Adobe will launch the first public alpha version of its Apollo
platform later tonight - Ryan Stewart got the news out first. Apollo is the
code name for the much hyped Adobe cross-operating system. It allows developers to build
RIA (Rich Internet Applications) for the desktop, using the development platform of
their choice. A key value proposition of the new technology, according to Adobe, is the ability for developers
to create desktop applications in a fraction of the time they're used to. Using Apollo developers can build applications using HTML, JavaScript, Flash, Flex and Ajax. Adobe's
goal is to redefine the Internet application and how it interacts with the browser - and
vice-versa.
Included in the Alpha release is:
A new feature in this alpha release is multi-window support, which means that all apps can talk to each other.
However there are still a number of things missing in the Alpha release. They include:
Well here I am joining a Techmeme scrum ;-) The big news today is that Michael Arrington announced a CEO for Techcrunch - Heather Harde, who is currently the SVP of Mergers and Acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media. This really does prove that blogs can be big business - it's a heck of an achievement head-hunting a senior executive from Rupert Murdoch's Internet arm (and the owners of MySpace)! It's also good news for other tech blogs - like Read/WriteWeb, Gigaom, VentureBeat, and indeed any new professional blog - as it validates that blogs can be successful media ventures, given the right focus and a lot of hard work.
It also made me think back about the days when Techcrunch started. Its first post was June 11 2005 and the topic was Technorati - ironically in that post Mike mentioned the Technorati 100, which he wistfully noted "is the definitive list of popular bloggers on the web." Little did he know that 21 months later he would be number 3 on that list. Indeed little did I know that I would be number 41!
Techcrunch logo circa June 2005
I actually contacted Mike and Keith Teare (a shareholder in Techcrunch and Mike's business partner) in that very first week of Techcrunch's publication. Ivan Pope had pointed out to me a new blog called Techcrunch and so, a few days after their first post, I emailed Keith to find out more. He cc'ed Mike and from there I discovered that both were fans of Read/WriteWeb. Indeed Mike told me he had "been using it for leads on Techcrunch" :-) Of course this was back in June 2005 and we all know what happened next: Techcrunch was the first to focus exclusively on web 2.0 startup reviews and as a result it became the main resource for the dot com II boom, which came to be known as Web 2.0. Read/WriteWeb has also done well out of the boom, but my niche turned out to be not quite as mass appealing as Mike's ;-)
Every Friday afternoon PST, Read/WriteWeb publishes a Weekly Wrapup of news, reviews and analysis from the past week. I know a lot of people are too busy with their jobs to keep up with Web tech news on a daily basis, so the Weekly Wrapup is the perfect opportunity for those people to catch up with the most relevant Web Tech news from the week.
We offer the Weekly Wrapup in an email newsletter and also as an RSS feed. Here is the form to subscribe to Read/WriteWeb's weekly email newsletter:
And here is the RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/readwriteweb/weekly
Incidentally, how much demand is there for a DAILY roundup of Web Tech news from around the blogosphere? If there is sufficient demand, than that is another option. Let us know in the comments...
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb.
Google Interview
This week Read/WriteWeb finally got an interview with Google, something I've been wanting for a long time. Matt Cutts, head of Google's web spam operations, talked to me on the topic of next-generation search. Unfortunately I published it just as news of the $1B Viacom lawsuit against YouTube hit (the Techmeme 'Scrum of the Week'), so my interview with Matt didn't get the attention it deserved. However there is a lot of great info in this interview, so I encourage you to read it - maybe print it out and read it in bed on Sunday morning, along with the Sunday paper :-) Also check out the follow-up post: Video PageRank: Google Searches for The Holy Grail.
The interview post got some good comments, for example Steve said:
"The personalization of search is great for local companies competing in global markets. It will be interesting to see the evolution of natural language in search. If i was google, i would be doing my best to purchase Wikipedia. They are sending them most of their traffic... so why not?"
Why not indeed? Apart from the fact that Wikipedia is non-profit, so there would be a major outcry from people about a commercial company taking it over - especially a company like Google that already controls so much access to information on the Web.
