Sponsor:Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feedor by email.Web NewsAdobe Acquires Virtual Ubiquity - Enters Web Office FrayJosh Catone was at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference in Chicago this week, where several Web-related announcements were made. The biggest was Adobe's acquisition of Waltham, Mass.-based Virtual Ubiquityfor an undisclosed sum - and in doing so officially entering the Web Office fray. Virtual Ubiquity are the creators of Buzzword, an online, collaborative word processing application powered by Adobe's Flex framework. Buzzword is built on Adobe's Flex framework and runs in the browser using the Flash player. The interface is slick and seems reminiscent of recent Adobe imaging applications, such as Lightroom.See also:Adobe Unleashes Media Player to the PublicAdobe Announces Document Sharing ServiceAdobe Demos "Thermo" RIA Design Tool to Delighted CrowdLone Remaining Burmese Blogger Uses Lightweight Messaging Service to Broadcast to the WorldThe story of the monk-led protests in Myanmar, or Burma, and subsequent police crack-down was a widely reported one this week. Bloggers were particularly important as the events unfolded, posting news accounts and photos to the internet from a country that very few outside reporters have access to. At least one blogger remains active in the country, posting to a lightweight messaging service with an embeddable widget for output - click on our storyto see the widget in action.Microsoft Launches Office Live WorkspacesThis week Microsoft announced a new online office service called Office Live Workspace, plus re-named its Office Live service to Office Live Small Business. Both moves are attempts to complement Microsoft Office, its dominant desktop office suite - rather than replace functionality present in MS Office. Office Live Workspace will allow users to store, access and share 1,000+ documents in an online workspace. It will also synchronize contact, task, and event lists with Outlook. The service is free and is being marketed as an "online companion to Microsoft Office".R/WW editor Richard MacManus asked: Is this what Microsoft's answer to the Web Office is - tacked on features to its all-powerful desktop suite? Apparently so.In other Microsoft news: Microsoft Aims to Store Health Records Online -- Will Anyone Bite?Yahoo! Launches Search EnhancementsThe news search engine features that we wrote about at Yahoo! in early Augustare now live on their site. The enhancements include Yahoo!'s Search Assist, which is an improved version of their search suggestion feature, and a number of new Yahoo! Shortcuts. Shortcuts are self contained information widgets that appear at the top of results for certain searches and draw content from other Yahoo! properties.Techmeme Launches Leaderboard - Read/WriteWeb Ranked #6Provoking a storm of blogger coverage, Techmeme launched a new Leaderboardthis week. It's a list of the top 100 sources for the popular tech news aggregator - calculated over the past 30 days. The Leaderboard updates daily and each site is ranked with a "presence" indicator, defined as "the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period". Read/WriteWeb is currently ranked 6th, ahead of such news luminaries as the BBC and Wall St Journal.Web ProductsA Flood of Mashups Coming? OAuth 1.0 ReleasedWhile not a product, this announcement may have wide-reaching ramifications for web apps. This week the distributed group of developers working on the Open Authentication spec OAuthreleased what they hope will be the final draft of their 1.0 version. The OAuth spec will create a standardized way for applications to request permission for access to user info from other applications and for info-holding services to communicate clear rules and options for accessing parts of the data they hold.The spec got a burst of publicity earlier this week when the widely used feed reader Bloglines announcedthat they intend to support it in addition to OpenID and the Attention Data standard APML.Webmail.us Acquired by Rackspace - Subscription Model Does WorkWebmail.us, a business web email service, was this week acquiredby leading web hosting company Rackspace for an undisclosed sum. We last covered Webmail.us in August last year as part of an overview of the web email market. At that point Webmail.us provided email hosting services to more than 23,000 small-medium businesses. Currently, over a year later, Webmail.us provides services to more than 72,000 businesses and 600,000 users. Also recently Webmail.us made the Inc 500 list as the #217 fastest growing private company in America.Probably the best thing about Webmail.us is that it's a great example of a web 2.0 startup which earns good revenues via a subscription based business model. Netvibes Launches Corporate Startpages - Will Companies Go For It?Netvibes, the French startpage near the top of the startpage market, launched a new service this week called Netvibes Premium Universes. The service allows companies to offer Netvibes functionality (reading feeds, posting widgets) on their own website with their own branding and domain. It's essentially a Netvibes page in an iframe on your website.You can find many other startup profiles in our Startups category.AnalysisStorms in the Web 2.0 Petri DishBernard Lunn wrote: "The Web 2.0 world is looking increasingly like a giant petri dish. There are so many experiments, so much innovation and, as yet, relatively little real revenue. Within this petri dish are a few ideas that will turn into billions of dollars, at which point we will all say “why didn't I think of that”? There are also lots of “what on earth were we all thinking” ideas out there. Numerically of course, there will be much more of the latter - but in $ terms the few big winners will mean it'll all make some kind of sense in the end."Check out Bernard's advice to entrepreneurs, to weather these coming storms. They are wise words worth heeding. Also check out Bernard's other post this week: Creative Entrepreneurs: The Next Masters of the Universe.The New Rules Of Technology VCOn a similar theme to Bernard's post, Alex Iskold took a close look at the current state of the VC industry and how it effects entrepreneurs. Alex wrote: "If the way in which a company is built has to change, the way in which it is funded needs to change as well. What are the new rules for tech venture capital? Where and how should the money be allocated? In this post we take a deeper look."You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.R/WW Network Blogslast100The major digital lifestyle news this week on last100was Microsoft's announcement of second generation Zunes, the company's line of digital audio players. New flash-based models were introduced, along with a beefed up 80GB hard drive-based version. The company also announced that its online music store, Marketplace, will offer 1 million DRM-free songs for purchase, and that the company is launching a music-based social networking site called "Zune Social". In a follow up post titled Zune 2: five things Microsoft got right, last100 editor Steve O'Hear wote: "while the new Zune lineup is at best evolutionary rather than revolutionary, especially when compared to the User Interface innovations found in Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, Microsoft has made some significant improvements — and, dare I say it, done a few things from which even Apple might learn a thing or two."Also check out a great guest post by Guinevere Orvis on how social media is helping to boost TV ratings.Alt Search EnginesAltSearchEnginesthis week released the latest version of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list. One trend that ASE editor Charles Knight is beginning to see is that some of the alts are getting larger. Charles noted: "We have always said that there are 4-5 major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask) and 100 Top ASE. But we may have to revisit that. Some ASE (maybe - blinkx, GigaBlast, Exalead, picsearch, Answers.com, Eurekster, Quintura - this is a new concept) seem to be growing larger than a typical ASE, but are not “major” yet either."Read/WriteTalkThis week Sean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalk- our new podcast show - spoke with Dan Saffer, Experience Design Director at Adaptive Path. In the podcast, Dan discussed the process of designing for new types of Web-enabled devices - such as Nintendo's Wii, Apple’s iPhone and the new touch iPod..That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

