Perry Ellis gives away cheapo USB flash drive
Friday, June 22, 2007
Xcavator.net: Visual Stock Photo Search
Xcavator.net provides natural and intuitive interactive search for stock photography providing buyers with a browsing experience based on both visual content and keywords. The key to the visual search capabilities is the portal’s color and image search engines, powered by CogniSign Intelligent Image Recognition Technology.
In laymen’s terms, Xcavator.net offers three types of interrelated search options. Tradition search delivers photos based on tagged keywords and is much the same as others in the stock photography market. Where Xcavator.net gets interesting is in color and image search. Xcavator.net allows color search matching, for example if a stock photograph was needed that matched a brochure or web site in terms of colors, users are able to refine the photo search to those colors by utilizing a color chart or by inserting the exact hexadecimal color into a box. Image search provides similar photos based on a user uploaded image or via a drag and drop of images found in an initial search.
Xcavator.net competes with other visual search sites including Riya, Pixsy and PicSearch. Xcavator isn’t necessarily better than any of their competitors, but different. The color and related search capabilities don’t have the same level of user enjoyment as Riya’s search features do, yet Xcavator.net’s features feel more practical and are definitely more finely targeted at niche stock photo search.
Xcavator.net recently signed a deal with iStockphoto that delivers 1.8 Million images from 38,000 contributors into the Xcavator.net search database. The site comes out of Beta on July 2.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
iChat display sharing removed from Leopard?
The first Leopard iChat demo video from Macworld Expo in January Apple shows a feature called “display sharing:” Narrator: Screen Sharing lets you remotely observe and control your buddy's display from the other room or another time zone. Initiate a screen sharing session and iChat immediately kicks off an audio chat so that you can talk through simultaneous control of a single Mac desktop. Create Web sites together, make travel plans or review that big presentation. iChat with display sharing opens a whole new world of collaboration possibilities. Curiously display sharing is not mentioned in the Leopard demo video (Apple, YouTube) of iChat from WWDC 2007. The new demo mentions "iChat Theater" but not a peep about "iChat display sharing."...
"I have 250,000 users, now what?"
"I have 250,000 users, now what?" — Craig Ulliott is a web developer in Philadelphia, PA, USA. 3 weeks ago, he built the Where I've Been Facebook application, which lets you create a map for your profile page showing visitors where you've traveled. Cool experiment, right?
Source: Inside Facebook Author: Justin Smith Link: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/06/21/i-have…
Thursday, June 21, 2007
killer video search engine (ClipBlast)
I’ve been looking for a great video search engine that includes all the videos that I’ve done. I’ve been to Dabble, Blinkx, YouTube, MeeVee, Truveo, and others. None have all my videos with the latest videos represented. Dabble is pretty close, actually, but Clipblast really blew them all away. Visit Clipblast and search on my last name, or on a topic you know I’ve covered like “Google Reader” to find the videos I’ve done of the Google Reader team. It’s really great.
I just learned about it from Gary Baker, Founder/CEO who is sitting next to me (I put a short video of him up on my Kyte channel, although that was a bit choppy because the Wifi sucks here).
Anyway, here’s the highlights.
1. Their engine has been spidering the video world for 3.5 years. 2. Three million professionally-done video clips with five million additional of user generated clips. 3. The current interface on Clipblast went live in April.
They also crawl engines like YouTube and MySpace and Daily Motion. Blip, Veoh, Brightcove, etc. are all crawled for their latest video.
Stuff they are strong on, according to Gary:
1. News video from local, national, international sources. 2. Video podcasting and video blogging 3. Newspapers that are putting video out, like New York Times and Los Angeles Times. 4. Commercials.
“Our ultimate goal is to get viewers and more views to the video.”
I’ll try it out more, but on a few minutes first look it really is great. What do you think?
Personally this is one I was happy to see before Mike Arrington and the TechCrunch crew. I have a feeling Mike will write about this pretty soon.
