In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we report on a new “superphone” launched by Google, take a look at how the Web is transforming personal finance, give you 5 reasons why RSS Readers still rock, get a first look at the new startup of ex-Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, analyze the trends that emerged from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (our daily resource for entrepreneurs). Also read on for details of the newly released printed edition of our current premium report , about the Real-Time Web. Sponsor Now Available: Printed Edition of The Real-Time Web Report At the request of the librarian community and people that just like paper , we have made The Real-Time Web and its Future report available in print . For those of you that prefer it digitally, you can still download it . Don’t forget about our Community Management Report . It too is coming in print soon, so watch out for it! Web Trends How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Today, free online tools like Mint , moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track financial information. So you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before. Editor’s note : This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . 5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock Recently we wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. We noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments. What we learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters Recently, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How did we know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told us. Nozzl Media unveiled this week a demonstration of its first product, a widget intended for newspaper websites seeking to display real-time local information derived from Twitter messages, blog posts and automatically extracted public records. Web Apps Meet Consumer Electronics at CES The 2010 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show ( CES ) saw a big trend emerge: web applications being ported to consumer electronics , from the technology inside cars to Web-enabled TVs. Earlier this week we noted that online music service Pandora will be made available in cars , courtesy of a new Pioneer device that will begin selling in March. Other evidence of this trend can be found in Ford’s announcement of a new in-car system and Samsung’s latest Internet-connected TV . SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise , devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations. The Pros and Cons of the Google Nexus One As An Enterprise Phone The Nexus One is another smart phone that we will inevitably see inside the walls of the enterprise. Smart phones seem to have a way of being used for all kinds of work activities. So, what are the pros and cons of using the Nexus One in the enterprise? ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. 5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed. Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Los Angeles Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn’t the first place you’d think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like Demand Media and Docstoc call Southern California home, it’s not surprising that the community is emerging as one of the country’s hottest startup hubs. SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL Web Products Live Blog: Google’s Android Press Gathering Google held a press event this week to showcase the new Nexus One , which it described as “Where Web Meets Phone.” Google calls this a new category of phones – the “super phones.” The Nexus One apparently “pushes the limits of what is possible on a mobile phone today.” Google will sell the phone in its own web store. Check out our live blog coverage for more details. Droid’s December Boom: Metrics Show Device Use Doubled in One Month The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December’s stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption. In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests. Facebook’s 1st CTO Launches His Next Company Adam D’Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company’s first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora . Built by D’Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself “A continually improving collection of questions and answers.” Skype: Coming to a Couch Near You Starting this spring, you won’t need to gather the whole family around a 15-inch laptop screen to talk with cousin Joe on the other side of the country. As a matter of fact, you won’t even need to get up off the sofa after the evening news, because Skype is coming to the big screen – the big TV screen, that is. Skype announced this week that they have been working with LG and Panasonic to embed Skype in Internet-connected widescreen HDTVs. SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss

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Weekly Wrapup: Google Nexus One, CES Coverage, Online Finance, And More…

The smart phone is not a phone. It’s a computer. It’s like your desktop or laptop. It stores data. It connects to the Internet. It runs applications. It’s a computer, not a phone. The real challenge for the enterprise is to shift its thinking about how it will move beyond the carriers and one day become an entirely data-centric organization – an organization that gives information workers the ability to work entirely on an IP infrastructure, be it for Web-based productivity applications or on a VoiP network. Forrester Research issued a report today that calls 2010 the year of the smart phone. That seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? To its credit, Forrester does use the report as an opportunity to explore how the enterprise can make the smart phone a part of the daily work life for as many employees as possible. Sponsor There are many reasons for the enterprise to adopt a smart phone culture: There is no excuse anymore. Workers have to be connected. The big weave on the social Web is getting richer. Billions of threads are being added by the day. How can we even tolerate not being connected? Collaboration depends on being connected. You can’t be fully connected without a decent smart phone strategy. People are not working at the office as much anymore. They need a smart phone to keep up with their work. As illustrated by Forrester, the trend is already in play: It does not have to be that expensive to adopt a smart phone culture. People want to use their smart phones for both their personal lives and work, too. They will pay for their data plans. Forrester agrees. From the executive summary by Ted Schadler: “Employees, aka consumers, are mad about smartphones, attracted by the ability to email, collaborate, and work with documents from anywhere. Fourteen percent of information workers across the US, Canada, and UK already use smartphones to do work today, and another 64% would like to. That demand, coupled with the willingness of some employees to share the cost of a monthly mobile plan, sets the stage for a surge in the use of personal smartphones for information work. Information and knowledge management professionals should immediately call for a formal bring-your-own (BYO) smartphone strategy, establish a sliding scale for when to reimburse employees, and pressure mobile carriers to cut costs across corporate-liable and personally liable plans.” Forrester’s BYO recommendation makes sense. But he does not explore how smart phones can be treated as computers. This discussion can create a new level of discourse in the enterprise between IT and business users. Forrester points out that IT recognizes the importance of smart phones. Many companies are already developing policies for how the devices should be treated. Collaboration tool are not being heavily used but this could change if smart phones were treated as tools as much as communication devices. MobileIron follows this approach, offering services that give IT managers the ability to be more like change agents than police forces. In MobileIron’s view , information can be tracked with a data-centric approach. Applications can be monitored. Users and administrators can view a social graph that shows usage. That’s a smart approach. It stimulates thinking and moves people to start exploring how a fully data-centric approach can be adopted over time as VoiP matures in the enterprise. Discuss

