It’s tough to find a great geek present during Black Friday sales. Thousands wait in line at department stores and electronic shops in the hopes of scoring a bargain on laptops, netbooks and mobile accessories. For the shy netizen, the idea of facing these crowds can be daunting. Rather than scouring the malls for holiday presents, consider returning to your web-based roots. Below is ReadWriteWeb’s list of 10 gadget, gear and geek gift sites.

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1. ThinkGeek: From T-shirts fitted with wi-fi signal displays to portable solar chargers, this site offers gadgets, clothing and a selection of strange oddities including these plush sushi-shaped pillows.

2. Steam: If you’re looking for a good gift for gamers, you may want to check out Steam. For the next 5 days the company is rolling out 25-80% off deals on titles like Batman:Arkham Asylum and Far Cry 2: Fortune’s Edition.

3. Amazon Electronics: In just a few hours Amazon’s Black Friday features will begin churning out deals on web cams, video recorders and Apple desktop computers.

4. Woot: While there’s no mention of a Black Friday deal, Woot maintains its ability to provide salivating geeks with a deal per day on electronics. Users can follow the Woot Twitter account for the latest deals as they appear.

5. Best Buy: There are already people waiting in line for the Best Buy door buster sale. Nevertheless, if you want an easy geek gift without the hassle of line ups, consider checking the Best Buy Outlet Center for deals on electronics or track the sales on items like the coveted Magic Mouse.

6. MakerSHED: If you’ve got a DIY geek you need to buy for, then MakerSHED is a great place to find arduinos and build-your-own robot kits. The site offers a number of cool weekend projects for the entire family.

7.MacMall: MacMall is currently offering a $300 dollar discount on the MacBook Air as well as more than 400 other deals on Mac-related products.

8. B&H Photo Video: This site offers a good selection of e-readers, Apple products and of course, cameras. Some unique products include this car mount camera and a selection of camcorders for divers.

9. Hammacher Schlemmer: While the non-electronic gifts in this site are a little lame, the company carries a number of cool items including this light progression alarm clock and this iPod controlled pico projector.

10.CheapTweet: While not a shopping site per se, this service aggregates deal-related links from Twitter and offers them up in one long stream.

Photo Credit: Zac Bowling

Discuss

Creathor Venture is a 25-year-old venture capital firm based in Germany and Switzerland. That makes it unusual. In 1984, when it started, not a lot of VC funds were in Europe. So, we decided to speak with Cédric Köhler in Creathor’s Zurich office. As innovation accelerates and globalizes, we wanted to find out how a smaller regional fund like Creathor can compete with much larger Valley-based firms that have a global footprint. And of course, we wanted to find out what’s hot on the European tech scene. Read on to find out.

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Aka Aki: European Play in the Web’s Golden Triangle

First, what’s hot? In short: mobile + social + real time. That sounds like it was created by a random buzzword generator. But the combination can be very powerful. This is what Fred Wilson calls the Web’s golden triangle.

When Fred talks about this, Foursquare is probably at the front of his mind. He is an investor, and Foursquare is as hot as it gets.

This area is hot for a reason. Mobile devices reach more people and occupy more of their time than desktops or laptops could ever do. But to reach people effectively on mobile, you need mobile-native services, built for the limitations and advantages of the small screen. (Standard HTML apps retro-fitted to mobile are like the talking heads in early television.)

Mobile is inherently social: you use it to communicate with people. It has to be real time (or “just in time” if we want to be accurate), because the small screen demands a filter that shows only what is relevant right now. (Yes, that does pre-suppose great filtering capabilities.)

When Cédric talks about mobile + social + real time, he is thinking about Aka Aki, in which Creathor has invested.

The way Cedric puts it, Aka Aki “adds the dimension of time” to location-based services. This addresses the question, “Which of my friends is within shouting distance right now.”

FourSquare is from New York, and Aka Aki is from Berlin. With location-based services, location matters. Specifically, density matters. People will use the service if it connects them to people they know locally. If I am in Rhinebeck, New York, discovering that I have friends in Manhattan, Zurich and San Francisco who are online right now does not help me. I am only interested in the friends in Rhinebeck.

This is an argument for a territory-based expansion model. You become dominant in one area, and then expand to neighboring areas. This is the way business worked for centuries before the Internet. Then the Internet heralded the death of distance. You could create a site and get readers from all over the world.

With mobile location-based services that connect you to people in the real world, the old territory-based expansion is returning – with a twist, of course.

German, Then French, Then English?

Aka Aki started in Berlin. As this blog from March 2007 shows, it was early to the game of mobile + social + real time. It got its first round of funding from Creathor in December 2007.

Then, in October of this year, it got a second round from INNOVACOM, the leading French VC (with Creathor joining in that round as well).

That is a natural expansion model. Aka Aki did well enough in Germany to raise a second round and then uses that to grow geographically. In this context, bringing on a French VC made a lot of sense.

