Home / readwriteweb.com rss archive / September-03-2007


B2B Opportunities for Web 2.0 Startups
The first era of the Web moved from B2C to B2B. However the bubble burst just as the B2B phase was getting into full gear. As we enter the "digestion phase" of Web 2.0, many startups may want to re-focus their efforts on B2B markets. If Chasm models are still relevant (I think they are, but so accelerated that it looks quite different), then B2B niche markets enable the classic strategy of knocking down “bowling pins”.Note that I am not talking about Enterprise 2.0. That is behind the firewall stuff that is mostly catered to by classic enterprise players such as BEA, IBM, Oracle, HP, SAP; as well as open source. What is much more interesting is how porous enterprises have become. The corporate gatekeepers in purchasing and IT have lost power, as millions of cubicle dwellers vote with their mouse. This leaves a lot of room for startups to break in without investing in sales guys to knock on CIO doors. Increasingly IT will bless and reinforce...

Thanks Sponsors
A big thank you to our sponsors for supporting Read/WriteWeb. Wine Library TV is one of my favorite video blogs. In the latest episode Gary Vaynerchuk checks out some California Chardonnay. Zoho is a leading Web Office suite, with probably the most comprehensive product range of all the online office suites. Last week they introduced a Start Page and look for more releases at Office 2.0 this week. ADS-Click enables you to earn money from your Tag Cloud Widget. You select your keywords and then add it to your blog. The company is based in Switzerland, so great to see international startups doing well! Pageflakes is a personalized start page that features "Pagecasts" - allowing users to share their Pageflakes page with the public or a specific group of users. They also recently introduced a social networking component. Wild Apricot offers Web-based Membership Software for clubs, associations and other non-profits. Probably the most popular area of functionality...

Paying For Schwag Makes a Comeback
Living about 3,000 miles from the Valley in a small east coast college town, as I do, I rarely get a chance to score any fun schwag from the web sites I love to use and write about. Many geeks across the world are in a similar situation: we want our share of schwag, but we just don't have access. It was with that in mind that last year saw the launch of ValleySchwag, a company that collected free stuff from companies (t-shirts, stickers, pens, buttons, and some stuff I have yet to identify), packaged it all up, and sent it out to web 2.0-heads worldwide for $15/month.Unfortunately, ValleySchwag's model wasn't sustainable and it was just too much work to pull together that much quality promotional material each month. After about four shipments, VS moved away from the subscription model to a traditional shop, but without the cachet of not knowing what was coming, the service lost appeal and eventually closed up shop. Enter Startup Schwag, a new schwag distribution hub from...

Coming Soon to a Google Apps Near You: Wikis
It looks like Google will shortly be adding a wiki to their web office application suite. Google acquired JotSpot, a provider of hosted wikis, last October, and signs now point to a re-launch of the service as Google Wiki. Google Blogoscoped noticed that "jotspot" is now a Google Apps service code, and if you try to log in to the service you're treated with a rather poorly-sized Google Wiki logo.Google said in July that it would be adding JotSpot to Google Apps, so this doesn't come as much of a surprise. The Google Operating System blog speculates that the launch will be timed with an announcement at this weekend's Office 2.0 event in San Francisco.Last week, Richard MacManus wrote that the core products of a web office suite, are email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets and presentation. Google, which this year acquired two companies working on presentation apps, will soon offer a suite that has all of those components. By adding wiki support to Google Apps, the...

I Would Not Feel So All Alone, Everybody Must Get Phoned
Apple obviously already has a phone. Microsoft has been rumored to be making one. So has Yahoo!. And, of course, the Google phone is supposedly just around the corner. You're not cool if you're not rumored to be working on a phone.It's clear that companies realize the mobile market is big and getting bigger. So where are the eBay phone rumors? Barring Apple, which is a proven gadget company, I think a phone from eBay might make more sense than phones from any of them. Of course, eBay is not a gadget company, and eBay does not make a mobile operating system (like Microsoft), or control a lot of mobile information services (like Google and Yahoo!). What eBay does own, however, are PayPal and Skype -- both of which are very well suited for the mobile world.Over the weekend, Google published a patent filed in February 2006 for a mobile payment system called GPay. Duncan Riley theorized that GPay could well be the killer app for a Google phone, and would catapult them ahead...

Poll: Top Web Technology During Next 10 Years
This week's poll is a tough one, because we're asking you to predict the future. But we hope you're game enough to vote, because it'll give us some clues on what to write about in Web Future Week ;-) We're asking: Which Web technology do you think will have the most impact over the next 10 years? In some ways it's a follow-on to a poll we ran at the end of 2006, asking about 2007 Web Trends. But this one is a longer view. It is of course very difficult to predict what will happen in 10 years time, given how fast technology moves. Who would've predicted in 1997 that a search engine company would rule the Web tech world in 2007. Probably not many people, given that Google wasn't formed until September 1998. It's possible that the dominant web technology of 2017 doesn't even exist yet, or is a twinkle in a Standforn Uni student's eye (or maybe Shanghai Uni).So here is our poll, please vote your best guess: Survey Polls - Take Our Poll