We're excited to introduce today the launch of a new content channel here at ReadWriteWeb. It's called the ReadWriteWeb Jobwire and it's a site dedicated to reporting on people who have been hired for new jobs in tech, new media and related companies.
We've been working on it for months, well before the current economic climate unfolded, but we're hoping that a whole site of good news will serve our readers well in these troubled times. Companies are still hiring, people are still getting cool new jobs, and we're going to report on it. We invite you to check out the new Jobwire site to meet the Jobwire team, learn about our special guest editors and check out some of the great new jobs people have landed lately! Click here to read more and meet the Jobwire team.
Google today announced that it has reached a deal with book publishers to settle two copyright lawsuits over potential copyright violations in its Google Book Search product. This $125 million settlement, which still needs approval from a U.S. district court, will be used to establish a Book Rights Registry that will ensure that publishers and authors receive compensation from subscription services and ad revenue. For users of Google Book Search, this settlement will mean that they might soon be able to build an "online bookshelf" and buy licenses to read the full-text of books in Google's index.
Microsoft announced this morning at its PDC conference that the next release of Microsoft Office will include browser-based versions of some of its main office software products - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. These will be "lightweight versions", but Microsoft told us yesterday that they'll still have rich functionality and will be comparable to Google's suite of online office applications. The apps will enable users to create, edit and collaborate on Microsoft Office documents through the browser. The apps will work in IE, Firefox and Safari browsers (no word on whether Google Chrome will be supported). Update: Microsoft clarified in an email that these apps will use HTML and AJAX, but also Silverlight components.
Given yesterday's cloud computing announcements from Microsoft, it only seems reasonable for Yahoo to make at least some announcements about cloud computing as well. Today, Yahoo announced that it will offer the Zimbra collaboration suite as a hosted solution for educational institutions. According to Yahoo, over 400 schools are already using Zimbra at this time. While this hosted solution is currently only available to educational institutions, chances are that Yahoo is testing the waters with this release and will soon offer a similar solution to small businesses.
If you use Google's apps, you likely find yourself spending an inordinate amount of time in Gmail. And with good reason. Gmail is where the majority of the activity is happening, so it tends to be where you live. That said, you're likely still interested in keeping tabs on your schedule and what's happening with your work.
Wouldn't it be great if you could keep an eye on your other Google apps - like Calendar and Docs - without having to open multiple tabs or traverse from window to window? Now, thanks to the latest feature releases from Google Labs, you can. Introducing Google Labs Calendar and Doc gadgets for Gmail.
I'm at the Microsoft PDC in Los Angeles, where I was among a small group of bloggers and analysts who had a roundtable today with Microsoft executives Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect), Bob Muglia (Senior Vice President of the Server and Tools Business) and Amitabh Srivastava (Corporate Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Services). The topic of conversation was Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing operating system announced earlier today. I also had a 1:1 briefing with Daz Wilkin, a program manager in Microsoft's platform strategy group. All of this to get to the bottom of what Microsoft Azure is and what it means for the Internet, consumers, and businesses.
OpenID - the "free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet" - has rapidly gained traction as a login credential for Web 2.0 apps and sites. Its adoption by more mainstream technology properties, however, has occurred at a slower rate.
But all of that could be changing with today's announcement from Microsoft. Anointing OpenID "the de facto standard Web protocol for user authentication," Microsoft has moved to give millions of Windows Live users access to any OpenID-enabled site on the Web by ensuring every Windows Live ID will become an OpenID.
We have surely seen our fair share of Digg-style social news sites over the last few years. The latest entrant into this market is Vanno, which puts an interesting and novel spin onto the social news experience. Unlike other social news sites, Vanno's focus is exclusively on news stories about companies and Vanno then uses its community's votes to calculate a company's reputation.
Vanno is still in private beta testing, but we were able to get 500 invites for our readers. You can find a link to the sign-up page at the end of this post.
Aviary, an impressive suite of online image editing tools, just launched after an extensive private beta test. The suite consists of the Phoenix image editor, the Peacock image laboratory, which allows you to create very nifty special effects through a Yahoo Pipes-like interface, and the Toucan color management application. Subscribers to Aviary's most costly subscription plan also get access to the Raven vector editor. The first 100 RWW readers who subscribe to Aviary's yearly subscription plan before November 3rd will receive a $55 discount off of Aviary's regular price.
I don't remember what I did last Monday, do you? I'd have to think pretty hard to remember what I did even on my last birthday, and that was only two weeks ago. That's depressing.
Enter Memiary, a startlingly simple diary service that prompts you to enter up to five sentence fragments about what you did today and lets you look back by date at what you did in the past. It's really simple, from the gracefully implemented account creation process to the AJAX item editing. I've bookmarked it and am going to try to fill it out daily for awhile; I'd sure like to be able to look back at any given day in my life and remember what happened. This is so simple I might actually use it.