Insta-Site: The No-Barrier-to-Copying World

Cédric gave us a good perspective on the early-stage investing scene in Europe. Like other European VCs, he pointed to the rash of copy-cat ventures in the Web 2.0 era. These have been referred to, more politely, as “concept arbitrage”: someone sees a service doing well in one location and creates a version for their location.

While “copy cat” is a derogatory term, Cedric was keen to point out that it has been a valid strategy in the past. As he puts it, “If I have a successful pizza shop in one location, I could probably create a successful one in another location”. In the Internet business, many successful exits have been based on this model.

But VCs around the world who we have spoken with tell us that this game is pretty well over. The reason? Well, it’s all our fault. Bloggers and tweeters spread ideas so fast that the time needed to exploit a concept arbitrage has shrunk to nothing. The tools for building and deploying a website have also dramatically shrunk the time and cost to market. 1. Get idea on Monday, 2. Launch on Friday, 3. Move out of dorm room on Sunday.

In the world of close-to-$0 insta-sites, the copy-cat model is being challenged. This is just like the arbitrage strategies on Wall Street. When friction goes, profits eventually wither as well.

But Don’t Underestimate Local Nuance

We can still see big wealthy countries where the US Internet giants have not become dominance for one reason or another. For example, Google does not dominate search in Korea or China.

What looks like a tiny bump from 30,000 foot can be a massive obstacle when you are in the war on the ground.

This is even more true in the world of social media. By definition, social involves cultural norms, and they differ around the world (thank goodness for that, homogeneity is terribly boring). When social + mobile + real time connects people in the real world, the differences can be even more striking. We are all humans with similar basic needs, but the cultural differences between, say, Germans, the French, Americans, Brits, Chinese, Indians and Koreans (to name just a few) are significant.

The Globalization Challenge for VCs

The top-tier VCs on Sand Hill Road know that innovation is going global and that the biggest markets and best ventures may no longer reside within a few miles of their office.

So, the big VC funds are setting up branch offices around the world. This is the traditional multi-national model. The problem is that it might not work as well in the VC world, where personal relationships matter so much and yet you have to make decisions very fast. The multi-national model does not easily square that circle. Venture capital is not a naturally scalable business.

VC funds have to decide between staying local (i.e. being a small firm of partners who can meet face to face every Monday in their office) and going global. The business does not scale well. If you bring in more partners, you won’t be able to maintain the situation in which all partners agree on every deal. That would create way too much overhead and friction. Fast decision-making overrides the standard layers of corporate management approval.

On the other hand, if local partners are making the investment decisions, what value would they get from being part of a big global fund (one in which the folks way over at head office take a big chunk of their profit)? Is branding really that important? Smart entrepreneurs know that a fund’s name (i.e. its brand) is much less important than the individual partner who they deal with.

This is a strategic dilemma for big funds.

Federated Best-of-Breed VC

Creathor, along with other smaller regional funds, is moving towards a federated model.

As Cedric puts it, “We are partnering more with other funds.” In one sense, this is nothing new. VCs have always worked together on deals. But in the past, this usually meant two VCs on Sand Hill Road meeting at a Palo Alto coffee shop. Now, it means a Swiss fund working with a French fund (or a New York or Indian or Chinese fund).

European VCs have to innovate in this way. They cannot win on the multi-national model: their funds are not big enough for that.

As the markets move East – to China and India, for example – VCs have to “be there.” Similarly, a VC in Asia needs to work with VCs in Europe and America.

It will be interesting to see how the globalization of innovation plays out and what new models emerge.

Discuss

Earlier this morning, Mozilla released the fourth beta version of Firefox 3.6. Besides over 140 bug fixes, the new beta also introduces support for HTML5′s local file handling API. This feature gives web apps the ability to access and handle local files selected by the user. A photo site that implements this feature can now work with images locally, for example. You don’t have to upload your images to the site – instead, the web app can just manipulate the photo through the browser locally and an upload is only necessary if you want to store the image remotely.

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The development of Firefox 3.6 has fallen behind schedule, though barring any major bugs in this latest version, Mozilla will likely release the first release candidate next month and the final version should arrive early next year.

Local File Handling

Another example that Mozilla uses in its documentation is photo thumbnails. Normally, you would have to upload the image to the site’s server before you could see a thumbnail. Now, developers can easily render and display these thumbnail before the file is uploaded.

Support for the HTML5 file handling API is the only major new feature in this latest beta, though Mozilla also made some tweaks to how extensions integrate with Firefox, which should improve stability.

Help Mozilla to Test Add-Ons

Mozilla also recently launched the latest version of its Add-on Compatibility Reporter tool. If you want to help out Mozilla and your favorite add-on developers, this tool will send back information about how an add-on performs in whatever version of Firefox you have installed on your machine. About 70% of all Firefox add-ons are already compatible with Firefox 3.6.

