I just finished listening to RedMonk's weekly PodCast on RIA. Our own Richard Monson-Haefel participated along with Ryan Stewart of Adobe.
Richard did a great job answering many questions including comments on Curl's origin as an MIT Research Project before the start of this decade. Curl Inc., the commercial company, brought out its first product back in 2002 during the difficult time of dot-com bust. Subsequently the Japanese company SCS (Sumisho Computer Systems) acquired it back in 2004 and stayed focused in the Japanese market for 3 years. The result was rapid growth there in several global enterprises (with house-hold names) jumping into the enterprise RIA solution far ahead of their US counterparts.
Do listen to it when you get a chance. It also covers general trends in RIA.