Israeli mobile startup Fring is a great way to use Skype, Google Talk and MSN Messenger IM on your phone. This weekend the company added AIM and Yahoo messenger to its offerings for Symbian and UIQ handsets.
Fring is a finalist in the Crunchies awards and has raised more than $12 million in VC funding. Its primary competitor is generally said to be Nimbuzz. I like Fring a lot, but I hope that the company can spend some of its money fixing some serious problems I experienced with the service (more on that below).
We've already revealed our picks for the "Best Web BigCo" and "Best Web LittleCo" of the past 12 months. But not everything was so rosy for some companies on the web this year. Below we've gathered our list of the top flubs in the web technology sector in 2007. In fact, one of the companies we named as our year's best is on the list. Feel free to add your picks in the comments.
It's the end of the year and so time for 'best of' and prediction posts, which are a lot of fun. Today I've been re-organizing my Firefox bookmarks, which made me reflect on which web apps and sites I've used the most this year. I encourage you all to add your own most used web apps in the comments. I've experimented with and tested many more, but in the final analysis you can't go past the usage metric.
In no particular order, but loosely categorized, my favorites of '07 were:
This Fall pollsters Zogby International released the results of a survey that asked nearly 10,000 US adults the following question. "How likely would you be to implant a device into your brain that enabled you to use your mind to access the internet if it could be done safely?" 11% of respondents said they were very or somewhat likely to do so.
I've talked to a lot of people in the internet industry about this survey since then and have found an even higher percentage of people who say they are interested in a web enabled brain implant. Let's discuss this sooner rather than later, shall we?
Along the lines of Million Dollar Homepage in the "that'll never work... will it?" category, 2007 saw the successful launch of Wants For Sale. The innovative project by New York artist Justin Gignac and his girlfriend Christine might just be my favorite idea of the year.
This past year was a big one for RSS. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, was the backbone of all early developments in the new era of the internet. It made blogs readable, podcasts subscribable, wikis trackable and search persistent. While explicit, knowing adoption of RSS is often said to be dismal ("it's too complicated, it's just more info overload" etc.) - I think we may be underestimating the extent of adoption. Here's my list of highlights from 2007, what's yours?
This is a guest post by Aseem Kishore, a technology enthusiast and lead blogger for Online-Tech-Tips.
Adroll.com is not just another ad network, it's a social ad network. There's a difference. Adroll is betting that by allowing niche publishers to organize themselves together into communities with similar interests they will be able to be able to better attract advertisers by combining their traffic. This is an example of making money on the long tail, something Alex Iskold recently noted was the only effective way to make money involving the long tail. Adroll was founded by one of the members of the so-called "Paypal mafia," Jared Kopf, who is also a co-founder of Slide.
The LA Times reported last week that many striking Hollywood writers are in negotiations with funders to set up production studios that would create content exclusively for the web, bypassing the Hollywood system completely. Maybe, though, they should put those plans on hold for a little while -- highly touted scripted web shows aren't doing so hot.
What Web applications and trends will make it big in 2008? In this post the RWW authors ruminate on the current trends in Web technology and look forward to what 2008 might bring us. Topics include Google, semantic web, online advertising, recommendation systems, Facebook, digg, open standards, Mobile Web, search engines, and much more!
So check out our predictions for '08 and please contribute your own in the comments. Also you may want to review our track record for 2007 Web predictions.
Last Monday we rolled out a new design on ReadWriteWeb and we received a lot of feedback on it, both positive and negative. Thank you to everybody who commented on the new design, particularly those of you who left detailed critiques. I'll address some of the feedback below, as well as update you on our comments system in general - which had technical issues during the week.
Overall I am still very happy with the design and it achieves the goals that I listed in the announcement post. But as with any Web development project, there is room for more iteration and some tweaking. So I want to assure you that all your feedback will be taken into consideration. Now to the specifics...
