FCC Chaiman Julius Genachowski outlined a number of new principles today that will guide the commission's rulemaking with regards to net neutrality. As Genachowski points out, openness was a key factor that made the Internet the success it has become. While the FCC never adopted any formal rules with regards to net neutrality, the commission adopted a set of four policy principles in 2005. Today, Genachowski announced that the FCC will begin the rulemaking process to formalize these principles and also announced two additional principles that should guide this process: non-discrimination and transparency.
For the last 10 years, Brainshark has offered a very popular on-demand presentations service for enterprises. While most web services today typically start out by offering free services and then slowly move towards offering paid features, Brainshark is turning this model on its head. While the company already offers a profitable paid product, Brainshark just launched a free version of its service today. MyBrainshark, as this new service is called, was built on top of Brainshark's enterprise product. In terms of its features, MyBrainshark clearly takes on Slideshare and similar services head-on, though the company is mostly targeting business customers for now.
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Since the launch of the contextual link advertising product on ReadWriteWeb, we at Hakia have been anxious to see the results and evaluate the success of our contextual advertising product, Contexa. The Contexa system matches the semantic context of a blog post with a sponsor's criteria on the fly to deliver relevant ads to the reader. Participating ReadWriteWeb sponsors have provided the contextual engine with up to three "trigger phrases" that define their business. As a reader of the blog, you may have seen the product's implementation at the bottom of certain blog entries, as shown below. You can see another example here.
Adobe just announced the launch of Flash Platform Services for Distribution. These new services will allow developers to make their applications more sharable on a variety of platforms, including a wide range of mobile devices. Adobe will give developers the ability to enable their users to embed applications on over 70 destination sites. In order to provide this service, Adobe has partnered with Gigya, a company that already has a lot of experience in giving publishers the ability to make their content sharable through social widgets.
With a product as ubiquitous as Facebook, the public has raised a number of privacy-related concerns including optional settings, privacy policies and data mining. In the past, ReadWriteWeb covered Facebook's plans to sell user data for market research purposes. However, today's article in the Boston Globe suggests that user information can be mined for more than just advertising purposes.
Five years ago it was strange to see TV (a form of entertainment built for at-home consumption) rally people to congregate outside of their homes. Special programming like heavy weight boxing title matches, the Super Bowl and the Oscars could encourage viewers to establish a shared viewing experience, but regular shows rarely commanded the same effort. Today, bar-hosted TV screening parties are as common as beer. In an effort to build on the shared viewing experience, popular HD television site Hulu is expanding beyond its walls. The company launched its Watch Now Facebook App where audiences can watch season premieres and comment in a group setting.
This year's OneWebDay, on Tuesday, September 22, has the slogan "One Web. For All." It's geared to raising awareness of and generating discussion on the digital divide, a topic that seems to me to have drifted out of fashion in recent years.
("One Web. For All." also has the virtue of being a shorter, catchier slogan than the one being pushed by the telecommunications industry: "Two Webs. One a Really Fast Super-Premium Web, and the Other One for You.")
This is an exciting week for us here at ReadWriteWeb. We just recently announced the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, which is gearing up to be an excellent event on the state of the real-time Web and the challenges ahead. See the details on it and all of the other great events lined up below. You can download the calendar in iCal format or import it into your Google Calendar. You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. This events guide is a weekly feature here on ReadWriteWeb. We publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.
Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.
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In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we announce our first event: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. It's a 1-day event that will bring together some of the smartest minds doing real-time work for an industry-changing, face-to-face conversation. Also this week we look at which 'light blogging' service is the most popular, tell you how to fix your Facebook privacy settings, analyze web tech VC trends in August, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).