  Trillian Astra, the next version of the popular Windows multi-client chat application Trillian, is being developed for the Mac. Cerulean Studios, the makers of Trillian, has released a limited and experimental Mac version to approved testers of their new Astra platform. Hopefully a working version will be made available for general release someday; Astra itself as been in invite-only Alpha stage for nearly a full year now.Testers can grab the download hereand readers interested in becoming testers can go here.Trillian on Mac is something that many people have waited for for a long time. It's an aesthetically pleasing, feature rich service with a very loyal group of users. Trillian Astra users can chat seamlessly with friends on Yahoo!, ICQ, AIM, Bonjour, Windows Live, Google Talk and MySpace IM. There's a web component of the new service, an RSS ticker and more - see a screenshot of the pared down Mac version below.The particulars of this service as opposed to others are better experienced than they are described. Other multi-client chat tools include the open source Pidgin(formerly known as GAIM) on Windows and Adiumon Mac.See a screenshot of the current Mac build below the fold.

  A new survey released this week by the marketing analysts and consultants at Anderson Analytics found that Facebookis now the #1 most liked website among US respondents between the ages of 18 and 24. In other words, it's not just tech bloggers talking about Facebook all the time.The sample set for the survey consisted of 1,000 young people suckered into answering questions and viewing ads at the "analyst" company's website, Brandport.com, and 500 Facebook users - for a total of 1500 respondents. Perhaps our headline should then read "Young Facebook Users Think Facebook is #1." The release is here, I found it via Kathleen Mazzocco. Last year's #1 spot was held by MySpace and presuming the study surveyed 1/3 of its respondents on Facebook then as well, this is a big change. I can say anecdotally that everywhere I look I see laptops (other than mine) on Facebook all the time. You can read our in-depth comparison of MySpace and Facebook here.Gender DifferencesGender differences in the survey were marked; use of social networking sites was twice as high in self-identified women as it was in men, only 33% of women said they were satisfied to use just one social networking site and MySpace was the #2 favorite for women while falling out of the top 5 for men.The survey's authors say they believe this shows that the social networking world is set to change drastically when today's youth replace contemporary adults in the workplace. Social networking is currently believed to be much more common among adult men.

  In August we wrote about Stan Oleynick, an Internet developer who was selling the rights to his name to finance a web project. At the time, his top bid was $16,000. Now, it's $25,500 (and he's actually only received one new bid since we wrote about his interesting, if a little wacky, idea). That's still well off his goal of $250,000. But Stan still has 3 days to attract bidders, and now they might have a bit more incentive to pony up the big bucks.Along with the rights to give Stan his new name, the winning bidder will also receive a 10% stake in the web company he is attempting to launch. When we last wrote about Stan, his web project was stil under wraps, though he promised it would be revolutionary. This week it was finally revealed: the winner of Stan's name will also become a shareholder in CrowdChess.As the name would suggest, CrowdChess is a crowdsourced version of chess. Teams made up of hundreds or thousands of players compete against one another by voting for the best move (from a list of choices suggested by the crowd). Each team has one hour to complete their voting and make a move. It's an intriguing idea, and would be an interesting test of crowd wisdom theory to see if a large group of average Joes playing chess as a team could beat a grandmaster or an IBM supercomputer.But there are some potential pitfalls with the idea. First, it may just be too boring to attract many users. I enjoy a good game a chess, but one that can only advance 1 turn per hour probably wouldn't hold my interest. Only the most die-hard chess fans (those who play by mail, for example) are likely to find joy in a slow-as-molasses crowdsourced game. And if the crowd consistently picks bad moves, then perhaps even the most die-hard chessheads could be turned away. (Of course, crowd wisdom theory would theorize that the crowd will pick mostly good moves.)Second, what is to stop teams from cheating? One team could theoretically organize a large contingent of people to register on the other side just to throw off the voting and cause the other team to make poor decisions. Certainly that gets less likely the more players you have, but early on at least, the system seems open to potential gaming. Finally, is the voting hidden until a move is chosen? I wasn't able to test this out as I couldn't get CrowdChess to email me my account verification, but if results are shown in real-time during the voting process (as they are on other crowdsourcing sites, such as Digg), that would likely influence the outcome and tarnish the results.Once the site reaches critical mass (if it does), and has a large number of concurrent users at all times, I would suggest launching a non-voting reliant version that instead shows everyone the same chess board and asks them to choose the next move -- the move that is chosen the most gets played. That would eliminate some of the problems above and would allow the "vote" time to be cut significantly.ConclusionSo is this the revolutionary project Stan Oleynick promised us in August? Currently, no, it's rather mundane. But if he can prove that a crowd of a chess players can take down Gary Kasparov -- well, he can probably book his appearance on the Today Show after that one...If Stan really wants to make a sticky site that keeps people coming back, he should probably also set up a general chess room where people can play regular, one-on-one games with each other. An hour is a long time to way between moves, and a side game to bone up on chess skills and pass the time would certainly make the site more useful, more social, and more fun. Chess is currently the second most played game at Yahoo! Games, so there is certainly a market for it.

