At ReadWriteWeb we work hard to provide you with the smartest Internet news and reviews each and every day. The sponsors that give us the opportunity to spend our time writing are companies that appreciate the thoughtfulness of the whole community here, including our readers. Once a week we like to write a post about them; here's who they are, what they do and what they've been up to lately. We hope you'll pay them a visit as a way to show your appreciation for their sponsorship of this site.
Interested in joining our crew of supporting companies? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a particularly sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision makers. You can email us for more info.
Ready to learn more about the smart companies that are supporting this site you love to read? Read on...
Startups - want to be innovative? Go back to the garage. That's the message venture capitalists at the Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase in Redwood City CA today, are offering to entrepreneurs and startups.
In the midst of one of the worst economic crises the world has seen, investors are in the main optimistic, and agree that to weather this storm and come out on top, today's entrepreneurs need to change their mindset and go back to basics: go back to the garage, and success will follow.
Anything that can be a video will be a video
During the Web 2.0 Summit recently, the Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, pointed out that one of the reasons the world is no longer the same is YouTube. For better or worse, said Mr. Newsom, we are now always on the record. Every significant and insignificant conversation is being recorded, and the videos are available on YouTube.
While the tech world eagerly waits to see who Barack Obama will appoint Chief Technology Officer of the United States, a similar appointment of more immediate impact to many people has just occurred. Terence Milholland began work this week as the first Chief Technology Officer in the history of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
He enters an IRS that the General Accounting Office said last week suffers from technology so outdated it leaves the agency with inadequate integrity, reliability and security for sensitive taxpayer information. Check out our coverage of the first IRS CTO and the daunting problems he'll face on our new blog the RWW Jobwire, sponsored by VisualCV.
Successful Creative Commons music store Magnatune announced today that they have made another radical transformation in their business model. Customers can now pay as little as $5 per month for unlimited streaming and $10 per month for unlimited DRM-free downloads, they can purchase as little as 1 month of membership and they can use Paypal's recurring payments feature to stay subscribed if they wish. The company, whose motto is "we are not evil," then gives 50% of revenues to the artists.
We really like what Magnatune is doing and we think this business model is great, but we're concerned that the service is still too antiquated in its music delivery to get customers beyond the fact that it has a really obscure catalog.
According to a new report by Accenture, a large number of Millennials (those born between 1977 and 1997), expect their companies to accommodate their IT preferences, including their preferred computers and applications. More than a third of Millennials also indicated that they were dissatisfied with the technologies their employers currently provide.
Among other things, Millennials would prefer to use instant messaging, text messaging, and RSS feeds to communicate with their clients and customers, though very few companies currently support these technologies. The report also highlights that a lot of employees are simply bypassing corporate IT departments if those don't offer them the services they need.
Where is that friend of mine? Who else likes to go there? Where is that place on the map? It's simple, useful questions like this that location based social network Shizzow aims to answer and the service just opened up today to users outside of beta location Portland, Oregon to now include users anywhere in California.
There are lots of location based social networks available, but this one is refreshingly simple. Is that enough to effectively differentiate Shizzow? It's going to have to be, because there's not much else about the service that's unique. Most features are easily reproduced, however, and usability may be the key point of competition in this market.
These are clearly not the easiest times to secure financing for a startup, but Boxee, which makes an open-source media center application that works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and the Apple TV, just announced a $4 million investment from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Bijan Sabet from Spark and Fred Wilson from Union Square will join the Boxee board.
Boxee, which is still in private beta testing, is a media center solution that allows you to play back content from third-party providers like Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, or Last.fm through a very slick interface.
Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp., gave a speech on Sunday titled "The Future of Newspapers: Moving Beyond Dead Trees." In the speech, he made the bold statement that newspapers would always be around in some form or other. "Too many journalists seem to take a perverse pleasure in ruminating on their pending demise," he said. "Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights in the 21st century."
Mobile messaging is experiencing a period of record growth, according to some figures released from VeriSign earlier this week. Looking at the numbers more closely, some interesting trends emerge. Those include the use of messaging for social and political change, marketing, such as that done by U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's mobile campaign, and the use of mobile messaging for charitable donations. Other sectors experiencing significant increases are the enterprise and financial institutions. In those two areas alone, mobile messaging has seen a 115% increase in only a year's time, and much of that is thanks to the financial industry's adoption of the medium for business to consumer communication.