Discuss

This Monday we’re releasing our latest premium research report, entitled The Real-Time Web and Its Future. You can pre-order this in-depth report for just $200.

One of the 50 interviews we conducted was with Ted Roden, a Creative Technologist at The New York Times. In this post, an edited extract from our new report, we explore how Roden works with real-time data at The Times. We also discuss the creative real-time development he’s doing on a side-project called EnjoysThings.

Pre-order now: The Real-Time Web and Its Future, $200 if you order before 30 Nov; check out the Table of Contents (PDF) and a sample chapter (PDF).

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The primary contributions Ted Roden makes to understanding the real-time web include articulating:

• the material benefits of going real time
• the importance of user experience
• the changing landscape in analytics and advertising

We had a conversation with Roden about what happened after he added a real-time feed to EnjoysThings; he articulates well some of the biggest advantages of a real-time infrastructure.

EnjoysThings is a visual bookmarking site, like Delicious for images and other media. Even text snippets bookmarked are highlighted visually. User experience is a key consideration in all the site’s developments and the service is a lot of fun to use.

This summer Roden added a premium subscription option to the site, called Joy accounts. Joy accounts cost $20 per year for access to all the current and forthcoming premium features, or users can pay $5 for a single premium feature like disabling ads on the site or being able to view NSFW content.

One of the features Joy account holders get is access to a real-time view of new content shared. That real-time stream can be viewed in any browser but may be best served up via a Firefox sidebar. A real-time feed as up-sold value add? That’s remarkable and Roden says the response has been positive.

The sidebar is simple but compelling. New content is pushed live into the side of the browser as soon as it’s shared on the site, including images. At first Roden said he used AJAX set to poll his site every few seconds. Then he switched to a Comet implementation. He says he’s using the open source infrastructure Tornado, from Facebook, for his real-time prototypes at the Times.

EnjoysThings is still very small but the implications of adding real-time to this site could likely be incurred by sites of any size.

1. INCREASED TIME ON SITE

“People leave it open all day long,” Roden said of the sidebar. “Time-on-site has seen a huge increase. It’s like when the new content comes in on the Facebook Live Feed, if you know it’s about to pop in 5 seconds you’ll stick around.”

There are a number of different factors that are making time-on-site an increasingly important metric on the web, compared to pageviews. Increased consumption of video is the best known, but as real-time streams of aggregated content become increasingly
common, increased time-on-site will be an important measurement of how successful an implementation is.

2. DECREASED SERVER COSTS

After implementing real-time infrastructure, Roden reports that “my site runs a lot more
smoothly, I’ll probably move the whole site to that technology because deep down it’s
much easier on the database for me.”

“I used to get hit by Stumbleupon and [the site] would start to crawl. Then I changed to some of this real time stuff and I’ve reduced the number of servers. Instead of the users sitting on the page and refreshing, I push it out to them. My EC2 bill has gone way down.” Roden’s experience compliments the story that Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick told us about using PubSubHubbub push feeds to deliver shared items in Google Reader to FriendFeed. Changing from polling to real-time push cut traffic between the two sites by 85%. Likewise, magazine-style feed reader Feedly says that the part of its service that now consumes PubSubHubbub from Google Reader has seen a 72% reduction in bandwidth.

…(continued) To read the rest of this sample chapter, see the PDF download. You can also check out the Table of Contents and pre-order the full report at a discounted price of $200.

Discuss

Games can be a clever way to gain knowledge about a market and provide a simulated way for people to play with the products you sell.

“IT Manager III: Unseen Forces” does just that. It’s an online game developed by Intel that touches on the aspirations of any IT manager to become the CTO of a global enterprise.

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The game is set in an IT Department of a fictitious company. The aim is for the player to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the company by applying special powers to a fleet of PC’s, laptops and servers. In the meantime, the player faces a constant array of technology issues that pose threats to the company’s bottom line.

Successful players discover that their IT department and company expand, leading to more challenges that come with any corporate expansion.

The “special powers,” gives the game a sense that the IT Manager is like the “Clark Kent,” of the enterprise. He’s the ordinary guy who fixes the laptop when it crashes. But in actuality he is a super hero, who, of course, uses the special powers of Intel technology to save the day and bring new glory to the corporation.

The game is entertaining and can be a bit stressful, too, as glowing, red wrenches float over the heads of the people who need assistance. This game is about gaining work knowledge but also about the culture and the camaraderie that comes with working in an IT department. In the game the player can unwind after a stressful day or engage in friendly competitive games.

For instance, the game has its own sense of humor that runs through the IT culture of any enterprise. Employees who need help are sometimes spoofed for the types of questions they are asked. An employee with a faulty monitor may ask what is wrong with their television. Hilarious is the “bozon” count that measures the level of technical naivety. Awards are given that include an “attitude adjustment and an “Order of the Reboot,” medal. It provides the hopeful intention of giving the user a reason to come back to the game, a place where they can relate to their peers.

