IMIA Web 2.0 Taskforce Portal

The iTunes App Store is becoming a trendsetter for other companies in the mobile market. With a thousands of apps to choose from with over 60 million downloads total, what more could you ask for? Apparently a lot. Users still aren't satisfied with the offerings nor the apps that Apple is choosing to not let into the App Store. Apps that are extending the functionality of some of Apple's standard offerings are being denied their chance to shine. This has resulted in a small, but talented pool of developers finding other ways to promote their apps to iPhone users. Enter a method known as "jailbreaking". Jailbreaking your iPhone voids your warranty, but allows you access to some of the most incredible apps that won't be coming to the App Store anytime soon. Here's a look at our top 10 picks of apps worth jailbreaking your iPhone to get.

Pushr

There just aren't enough dedicated Flickr apps in the iTunes App Store. To add injury to insult, the majority of dedicated Flickr apps don't allow you to upload Flickr photos from your iPhone. In steps Pushr to fill this void! Pushr allows you to select a photo and edit a lot of the standard Flickr options. Users can edit the name, description, tags, and privacy options before uploading it their Flickr account. We're huge fans of its tagging feature because it pulls from the list of previously used tags for better convenience.

Pushr also allows you to upload multiple photos at a time, which beats emailing each photo individually. If you want to delete a photo from the list, simply swipe your finger from right to left. Our only quirk with Pushr is that you can't specify a set for images to go to. Otherwise, Pushr is the ultimate Flickr uploading tool for your iPhone.

Qik

Qik is one of the best livestreaming services available on the web. The service has recently expand its offerings of compatible handsets. Lucky for jailbreakers, Qik has recently become available on jailbroken iPhones. Since its initial release the Qik app has upgraded tremendously. You can now:

• Mute your broadcast
• Set privacy options
• Send an alert to Twitter
• Hide chat
• Set stream title
• Allow Qik to see your current location

It's still recommended to livestream with Qik over Wifi or 3G connections. Though, that's hardly something to complain about.

Flixwagon

If you're not into Qik, you may like its competitor, Flixwagon. Most of what applies to the Qik app also applies to the Flixwagon application. So we won't bore you with a rehash of the details.If you're on Flixwagon instead of Qik, you won't be left out in the cold. If only these apps were available in the App Store...

Winterboard

If you're a customization junkie like some of us here on ReadWriteWeb, then you were probably disappointed in the fact that there's very little you can do in terms of customizing the iPhone. The only customization option is the changing of the lock-screen wallpaper. Honestly, who even pays attention to that?

Winterboard is the ultimate solution for meeting your customization needs on your iPhone. There are thousands of compatible themes floating around for customizing the "real" background on your iPhone, icons, bars, keyboards, alert buttons, battery images, and tons more. The possibilities are endless with Winterboard. Quite frankly it's one of the main apps that most people do jailbreak their iPhones for. Check out the awesome theme to the right I have installed on my iPhone thanks to Winterboard.

MxTube

The iPhone's built-in Youtube app is great. Now you can watch videos all day without having to pay Apple a dime. What do you do when there's no internet connection available? You could go through the process of downloading and converting Youtube videos into the iTunes compatible format. Sounds tedious, doesn't it?

MxTube is a simple solution. With MxTube can stream Youtube videos just like you do with the standard Youtube app. MxTube also allows you to download and save these videos to your iPhone. The process is simple and entirely dependent upon your internet connection. Simply download the video you'd like to view later and that's it. You can watch all your videos directly from the MxTube app. No conversion necessary.

NES

The NES emulator app allows you to run Nintendo ROMs right from your iPhone. Trust us, there are plenty floating around the web for downloading. It's a little tricky to get these ROMs on your iPhone and also involves a bit of hacking. However, it's nothing serious enough to brick your iPhone and well worth the effort. So if you're in the mood for some old school games like Monopoly, a game that isn't available in the App Store, then the NES emulator might be worth considering jailbreaking your iPhone for.

GSphone

If you were a bigger fan of the Gameboy system, then developers have you covered with the GSphone emulator. Like the NES emulator, GSphone allows you to run ROMs for the Gameboy gaming system. All you old school Pokemon fanatics will love this one! Too bad you have to jailbreak your iPhone for it.

Snapture

For all it's worth, the iPhone's camera is really basic with no built-in editing options. Snapture changes all of that in a jiffy. This app provides a host of options and features for editing your photos. Here's a rundown of the many features you get with Snapture:

• QuickView thumbnail stack
• QuickView thumbnail enlarge
• QuickView delete
• EasyCapture
• QuickAccess
• Geotagging
• Color modes
• Multishot
• Delay timer
• Level aid
• Gesture zoom
• Auto-rotation
• Image size
• Touch zone
• Quiet mode

From easy access to photo sizing to color modes and image rotations, we know you wish you didn't have to jailbreak your iPhone to get this awesome app.

Scrobble

Fans of the Last.FM music service have something to be thrilled about. While you can only scrobble the songs that you listen to via the Last.FM app, Scrobble is an app that runs in the background and scrobbles every song you listen to via the iPod app. You can view the latest stats on how many tracks have been scrobbled and how many are left in queue by heading to your settings. It stays out of the way and works really well with the iPod app.

Cycorder

When Qik became available for the iPhone, we noted how you could use Qik as a video recorder for your iPhone. Those tips aren't obsolete, but Cycorder is a better option. Cycorder has great video recording quality ranging between 6-15 fps. We've been tipped off that for better recording quality with this app, you'll need to be in a will lit area. You can playback your videos on your iPhone or simply download them to your computer for maximum viewing pleasure. Someone tell us why this isn't in the App Store?

More to Come

The only hindrance with these apps is that you have to jailbreak your iPhone in order to get them. We really wish we didn't. The process for jailbreaking your iPhone can be pretty confusing on the first go round. However, it's relatively safe enough that if anything goes wrong you can restore your iPhone using iTunes.

The number of jailbroken apps available is tremendous, but doesn't rival the number of App Store offerings. In terms of quality apps with consistent updates, we'd rather go with jailbroken repositories Cydia and Installer 4. We're sure there are plenty more apps to look forward to like SwirlyMMS, which will make it easier for iPhone users to send MMS messages. We'll keep you posted as they come down the pipeline.

Apple iTunes company profile provided by TradeVibes

If you've ever tried to make a guide or tutorial visually appealing, then you know just how hard and tedious it can be. There are plenty of tools floating around the web to make this easier. Just do a search for screencasts or slideshows in the ReadWriteWeb search box for our reviews on such tools. For simple guides, tutorials, or for creating overviews of a project, we may have found a solution. Whizle is a newly launched service that looks to be a great tool for creating simple and visually appealing guides.

Making A Guide with Whizle

Making a guide or tutorial with Whizle is supposed to be a piece of cake. In our tests of the service, we found it to be dead simple. In creating a Whizle, we were given steps for creating a title, mission statement, and then steps with descriptions. The service provides both a WYSIWYG editor for formatting text and a more interactive application for creating your whizle. We found the interactive app to be more appealing and easier to use. However if you don't need all the bells and whistles, the WYSIWYG editor will do just fine. Adding new steps for our tutorial was simple. In addition to text, we were able to add Youtube videos and Flickr photos to help visualize our guide. All in all, the service did exactly what it said it would without any fuss.

Who is Whizle For?

