One of the mobile Web
companies in Charles Knight's 55
Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit was a beta product called Text2store. Charles categorized it as a Mobile Shopping
Engine, alongside a similar service called Slifter.
Text2store enables mobile users to sign up for shopping coupons and offers from their
local shops. The service is officially launching this coming Monday, in Chicago.
Text2store has been in "limited beta" since late November/Early December and they have a
small number of Chicago companies signed up currently. Several other businesses in other
states have also signed up.
How does it work? Unfortunately I couldn't test it out myself (as it's a US service), but on the Text2store blog they describe the process: firstly sign up on the home page with your cell phone number and valid e-mail address, then within 2-30 seconds you will get a text message with a confirmation code on your cell phone. Then you follow the 3-step process outlined on the homepage, beginning with inputting data about products and services you're interested in:
Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus
We’ve all been there. You’re in a rush, you need to find a parking spot - and there's nothing available! Well, how about finding a parking spot on your mobile phone; or maybe even reserving a spot from home via your browser? This kind of Web-based car parking solution is in its infancy, but we think this solution is going to change the way people park their cars - especially when in a rush!
So far, the early leaders in this space are the UK based Findacarpark.com, parkatmyhouse.com, peasy.com, the highly touted spotscout.com, and the Chicago-based ParkWhiz.com (although ParkWhiz has yet to fully launch their service).
As a resident of a downtown metropolis, agonizing over parking spots is a re-occurring theme. I would find tremendous value in being able to secure and reserve parking, rather than driving around the block hoping for an open spot to appear. Additionally, I see great value in aggregating the costs of parking from various lots in similar areas, providing more transparency in the industry - especially if someone is relatively new to a city. Why park at one lot if you knew you could save a couple of bucks parking across the street? This could force parking lot owners to compete more smartly over parkers, providing lower prices to consumers.
Written by David Lenehan of Polldaddy and edited by Richard MacManus. This is David's account of the second and final day of the Future Of Web Apps 2007 conference in London.
Today started with Mark Anders, Adobe's senior principal scientist. Mark previously
had worked on the Microsoft .NET project from it inception until 2003. He gave a good
technical demonstration of Flex and
then created an application on the fly, to search for photos on Flickr. He also showed
off an online photo editing site called picnik,
which was built with Flex.
In other Adobe news, Actionscript 3 - which ships with the Flash 9 plugin - has some impressive improvements and now runs at up to 10 times faster than AS 2.0 in some circumstances. Going forward Adobe's Tamarin (a.k.a. JavaScript 2), which was donated last year to the Mozilla project of the same name, will now be shipped with FireFox 4 - which is 2 versions away.
Chris Wilson from Microsoft, who has worked on Internet Expolorer from version 3 up, was here to talk about the future of the web browser. He looked back at the days when Outlook Web Access was one of the most advanced web apps around and was using AJAX before it was even called AJAX. He talked about the rebirth of the semantic web movement with RSS, microformats, and tagging. He ultimately talked at length about IE 7 and the importance of security, standards support and more.
I am a web developer and I spend most of my time trying to work within browser limitations. But I don't buy the idea that IE 7 is a progressive browser. It has taken about 6 years for them to release a new version - and there is nothing revolutionary about it. They fixed all of the IE 6 bugs and added a list of modern features, that we had already seen in FireFox. Yes IE 7 is at last a good stable browser from Microsoft, which has addressed the security issues that had plagued IE 5 and 6, along with the problems with lack of standards compliance, but I don't think they deserve a pat on the back for that.
Written by Charles S. Knight, SEO and edited by Richard MacManus
Last week I saw the following ad in Radio Shack for the Kronus 55 Piece Home Repair Tool Set:
Molded case (1)
Bits (20)
Bit holder (2)
Claw hammer (1)
Level (1)
Pliers (1)
Wire stripper (1)
Long nose pliers (1)
Utility knife (1)
Wrench (1)
Hex keys (sae
& metric) (18)
Hex key holder (1)
Tape measure (1)
Ratchet (1)
Screwdrivers
(4)
All for just $29.99!
As I was reaching for my credit card, the thought occurred to me: why not offer a 55 Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit... and not for $29.99, but for free!
The Mobile Search field is going to be "huge", but right now it's growing in fits and starts. So for the early adopters amongst us, a tool kit will come in handy. Here then is my 55 piece tool kit for mobile search:
Disclosure: Central Desktop is a current sponsor.
Today Web Office company Central Desktop announced a new online
spreadsheets feature, via a collaboration with HongKong-based company Team and Concepts
(TnC) Ltd and its EditGrid product. You may remember we profiled
EditGrid last week and touted it as 'better than Google Spreadsheets'. We said in
that post that EditGrid is a feature-packed app that is best in class, but that it
required partnerships with other vendors to be truly successful. Already it's integrated
into start pages
Netvibes,
Pageflakes and
Google Personalized Homepage, plus Salesforce
AppExchange and several SaaS products and platforms. Now Central Desktop has
integrated EditGrid too.
I spoke with Central Desktop CEO Isaac Garcia to find out more about the partnership. Central Desktop is a collaboration platform, similar to 37Signal's Basecamp. It's focus is on small-to-medium businesses, as an alternative to complex, traditional groupware products such as Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Notes. Central Desktop has what Isaac referred to as a "team level focus" and its features include collaborative document editing, Web and audio conferencing, discussion threads and versioned file tracking. The addition of EditGrid means that users can also now collaborate on spreadsheets, in real-time within the Central Desktop environment.
As
David
Lenehan reported today, Digg is the latest company to declare its support
for OpenID - the decentralized single
sign-on service. This follows on from recent announcements of support from Microsoft
and AOL. And
as Techcrunch
noted, Yahoo, LiveJournal, and Wikipedia are some other organizations that
had previously announced their support.