The game is definitely intended to serve as a community builder for Intel. Developers can show off their high scores and player profiles on their web sites. Code snippets are available for badges. It has also been localized into 12 languages. Players may also use a Facebook application.

The entire experience of the game is to engage IT managers in the world of Intel technology with the goal of becoming an IT superhero. It looks like Intel has done its research. The game is engaging and recognizes the culture of the IT worker. The only risk is if the game becomes too much about Intel instead of the user who is playing the game. Bu at first look, that does not appear to be the case.

Discuss

A year ago we polled you, the ReadWriteWeb community, on your favorite mobile apps. It’s become an annual tradition to run this survey, so in this post we’re collecting your top 5 lists for 2009. To get you inspired, the ReadWriteWeb team have listed their personal favorites below.

We first ran this poll in November 2007, before Apple’s App Store opened on July 10, 2008 and when Android was but a twinkle in Google’s eye. At that time, the 5 most mentioned mobile apps were the Gmail Java app, Google Maps, Opera Mini, Fring and Shozu. In November 2008 we began to see popular web services being mentioned as favorite mobile apps too: Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, FriendFeed. Also newer mobile-focused apps like Evernote and Brightkite. Read on for the 2009 edition of this reader survey…

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Note: ReadWriteWeb’s iPhone app is coming soon! To be notified as soon as it becomes available, email notify@readwriteweb.com.

Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb founder and editor (iPhone user):

• Diamedic; diabetes data input and monitoring tool that I use multiple times a day.
• Encamp; new Basecamp project management app that the RWW team has just begun using.
• Shazam; amazing song discovery app that I use regularly, e.g. holding up my iPhone to the car radio to identify cool songs!
• Evernote; notes service which I was late adopter of, but it’s since become essential.
• Tweetie 2; my current Twitter app of choice on the iPhone.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, lead blogger and VP Content Development (iPhone and Android):

• Aardvark
• Tweetdeck
• SuperSearch
• Regator
• Appsfire

Sarah Perez, feature writer and RWW’s resident Mobile Web expert ("Only 5?" she replied to my Basecamp message…Sarah uses iPhone):

• Facebook
• Tweetie 2
• Yelp
• NYT Mobile
• Bump (app for swapping contact details)

Frederic Lardinois, writer (iPhone):

• Tweetie2
• Beejive, for IM
• Notifications
• picposterous
• Pandora

Jolie O’Dell, writer and RWW Community Manager (Blackberry):

• TwitterBerry
• Flickr

Jolie notes (and you can sense the frustration!): "The BlackBerry user of the group has few options and fewer
favorites. In fact, I’d almost post a response rant about how
the development for BlackBerry devices AND the OS make enjoyable
user experiences a near-impossibility."

Dana Oshiro, writer (iPhone):

• Foursquare
• Tweetie
• Breaking News Online
• Aardvark
• Yelp, or
  OpenTable

Alex Williams, ReadWriteEnterprise editor (Blackberry, who notes that "the experience is just awful."):

• Yelp
• Slandr
• Facebook
• Gmail
• Google mobile

Jared Smith, RWW webmaster (Blackberry and iPod touch):

• RadarScope; weather radar viewer for iPhone and iPod touch.
• TouchTerm; on-the-go SSH for iPhone and iPod touch.
• MyKite; BlackBerry Brightkite app.
• Yatca; BlackBerry
  microblogging client that supports Twitter and identi.ca with
  seamless inbox integration.
• Google Sync for BlackBerry; "while
  not true push, it works so quietly and seamlessly I don’t give
  it a second thought."

Now, RWW readers, it’s time for your feedback!

Let us know in the comments below what your favorite mobile apps are and what mobile device(s) you use. Please limit this to 5 apps, so we can identify trends more easily and report back on them in an upcoming post.

Discuss

Thanksgiving is generally a horrible day for air travel, but tradition and the sweet smell of Thanksgiving turkey still makes millions of Americans forget the potential horror of being stuck in an airport. If you are one of them, or even if you are just heading to the airport to pick somebody up, here are some mobile applications and web sites than can help you make your Thanksgiving travel less stressful.

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Flightcaster

Not sure if your flight will leave on time? Surprisingly, the airlines often don’t have the most accurate information. Flights will show up as ‘On Time,’ even though your plane, which is supposed to take off in 15 minutes, is still sitting on another airport 500 miles away. FlightCaster looks at data from the airlines, FAA and combines this with historical data and weather information to give you a more accurate picture. The result is a good prediction whether your flight will leave on time.

Flightcaster is available as an iPhone and Blackberry app. The service is also available on FlightCaster’s website.

WorldMate

WorldMate, which is available in a free and Pro version for the iPhone, BlackBerry and most other mobile phone operating systems, gives you a one-stop shop for all your travel info. You can simply email receipts for your flight and hotel bookings to a private Worldmate address and the software will automatically update your itineraries on the mobile app. What makes the pro version so useful is that WorldMate also alerts you of delays and gate changes through push notifications and SMS messages. WorldMate also offers a list of nearby hotels and the ability to search for alternative flights if yours gets cancelled.

TripIt’s iPhone app offers similar service.

TripCase

TripCase offers fewer features than WorldMate, but it’s free and also comes with push notifications. It’s available for the iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Besides flight information and baggage claim info, TripCase also allows you to send out information about your flight status to your friends and family. You can also publish photos on your personalized TripCase site.

Next Flight

If you get bumped off an oversold flight or miss a connection, Next Flight can help you find alternative flights. The company indexes schedules from over 1,100 airlines and 4,200 airports around the world. Next Flight currently sells for $2.99 in the App Store.

Flight Status

If you are just picking somebody up at the airport, Flight Status is a nice iPhone app that gives you arrival information, including which baggage claim to go to. Flight Status is only available for the iPhone and costs $4.99. Flight Status was developed by the same company as Next Flight and also features data from 1,100 airlines.

Bonus: Flight Advisor Twitter Feed

If you just want to get a quick overview of airport delays in the US, also have a look at the Flight Advisor Twitter feed.

What About You?

Do you have your own favorite travel apps that we didn’t mention here? Let us know in the comments.

Discuss

We’re excited to announce that our latest premium research report will be available for download on Monday! Titled The Real-Time Web and Its Future, the report is a broad and deep look at the emerging world of real-time technology on the web. Based on 50 interviews with companies, engineers and executives building or leveraging real-time technology – the subtitle of this report could very well be “Real-Time, Beyond Twitter and Facebook.”

Social networks, infrastructure providers, media companies, non-profits and financial services companies were all interviewed and will all find this report useful to quickly develop a sophisticated understanding of this important trend on the web. Large portions of the web will be operating in real-time and this report will provide you with an important competitive advantage. You can pre-order the report at a $100 discount here; check out the Table of Contents (PDF) and a sample chapter (PDF) below.

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There is so much work being done around push delivery of messages – messages between people, between websites and people and between machines and machines – that it’s impossible to capture the whole market.

What we’ve done is develop in-depth case studies of 10 companies that are illustrative of general trends or have wildly innovative strategies. We’ve profiled twenty four key people to watch in order to understand the future of real time. We’ve done overviews of three of the biggest sectors in this market – search, stream readers and filtering/text analysis. And we offer five visualizations to help you understand the issues and strategies.

This report captures the wisdom of thousands of hours of work with real-time technology by people breaking new ground – then it was distilled down through hundreds of hours of interviews, research and writing by ReadWriteWeb staff and hundreds of Real-Time Summit attendee conversations. Now you can purchase the report and get an in-depth understanding of this emerging trend in just a few hours of reading and for a bargain price of $200 by pre-order, or $300 next week.

Pre-order today and you’ll receive a link to download the 60+ page PDF on Monday, November 30th.

For your perusing pleasure we offer today the Table of Contents and one full sample chapter for download. Or, check out this excerpt from that sample chapter below.

Ted Roden Brings the Real-Time Web to the NY Times and EnjoysThings

By day, Ted Roden works at the very top floor of the New York Times building, in the R&D department. The Times has a great team of engineers; they do cutting edge work in APIs, data visualization and computer assisted reporting. Roden does work with real-time data at his day job, but he gets full creative freedom when working a side-project called EnjoysThings.

The primary contributions Ted Roden makes to understanding the real-time web include articulating:

• the material benefits of going real time
• the importance of user experience
• the changing landscape in analytics and advertising

We had a conversation with Roden about what happened after he added a real-time feed to EnjoysThings; he articulates well some of the biggest advantages of a real-time infrastructure.

EnjoysThings is a visual bookmarking site, like Delicious for images and other media. Even text snippets bookmarked are highlighted visually. User experience is a key consideration in all the site’s developments and the service is a lot of fun to use.

This summer Roden added a premium subscription option to the site, called Joy accounts. Joy accounts cost $20 per year for access to all the current and forthcoming premium features, or users can pay $5 for a single premium feature like disabling ads on the site or being able to view NSFW content.

One of the features Joy account holders get is access to a real-time view of new content
shared. That real-time stream can be viewed in any browser but may be best served up via a Firefox sidebar. A real-time feed as up-sold value add? That’s remarkable and Roden says the response has been positive.

The sidebar is simple but compelling. New content is pushed live into the side of the
browser as soon as it’s shared on the site, including images. At first Roden said he used AJAX set to poll his site every few seconds. Then he switched to a Comet implementation. He says he’s using the open source infrastructure Tornado, from Facebook, for his real-time prototypes at the Times.

EnjoysThings is still very small but the implications of adding real-time to this site could
likely be incurred by sites of any size.

1. INCREASED TIME ON SITE

“People leave it open all day long,” Roden said of the sidebar. “Time-on-site has seen a
huge increase. It’s like when the new content comes in on the Facebook Live Feed, if you know it’s about to pop in 5 seconds you’ll stick around.”

