Free Access to Paid Content

The free access to paid content sites, however, is the big news here. According to Starbucks, this new service, called the "Starbucks Digital Network," will give users who surf the Internet from U.S. company owned stores access to "various paid sites and services such as wsj.com, exclusive content and previews, free downloads, local community news and activities, on their laptops, tablets or smart phones." Besides the Wall Street Journal, Starbucks' partners include Apple's iTunes, The New York Times, Patch, USA TODAY, Yahoo and ZAGAT.

While Starbucks did not release details about these partnerships, it is easy to image that in-store Wi-Fi users could, for example, get free access to specific songs on iTunes and be allowed to bypass the New York Times' upcoming paywall restrictions.

Our friends at Justin.tv will provide a live stream of these demos.

Watch live video from ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit on Justin.tv

Real-Time Conversations

Conversations about the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit will be taking place all over the Web. Tag your Tweets, pictures, and blog posts with #RWWSummit to show up here.

Starting out, Marshall stressed how ambiguous the term "real-time Web" is, so to kick off the discussion, he offered his own definition:

The real-time web is the Web in which data is delivered to its recipients (be they human or machine) in real or near real time, as soon as it becomes available.

In addition, he noted the enormous scope of the real-time Web, which ranges from finance and medical tools, to social networking and media services.

Myth #1: The Real-Time Web is just Twitter and Facebook

While this is still a very popular perception, Marshall noted that more than 50% of the links shortened by Bit.ly are now created outside of Twitter. Real-time search engine Collecta, too, doesn't just index posts from Twitter, but also collects millions of post from platforms like MySpace and WordPress every day. Besides these social tools, it's worth noting that a lot of real-time information is now being passed between machines and Internet-connected sensors.

Myth #2: The Real-Time Web Will Rot Your Brain

Does the real-time Web cause shallow thinking, information overload, narcissism and neurological degradation? Referring to Nicholas Carr's argument that it's slowly degrading our ability to focus, Marshall noted that he does not think that the real-time Web will rot our brains. Instead, he highlighted some of the ways that we use the real-time Web to our advantage at ReadWriteWeb.

We, for example, use lots of robots that alert us to breaking news stories. While we like to chase those stories, we also compliment these real-time methods with legacy research methods and slower news sources for more in-depth coverage. Thanks to this, the real-time Web just becomes another tool and doesn't replace our traditional research methods.

Myth #3: Real-Time Just Lets Us Do What We are Already Doing, Faster

Talking about this myth, Marshall noted that the value of a new technology is sometimes not clear until the right use cases appear and the right innovators come along that make use of this new technology. Clearly, though, the real-time Web has already given us lots of new ways of communicating with each other, and given our machines new ways of talking to each other and collect and distribute data.

Our friends at Justin.tv will provide a live stream of the keynote, which will start around 9:30am ET.

Watch live video from ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit on Justin.tv

Real-Time Conversations

Conversations about the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit will be taking place all over the Web. Tag your Tweets, pictures, and blog posts with #RWWSummit to show up here.

The company's U.S. team is currently compromised of roughly 80 people. InMobi targets brand advertisers and also offers a self-serve tools for smaller advertisers. The company offers services for advertising on feature phones and on modern smartphone platforms.

When we talked to Ann Frisbie, InMobi's , VP and managing director for North America last week, she argued that so far, most players in the U.S. market treated the mobile Web as just an extension of the desktop Web. The company hopes to be able to differentiate itself from other players in the U.S., as its international experience has already taught the company where mobile advertising is heading in the near future. Abroad, Friebie said, the mobile phone was always seen more as an entertainment device, while users in the U.S. are only now starting to regard their phones in the same way (in no small part thanks to the iPhone). We should note, however, that AdMob also has a major global presence, and that it will likely profit from Google's own international expertise as well.

InMobi also hopes to differentiate itself through its analytics tools and its adROIt product, which allows advertisers to track and optimize their buys in real time.

The idea here is that by being able to identify your visitors even before you render a page for them, you can cater your website to these visitors and increase your chance of converting these visitors into paying customers. This technology also comes in handy when it comes to registration forms. Instead of asking visitors for their company information when they want to download a white paper, for example, Demandbase already has this information.

Integrates with Existing Tools

Demandbase provides its customers with an API, so they can integrate this information with their existing customer management and business intelligence solutions. The company claims that it can correctly identify 83% of U.S. business traffic and that its real-time solution can identify a customer within 5 milliseconds. The company currently identifies about 200 million Web visits to B2B websites each month.