  Docstoc, which demoed at the TechCrunch40last month, is offering 1000 private beta invites to Read/WriteWeb readers. Docstoc is aiming to be the YouTube or Flickr of professional documents, by allowing users to upload and share (via an embeddable flash widget) professional documents. Docstoc has been in private beta and approaching official launch, but they were kind enough to give 1000 Read/WriteWeb readers a chance to preview the service early. Just navigate to http://docstoc.com/User/register.aspxand enter "RWW" (without the quotes) as the invite code to claim your invite. These are released on a first come, first serve basis.A video introducing Docstoc to Read/WriteWeb readers (you!) is embedded below.Remember, go to http://docstoc.com/User/register.aspxand enter "RWW" (without the quotes) as the invite code to check out Docstoc. Let us know what you think of it.

  A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times removed the pay wallin front of its TimesSelect service, which controlled access to much of the paper's archives and its popular columnists like Thomas Friedman and Frank Rich. Unfortunately, much of the paper's non-wire service content still sits behind an utterly useless and annoying registration wall.The Times says the reason they ask for registration is to be "able to offer people around the world free-of-charge access to news, reviews and more." But is it really necessary? Can't they do all those things without annoying users? Do to they get anything out of it? I don't think so.I think the New York Times registration system is hurting them for a handful of reasons:It's annoying.On more than one occasion I have simply left the Times site for Google News to find a different source for the news I was trying to access because I couldn't be bothered by a registration wall. The NYT nixed TimesSelect fees in the hopes of exposing those 787,000 subscribers to advertising -- how many more page views would they get if they pulled down the registration wall and fully freed their content?It doesn't get you anything extra.The only incentive to join is that you can read the article you were trying to read in the first place. Instead of a gaining access to a service, the Times makes it feel like you're being punished.Does anyone sign up with real info?Since there is no email verification, there is really no reason for most people to use real information when signing up for the New York Times web site. I would guess that much of the information they capture is fake and thus useless to them. The site is also the most popular on BugMeNot, indicating that there are a number of people fed up enough to only use false info.So what does the Times get out of all of this? User info that might be helpful for marketing and ad sales if it wasn't polluted by bogus entries, a few sign ups to their email newsletters (which are opt-in and unchecked by default on the sign up form, so probably not that many), and a bunch of pissed off readers. Is it worth it?To be fair, the New York Times isn't the only newspaper that locks content behind a stupid registration wall. The Washington Post, the LA Times, and other major papers have the same annoying habit. There is a simple way for the New York Times to tear down their registration wall and still capture user data and encourage users to sign up for their newsletters.They can begin by removing registration requirements on all of their content and adding some reason for people to register. The most likely path is to take a page from other news sitesand add social features like comments, article rating, and blogs. Not only would the Times only require registration from users who are interested in registering, but they would be capturing information about their most engaged users. The Washington Post is actually halfway there -- they already offer a lot of added utility to users who register, but unfortunately, they still require registration simply to view much of their content.

  Multiple press outletsare reporting this morningabout the increasing use of YouTube's messaging and basic video hosting features for spam. There's nothing that many people hate more than spam, apparently feeling obligated to read every email that lands in their inbox. Why the new world of social networking and social media hasn't taken the most basic steps to stop spam and pre-empt this criticism I don't know. Perhaps like MySpace's awful but page-load intensive site design, YouTube doesn't stop spam because it serves their interests in driving traffic and selling ads.Google's video sharing site still hasn't instituted as much as a captcha requirement in order to send a message through its service, something that even MySpace did only last week. If the proliferation of spam blogs on Google's Blogspot is any indication it may be a long time before YouTube does anything about spam emails driving users back to their site.Unfortunately even if the sitemail spam was brought under control there will always be content spam on any social media platform. Witness the once proud brand of Tivo and its reported use of the insipid service PayPerPostto amass video testimonies on YouTube. I'm a believer that commercial communication can have a place in social media conversations, so long as it's fully disclosed and is at least 80% focused on adding honest value of general interest even to audiences uninterested in the particular product. I don't think that's the case with most PayPerPost ink spilled in praising B-rate bed and breakfasts and online services with no scruples or genuinely compelling value. Regardless of all that, unless increasingly high-profile social media outlets like YouTube take effective steps to stop both messaging and content spam we can expect not only more unsolicited email but also a pile of media coverage on the topic. I just thought I'd get in on the news cycle early and put it in context.Check out a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb with our Weekly Wrapup!

  [Richard]The Future of Web Apps conferencewas held again this week in London. John O'Sheaand Fergus Burns of nookedwere there (a company I am an advisor to) and John offered up some comprehensive notes for Read/WriteWeb. I read through them and decided to post 'as is', because there are plenty of nuggets there - and I'd hate to edit out any of the good stuff! So here you go, John's notes from FOWA in their unedited glory:[John]First up, its worth noting that there were two tracks/sages - developer and entrepreneur stages so I only saw half the talks (if even, I skipped a few while in the exhibit hall)Wednesday"High Performance Websites" - Steve SoudersSteve is Chief Performance Yahoo! at, well Yahoo!.  He has worked extensively on improving the page load performance of various Yahoo 'properties' including the main search engine homepage.  His talk centered primarily on the topics covered in his new bookwhich covers how following his 14 different 'rules' will improve the page load times, leading to a better user experience.  His book concentrates on optimizing the front end HTML/script/resource loading and layout.  His point is that big gains can be made by optimizing how pages are generated for and loaded/parsed by browsers.  Other, system level optimizations of backend application server/database layers are equally valid but can take weeks or months.Steve demoed YSlow, an extension to the popular Firebug web page debugging plugin that measures page load performance, grading it from A(good) to E(bad) under the 14 different rules (understanding expires headers/caching, gzip, reducing no of http request, script locations within the page, etc).  He presented some interesting measurements of page load times for some of the top 10 US websites page - suffice to say CNN, Amazon & co were rated poorly while yahoo.com came out with an A. "How to take your Apps Offline" - Dion AlmaerDion works in the Google Developer Porgrams group (as well as doing ajaxian.com), primarily on Google Gears.  Lots of architecture slides on the 3 components - Local Server, Database, WorkerPool, nothing new there.  There were two areas that he was reluctant to be drawn on: mobile support.  Questions asking which mobile devices would get Gears support met with a "expect announcements from handset vendors in the near future, not just iPhone" - apparently many are working on integrations.  Said that browsers based on opera/gecko (firefox core) are prime candidatessynchronization.  Before he hit this topic he mentioned that Google have developed "Cross Origin API" support in the new Gears Worker Pool implementation, allowing Gears Worker based JS to talk to servers *outside the origin server domain*.  This is apparently safe as the workers have no access to the page DOM or browser window.  He then had a very vague reference to synchronization in one of his last slides that also had a screencap of iSync on it and I suspect that is strongly tied to this Cross Origin API support in workers - sync with lots of sites would presumably need this feature.  Suspect Google will use this to do sync between their properties (calendar, gmail address book etc) and other sites/applications? Also worth noting Google have contributed a free text search extension to SQLite (the database used by Google Gears) back to the SQLite community."The Future Of Funding" - Dan Waterhouse, 3iMostly VC funding oriented, standard enough stuff. "The Architecture Behind Wordpress.com" - Matt Mullenweg, wordpress.comMatt presented "Matts Magic Mini Cluster" a hypothetical configuration of 7 boxes (2 load balancers, 3 web servers, 2 db hosts) that cost about $1500 per month on Layered Technologies.  Referred to it as a "mini me" version of the wordpress.com back end, minus some custom pieces they have developed/integrated themselves (e.g. CDN).  Not too much else earth shattering in this one, though he did admit that he doesn't like ads (and runs adblock in his Firefox) and explained that Wordpress.com started experimenting running ads on their site by first targeting them by User-Agent, primarily at the AOL Browser users who are far more likely to click on ads apparently.  Says he doesn't want 'core users' (bloggers) to ever see ads to show on wordpress.com pages, rather they are mostly shown when someone arrives via search engine referrer... Taking Your Application Mobile - Heidi Pollock, BluePulseHeidi seems to be a veteran of this space so her talk was keenly attended, after all mobile is one of the next big things.  Unfortunately her message was a scary one - lots of problems getting pages to render on what appears to be about 1300+ browser/handset combinations means developing XHTML Mobile content is a tough job.  She did cite some interesting experiences that the vast majority of users who use mobile internet do not have high end phones - PDAs, iPhones or even Series 60 handsets.  Instead she is amazed that most are using handsets that have an effective pixel width of 176 pixels - 30 characters.   This introduces all sorts of restrictions with even internationalization having to be considered early (to make sure navigation links will still fit!) She also made one key recommendation - never try scale an existing site onto a mobile device.   It just won't work in practice.  Instead she suggested identifying which pieces of the main site would be used on mobile and just develop pages for them. Cross Platform User Interfaces - John Resig, Mozilla CorpJohn is one of the javascript developers working at Mozilla, mainly on the Firefox javascript runtime.  He started with an overview of the future of firefox, highlighting a couple of enhancements: SVG support.  He mentioned that Joost is built on the Mozilla javascript runtime, with most of the Joost UI generated by SVG.  Lots of enhancements coming, including 3D web page canvases (though I don't know how useful that would be!)Offline Support.  He mentioned three offline development projects that are running in parallel:Mozilla are working on there own (which ties with their HTML 5 support which is tracking the HTML 5 working groups effort)Google Gears (see above)WHATWGare doing some work in this area. His hope is that they'll be able to eventually coalesce these efforts, with the browser providing the following features that things like Google Gears can reuseOffline/Online detectionFile Upload QueuingFile CachingCookies++ (Global Storage).  This is a basically a larger cookie repository within the browser, that can store multiple name/value pairs for each site (HashMap)Some 'SQLite-like stuff'.  Basically they see the value in having a local database to store offline content (rather than using filesystem).  Google Gears uses SQLite for this, he suggested that maybe eventually Google would be able to build Gears on this insteadXMLHttpRequest++Cross Domain XMLHttpRequest (in Firefox 3)JSON (De-)Serialization (object_to_JSONString() and string.parseJSON() type APIs)Desktop Integration.  This is basically a way for a user to take a web application URL and create a desktop shortcut just for that URL that will launch a completely separate Firefox runtime just for that application.  Basically the thinking here is to allow that web application to exist without the Firefox browser menu/toolbars and also to give it a OS process of its own to work in.  The underlying technology was referred to as XULRunnerJohn then moved onto JavaScript support in Firefox:Firefox 3 will have JavaScript 1.8 support, with FF4(?) aiming to have Javascript 2.0 supportThree new "Monkeys".  These monkeys are codenames for three new components that will integrate the Adobe 'Tamarin' Javascript runtime into Firefox (Adobe donated this to Mozilla a while back).  The three monkeys are for different purposes:'ActionMonkey' will integrate Tamarin into SpiderMonkey for FF 4 (Javascript 2.0)'ScreamingMonkey' will 'force' Tamarin into Internet Explorer ('kicking and screaming')! Not really Firefox related but the project will be run by Mozilla'IronMonkey' will bring Pythin and Ruby support to the Tamarin runtime.  Basically the goal seems to be to turn Tamarin into a multi-scripting-language runtime so rather than writing JS in web pages they developer could write python or ruby code...He also mentioned that Server Side Javascript is experiencing something of a resurgence with some web application developers using Helma (as an web app dev framework) and Phobos.  Also mentioned other applications (not web apps) using SpiderMonkey and Rhino (their Java based JS runtime).  Rhino will apparently soon support JS 1.7 and he mentioned the idea of bringing the page DOM into the server (whatever that means!!!) "Lessons Learned from Launching Web Apps"  - Kevin RoseKevin gave an entertaining talk on the ins and outs of launching 3 startups in 4 years.  