Home / readwriteweb.com rss archive / September-17-2007


IAC Buys UGC Gaming Company, GarageGames
Bary Diller's Interactive Corp. announced tonight that it is taking majority share of Eugene, Oregon based GarageGames, a company that shepherds independent online game developers to market. IAC will place GarageGames at the center of an innovative project called InstantAction.com - due for release early next year. InstantAction will include a fund to publish games and will begin accepting applications from developers on Tuesday. This according to the Wall St. Journal, who reported first on the move. The price IAC has paid isn't being disclosed. Independent game lovers can take heart that IAC has taken zero positions on the GarageGames board of directors and will support the company's original mission with an infusion of cash.InstantAction will be a continuous social gaming environment, where users can move from one game to the next without web page reloads or leaving the basic environment in any other way. User profiles will be carried from one integrated game to the...

Confirmed: Google Presentations
Google has tonight announced its much anticipated Powerpoint competitor. It has been added to Google Docs - the new, simpler name for "Google Docs & Spreadsheets". With the new Presentations feature, users can create "simple web-based presentations". A quick glance at the functionality shows it is similar to Google Docs - with sharing, revisions, etc. Google noted in an email to media that "the presentation feature of Google Docs is also available to businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps to offer communication and collaboration tools to their users."We'll test out Presentations some more before delivering our verdict to you. For now here is the rest of the email Google sent out (sans the PR quotes from execs):Presentations are a natural addition for Google Docs , as they are usually created with the intention of being shared. Web-based, collaborative presentations offer users much-needed relief from manually managing and compiling group members' input in...

Mozilla Launches New Email and Communications Organization, Similar to Firefox
Today Mozilla is launching a new organization to develop Internet mail and communications software. It will use the open source email desktop client Thunderbird as a base - the product, code and brand. Technically this will be a Mozilla Foundation subsidiary - and it is very similar to Mozilla's Firefox effort. Just as Firefox aims to give choice in the browser space, this new initiative will try and advance email and communications technology. As with Firefox, the aim is to create a robust developer ecosystem to encourage open source development and community innovation. Mozilla will provide US$3 million seed funding to establish this new company.The new organization will be led by Dr. David Ascher, currently CTO and VP Engineering of ActiveState, who joins Mozilla to carry out this job. Ascher has a lot of experience in the Mozilla community, going back to 2000. He was formally the lead of Komodo, a Mozilla-based integrated development environment (IDE), and is a director...

TechCrunch40: Crowd Sourcing
The last session of the 1st day at TechCrunch40 was about crowdsourcing. Cake FinancialCake Financial is a financial sharing platform backed by Ron Conway. It allows people to share portfolios and real time transactions with others. The site can be integrated with services such as E*Trade and Charles Schwab. This sharing feature allows you to chart yourself against other people and the market normals. You see what your friends are doing, you get notified in real time, and so on. So it's financials, enriched with social networking features.All members are ranked as silver, golden member etc. You can see everyones portfolios - and whether they are risky, moderately risky or safe.My question: isn't this private information that you'd rather keep to yourself. Plus this may result in gaming and legal problems. However, since this business deals directly with money, it can create real addiction among its users and virally spread. So it may be a great success.DocStocDocStoc...

TechCrunch40: Community and Collaboration
Session 3 was of community and collaboration startups. Two of the participants were from Korea, showing the internationalization of web 2.0.StoryBlenderStoryBlender is a promising video mashup startup from Korea. Video editing is not new, but this one's approach is like a 'video wiki'  - it lets you mash up videos collaboratively, with your friends and peers. The interface they demonstrated was very easy and straightforward. You can easily add music, video, text and animate things. No need to be a pro, no special skills needed.The interesting point is that the company was founded by Yong Jun Hyoun, the founder of Korea's very successful social network, CyWorld. At the end of the session, Don Dodge expressed concern about copyright (as an ex Napster employee, that was quite understandable!).TripitTripit solves a big problem. It is hard to plan travel; you have to deal with many sites, papers and other details. Tripit's mission is to make this process ...

Facebook to Offer Data Storage?
Rev2.org is reporting that buried deep in the Facebook Developer wiki is mention of a Data Store API hinting at Facebook's possible intention of offering data storage to app developers. The wiki page was updated this morning to announce that the service is now in open beta and is accessible by any application (any app developers out there want to shed more light on this one?).Just this afternoon I wrote about platform definitions floated by Marc Andreessen, who called Facebook a level 2 platform -- or a "plug in API." It seems like Facebook might be transitioning into what Andreessen would call a level 3 platform -- one that "handles everything required to run your application on your behalf."People actually began noticing the Data Store API back in August when Facebook employee Haiping Zhao first published the page in the Developer wiki, though it only just came out closed beta this morning. When it first appeared Marc Canter noted that it would be in competition with Amazon's...

Celtx Releases New Online Collaboration Tools
When the whole world has its attention turned to the TechCrunch40 conference -- at least the whole web tech blogging world -- how does a company expect to get any press about a new product launch? One way is to send out an eye catching, innovative press release. Celtx, a free, open source screenwriting software package we mentioned in the Filmmaker's Tool Kit, sent us one of the most innovative press releases we've seen.In order to announce the new version of their screenwriting suite, Celtx created a script detailing the writing of the press release. It was a little kooky, a lot existential, but most of all, it was eye-catching. Celtx's interesting and clever gimmick was enough to really catch my eye and ensure I took a closer look at the actual press release to follow.Of course, press releases will only get you somewhere if the news contained within them is worthwhile. Celtx delivers the meat in the form of new online collaboration tools for screenwriters. Most notably,...

