Web 2.0 New York starts today and I'm here at the event. I will be Twittering my instant takes (@bernardlunn), summarizing here on ReadWriteWeb when I have time. I plan to be a total mobile Blackberry Twitter-head all week, leaving my laptop at home and making my notes on Twitter. I will blog my experience with this later, hoping that there will be insights into where microblogging can go.
You can follow along with my tweets from Web 2.0 Expo New York, in the widget below.
Flixwagon, one of the top providers of live video broadcasting applications for consumers, has just announced the launch of a new telco-grade platform targeting both mobile carriers and media organizations. The platform is designed for integration with carriers' handsets so that their users will be able to stream live video from their phones directly to their blogs, social networking sites, video sites, and more, simply by using the Flixwagon mobile application. With this platform, they are paving the way for news organizations to incorporate more citizen journalism and user-generated content into their online offerings and TV broadcasts.
If you had a 'clean sheet' opportunity to create the ideal digital office environment for you and/or your business, what would you buy? What hardware and software would give you a productivity advantage, while being fun and affordable? Here is what we did in our London based marketing agency.
This is Part 1 of a 5-part series in ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel. Part 1 covers everything from a physical perspective. What, ideally, you need to have to make the digital office run. In subsequent parts, we will cover browser, web apps, mobile, and more.
So the 'Twitter for enterprise' product Yammer won the TC50 contest. Having slammed Yammer, here is who I think should have won: GoodGuide. It's a consumer play, but it is not Web 2.0 social media wisdom of the crowd. It uses hard core technology and research to deliver a service that is totally mainstream. It is also needed and in a hot area.
A new report about Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, by Awareness, Inc., shows that employers are increasingly allowing staff to use social media applications in working hours. Awareness puts the figure at 69 percent of businesses in 2008, up from 37 percent last year.
It's the latest in a string of reports this year - from Awareness, Forrester and others - which provide data about the growth of web 2.0 in the enterprise. It'll be a $4.6 Billion industry by 2013, according to Forrester. More of Awareness' findings below...
A Google patent application filed two years ago but published this fall is getting some new attention because it's just too interesting to ignore. The patent (link) is for putting data centers on ships at sea and harvesting the energy in waves for power.
The biggest benefit for the company, though, could come from changed legal and tax status by placing the ships outside of national jurisdiction. It's a thought both fascinating and frightening, although it also may end up as just another crazy patent filed for the sake of filing it.
Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, announced this weekend the formation of a new organization dedicated to studying how the web works and expanding access to the billions of people who can't get online today. The World Wide Web Foundation kicked off with $5 million in support from media funders the Knight Foundation.
Can yet another organization really make a difference? Some observers seem to be suffering from Organization Fatigue, but we're interested to see what Berners Lee can do. A group dedicated to deep study of the web and the obstacles to its growth sounds like a great idea to us. Not everyone agrees.
Today, Dopplr, the social network for business travelers, announced that it has secured a second round of financing. The lead investor for this round is Ester Dyson. Other investors include Tom Glocer from Reuters, Joshua Schachter from delicious, and magazine publisher Tyler Brule. Dopplr received its first seed investment from Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman, and Joichi Ito in September 2007. Dopplr expects to use this new round of financing to expand its business globally. Currently, Dopplr's user base is mostly in Europe and the U.S.
Electronics retailer Best Buy today announced that it plans to acquire music retailer Napster for $121 Million. According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal values Napster at $2.65 a share, almost double its closing price on Friday. However, while Napster was a major success story when its name was still synonymous with illegal P2P file sharing, it never quite caught on with users after it turned into a legitimate business. Judging from the press release, Best Buy is mostly interested in Napster's mobile business, where, with the help of Best Buy's marketing power, the company might just be able to create a profitable niche for itself.
Having owned Xcreative, a web development company that specialized in websites and marketing for the movie industry, the founders of MeDeploy (Christian Taylor, Joelle Musante, and Abe Lettelleir) were very familiar with the film industry. But for every filmmaker they helped, several more were turned away. Why? Cost. So many of the filmmakers simply couldn't afford the services the company provided.