New Today: LivePerson Integration

Starting today, Demandbase is also bringing its technology to LivePerson, the popular live chat solution for businesses websites. Thanks to this, a company that implements Demandbase's solution can now, for example, ensure that chats on their website are routed to the right specialists, and instead of having to gather basic information from these customers in the chat, the agents can immediately provide relevant information to their customers.

While it remains to be seen how many users will actually switch their default search engine, this could potentially be a major win for Bing. Bing's market share on the desktop continues to increase slowly but surely (though it saw some minor dips in its popularity recently), but even though Microsoft already offers a mobile version of Bing, it doesn't look like the company has made any major headway in getting market share in the mobile search market recently. Today's announcement is likely to change this, though we will have to wait and see what the actual numbers will look like once Apple releases the next version of the iPhone OS.

Image credit: gdgt

2.5 eBooks Per iPad

With regards to eBooks on the iPad, Steve Jobs also announced that Apple has sold about 2.5 books per iPad since the launch. That, of course, is far behind Apple's numbers for iPad apps (users have installed about 17 apps per device) - though 2.5 books is not a bad number, especially given that most books are retailing for at least $10. Sadly, Apple did not disclose how many of these books were paid downloads. In total, iPad owners downloaded 5 million books so far.

Jobs also stressed that publishers are telling Apple that iBooks now accounts for 22% of their e-book sales.

Image credit: gdgt

Longform.org is the brainchild of Max Linsky - a former Creative Loafing reporter and Slate contributor - and Aaron Lammer. The stories on the site cover a wide range of topics, ranging from Neal Pollack's recent Wired story about the check-in wars, to this New Yorker story about elevators from 2008 and this in-depth look at a penal colony off the coast of Panama. The selection of stories on the site is obviously subjective, but if you come across a great story that hasn't appeared on the site yet, you can also submit your own suggestions.

You can find a more in-depth look behind the scenes of Longform.org in the Slate piece here, but if you are looking for some stimulating reading material just head over to the site and give it a try. You can read the stories without an Instapaper account, but the site's tight integration with this service allows you to easily bookmark stories and read them on the Instapaper mobile apps later.

Bing Shopping, the price comparison section of Bing that featured the cash back rewards, grew rapidly since its launch. With Bing Cashback, Microsoft was able to give users a reason to return to Bing regularly and give monetary rewards to its frequent users. Last year, when Microsoft ran a "Double Cashback" promotion, traffic to Bing Shopping increased 169%between June and July. We don't have any recent data, but in August 2009, Bing Shopping was the fourth most popular price comparison shopping service in the U.S.

As Microsoft's senior VP of the Online Audience Business Group Yusuf Mehdi notes, Microsoft started offering this feature as a way to "help advertisers reach you with compelling offers, and to provide a new type of shopping experience that would change user behavior and attract a bunch of new users to Bing." He also points out that Microsoft was able to attract "over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns." Ultimately, though, these numbers did not live up to Microsoft's expectations.

The average blogger today falls into the 21- to 35-year-old demographic. Indeed, this group accounts for a little bit more than half of all blog posts in the company's database. Bloggers under the age of 20 account for about 20% of all posts, and bloggers between 36 and 50 account for another 20%. Bloggers over 51 only account for 7.1% of all posts.

Gender

The blogosphere represents a very balanced gender distribution, with women accounting for about 51% of all posts and men accounting for 49%.

Location

The vast majority of bloggers still reside in the U.S. (29.2%), followed by Great Britain (6.75%), Japan (4.88%) and Brazil (4.19%). In the U.S., California plays host to the largest number of bloggers (14.1%), followed by New York (7.16%) and Colorado (5.25%).

These numbers, of course, are skewed, as they don't take the relative size of these countries and states into account. It would be interesting see these numbers on a blogger-per-capita scale.

Besides the basic e-reader features (change font, font size, page and text color), QuickReader also allows you to test your current reading speed and share your accomplishments on Twitter and Facebook.

Getting Books

QuickReader allows you to download books from Feedbooks.com and thanks to its support for the increasingly popular OPDS e-books catalog standard, you can also add books from a number of other vendors as well. You can also copy and paste text from other iPhone apps. Sadly, thanks to the DRM-issues that are still plaguing the e-book world, you can't use the app to read books from vendors like Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Pricing

QuickReader comes in a free edition with just a few books and without the ability to download more, as well as in a number of paid editions for $5.99, including three international editions that come pre-loaded with books in German, French or Spanish.

iPad Version Coming Soon

As Patrick Thompson, the app's developer, told us last week, he is also working on an iPad version of the app, which should be available later this summer. He also plans to make it easier for users to import DRM-free ePub texts.

