ReadWriteWeb

Today is the 3rd annual international Data Privacy Day and a whole bunch of companies are listed on the organization's website as participants. Google, Microsoft, even Walmart. Facebook is not listed as a participant and has stirred up a lot of controversy with changes to its privacy policy lately.

Why are these corporations singing out loud about protecting our personal privacy? According to the website, "Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information." More than dignity, this is about building trust with consumers so that these companies can do things with our personal data. Some of those are things we might like, a lot. Aggregate data analysis and personal recommendation could be the foundation of the next step of the internet. Unfortunately, Facebook's recent privacy policy changes put that future at risk by burning the trust of hundreds of millions of mainstream users.

We started tracking VC funding in October 2008, as the financial markets were melting. What caught our eye in those dark and gloomy days was True Ventures' announcement of its Series A investment in Syncplicity. The more we looked, the more we found that the headlines were wrong. It was not all doom and gloom, not in our corner of the universe: early-stage Web tech ventures. So we figured that getting (and passing on to you) good reliable data on a timely basis would be a good idea. Searching for that turned out to be harder than we thought, and herein lies a tale.

Moore's Law, the observation that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit has doubled every two years, explains the exponential growth in computing power that enables all the innovation we web-heads love so much. Futurist Ray Kurzweil argues that the exponential growth of computing power extends beyond the history of the integrated circuit, though. Exponential growth in computing happened as a result of innovations prior to the circuit board and it will continue after the integrated circuit's dominance has been surpassed, Kurzweil believes.

Steve Jurvetson, one of the best-known technology investors in the world, has posted an updated version of Kurzweil's visualization of the history of exponential growth in computing. In his thought provoking discussion of the phenomenon, Jurvetson calls this "the most important chart in technology business."

This one's for everyone who ever announced they'd be waiting overnight outside a store for a new game's release, or couldn't sleep because they were so excited about the next day's Macworld keynote, or babbled with helpless glee about the upcoming beta of the latest version of their favorite browser -- only to be met with blank stares from friends, co-workers and loved ones.

You're not alone. And maybe they're right in thinking we have our priorities out of whack... but in the great scheme of things, there are worse things to lose your sense of proportion over than innovation, new possibilities and sheer fun.

Recently, Facebook added a new feature to its News Feeds: a "like" button. Now, rather than leaving a throw-away or otherwise unnecessary comment on a friend's status update, you can show your appreciation by just clicking "like" instead. Sound familiar? If not, then it's clear you haven't tried FriendFeed FriendFeed, the social web aggregation service popular among early adopters.

As avid users of FriendFeed will tell you, Facebook's implementation of FriendFeed's features are nothing but a pale imitation of the real thing. Still, there's a growing concern among the service's fans about its sustainability. Although FriendFeed's founders believe they can still innovate to profitability, we're no longer sure that's true.

Stanford University has produced more entrepreneurs of mega-ventures than any other college. And success breeds success. The money people love to connect with anybody coming out of Stanford, and that helps Stanford get the best students, and so it repeats.

ReadWriteWeb will be reporting from the 15th Stanford Accel Symposium on February 25th. Hosted by Accel (the VC firm that funded Facebook, Etsy, and dozens of other companies we write about here) and Media X at Stanford, the event boasts some big name speakers, such as the CEOs of eBay and WPP.

One month after their preview release was downloaded by over eight million people in October 2004, the Mozilla Foundation announced the release of Firefox 1.0 on November 9, making today Firefox's 4th birthday.

As the worlds second most popular browser, and with their recent milestone of reaching 20 percent worldwide market share, the folks over at Mozilla certainly have some celebrating to do.

Turns out Chris Miller over at The Social Networker noticed a list of top 150 social media blogs on eCairn's blog last week, but was disappointed to see that it was not available as an OPML file. So, he created one.

Today, we realized that the most popular posts from those blogs may be useful resources for many folk, so we created our own OPML file. Ah, the beauty of the Web.

Twitter is the poster child for the 'scale first, don't even think about revenue at launch, monetize much, much later' model of startup. In the current climate, ventures like that probably won't get funded. Which is a shame. Twitter is addictive and fun and even occasionally useful. If anybody can pull this business model off, it will be Twitter. It has scale, seem to be moving mainstream and they've even fixed their reliability issues.

But Twitter won't survive if it doesn't find a great revenue model. This matters to all of us.

CAPTCHAs, those pesky challenge-response tests that many web sites use to determine whether you are human or a spambot, are an annoyance to many users. According to a report in Science (subscription required), users now solve about 100 million CAPTCHAs a day. ReCAPTCHA, a project based at Carnegie Mellon University, has found an ingenious way to harness all this work and, according to the findings published in Science this week, CAPTCHAs could be used to transcribe printed texts at the rate of 160 books a day.

What a week of market mayhem! How odd having that as the backdrop to the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. We have been sounding alerts about the economic backdrop to our world of innovation for nearly a year. Back in February we wrote that this is not our bubble. Since then, the news from the economy has gotten worse and nobody is suggesting it will get better any time soon. Reading the papers is pretty grim (unless you stick to Sports or Arts). Yet we contend that it is not grim in the 'innovation economy'. Here's why...

