Over the last week we ran a series of posts outlining the five biggest Internet trends of this year: Structured Data , Real-Time Web , Personalization , Mobile Web / Augmented Reality , Internet of Things . Effectively this was ReadWriteWeb's State of the Web 2009 . We've now compiled the main points into a single presentation, available on Slideshare and embedded below. You can view the presentation in full screen by clicking the "full" button at the bottom of the presentation. You can also download the presentation as a Powerpoint file. All of the links in the presentation are clickable, should you wish to explore a certain topic more. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Discuss
Read the original post:
ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009
SnapLogic is one of those kinds of companies we run across that you can say, "yes, these guys get it." The company provides data integration services that snaps information from the enterprise, social networks and the web. MindTouch is a company we have covered a lot about lately. MindTouch provides a presentation layer that for instance, shows information from multiple data sources in a dashboard environment. Now the two companies are teaming up to provide Business Application Integrations (BAI) . Systems that the companies say make for affordable enterprise integration services that are cheaper by an order of magnitude compared to more traditional offerings. Sponsor BAI integrates the database functionality of SnapLogic and combines it with the presentation capabilities of MindTouch. The service is priced at $4,995. Historically, custom built systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement. It's an Enterprise 2.0 play. The service can be up and running in almost no time at all. Custom, heavyweight systems often take months to implement. The companies maintain BAI cuts down on operation costs such as maintenance and the need to have multiple developers constantly managing on premise systems. Almost more so, data is overwhelming companies right now. Analytics are of critical need. Will BAI be adopted? Larger questions will be about the value the service provides and how customers view it. On the one hand it is affordable and simple to implement. But those factors may be a hindrance, too, as companies are not quite accustomed to the lightweight systems that SnapLogic and MindTouch embrace. Discuss
Continue reading here:
MindTouch and SnapLogic: Another Affordable Way to Fit Information Together
While startup companies are often asked about their monetization and member strategies, it's rare that they're asked how they plan on changing the world. At today's Supernova Conference in San Francisco, speakers attacked the subject of social chance and how it applies to business models, technological expertise and mass distribution. Sponsor First up, director of Havas Media Lab Umair Haque, gave his presentation, "Constructive Capitalism." Haque believes that only 5% of those within a given industry measure themselves in what he describes as "thick value". He explains that one of the legacies of our economic downturn is the realization that our understanding of profit is based on "thin value" - a model that has not addressed economic harm from profit and growth. Haque's answer to changing the current economic system is to change the way we think about profit. By employing radically different strategies and value sets, companies change the level of competition and instill "thick value" in entire industries. Pioneering blogger and entrepreneur Anil Dash drills down to one such strategy. His latest endeavor Expert Labs is a project that crowdsources expertise from the tech entrepreneur community to answer the questions of policy makers. Dash explains, "If we think outside of our insular communities and use a language that is respectful for all, we can create really transformative things." Dash hopes that by finding new ways to filter expertise we can broaden the depth of information reaching those who make world changing decisions. After giving a number of examples on how tools of production and distribution have been democratized through innovative technologies, Wired editor-in-chief and author Chris Anderson exclaimed, "If the past decade was about finding new post-institutional social models on the web, the next decade will be about applying them to the real world." It's that time when we look back at the past year and reflect on our achievements and failures. As a startup entrepreneur, investor or technologist, how have you taken new business strategies and ideas of social change and applied them to your everyday work? Let us know in the comments below. Discuss
More:
How Startup Companies Can Change the World
