Written by Rudy De Waele and edited by Richard MacManus. Note: this is a Mobile Web focused excerpt from Rudy's complete wrapup of the 3GSM World Congress, held recently in Barcelona.
One
of the things I realized during the
MobileMonday Global Peer Awards is the increasing globalization of innovation. Innovation
is happening everywhere and a lot of start-up companies are working in the mobile web
area; while still in its very early stage, the mobilisation of the web is happening.
Google vice-president and chief Internet evangelist Vinton G. Cerf - also one of the founding fathers of the Internet - predicted Tuesday that mobile phones, not personal computers, will fuel the growth of the worldwide Web, as countries like India snap up millions of handsets monthly.
The mobilisation of the web was an important part of the discussions during 3GSM. Mike Rowehl and Carlo Longino wrote on this already; also read Michael Mace's interesting take on this subject.
The content
hall (Hall 7) of the exhibition was filled with a lot of mobile adult (Sign ‘O’ the
Times?) and web companies resolutely going mobile including Yahoo. Shozu won for the 2nd time in a row the prize for Most Innovative Mobile Application
or Content Award with its Mobile MultiMedia Delivery Platform. To me Shozu is one of
the truly real great mobile integrated applications, but isn’t this a sign that no
other great innovative applications are around, or haven’t been noticed by the
organizers, or maybe have not been found worthy or mature to market yet?
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb.
The launch of Google Apps Premier Edition was the big news this week. In our view, this represented a significant (but not earth-shattering) step forward for Google - in its bid to create a web-based Office Suite. Some comments from our readers:
jbradford noted:
"In the short term, lets be honest this is not going to have a profound impact upon the sales of ms office any time soon. i think 'docs and spreadsheet' is great but a huge mind shift."
not-so-fast commented:
"The styles of Microsoft and Google are going to become of utmost importance in defining the way people work in the next 20 years.
Microsoft=big, heavy, showy programs.
Google=light, focused, simple programs."
Juha noted that "a bunch of bought-in, loosely integrated web apps do not make for a full office suite..."
Also noteworthy this week was Microsoft WPF News Readers. Following the high profile launch of NY Times Reader in August last year, three more were launched this week: Forbes, Seattle PI, Daily Mail.
As usual here on R/WW, there was plenty of commentary on Web issues to keep you thinking. Check out Emre Sokullu's latest post, an illuminating analysis of how Microsoft's Vista-Live Strategy is already impacting Google. It studies the early results of Microsoft making its Windows Live web properties the default in Windows Vista PCs, where possible - for example Live Search is the default search engine in IE7 on new Vista machines. This post prompted some insightful comments from readers.
Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus
Widgets are becoming
increasingly important in sharing and displaying content over the web. Recently we
chatted with two companies, Pickle and Cellblock, that provide photo and video widgets.
Each service allows multi-user contributions to their widgets - forget user-generated
content, these are user-generated widgets!
The widgets can be placed nearly anywhere on the web - blogs, social networks, etc. You can send photos and videos to your widget, directly from your computer or mobile phone - sharing your media with the world instantly. The kind of functionality these services offer is really taking viral media to another level; and what’s more both Pickle and Cellblock have launched some pretty important features in the past 24 hours.
Pickle has re-packaged several of their features, creating a widget media player that will operate on MySpace. It works by streaming photo and video content from users desktops or mobile phones.
"We've taken some of the capabilities that have been available with Pickle for a while, and recombined [them] to put some of those features more front and center", John Funge, CEO of Pickle, told Read/WriteWeb.
I'm participating in the Radar Relay, a group blogging effort being run by Under The Radar in preparation for the upcoming Office 2.0 event on March 23 in Silicon Valley (I will be a judge at the conference). So in this post I’ll be highlighting some of the office 2.0 news that came out this week.
The big news of course was Google releasing a Premier Edition of its Google Apps suite of office tools. The new-look suite includes the existing Google Apps tools - Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator and Start Page – plus Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a set of APIs and third party services, and a solid support and hosting package. We covered this on Read/WriteWeb, noting that it still falls short of a full office suite – missing is presentations, CRM, JotSpot(!) and other things. Also lacking is full integration and collaboration between the apps, a la Basecamp or Central Desktop. So Google Apps is a step forward, but by no means the final deal.
Following on from the New York Times Reader last year, made with Microsoft's rich presentation technology WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), three more big media companies have released Web/desktop News Readers built with WPF. Tim Sneath from Microsoft notes that the Daily Mail in the UK, forbes.com and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have all just announced WPF-powered News Readers that are similar to Times Reader.
Image:
Nigel Parker, Microsoft NZ
Read/WriteWeb covered the NY Times Reader back in August, noting that it works online or offline - and is probably best suited to a portable computing device like a laptop or tablet. It also aims to be a mix of the print and Web reading experience. With big media publications, where content is read every day and often on public transport like trains and buses, the user experience is considered to be key. Microsoft believes the WPF technology provides a better experience than with browser-based News Readers (like Google Reader or Bloglines). Many people would debate this, pointing to the increased convenience and portability of browser-based solutions. Nevertheless, this news today shows that Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into bringing big media companies on board and using WPF instead of browser technologies.
Written by David Lenehan of Polldaddy and edited by Richard MacManus. David also covered the Future of Web Apps event [1, 2] in London this week. Photos from Route79, via Flickr.