It's clear that OpenID is gathering a good head of steam as the single sign-on mechanism of choice in the web 2.0 world. But let's take a poll on how many people are actually using it right now. Even though OpenID is a great initiative, R/WW's identity guru Jitendra Gupta has pointed out several times that OpenID is not without flaws - particularly in the areas of security and authentication. So many people may be reticent about using OpenID, at least for now. Another issue is that many people use fake identities on the Web or have multiple IDs, particularly those in the younger generation.
Please participate in the poll below and let us know in the comments to this post your thoughts on if/when real users will start utilizing OpenID.
Update: I forgot to mention that Emre Sokullu wrote a great analysis of OpenID for R/WW at the start of 2007. It includes a screencast explaining what OpenID is and how it's used.
Written by David Lenehan of Polldaddy and edited by Richard MacManus. This is David's account of the first day of the FOWA conference in London. Photos in this post are by donkeyontheedge (I hope he doesn't mind me using them).
The Future Of Web Apps 2007 kicked off in London
today with a host of speakers from various startups, bigcos, media outlets and associated
businesses. Hosted by Ryan Carson of Carson
Systems, the event is covering what various successful web companies are currently
doing, why they are successful, and where they are headed.
With a lack of Wifi access, most speakers have had a very attentive audience. First up on the podium this morning was Michael Arrington from TechCrunch. Arrington first apologized for the closure of TechCrunch UK. He hopes the site will be up and running again soon (and talking to him after the show, he hinted that he had found a new blogger to take over this role). He dealt with a few big issues that web companies are facing today. Firstly, bubble 2.0 - are we in a bubble? He pointed out that last year in the US, TechCrunch covered $600 million of VC money that had been invested into new startups; while on the other hand, for example, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. So that deal alone was bigger than the total invested in startups that year. His point was that the money being put in by investors is a lot less that the money being put in by existing companies. Instead of being in a bubble, we have not yet seen the peak of what's happening in this new web 2.0 era. He said there are still a lot more big applications, as important as Digg, Flickr, YouTube etc, waiting to come online. He also felt that the new Adobe platform Apollo is going to be big news and will help bridge the gap between the web and desktop. Adobe is a sponsor of this event and were on hand in the reception area, showing off some slick looking applications written in Apollo. However they shied away from questions regarding the ever-changing launch date.
Next up was Edwin Aoki, a
chief architect with AOL, who went through the importance of building user trust in your
products, and protecting their privacy and personal identities. This seemed like more of
a confidence-building exercise for AOL, given their data leak last year. He also pointed
out that email is still the biggest destination on the web, and not community
sites such as MySpace.
Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency followed on that theme of community building and its importance for any startup who wants to build up a large user/customer base. She talked about the importance of company founders and developers alike continuing to have a role in customer support, in order to build confidence with your user base.
In October 2005 I reviewed a potentially disruptive
search engine called ePrécis, from Syntactica. Unfortunately it got shut down by
Google (they "nearly put us out of business", said Syntactica President Henry Neils). But
there was some heavy duty linguistic theory behind ePrécis and the good news is
that now Syntactica is back with a new product, which looks equally promising.
iReader is a browser extension (for both IE and Firefox, and on PC or Mac) that lets you preview the content of a link, before you click on it. It's similar to the web previews products we reviewed back in January - Browster, Cooliris, Snap, and Sphere. Our conclusion in that post was that previews are good, if implemented correctly - because previews can save us a lot of time over the long run.
iReader (full name: iReader 2.0 Web Previewer) is probably the most sophisticated previews product we've seen on the market yet, because it doesn't just preview a webpage like Snap, or relevant links like Sphere. iReader actually studies the semantics of the content behind each link, and pops up a preview of that content in the form of a short list. The best way to illustrate this is to show you an example. Here is what happens when I hovered over a link in an earlier R/WW post:
Last month we reported that
automated text-to-voice service Talkr was put up for
sale, by founder Chris Brooks. Well Talkr has just been acquired - by a company who found
out it was for sale via Read/WriteWeb! The buyer is LiveOnTheNet, a Huntsville-based digital media
company which is developing a new social networking VoIP product. They decided to buy
Talkr because of its synergies with their new product.
The sale price is not large, just $25k up-front plus a $25k earn out for a 100% buy-out of Talkr. The low price (by industry standards) probably indicates that Talkr was more of a 'feature' than a business, long term. We discussed in our previous post about how Talkr struggled to get a revenue stream going, a common affliction of 'web 2.0' startups. And Chris admitted to me after the sale: "I've come away from this experience with a new respect for the importance of focusing first and foremost on revenue generation!"
Written by Gang Lu and edited by Richard MacManus. China's QQ.com is the world's 9th largest web property and in this post Gang Lu talks with Richard Chang, the Founder and Director of QQ Labs, to find out more about their Web 2.0 plans.
Founded by
Pony Ma in Shenzhen, China, in November 1998, Tencent is now recognized as the leading
provider of Internet, mobile & telecommunications value-added services in China. QQ, Tencent's instant messaging service platform,
officially launched in Feb 1999 and announced in its 2006 Q3 report that it has
221.4 million active users. What's more, the total registered user
accounts has climbed to 572.3 million!
Tencent
Innovation Center, also called QQ Labs, was founded in May 2005 and acts as QQ's
Web2.0 service incubator. So far it has launched Tencent's web2.0 service QQVideo and a social bookmarking service called QQ Bookmark is in public beta
testing. So this Chinese IM giant is obviously showing a lot of interest in the
web2.0 market.
We recently interviewed Richard Chang, the Founder and Director of QQ Labs. In this talk with Richard, we cover Tencent's business model, its web2.0 services and the overall mission of QQ Labs.