Recently I was the keynote speaker at the Unlimited Potential W2W (Wellington to the World) event in Wellington, New Zealand. The topic of my presentation was running a virtual company . In the presentation, written by our Marketing Manager Elyssa Pallai , I spoke about the unique nature of ReadWriteWeb's virtual business model and culture. Watch the video of my entire presentation below, for details of how our company is run and the Internet tools we use. Sponsor As I explain in the video, ReadWriteWeb is a totally virtual organization. We have no head office, or any office for that matter. Our team work from home or on the road, around the globe, in multiple time-zones, 24/7. Being totally virtual is about a cultural change - a mind shift. Presentation, video-taped by Spring TV and available on Viddler : Slides, via Slideshare : Discuss
Read more from the original source:
Totally Virtual: How ReadWriteWeb Operates
As we approach 2010, a number of new efforts are underway to make documents more social. One consultant told us how recently a client tried to turn Sharepoint into a Twitter client. That's a monster! But we have to give SAP credit for developing a more innovative way to add social elements to PowerPoint presentations. Sponsor Last month, SAP launched a free PowerPoint Twitter tool. Yesterday they made a number of upgrades to the service, including: Auto-tweeting An additional feedback slide An option for secure internal use The ability to pre-format slide with Twitter values. For instance, create templates for conferences. Aspects of the service may be a bit complex for many presenters. But if you keep to the basics, it can be a smart tool for engaging audiences. The download for the PowerPoint Twitter tool is free. Auto-Tweet Let's say you are presenting a PowerPoint deck and you want to tweet what you are saying about the slides. With auto-tweet, you can tweet your slide notes from the PowerPoint presentation. Timo Elliott writes on the SAP Web 2.0 blog: "You can use the twitter feed to reinforce the points you are making in your presentation, or ask the audience questions related to your content, and include a feedback slide later in the presentation to review the audience replies." Feedback Slides The new feedback slide shows twice as many tweets as the original version. According to Elliott, the feature supports pagination and custom feeds. For example, it can use a service like http://TidyTweet.com for a moderated feed, or any other atom-based feed Features for the More Advanced User The remaining new features are for more advanced users. For instance, to secure feeds internally, Elliott recommends adding a server and installing the open-source microblogging platform from Status.Net . That usually requires assistance from a company's IT department. The Basic Stuff Is Pretty Cool The more basic features make the SAP service worth checking out. For example, the service provides the ability for people to tweet their votes: Overall, the SAP service does work. it adds an interactive element to presentations. "Death by PowerPoint?" Maybe not so much with Twitter part of the equation. Discuss
Read more:
SAP Joins PowerPoint and Twitter - Does This Work?
Microsoft just announced that it started work on Internet Explorer 9 three weeks ago. Steven Sinofsky , the president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division, showed an early build of IE9 during his PDC keynote today. In this presentation, Sinofsky announced that Microsoft will focus on support for new standards like HTML5 and CSS3, as well as developing a faster JavaScript rendering engine. Sinofsky candidly acknowledged that IE8 did not do well on the Acid3 test , though this early build of IE9 only scored a few points higher than IE8 (24 vs. 32). Sponsor According to Sinofsky, there is still a lot of internal discussion about how much of HTML5 to support in IE9. HTML5 is still in its draft stage . Sinofsky did not say when the company plans to release IE9. JavaScript Performance Today's presentation of IE9 was refreshing, as Sinofsky noted that IE8's JavaScript performance was clearly slower that that of its competitors. The current build of IE9, however, has already closed this gap significantly and the difference in performance compared to the latest builds of Chrome and Firefox were only minor. As Microsoft notes, given how fast modern JavaScript engines have become over the last year, improvements in the JavaScript engine don't influence real-world performance at this point and other browser sub-systems become the bottlenecks that impede improvements. Hardware Acceleration and Font Smoothing Microsoft also plans to make use of DirectX-based hardware accelerated graphics and text in IE9. In his demo, Sinofsky showed that Bing maps can render about 14 frames per second in IE8. With hardware acceleration in IE9 turned on, he got 60 frames per second. In addition, this technology will also increase font quality and readability in IE9. Videos Microsoft already published a number of videos with the engineers working on IE9 on Channel 9 (sorry, these are Silverlight only). Discuss
See the original post:
Microsoft Announces IE9: Focus on Standards and Speed