Congrats to Jerry Yang
Jerry Yang is taking over as CEO of Yahoo, a move that I think is brilliant. I first met Jerry back in 95 or 96 in Silicon Alley and he was clearly a bright guy. 12 years later, having run Yahoo with multiple management teams, it seems only fitting that he run the show.
What this move shows is that--like Facebook, Apple, and Google--the founders are often times the best folks to run the business. Wall Street and investors are too caught up in the "professional CEO" who knows how to "talk to Wall Street" and get deals done. The fact is our business is about one thing: product.
That's it. Product wins... nothing else.
Google has better product than Yahoo, Yahoo has better product than Microsoft. The peeking order is based on product on the internet because switching costs are zero. Users go to the best product... it is that simple. Really.
Example: Google search is clearly the best, Yahoo's is second best. After that you can pick and choose the next three players (MSN, Ask, AOL) since their products are not any better than the first two.
Jerry should rebuild the management team to focus on product and forget about hitting numbers for a year or two. The focus has to be on making better products than Google--not an easy task.
If you build great product everything else falls into place.
Go get 'em Jerry!!!
Green big shots in Cannes
What kind of contest, you might ask? Well, it's called Big Shot in Cannes and you can learn more about it (and see the work) here. Since the advertising industry has been abuzz about user generated content, we thought we'd challenge the best minds in our business to create a great piece of communications, on the ecological/green subject of their choice, and do it like a consumer would. No big budgets, no fancy production teams, no boondoggles in exotic locations, and no high-priced celebrity talent.
We got an amazing 165 entries from 10 countries (right, two more than could legally enter) and, with much difficulty, narrowed this list down to 33. Because we generated more than 100,000 viewings of the submitted videos (thanks to JumpCut for putting this together for us), we used viewer feedback plus our own very idiosyncratic perspective to narrow the list for our final judging.
We then sent the final 33 to our 11 top creative judges and, lo and behold, three winners emerged: one from the US, one from Spain, and one from India. We had strong runners up from Australia, France, and Italy too. Check them all out here. Amazing stuff.
Our finalists, Kristin Cahill (USA), Diego Duprat (Spain), and Pranav Harihar Sharma (India) all arrived in Cannes over the last few days. Given that two of them had long and tiring flights, we got them to their hotel room and let them nap. Then plenty of free time to wander around the Palais des Festivals, meet up with friends in the biz, and get ready for their introduction to polite society on Thursday afternoon at the Advertising Community Together (ACT) Pavilion when they'll receive their very own Yahoo! Big Idea Chair. BTW: ACT has an annual traveling exhibition of "socially responsible" advertising from around the world, and Yahoo! has been a proud sponsor since 2006.
That's all the news from La Croisette for today. Somehow I feel virtuous and ready to hug some trees even though we are consuming energy like there's no tomorrow (somebody turn off that TV!). But it's nice to see all the big shots going green in Cannes.
Jerry Shereshewsky
Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Madison Ave.
My time with the Geezeo founders... it's a pretty sweet service
Along with Wesabe, Geezeo was part of a piece in the Wall Street Journal last week. Geezeo wants to be considered an "Online Quicken Alternative" and the product offers a lot of new and innovative options past what Quicken or Money do.
For example, Shawn noted that a large percentage of Americans still have their money in savings accounts making sub-1% in interest. When you sign on to Geezeo, they will make recommendations on how to improve your savings by moving to accounts offering 4-5x more. This can amount to thousands of extra dollars a year. Also, the system will offer you suggestions on reducing your credit card debt by looking at using lower interest rate credit cards.
Their target is the 18-34 age bracket and they have ambassadors for their product at major university campuses around the U.S. I suggested to them that they might look at offering seminars on dealing with credit and how to effectively use student loans. I know when I got to college I was hit with 100 credit card offers and wound up with a large amount of debt quickly. Their seminars will provide two benefits: helping students and getting more subs for Geezeo.
So what is Geezeo? Basically it's a "smart" way of managing your money. I say smart because the system learns as it goes. You aggregate all of your bank account and credit information into the system, and it will smart-tag it as it goes along. You can also tag your items as well and then the system learns from your tagging to apply to other users in the future. Geezeo will also offer suggestions on other accounts that you might want to use to either make more or spend less. This is how they generate revenue by affiliate subs with the banking providers. Check out here, here and here for a more detailed product overview.
My immediate reaction when they said, "Yea, Allen you just give us all of your logins and we take it from there" is about security. With hundreds of startups out there, what faith should I have that either of the following won't happen: a. they will just wipe my accounts clean since they have access or b. that their security model will allow a hacker in to accomplish a. Check out their security overview page for some geez speak on how they protect your money.
We spent 45 minutes discussing security and I feel more comfortable now. I asked them to put together a video overview of the security they are using but basically its secure. They are using CashEdge which powers most of the online banks for authentication and they don't store any of your login information after you create your account. They also compared it to storing quicken files on your laptop and your laptop is stolen which would be worse than if someone was able to hack into Geezeo.
There are also mobile components to Geezeo. While I am not a mobile banker, by the looks of the Citibank ads all over NYC, there is a growing percentage that are mobile bankers. And the young'ns are using it more than ever. They also provide support via a MeeboMe widget.
I think the Geez'rs are smart by going after the college and university demographic. Students typically suck at managing their money and overspending on a daily basis. By using Geezeo they might be able to do a better job which could result in extra pocket money for the bars and clubs. Best of luck to Geezeo, if you have tried the service, please post your thoughts in the comments.
Picture of Google Phone from LG - Coming this Month
Unlike the previous image, this is no Photoshop version of Google Phone - it's real picture released by LG. The Google phone will be released around the iPhone launch but in Europe, not North America.
Dubbed LG-KU580, this CDMA phone provides one click access to GMail, Google Maps (the LG official says Google Earth?) and Google Web search. The design looks similar to LG "chocolate phone."
This will be released in Europe this week with a price tag of somewhere between $300 and $400. Also included is a a 2-megapixel camera, an MP3 player and Bluetooth.
Google's applications have been embedded into cell phones before but this is the first time its big three features - search, e-mail and mapping - have all been incorporated into one.
Full story at Korea Times [via, via]
Virtual Goods: the next big business model
This guest post is written by Susan Wu, a Principal with Charles River Ventures, where she focuses on digital media, software, and infrastructure. Susan is coproducing the Virtual Goods Summit this Friday at Stanford University - most of the companies mentioned below will be presenting.
The virtual worlds space has received tremendous press attention in the last year, fueled in no small part by Wild West stories of fortune and anarchy in worlds like Second Life and the plight of the Chinese gold farmer in World of Warcraft. But people aren't paying attention to the bigger story. While people preoccupy themselves with mocking the absurdities of some of these virtual worlds, the reality is that there are many businesses out there making meaningful amounts of money in virtual goods:
- Tencent is one of the largest Internet portals in China with over 250 million active user accounts. They generated $100 million+ in Q1 of 2007 and over 65% of their revenue comes from virtual goods.
- Habbo Hotel has over 75 million registered avatars in 29 countries and 90% of their $60 million+ yearly revenue comes from virtual goods.
- Gaia Online does over 50,000 person to person auctions and 1 million message board posts a day- making them the 3rd largest auction site and the 2nd largest message board on the Internet. Their average user consumes 1200 page views a month. They employ 3 people whose sole job it is to open snail mail envelopes full of cash that people send in for virtual goods.
- There's a commonly held misperception that virtual goods are only for online gamers. Both Dogster and HotorNot are succeeding with a hybrid ad/virtual goods business model. Currently, over 40% of HotorNot's revenue comes from virtual goods.
- Major mainstream brands are now buying advertising in the form of virtual goods in social networks. Gaians can now purchase and pimp their virtual Scion xBs. Coca Cola and Tencent partnered to allow Tencent's users to trade codes taken from real Coke cans for virtual objects in the Tencent network. Wangyou, a Chinese based social network, has also been extremely aggressive in experimenting with branded virtual goods.