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"Smart Phone" is a Misnomer: It’s a Computer, not a Phone

The Nexus One is another smart phone that we will inevitably see inside the walls of the enterprise. Smart phones seem to have a way of being used for all kinds of work activities. So, what are the pros and cons of using the Nexus One in the enterprise? First off, anyone using the Nexus One in the enterprise will be using a rogue device. That’s just the way it is. Perhaps that may change when the enterprise wakes up and realizes that people born after 1982 want to use any device to connect in any way they want. But that’s the future, unfortunately. In the meantime, let’s look at reality. Sponsor Compliance The Nexus One was not built as a device that meets compliance requirements. As with almost any device, compliance is a reality in the enterprise world. We doubt, though, this will stop most users. You Can Make it Compliant Dan Dearing of Trust Digital has a few points of advice for the IT manager with the foresight to deal proactively with the inevitability that the Nexus One will become his or her problem to solve: Make sure that the device can be locked and swiped of its data if a user loses their Nexus One. Make sure Exchange ActiveSync is installed on the device so permissions for accessing data can be set up according to the policy set by the enterprise. Provide the ability to configure the device to remotely provision application clients and device interfaces used to reach the application source (e.g. Wi-Fi, VPN). Allow for PKI support that allows Android devices to receive and ingest digital certificates. The use of certificates helps automate connectivity to enterprise applications via Wi-Fi, VPN and web by making authentication transparent to users. It’s Not an iPhone The iPhone has tight security features baked into it, and hardware encryption, too. Applications are tightly controlled with a centralized point for distributing applications. This may prove to be a temporary advantage for the iPhone over the Nexus One. According to Dearing: “The Nexus One is less secure than the iPhone 3GS. Nexus One is currently running on Android 2.1, the latest update, so is equivalent to iPhone 1.0. The iPhone 3GS provide the most comprehensive security controls with the addition of hardware-based encryption.” “The iPhone is much more mature in this area than the Nexus One. iPhone configuration profiles provides business IT with a way to configure the iPhone over the air and according to corporate policies. In addition, the iPhone 3GS provides device encryption to help meet corporate compliance requirements, ensuring the protection of sensitive corporate information.” Hooray – It’s Not an iPhone The Nexus One is a cloud-connected device, making it a true web-based, data-driven device. This to us is a huge advantage. Apple is playing catch up in developing a cloud infrastructure. Google may lose a bit on security but the ability to use the computing power of the cloud may be what shoots Google way ahead of Apple. Tim O’Reilly goes as far to say that at some point, Apple may never catch up. A Strong Start The Nexus One represents a very strong start for Google. It’s not designed as an enterprise phone but generally smart phones are meant to be used universally. We expect that as more smart phones enter the market, an ecosystem of middleware providers will emerge. These services will provide filters, treating the device as a computer, much like desktops and laptops. Discuss

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The Pros and Cons of the Google Nexus One As An Enterprise Phone

