Home / readwriteweb.com rss archive / September-26-2007


Mashery API Managment Service Announces Series A Funding
Mashery, possibly the coolest company in Silicon Valley that most people have never heard of, announced a Series A funding round tonight. The All-Star crew of Angel Investors in this "mashup service-provider" are being joined by VCs from two more firms, Formative Ventures and The Accelerator Group. The total A round was under $5 million and Mashery also announced a 16 company customer list.What's so cool about this company? Mashery provides other companies with an interface through wich to manage access to their APIs (application programming interfaces). Mashery applies the "business rules" of API access for its clients, managing throttling, caching and vetting requests. In other words, Mashery helps companies enable their data and services to be used by 3rd party sites to combine their services with those of Mashery clients. I wrote about the company in depth on TechCrunch almost a year ago when they launched. Not only is Mashery focused on making one of the most...

Web Apps Hit the Mainstream
A new study by Rubicon Consulting released today at the AJAXworld Conference in Santa Clara, California indicates that web apps have spread beyond the so-called "early adopter" set and have made their way into the consciousness of a majority of web users. "Most industry observers talk about 'Web 2.0' applications as something that's coming in the future, but our research showed that some web apps are already spreading rapidly through the PC user base," said Michael Mace, a principal at Rubicon Consulting of the report.According to the study, which surveyed 2,000 randomly selected US adults who have a personal computer (Linux, Windows, and Mac), 80% said they had heard of web applications. More than half have actually tried a web application and 37% use at least one on a regular basis. That's more than the 16% usually thought of as early adopters, said Rubicon. The survey defined web applications as "websites that replace a task the user previously performed using a software...

Yahoo! to Close Its Podcasting Site
Two years to the month after launching its large podcast search and listening site, Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo! Podcasts will cease operation on Halloween, October 31st. The site never came out of Beta before the plug was pulled. Some would argue that podcasting hasn't caught on like it was expected to, that it's been dominated by existing media giants and beaten as a medium by the rise of video. I still love me a good episode from ITConversations, Briefings Direct or our own new show Read/WriteTalk when I'm walking the dog - but Yahoo! users looking for podcasts will soon have to look elsewhere. I don't know how many people ever cared for the site anyway. The exact date of the closure seems to have fluctuated a bit already, but whenever it happens there are plenty of competitors ready to do podcast search right. See, for example, Podcast.com (from whose Tweets I found this news) and the recently funded Pluggd, who are doing some interesting speech-to-text technology...

Koinup Launches Social Networking for Virtual Worlds
Out of Milan, Italy comes Koinup, a new social network for your virtual self. Koinup is aimed at citizens of popular massively multiplayer online worlds and games like Second Life, The Sims, and World of Warcraft. It intends to be a central place for players of those games to share photos, videos, and tutorials.Earlier this month on the Guardian's Games blog, blogger Aleks Krotoski posed the question, would social networking be helpful for online games? The response from the handful of commenters was mostly, "yes." So is Koinup onto something here? After all, people will invest hours into making social networking profiles for their pets, so why not for their avatars?Koinup mainly targets four games right now: The Sims, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and imvu. Most of those sites, unfortunately for Koinup, already have thriving communities elsewhere. World of Warcraft has Warcraft Social -- which has at least 8,000 members, and Shawn Fanning's Rupture. Second Life has...

Surprise: MSN Has Built the Video Site of the Future
There are big changes underway over at MSN Video, some of which represent a real look forward for the industry. It's hard to believe, and it isn't pretty, but this is a site you've got to check out. The site's design, full screen player and advertising model are big.Time on SiteThe big news at MSN Video is that the site has embraced a "Time on Site" traffic metric that's sure to represent the future of advertising. Neilsen announced this summer that they are replacing page views with "time on site" as the primary web traffic metric. It's widely acknowledged that AJAX and online video are making pageviews less and less relevant all the time. While other sites (like YouTube and MySpace) keep pumping out the pageviews and trying to figure out how to run ads - this new MSN Video site has hit on a formula that will likely represent the video portal of the future: AJAX powered video playlists, including recommended videos, that do not require new pageloads and time based advertising...

Social Bookmarking Faceoff Reloaded
That del.icio.us dominates the social bookmarking space is clear, but by how much? Where do the other players stand? We'll attempt to sort it all out and predict what's coming next for social bookmarking in this post. A year ago in our Social Bookmarking Faceoff post, we looked at the stateof the social bookmarking space. In the post, we used several techniques, ranging from counting the number of users who bookmarked a particular post, to counting posts with specific tags, to estimatethe number of users for each service. Our conclusion back then was that the market was dominated by del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.A year later we're passed the hype, StumbleUpon has been acquired by eBay,and during this digestion phase social bookmarking has largely become yesterday's news. In this post, we'll look at what happenedto the other players in the space and look into what the future holds for social bookmarking.Estimating The Number Of UsersWe're using one of the methods from last year's...

Emergent Business Networks - The Real Enterprise 2.0 Story
In Chongquing, China - the worlds fastest-growing metropolis - hundreds of small motorcycle firms are using a radical form of collaboration to triple output to 15 million motorbikes per year, which beats their giant Japanese competitors. That story was told in the book Wikinomics, how mass collaboration changes everything. It's is a deeply impressive book, because it relates the flurry of Web 2.0 innovation to real world economics. The Chinese motorcycle story is not about an online network, but it illustrates a potential for Web 2.0 technologies that goes well beyond todays relatively simple consumer applications. The motorcycle entrepreneurs build trust through lots of face-to-face time in coffee shops. China has a weak rule of law, making personal relationships even more important.This is an emergent business network, because there is no centrally defined structure. The structure emerges from lots of little interactions that are designed to solve specific problems. There...