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Today's winning comment comes from our post Top Health 2.0 Web Apps. At the end of that post we asked for your suggestions of innovative, potentially ground-breaking web apps that will change how healthcare is done. One came from Dr. Anri Kissilenko, who was particularly impressed with the doctor ratings site Vitals. Well done Dr Kiss, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget.
Like most people, when I saw the headline “Google founder spooked by Microsoft bid” (because Microhoo dominance would stifle innovation on the Internet) my thoughts ran to pots and kettles, PR battle for proxy votes, confuse the enemy with antitrust and so forth.
Don’t the Google guys realise how big and dominant they have become? Sure they do, but “only the paranoid survive” and Microhoo does give some room for paranoia in the Googleplex.
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
Why Google Apps is a Serious Threat to Microsoft Office
Bernard Lunn wrote that he is a “skeptical, later early adopter”; the sort of person who Microsoft needs to retain and should have been able to retain easily. He doesn't spend time on productivity tools that may at some date make him more productive, but which today are just a frustrating time sink. That describes the majority of people. MS Office can be annoying, but it does work. So any serious alternative has to offer a significant advantage and at the same time make adoption a total breeze. Bernard thinks Google Apps has reached that point. The significant advantage is collaboration.
In his post Why Google Apps is a Serious Threat to Microsoft Office, Bernard Lunn argued that the collaboration features in Google Apps are good enough to take on Microsoft. Commenter Karim took him on, with a well-written defense of MS Office. Also check out Bernard's response and the further debate that ensued. This kind of discussion is what we like to see on RWW, so well done Karim, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. Here is Karim's full comment:
Twitter was originally designed as an app that would allow people to share information about what they were doing within a distributed group setting. It's something akin to a collection of automatically forming email discussion lists (except not via email). The benefit of this is that people can receive and send information within a group very quickly. That's why Twitter has become such an important source of breaking news, and it's also why helpful consumer information apps like Commuter Feed are possible.
Last July, while the seventh Harry Potter book was setting sales records, we wrote a post detailing how to write and publish a book from start to finish. At the time, Lulu was easily the best self-service print on demand option available to fledgling authors. With limited fees, a thriving community, and distribution options that made it easy (relatively speaking) to get your book on store shelves, it was a no-brainer for many writers. Since that time, though, things have changed, and the burgeoning print on demand industry is starting to come into its own.
An open source identity platform called the Higgins Project launched the 1.0 version of their service this week and it's a nice look into what could be the future of user-centric identity online. Higgins offers a variety of features and services, but the basic premise is that it serves as a portable container you can use to carry multiple identities with you around the web.
Why would users want that? Because you don't want to sign in to a social network with the same identity card you use to sign in to financial websites. Higgins aims to replace the assorted user names and passwords we all use today with a set of simple, standards-based identifiers that you can take from site to site.
Inducement prize contests are simple: offer up a cash reward to whoever can best solve a problem first. One of the most famous current inducement prize organizers is the X Prize Foundation, which organizes a number of such competitions around scientific endeavors such as space flight, lunar exploration, and human genetics. Inducement prize contests can be extremely effective at initiating innovation and inspiring public imagination about complex problems, but they're not easy to organize. A new web site called BigCarrot aims to change that by crowdsourcing the creation of inducement prize contests.
Radar Networks, the home of the eagerly awaited semantic web app Twine, will announce on Monday that it's closed another round of funding, including a major investment from the fund lead by Ross Levinsohn, the man who bought MySpace while at Fox.
Super-sleuth Dan Primack over at PE Hub dug up the early news about the investment and Chris Morrison at Venture Beat says Velocity Interactive Group and a number of other investors are putting in money in the $15 to $20 million range.