We don't recommend using Whizle for any hardcore tutorials such as a design tutorials. Formatting images is not one of Whizle's specialties. We'd really like to recommend the service to bloggers, marketers, and those in PR looking to create simple guides for clients. Unfortunately, there isn't an option to embed any of the whizles you create. Your creations stay on the Whizle site where viewers are allowed to comment and edit your whizle if you allow them to. The service could also use a little more work in the design department. Whizle is functional enough for beginners, but anyone looking for a more advanced tool will have to keep searching.

So Google has released Chrome, its entry in the browser wars (bonus points, Google, for promoting it with a Scott McCloud comic).

I know, I know, it uses the same rendering engine as Safari... but even still, Murphy's Law of Browsers dictates that weird little quirks and idiosyncrasies will somehow find their way in. And in a world where we have to test web pages against Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, old versions of Netscape, various mobile browsers and that web-enabled toaster oven in your client's office kitchen, well... oy.

That said, am I itching to install it the moment the first suicidally-alpha version is available for the Mac? You betcha.

The Office 2.0 conference took place in San Francisco this week and I attended and took notes for ReadWriteWeb. The Day 1 recap is here and Day 2 is below.

The sessions highlighted in this post are Going 100% SaaS and Meeting without traveling. I also reviewed Joblogs, a CRM "relationship and management lite".

Going 100% SaaS

This was the session I really wanted to see the roll call of panelists was;

• Gadi Shamia (Revongo)
• Daniel Druker (Intacct)
• Doug Harr (Ingres)
• Robert Hull (Adaptive Planning)
• Jeff Schultz (Bill.com)

Not surprisingly the recent Debes article came up - the crowd, again not surprisingly, was dismissive of Debes contentions about the imminent demise of SaaS as a model.

First question was why aspire for 100% SaaS?

The panelists agreed that SaaS gives functionality to SMBs that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to access. There was also agreement around the enabling benefits of SaaS apps. Why build a data center or expensive traditional software when it's so much more readily accessible and cheaper via SaaS?

In response to a question from the floor about whether or not SaaS is actually cheaper or whether that is just a marketing spin, Doug Harr from Ingres gave the example of a Siebel implementation for 150 salespeople that cost $1.5million. His new company implemented Salesforce.com which cost $140k/year for 130 users.

Another question from the floor raised security concerns for large businesses - the panelists agreed that they had no real concerns about their data being in the cloud.

What sort of business is more likely to adopt SaaS? - not surprisingly the panelists felt technology companies were prime candidates, also service companies, young companies and rapidly growing organizations. Phil Wainewright brought up the issues around large businesses not going with SaaS due to their already sunken costs - again Doug Harr gave a great example where true total cost of ownership analysis can bring up surprising results - the costs and hassles with the old school behemoth software offerings are often sufficiently high to outweigh the monthly costs of a SaaS alternative.

Discussion around integration - feeling was at this point in time it's acceptable but this is where the growth will come from  - creating pseudo best-of-breed total solutions via integration of diverse offerings.

To be honest, given the fact that this conference is meant to be about visioning the future - it was a surprise that so much time was taken in justifying SaaS as a model - it would have been nice to see more time spent on a picture of what a truly 100% SaaS ecosystem would look and feel like - maybe next year....

Meeting without traveling

A panel discussion that the Twitterverse was no doubt interested in - check out the Twitter cred of the participants;

• Robert Scoble (Fast Company)
• Guillaume Cohen (Veodia)
• Gary Griffiths (LiteScape)
• Loic Le Meur (Seesmic)
• Alain Mowad (Polycom)

The panelists introduced themselves and their businesses/offerings. The panel ranges across the spectrum from super hi quality Cisco Telepresence systems down to Seesmic for low quality ad hoc solutions like Seesmic.

Loic Lemeur announced that Twhirl will include video within the next two weeks. He discussed the fact that video allows relationships to be formed around the world without actual presence - it brings people closer together.

Robert told of WalMart's ability to buy fabric internationally over video conferencing the quality is so high.

Cohen told of the savings that video conferencing brings - gas, time, environmental etc. People can work remotely easily - so long as the video integrates tightly with their existing workflow processes - people feel more comfortable giving feedback over video than "in the flesh". Veodia does all the hard work in the background and serves up one button for users to push - delivering up the best quality that the connection available can give.

Mowad says that Polycom is much more focused on real time video sharing - gives examples of tele-medicine and tele-education.

Questions from the floor.....

What are the coolest things the tools could have?

• Someone who has video on 24hrs a day when she works remotely - a sense of intimacy when they're not there
• How do you create a technology that becomes so immersive that one feels that they're "really there"
• Video brings an experience as close as possible to real life
• Video enables Seesmic to run an international development team with real time collaboration

How can video-conferencing work when their are larger teams?

• Remote controlled monitors that move depending on who is talking!
• There's a threshold beyond which video conferencing just doesn't work - 9 or 10 people perhaps?
• There is a perception of presence - the host of offerings - audio, video, IM etc build up a feeling of intimacy that means that the group feel together - even if the camera is focusing on someone else at the time

Discussion ensued about the fact that going forward the ability to catalogue the audio from a video stream - allowing for searching and text string recognition.

Joblogs launches!

I took the opportunity to meet this morning with Steve Ireland from Joblogs - a startup out of Canada which launched their offering today.

Joblogs is most readily described as CRM, relationship and management lite. It serves up a nice, intuitive and quick workspace which allows for the aggregation of contact information, email and documents and links and stakeholder comments all in one location. Their name is a mashup of Job and Blogs - not blogs in the traditional sense but in the sense of being enablers of two way communication and idea collaboration.

It's a good solution for anyone handling large number of customer interactions - service based industries being the most obvious - anyone that requires daily coordination of a dynamic set of different data streams.

It goes out to general release on Monday 9 September and has been bootstrapped via subscription from a previous offering. Joblogs puts their specific points of difference as;

• Non-obstructive user interface (e.g. no save or cancel buttons, and of course no page refreshes)
• Customizable databases with drag and drop
• Private blogs with that serve as a point of collaboration for business projects
• Arbitrarily relate different records together
• Email dropbox that automatically links messages to associated contacts, companies and projects

Here's a screencast of the product:

And it's over!

Sitting in the last session of the conference with organiser Ismael Ghalimi going over the tools used to run the entire operation - 500 physical attendees and a couple of thousand virtual ones. All planned and arranged in a couple of months - it's been a whirlwind.

Overall it's been great to be around a bunch of people who "get it" - understand the cloud and what it can bring to business going forwards.

If I had any criticism it would be that a lot of time was spent talking about where we are at - not so much time spent envisioning the future. Obviously with a number of vendors present this isn't a surprising fact - but nonetheless it would have been great to have some vision sessions that were vendor agnostic.

Anyway... thanks to all the attendees, thanks a bunch to Ismael and his team and I look forward to seeing you all again next year.

What we thought might have been an AIR app in the making, may be something entirely different. With social video sharing sites such as Youtube and Vimeo it can be hard to keep the recommendations flowing. Hundreds of videos are added to these sites daily, but only a select few are really worth our time. With no easy way to sort through these uploads, Vimeo is asking the community for help in finding a solution. Today the site has announced the launch of Vimeo Toys. These toys aims to give users an interactive and visually appealing way to find more video content. Here's a look at what's available.

