Martha Stewart's company today officially unveiled the latest version of its marthastewart.com website. They are positioning it as "the most authoritative lifestyle destination on the Internet" and it's aiming for a market of an estimated 102 million women online. I was immediately curious to look at the new site, because back in July 2005 I did a comparative analysis of marthastewart.com for a consulting client at the time. My conclusion in July 2005 was that marthastewart.com wasn't a lifestyle website to emulate. My exact words in the report were: "The Martha Stewart site has a very strong offline brand, but the inconsistent navigation and design of the website produces a disappointing online experience."
Back in 2005, marthastewart.com had few community features - what it did have was in the form of bulletin boards and a Q&A called "Ask Martha". But it hadn't yet caught onto the web 2.0 craze. Mind you, few mainstream websites had at that stage. There was also no video or other media on the site in 2005. When it came down to it though, the real problem of the marthastewart.com site circa 2005 was inconsistent navigation and design - no-no's in any era of the Web.
So what's changed in 2007? Well I'm happy to say that marthastewart.com has finally fixed up its navigation and design - everything is now consistent, colorful and easy to navigate. Specifically, visitors can now more easily browse marthastewart.com by lifestyle interest (gardening, health, entertaining, etc); as well as search and browse by media property.
Techcrunch is reporting that China-based web browser Maxthon has sold a minority stake to Google, rumored to be around $1 million. More importantly Techcrunch is "also hearing that this investment is part of a ‚Äúmuch larger strategic deal‚Ä? between the two companies." Maxthon is a powerful tabbed, fully customizable and 100% free Internet browser built on top of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) platform.
Read/WriteWeb has covered Maxthon a few times and frankly, this news of Google cozying up to Maxthon comes as no surprise to me. For one thing, as Gang Lu first reported for R/WW at the beginning of the year, Maxthon reportedly has 30% of the browser market in its home country of China, second only to IE and ahead of Firefox. In a follow-up R/WW post in mid-January, we noted that Maxthon is probably more of a threat to Firefox than it is to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Which makes this news that Google has possibly partnered with Maxthon very intriguing. Google already has a very cuddly relationship with Mozilla and recently we've noted here how Firefox's developments (e.g. offline browsing, being an information broker) will turn out to be very favourable to Google long-term. Those Firefox developments literally play to Google's strengths - as they enhance the functionality of web apps. So for Google to now turn its amorous attentions to Maxthon, will likely cause a little pique in the Mozilla camp. Who is this Microsoft-based upstart, eyeing up my Google? (Mozilla will be saying)
What do you think the above image (which I drew) represents? It's YOU -- as a slave of the popular internet culture and as a participant in the massive user-generated social web. Allow me to describe what all these fancy colors and lines represent:
Today Salesforce.com announced a new product called Salesforce ContentExchange, a content management product for unstructured data such as email and html. They also publicly announced the acquisition of Koral, a web 2.0 content collaboration platform that was at DEMO07 earlier this year (see Zoli Erdos' review). Koral is a key enabling technology for Salesforce ContentExchange. The new product means that Salesforce.com now manages all types of content in a company - both structured information (e.g. CRM data like contacts and sales information) and unstructured information (office documents, HTML, video/audio files and email, etc). Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, calls this ‚Äúanother step towards our vision of managing all information on demand‚Ä?.
Also announced today was Apex Content – which allows enterprise users to create web services for unstructured data (as well as structured data).
Today I spoke to Bruce Francis (Vice President of Corporate Strategy), Mark Suster (Koral founder/CEO who is now in charge of Salesforce ContentExchange), and Gordon Evans (salesforce.com PR) about the news.
Recently I spoke with Siva Kumar, founder and CEO of TheFind.com - a next generation online shopping engine focused on the Lifestyle segment. According to Siva, TheFind.com is a discovery shopping search engine optimized for lifestyle products such as clothing & accessories, home & garden, sports & outdoor, kids & family, and health & beauty.
TheFind comprehensively indexes all of the products available for sale from all online retail sites, then - using derived knowledge of the shopping domain - serves up just the right matching products, ranked in order of best selling brands, styles and stores. In this piece, I will review their offering against my Web 3.0 framework.
The results display is very visual, with large pictures of the products. It resembles a customized shopping catalog that has been constructed for a specific consumer search query. Additional search tools provide a way for consumers to search for items similar to the one that interests them, and also to find all of the stores that carry a particular product - in order to decide the best place to buy the desired product.
See for yourself - this is a very different internet shopping experience than the largely text based results offered by Google, Shopping.com, etc.
