Web 2.0

By Om Malik The possibilities of what a similar service could do with this data are endless. Imagine a service that would scroll through all the Flickr photos, Twitter messages and marry them to data on the Internet, such as nearby mass transit stations, Starbucks, movie theaters and grocery storie...

By Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher 5) Scaling through third parties: If you’re a hyper-growth SaaS site, you don’t want to be locked into a vendor for your future business viability; rather you want to make sure that the scalability of your site is a core competency and that it’s built into your architecture. Define how your...

By Jason Harris Each web site or web application that we use in this Web 2.0 world has a feel that we’re used to; the mobile version of web sites should merely be an extension of that experience. Web developers should use the same fonts, color schemes and buttons wherever possible to make us feel at home. For an e...

By Om Malik Your subscription also gives you access to MyDash, a special web site that allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds of your choice. If you’re a New York Yankees fan, for instance, and need to find a Yankees-friendly saloon in, say, San Francisco, you can look on one of the mapping services such as...

By Wagner James Au Om just passed me the link to two contests on a Microsoft site that sells their office software to college students. I can just picture the meeting in Redmond where this was cooked up. “So what are the kids into nowadays?” demands the Microsoft exec. His team begins barraging the whiteboard wi...

By Nitin Borwankar Say we had an SQL database, with tables for “Company,” “Departments” and “Employees.” In SimpleDB, the items (rows) for all three could all go in one domain (database), with it you can run queries on this domain and using operators like UNION and INTERSECT, you can do the equivalent of join...

By Wagner James Au Turbine went even further, merging the Lorebook to a Google (GOOG) Maps’ API of Tolkien’s universe. “Through the Lorebook,” said Anderson, “players can add detailed maps, plot quest paths, and mark locations in their Lorebook entries, or just explore the game from a bird’s-eye perspec...

By Om Malik Anyway I will have more stories from Web 2.0 Summit tomorrow. Till then! Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may have kicked off the Web 2.0 Summit by saying nothing, but today was all about MySpace - both in and out of San Francisco. Chris DeWolfe and Rupert Murdoch were on stage talking about opening...

By carleen This summer Vidoop Secure landed its first anchor client, Schwab Retirement Technology, a business unit of the discount brokerage firm (SCHW). And security is clearly already on these companies’ radar. Google recently paid $625 million for Postini, which specializes in security emai...

By Om Malik This resulted in massive outages at some of Web 2.0’s brand name companies - Six Apart, Facebook, Technorati and Yelp - knocking out their systems and web services out flat. Whatever the reasons behind the failure might be, yesterday was a rude reminder of how fragile our digital lives are.

By Om Malik Six months into the gig, I started appreciating the What Works section, which to me is the heart and soul of the magazine. Lately, there has been less of a focus on that, and more writing about Web 2.0, including me contributing to the noise as a columnist. It made me aware that the service journa...

By Om Malik You know Open Web (the trend formerly known as Web 2.0) has reached a point of maturity, when eBay, the auction giant decides to embrace it ethos. The company at the eBay Developer Conference in Boston announcedthat it has opened up its three core business units – eBay, PayPal and Skype to thi...

By Anne Zelenka Ajax start pages like yourminis, Netvibes, and Pageflakes overlap in intent and function with the Web OS offerings, the difference being that a Web OS includes a full development environment and often email clients and other desktop software replacements.

By Raghav 'Rags' Gupta Social networking around music has emerged as a class of Web service. While terrestrial radio has yet to fully embrace this, music social networking represents a large opportunity for terrestrial radio stations to gain relevance and currency online. Fundamentally there are two functi...

By Om Malik It makes perfect sense for HP to acquire them because first, it gives a good strategic fit with printer business, the bread (if not the butter) for the computer maker. Secondly, HP owns Snapfish.com, another photo site, which could use some of Tabblo’s sensibilities, and can also get more p...

By Om Malik Forget Web 2.0, and think VoIP when it comes to start-ups that are kicking the bucket. Tello, a San Mateo, Calif.-based start-up that launched with much fanfare back in January 2006, is no more, becoming one of the first high profile causalities in the voice over the Internet space.

By Om Malik Glaxstar is the brainchild of Ian Hayward, father of three, who wanted to build a safe web experience for his own kids, keeping them away from all the nefarious stuff on the Internet, but without complex software installs, or spending hours on tech-support. Since Glaxstar did custom deve...

By Anne Zelenka To be fair to these VCs, they’re not advocating doing everything without pay. They’re suggesting free as a tactic towards getting paid in other ways: through advertising, or by premium services (as in a freemium model), or maybe even through being acquired by a company with a large wallet....

By Allan Leinwand EngineYard offers two different types of services: a RoR development and deployment environment using virtual server slices and an installation, service and support of dedicated on-site RoR appliances for larger customers. Lance explains that many companies like to start on Engine...

By Paul Kapustka According to GrandCentral, here’s how the new Gizmo feature works: Starting today GrandCentral customers can now designate their free Gizmo Project profile ID (which appears like a 747 area code number in their Gizmo profile) as one of their destination numbers which will ring on thei...