VimeoLand & Pulse

The VimeoLand toy gives a look at recent happenings on Vimeo. VimeoLand displays an interactive landscape of characters that represent the latest actions from Vimeo users. Hovering your mouse over a character will display a pop-up containing one of the following recent actions:

• A comment
• A like
• Recent signup
• Recent upload

Each action includes a link to the profile of the user who completed the action and a link to the video that the action took place on. What's a little random and unique about VimeoLand is an airplane that flies back and forth above the landscape. Clicking the plane will cause a random video to be dropped from the plane's cargo. It's pretty nifty. Vimeo fans will find this particular toy to be very useful and entertaining.

Currently there's only one other toy available. If you're looking for something less flashy than VimeoLand, we recommend Pulse.

Making Your Own Vimeo Toy

We're interested in seeing what other unique visuals developers will create with Vimeo Toys. To help developers get started, Vimeo has listed a sample XML file with over 50 activity items to choose from. Vimeo's team of workers will decide whether or not your toy is worth being featured on Vimeo. While this isn't a problem for us, we'd rather see the community take a vote on what stays and what goes.

What we think would be really interesting to see is for Vimeo and developers to take things to the next level. By this we mean seeing a visual graph of what our friends, or a select group of users, are up as a Vimeo Toy. The current offerings are still a little too random for our tastes. Nevertheless, we're happy with what we see so far and look forward to see what else is next.

Vimeo company profile provided by TradeVibes

NBC seems to be having a change of heart this week. The network recently wrapped up their streaming of the Olympics using Microsoft's Silverlight technology. However if you tuned in for this week's NFL season opener, NBC was using Adobe's Flash technology instead of Silverlight. Making some do a double take, here's a look at why NBC left Silverlight in a flash (pun intended).

As we stated, NBC took a chance on Silverlight to stream the Olympic ceremonies for online and mobile viewers. While this was a great opportunity for Microsoft to promote its Silverlight platform, it wasn't enough for NBC. According to SAI,
"Microsoft, meanwhile, said that during the Olympics, 40 million US to visitors NBCOlympics.com didn't yet have Silverlight installed."

NBC has already begun switching back to Adobe Flash for the start of the NFL season. Yet their efforts don't seem to be paying off at the moment with reports of video playback for the NFL season starter game being too horrible to watch.

Not a Good Look

We all know that at least 90% of computer users have Adobe Flash installed. It's easy to see why NBC would want to switch back. The partnership between Microsoft and NBC was likely more beneficial to Microsoft in the end. One of the downsides for NBC was that users tend to become either wary or lazy about downloading new extensions for a website. This is especially true if the website was working just fine with previous extensions only days before. However, with a rocky start to switching back, NBC online sports fans are probably wondering if it's even worth the effort anymore.

With all the news about Chrome, it's been pretty easy to forget about one of Firefox's recent releases: Ubiquity. We gave Ubiquity a rave review for giving Firefox a whole new UI. The standard commands, or "verbs", that come with Ubiquity are great. Yet we couldn't help but want more. Developers have been working around the clock to produce some fantastic custom verbs for Ubiquity. Here is ReadWriteWeb's list of the top picks of custom Ubiquity verbs!

Media

Ubiquity already comes with built in search commands for Youtube, Amazon, and Flickr. Here are our top picks for searching media sites using custom Ubiquity verbs:

• Last.FM - Allows users to search the Last.FM music network for artists pages.
• Seeq - Search Seeqpod for music.
• Vimeo - Allows users to search Vimeo for matching video results.
• Stickam - Watch the livestream of your Stickam friends no matter what page you're on.
• Netflix Search - Search Netflix for movies.

Social Networks

So far Ubiquity only allows you to interact with one social network: Twitter. With these custom verbs you'll be able interact with more popular social networks.

• Ping. FM - Update your default Ping.FM status.
• Jaiku - Update your Jaiku status.
• Identica - Update your identi.ca status
• Facebook - Update your Facebook status or locate a friend.
• FriendFeed - Post a link or comment to your FriendFeed stream.
• Twitter and Link Shortner - Extends Ubiquity's default Twitter functionality to include a link shortening command.
• Myspace Person Search - Search for someone on Myspace.

Social Sharing and Bookmarking Sites

Outside of Digg, there are no other ways to share news and links with friends. So for those of you on Reddit, Delicious, and other related sites, we have just the verbs for you!

• StumbleUpon - Stumble the current page you're viewing. Requires StumbleUpon extension.
• Sphinn - Submit an article to Sphinn.
• Reddit - Submit a link to Reddit
• Twine - Post an article to Twine.
• Delicious - Bookmark an article with tags to your delicious account.
• Share On - Share a link on any of the following sites: Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, or Fark.
• Most Popular on Delicious - Get a quick overview of the current 10 most popular delicious bookmarks.
• Google Bookmark - Add the current page you're viewing to your Google Bookmarks.
• Instapaper - Save a page for later to your Instapaper account.
• Soup.io - Bookmark a page to your Soup.io account.
• Tumblr - Share a ton of link love to your Tumblelog.
• Check Slashdot - Get a quick overview of either three of the latest articles on Slashdot or any number of articles that you specify.

Notable Verbs

While searching for the best Ubiquity verbs we came across a ton that were great, but couldn't be categorized. Without further ado here are other notable verbs:

• Subscribe via Google Reader
• Multiple URL Shortners (TinyURL, isgd, Bitly, Hurl)
• EveryStock Photo Search
• Find Movie Times Near You
• W3C Validator
• Torrent Search
• 30 Boxes
• Remember The Milk

And The Verbs Keep Coming

We're sure you'll be able to find a ton of new Ubiquity verbs to subscribe to. What we'd like to know is what verbs you're already using and what verbs you hope to see in the near future. To start the list, we're already using quite a few of the built in verbs and most of the social media custom verbs listed here. In the future we'd like to see verbs for Diigo, sharing items via Google Reader, and more video related verbs. Let's hear what's on your list.

If you were interviewing someone for a position with your company and they admitted that they didn't know anything about the new trends and innovations taking place in their field, what would you think? Likely, what you would think is "next candidate, please." In today's business world, job-seekers are expected to stay current with the happenings taking place in their area of interest. There was a time when those happenings were very much job-specific and anything having to do with technology fell squarely on the shoulders of I.T. That time has passed. Web 2.0 technologies lifted the veil of mystery surrounding computing technology and made it accessible to everyone. Today, if you're not staying current with Web 2.0 technologies' impact on business, then you're just not staying current. Period.

Web 2.0 Is Everywhere

No matter which department you're in, Web 2.0 technologies have had an impact. If you've been ignoring their prevalence and adoption, you're at risk of falling behind in your career and your business is at risk of losing ground to its competitors who are tuned into this trend.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we deliver news about Web 2.0's impact on business in addition to news about web technologies in general. Depending on your area of interest, you can find a lot of great information on this subject in our archives. Or simply bookmark this post for easy reference.

Document Collaboration Suites

GroupSwim is an innovative company which has created an intelligent community building and collaboration SaaS solution. They aim to connect individuals and build knowledge utilizing social based methodologies. Read more.

DreamFactory's suite of Enterprise 2.0 applications consists of a Project Management module, a Time and Expense Module, a Document Manager, and a Team Calendar. Originally, the company was available on Amazon Web Services, but now DreamFactory's software will be available on Intuit's QuickBase platform, too. Read more.

Box.net offers collaboration functionality which allows any Box.net user can invite collaborators to any folder in their account. The collaboration feature is also fully compatible with all the OpenBox services, which extends online collaboration beyond just word processor documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, similar to what Google Docs currently offers. Read more.

The term groupware refers to applications that facilitate real-time communication, coordination and collaboration amongst groups of people. A number of startups are working hard to develop the nascent groupware market, so in this post we identify some of those startups and provide an overview of where the market is heading...read more.

