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Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Nifty and dangerous: FlickrCash
from StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog by Andy Goetze
As FlickrCash´s founder Augustine Fou puts it, using Flickr´s API "FlickrCash turns Flickr into the world´s largest stock image marketplace by helping image buyers more efficiently find images and image owners to sell them, by accepting payments for them and archiving licenses for public inspection".
To get the basic idea, you can view here for example the impressive Sunset Lightbox of FlickrCash´s developer Jesse Skinner, or watch the FlickrCash demo.
read more at StockPhotoTalk http://www.stockphototalk.com/phototalk/2007/04/flickrcash.html
Monday, April 16, 2007
Coghead Announces 17,000 Developers Building Applications Visually
from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington
Silicon Valley based Coghead is making a bit of a splash today at the Web 2.0 Expo. They’re officially launching, although it’s largely ceremonial: they’ve been open to the public since October 2006.
I wrote in detail about Coghead last year. The company competes in the “online access” space (a reference to Microsoft Access). We’ve written about Coghead competitors in the past, including Dabble DB, Zoho Creator and WyaWorks. The primary use of these products is to create business applications that deal with everything from task tracking through to purchase orders.
What is special about CogHead is that users building applications with the product require less technical skills because the process is (mostly) all drag-and-drop and visual. CogHead is unique because of just how easy it is to create forms, views and apps - the design view allows users to create fields by dragging and dropping them onto a form. The user can lay the fields out and place them on the page, making the application they build more user friendly and easier on the eyes. Building the logic behind the forms is also a graphical process, the user takes objects and actions and drags them into a flow chart that is similar to a data-flow or logic diagram. There are a number of starter applications to help users get comfortable with the platform.
Coghead is also announcing today that 17,000 developers are now working on the platform.
The company has raised $11.2 million in two rounds of venture capital from American Capital Strategies Ltd., SAP Ventures and El Dorado Ventures. They have 21 employees in their Silicon Valley headquarters and another 15 in China. 
Boonty: The Casual Gamer's Playground
Boonty brings a new wrinkle to the crowded online video game space. Somewhat surprising, the most avid consumer of online games is the 25-45 year old female demographic. These long time causal gamers have taken their gaming habits online. Boonty accommodates them with a free, multiplayer platform that lets individuals enjoy retail-quality games in a community atmosphere with advanced features, such as in-game chatting.
Most of these features are integrated in the recently launched beta version of Boonty's Cafe.com treats each game as a social opportunity. The site's library comprises high-quality casual games specifically designed to feature maximum community functionality. Membership is free, and players can enjoy private and public game rooms, multiplayer chat, and personalization capabilities such as avatar creation and item-level purchases for game play enhancement.
With one billion people online worldwide, Boonty CEO Mathieu Nouzareth believes his market is enormous and plans to monetize the platform by selling virtual goods. Cafe.com's gold-coin microtransaction economy provides a clever ay to monetize the social networks springing up around specific games. When players run out of lives or turns, want to harass an opponent, or stock up on additional ammunition , they can purchase additional goods. The business model lets the teeming masses further growth without demanding up-front subscriptions or full-game purchases. Micropayments are the quarters of the virtual game-playing world.
(source: http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/12692)
Fotowoosh Will Turn Any Picture Into A 3D Image
from TechCrunch, written by: Michael Arrington Fotowoosh, a new service from Maryland-based startup Freewebs, will turn any image (preferably an outdoor image) into a 3D model. They went live on Friday. Examples of what the service can do are above (along with the original 2D images. A video is here which shows more examples.
The 3D image is constructed in Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) format, meaning you currently need a VRML reader to see it (future browsers will likely build this functionality in). In a week or so, the company say, users will be able to upload a picture and have a 3D animated image returned to them in a Flash widget that can be embedded on any website.
When you upload an image to Fotowoosh, their software tears it apart and distinguishes the sky, ground and vertical elements within the photo, then cuts and folds it into a 3D model:
Our system automatically constructs simple “pop-up” 3D models, like those one would find in a children’s book, out of a single outdoor image. The system labels each region of an outdoor image as ground, vertical, or sky. Line segments fitted to the ground-vertical boundary in the image and an estime of the horizon’s position provide the necessary information to determine where to “cut” and “fold” in the image. The model is then popped up, and the image is texture mapped onto the model.
This is the creation of Derek Hoiem, a PhD candidate in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, who’s now working with the company. Additional information on the intellectual property behind Fotowoosh is here and here (these links auto-download a pdf and a powerpoint document).
Microsoft is working on something related to this in their Live Labs group called Photosynth (more information here). The product will construct a 3D model based on lots of photos of the same thing or general area from different angles.
Freewebs raised $11 million in venture capital in August 2006 from Columbia Capital and Novak Biddle. The company’s main product is a website building tool that draws 18 million or so visitors per month. Shervin Pishevar, the company’s president, say that Fotowoosh will be a standalone service, and they’ll also integrate it with offerings from partners as well as the Freewebs service itself.
