berlin-based artist eboy, renowed for the pixel-designs he’s been doing for clients such as Microsoft, Amazon and Wired Magazine, just released a marvellous web2.0-themed poster sporting all the logos of your favorite web-companies. you can order the poster along with the well-known pixel-styled city-landscapes for EUR 16,- each (via TechCrunch).
I haven’t been using online collaboration- & email-suite Zimbra until now, but todays announcement sure sounds interesting: Zimbra is about to receive a local cache-feature, which will allow users to access email even when being offline - auto-syncing included. however, the official blog-entry doesn’t go into detail on how this will be implemented. recently introduced online-PIM Scrybe seems to realize similar functionality by using a flash-based cache.
solving the offline-dilemma might be crucial for the success of web-based office-apps in the nearer future (”network anywhere, anytime” doesn’t seem very realistic, esp. considering airplanes). what seems to miss is a general, standards-based approach on solving this issue (mabye browser-integrated?). while this spawns lots of different, incompatible on/offline-synching mechanisms, it’s at least a way for upcoming products to differnetiate themselves. 
while O’Reilly’s web 2.0 summit is almost over, PodTech’s John Furrier published a bootlegged video of Eric Schmidt’s keynote given on tuesday:
An overflow crowd waits for the Eric Schmidt Web 2.0 keynote. At $3,500 per conference attendee, and a full plate of sponsors, it looks like they made some serious bank. Speaking of bank, the Google CEO denies rumors of $500 million legal reserve for YouTube, and states that Google will never trap user data.
Michael Arrington gave a comprehensive summary of Launch Pad, the kick-off event giving 13 startups the chance to demo their products to an high-profile audience. contestants included companies like sphere, omnidrive and oDesk.
despite not participating in the summit itself, Riya (formerly known for their face-recognizing image-search engine) managed to do the most-covered product-launch this week: like.com utilizes their technology to find products (currently limited to jewelry, shoes, handbags and watches) based on visual similarity. coverage all over the place.
and finally there’s an interesting sum-up of a talk between John Batelle and Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie on Read/Write Web.
update: Redeye VC links to Mary Meeker’s presentation on the “state of the internet” - 41 slides incredibly stuffed with numbers & stats on business-development on the net.
a very honorable mention goes to Lou Reed, who has been performing on yesterdays post-dinner party, sponsored by AOL (via Webware). bubbly, anyone? 
…update: here’s the video!
SF Gate’s Dan Fost reveals the top 10 lies of web 2.0, spiced up with this great propaganda-image …
5. These sites are so easy, my mother could use them. And they’re so geeky, she has no interest in even trying.
6. The analysts are trustworthy now. Like the one who said MySpace will be worth $15 billion in a few years — or was that the one who said Amazon was worth $400 a share? Whoops, I’m mixing my bubbles.
7. There’s no glut of social networks — young people are always up for trying something new. And we’re happy to share in the 17 percent of them who aren’t glued to MySpace.
rev2.org - a site dedicated to web2.0-news - didn’t come to my attention until their recent - very extensive - company-profile of YouTube. covering the company’s history, lack-of-a business-model, legal threats and technological background (don’t get me wrong, this is really an interesting read!), the article makes me crave for more in-depth profiles on other companies (compare this MySpace-roundup, published on Valleywag)!
Om Malik’s GigaOM blog-network just launched Web Worker Daily - probably not coincidentally on yesterdays Labour Day. featuring hammer&sickle-inspired graphical design, the new blog is dedicated to nowadays’ mobile information-workforce: geographically uprooted from office-space, always-connected through wifi- and mobile broadband connections, laptop-hauling, latte-sipping cyber-beduins ;)… WWD aims to be a place for web-workers sharing their views & opinions among the decentralized business-world they are living in.
The Museum of Modern Betas is dedicated to collecting new web-apps as they get launched into beta. sure, the concept of keeping websites in perpetual state of beta may be questionable (check yesterdays rant by dead2.0 ), but for cureless web-junkies, MoMB’s RSS-feed is their daily fix needed so bad - enjoy!
Scott Schiller built this prove-of-concept, using javascript to sniff on visitors browser-histories. using the CSS pseudo-class visited:, any script can determine if a user has visited a particular URL before. this issue of course is many years old, but Schiller uses it in a fun way: by checking your browser-history for various web2.0′ish websites, his script computes your personal web2.0-awareness (mine was only 56% 
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from IBM’s developerWorks-podcast comes a 25min interview with Tim Berners-Lee, originator of the world wide web and director of the w3c (a transcript is available as well). Berners-Lee talks about his hopes on the Semantic Web and RDF-based applications. he further stresses the fact that the web was originally intent to be a read/write-environment for all users since its invention in 1991:
LANINGHAM (developerWorks): You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?
BERNERS-LEE: Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. (…)
So Web 2.0 for some people it means moving some of the thinking client side so making it more immediate, but the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact.
btw, here is the link to Berner-Lee’s (semi-regular) blog.
Richard White, member of the team that created Kiko, wrote an honest post on the lessons he learned from Kiko’s failure. Kiko is an early - if not the first - AJAX-calendar (way before Google Calendar and 30boxes). yesterday, TechCrunch among others broke the news that Kiko Software decided to discontinue the service and put the domain and software for sale on eBay (if you ever felt an urge to compete with Google in a market where it’s hard to charge users, now is the time! the bid is currently at USD 50.000,-). Richard points out that Kiko wasn’t doomed by the mere appearance of Google Calendar or other competitors. according to him, the reason for the team calling it a quit was the perceived impossibility of getting a grip in the small business-market. the importance of breaking out of the blog- & web2.0-audience is probably the most significant lesson learnt from Kiko…
Maybe you could explain me sometime