What's the Deal With Wikis?

Only a handful of years ago, it was common to hear people laugh at Wikipedia. Anyone can edit it! How could you take it seriously? These days, just as blogs are, wikis are on their way to winning a reputation as serious publishing platforms. Wikis are now serious business. Read more.

Atlassian Confluence, makers of one of the most popular enterprise wiki solutions, offers Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration in their release of the Confluence 2.9 software. With these new tools, users no longer have to know the technicalities of wiki markup or even how to use the included rich-text WYSIWYG editor in order to make changes to the wiki - they can simply open up a Microsoft Office document instead. Read more.

WetPaint, a popular hosted Wiki solution, provides person-to-person and private messaging between users of their Wiki network. This means that Wetpaint Wiki users can now send single or multi-person private messages, to connect and collaborate with others about their interests. This post introduces wikis and discusees who is using them and for what purpose.First, wikis are described and then the range of wiki products in the market right now is explored. Read more.

Leave it to people in the wiki market to know how to collaborate. Nearly 20 different wiki providers have teamed up to offer a new Firefox extension that will notify users whenever they are on a page that is publicly editable, using a standard icon that sits in the same place the RSS autodiscovery icon appears. Clicking on the icon (img. on the left) will take you to that page's editing interface. Read more.

What's Office 2.0?

Web Office Defined: A Web Office suite is a combination of productivity, publishing and collaboration features. A Web Office both embraces the functionality of desktop office suites (e.g. Microsoft Office) and extends it by using Web Native features. Read more.

The State of Office 2.0: Over the past 10 years, Corel, Sun, IBM and others have tried to compete with Microsoft in the office software business, but thus far none of them have been able to take a significant chunk of Microsoft's large market share, which generates revenues exceeding $15 billion each year. These companies have tried everything; including Sun open sourcing their StarOffice suite and releasing it as the free OpenOffice. Yet, even this very compelling move has not been able to make a serious dent in the market. Read more.

Microsoft announced their Office Live Workspace is publicly available for everyone to access. The site, a free web-based extension of Microsoft Office, lets you access your documents online and share your work with others. Some say that the service's launch is a direct response to Google's entry into the web office space with their Google Docs online service. If that's so, then the question now is: did Microsoft just trump Google Docs? Or does Google Docs still rule online office suites? Read more.

The Web Office was a market that underwent a lot of changes in 2007. Our definition of Web Office is: A Web Office suite is a combination of productivity, publishing and collaboration features. A Web Office both embraces the functionality of desktop office suites (e.g. Microsoft Office) and extends it by using Web Native features. The 2007 year in review: Read more.

This is the perspective of a "skeptical, later early adopter"; the sort of person who Microsoft needs to retain and should have been able to retain easily. I don't spend time on productivity tools that may at some date make me more productive, but which today are just a frustrating time sink. That describes the majority of people. MS Office can be annoying, but it does work. So any serious alternative has to offer a significant advantage and at the same time make adoption a total breeze. Read more.

EditGrid, the main product of HongKong-based company Team and Concepts (TnC) Ltd., is a leading Web 2.0 online spreadsheet service that focuses on online collaboration and interoperability. Read more.

eXpresso was named as one of PC World's 25 Most Innovative Products of the Year for 2007. PC World succinctly summed the product up: "[it] allows Excel users to share their spreadsheets, online or off." eXpresso is different from the web office contenders that you normally hear about on ReadWriteWeb for three reasons...Read more.

Zimbra is looking to expand its platform to the iPhone. Recently they announced Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0. Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 will allow iPhone users over-the-air two-way synchronization of e-mails, calendar, contacts, and photos between user mailboxes and mobile devices, and seamless "push" e-mail service for all Zimbra Collaboration Suite users. Read more.

News from the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, 2008. Read more.

What's Happening in the Enterprise 2.0 Space?

A report released by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a global enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013. Read more.

Enterprise 2.0 is Happening: If you're a business who has been ignoring the Web 2.0 trend and the spread of social media: look out, the tide is shifting and you're about to be left behind. The rise of social media didn't happen overnight, the power of the internet to unite people, the ubiquity of broadband, the rise of Gen Y, the development of new technologies for socializing on the web - all of these things and more have led to the rise of social media. And this new force is affecting change in the way that companies do business - now and for many years to come.

The break-up of behemoth, vertically integrated enterprises commenced in the 1970's, got a boost from junk bond financing in the 1980's, and accelerated in the 1990's with globalization. Now, late in the 2000's, Social Media (aka Web 2.0) is adding another gear that will accelerate the fundamental restructuring of the enterprise. Read more.

Most enterprise software sucks. That is my considered opinion from 30 years in the software biz. Words that come to mind are: bloated, inflexible and user hostile. The good news is that it is getting better, a lot better. The driver for change is what I call the consumerization of enterprise software. These new software champions typically have some if not all of these 8 main attributes...Read more.

The Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad program is a program that allows companies to showcase their products and compete for the opportunity to present their ideas to the community at this year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference. This competition, organized by Stowe Boyd, began in April when companies were invited to post their video pitches to the E2 web site. After the community voted, the list of contenders was narrowed down to five finalists who will now compete for the final spot. For that grand prize winner, the prize is free exhibit space at the upcoming conference. Read more.

SharePoint to run Enterprise 2.0? 9 companies are saying "yes," having recently launched Enterprise 2.0 offerings that integrate with SharePoint technology. If there's one thing that any I.T. pro knows it's the value of "maximizing their investment" in whatever servers they run, technology they use, or services they've signed up for. With strict budgets in place, no I.T. purchases are bought on a whim. Instead, each decision is researched, tested, thoughtfully considered, and, if worthy, purchased, then rolled out to become a part of the I.T. infrastructure. SharePoint is no exception. Read more.

Is 2.0 Affecting My Industry?

Yes! Check out the examples below of Web 2.0's impact on various industries and fields.

Finance/Banking

Google is announced that after more than a year of work on the problem, Google Finance is now offering real-time price quotes for any stock traded on NASDAQ. Read more.

Strands, the recommendation and lifestreaming service we've written about here before, announced a much anticipated deal that will put it in the driver's seat for financial recommendations served up to millions of online banking customers around the world. The company's recommendation test-case in music is no longer all they will be known for around the world. Read more.

We reported on a survey that revealed that 48% of online banking customers between the ages of 18 and 34 would be interested in using "secure gadgets for personal banking" if their bank offered them. More than a quarter of bank customers would consider switching to another bank if it took better advantage of web 2.0 technologies. While that survey was flawed in some ways, there is another access point to banking information that customer may want more than secure widgets: mobile. Read more.

48% of Bank Customers Want Web 2.0 Gadgets. WorkLight, a startup that offers enterprise 2.0 products, recently did a survey among Facebook users to find out their willingness to use Web 2.0 tools for secure banking. The survey was conducted among 1000 Facebook users between the ages of 18-34. The fact that the survey was conducted among Facebook users gives it a bias towards tech-savvy people. However there are some surprising findings. Read more.

Accounting

Online Accounting: State of the Market: Accounting software for small business and personal use is increasingly moving from the desktop to online. However, compared to other office software, this transition to online has been relatively slow. Partly that's due to user reticence: writing a document online and sharing it with others (via Google Docs, Office Live, Zoho, or whatever you use) is one thing. Entering sensitive financial information into your browser is harder to adjust to. Read more.