Google gets big company disease?
from Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger by Robert Scoble The two guys who started Dodgeball leave in a hissy fit. Google bought Dodgeball in mid-2005. Dodgeball was the pre-cursor to Twitter and Jaiku (albeit a bit more focused on just cell phones than either of those newer services are). Last summer it was the rage with many of the San Francisco cool kids, er, influencers. I remember Irina and Eddie using it almost non stop on our trip to Montana. So, why didn’t Google get it enough to give these two more resources? Easy. Same reason I couldn’t convince Microsoft to buy Flickr before Yahoo did. It’s a small thing. A stupid thing. A lame thing. Big companies have trouble grokking small things like Dodgeball. Heck, how many of you have called Twitter “really lame” in the past two months? Tons! More evidence that Google is having difficulty getting small things? I heard a rumor that Google executive Marissa Mayer almost killed the Google Reader team because she didn’t think it would get popular. Feed readers are still “small things.” Seeing business value in them is difficult. It seems that management is trying to get a handle on the chaos that is Google but in doing so is removing some of what made Google attractive to entrepreneurial developers. What are you hearing from your Google friends?
HTC subsidiary will sell 3.5G data cards
from Engadget by Evan Blass
Not content with simply making some of the best smartphones on the planet, Taiwanese powerhouse HTC is now looking to get into the data card game, with the company prepping a new HSDPA card through its BandRich subsidiary. The C100, as it's known, will offer download speeds up to 7.2Mbps where available, and is said to be just the first of many mobile modems BandRich is planning. DigiTimes is reporting that the C100 will be priced north of €200 ($269), so although we don't yet know when/where these are gonna drop, it looks like you'll have to part with at least a few C notes if this model lands in your neck of the woods.[Via jkOTR]
Most sophisticated Flickr/CC mashup yet
from Creative Commons, written by Mike Linksvayer, April 15th, 2007 http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7390.com
FlickrCash uses the Flickr API to search by CC license, build lightboxes, and keep a record of licensed photos you intend to use.
Augustine Fou, creator of FlickrCash, tells us:
I created FlickrCash because I found many really beautiful photos on Flickr but could not use them for “commercial” purposes like design work for clients, because there was no way to document I had a license to use it. FlickrCash is BOTH a search/find interface to more quickly find images on Flickr, and also a way to document that you have a license to use a specific image.
Sample of image search (currently only searches Flickr repository): http://flickrcash.com/?k=flowers
Sample of archived license, available for inspection at any time: http://flickrcash.com/license/27i8d5sf
With this publicly archived license the image buyer can definitively prove they have the right to use a specific image for a specific purpose — so they can use it for client design work. Both image owner and image buyer are named signatories to the agreement, and an official date/time stamp is obtained from the NIST Atomic Clock to document the exact time the license was executed.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Is Digg the Result of Cumulative Advantage?
April 15, 2007 — 05:13 PM PDT — by Pete Cashmore
The NYTimes has a fascinating piece today about how the “rich get richer”, or popular media gets more popular. In other words, things rise to the top not because they are better quality than the alternatives, but because people copy what their friends do: a tiny rise in popularity an early stage can mean massive popularity further down the line.
But the theory has much deeper consequences when it comes to the success or failure of startups themselves. We love to think that there’s some kind of magic formula for the perfect social site, but the results seem far more random: if you rerun history, it could turn out that a whole different set of startups rise to the top. That’s because the first few users influenced the final outcome of those startups, and as soon as one site hits “critical mass”, everybody gravitates towards that site. So imagine a world in which Reddit had a few thousand more influential users than Digg: it may have won in the long term. This theory also tells us that Digg will never hit the mainstream: it is so heavily seeded with geeks that it will continue to attract that demographic and alienate non-geeks.
Atari Gets Into the User-Created Online World Game
from GigaOM by Wagner James Au In the future, everyone will be in the virtual world business for fifteen minutes. UK game industry pub MCV reports that Atari, the venerable company that launched the videogame industry, is now developing a user-created online social world of its own. With Atari’s announcement, there are now at least eleven upcoming virtual worlds which emphasize user-developed content, or at least cite Second Life as a role model. For those keeping track: Atari is joining an already overflowing roster that includes Sony’s Home, Viacom’s as-yet-unnamed world, along with start-ups Areae, Croquet, HiPiHi, Kaneva, Multiverse, Ogoglio, Outback Online, and Whirled. (SL blogger Onder Skall just posted a marvelously helpful guide to most of these worlds and more.) With the market so crowded, nearly all of these projects are almost certainly doomed to fail, or just as likely, modestly succeed as niche metaverses. And why are three major multinational media corporations trying their hand in this upstart genre at all? Used to be, the term “user-created” gave game companies hives, terrified as they are with legal liability. And Second Life, while popular, is still far off from having the numbers of paying customers that companies like Sony and Atari (now a division of EU publishing giant Infogrames) are used to dealing with. What we’re seeing, I think, is game publishers slowly learning to apply the logic of Web 2.0 on their own medium. Creating content is expensive, and with the sole exception of World of Warcraft (8 million users and still growing), involves an increasingly futile struggle to retain subscribers. Traditional online worlds require a large team of designers and artists constantly adding new content, for fear that players will quickly churn through the existing experiences, get bored, and leave. (Subsequently, most MMOs spike in growth, then quickly plateau and begin declining.) Going the user-created route means new content on a regular basis, produced by subscribers, with the company only spending money to foster and police it. That aside, the next question is whether these companies will allow their customers to retain IP rights to the content they create. While young and hungry startups can dare to do that, a la Second Life, major corporations are institutionally unwilling to cede any rights. Then again, with the competition already so fierce, they’re likely to start rethinking that assumption soon.
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