This year there has been an explosion in Rich Internet Application (RIA) frameworks. The first major player to announce one was Adobe and its Apollo framework, which Richard covered back in March and I wrote about during ETech. Richard also wrote an explanatory post on Apollo. Next was Microsoft's announcement of Silverlight during Mix 2007. Mozilla has plans to implement offline mode in the next version of Firefox and this week Google jumped into the game with their offline framework called Gears.
Why this storm of RIA and offline functionality? As long as broadband, WiFi and mobile are all on the rise, why are we even talking about Desktop applications? Surely there must be good reasons and use cases for these frameworks. In this post we take a closer look at the intended use and marketing behind these RIA frameworks.
All too often when we report about a major acquisition or merger, there is a part of the story that is ignored: how the users respond to the news. Reactions usually run the gamut from expressions of congratulations, to expressions of fear, to expressions of rage. The case of Last.fm's purchase for $280 million by CBS is no exception.
Though the user reaction was mostly positive in this case, it was tempered with a wariness that the acquisition might lead to changes in the Last.fm service. From the Last.fm user forums, came this comment:
"Why do I have the feeling it's downhill all the way from now on :( Time to pull all my stats and find someone to write this kind of site again"
-mrhAWK
Userplane, a communications widget provider that allows website owners to add chat, instant messaging, and video conferencing to their sites, has launched a revenue sharing program called Userplane Money. The company, which was purchased by AOL in August 2006, has deployed widgets on over 155,000 websites including Friendster, MySpace, and date.com. The free version of Userplane's platform, which is ad-supported, will now allow publishers to make money from those ads.
Userplane says they are seeing an adoption rate of about 5,000 news widgets being deployed per week, and they are hoping that this new business model shift (from paid products to ad-supported products to rev share) will fuel future growth. "We’re counting on Userplane Money to explode our base into the millions, because we’re telling publishers, 'Hey, you can make money off of this,'" said Userplane CEO Mike Jones.
last100 has an excellent post analyzing comments about the upcoming AppleTV, made by Steve Jobs at yesterday's D5 event.
‚ÄúWe‚Äôre in two businesses today, we‚Äôll very shortly be in three, and a hobby‚Ä?, Apple‚Äôs CEO Steve Jobs told Walt Mossberg in an on-stage interview at yesterday‚Äôs D: conference. The first two are computers and digital music (iPod/iTunes), and the third will be the cell phone market which Apple will enter next month with the launch of the iPhone. And the hobby? The company‚Äôs recently released set-top-box, the AppleTV.
Earlier this week we reported that the F.T.C. is looking at a possible antitrust investigation against Google, over its DoubleClick acquisition. Our poll this week asks: Should Google be investigated for antitrust? I'm somewhat amazed to find that nearly half of respondants so far think that YES, Google should be investigated for anti-trust. At this point 47% of you think that.
42% say no, Google should be left alone. 11% of you don't know either way.
There's still time to cast you vote. Not that the F.T.C. is avidly following Read/WriteWeb's poll (well, I guess that could be a reason for the delay). But seriously, what do you think? Is Google/DoubleClick a monopoly that the US government needs to crack down on?
Yumondo is an "urban stylesharing" social network startup currently in private beta testing, that claims it will set new standards for community on Web 2.0. The site approaches community from a place and style standpoint. The vision is obviously one of creating local communities that branch outward (from a distinct place or location), rather than the traditional Web 2.0 model of remote communities reaching out to a diverse geographic user base. At Yumondo, users share their real home and their sense of style.
Yumondo is being developed by the German Web technology company Metaversum. CEO Jochen Hummel, a Silicon Valley veteran, is the founder and is backed by an impressive development team.
Google has released a browser plug-in called Gears, which enables people to use web apps while offline. The technology behind the plug-in gives developers the ability to implement offline functionality into their browser-based web apps. Gears is an open source collaboration between Google, Adobe, Mozilla, and Opera.
We've written many times before about the need for offline web app access, and in February '07 we reported that Mozilla will offer offline web access in Firefox 3. At that time, February, Robert O'Callahan from Mozilla responded in the comments that "yes, Web apps need to be reengineered for this, and no, no-one (including Google) has announced they will do so --- although we hope they will! [...]". Well Google has basically just announced it today, meaning the working relationship between Google and Mozilla gets even cozier.
Update: Google has acquired Panoramio, a website that links millions of photos with the exact geographical location where they were taken. It's all happening today!
(original post) A lot of acquisition news has been released today, with the common theme that Big Media is buying successful web 2.0 startups. First it was CBS acquiring last.fm for $280M, which Josh Catone wrote up earlier today. CBS has been very active in Web 2.0 activity lately. As well as today's acquisition, CBS has been courting web 2.0 sites - like Bebo, MuseStorm, Clearspring, Goowy Media and many more - in order to spread their content virally across social media sites. Also last week CBS announced its Audience Network initiative.
We barely have time to pause and reflect these days on how far communications technology has progressed. Without even taking a deep breath, we've transitioned from email to chat to blogs to social networks and more recently to Twitter. Here is my representation of the current ecosystem, which we will explore in this post:
Find Internet TV today launched what they say is the first online guide to live Internet television streams. Even though their new TV Listings page currently only display information on about 50 of the 600 channels in their database of TV stations that stream content online, this guide puts Find Internet TV a step ahead of similar guides to online TV content like ChooseAndWatch and FreeTube, which link to video streams but can't tell you whats on.
Find Internet TV's Listings are displayed in an attractive manner that resembles other online TV guides. They use a 10 channel by 4 hour grid that loads in an iframe, left/right arrows advance listing by an hour. There are drop down menus that allow you to jump to any date or time and filters for General, Music, News, Sports, Entertainment, Kids, Shopping, and Religious programming.