Project Management

Add this one to your web office toolkit - LiquidPlanner is an online, hosted project management tool that lets you access and update projects anywhere you have an internet connection. The service offers you and your team a complete project environment, social networking and collaboration features, and a probabilistic scheduling engine which tells you the probability of completing each task - and ultimately the entire project - by a certain date. With everything organized into a centralized dashboard that can be customized for each team member, everyone on your team can stay focused on their tasks and how they relate to the project as a whole. Read more.

The Clarizen project management software came out of stealth mode last year and has now just launched a new version with additional features. The latest version, Clarizen v 2.0, will be demoed at the "Under the Radar Conference," an event held on Microsoft's campus whose current theme is "The Business of Web Apps: Where the Web Goes to Work." Read more.

Enterprise 2.0 is a rapidly growing trend that takes the concepts and tools of social media (social networking, RSS, wikis, blogs, etc.) and re-purposes them for business use, wrapping them up into applications that make the tools at work seem more like the tools we use in our day-to-day lives. While these enterprise 2.0 apps give us that web 2.0 feel, it's rarer to see actual Web 2.0 services like Facebook or Twitter used by businesses. And although we've seen many people promoting the business use of Twitter, we had not yet heard about anyone actually going so far as to integrate Twitter into a non-consumer focused application. However, that's just what Joint Contact has done. Their PM tool now shows how tweeting can actually be a productive activity. Read more.

37Signals offers a range of applications, from simple, single-function apps like Ta-Da Lists (to-do lists), Writeboard (collaborative word processor), and Campfire (group chat) to more complicated apps like Basecamp (project management) and Highrise (group contact manager). Read more.

eProject is an on-demand Project Management company. More than 100,000 users at 650 companies currently use eProject's solutions. They run the gamut from Fortune 500 companies to medium-sized fast growing organizations. Read more.

Health

Health 2.0, web-based apps and services for the healthcare sector, is a nascent but potentially huge market for web 2.0. As of now, many of these apps have an emphasis on communication, information sharing and community. These are relatively easy things to address using Web tools. However we're starting to see health 2.0 apps try to tackle the enormous inefficiencies in the healthcare system - check out our description of Carol.com below. Also, in the longer term, we will see the Web being used in medical diagnosis and practice. Read more.

The Health 2.0 Conference is reviewed here and some of the health web apps that caught our eye as well as trends that are discussed. Read more.

Google announced the public availability of Google Health, after initially launching as a closed beta back in February. It is described as "a safe and secure way to collect, store, and manage [your] medical records and health information online" and is being positioned as a way for users to control their own medical records. Read more.

HR

Traditional resumes are boring. They become stale and out-of-date, they can't really showcase your work or achievements, and they end up just sitting in the bottom of someone's inbox. A paper resume, while professional, doesn't really let an employer get to know you. Many sites are trying to solve the problems of traditional resumes by providing job seekers a new way to stand out in the crowd. Read more.

The iPhone has been making headway in its battle to become a business-ready tool. Obviously, the addition of Microsoft Exchange support was a big step towards being considered a viable alternative to the traditional smartphones used at work, like Blackberry and Windows Mobile. However, beyond simply supporting enterprise email, the iPhone platform has a lot of potential to cater to the needs of its business users, too. Read more.

LinkedIn has an audience that is both younger (41 vs 48) and richer ($106k vs $98K). LinkedIn was also naturally crowing about their growth (189% for year ending Oct. '07) and the chart from Nielsen which shows comparative Facebook growth at 125%. Note that Facebook growth is from a higher base and the law of large numbers applies, but Facebook has always crowed about their growth rates vs the larger MySpace, so they have to live with growth rate comparisons to LinkedIn now. Read more.

Marketing

Viral marketing, user-generated content, online buzz: over the past few years, these terms have been representative of a new way of marketing to consumers that takes advantage of the current popularity of the social web. This new technique involves companies encouraging its customers to create content of their own in order to generate interest in the company's brand. Unfortunately, one of the potential side effects of this strategy is the potential for negative buzz. Despite this fact, a surprisingly low percentage of marketers are monitoring for negative responses. Read more.

Using the new pilot program from a company called Involver, Kiva launched a video campaign on Facebook to draw users to their site to lend directly to these developing nations. The video even features a button that appears at the end of the video encouraging you to "lend" money. Read more.

Mobile marketing startup, TextBound, has big plans to make text messages the new mass media for advertisers. Like we mentioned earlier, more and more companies are going to be betting on location based mobile ads this year, and TextBound hopes to capitalize on this trend. But unlike mobile social network/marketing vehicle, Fluc, TextBound isn't about connecting with your friends, it's about delivering ads to your cell phone via text message, then taking you to the mobile web for more details. Read more.

Recently, HiveLive announced a new partnership with Responsys, a marketing firm whose client list includes some big-name brands like Apple and Salesforce.com. Enterprise 2.0 is sure to follow. What Responsys offers their customers are on-demand email and marketing solutions that can be anything from web sites to email to mobile. With the new partnership with HiveLive, they can expand that offering to include enterprise social networks. Read more.

Widget platform Clearspring has an ad network that will allow widget publishers to monetize their widgets with advertising. The ads run inside widgets and come in a variety of formats. Clearspring has already inked deals with some of their largest widget publishers to run ads, including the NHL, 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate Films, Blockbuster, and Virgin Mobile. Read more.

Join us now for our weekly review of Web Technology news. This week was dominated by the launch of Google's new open source browser Chrome. As the Ed tweeted during the week: how often does a major Internet company launch a brand new browser? Check out our extensive coverage and analysis below.

This week we also reported on another major announcement from Google: a YouTube-like app for Google Apps. Finally, check out our poll - it asked our readers what word processing tool they mostly use. The results may surprise you...

Google Launches Open Source Web Browser, Chrome

In what may be the story of the year in Web tech, this week Google launched Chrome, its open source app browser. Can Chrome kill IE? Will it kill Firefox? Or will it go the way of Google Base, Google Sites and other Google Flops? The browser became available for Windows users in 100 countries and 43 languages this week. It's Live now at google.com/chrome.

As mentioned, we at ReadWriteWeb extensively analyzed this big news. Here is our coverage...

Chrome News Leaked in Comic Book Form

The news first leaked on Monday morning via Google watchdog Phillipp Lessen, who scanned and posted a printed comic he received in the mail from Google. You can view it here. In the comic, Chrome was framed as a browser for applications instead of just web pages.

Test Drive Google Chrome With RWW

As soon as Chrome was made available as a download, the ReadWriteWeb team took the new browser for a spin. We walked through it live and shared our screen as soon as the browser became available. The video of our session is posted below. Thanks to DimDim for help with this.

You can also see the slideshow from the press conference here:

Does Google Have Rights to Everything You Send Through Chrome?

Our coverage of Chrome initially touched on issues like browser performance and business implications for Firefox - but one thing we picked up on shortly after was a curious section of the Chrome Terms of Service.

The terms include a section giving Google "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services." That seems pretty extreme for a browser, doesn't it?

Later in the week Google removed the offending section of the Terms of Service. It seems that the default Google service TOS includes these kinds of claims, even though they may not be as appropriate in some circumstances as in others. We're not sure when such claims would be justified but we're glad they've been removed from Chrome. Here's the original version of the End User Licensing Agreement.

Note: be sure to check the comments of this post for a rigorous debate!