There really wasn't anything revealing in his talk, though he did express some regret over how Digg handled the whole HD-DVD key DCMA C&D notice and their subsequent u turn because of the community reaction.  He mentioned that he'd recommend better visibility to the user community whenever handling issues like this in the future, referring the community to ChillingEffectto help the community understand why they sometimes have to take content down. Diggnation - LIVEWednesday evening saw the live shooting of an episode of Diggnation, in front of an absolutely packed hall of well over 500 geeks, most with free drink on board - apparently quite a few people came out to the ExCeL center just to watch thisand it proved to be their biggest live audience ever. Alex and Kevin got suitably drunk while presenting - in fact they may have been drunk before they even got on stage!  I'm not sure it'll all make it onto their site unedited as some of the discussion would probably prove offensive to some but it is definitely one to keep an eye out for, even if you don't watch Diggnation regularly.  The buildup and reaction from the crowd was, to put in their terms, 'awesome'.  Those guys have a cult-ish fanbase though I don't think I 'get it' but it was certainly an experience watching the crowd, some of whom were waving their arms in the air while holding their open MacBooks!      That was followed by the 'Carsonified' partyin the local bar, hosted by Ryan to promote the rebranding of Carson Systems as 'Carsonified'.  That ended up going on until the wee hours. ThursdayWeb Apps Dos and Don'ts - Leah Culver, PownceLeah just did a quick overview of getting Pownce up and running with a small team (4-5 people).  She mentioned that they were always 'self funding' and only spend in the 'tens of thousands' in completing the initial site using Python & Django.  She did make references to the emerging O-Auth standard, sounds like they will be using it. The Story Behind the Facebook Platform - Dave Morin (Platform Manager @ Facebook)Dave gave a pretty high level overview of the platform, reiterating that Facebook view themselves as a utility/technology company - very Google sounding!  Some interesting stats: 60 billion page views per month50% daily return rate for users (phenomenal)1500 page views per user per month80% of users have added at least 1 applicationSome tough questions from the audience at the end of the talk that he couldn't really give straight answers to:Can Facebook do anything to stop the big FB app vendors from cloning apps developed by others that appear to be gaining traction? Answer was they would continue to innovate.Would Facebook ever allow application vendors to ask the user for permission to get details from their profile?  The use case was for billing/shipping if the FB user has just bought something in the application. Answer was they would continue to innovate.No details on how Facebook scaled their system so quickly ('We have a lot of servers')No details on the future.  Ironically Dave actually said they don't like talking about the future (which kind of left me wondering why he was talking at the Future of Web Apps conference!)Short on Cycles, Long on Storage - Simon WardleyBrilliant presentation by Simon on "Competitive Utility Markets" and how utility computing may move in that direction as barriers to switching utilities are slowly removed (through efforts like OVF - Open VM Format).  Simon got through what looked like several hundred slides while talking (I'm not kidding!).  Best slide deck at the show, by a mile! Practical Semantic Web - Jon Aizen & Eran Shir, DapperThis was primarily a talk on how the web is evolving towards a rich semantic web through use of Feeds (with GData, GeoData extensions), REST, Ajax and Microformats.  Their focus was on Dapper, calling it a "user generated semantic web".  Interesting talk, there were some skeptics in the audience at the end that voiced concerns about how fragile Dapper might be (if the HTML pages it is pulls content from change structure) Smart Web App Integration With Third Party Sites & Services - Matt Biddulph, DopplrThe popular travel site Dopplr is built using Ruby On Rails.  Matt covered 5 areas he felt were worth talking about Matts aim is that users should be able to get their data without using the site so he placed heavy emphasis on producing a rich RSS feed for each user, with embedded GData (+ hCalendar microformat) calendar data, GeoRSS cordinates etc.User Identity.  He covered the current 'issue' of verifying identify when trying to match identities from different social sites.  He mentioned that he is using Mofoand hpricot to do screen scraping when absolutely necessary to try match the users friends from various social network sites.  He has opensourced his codeat as he figured others would go through the same pain.  He also mentioned that Dopplr will support OpenID (multiple per account in fact)Delegate Authority.  Another one of the 'current issues' is how to manage delegating authority to another site.  The big players all have their own APIs for this - Yahoo! BBAuth, Google AuthSub, Flickr Auth, AOL OpenAuth etc).  He's looking forward to O-AuthWidgets.  Matt demoed a few Doppler widgets - a facebook application that he did in a day and some web page sidebar widgets.Utility Computing. Although not using them in production yet he could see the value in using EC2 for hosting his apps, and plans to do so - I think he mentioned they had it 'in the lab'.An Insight into FireEagle - Tom Coates, Yahoo!FireEagleis a code name for a geo tagging platform that yahoo will shortly be making available via lots of free APIs.  The general idea is to provide a single place for various devices to report your geo location via APIs (cell phones s cell ids, GMS units reporting lat/long coordinates etc).  Then 3rd party applications can be built to use this data in interesting ways - route finding, social networking etc, all controlled by delegated authorization via the FireEagle web UI by the user.  Obviously here are all sorts of privacy concerns surrounding this so Tom went through how they plan to help with some of the potential issues: Allowing the user to view and expunge all data - logs etcPotentially using wasabi-type encryption within FireEagle so that even Yahoo! employees couldn't misuse the dataA "Hide Me!' controlA "Private Places" feature that allows the user to mark regions within which the FireEagle platform should not collect any geo data from their devices (even if it is reported by the users devices)Periodic checks with the user (via email) to make sure they havn't forgotten they have enabled the serviceLaunch Late to Iterate Often - Dick Costolo, FeedburnerUnfortunately Dick only had 1/2 hour for his talk which was a shame as he was delivering a great pep talk on how to plan for the first year or two of a startups existance.  Some notes that I gathered (he was going very fast!) Dealing with VCs who ask the "why won't google/MS eat your lunch?' question with a response that focusses on speed, flexibility, agility and single minded focus of small startup companyDon't hire sales/marketing/bus dev folks too soon.   They'll want something to sell/market/develop which will interrupt the critical early development iterationsDon't rush out a v1.0 in order to get 'something' out to market.  He highlighted that doing so only forces you to maintain that version (and its customer base) while trying to fix it and devlop the features that should have been in the 1.0.  Better to wait...Providing APIs allows the market to tell you what business model your company should have.  Don't procrastinate on developing pricing plans too early, go with something simple/free and change it later.  Good APIs also create barriers to entry for later competitors.Be competitive on your own merits, not on how bad the competition is.  Customers like this, projects a better image from the company.Make sure your website has a bit of personality, a voice.  Helps user relax a bit when using it.  Mentioned the silly "Here are your dripping wet feeds" type banner that appear in feedburner pages.Don't kid yourself when developing revenue plans.Don't worry about exit strategy - the market ultimately controls this, not you.VC Term Sheets - Study the lingo, don't accept 'standard' vc term sheets as they don't really exist.All in all, very sound advice.Wrap Up Panel DiscussionThe final panel was a low key affair, i suspect because many of the delegates were dripping away - it was past 6pm. See also John O'Shea's blog.