There are a number of different factors that are making time-on-site an increasingly
important metric on the web, compared to pageviews. Increased consumption of video
is the best known, but as real-time streams of aggregated content become increasingly
common, increased time-on-site will be an important measurement of how successful an implementation is.

2. DECREASED SERVER COSTS

After implementing real-time infrastructure, Roden reports that “my site runs a lot more
smoothly, I’ll probably move the whole site to that technology because deep down it’s
much easier on the database for me.”

“I used to get hit by Stumbleupon and [the site] would start to crawl. Then I changed to some of this real time stuff and I’ve reduced the number of servers. Instead of the users sitting on the page and refreshing, I push it out to them. My EC2 bill has gone way down.” Roden’s experience compliments the story that Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick told us about using PubSubHubbub push feeds to deliver shared items in Google Reader to FriendFeed. Changing from polling to real-time push cut traffic between the two sites by 85%. Likewise, magazine-style feed reader Feedly says that the part of its service that now consumes PubSubHubbub from Google Reader has seen a 72% reduction in bandwidth.

…(continued) To read the rest of this sample chapter, see the PDF download above. Please see also the Table of Contents and pre-order now to get a great discount on the forthcoming report!

Discuss

The estimates for cloud computing can make you wonder sometimes about what to believe. Analyst firms and it looks like investment houses, can be notorious for wild estimates about market sizes.

So we have to wonder about the estimates from Merrill Lynch, which is estimating the cloud computing market to reach $160 billion by 2011.The estimate includes $95 billion in business and productivity applications.

Whoa! That makes cloud computing one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

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But Merrill Lynch is not alone in its lofty estimates. Earlier this year, Gartner pegged the market at $150 billion by 2013.

In their estimate, Gartner included Google Ad Words estimates in their estimates. This seems sketchy at best. Here’s what Gartner analyst Lydia Leong wrote back in May:

“Obviously, one argue whether or not it’s valid to include advertising revenue, but a key point that should not be missed is that in the trend towards the consumerization of IT, it is the advertiser that often implicitly pays for the consumer’s use of an IT service, rather than the consumer himself. Advertising revenue is a significant component of the overall market, part of the “cloud” phenomenon even if you don’t necessarily think of it as “computing”.

What’s at risk is making cloud computing totally irrelevant. How can corporate IT departments make sense of the market when it appears that cloud computing is essentially tied to anything connected to the Internet?

But then you need to look at the dynamics in play. IT is built on legacy systems, custom, built to order environments. Cloud computing provides a level of automation.

From the PriceWaterhouseCoopers summer Technology Forecast:

“Legacy IT soaks up much of the available IT budget and is a primary barrier to IT responsiveness and overall business agility.”

The report goes on to say that cloud will be necesssary for automating the world of IT:

“…IT must adopt an architecture that creates loose coupling between the IT infrastructure and application workloads. It also must modernize and automate IT’s own internal business processes for provisioning, managing, and orchestrating infrastructure resources.”

In other words, cloud computing will be huge but to call it a $160 billion market seems like a form of hype that can lead to all kinds of issues. It’s almost reminiscent of the dot-com bubble.

And look what happened there.

Discuss

Earlier this morning, Wikileaks began to post pager messages that were sent on September 11, 2001. According to Wikileaks, these messages were intercepted by an “organization which has been intercepting and archiving US national telecommunications since prior to 9/11.” Some of these messages are from officials in police and fire departments, though a large number of messages are also from businesses. Others are automated messages to engineers that were sent by computers about network and hardware issues.

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Wikileaks is posting these messages semi-live – in sync with the events of 9/11. It’s not clear how Wikileaks got this data or who intercepted these messages.

This archive is likely to become an invaluable source for anybody who wants to study the events and the public’s reaction on this day. Chances are that conspiracy theorists are already wading through this data looking for an official page that authorized the destruction of Building 7.

As is to be expected, the archive includes many Twitter-like messages like “Bush calls World Trade Center crashes apparent terrorist attack.” Others are internal messages from unknown businesses or government departments (“please due to the incidents taking place and with trying to close centers Please do not tie up aol today unless it is business. Thanks”) or personal message (“Things are getting worse….fear is rampid…please call me. HISD are advising to come get children etc.-sm”). This thread on Reddit highlights some of the most interesting (and often shocking) messages.

We don’t know the nature of Wikileaks this source yet, so it’s only prudent to treat this data with some skepticism. Wikileaks, however, has a track record of releasing authentic information and it seems unlikely (but not impossible) that somebody would go through the trouble of writing 500,000 pager messages just to be featured on Wikileaks.

Examples

Here are a few examples from Wikileak’s archive:

2001-09-11 11:20:01 Things are getting worse….fear is rampid…please call me. HISD are advising to come get children etc.-sm

2001-09-11 11:20:01 have you seen the news this morning? penagon and world trade center attacked Mark Hodges – SunIT Ops

2001-09-11 11:20:01 Alaric! Call me on my cell!! Will!