See also: Google and Privacy: A History and It's Time for a New Terms of Service Regime

Serious Security Flaw in Google Chrome

It wasn't all good news for Google. Ryan Narraine, a security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, reported that Chrome also inherited a potentially serious security flaw from the old version of WebKit it is based on. An attacker could easily trick users into launching an executable Java file by combining a flaw in WebKit with a known Java bug and some smart social engineering. Security expert Aviv Raff, who first discovered this flaw, set up a demo of the exploit here. (Note: This page will automatically download a Java file onto your desktop). You can safely click on the download, as it only opens up a notepad application written in Java.

But Wait, There's More...

• Video of Google Chrome Announcement
• Chrome Is Coming To Android
• Chrome To Get Extensions - Just Not Yet
• Chrome: 1% Market Share In Less Than a Day
• Chrome Not Ready For Enterprise

Did Anything Else Happen This Week?

Google Video for Business Launches: YouTube for Enterprise

This week Google launched a new product for the enterprise market, Google Video for business. It's a new application in the Google Apps office suite, enabling workers to upload and share videos inside their organizations. Videos can be shared on an individual, group or company-wide basis. Google sees it being used for such things as executive communications, product training, trip reports, "social videos" for the company intranet.

We think this has the potential to break open the Web Office market, because up till now nobody has done rich media for the enterprise as an easy to use browser-based package. Google Video for Business manages to do this, mostly because of YouTube's influence.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Poll: Which Word Processing Tool Do You Mostly Use?

We ran a poll a year ago asking which word processing tool you used the most. What we were really driving at was: how many of you are using an online word processing service (Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, etc) as your main tool, instead of a traditional desktop one (MS Word, OpenOffice, etc). We ran the same poll this year:

Which tool do you mostly use for word processing?
( polls)

The best of the online word processers was still, you guessed it, Google with their Docs program at 17% at time of writing. But Microsoft still dominates this market, polling at 48% of our readers using it as their main tool.

For further analysis of the poll results, see: Word Processing: Most of You Still Use Desktop Software

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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Strands has created a social recommender engine that is able to provide real-time recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices.

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The Web 3.0 Conference is for the builders of the next generation Web: designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, business strategists, and venture capitalists. It's on October 16 - 17, 2008 in Santa Clara, CA.

Talklets, from TEXTIC, is a Text to Speech system for your web pages or applications. Its API gives you the ability to convert text to speech, dynamically, on your website.

Compete Search Analytics is a way to build and optimize search marketing campaigns.

Direct Media Exchange is a simple solution for managing ad networks that allows publishers to make more money from their websites.

Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.

The Defrag conference is focused on the tools and technologies that accelerate the "aha" moment. It is being held November 3-4 in Denver, Colorado.

DEMOfall 08 is the launchpad for emerging technology. Over the course of two days, 70 emerging technologies each have six minutes to deploy technology's next big thing. It is on September 7-9, 2008 in San Diego.

EditMe lets you make a web site in minutes and edit the content with a single click.

Quintura is a visual-based search engine, which we are now using to power ReadWriteWeb's main search. Check it out here.

Eurekster is developer of the swicki that we use on RWW, a custom social search portal on the topic of your choice (in our case web tech).

MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW and SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteWeb is one of the media partners for DEMOfall 08, which starts this weekend September 7-9 in San Diego. Sarah Perez will be there to cover the event for RWW.

ReadWriteWeb readers can receive a discount rate of $2,395 ($600 off the standard rate of $2,995 and $400 lower than the July early bird rate of $2795) by clicking here for registration.

There are 70 companies presenting and they fall into the following broad categories: Moving the Chains ("smart incrementation" of innovation); Television Meets the Web; Web Meets the Television; Words, Pictures and Music; Your Mobile, Your Life; Open Studios ("seamless cooperation"); Protecting What's Yours (security); Getting Embedded with Social Networks; It's Easy Being Green; Managing Green; Activism; Web 2.0 Gets to Work; Defining the Next Web.

Here is the entire agenda.

Social media tools are some of the latest crazes these days. We happen to be huge fans of a ton of them here on ReadWriteWeb. Yet the biggest problem with most social media tools is that they aren't for everyone. There's a constant debate on how early adopters can persuade more mainstream users to try these tools out. We might have the most flexible social media tool available for any user: Yoono!

Widgets Galore

Yoono is a Firefox extension that sits in your browser's sidebar and provides access to a ton of widgets that help keep you connected to your friends. The available widgets range from your favorite social networks such as Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and Flickr, to providing related web page recommendations.However the things that Yoono is able to do are endless. Essentially Yoono is a tool that can do a lot more than it seems at first glance.

How Mainstream and Early Adopters Can Use Yoono

For mainstream users, Yoono is the perfect tool for casual surfing habits. With Yoono in your sidebar you can easily access all of your contacts from popular social networks, instant messaging platforms and receive instant update notifications of what's going on. You can keep up with your Facebook friend's updates (sorry Myspace users). If you're on Flickr, you can view the latest pics from the photostreams of your friends. For those that don't wish to leave their current page just to see one of your friend's latest pics, Yoono provides a fast loading overlay of any picture you hover your mouse over. You can also add comments to Flickr photos and upload your own images right from Yoono. For Twitter users, Yoono pushes the latest replies, direct messages, and updates from your twitter friends with the ability to reply and send updates right back. There are also widgets for Google Reader, Digg, and Youtube.

Early adopters can also find Yoono useful. Of course, the reasons stated above for mainstream users will also apply to early adopters. As an early adopter I've found more unique ways to Yoono. Normally I would overload Google Reader with a bunch of feeds that I'd like to keep track of. Flickr photostreams are a prime example of this for me. Now, I use Yoono instead to keep track of such feeds. Their web notes feature is great for annotating pages and sharing them with friends and contacts. The Discoveries widget is also valuable for finding related sites and services. We don't recommend Yoono for heavy social media usage. However, Yoono can provide assistance in lightening the load of other tools that you might use. It's just that flexible.

Room for Growth

This extension does what it says it does; it compliments your current tools instead of replacing them. There's still plenty of room for Yoono to grow. Some of these widgets are not the real deal. The Gmail, Google Reader, and Digg widgets are more like mobile versions of their web service counterparts. Also, the extension has had numerous problems with several Firefox themes. So if you happen to run into a bug or two, turn off your theme to see if that helps. Installing a bunch of widgets at once could result in a serious overload and make Yoono seem very unappealing. Essentially, keep the amount of widgets you add low.

Learn How to Use Yoono in less than 6 Minutes

We think anyone could find Yoono to be a valuable social media tool that's easy to use. The extension provides numerous offerings and flexible options to users. Signing into social networks is a breeze and updates are instant. Here's a clip on how to use Yoono is less than 6 minutes:

Google's Picasa team released a number of major updates to both its desktop photo managing application Picasa and its online photo gallery this week. On Tuesday, we already reported about the addition of face recognition to the Picasa web albums, but Google also added Creative Comments licenses and email uploads, while the desktop application now lets you create collages, retouch photos, add text to your images, and upload your videos to YouTube.

Picasa3

Google's desktop photo-managing software has always been a great product, and the newest version, which was released on Tuesday, builds on the success of its predecessors.

The overall layout has not changed, but Google has added a large number of interesting new features in this release.

You can now easily sync albums between your desktop and Picasa's online albums. Any change you make on the desktop will be reflected online. However, this does not work the other way round, which limits the usefulness of this feature quite a bit.

Among the other new features are the ability to add text to your photos, retouch photos, create collages, upload movies to YouTube, and create movies based on your photos, videos, and music.