Privacy: Get a free disposable phone number with Numbr
Web site Numbr provides free, anonymous, disposable phone numbers.
Similar to previously mentioned Craigsnumber Numbr is Craigsnumber re-branded with a lot of cool new features. Numbr supports 23 US cities, can forward calls to up to 2 phones, blocks telemarketers, and offers a Do Not Disturb option from 9PM to 8AM. Additionally, the app can also take voicemails and email you your disposable number's call history. If you ever feel wary about handing out your real number for a short term contact (say for Craigslist), Numbr is the perfect place to go.
Numbr [via UneasySilence]
Enter Zenter, Google Office is now complete
Google has snapped up yet another start-up - Zenter, which is building online presentations. This is yet-another-exit for YCombinator, the madrassa of the Web 2.0 crowd. In Microsoft world those are known as PowerPoints. Google had earlier bought Tonic Systems, a start-up that was working on similar technology but was more focused on backend technology. With this acquisition, Google has completed its online productivity suite - Docs, SpreadSheets, Calendar, Mail and Presentations. Now they are on equal footing with Zoho. (Check out the comparison between various online office suites over on ReadWriteWeb .)
The problem is that unless Google figures out a way to create a seamless integration between these online apps, these will all have limited utility. The other aspect of the Google Apps which the search giant needs to address is usability and interface. A lot of people like their minimalist approach to UI, but not me personally. Similarly, like many GMail users we are still unconvinced about Google's ability to provide an always-on service, and ensure the safety of data
AT&T kicks off Video Share rollout
Though phones that support it have been on the streets for a few weeks now, AT&T is just now getting official with its Video Share service. Though the feature is the first to bring 3G video calling to the US, excitement is a bit tempered by the fact that the service is one-way -- callers must manually switch feed directions to see each other, despite the fact that other UMTS networks across the globe already support two-way services. What's more, we can expect to get nickeled and dimed here: Video Share runs $4.99 a month for 25 minutes of usage, $9.99 for 60 minutes, or 35 cents per minute, regardless of whether the customer is already subscribed to a data plan. AT&T claims its "research" has shown a strong demand for stuff like this, but we think we'll wait for generation two (you know, when we can actually see each other at the same time and it's included with our already-pricey unlimited data). Look for Video Share to be available first in Atlanta, Dallas, and San Antonio, with a full rollout on AT&T's 3G network come late July.
Verizon FIOS plans to add HD VOD
Fiber to the premises (FTTP), has the potential to deliver the most advanced HD services today, and although it isn't available in most of the country, Verizon (and others) are bleeding money digging up neighborhoods all over the US to install the magical stuff. Just because you have fiber to your home doesn't mean life is perfect though, there are still plenty of things that can get in the way of your viewing pleasure -- like franchise agreements. Verizon recently announced that they were testing HD VOD in their labs and have an internal time line for launching the service -- that they aren't ready to share. But with their competition already offering this service in some areas they can't wait forever.
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Philips intros 20-inch 3D display -- no need for gaudy glasses
from Engadget by Darren Murph
Don't count Philips as the first outfit to dream up a 3D display that allowed you to leave the eyewear at home, but it looks like the technology is coming ever closer to the mainstream -- for better or worse. The firm has reportedly developed a 20-inch LCD "designed to increase brand awareness and attention value of products at point-of-sale locations," and is showing off the (literally) eye-popping effects at this week's InfoComm. Of course, this rendition seems to be aimed at businesses rather than consumer applications, but we'd expect to see more where this came from as the WOWvx-equipped lineup expands. The newest duo consists of a frame-mountable 20-3D2W01 (pictured above) and a more decorated 20-3D2W04 if you're wanting a bezel and stand. As expected, there's no word yet on pricing or availability, but feel free to peep another shot of the third-dimension after the break.Continue reading Philips intros 20-inch 3D display -- no need for gaudy glasses
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