Written by Aydin Senkut, an ex-Google senior manager who is currently an angel investor for his company Felicis Ventures. During Aydin's 6 years with Google, he managed their international expansion - including launching Google's first 10 international sites.
Today China boasts over 105 million Internet users, not to mention 350M mobile users (growing by 57 million every year). By 2010, Chinese Internet users will outnumber US Internet users by 25%. Currently, 87% of the Chinese Internet audience uses search. And given Internet search’s dominance of monetization and audience rankings globally, the competition for the top spot in the Chinese search market is pretty intense.
Baidu, Google, Yahoo, Sohu and Sina are battling each other to be the leading provider of search in China. Currently the two largest search players, Baidu and Google, account for almost 90% of the searches (source: CNNIC Search Survey, 2006), per the latest local search market share depicted in the pie chart below.
There is little doubt that RSS is a disruptive, game-changing technology. The so called Really Simple Syndication (previously also called Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary), has powered a fundamentally new way to deliver and consume web content. Before RSS, users had to visit individual web sites to find out what was new. Today, news is delivered via RSS directly to web browsers, desktops and aggregators. With RSS, the dynamics of the web changed into an on-demand medium.
RSS usage has since spread beyond simple news delivery. Companies like de.licio.us, Flickr and YouTube added another dimension to RSS - i.e. they made it an integral part of the Social Web (social networking, photos, video, etc). Also Google built Google Base, its Craigslist competitor, entirely on RSS. Other companies too are beginning to extend RSS, sometimes with proprietary extensions.
In short, because of RSS ubiquity it is now a very attractive delivery medium for all kinds of content. However because the basic format is simple and primitive, there is no way to encode semantics without building an extension. So in this post, we look at RSS today and ask if RSS is evolving into a tool for delivering complex, semantically rich information.
Peepel.com today announced the Beta launch of its Online Office Suite, entering a competitive market alongside existing vendors like Zoho, ThinkFree, Zimbra - not to mention Google's growing Web Office suite.
Peepel claims to differentiate itself by being "the only competitor offering a true multiple windows system in an online desktop." Users can open as many applications, files and tools as they wish "in multiple, resizable PeepelWindows on the same PeepelDesktop in the one browser window." They aren't pop-ups and can be resized, moved, stacked or cascaded.
The Peepel suite includes Peepel WebSheet (online spreadsheet), Peepel WebWriter (online word processor) and Peepel Desktop (a virtual desktop running in a web browser). Also Peepel WebMaps is "very near to release." As with most of its competitors, Peepel is free to use.
Written by Can Erten and edited by Richard MacManus. This is the second in a 2-part series exploring the world of P2P on the Web. Part 1 was a general introduction to P2P, along with some real-world applications of P2P. Part 2 (this post) discusses future applications.
As we mentioned in Part 1, broadband speeds are ever increasing and so the demand for peer-to-peer networks is also increasing. However many things that could be accomplished by P2P networks are still in development or research. There is huge potential that at least some of the resulting applications will go mainstream, just as Napster did in the late 90's or Skype in the early part of this century. In Part 2 of our series, we look at some of these potential future applications for P2P on the Internet.
Starting in the late 90's, a search engine company called Google changed the way we search the internet. Their idea was to index the web and get the top results, using their now famous Page Rank algorithm. However nowadays, indexing the web accurately has become a huge and seemingly impossible job to complete. So P2P search engines could be the next solution - where every node (user) is a crawler itself.
Following last year's backlash over Yahoo!'s re-design of their TV section, and in particular their television listings feature, many users felt left out in the cold. I was one of them. Having previously relied on the Yahoo! online television guide to know what was on the boob tube, I was annoyed when a simple and easy-to-use product was replaced with such a clunker (more on that in the review of Yahoo!'s TV page below).
So, I set off on a quest to find a replacement for Yahoo!'s television listings. At times, as I dug through the various online tv listings services, it almost seemed that there were as many ways to find out what was on TV as there were channels to watch! Below, in alphabetical order, are quick reviews of 10 such services that I tried (including Yahoo!'s).
Note that each site is linked via its logo. Also, some of the sites below may only be accessible in the US.
In an attempt to go beyond page views and visits, today web stats company Compete introduced "Attention metrics". The reason is that interactive Web page technologies such as Ajax and Flash - not to mention online video - are making simple page views and visits increasingly outdated. With Ajax for example, information on a webpage can be updated without needing to refresh the page. In order to get around these issues, Compete has introduced two specific attention metrics:
The move is aimed at marketing people, to help them find "high-potential advertising sites".
Slashdot is running a story stating that Morfik, an Ajax development platform we covered recently on Read/WriteWeb, has filed a patent dated September 2005 for the compiling of high-level languages into AJAX apps. The timing of the news is interesting, because Morfik is just about to release its version 1.0 - after 8 or more years of development.
To remind you of what Morfik is. Morfik allows developers to use high-level programming languages (which give the developer more power - e.g. BASIC, C#, Pascal) to create web apps. It does this by converting apps from high level language INTO Ajax code. The Slashdot story states that Morfik has actually patented this technology, as of September 2005. According to Slashdot the patent covers virtually any high-level language, including "Ada, C, C++, C#, COBOL, ColdFusion, Common Lisp, Delphi, Fortran, Java, Object Pascal, SmallTalk, Visual Basic, and Visual Basic.NET".
It seems that Google and its Google Web Toolkit is the primary target of the patent, because Google (more than any other big Internet company) relies heavily on Ajax apps.
The big news today is that EMI Music announced a new higher quality DRM-free music download offering. It is a premium service, covering EMI's entire digital catalogue, and will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms. Steve Jobs of Apple was there at the announcement, to emphasize that iTunes supports the move towards DRM-free - indeed it is the first real sign that Jobs' call in February for record companies to abolish DRM, was more than just PR bluster. Apple iTunes will be the first online music store to receive EMI's new premium downloads, offering EMI music "at twice the sound quality of existing downloads" and with their DRM removed, at a price of $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. Complete albums from EMI Music artists purchased on the iTunes Store will automatically be sold at the higher sound quality and DRM-free, with no change in the price. Further details are in the EMI press release and the Apple press release.
Written by Emre Sokullu, with contributions by Charles Knight
Quintura is a clustering search engine, one of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines chosen by Charles Knight. Quintura, like many other alt search engines, is focusing on user interface (UI) innovations - see our previous categorization of search engines here. The company recently closed an undisclosed amount of funding from Skype's investors, Europe's leading early-stage VC company Mangrove Capital Partners.
Many believe that it's nearly impossible to convince users to switch search engines due to user interface innovations only. However I spoke to Quintura CEO Yakov Sadchikov and he told me that one should start with user interface innovation, followed by providing users with more relevant search results on the first page. So let's open up this topic for discussion here on ReadWriteWeb.
This week's poll is a companion to a thought-provoking post co-written by Emre Sokullu and Charles Knight. The post is a review of alt search engine Quintura, which differentiates itself with clustering technology. But there is a larger question: can search engines such as Quintura, that rely on UI innovation, really be competitive with Google?
Emre argues that the problem with relying on UI innovation is that the barrier to entry is too low. The big players Google (SearchMash) and Microsoft (Live) are actively experimenting with UI innovations, not to mention a number of other alt search engines (e.g. Snap). Meanwhile Charles says that "I do not believe that any of the Top 100 alternative search engines is a 'Google Killer;' but: they all are!". He cites an Aesop fable about a lion and 4 oxen to back this theory up.
So what do you think? Take part in our poll below - and don't forget to read Emre and Charles' review of Quintura.