One other neat feature is that the cropping tool now automatically tries to find the best places to start cropping in a picture.

Picasa Web Albums

We were a bit skeptical when Google first announced the face recognition feature, but in our tests, it actually performed quite well. Part of this might have to do with the fact that Google did not get too ambitious and left a lot of manual work to the users. While Picasa recognizes that a face is present and will group similar faces together, it leaves the final approval of the tags to the user, though Picasa will make an educated guess about whose face it is seeing. Because of this, there is less of a chance of making a mistake, but it also means more work for the user.

While the face recognition feature is definitely the splashiest addition to Picasaweb in this this new release, Google also added a lot of other new features to the web gallery. These updates include Creative Commons rights management, an Explore page that showcases some of the best public pictures, and the ability to upload photos by email.

Chasing Down the Competition

Of course, a lot of these new features besides the face recognition have already been standard in a lot of other online photo albums and these updates mostly make it seem as if Google is trying to get its feature set up to par with Yahoo's Flickr. Especially the 'Explore' page would not look out of place there.

For Picasa's Web Albums to really become popular, though, Google will have to increase the amount of space it is giving its users on the service. Right now, you only get 1GB of space for photos, which is simply not enough. You can buy more space from Google, but every other service offer more space or uses a monthly bandwidth limit instead of putting a hard limit on storage.

Rich Internet Applications is the fancy name for desktop apps that leverage internet connectivity outside the browser. RIAs, as they're called, are supposed to be ushering in a post-browser future, according to some people.

Why, then, has one of the most high profile RIA providers in recent years, Joost, moved to ditch their desktop video player?

Adobe's Ryan Stewart, one of the leading advocates of RIAs, posts a list of steps other RIA providers should consider taking in order to avoid the same fate. Are RIAs not shaping up to be everything they promised? We still like some of them quite a bit, but we think Joost is making the right decision to move into the browser. In fact, we think that iTunes Video would be well served to do the same thing. Here's why.

RIAs are Good for Background Use

We like using desktop Twitter clients like Tweetdeck or Twhirl or other RIAs like Fluid and Snackr. Those are all apps that work well in the background of our workflows. We spend most of our focused time in the browser. Apps that require extended focus, like video viewing, may as well go on in the browser. That way they don't require separate downloads, potentially suspect software, etc.

One advantage to an RIA is that it can sit on your computer and wait until you're in between doing other things. If your browser crashes, while you load page after page from different sources, that RIA is still there keeping up in the background - waiting until you're ready for it.

RIAs Are Best When You Need Responsiveness

Rich Internet Apps combine the responsiveness of a desktop app with the connectivity of the web. If you don't need a lot of responsiveness, though, then you may as well just stay in the browser. Despite its social features, video viewing apps like Joost are mostly consumed passively. You find something you like and then you sit there and stare at it for awhile. Responsiveness to quickly entered commands? Pretty much irrelevant.

RIAs Are Good When Storage and Offline Access Are Important

Desktop RSS readers are nice because you've got a local copy of your feeds. You can see changes to the text and you can read in a plane. It's useful to view videos when offline, but how many of them do you want to keep on your computer after you've watched them? Better to let them stream in through that part of your computer's memory and then be gone.

Amazon may have hit the sweet spot in its move yesterday to ditch Amazon Unbox and rename the service Amazon Video on Demand. Users (now including Mac owners, by the way!) can either stream video or download it locally - it's up to you.

Maybe Video Works Best in the Browser - So How About iTunes?

That's all well and good, but watching video in the browser is so convenient it's hard to beat. As Adobe's Stewart points out, even watching full screen is now trivial with the upgrades to Flash and Silverlight that weren't available when Joost first hit the scene.

Hulu is rocking out and it's no surprise. It's attractive, easy to use and has a whole lot of content. It could be better, but there's absolutely no reason to believe that a desktop client would help make it any better.

We like Rich Internet Apps sitting on our desktop, pulling and pushing data to and from the internet. We don't feel compelled to consume video that way, though. We expect to see other desktop video apps follow Joost's footsteps and move back into the browser. Might iTunes move toward an ad supported model and move to the browser some day for video? It would probably be a good idea for all the same reasons that it's smart for Joost to do so.

Thanks to successful projects like Wikipedia or Wikitravel, wikis have quickly become a standard tool on the Internet, but in academia, the anonymity often associated with publishing in wikis is a key factor that works against them. Tracking down the exact history of changes in a wiki entry can be a convoluted process, yet being able to exactly attribute a certain statement to one writer is at the heart of the academic enterprise. Mememoir aims to provide a wiki that is heavily focused on authorship and can help to dispel the prejudices scientists have against publishing in a wiki-like format.

Wikis in Science

Mememoir is a completely new development and as of now, its only deployment is in the form of the WikiGenes wiki. Both Mememoir and Wikigenes, a database of literature about genetic information, were created by Robert Hoffmann, a fellow at Society in Science in Switzerland and a visiting scientist at MIT.

For scientists in academia, publications are the lifeblood of their careers. Having published in a wiki is not going to persuade a tenure track committee anytime soon, but the systems that Mememoir puts in place might just make those contributions stand out a bit more. Besides attribution, Mememoir also gives its users the ability to rates authors and their contributions.

The developers are still looking at their options for possibly open-sourcing the code behind Mememoir. As Robert Hoffmann pointed out to us, the project will look at its options at a later time and is mostly focused on running the Wikigenes project for now.

WikiGenes

The information in WikiGenes itself was based on iHop, another project by Hoffman (and not the infamous chain of pancake houses). The idea behind iHop is that information about a single gene can often be dispersed over hundreds of different academic papers, which makes finding and synthesizing all this information extremely hard. IHop used algorithms to parse all this information and bring it together in one database, which was then used to seed WikiGenes.

According to Hoffmann, the idea behind WikiGenes is that it will combat this dispersal of information in the first place, as scientist can enter their research results into the database directly.

Trust and Authorship

WikiTrust, which rates authors on Wikipedia according to an algorithm is trying to do something similar for all of the Wikipedia, but Mememoir takes this to a more personal level. Both systems are, of course, potentially fraught with problems, but it will be interesting to see if scientists will warm up to the wiki model.

We would really like to see Hoffmann and his team open up the code to Mememoir, as the wiki itself is a highly capable piece of code that looks flexible enough to power any kind of wiki - academic or not. In testing it, it turned out one of the easiest to use wikis we have seen so far and it could surely benefit a lot of different projects in the long run. If you would like to see it in action, the project has create a short screen-cast that you can see here.

Afrigator, a multimedia meme tracking site aggregating African blogs, podcasts and video, has been acquired by South African conglomerate MIH Group/Naspers. We gave Afrigator a positive review nine months ago and CNN's Business 2.0 called it one of 31 companies to watch outside the US last year. (Warning: Insipid, traditional media, ad-ridden "slide show" behind that CNN link.)

The Afrigator interface, algorithm and user experience were key in driving the kind of growth that made it an interesting acquisition target. We haven't been able to get any details on the record about the price paid but suffice it to say that Afrigator's founders and angel investors have all been well rewarded.

First coverage of the deal came from Africa tech 2.0 watcher Charl Norman, who puts Afrigator's acquisition in context with other recent deals in the region.

If you're unfamiliar with the blogging scene in Africa, Afrigator is a good place to discover top blogs there like The Mail & Guardian's Thought Leader, the occasionally prurient tech blog iMod, the very politicized Black Looks and the internationally minded Afromusing.

