ReadWriteWeb

Our startup-minded readers may remember Mike Trotzke, our good friend who, with a little help from his good friends Marc Guyer and Brad Wisler, founded a startup incubator called SproutBox earlier this year.

One of the latest sprouts to emerge from the box is Squad, Trotzke's gift to developers everywhere - and we mean everywhere! This web-based environment allows distributed teams to collaborate in real time, opening, editing and sharing code from anywhere with an Internet connection.

It's official: Google is ditching its homegrown Gears offline web app API in favor of backing HTML5 for the win.

Now that the Chrome browser is becoming available for Mac, and the Snow Leopard OS doesn't play nicely with Gears, a Google rep confirmed the company has decided to trash the whole works and wait for HTML5, even though the spec isn't yet ready and isn't supported by commercially available browsers. Oh, the humanity... or rather, the machinery.

Recently I was the keynote speaker at the Unlimited Potential W2W (Wellington to the World) event in Wellington, New Zealand. The topic of my presentation was running a virtual company.

In the presentation, written by our Marketing Manager Elyssa Pallai, I spoke about the unique nature of ReadWriteWeb's virtual business model and culture. Watch the video of my entire presentation below, for details of how our company is run and the Internet tools we use.

Twitter's default URL shortening service Bit.ly announced steps today to stop phishing and malware attacks from being passed around online through its service. If effective, the effort should help a whole lot of people save face and prevent those moments of panic when you're afraid you may have lost access to your Twitter account forever.

Really, though, people who take tech seriously don't fall for those kinds of things, right? Wrong! Below we offer the job titles of some of the most surprising people we've received phishing direct messages from over the last several months. It's a pretty surprising list.

Wrapping up a six month-long challenge to mobile developers, Google has announced a string of winners of their second Android Developers Challenge (ADC).

From games and social networking apps to productivity and privacy tools, the cream of the ADC 2 crop includes an app for just about every kind of mobile user — and just in time, as the Droid has recently become "the fastest-selling Android phone to date." Take a peek at the innovative apps waiting in the wings for the lucky owners of Android-powered devices.

Last week we surveyed you, the ReadWriteWeb community, about your favorite mobile applications. We asked for your top five mobile apps and ended up with nearly 200 different mobile apps in the post and comments! Today we reveal the full results, including the most popular mobile apps of our tech-savvy readers.

Earlier today our resident Mobile Web expert Sarah Perez listed ReadWriteWeb's top 10 Mobile Web products of 2009. As for your choices, we discovered that you like social networking on the go (Facebook, Foursquare), Twitter clients (Tweetie, Twitterrific), Google (Google Maps, Google Mobile), and innovative mobile-focused apps (Evernote, Shazam). The top 16 is listed below, with commentary. Also at the bottom of the post you'll find a spreadsheet of the entire list.

If you ever wanted to quickly share or collaborate on a simple sketch online, here is a fun new tool to try. With FlockDraw, you can draw simple sketches collaboratively in your browser in real-time. Up to 50 people can draw simultaneously on a single whiteboard. FlockDraw doesn't limit the number of people who can watch. FlockDraw feels a bit like a pre-Windows7 version of MS Paint, and isn't anywhere close to being a replacement for a full-blown design app like Balsamiq, or a browser-based image editing suite like Aviary. The service, however, makes it very easy and fun to create simple drawings and sketches in real-time.

TweetDeck, the most popular third-party Twitter client on the market today, just got a major update. TweetDeck now features support for Twitter lists and Twitter's new geolocation feature, as well as a LinkedIn column and optional support for Twitter's new retweet function. Users who prefer to use old-style retweets can still use these as well. For now, TweetDeck geolocation feature doesn't allow you to update your location from the desktop. This feature will soon be part of TweetDeck's iPhone app, which will be updated in the next few weeks.

Google Calendar has a new experimental feature in the works that allows you to check the availability status of people you're inviting to an event. In our early testing the experimental feature looks utterly broken, but once working it should be great.

If you'd like to see how it works, open any event on GCal and click the "sneak preview" link at the top of the event listing. This ability to view someone's busy/available status only works if they have a publicly viewable Google Calendar account, but many people do. Even as a work in progress, this is a reminder of how much room for innovation there is in online calendaring.

The newest premium research report from ReadWriteWeb is available for purchase and download now. Titled The Real-Time Web & its Future, the report is based on 50 interviews with engineers and executives building or leveraging real-time web technology.

This is about far more than Twitter and Facebook. From a little startup called Nozzl Media delivering real-time public records to newspaper websites, to Aardvark's building a "real-time web of people" using social networks and IM, to the way the Red Cross uses the real-time web to save lives - this report will give you a broad and deep understanding of the state of the real-time web, directions things might go in the future and some of the key personalities advancing these technologies.