2001-09-11 09:15:01 I just got a page from Jurko in New York. He said they are okay. Thanks

2001-09-11 08:55:35 BreakingNews@CNN.COM| CNN Breaking News|BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com — World trade center damaged; unconfirmed reports say a plane has crashed into tower. Details to come. For complete coverage of this story visit: http://www.CNN.com

08:50:50 BOMB DETINATED IN WORLD TRADE CTR. PLS GET BACK TO MIKE BRADY W/A QUICK ASSESSMENT OF YOUR AREAS AND CONTACT US IF ANYTHING IS NEEDED AT 212-647-xxx.

2001-09-11 08:45:39 I love you and miss you very much!!!!!!xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo I waited to wave at you at the doorway and you didnt I paged you…. you didnt call Did I make you angry with me? I love you

2001-09-11 08:45:46 Update X4236083. PROB: Funlove Virus at KCMART IMP: Affecting 33 workstations. STATUS: Desktop technicians are on site and addressing individual workstations. No servers infected at this time. Peoplesoft has been checked and cleared. Bridge

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During a ceremony in Iraq’s National Museum in Bagdad today, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt announced that the company will digitize the museum’s collections. By early next year, all of these images will be available online for free. The museum lost a large part of its collection to looting in 2003. Except for a number of photo ops and press conferences, the museum has remained closed to the public since the beginning of the war in 2003. Most of the museum’s collection remains in storage.

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According to Reuters, the company has already taken 14,000 photographs in the museum. It’s not clear how Google plans to present these images, though it seems as if Google plans a bit more than just a simple gallery of the photos it took. Eric Schmidt promises “a few surprises” for when the site launches early next year. Google and the U.S. State Department will share the cost of this project.

A Government-Sponsored Infomercial for Google?

While this sounds like a great idea, the New York Times also reports that there are also some interesting politics at play here. Parts of the museum’s collections, for example, have already been digitized by Italy’s National Research Center. This collection is already available online.

Today’s event was sponsored by the US Embassy in Iraq, where, according to the New York Times, US Ambassador Christopher R. Hill described the digitization project as “part of an effort spearheaded by the State Department to bring technology to Iraq.” Some of the invited journalists, however, argued that the event was nothing else but a “government-sponsored infomercial” for Google.

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Scott Lockhart used to tell his co-workers in the real estate industry that there was a lot of valuable information to be found by reading blogs. They, like all of us, would try blog search engines and end up frustrated with spam, abandoned blogs and low-quality content. So Lockhart quit his job and built an application he thought could solve that problem by unearthing just the most high-quality blog content concerning a wide variety of niche topics. In doing so, he stumbled onto one of the most important issues in the future of the web – the tension between controlled user experience and chaotic freedom.

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That sounds crazy, but Lockhart’s now three-person Atlanta company has actually done a remarkably good job of unearthing good content in a compelling user experience. Regator offers users a curated collection of high-quality sources on more than 500 topics, everything from martial arts to ceramics, aviation, cheerleading, law and Antarctica. Of course there are tech and business channels, too. Regator just got its $2 premium iPhone app into the iTunes store and it’s the best “channel clicker” for niche content we’ve seen yet.

There’s something a little bit odd about having the borders of your internet limited by someone else, but the Regator user experience is excellent otherwise. It’s well designed and fun to use. User experience is key to making the web…usable. I’ve wished for years that more people got excited about sharing OPML files, bundled collections of dynamic RSS feeds, but that just hasn’t happened.

Curation, bundles of content, discovery – these are functions of a prolific web that a new crop of services is trying to tackle with good design and tough decisions about openness versus…something else. Regator is an interesting entry into this place of tension and possibility.

The new premium iPhone app offers subscription to the selected blogs you like, video viewing, recommendations of related posts and issue tracking by keyword search. You can view the most recent posts from sources, or the most popular posts with other Regator users.

But is this just a pretty looking walled-garden? Regator brings to mind an admittedly paranoid but important blog post that consultant Chris Messina wrote this week called The Death of The URL.

“I see signs that the essential freedoms of the web are being undermined by a cadre of companies through the introduction of new technologies and interfaces that, combined, may spell the death of the URL…As a user experience designer, [the responsibility lies with] my discipline and peers to provide the right kind of ideas and leadership. If we get the design right, we can empower while clarifying; we can reduce complexity while enhancing functionality; we can expand freedom while not overwhelming with choice. Surely these are the things that good, thoughtful user experience design can achieve!

“If I were forced to choose between all the messiness of free will over the ‘comfortability’ of a contrived existence, I’d choose the red pill, time and time again. And I hope you would too.