We'd like to offer our congratulations to the Afrigator team and to the African blogosphere, whose work has been recognized by a large traditional company as important enough to warrant a significant acquisition in that space. Such recognition isn't the most important thing in the world, the social media world has plenty of its own inherent worth, but such validation is nice too, even for people beyond the founding team. We assume that Afrigator will expand its operations significantly with this infusion of support.

Browsing the web is typically a very solitary activity, even if the Web 2.0 revolution has given us easy tools like FriendFeed or SocialMedian to share our online activities. However, a different breed of services like Browzmi or the Y Combinator funded Socialbrowse are trying to make the actual browsing experience more social by displaying your friends' actions right in the browser. Socialbrowse is releasing a new version of its service today which, besides being faster, lets you post any link directly to Twitter.

More Updates

Besides the closer integration with Twitter, Socialbrowse also switched from flat files to using SQLite as its database back-end. This, according to Socialbrowse co-founder Zack Garbow, resulted in a 10x speed increase over the old system.

Also, the sidebar now features a 'Hot' tab which displays the most popular and active shares or discussions in your network.

How Does it Work?

At the core of Socialbrowse is a Firefox extension that displays your friends' activity on the service in a sidebar. It's important to note that Socialbrowse does not aggregate your online actions the way FriendFeed does. Instead, Socialbrowse adds three icons to your Firefox navigation toolbar that let you toggle the sidebar, share and tag a site, or comment on it. Every time you share something or comment on a page, your updates will instantly appear in your friends' sidebars.

Twitter

In this newest version of Socialbrowse, you can also send your links directly to Twitter to share it with your social network there. Interestingly, Socialbrowse is using its own URL shortener in these Twitter posts.

Sidebar

In the sidebar, you can chose to either see all of your friends' updates, or you can chose to only see their latest shares or comments. It would be nice if you could comment on a page as you are sharing it, but for now, Socialbrowse is keeping these two activities completely separate from each other.

Once you close your sidebar, you will still get update from your friends through little pop-ups at the bottom right of your screen. This is a nice feature, especially if you have a small screen and you don't want a sidebar to take up a lot of your space.

Ranking

One other interesting feature in Socialbrowse is its ranking system. You get a 'social point' every time one of your friends shares a link you discovered first. Based on this ranking, Socialbrowse then creates a list of highly active users that new users can chose to follow when they sign up.

Annotated Links

One really nifty feature of Socialbrowse is that it analyses every page you surf to and then adds little icons to links that your friends have already shared or commented on. As you hover over these icons, Socialbrowse will display a list of your friends and the comments they left. To us, this feature itself is worth the price of admission.

Invites

Socialbrowse is still in private beta, but Socialbrowse gave us 500 invitation to hand out to you. Just follow this link, sign up, and you will get an invitation immediately.

If you want to follow me on Socialbrowse, my profile is here.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation, the group working to create computers that can be sold for $100 and given to children in developing countries, has partnered with popular French video company Daily Motion to advance the Open Source video format Ogg, an alternative to Adobe's Flash.

The OLPC computers don't support Flash, they are Open Source throughout and avoid proprietary software. Daily Motion publishes its video in Flash but will now make video available in Ogg format for OLPC users.

OLPC is a long shot, hasn't achieved its $100 price goal yet and the Foundation's fortunes go up and down with various partnerships. The computer that's been produced so far totally rocks, though, according to reports we here from people who've bought one.

We love Adobe for the incredible ecosystem of innovation the company has fostered and the impact of Flash video on the internet is undeniable. That said, we are skeptical of proprietary media formats with effective monopolies and we are excited to see this partnership moving to advance Open Source video. If the OLPC project succeeds in putting low cost computers into the hands of children all around the world, that could be a real change to the balance of power in video codecs. It would be fantastic, in fact.

Above, a video, in Flash, from YouTube. That's just how it goes.

Are you addicted to the news lately? Here in the U.S., it's election season which means that easy access to live news coverage is a must-have these days. There was a time when you could only get the news via TV, radio, or paper, but now the web offers a number of different ways to watch the news. Whether it's your favorite news web site, up-to-the-minute blog coverage, streaming video, citizen journalism, or even desktop apps like Livestation, there are a million ways to feed your news addiction when you go online. Today, you can add one more app to your news-gathering arsenal: an Adobe AIR app delivering 12 live streams from FOX News.

Even if FOX News isn't your cup of tea, the FOX News app is worth a look. Through this desktop video player, you have access to 12 simultaneous live streams from FOX News. However, it should be noted that all the streams are not necessarily live all the time. Sometimes you'll only see a handful, but what they deliver is compelling. The reason this app is interesting is because it delivers the news live and uncut - it's the raw footage, not edited and produced the way you see on TV. You're getting the live feed, and sometimes that means you're seeing the ground and people's feet as the cameraman adjusts the camera or moves to a different location. Maybe you'll catch the reporter fixing her hair. Or maybe you'll just see the footage being filmed by the helicopter, with no voiceover. Yet all this is what makes the app great - it feels like you're really there and getting the scoop.

In addition to the video feeds, there's also a live feed from FOX News Talk Radio. Another nice feature is the breaking news alerts. When the app is minimized, a small window will pop up from time to time when there's breaking news. The pop-up window will show the headline and the video. If you want to tune in, just click on it. If you ignore it, it will disappear in a moment or two. If that feature annoys you or you just need a break from distractions, you can easily turn it off from the Alert Settings in the app.

The last notable feature of the AIR app is the sharing feature. If you catch a video that you want to share with your friends, you can simply click the "Share" button to send them the video via email. Your friend receives a link to the video stream. The link delivers them to a page on the FOX News web site where they can watch the stream live.

If you want to check out this app yourself, you can download it from here. You will need to have Adobe AIR installed in order to install it.

This week we ran a poll asking which word processing tool you primarily use. We wanted to see if things had changed much since we ran the same poll one year ago.

So are ReadWriteWeb readers, many of whom are early adopters of Internet technology, using online word processing services now instead of desktop software? Er, no.

As at time of writing, over 1,500 people had voted. 48% of those still use Microsoft Word as their main word processing tool. Its open source desktop equivalent OpenOffice got 15%. However, there is good news for Web Office fans - Google Docs was in second place with 17%. This is a 6% increase from last year according to our polls.

Less Than 1/4 of You Use an Online Word Processer as Your Main Tool

Let's delve further into the results, firstly for the desktop software. Last year MS Word got 46% and this year 48%. So not much has changed for the dominant office software supplier, even with RWW's Net savvy readers. OpenOffice slipped a bit, down from 17% last year to 15% this year. Overall, 76% of readers still use a desktop software program as their main word processing tool (counting the 8% who use a text editor for this purpose). That's up slightly from 74% the same time last year.

That means that less than 25% of our readers use an online service as their primary means of doing word processing. The best of the online breed was Google Docs, with 17%, up from 11%. This is a good sign though, because Google Docs is now second behind only MS Word.

Google Docs Gains Users, But Not From Microsoft

What was a little surprising is that the Web startups competing with Google Docs all performed worse than last year. ThinkFree got 2%, Buzzword 1%, Zoho 1%, and Zimbra less than 1%. ThinkFree and Zoho both polled at 5% last year and Zimbra 2% (Buzzword wasn't in last year's poll). This indicates that Google Docs has gained users not from MS Word... but from the online startups.

Tell us your reaction to these results. What's happened to the startups? Are they doomed in this market dominated by the big guns?

Which tool do you mostly use for word processing?
( polls)