Hype Machine , the smart, long-running MP3 blog aggregator, has posted its annual collection of the most-blogged-about albums, songs and musical artists of the year . Once again, the project is a pleasure to consume and will unfold throughout the month of January. Top albums 50 through 41 , Mumford and Sons through Monsters of Folk, are available now in full for streaming. The album collection combines weighted rankings – based on submitted top 10 lists from 550 MP3 blogs – with a widget from Grooveshark to listen to the album, and a Creative Commons photo of each band. It’s quite nice. The newest addition to the project is unusually low-tech; it’s artist renditions of the top 50 musical artists of the year . Sponsor Last year’s Zeitgeist combined different technology to present the top albums and is still available as a list . It’s not as easy to listen to, though, perhaps because it was powered by Imeem, which MySpace bought and made a tragic mess of last month . This year’s Hype Machine Zeitgeist is another example of the awesome potential of free online music combined with smart technology and excellent design. Check it out and be inspired. Is this era the end of the music industry? It sure doesn’t need to be. Discuss

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The 50 Most-Blogged Albums of 2009, Streaming Free: HypeMachine Zeitgeist Out Now

Hype Machine , the smart, long-running MP3 blog aggregator, has posted its annual collection of the most-blogged-about albums, songs and musical artists of the year . Once again, the project is a pleasure to consume and will unfold throughout the month of January. Top albums 50 through 41 , Mumford and Sons through Monsters of Folk, are available now in full for streaming. The album collection combines weighted rankings – based on submitted top 10 lists from 550 MP3 blogs – with a widget from Grooveshark to listen to the album, and a Creative Commons photo of each band. It’s quite nice. The newest addition to the project is unusually low-tech; it’s artist renditions of the top 50 musical artists of the year . Sponsor Last year’s Zeitgeist combined different technology to present the top albums and is still available as a list . It’s not as easy to listen to, though, perhaps because it was powered by Imeem, which MySpace bought and made a tragic mess of last month . This year’s Hype Machine Zeitgeist is another example of the awesome potential of free online music combined with smart technology and excellent design. Check it out and be inspired. Is this era the end of the music industry? It sure doesn’t need to be. Discuss

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The 50 Most-Blogged Albums of 2009, Streaming Free: HypeMachine Zeitgeist Out Now

OpenID, the open standard for federated user identity across multiple websites, is led by the OpenID Foundation . That organization announced the election of its newest Board members today. These are the people who will be moving and shaking OpenID on a policy and standards level. While systems like Facebook Connect and Twitter Auth are making fast progress in offering website users easy access to their primary identity, social and activity data when visiting sites all around the web – OpenID technology is making progress as well. Here are the three new leaders elected to help advance that agenda. Sponsor The OpenID Foundation has both Community and Corporate members. There is always one more community member than there is corporate members. You can see the as yet un-updated list of all the members here . Below are the three newly elected members. Marc Frons , CTO for New York Times digital operations At LinkedIn (Past gigs include Dow Jones, AOL and SmartMoney.com) On Twitter (Joined April, 2009) On Times People , the NYT link sharing network Daniel Jacobson , Director of Application Development at NPR On LinkedIn . On Twitter . Joined July, 2008, communicates with @nprtechteam , @magicmerl , @acarvin and @khopper . John Bradley , engineer On LiveJournal . Works on OpenID for government . Discuss

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Meet the New OpenID Foundation Board Members

In just a few days at the SIGGRAPH Asia Conference , MIT’s Media Lab will present a revolutionary interface that allows users to manipulate on-screen images with the wave of their hand. While we’ve seen gestural interfaces through the accelerometers in our smart phones and gaming-related devices, this system is different. MIT’s bi-directional display interface (BiDi) screen is capable of capturing both touch and off-screen gestures through the use of embedded optical sensors. Sponsor According to the project team, “The BiDi Screen uses a sensor layer, separated a small distance from a normal LCD display. A mask image is then displayed on the LCD. When the bare sensor layer views the world through the mask, information about the distance to objects in front of the screen can be captured and decoded by a computer.” In the past ReadWriteWeb has covered Pattie Maes presentation of what she describes as “sixth sense” – a wearable interface where users interact with a camera, mirror and colored finger caps. We’ve also looked at other gesture-based interfaces like Microsoft’s Project Natal which encompass sensor-based cameras and voice recognition. Nevertheless, BiDi screen takes a different approach to spatial tracking. The system can be incorporated into a “thin LCD device” like a cellphone and it does not require the use of cameras, lenses, projectors or special gloves. For a complete list of BiDi project specifications or for a look at some of MIT’s video demos, check out the project website . Discuss

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Future Interfaces: Gestures, Light and the BiDi Screen