From WebTV to the tightly controlled iPhone app platform, though – these interfaces can be very compelling to use. One of the risks of a controlled platform, perhaps secondary to the inherent loss of freedom, is that whoever is in control might not do a good job of picking out what shows up. Editorial control risks conflicts of interest and a lack of broad editorial knowledge compared to what topic experts know. It’s not an easy role to play.

Kimberly Turner is the editor of Regator’s selection of blogs. She’s a former magazine writer and she works with volunteer reporters and editors who suggest top blogs in niches when they have free time. Turner doesn’t believe that Regator is guilty of the sins that Messina calls other companies out for.

Whether you’re finding sites through Google’s algorithm, the community votes at Digg or your friends on Twitter “we all use some service or site to help us find what we’re looking for,” Turner says “and those are all ‘curated’ in some way.”

“Regator’s human-powered curation is simply less likely to yield poor quality content than some others’,” Turner contends.

Thousands of blogs are included on Regator already and Turner says new features like related posts and searches help users “explore and wander into fresh territory rather than getting stuck in a rut and going to the same small subset of blogs repeatedly.”

So far there are 20 blogs in the wine category for example, just 1 in the beauty/nails subcategory, 4 hockey blogs, 22 law blogs, 3 blogs about cheerleading and 7 about Emergency Medical Services.

The service adds new sources based on user suggestions and other discovery methods. Turner says, “once a blog has established itself as a well-written and trustworthy source, we want to make sure it is included.” The fact is, though, that if a blog Regator turns you on to then links to another related blog that’s not included in the Regator index – you as a user cannot subscribe to it. If the company offered a “suggest” button next to its “share” button in the Regator browser, that could be helpful.

Does that sound reasonable? It’s not as free-form and dynamic as other services. Collected.info, a new service for sharing and subscribing to other peoples’ collections of feeds, is a particularly interesting recent entrant into this market from perhaps the other end of the spectrum. Both services take a little time to get your reading list set up well, but Regator delivers high-quality content from the start.

I like Regator and am already using the new iPhone app to discover interesting new content while on the go. A service that gives me access to fresh, high-quality content about ceramics, anthropology and museums with just a few clicks? Sign me up!

Still, there’s something about the sources available being limited by someone else’s choice. It’s an interesting tension that may never be resolved – but is the basis for some very interesting software in the meantime. The Regator crew is right to identify as a problem the way people new to this social web struggle to find the best content. They offer a compelling solution to the problem. Time will tell which solutions catch on and what the consequences will be.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank one of the companies that makes it possible for us to bring ReadWriteWeb to you.

Groupsite is a long-developed, feature-rich, self-serve, professional grade social networking and collaboration service. If you’ve got a group of people you want to facilitate online conversation between – you should check out Groupsite. We really appreciate Groupsite’s support here at ReadWriteWeb.

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Google Apps is making it a bit more enticing for companies of all sizes to adopt its service for the Blackberry smart phone.

In a post this morning on the Google Enterprise blog, the group announced Google Apps Connector for Blackberry Enterprise Server has doubled the number of Blackberry phones it can support. This effectively allows larger enterprises to place more users on fewer servers.

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Google is also offering the capability to host multiple Google App accounts, broadening the number of users that can be supported.

In August, Google Apps launched its integration with Blackberry. The most significant aspect of the integration is the syncing capabilities. Google Apps Connector provides access to Google Apps email, calendar, and contacts from the built-in BlackBerry applications.

Email, folders and contacts are all synchronized between Google Apps and the Blackberry application.

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Last night we wrote about Forrester’s prediction that online holiday retail sales will grow 8% this year to $44.7 billion. comScore had similar numbers about the growth of online retail – toy web sites grew 9% in October, as did the retail apparel segment. Online personal finance service Mint.com has joined the festive statistics parade, with data analyzing some of the U.S.’s leading retailers.

Mint analyzed spending data and compared it to one year ago. The data is for top performers in the third quarter this year, based on "average monthly spend per user versus recession lows."

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Interestingly, Mint’s data says that Q4 sales will not be as good as last year – which is the opposite of what Forrester predicts. However Mint does say that consumer electronics and clothing are set to rise in Q4.

Check out the charts below and compare them to Forrester and comScore’s data.

The highlights, via Mint.com:

• Aeropostale – the clothing retailer is up 10% year-over-year, having grown consistently quarter over quarter.
• Best Buy – the electronics retailer is up 1% Q3 year-over-year, hit a recession low of -7%.
• Fry’s – while competitor Best Buy’s sales exceed where they were at this point last year, Fry’s remains down -7% year-over-year (though it’s up from a -16% recession low).
• J.Crew – the clothing retailer’s lowest point was -3%, but it has since entirely corrected and even improved sales 4% year-over-year.
• Sears – the department store’s sales are up 8% over this time last year, having dipped to -10%.
• Target – after an initial drop to -8% in Q109, Target has halved that loss and is currently down only -4% year-over-year.

See also:

• Online Retail Thriving: 8% Growth Expected This Holiday Season
• Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: E-commerce

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