When Google released Chrome just a few weeks ago, we praised it for its innovative user interface and the speed of its JavaScript rendering engine, which blew away the competition. Now, however, WebKit, the open-source project that forms the basis of both Chrome and Apple's Safari browser, has released the latest version of its own JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme. In our benchmarks, this new engine turned out to be significantly faster than Google's V8 JavaScript engine.
Fairtilizer isn't a record company - it's a new music company. What's the difference? A record company is about owning the rights to music and establishes an employer/employee relationship with the artists. A music company, on the other hand, is about having artists establish a relationship with a service. At Fairtilizer, they believe the services they provide will establish them as the "music company" of the future.
This week, Fairtilizer has launched the first part of their new distribution platform: an embeddable player which allows indie artists to share their music anywhere on the net from web sites to blogs to social networks.
According to a report on TechCrunch, eBay is trying to sell the popular recommendation engine StumbleUpon, which eBay bought for $75 million in early 2007. It was never clear to us why eBay bought StumbleUpon in the first place. When the acquisition was first announced, we speculated that eBay would use StumbleUpon's technology to create a new, viral way of shopping. In the end, though, eBay never integrated StumbleUpon into its business.
OpenACircle is a new collaboration tool for teams which includes innovative screen-sharing and video conferencing features for instant collaboration with co-workers. This makes OpenACircle somewhat unique in the web-based project/task management space where most competitors have just designed a lightweight version of SharePoint and offer it up as a service. Instead, OpenACircle acknowledges the fact that distributed teams need better tools for collaboration and real-time interaction than just a simple file repository and meeting workspace.
Web analytics firm WebTrends reported today that mainstream Internet users are "embracing" the Google Chrome browser. In the third week since its launch, WebTrends states that Google Chrome is the fourth most popular browser used by visitors to the web site of The Daily Telegraph, Britain's highest selling newspaper. WebTrends puts the figure at "nearly 2 percent" of the total traffic to telegraph.co.uk, which it says is more than Netscape, Mozilla, Opera and other browsers. Presumably the browsers above it are IE, Firefox and Safari.
Here at tech-focused site ReadWriteWeb, the last couple of weeks of Google Analytics data shows that about 7.25% of our readers are visiting using Chrome.
We all love the David and Goliath story. What about David vs two Goliaths? That is the improbable story of Zoho, the Web Office startup competing head on with both Microsoft and Google. On top of that, Zoho is from India and who ever heard of a product company from India? Indeed Zoho has only 10 people in America, yet it is winning really big enterprise accounts in head to head evaluations with both Goliaths. What's more, they have not taken a dime of external money - having bootstrapped it from the start.
At Web 2.0 Expo in New York this week I met up with Raju Vegesna, one of Zoho's founders, to find out how they're succeeding despite the odds.
In its early days, FriendFeed was known for releasing new features on an almost daily basis. That breakneck speed has slowed now that the lifestreaming and aggregation service has come out of private beta, but sometimes FriendFeed still surprises us with new features and user interface changes. Just a few days ago, we wrote about FriendFeed's new design, which came out of beta today. More importantly, though, FriendFeed finally solved one of the most annoying aspects of the service: duplicate shares. FriendFeed now groups similar items together, which is a major improvement and reduces the noise on the main feed significantly.
What a week of market mayhem! How odd having that as the backdrop to the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. We have been sounding alerts about the economic backdrop to our world of innovation for nearly a year. Back in February we wrote that this is not our bubble. Since then, the news from the economy has gotten worse and nobody is suggesting it will get better any time soon. Reading the papers is pretty grim (unless you stick to Sports or Arts). Yet we contend that it is not grim in the 'innovation economy'. Here's why...
This morning, Amazon announced that it would soon launch a content delivery network (CDN). This new service, which does not have a name yet, will be complimentary to Amazon's existing web services and will work seamlessly with S3, Amazon's online storage solution. Like most of Amazon's web services, this new product will not require a contract and does not have any minimum-usage requirements. Amazon did not announce a specific launch date, but it expects the new service to be available by the end of this year.
Today, Joost announced that all of its content is now available directly on its website and not just through its desktop client. Joost was one of the most hyped-up companies on the web when the peer-to-peer streaming video service was still in stealth mode in 2006 and beta invites were rare and coveted. However, once users actually got a look at Joost, disillusion quickly set in. Joost's video quality was very high and it had signed up a wide range of content producers, but its downfall was its reliance on a desktop client. Users were already switching to viewing video on the web and having to start up a client just to watch video was simply too inconvenient.