To counter this threat, Google acquired On2 Technologies last year. On2's VP8 codec forms the basis of the WebM project. It is worth noting that Google itself has remained relatively neutral in the current discussion around HTML5 and Flash. Indeed, Google plans to ship an optimized version of Flash with every Chrome install.

Give it a Try

If you want to see WebM in action, here are instructions for how to find and watch YouTube videos in this format. You also have to make sure that you are using a developer version of Chrome. Instructions for how to switch between the stable, beta and developer channels are available here.

At $199, Zeo's tool is definitely not cheap. The FitBit, which also measures sleep, clocks in at $99 and the popular Sleep Cycle iPhone app (which measures your movement during the night with the iPhone's built-in motion sensors) only costs $0.99.

The Zeo, however, gives you a complete package, including a bedside radio and an adaptive alarm which works similar to Sleep Cycle and tries to wake you up when you are already in a light sleep phase. Unlike its cheaper competitors, the Zeo uses a more sophisticated EEG headband that measures your brainwave activity every two minutes. The other tools rely on motion sensors. You can find a more in-depth review of the Zeo here.

While bloggers will surely appreciate the new version of Windows Live Writer, Microsoft has also added a few nifty features to all the other Live Essentials apps. The new version of Photo Gallery, which now supports multitouch screens and Windows 7 libraries, also features built-in photo recognition. The real wow-factor, however, comes from a new feature called Photo Fuse, which allows you to combine the best parts of different pictures into one composite image. This is a great tool for making sure that everybody in a group photo is smiling, for example. You just select the best parts from multiple images (preferably all taken at the same height, distance and zoom range). Photo Gallery's new retouch feature should also make it easier to fix problems in your photo.

In addition to these features, the Photo Gallery app now also allows users to send their photos on Facebook and - more importantly - comments from your Facebook friends will be imported back to the desktop app.

Sync

Windows Live Sync helps users keep their folder in sync across multiple computers. This feature works in the background and automatically syncs data back and forth between different machines. Just like Live Mesh - which this tools is partly based on - Sync also allows users to easily open up a remote desktop connection to their PCs. The folder synching feature is available for Windows and OSX, though the remote desktop access is limited to Windows machines. To get started with Sync, just head over to http://devices.live.com

Mail

Windows Live Mail now features a Gmail-like conversation view - and unlike in Hotmail, this feature will be turned on by default. Just like Hotmail, Live mail now features "quick views" that allow users to organize and filter their mail.

Thanks to tighter integration with the calendar, Mail now feels more like Outlook.

Mail has also inherited some features from Windows Live Writer. Users can now, for example, create small image galleries inside an email and perform some small image editing tasks in the app.

Movie Maker

Movie Maker also got a nice update and now allows users to easily share their videos on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Microsoft's SkyDrive. In addition, Microsoft added a number of new themes, and you can now easily import photos from the Photo Gallery and create an animated slideshow with just a few clicks. The new movie even highlights captions.

Verdict

The question, of course, is how these apps compare to Google's and Apple's offerings. Google's Picasa and Apple's iPhoto offer some of the same features as Microsoft's Photo Gallery (face recognition, retouching, online galleries), but Microsoft, of course, has the advantage of offering a tool that is more closely integrated with the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft also makes it easy to upload images to multiple third-party photo services and gives users a more generous allotment of free space for sharing pictures than Google. (Apple charges for these features.) The ability to sync Facebook comments back and forth between the cloud and the desktop is also a welcome addition to Live Essentials.

We haven't been able to get our hands on the Windows Live Movie Maker, so we will have to withhold judgement of how well it compares to iPhoto. In the last version, the app got a major makeover and compared very well to Apple's iMovie.

Microsoft is clearly trying to create a better connection between its desktop and online tools. While there used to be a lot of confusion around Microsoft's syncing tools, for example (at one point, it felt like the company offered 10 tools that all performed similar functions), Sync now feels like the glue that will hold all of these tools together. While geeks generally tend to overlook Microsoft's offerings (besides maybe Live Writer), this new suite of tools is worth another look.