I went down to the Mashup event in London tonight, which was
organized by Vecosys and eTribes. The topic of conversation for the night was:
"What's next, Web3.0? - The coming semantic web". The panel consisted of Paul Walsh from
Segala, Mark Birbeck from X-Port Ltd, Tony Fish, and Sam Sethi - who took the role of chair
for the night. Sam started by talking about where the semantic web movement was at the
moment and the emergence of Microformats. He showed us some
examples of sites that are using formats like HCard and HCalendar. For those of you who
are not familiar with Microfomats, a good example is a site called worldcupkickoff.com. They used the HCalender
format to help users bookmark the dates of games in the World Cup, in their own
calendar applications. Microformats are only supported in the browser at the moment
through the use of third party browser plugins, but it seems almost certain at this stage
that Firefox 3 is going to support them natively.
Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus
Windows Vista is finally
out and along with that Microsoft seems to have kick-started its Vista-Live joint
initiative. This initiative aims to push Microsoft's new web properties in tandem with
their dominant Windows operating system - and so become a leader in the web industry as
well. Basically this means that Microsoft makes its Windows Live web properties the
default in Windows Vista PCs, where possible - for example Live Search is the default
search engine in IE7 on new Vista machines.
But the question is, will this strategy be enough for Microsoft to beat Google and Yahoo in the web race? Or will the average Joe and Jane User, with their new Vista PC, make the extra effort to change their default search engine back to Google again? In this article, we will analyze the early results of Microsoft's Vista-Live strategy, after the official releases of IE7 and Windows Vista this year. Our data source is Alexa, which is known to be not overly reliable - but it is quite adequate when making comparisons between leading sites like Google and Microsoft.
Before starting with the graphs, let's remind you of the official release dates:
Keeping in mind these dates, let's take a look at the following graphs. The vertical red lines roughly show Windows Vista's release date.
Feedburner has released an interesting new report on web-based RSS Readers, prompted by the recent introduction of Google Reader into its stats (incidentally, for some reason R/WW only increased by around 20% after Google Reader was added to Feedburner; whereas most other tech sites increased by 40+%).
Feedburner is putting a lot of effort into enhancing the way it measures RSS feeds. I was talking to someone the other day about how RSS analytics is still very much a nascent industry - i.e. it's even more difficult to get reliable feed reader stats than it is to get reliable webpage stats (and I've written before about how easy it is to manipulate both). Feedburner itself points out one of my particular bugbears at the moment - how being a default feed in an RSS Reader like Netvibes or Pageflakes artificially increases your RSS subscriber number (in some cases by a large amount). R/WW has benefited from this behavior too, as we are a default feed in the bundles that Rojo provides. But alas, we're not a default feed on the other popular RSS Readers and startpages :-( Anyway, all of these things mean that a blog's RSS subscriber number should be taken with more than a few grains of salt.
Despite all these issues with RSS analytics, Feedburner is leading the way in feed management for consumers and in this new report they discuss some new measurements - focused on how people are reading feeds and interacting (i.e. clicking or 'viewing') with them. They call this "Audience engagement" and it seems to be a priority now for Feedburner, in order to counter the issues with straight subscriber counts (e.g. the default feed issue discussed above). For the record, I think this new focus on audience engagement makes perfect sense for Feedburner - as it will help move RSS analytics forward and remove some of the stigma attached to it, due to the current unreliability over RSS subscriber counts.
The big news tonight is that Google has released a premier edition of its Google Apps package (previously known as Google Apps For Your Domain). I've been following the Web Office trend for a long time and, like everyone, have been particularly obsessed with Google's gradual progression towards a Web Office suite. Tonight is another step towards fully challenging Microsoft Office, but there is still a ways to go. More on that in a minute, but first a quick overview of what's in Google Apps Premier.
The new 'suite' includes the existing Google Apps tools - Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator and Start Page. New to the package is Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a significant edition considering that word processing and spreadsheets are mainstays of Microsoft Office. A comparison between the free edition and premier is here. Also new of note is APIs "to integrate with your existing infrastructure" and ability to integrate with 3rd party applications and services. 'Best of breed' web apps is another theme we obsess over here at Read/WriteWeb - so APIs and 3rd party features will go a long way towards making Google Office an attraction for external developers and startups. Google wants to be the center of the Web Office ecosystem, a very wise strategy.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
Music makes us happy. So happy in fact that we
shake, smile and fork off billions of dollars every year on it. So it is not an accident that
music is one of the most popular forms of media online.
Because the music market is large, there is an opportunity for innovation. We have recently seen a lot of new services such as Last.fm and Pandora jumping into the music market to compete with iTunes and more traditional music sites. In this post, we will discuss another newcomer - a mashup between a desktop music player and a web browser called Songbird.
Songbird is really just that - a mixture of a music player and the web browser. Built on top of the open-source Mozilla code base, this desktop application lets you manage your local music collection, search for new music online as well as instantly play any music on blogs and web sites.
You maybe thinking: So what? Why mix a music player and a web browser? We already have great applications that play music and let us browse the web. While this is true, we think there are good reasons to mash them up, particularly for music and perhaps for other things as well. The thing is: Songbird really understands music, understands the web and understands what people want to do with music on the web.
