating into the browser web concepts such as search, RSS, OPML, microformats and more. The core browsers are getting slimmer and faster, while extensions that cover a wide range of services are being developed by external parties.
Transclick is a mobile enterprise application that
translates text in email, SMS and IM. The software has been around for a while (see
this CNNMoney.com article from March 2005), but is now starting to make waves as a
business productivity tool. RIM Blackberry just announced Transclick as the winner of its
BlackBerry
Developer Productivity Tools Challenge and they were a runner-up
in the Skype Developer Contest recently.
For the Blackberry version of Transclick, the translation tool that can be applied to any outgoing email or SMS message from the BlackBerry device and caters to 15 languages.
Disclosure: Read/WriteWeb will be going live shortly with a custom Eurekster search box.
One of the big pieces of news this week has been Google's new Custom Search Engine. It's noticeable not because it's an innovative product, but more because Google is most definitely a follower and not a leader when it comes to custom / social search. Not only are there a number of small startups already doing the same thing, but one of their direct competitors Yahoo! has been doing social search for quite some time. So it was a little humorous to see the Google Blog post trumpeting custom search as a "Eureka!" moment. Also my immediate thought upon seeing the post, entitled "Eureka! Your own search engine has landed!", was that they were taking a sly dig at Eurekster. Mike Arrington also picked up on this.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. Disclaimer: Alex's company AdaptiveBlue has a product called The blueorganizer, which was one of the twenty "Recommended add-ons" selected by Mozilla for the Firefox 2 launch.
This week the spotlight is on Firefox as it launches its milestone 2.0 release. We've covered the launch with a Firefox 2.0 product review, an interview with Mozilla exec Chris Beard and a Firefox marketing discussion post. Today we bring you a review of the top twenty add-ons (aka extensions) selected by Mozilla for the Firefox 2 launch. We've categorized the add-ons and analyzed them, to bring you what are hopefully the pick of the crop.
Since its inception, Firefox has been a great platform on which web developers can build on top of. Recognizing that the core browser must be lean, the Mozilla team put together the infrastructure for creating add-ons. In this single decision, Mozilla created not just a fine browser - but a thriving community and a free marketplace, which links add-on developers directly to browser users. The developers are free to be creative and the users are free to choose the add-ons that they like. Such an ecosystem gives rise to innovation.
The moment has arrived, Mozilla has pushed the go-live button on Firefox 2. The new final 2.0 version of the browser is now available for everyone to download.
Read/WriteWeb has been actively covering the launch, most recently with a pre-launch interview with Chris Beard - Mozilla Vice President of Products. We've also reviewed the product and have additional notes on how Mozilla plans to market Firefox 2. Digg and Slashdot have additional commentary.
For a look at the competition, you may also want to check out our comparative review of Internet Explorer 7.
And the R/WW coverage doesn't stop there! We have a couple of other in-depth articles coming soon, one about Firefox add-ons and a special one on a yet-to-be-disclosed topic ;-)
This
afternoon Firefox 2 will be officially launched. In anticipation of the unveiling, here
is an in-depth interview with Chris Beard (Mozilla Vice President of Products). Subjects
discussed in the interview include the growing enterprise usage of Firefox, the
importance of user experience and security, Mozilla's theory behind Web feeds and why
they haven't included an integrated RSS Reader, the growing add-on ecosystem,
offline browsing, why this is a 2.0 release and not a 1.x one, and finally Chris tells us
a little about the future of the browser.
Chris started off with an overview of Firefox's market position. He said it is a global community and a public benefit organization. Their free and Open Source products attract:
Chris said there is strong demand and growth. Last year at this time when they released Firefox 1.5, they had around 200,000 people per day downloading it. Today that number is more like 350,000 and growing, which Chris attributes to strong viral and organic growth.
I asked Chris whether enterprise users are beginning to use Firefox more? Chris said yes, they're noticing that more and more. He said their focus is building products for individual users as opposed to enterprises or organizations, however they're finding that users are bringing Firefox into the enterprise with them - on the basis of security advantages, productivity gains [etc].
Following hot on the heels
of the Microsoft-powered
NY Times Reader, Adobe has released Adobe Digital Editions
Beta - a Rich Internet Application (RIA) for digital publishing and reading. The
product enables users to acquire, read, and manage content such as eBooks and other
digital publications. This market is ramping up quickly in late 2006, as the Sony Reader is also in beta form currently.
Last week I spoke to Bill McCoy, General Manager of the ePublishing Business Unit at Adobe, to talk about the new product.
Adobe Digital Editions is designed to be a lightweight, standards supporting digital reader - and is focused on the consumer market. Bill said electronic reading "is reaching a tipping point" in the market right now.
As with the NY Times Reader, the Adobe product reflows content and makes readibility of e-content easier. The product is also cross-platform - working on PCs, mobiles, PDAs and dedicated ebook devices. Also the Digital Editions beta includes integration with Adobe Acrobat 8 and Reader 8, which can install and launch Digital Editions from within their user interface.