TechCrunch40: Mobile and Communications
The second session of the first day of the TechCrunch40 conference was on the topic "Mobile and Communications." There were very interesting companies but unfortunately, they all suffered bad connection & coverage problems, so they couldn't pitch their products so well. Here they are:Cubic TelecomCubic Telecom's mission is to make phone calls seamless and cheaper than ever. They do it by locating special wifi spots all around the world and making your calls via these spots. For GSM calls, they have a special cheap price as low as 15 cents per minute. You can call anywhere in the world anytime you want.According to Om Malik, if they can scale, Cubic can be a viable business. However, they're going need to compete in a very commoditized market and it's likely that their profit margins will be way too low.YapYap is trying to enable speech for the mobile web. Small keyboards are really archaic interfaces and they impose a lot of frictions on the popularity of mobile browsing....

Platforms on the Web are Platforms on a Platform
The web as a platform is something we have written about quite a lot over the years here at Read/WriteWeb. Over the weekend, Marc Andreessen put up a lengthy post attempting to sort out the idea of an "Internet platform." Andreessen writes, "One of the hottest of hot topics these days is the topic of Internet platforms, or platforms on the Internet ... 'platform' is turning into a central theme of our industry and one that a lot of people want to think about and talk about. However, the concept of "platform" is also the focus of a swirling vortex of confusion -- lots of platform-related concepts, many of them highly technical, bleeding together; lots of people harboring various incompatible mental images of what's about to happen in our industry as a consequence of various platforms."He goes on to identify three types of platforms:Access API - where data is pulled from a service and reconstituted to create something new or add value to something else (think Flickr, or Google...

Yahoo! drops $350m on Zimbra; an open source, enterprise RIA
It's official; Yahoo! has acquired open-source enterprise email vendor Zimbra for $350 million in cash. The company's alternative to Microsoft's Exchange server includes:webmaila desktop clientcontact managementcalendaringword processingspreadsheetsSalesforce integrationand a reportedly strong mobile component. Look out Google and Microsoft! Richard MacManus reviewed Zimbra in detail last year. Zimbra was an early force in bringing AJAX to the enterprise and adoped an RIA model in March, including both online and offline modes. The company followed up Microsoft's very public critique of Google Apps' utility for the enterprise with a (questionable) statement of their own just last week. I wonder if there was some fascinating communication with the Yahoo! communications team about that.Kara Swisher, left "cranky and bored" after not being briefed, broke the story based on leaks. TechCrunch broke the price of $350 million and Liz Gannes confirmed it. This acquisition tops...

First Five Present at TechCrunch40
With additional writing by Josh Catone.This morning saw the first five startups at the TechCrunch40 event hit the floor and presented to journalists, investors, and early adopters. The first session focused on search startups. It's interesting to note that one third of the presenters at the TC40 are from outside USA. Below are quick reviews of the first five companies to present.PowersetPowerset is a natural language processing-based search engine that raised $12.5 million a year ago to create what many have touted as a "Google killer." Company founder Barney Pell said this morning that interacting with today's search engines is like talking to a 2 year old. What Powerset does to change that is index the web semantically and extract meaningful relations.They are still very early in the process of perfecting their technology, but today they will be opening their Powerlabs beta site that lets users search within pre-defined areas (such as a quotes database from Wikipedia). ...

Intel's MashMaker to launch this week
IDF, Intel's annual Developer Forum starts tomorrow in San Francisco and the hardware company will make some of its most interesting moves into the consumer software world yet. Included in the event will be the unveiling of two new projects: a developer focused beta testing site called Whatif and a mashup tool called MashMaker. Whatif was opened up late last night and currently showcases a debugger, a compiler and and a performance optimizer that developers can download and test out.MashMaker will open to the public at the end of this week's conference and is the project of greatest interest to me. The service is a cross-platform Firefox toolbar that lets users create their own mashups on the fly and recommends mashups alredy created for any site you visit based on the MashMaker mashups you've used before. A mashup for the uninitiated is a service that adds value to one website by integrating appropriate data brought in dynamically from a different website. They are a...

Fear of Web 2.0
Enterprises continue to adopt web technologies and 'web 2.0' trends, but there are two common threads to this adoption. One is that web technologies are step-by-step being adopted by enterprises, but they aren't yet ready to usurp many desktop software apps. The Google Apps vs Microsoft Office debate currently raging is proof of that. The second thread is that enterprises have a fear of web 2.0 tools being mis-used by their employees. I was recently in a TV news segment in my home country, answering the question: should Facebook be banned in the workplace? (for the record, my answer was no!).Forrester Research has just released two reports that address this 'fear of Web 2.0' (my term, not theirs). The first report is entitled 'Web 2.0 Social Computing Dresses Up For Business'. The executive summary first neatly defines the value of Web 2.0 in the enterprise: "Its the ability to more efficiently generate, self-publish, and find information, plus share expertise in a...