  For decades financiers of one type or another have been the “Masters of the Universe”. People who, as Bob Dylan once sang, “make the rules, for the wise men and the fools”.In the 1970’s, with stagflation and oil crises, it was the commodities traders who ruled the roost. As the 1980s kicked in, the forex traders had their day; when Tom Wolfe published Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987, the leading character was a bond trader. From 1995 to 2000, the VCs in Silicon Valley had inherited the formula for turning base metal into gold. Today the crown is shared by Private Equity (PE) and Hedge Funds. When you see the PE big shots selling shares to the public, you know the PE party is nearing its riotous end. And the Hedge Fund party is getting crowded, with too many lesser talented investors dragging average returns down - to levels similar to buying an index fund (but with massively bigger fees).So who will be the next 'Masters of the Universe'? For the first time ever, maybe it won’t be another financial asset class. All those assets classes remain and their practitioners will always be wealthy and influential; it's a great time to be in commodities again for example. However, we are at a unique moment in history when power is shifting to creative entrepreneurs.What are Creative Entrepreneurs?I was going to just say “entrepreneurs”, but it is broader than that. Creative people - whether they are developers, musicians, actors, scientists, writers or (insert creative type that I have annoyed by omitting) - are the next Masters of the Universe. Entrepreneurs who tap the rise of the creative class will do well, but the trend is a deeper one that makes creative people into entrepreneurs.This has huge disruptive and destructive implications for big companies which today act as the toll booths, through which creativity has to pass. Hedge Funds that like selling short can take note. It is of course the Internet that changes everything. Here are the “straws in the wind” that indicate a pretty profound change:* Radioheadopt to sell all their music online, by-passing the 4 major firms that dominate music sales and even by-passing the “new” toll booths called iTunes and Amazon. They are not the first and won’t be the last music artist to do this.* Software developerswho build an intuitive user interface on a SaaS model don’t need to sell to CIOs to get traction within companies.* People seeking attention(for themselves, their products and services) no longer need to hire PR firms to get journalists to look at them; as long as they have something worth saying of course.* In Hollywood, clout has shifted from the studios to actors and directors. Outside Hollywood, the path from YouTube to Sundance (and alternatives) to a growing network of independent cinemas is increasingly well trodden.* For authors, yet another publisher rejection letter is less depressing when you can self-publish using Lulu. * For entrepreneursthe VC round is no longer mandatory; with much lower start-up costs, lots of 'pay as you go' infrastructure, increasingly active angels and, yes, Hedgies willing to jump in with creative financing when you need to scale. See Fred Wilson's recent postand Alex Iskold's follow-upfor more on this trend.Conclusion: Power Shifting to Creative PeopleI don’t mean to underplay the very real barriers that still remain and the power still wielded by incumbents. This is a big transformation and one that won’t happen quickly. A big reason that power is shifting to creative people is the reduction in inter-company friction. You can outsource pretty much everything, other than creativity. More importantly, you can use multiple smaller, specialist vendors on something close to a level playing field relationship - rather than being dependent on one big company that does everything to get you to market. When you add in millions of new knowledge workers from what we used to call the emerging markets, you have a formula that keeps the prices down and terms for these services quite reasonable. Photo by Thomas Hawk

  Microsoft today unveiled their new consumer health and search site Health Vault. Built around their fairly impressive health search engine, Microsoft hopes that the site will become a central repository for people to store and selectively share their health information and records, including patient records, test results, and prescription info.I have no doubt that eventually health records will be stored online. Easier access and sharing of health information between doctors and hospitals is something that can lead to better and quicker diagnoses, less headaches when changing doctors or moving to a new town, and less chance of a serious condition being missed by a doctor. Many large companies are betting on the future of online health information portals, Google, Intel, and Cisco all have initiatives underway in this area. But there are major hurdles toward gaining public trust and acceptance, not least of which is security concerns.Personal health records are something most people guard very closely -- as closely as financial account information. I agree with Search Engine Land's Greg Sterling, who points outthat the success of HealthVault or any similar endeavor is tied very closely to the outcome of universal health care proposals in the United States. People will be far more likely to feel comfortable putting their health records online knowing that their insurance coverage won't be in jeopardy should that information leak out.Microsoft says that they have taken pains in creating a secure environment to ensure user privacy and control over who has access to health records. The company says they worked "in cooperation with leading privacy advocates, respected security experts and dozens of the world’s leading healthcare organizations" to create a platform that users can feel comfortable storing their sensitive health data on.HealthVault stores data on its own infrastructure, separate from other Microsoft properties, and users have control over who gets access to their personal information. Health searches done on the site are conducted anonymously and not linked to users' personal data. Microsoft acknowledges that users are unlikely to add much personal information to the site regardless of privacy protections promised by the company, but they hope that users will give permission for their doctors to utilize the site as a central storage repository for health information.In that vein, Microsoft announced a number of partners for the site including NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Johnson &Johnson, the Mayo Clinic, Diet.com, and Texas Instruments. The partners fall into three main categories: hospitals and doctors, web sites, and device manufacturers who will allow users to automatically upload readings from medical devices such as blood glucose monitors or heart monitors to their personal HealthVault accounts.On the search side, the new HealthVault health search vertical is rather impressive. Searches on the site combine relational refinements (i.e., search for "wheat" and the site will recommend that you search for "celiac disease" as well), article content from sources like Wikipedia and the Mayo Clinic, and web results in an attractively laid out search results page. The site also serves up sponsored results and book recommendations from Amazon.Tying into HealthVault, members of the site can save search results to a personal "health scrapbook." Article and web site results are added to the scrapbook individually, allowing users to pick and choose their favorite information and create a private, personal resource for whatever it is they're searching.ConclusionI personally would be very hesitant to store medical records online. Having once been almost burned by my health insurance company because they had access to health records, I am very protective of my medical records. I generally think that a lot of people feel that way about their personal medical information.Would you trust Microsoft, or Google, or Intel, or any other company with your personal health information? If health care was guaranteed to you regardless of your medical history would you be more apt to store health records online? What do you think of HealthVault's search? Better or worse than competing search engines in the health vertical? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

