Freebase, the first product of semantic web company Metaweb, is an open, semantically marked up database of information that we called one of the "10 semantic apps to watch" last year. With $57.4 million in funding, a smart team, and a tech legend in Danny Hillis at the helm, Metaweb is considered to be one of the most serious players in the Semantic Web space. Yet the company's
efforts to date have been met with skepticism. Particularly, people have asked how is Freebase different to Wikipedia? Jamie Taylor, the Minister of Information at Metaweb, spoke at the SemTech 2008 Conference that took place in San Jose last week in an effort to dispel some of that skepticism.
Social networking is at a major fork in the road. Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for your connections (aka the social graph), but with this data available via open APIs to anybody who needs it. That is a utility type model, and as with any utility, it can be hugely valuable at scale.
Screencasts, how-to videos that show only what's happening on the computer screen, have been around since as early as 1994, according to Wikipedia. But in recent years, their popularity as an instructional method has grown and screencasts have become an essential means of teaching on the web (the term "screencast" was actually coined in 2004). Below are some of our favorite places to learn by watching on the web.
A company called DreamFactory based in Mountain View, CA has just launched a new Enterprise 2.0 suite of applications called the "DreamTeam Suite." The suite's social element, which consists of online collaboration between team members, gives the suite its "Enterprise 2.0" flair, a term that loosely applies to any business-ready application integrating concepts from the Web 2.0 world. The DreamTeam Suite also joins other business applications in choosing Amazon's cloud infrastructure for their hosting needs, and then passes the money they've saved by doing so back to their customers.
Today SezWho a universal profile, content discovery, and a sophisticated reputation engine provider, has announced its acquisition of Tejit, a provider of semantic intelligence solutions. The acquisition enables SezWho to provide more precise contextual reputation scores for contributors based on topics of conversation. ReadWriteWeb gives you an in-depth look into SezWho's latest acquisition and how SezWho measures up to the competition.
Google Gears, the offline web application API it debuted last year at its developer conference, is turning one this week, and to celebrate, Google will be dropping the company name from Gears. The name change is a symbolic move aimed at reinforcing Google's commitment to working with existing standards communities and helping them to define better open standards for bridging online applications and the offline world.
With so many social media sites in circulation today, badge soup can become a real problem for web sites trying to squeeze the most out of their traffic. Everyone has a different set of core social media sites that they use -- from del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia, to Digg, Reddit, and Diigo, we all have our favorites. But appealing to your users' varied tastes often means an overwhelming sea of site badges that is both unattractive and ineffective. Web developer Aza Raskin has a solution based on a browser history leak introduced due to CSS.
Skyfire, the mobile web browser that allows users to experience the web as they would on a PC, has secured $13 Million in Series B Funding. The application has a waiting list that amounts to the publicity Gmail received with its invite system. Here's a closer look at a next generation web browser that users should look forward to.
With all the discussions about information overload and the need for filtering, it looks like we're going to finally start getting some relief. This month, two companies made announcements about updates to their RSS readers which will now provide their users with built-in filtering technologies. Those two companies are illumio and Newsgator Online. However, each company has taken a different approach in doing so. Which one will succeed?
The next Mobile 2.0 Conference is happening in Europe, on July 4 in Barcelona, Spain. ReadWriteWeb is a media partner, because we support what Rudy De Waele and team are doing to promote the Mobile Web across the world. I myself attended the last event in San Francisco last October and learned a lot. We have 5 free tickets to the event to give away...