Today Central Desktop launched the Spring 2007 Release of its collaboration platform. Of most interest in this release is that Central Desktop is introducing "a turnkey Intranet" for its enterprise subscribers. Key features of the turnkey intranet include easy setup (without coding or "wikifying" it), a company directory and calendar, password protection for documents, Office 2007 document index support, workspace archiving, an auto-save feature while editing documents, and a dynamic interface that displays personalized data for each user.
Central Desktop is a web-based groupware product which currently has 30,000+ users worldwide. See our review of the product in February, at which time Central Desktop announced an online spreadsheets feature using EditGrid. At that point I compared the product to 37Signal's Basecamp - as it had features including collaborative document editing (wikis), Web and audio conferencing, discussion threads and versioned file tracking. But with the latest announcement of a turnkey intranet, it seems that Central Desktop is becoming more like Google Apps.
About a week ago, the hot topic online was NBC Universal and News Corp launching a joint-venture to provide "the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled." The joint-venture is still months away from being finalized - and from reading TechCrunch's notes of the conference call, it is obvious a lot of details still need to be worked out.
However, there are currently hundreds of sites that allow you to upload a video and share it with others. While partnerships like NBC Universal/NewsCorp demonstrate that offline video content will be coming online, how those videos are organized and delivered to end-users still is an open question. I believe a new set of companies serving as 'hyperaggregators' will emerge to fill that role.
For the purpose of this post, I'm focuing on the lightweight web services that empower users to select videos from the hundreds of video sharing web services and point to them for distribution. Om Malik coined the term 'hyperaggregators' to describe this approach on the web in February's Business 2.0:
"This is one of the hot opportunities in new new media: hyperaggregation. If aggregation is what we've seen so far on YouTube and Flickr, hyperaggregation is aggregating the aggregators. The way of the Web is to go meta - a website is born and covers politics, then another, and another, and that leads inexorably to ... a blog that covers all the websites that tackle politics."
I agree with Om's characterization of hyperaggregation. So for the remainder of this post, I'd like to highlight some web services that are trying to achieve this in the online video industry.
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email:
The week started off with a flurry of April Fools jokes, blog style. Techcrunch got in a day early and fooled a lot of people (including me, initially). And as usual, Google had a couple of doozies - Gmail Paper & an In-Home Wireless Broadband Service.
When the serious news got underway for the week, EMI's announcement of a DRM-free service got a lot of attention. In our post covering the news, I outlined what this means for the online music industry. Note that I made an update to the post a few days later. I discovered from a very reliable industry source that EMI had decided on, and made moves towards, removing DRM before Steve Jobs' letter in February.
A quick thanks to our readers and sponsors, for supporting Read/WriteWeb's mission to deliver in-depth news and analysis on Web Technology. Also of course thanks to our excellent writers!
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Wild Apricot offers web 2.0 products for non-profits - one of their largest user segments is professional associations. Probably the most popular area of functionality in Wild Apricot is the online member database.
Zoho is a leading Web Office suite, which recently added a Web Conferencing application called Zoho Meeting to their excellent range of office products.
Userplane is the premier provider of communication software for online communities. It is now part of the AOL network.
Compete is more than just a statistics service to rival Alexa; Compete also provides search, analytics, shopping deals, and a personalized homepage.
BlogRovr is a download plugin for Firefox 2.0, which 'fetches' related blog stories for you as you surf the Web. BlogRovr is complementary to RSS Readers, because it allows you to track your favorite blogs while you are browsing.
DesktopOnDemand is a free "online desktop service" that lets you access your desktop remotely. DOD comes with 1GB of free disk space, with extra space available for a fee.
Eurekster is an innovative kiwi startup that provides the community powered search box on Read/WriteWeb. It is a search engine that learns from the community's search behavior, so it gets better the more you use it.
Also I want to mention Federated Media Publishing's latest CPM campaigns running on this site, which are quite innovative - e.g. the Hakia one ("Richard MacManus on the search for better search...").
Finally, check out Read/WriteWeb's Job Board (in partnership with VentureBeat and Alarm:Clock and run by JobThread). Just this week, Rearden Commerce posted 7 great new jobs - among other positions, they're looking for an Engineering Program Manager and a Sr. Software Engineer, Platform.
Written by Bilal Hameed from the Startup Meme blog
This week we've seen evidence of a new trend in the Web, which I've termed "The Sidebar Syndrome". Before I analyze the effects of this trend, let's first take a look at the services that may ultimately become flag bearers of the Sidebar era.
Google Talk "IM in the Sidebar"
Google Talk was originally launched as a desktop client, but it can now be integrated into your browser sidebar. This is certainly a great feature and will allow users to stay in touch with friends, without the need to periodically click on the taskbar.