  Just a few years ago, large venture firms were incubating companies for months. During the incubation period,the founders wrote 70+ page business plans, which described the market opportunity, the execution plan, along withthe five year financial projections. The plan was a proof, a risk management tool, used to justify that the ideahas legs and will work.But this isn't true anymore. You can't afford to be in stealth mode for months. Your can no longer buildrealistic projections for five years. The only way to create a technology company in this market is to evolve it.If the way in which a company is built has to change, the way in which it is funded needs to change as well.What are the new rules for tech venture capital? Where and how should the money be allocated? In this post we take a deeper look.How Old VC WorkedIn the good old days, startup funding was a well a understood process. The founders would write the business plan.Typically it would be a lengthy document including opportunity, market analysis, competitors, description of the business,execution strategy staffing and five year financials. With this plan, they would then knock on the doors of different venturefirms - usually through connections, as sending the plan by mail or email was not likely to turn people on.If all went well, they would score a pitch and get to present to a few partners. Large firms would take their timeto make sure the plan was solid. They would bring in consultants, typically founders of already funded startups, tolook at the idea - to poke at it from different angles. Then, if all added up, they would invest - typically 5M+ in Series A- and get the ball rolling. After the technology was built and looked promising, they'd line up for series B with 10M+ and bring in more VCs.The typical series B was aimed at shifting focus from engineering to business, so a new CEO would often come on board at that point - as well asan army of sales staff. All of this would take years and cost massive amounts of money.Why New Is DifferentAmong the factors that caused a major paradigm shift in technology investment, two stand out: 1) a drastic dropin initial startup costs, and 2) the increasing willingness of the public to pull technology into the market (i.e. try it, adopt it, champion it). In the old days, $1M was needed toeven get a technology off the ground - but these days, it can be done with $100K. Because the hardware is cheap, theweb infrastructure (like Amazon Web Services) is in place and software libraries are abundant, creating new software is dramatically simpler.It is all about the idea, whereas before it was all about the infrastructure.Image via Cogdog blogThe social web made people more receptive to new technologies; it taught us how to love new tools and services,and made a major step towards curing the public's technophobia. People realized that software does not need to suck, that it can befun and more importantly useful. 'Build it and they will come' turned from a joke into a reality.If the bottom-line costs of getting a tech startup off the ground are a fraction of what they used to be,then the old approach to funding no longer makes sense. In the old days, top-tier VC firms would do 5M+ series A in exchangefor 40%+ of the equity. Today, a typical series A is just 1-2M for 15-25% of equity. As it is cheaper to build the company,large VC firms find it harder to get into series A. The market has created an opportunity for smaller size funds.Big Firms vs. Small FirmsLarge VC funds have hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars under management. Because they engage individually with eachinvestment (like any VC firm), their most valuable asset is time.For these funds, having a lot of small investments isjust not possible, they are not setup that way. Instead, they are designed to methodically research and identify thebest opportunities and then deploy large amounts of money in each of them.Because of the way this equation plays out,they also need to make sure that they own a substantial stake in each company, typically at least 20%.Smaller funds do not have this problem. They are agile and flexible and look to invest much smaller amounts.And they do not necessarily need to own 20% of the company. Fred Wilson, the managing partner of Union Square Ventures, explains in his blogthat the "need"to own 20% of a company is no longer true.What is going to happen next?Lots of people have already acknowledged and recognized the coming change. Here are some examples:Y Combinatoris creating tech companies with a tiny (10-20K) seed investment;Charles River Ventures starteda Quick start program;Jeff Clavier launcheda 12M fund for tech startups.Maybe not all that we are seeing is real and going to stick, but certainly reactions are rolling in. To be ableto get into the game early, large firms need to re-think their play. Doing smaller rounds for less equity is certainlyan option, but the question is - can this scale? Since a VC partner's time is finite, the answer seems to be 'no'.There is an interesting dynamic brewing in the technology VC space. Since the last bust, IPOs have been scarce.Only recently have some companies gone public, but at large this is still far from a good opportunity. The big exits havebeen far and a few between. YouTube and MySpace are the exceptions, not the rule. Now, putting it all together, leads us to concludethat large venture money is going to migrate away from technology. Specifically, this is what is likely to happen:We will see more smaller size funds and they will be successfulLarge firms are going to focus on series B deals and will have to pay premium for the same equityBig firms will focus less on tech, shifting to alternative energy, healthcare, etc.ConclusionThe markets are endlessly fascinating. If a few years back someone would've claimed thatbig VC firms would face a tough tech market, people would've simply laughed. Yet, here we are and it is true.This change has led to a new category of smaller tech funds, as well as some shifts of big money fromtech into other sectors.But just because big money cannot be deployed, does not mean that big money can't be made.A company can become big and successful with much smaller investments. del.icio.us, Flickr and StumbleUpon area few such examples. But even though the return multiple is the same, the scale is going to be different.10x return on 1M cannot be compared with 10x return on 10M; and this does fundamentally change the business.At the end of the day, the winner of all this turmoil is going to be the consumer. Because there will be moresmaller funds making many small bets, the result is going to be fierce competition and superb products.So here is to change, endless innovation and technology improvements!Disclosure: Union Square Ventures is an investor in Alex Iskold's company AdaptiveBlue.