Every week it seems like the debate over access to, portability of and privacy over user data on the social web has reached new heights. It's only going to get louder though, just as discussions about other forms of economics will never be resolved.

That's a part of what's going on, economics. This is an information economy, after all, and user data is clearly one of the most important currencies in circulation.

Since the Web 2.0 Expo last week, two parallel questions are being asked about the current era of the Web:

a) Are we about to enter into a recession, and if so does that mean an end to the current 'web 2.0' era of innovation in web technology?;
b) Why aren't we (meaning startups) tackling the "big, hard problems" with web technologies?

Presuming you've seen the news that Microsoft has moved to buy Yahoo! for $44 billion, the next logical question to ask concerns what this means for users and lovers of technology.

If its business analysis you're looking for, go read Paul Kedrosky. Here at ReadWriteWeb we focus more on the cultural impact of innovation in technology. On that front, I think this acquisition could be very good news.

A survey of 25,000 people in 12 countries by the Institute for Innovation and Information Productivity (IIIP) shows what they are referring to as "innovation confidence" among the world's population. The most acceptance of innovation in the 12 nations surveyed was observed in the United Arab Emirates, the least was in the Netherlands. The US and the UK fell somewhere in the middle of the pack. "The difference in innovation confidence across the countries in our sample is striking. In some continental European countries, over half of working-age people lack confidence in new innovations. We found a more positive acceptance of innovation in fast-growing economies," said the report's author Dr. Jonathan Levie of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

One of the categories at next week's Crunchies awards show, which ReadWriteWeb is co-hosting, is Best technology innovation / achievement. The 5 finalists in that category are: Earthmine, Like, Move Networks, Twine, Viewdle. Here's a look at what each of these startups does and what makes them "innovative".

Among the 5 finalists, there is 1 Semantic App, 2 Visual Search Engines, a 3D mapping service, and an Internet video streaming product. Tell us who you think should be the winner in the comments.

10 years ago, in 1997, I wrote an article called Playing Against 5 Aces for a technology magazine in India called Dataquest. The article looked at how the deck was stacked in favor of American technology companies, because they were playing with 5 Aces in the pack:

1. A large domestic market

2. Access to intellectual capital

3. Reliable, low cost telecommunications

4. A culture that rewards innovation and risk taking

5. A well developed venture capital industry

Against these 5 Aces, India had only one good card, which was low cost labor. It is interesting to revisit these 5 Aces ten years later in 2007 (well, 2008 now!) and see what it means for the state of innovation in India. In short, India is looking a lot better:

This is a guest post by by Zach Beauvais.

Talis is a bit different than most web 2.0 startups we hear about. It is a 40 year-old technology company with a significant presence in the UK - nearly a quarter of British academic and public libraries make use of its software. Although the Web is a prominent feature of the organization, their primary focus is on data management.

The BBC's Internet presence came online ten years ago this past weekend on December 15th, 1997, and for the past few months on the new BBC Internet Blog, company executives have been reminiscing about the last 10 years and projecting into the future. Yesterday, Group Controller in Future Media and Technology Erik Huggers wrote an interesting post on why he left Microsoft for civil service at the BBC.

We've discussed before on Read/WriteWeb about how we've entered The Digestion Phase of the Web, a term that Alex Iskold coined. He defined it as "a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, and to understand recent technologies and how they fit together." Tim O'Reilly has also been reflecting on how innovation has slowed down and consolidation is occurring.

But something doesn't sit right with me when we start talking about reflection and consolidation. Both of those things are happening, for sure -- and much of today's tech news and blog coverage is about M&A and how big Internet companies are integrating web 2.0 features. Which is precisely the problem! It's not nearly as interesting as Web innovation. I can't be the only person bored with the tech blogosphere these days. How can we - as bloggers, entreprenuers, businesspeople - get back to thinking about actual innovation?

A lot of the Web technology that has inspired me in recent months is Mobile Web apps and the Semantic Apps we're beginning to see blossom on the Web. Also, like Tim O'Reilly, I find myself increasingly interested in what is bubbling up from China and other international markets. It's not to say Silicon Valley isn't still fascinating (Google's OpenSocial and Android initiatives were both fine developments), but there are new innovations and markets that are in many ways far more interesting than what is happening in Silicon Valley.

So in an attempt to break through to the other side, I've set myself the task of investigating 'the next wave' of Web innovation. It's something all our writers look for - e.g. Marshall Kirkpatrick's superb analysis of the Twitter ecosystem (and Twitter is certainly innovative and something to watch), and Josh Catone's analysis of facial recognition platforms. So what else is out there in terms of Web innovation?

Where Web Innovation is Happening - All Over the World, in Certain Segments

Tangos Chan of China Web2.0 Review posted a very interesting set of slides that he presented at an event organized by Orange Lab, called "Web 2.0 in China: What’s Next?". He first makes the point that China's Web scene is not just made up of copycat sites - he says that phenomonem is happening all over the world. Then Tangos reveals some areas of innovation in China: