Guest author Richard MacManus is the founder of ReadWrite. This article originally appeared in his Augment Intelligence newsletter. If you’re thinking […]
How MyFitnessPal Became The King Of Diet Trackers
One food entry at a time.
RW10: A Decade Of Spotting The Future Taking Form
ReadWrite’s founder marks the site’s 10th anniversary.
Health 2.0 Conference: Big Data Making A Big Impact
Big Data is becoming the biggest trend in health care – for researchers, doctors, patients and people trying to avoid becoming patients.
Health 2.0 Challenge #1: Getting Doctors Off Fax Machines
Today at the DC to VC: Health IT Startup Showcase, a collaboration between Morgenthaler Ventures and the Health 2.0 Conference, I saw firsthand how health IT startups are tackling big, real-world problems. Coming from a world where a photo-sharing mobile app gets bought for $1 Billion, it’s refreshing to see startups trying to solve important…
Health 2.0: Here Come The BigCos!
I’m at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco – and it reminds me a lot of the Web 2.0 Conferences of 2006-07. The second coming of the Web, coined “Web 2.0” by Tim O’Reilly and his company, was entering its peak around 2006. If I ever doubted that Web 2.0 was big business, I certainly didn’t after I spotted IBM teaching it at the…
How Big Data Is Improving Healthcare
With the increasing digitization of healthcare, the trend of “Big Data” has been gathering steam. According to a new report from digital health consultancy DrBonnie360, there is an estimated 50 petabytes of data in the healthcare realm. That’s predicted to grow, by a factor of 50, to 25,000 petabytes by 2020. The report, which I’ve summarized in…
Sorry Facebook, This Was A Privacy Bungle! Here’s What You Should’ve Done
A week ago Facebook got itself caught up in yet another privacy controversy, when old Wall posts from 2007-09 were automatically converted into Timeline posts. The confusion was that for some people, those old posts seemed private in nature. So it was thought that Facebook had mistakenly turned private messages into Timeline posts. Facebook…
Why Tablets Are The Future Of Electronic Medical Records [REPORT]
The adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) by doctor practices and hospitals is one of the most exciting developments in health – and the iPad is playing a big part. Up till recently, the typical EMR system was a PC-based enterprise software suite deployed in a large, public hospital. But thanks mainly to the iPad, EMRs are finding their…
Coming Soon: Apps That Use Your DNA
Earlier this month, I finally purchased a DNA test at 23andMe, the personal genetics company based in Silicon Valley. When the test kit arrived, I duly spat into the plastic tube and posted it back. It isn’t cheap, US$299 plus postage, but the results promise to tell me about my ancestry, inherited traits, and any possible congenital risks. All…
How The Big Six Book Publishers Are Using Social Media
In the fifth and final part of our series, Social Books, we explore how the “big six” book publishers use social media. So far in the series we’ve looked at the largest social network for book lovers (Goodreads), a new social network for book writers (Writer’s Bloq), how public libraries use social media, and whether book highlights are being…
The Social Library: How Public Libraries Are Using Social Media
Like many of you, I’m connected to the Internet virtually every waking hour of my day – via computer, tablet and mobile phone. Yet I still regularly visit my local public library, in order to borrow books, CDs and DVDs. Which made me wonder: are these two worlds disconnected, or is the Social Web being integrated into our public libraries? In…
Why Book Highlights Are Anti-Social
Continuing our Social Books series, today I’m looking at book highlights. The increasing popularity of e-readers, in particular the Kindle, has made it common practice to highlight passages and quotes within books. There have been various efforts to make those highlights social and today I’ll look at the two leading services. One is from Amazon…
Digital Magazine Subscriptions: iTunes & Kindle Still A Mess
Today I reviewed my magazine subscriptions, partly to see which of Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle and digital magazine indie Zinio has the best offering currently. My check reaffirmed many positive things about digital magazines, but one thing still frustrates me: the user experience for subscriptions in both iTunes and Kindle. Apple and Amazon…
Social Networking For Authors & Overcoming The Rejection Slip
Yesterday I reviewed the leading social network for book readers, Goodreads. In the second post in my Social Books series, I’m checking out a brand new social network for book writers. Called Writer’s Bloq, it was founded by a young wannabe writer from New York named Nayia Moysidis. In a phone interview, I discovered that Moysidis, a graduate of…
Book Lovers: If You’re Not Already On Goodreads, Here’s Why You Should Be
My next series of posts is entitled Social Books. Over five posts, I’m going to explore how book readers and writers use social networking tools. Three of the posts will be from the point of view of readers, starting with this one today about the leading social network for bookworms: Goodreads. In the remaining posts, I’ll be checking out a brand…
Amazon’s Renaissance Of Reading
“The only thing more perfect than reading is more reading,” declared Amazon in a TV advert for its new Kindle eReader device. At a self-hosted event in Santa Monica today, Amazon launched new versions of its eReader and tablet products. Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos spent over an hour on stage, extolling the virtues of the new hardware. But perhaps…
The Reimagination of Publishing
Last Friday I did a presentation at The Project [R]evolution conference in Auckland, New Zealand. I presented on a topic I’ve been writing a lot about recently: the reimagination of publishing. I haven’t been this excited about innovation in Web publishing since the early, experimental days of blogging, when I started ReadWriteWeb circa 2002-03. In…
First Look: State, A Streams App Of The Future
As streams of information become more popular on the Web, we need better ways to consume and manage them. Apps that allow you to aggregate content from different sources – Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news websites and more – may become very popular. That’s if they can overcome the increasingly walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter. Which makes…
The Future of Streams: Twitter Looms As Biggest Obstacle
One of the five reasons why Web publishing is changing is the emergence of streams of information. In other words, a constant flow of information ordered chronologically and (ideally) topically too. In the near future, the theory goes, it won’t matter where you enter content – a blog platform, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etcetera – because all of it…