Phill Midwinter commented that he isn't so impressed by Google's search engine strengths:
"It's a nice interview - but again I'm not seeing anything new here beyond what I've been hearing for the past two years. Google is looking increasingly stagnant from my point of view as a search engine developer. If they are truly keeping to release often, release early; then they haven't actually done much of importance for quite some time to improve search."
My feeling is that Google is innovating a lot, but it hasn't necessarily integrated those things into the main search.
We wrote about Abdur Chowdhury in our recent
coverage of the Open Data 2007 Workshop. Until recently he was running AOL Search,
but left to start a new venture. Abdur is an impressive thinker and articulate speaker,
with a great track record in the industry. So we decided to take a look at what he is up
to! As it turns out, he is developing an innovative vertical search engine for
shopping called Summize. This search engine
uses a technique called heatmaps, which we'll explore in this post.
A heatmap is a visualization technique for
displaying complex information in two dimensions, using colors. For example, heatmaps are
used in weather maps to display temperature or amount of rain. The coloring works like
this: you choose a range of values (for temperature on the chart to the right, the range
is from -60 to 120 F) and then map colors onto this range. There various ways of doing
this mapping, depending on how fine grained you need the map to be. In the case of just
two colors, say red and green, you can do it using RGB encoding - starting with red
moving towards black, and then passing black towards green.
Heatmaps are also actively used in biology, particularly in DNA microarrays. Recently, stats service CrazyEgg applied heatmaps to tracking what visitors do on a user's website. Their software captures user clicks on each page and then presents a summary in the form of a heatmap. The visual effect is stunning - you get instant insight as to what your visitors are doing on the site.
Adobe recently announced they are to bring out
online versions of some of their desktop software suite, including Photoshop, within the
next 6 months. The first place we can get a glimpse of these offerings is on the popular
photo and video sharing site Photobucket. Since last month, pro users of Photobucket have been
able to access an Adobe online video editing tool called
Adobe Remix. This will be opened up to all users of Photobucket sometime this
month.
With a Photobucket account, you can upload and share your photos and videos - and blast them out to just about anywhere on the web, including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, eBay, Blogger. Founded in 2003, they claim to have 38 million registered users, over 17 million visitors per month, and serve out a whooping 3 billion media clips per day. According to Alexa, they have just recently overtaken Flickr in terms of traffic. Photobucket is free to use, but a pro account gives you some extras - such as 5 gigs of space and unlimited bandwidth for just $25 per year. And now, Adobe Remix is a pro account extra too...
The Adobe Remix feature in Photobucket is a flash application that was built with Flex and runs very smoothly. You can take video clips and pictures that you have uploaded to your Photobucket account and drag them onto the Remix time line, add captions, borders, transitions and effects. You can even add an audio track to your movie, by choosing from a large selection of tracks provided by Pump Audio. You can't upload your own music at the moment, but this may change in time.
13 months ago Read/WriteWeb published a review post about the leading "meme trackers" - i.e. sites that cluster and filter the latest tech news. My conclusion at that time was that Techmeme came out on top, closely followed by Tailrank and Topix.net. My summary back then:
"All in all, Memeorandum still comes out trumps in terms of clustering layout, speed and relevancy. Topix.net and TailRank are strong services too. Also I suspect Chuquet and Megite will pick up the pace once they've enhanced their interfaces. A very interesting space to watch!"
Later in 2006 I also compared TailRank to Techmeme. But it's over a year since the original analysis and so time for an update. I have to admit that personally I've stuck with TechMeme, although I check out the others every now and then too. To do a proper update would take me at least a few hours of research. Luckily Stan Schroeder over at franticindustries has saved me the trouble, by publishing an in-depth overview of the Memetracker market, circa 2007. Stan covers 8 memetrackers: Blogniscient, Buzzfeed, Chuquet, Daily Rotation, Feedable, Megite, Tailrank, Techmeme.
