There is a reason that Facebook delayed its developers' conference until the fall this year, after having hosted it in the spring or early summer previously. Simply, Facebook has been busy. It will have been nearly a year-and-a-half since Facebook last held a major event (Skype calls do not really count) and that is a long time for the platform to decide and then implement and announce where it is going next. We will learn exactly what the path is at f8 on Thursday.
So, what are we looking for? Facebook's recent release strategy provides a good road map. Since the release of Google Plus, almost all of Facebook's new features have been to counter Google's push into its territory. Those are just reactionary moves, blips in the road. Content is going to be heavily featured at f8 and the true ground shaking updates will be announced this week.
New data from comScore show that 14 million Americans, 6.2% of all mobile users, scanned QR (quick response) codes or bar codes with their mobile devices in June 2011. Users who scanned QR codes were more likely to be male (60.5%), between ages 18-34 (53.4%), and have a household income of $100k or higher (36.1%). The most likely places for people to scan QR codes were on printed magazines or newspapers, product packaging, or on the Web, straight from their computer screen.
We've covered some interesting ways of employing QR codes to bring the Web out into the world, like QR-enabled tourism and scavenger hunts. But comScore's new data show that, at least for now, QR codes are mostly used in more traditional marketing efforts, and they reach a specific demographic of young males in high income brackets.
Chance favors the connected mind. That is what author Steven B. Johnson says to those looking for the next big idea. Johnson is the author of "Where Ideas Come From" a book that looks at the macro trends on how innovation evolves.
Ideas are rarely created through a "eureka" moment. It may seem like Doc Brown fell off his toilet and invented the flux capacitor, but really the idea for time travel and how to do it were converging in his brain for quite some time before the blow tothe head. Instead of an "aha!" moment, Johnson believes that ideas are born of a "slow hunch" that are made possible through periods of technological innovation and evolution. If you are creating a startup, where do you get your ideas from?
Square, the mobile payments company launched in 2009 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is the name most often bandied about in tech circles these days when it comes to talk of credit-card swiping attachments made for iPhone. But Square was never alone on the mobile payments battlefront, and now it has a new competitor backed by a well-known brand name: Intuit.
Today Intuit is making its two-year-old premium GoPayment service free - a service which comes with a magnetic stripe reader attachment that hooks onto the iPhone, similar to the one Square offers.
You might not think about video transcoding software very often, but the technology it takes to prepare all those videos you watch on your iPad is helping drive new developments that will enable a very different experience of online video in the future.
"Video on the iPad," says Sam Blackman, CEO of video transcoding company Elemental, "has become a game changer for interest in video delivery to mobile devices." Did you know that almost every video broadcast online now needs to have 20 different copies of it made? Faster, cheaper transcoding technology could change that, too; some day, multiple personalized versions of every video could made for every individual who wants to watch it.
Every year ReadWriteWeb selects the top 10 products or developments across a range of categories. We kick off the 2010 'Best Of' series with our selection of the top 10 Semantic Web products and implementations of the year.
This year we've chosen 5 products by semantically charged startups and 5 implementations by large organizations. The startups represent the cutting edge of Semantic Web. Each has made an impact on the Internet this year, with user growth and innovation. The organizations we've selected - which include Facebook, Google and the BBC - offered the best examples of large scale deployment of semantic technology.
At the end of every year, ReadWriteWeb reviews the progress (or otherwise) of big Internet organizations and names one of them our 'Best BigCo.' We started this tradition in 2004, making this the 7th year. In 2009 it was Google, thanks to Chrome, Android and other advancements. In 2008 we chose Apple, due largely to the iPhone and App Store. Facebook won in 2007, Google in 2006, Yahoo! in 2005, and Google got the inaugural honor in 2004.
We first honored Facebook with Best BigCo in 2007, due to the launch that year of its development platform. Over 2010, Facebook has gone to a whole other level. It experienced astounding user growth and shut out all competition as an all-purpose social network. For this reason, Facebook is ReadWriteWeb's Best BigCo of 2010.
The Mobile Web has been a huge trend in 2010 and one output of that has been the emergence of app stores. It started of course with Apple's App Store for the iPhone and then iPad. Then we saw other app stores come onto the scene: Android Market, Nokia's Ovi Store, Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace and others.
In addition to these OS-based app stores, there are independent outlets catering to multiple types of OS (like GetJar), carrier app stores, device app stores, tablet app stores and retailer app stores like Amazon's forthcoming Android one. So it's been a very busy field! Let's take a look at some of the highlights of 2010.
Yesterday we selected our Best LittleCo of 2010, the light blogging service Tumblr. In this post we select a company that we think has the potential to be Best LittleCo of 2011. Next year we're expecting a lot from data-centric companies and one in particular. This company provides a platform for developers to create location-aware applications: SimpleGeo.
This is the 7th year that we've chosen a Most Promising company. Looking back at our results, we've hit the mark sometimes: for example, Feedburner in 2004 and Digg in 2005. Other times our picks have been accurate on the trends, but flew wide of the dartboard when it came to picking the successful companies. We chose sync app Sharpcast (now SugarSync) in 2006, but DropBox is better known now. We chose Brightkite in 2008, which ultimately lost out to Foursquare in the battle of the check-in apps. However, we think we have a winner here in SimpleGeo!
Looking back on the year in Web technology, we can see that several product categories have evolved significantly over 2010. We've already written about App Stores and eReaders. Another market that progressed in 2010 was Internet TV. Among the developments: Apple announced a major overhaul of Apple TV, Google launched its Android-powered Google TV platform and partnered with Sony, Boxee and Roku continued to improve their set-top box products, startups like Clicker innovated new types of web services for Internet TV, and content platforms like Hulu captured more viewers.
In this post we review the Internet TV market over 2010 and highlight the big stories of the year.
