Daniel Langendorf at last100 has written an outstanding post, explaining how (if done right) the Gphone and not the iPhone will be the one to change the face of the wireless industry.
The post has accompanying graphics - Gphone concepts contributed by Lorin Wood, a previsualization designer who specializes in concepts and ideation for Hollywood. Wood’s concepts for last100 explored how Google applications, and its advertising, might look like on the Gphone.
Here's a taste of what Dan wrote, but I recommend you click through to read the whole thing:
Earlier today, as part of our Web Office Week Richard MacManus defined what constitutes an online office. His ultimate definition was a set of applications that include "a combination of productivity, publishing and collaboration features. A Web Office both embraces the functionality of desktop office suites (e.g. Microsoft Office) and extends it by using Web Native features."
Richard wrote that an online office suite includes online versions of traditional office software, but it does not include specialty applications like Customer Relationship Management and content management systems. While those apps have a home in the office, they are specialist applications and do not belong in the standard web office definition. So with that in mind, below are my picks for ten must have applications in any web office. These are my choices for the best of breed online word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, calendar, email app, groupware, file storage, RSS reader, contact manager, and to do list. This list is simply my opinion, so please chime in and leave comments with your must have applications.
Search Radar, a recently launched browser plugin, aims to help users refine their search results by providing suggested queries based on their search terms. When the plugin is installed, the Search Radar suggestions are delivered in the sidebar of the search results page.
Search Radar works by analyzing the search results for your query and figuring out which terms appear the most across all results. The idea is that while searchers tend not to search beyond the first page of results, Search Radar's suggestions, because they're drawn from all results, will point you toward related topics you may not have found otherwise. Search Radar also says they're results provide an overview of the topic you're searching for, without having to dig through the actual results.
Online office tools provider Zoho today released a beta version of Zoho Start, a launch pad for Zoho's suite of office applications. Zoho currently offers a suite of 16 separate apps and utilities, and while they have a common login, there was nothing really tying them together as a single office suite. There was no easy way to access your spreadsheets and word processing documents from a single space, for example.
Zoho Start is what the company is calling a first step "towards integrating Zoho Apps under a single page." The page currently aggregates files from Zoho Writer, Sheet, and Show and lets users organize them into folders, as well as share, tag, import, and export documents via a common interface. Zoho Start also draws a list of contacts from Zoho Chat, and a features a launcher for their entire application suite.
This is Web Office Week here at Read/WriteWeb, but some of you may not be 100% sure what a Web Office is. Even the Wikipedia definition is a bit bare bones, so in this post I'm going to take a crack at defining 'Web Office'. What I ended up with is this:
A Web Office suite is a combination of productivity, publishing and collaboration features. A Web Office both embraces the functionality of desktop office suites (e.g. Microsoft Office) and extends it by using Web Native features.
But let's start at the beginning. Wikipedia currently states that a Web Office "is a set of applications hosted on a server that enable users to create, edit and share information. It is a derivative of the Desktop Office Suite, but has more collaboration capabilities due to its Web nature."
It then lists a very broad set of applications that might be considered part of a Web Office - everything from word processing to blogs to CMS to wiki to email to CRM and accounting. I think this is too broad a definition - for example a CMS (content management system) is an office application, and it may be a part of a company Intranet, but we wouldn't normally associate it with an office suite.
Slide, which makes slideshow and media widgets for the major social network platforms (including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Xanga, Tagged and Blogger) has announced that more than a million new flash widgets are being added to its network every day. Its most popular widgets are Slideshows, SkinFlix, Guestbooks and FunPix.
Slide is very popular on Facebook. Currently Slide's non-flash based widgets are the 1st, 2nd and 6th most popular applications in Facebook - Top Friends (13.6 Million users), My Questions (7.7 M) and SuperPoke! (6.1 M). Indeed most of the very big Facebook apps seem to be owned by Slide or RockYou!.
I never thought one of our network sites would be outed by Valleywag, but that's what happened today :-) I'm pleased to introduce Read/WriteTalk, a brand new podcasting show produced by Sean Ammirati and myself. Sean is the driving force behind the show, so all credit goes to him for setting it up and doing the podcasts. By day, Sean is the VP of Business Development and Product Management at personalization startup mSpoke - so Read/WriteTalk is a part-time gig for him. There are still a couple of minor design issues that we wanted to fix up before announcing Read/WriteTalk, but now that the site is out there we'll tell you what it's about.
The tagline behind the show is "The People Behind The Web" and Sean will be interviewing a number of major players in the Web Technology industry over the coming months. The opening podcast features Jason Calacanis and - as well as the Samurai quote that Valleywag picked up on - Jason gives a lot of informative details about his background and experiences as an entrepreneur. Jason also reveals how he came up with the idea behind Mahalo, the people-powered search engine he founded this year, and how he went about launching the product (also see our review of Mahalo). To add spice to the podcast, there are also a couple of none-too-subtle digs at Valleywag and in particular Jason's arch-nemesis Nick Denton!
This week chef to the stars Niall Harbison launched a social network aimed a food lovers, iFoods.tv. They're touting it as "Facebook for foodies." The site is basically a social network formed around a library of video tutorials produced in the familiar TV instructional style. In the press release we were sent, iFoods.tv made a big deal of all the famous people Harbison had cooked for, dropping names like Victoria Beckham, Bill Gates, Bono, and Mariah Carey.
But of course, there are only three things that really matter for this site: the quality of the video instruction, the quality of the social network, and, of course, the recipes.
Part of the Digestion Phase
that we wrote about last week includes evaluating technology trends. We can identify a clear
set of winners: online video and online photo are taking off, vertical search engines are making great progress, MySpace and
Facebook are the new social phenomenon, etc. But not everything we have recently invented is working out.
I remember being in a cab in New York City listening to John Furier's podcast coverage of DEMO 2006 and thinking it was nothing short of inspiring. Later that year when my company launched its own product at DEMOFall, it was even more inspirational to be interviewed by John. So when I saw the news a few days ago that John leaving PodTech, I was particularly sad. Certainly things were complicated and the company was in trouble, but the reason it was upsetting to me is because John is one of the major figures behind the podcasting movement.
One of the leading RSS Aggregation startups, NewsGator Technologies, jumped on the Facebook bandwagon today with NewsFriends (add to Facebook here) - a social news application where Facebook users can aggregate and share news, videos and podcasts. Once you have it installed, you can select friends and it automatically delivers you the news they are reading. You can also pick packages of popular feeds selected by NewsGator editors, or add news feeds directly.
The latest news stories display on your profile page, and by opening the app you can browse all your news feeds. You can post any news story and your comments to your profile, or send to a friend. Video and audio podcasts play inside NewsFriends.