By Paul Kapustka Usually the story was packaged with a link-seeking headline like USA Today’s, which claimed Google and cable firms warn of risks from Web TV or PC Magazine’s Internet Not Designed for TV, Google Warns. Over an even better ominous riff: Will Web TV Kill the Internet.

By Om Malik But they didn’t! The broadband boom happened, and suddenly everyone wanted to get a piece of Redback’s multi-service edge routing technology. That’s a fancy way of saying it makes boxes that allow phone companies sell DSL, broadband, telephone, TV and other services over the local loop....

By Liz Gannes Just spent a peaceful evening reading through Time’s Person of the Year issue. Their choice: you. That’s “you” as in user-generated content, web 2.0, YouTube. My initial impression was skepticism — c’mon, it’s a gimmick — but I’m impressed with the cast of characters Time put together to sho...

By Guest Columnist By Allan Leinwand Some of my colleagues and I were talking about how the investing climate of venture capital has changed given the capital efficiencies of Web 2.0 companies. Web 2.0 companies can leverage open source software and commodity hardware to build very interesting businesses w...

By Om Malik Brady Forrest points out that like MySpace, Google, and Microsoft, the over-hyped Second Life and World of Warcraft are platforms that can foster the technology version of cottage industries. His post is inspired perhaps by the investment in Shawn Fanning’s new company. He is right - gol...

By Liz Gannes Mavani says AGLOCO is also different because it plans to diversify its revenue streams by including sponsored software and services and affiliate fees, in addition to highly targeted advertising. While it’s currently subsisting on an undisclosed amount of angel funding, the company...

By Om Malik Rest of the money – about $2.2 billion - is being shared by hundreds of web properties - everyone from big media owned properties to little tiny blogs like ours shared that pot of gold. Unless you are AOL, Facebook or MySpace, those advertising dollars don’t add up to all that much.

By Om Malik The whirligig that was Web 2.0 conference is finally beginning to spin down; but Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos’ talk at the conference will remain with me for a long time. Bezos was one of the handful willing to provide a vision of the future. It is hard to argue with Amazon’s ability to spot [...]

By Katie Fehrenbacher The wireless connectivity group is the fastest growing Broadcom business, and includes wireless technologies like bluetooth, WiFi and wireless VoIP. Mike Hurlston, Vice President for the Wi-Fi Group showed off the next-generation “draft-N” WiFi products and said the company recen...

By Liz Gannes Medium, founded July 2005, is in private beta right now, and won’t be available till at least the end of the year. The current implementation is a Firefox extension comprised of a visualization window and a chat window. The visualization is a bit oblique at the moment, but the idea is to portr...

By Om Malik The new service has shades of Jangl, Grand Central, iotum, and several other Voice 2.0 companies. We find the concept intriguing, and once we get our hands on the beta software (which currently runs on most regular phones, but not smart phones,) we will bring you a review. We will look at their...

By Om Malik Amongst the widgets to be offered, there will be an IM widget, the Buddy List widget, and a Get Info Widget, which provides buddy info by way of a separate window. These will be offered as APIs along with a Presence API, which would allow AIM users to get and set their availability, away messag...

By Liz Gannes Tailrank, one of a few services which tracks online conversations, launched an overhaul today, adding useful personalizable research tools. I like two features in particular: the archive, which extends the idea of “what’s being talked about right now” to “what were people talking abo...

By Om Malik Funny, none of them knew about Digg, Web 2.0 or all these cool things we seem to be building in Silicon Valley. It was a big reality check, for most of them have not used Skype or Vonage and frankly didn’t care about these offerings. And here we are already talking about VoIP 2.0 – the cool mash-ups o...

By Shailaja Neelakantan But a Qualcomm corporate communications official told the newspaper via email that only handset device makers, not operators, have to pay “associated royalty” to Qualcomm. “Average royalty paid on devices sold in India over the past 12 months is around 15 per cent lower than royalties t...

By Shailaja Neelakantan In their response to a consultation paper on 3G and Wi-Max services put out by India’s telecom regulator, CDMA operators including Reliance Communication said that the 2.5-2.69 Ghz band should be allocated for Wi-Max services so that more numbers of operators can offer services. (The Gov...

By Michael Wolf By pushing a more proprietary approach to web services for connected devices beyond the standard they helped create (Microsoft was the driving force behind UPnP 1.0) means Microsoft may truly be moving towards an Apple-ization strategy. Windows Rally can be expected to be a key underlyi...

By Om Malik Dodgeball is so New York! In Silicon Valley, its all Twttr! Twttr is a new mobile social networking application written by Noah Glass, an Odeo-guy, and a long time compadre of Blogger founder Ev Williams. (Twttr is a side project.) It is not a very complicated application - and which is what m...

By Katie Fehrenbacher Earthlink’s foray into RSS/Social Bookmarking is hot news of the day, but Atlanta-based company is not done with what is turning out to be a total Web 2.0 makeover. Earthlink’s plans to offer more web-based services. Craig Forman, President of Earthlink’s Value-Added Services, who was fo...