Stan's conclusion is that Techmeme, Tailrank and Megite are the leading three memetrackers, because "they have more features, index more sites, and bring the news faster than the rest.". He also noted that Daily Rotation (a customizable news aggregator) and Buzzfeed (adds its own editorial commentary) "are a bit different than others".
With
the proliferation of online video (yes there is more than just YouTube out
there!), the opportunity has arisen for portal players that provide a 'one stop
shop' for online video. One such service is PureVideo,
which has just released some new features. In fact it almost has too many
features, because it's hard to get a grip on what the site offers when you first
go there. It's main offering though is a search engine for video and an
associated portal frontpage, which lists popular videos at destinations such as
YouTube and GrindTV.com. PureVideo launched in October 2006 and gets over 2.2
million monthly visits, according to comScore.
They've also just released a start page offering, called My.PureVideo (Beta). It's an Ajax-powered, custom video startpage that enables users to keep track of their favorite video sources and subjects - via RSS. Users can select feeds by media source (e.g. StupidVideos.com) and/or by keyword (e.g. "mentos"). There are also categories (called "channels" here) and users can of course input their own feeds. Interestingly, PureVideo says that it "tallies the popularity of every user-submitted feed, for considered inclusion in the featured menu". This is something the likes of Netvibes and Pageflakes would do well to implement. The My.PureVideo page supports drag-and-drop and soon there will be video-related widgets (ahh, the magic 'w' word!).
A new website called We Dig TV is transforming TV game shows and re-making
them for the internet. The site converts tv programs and formats into Internet tv shows,
making them interactive and a two-way Web experience. As of now they have adapted 4
classic TV game shows and optimised them for broadband use - with the user as the main
participant. The current game shows are: Blockbusters, Countdown, Family Fortunes and
Catchphrase. There are more coming soon, plus they have other shows currently being used
by third party clients.
While the current lot of shows are relatively simple question and answer formats, We Dig TV is also creating more diverse shows. For example, they have just completed a broadband version of Popstars - which allows the user to 'audition' as a singer over the telephone. The game also apparently allows the judges to react online to the perceived quality of the singing (or lack thereof - all you virtual Simon Cowells get your British accents ready!).
So how is We Dig TV going to make money? Well, by traditional advertising of course. We Dig TV is, rather curiously, positioning the advertising as being "an important part of creating an authentic user experience". In other words, they have made traditional broadcast advertisements interactive as well. For example, participants in the Blockbusters game are presented with ad breaks. An example of an advertisement currently running is one for Dettol, which is the same as the TV broadcast version - except that the user can participate using his/her mouse to apply dettol to the kiddies high chair. We Dig TV says that "not only does this mean the user takes note of the ad, it is linked in to reinforcing the message that Dettol kills germs." I for one will be interested to see how these ads are greeted by the users - I'm not sure why people would want to participate in a Dettol ad.
In yesterday's post about Google, a follow-up to this week's interview with Matt Cutts, we wrote that Google is still searching for a way to measure relevancy for video - and by extension a way to automatically insert contextual advertising around its YouTube videos. We think that the lack of an adequate "VideoRank" is the main reason that Google is not putting advertising around YouTube videos.
However Mark Cuban left a comment onto the latter R/WW post, saying that he thinks relevancy has nothing to do with it. He wrote:
"The lack of ads has nothing to do with relevancy. It has to do with copyright laws. If Google doesnt have a license from the video owner, they cant show ads.
If you do a viewsource, you will see the ad tags which define a user id, along with category and demographic info. If the user id reflects an uploader that Youtube has a deal with, you will see ads. If not, not."
And, as is Mark Cuban's custom these days, he finished with a none-to-subtle dig at Google:
"In terms of video search. There needs to be a differentiation between internet video search, and website video search. Google only does indexing of video on their owned sites.
Maybe they think they can host all the worlds videos ?"
We think Google is indeed scared of the copyright laws, but that the real underlying problem is that Google hasn't found an adequate technical solution to inserting contextual advertising next to YouTube videos.
So who do you think is right, the billionaire or a bunch of uppity tech bloggers? ;-) Here is a poll to find out...