  digg_url = 'hhttp://digg.com/tech_news/A_Flood_of_Mashups_Coming_OAuth_1_0_Released';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';The distributed group of developers working on the Open Authentication spec OAuthhave released what they hope will be the final draft of their 1.0 version. The OAuth spec will create a standardized way for applications to request permission for access to user info from other applications and for info-holding services to communicate clear rules and options for accessing parts of the data they hold.The spec got a burst of publicity earlier this week when the widely used feed reader Bloglines announcedthat they intend to support it in addition to OpenID and the Attention Data standard APML.In this post I offer a high-level overview of what OAuth does, in as much as I understand it, followed by some thoughts on the concepts from some helpful industry experts.Why a Standard?Standards are the railroad tracks to a potential explosion of innovation and OAuth aims to make mashups far easier to develop than ever before. The group of developers took what they believed to be the best qualities from a long list of other authentication protocols and created an open standard they believe will make mashups safer to use and simpler to develop.What Will This Look Like?Here's one example of what OAuth might look like. There are lots of services like Twitbinor Twitterifficthat let you use your Twitteraccount in a much more powerful way outside of the Twitter web page. Those applications ask for your Twitter username and login, though; OAuth will let these apps interact without users exposing their full login info. In that, OAuth is like OpenID, but this protocol will let services that hold your data offer a set of rules and options for allowing other applications to access selected parts of it. You could login to Twitter through Twitterific but only give Twitterific access to read and write messages - not to change your user profile page, your password or do anything else that they could in theory do today with full access to your account.Is This Really Going to Happen? Let's Ask Some ExpertsMaking open standards real doesn't sound like a lot of fun, but the OAuth group seems to have a good start. The spec is being worked on by people from Google, Amazon, Yahoo/Flickr, Six Apart and all the three leading microblogging services. Implementation is expected soon by Netflix, Threadless, Bloglines, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Ma.gnolia and others. Agreeing on the final draft of the 1.0 spec is likely the last thing companies are waiting on and that's something that's happening a lot faster with OAuth than with OpenID 2.0, for example. Scott Kveton, Chairman of the Board of the OpenID Foundation, told me he thinks OAuth is another exciting move towards data portability and user control. He said that the small group involved in the spec is a real benefit when it comes to speed of development but that they will still have to struggle with IP like copyright before implementation really takes off with large players.Oren Michels, of the recently fundedAPI management service Mashery, says that OAuth could save his team a lot of valuable time currently spent working with the particulars of each non-standard API. He also told me, though, that many of his customers already have their own APIs built and would not likely go back and make them standards compliant. Ultimately, he said, good APIs are more important than standards compliant ones. In the future, companies that learn about OAuth early in the development of their APIs could implement it if there's sufficient market adoption.Finally, I talked to John Musser of API super-site Programmable Web. Musser said that he's long argued that security is the number one barrier to further mashup proliferation and OAuth appears to address that well. "Higher value, 'personal mashups' require access to more interesting data than you can get without some secured access," he said, "but of course it's also an area lacking in standards, certainly from the perspective of the current generation of web 2.0 APIs." Musser also agreed with Michels that good APIs are more important than standards; he said that mashups are perfectly buildable today with the current circumstances but that a standard like OAuth could make a big difference by easing the complexity for developers.Only time will tell whether OAuth has legs - but given the parties participating and the potential power of the standard, it may not take too much time to get a good look into the future.

  Tjoonis an interesting webcam app aimed at, I suppose, musicians. It let's users create a 30 second split-screen video with up to 4 participants. Tjoon can be used to jam with friends or create a 4 part harmony with yourself -- or maybe just to recreate the opening credits to the Brady Bunch (sorta).Unfortunately, there are a few limitations to Tjoon that effect its usefulness. First and foremost, there isn't any real-time collaboration going on with the application. Jam sessions must be done asynchronously by each participant recording their piece separately and passing the Tjoon along to the next guy. Second, 30 seconds really isn't enough time for a band to get their ideas on paper, er, video. Last, they only offer 4-way split screens -- a number of videos on the site just have empty third or fourth spots, which looks silly.Tjoon was created as a spare time project from a group of employees of Suite 75and was built with Ruby on Rails and Flash. The site supports some limited social features (commenting on videos, basic user profiles, and embedding of clips).There is certainly potential for this project, but they need to address their major limitations for it to really be useful for bands. I have some friends in a band that currently operates out of New York City, but for awhile they were separated by thousands of miles while band members pursued degrees at different schools. They worked on their music by sending recorded media back and forth, but a real-time web jamming application would definitely have come in handy for them. My advice to Tjoon would be to go in that direction -- that's something I think a lot of musicians would pay for and lends itself to a great social network (for musicians to hook up and find jam partners).A clip of a band jamming out -- albeit for just 30 seconds -- is embedded below.

  HP announced a slew of new licensing partnerships this morning as part of their on-demand wholesale DVD service called HP Video Merchant Services. The service allows business customers to order on-demand production and packaging or digital downloads of niche video content that would be unfeasible for retailers to sell otherwise. Online storefronts for digital downloads appear to be included in the list of retailers supported by the service. It sounds like a pretty cool idea to me.Today's announcement, first covered in the San Jose Business Journal(press release here), was that HP has made deals with 30 video content production companies for more than 4,000 titles. Classic TV, religion, independent film and geographically targeted content were among the examples of provided of available content.ContextAs points of consumption for video content proliferate and the cost of production falls, the market for video content is sure to expand substantially. Lingering brand fears around user generated content have kept demand high in distribution channels for professionally produced content. Facilitating a supply chain and market for small producers is a smart move by HP reminiscent of other large companies' offerings in the independent film and music markets. Related startups include digital content brokers Mochila, iAmplifyand video licensing platform ImageSpan, among many others.