photos, videos, music -- visual search

things we built


photos - visual search interface for stock photos  (/card is for photo greetings)

http://picturesandbox.com
http://picturesandbox.com/card


videos - visual search interface for videos  (/card is for video greetings)

http://footagesandbox.com
http://footagesandbox.com/card


music - visual music discovery interface for indie and mainstream music

http://mp3sandbox.com/index2.php   (mainstream artists)
http://mp3sandbox.com/cdbaby      (indie artists)


visual news is next -- filtered and prioritized news/rss, with drag-2-share

then a visual social networking (MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn are too text heavy and takes too much work, in my opinion)

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power to the consumers

http://whocallsme.com/

Recent Phone Call Reports

This is a user supplied database of phone numbers of telemarketers, non-profit organizations, charities, political surveyors, SCAM artists, and other companies that don't leave messages, disconnect once you answer, ignore the Do-Not-Call List regulations, and simply interrupt your day.

If you received a strange call, most likely you are not the only one. Search for this phone number to see the reports of others. If there are no reports yet, leave your comment to start a conversation.

• 508-438-2672

  pre recorded message, hung up... they have called before
• 866-234-6351

  I have been getting phone calls from this number thesedays as well. They call 3 times a day - 9:30am, 1:30pm, 3:30pm. Who is it?   I am worrying that they may charge for listening their ...
• 178-267-3000

  I am on O2 and keep getting calls from this number it is doing my head in. I can't wait to answer there call so I can tell them to F**K OFF
• 866-310-9662

  can someone please send me a fax program with an autodialer...    i got a call from these people this morning, called the # to ask to be removed from the list and they hung up!
• 888-398-2271

  This is a bogus call center who is using the Iraq war as a means to get money.  This is not sponsored by the Navy or anyone who is directly connected to the military.  If you wish to ...

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footagesandbox vs spffy video

FootageSandbox.com vs Spffy.com (video)

video search is an entirely different beast; and video for stock purposes is an entirely different planet. So we split off to a different site. The use cases are also very very different. YouTube videos are unlikely to be useful as stock. And we do one-click preview that remains on the site, rather than sends the user to YouTube - search results are identical for keyword "ferrari."

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picturesandbox vs spffy photos

PictureSandbox.com vs Spffy.com

I believe that by offering more thumbnails in the search results, PictureSandbox enables image buyers to more efficiently find suitable images -- I call it "glance test," which is faster than paginating. Also, look closely at the results for the keyword "flowers" -- different collections have different strengths.

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Amazon’s $100,000 Startup Challenge

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

Anyone out there with a great idea for building a startup around Amazon Web Services can enter a $100,000 challenge that Amazon is sponsoring. Amazon's collection of Web infrastructure services include hosted storage (S3), compute cycles (EC2), computer-to-computer messaging (SQS), payments (FPS), and an on-demand workforce (Mechanical Turk). AWS has already attracted more than 265,000 developers. And some of the services are growing at a nice clip. For instance, S3 has gone from storing 800 million files in July 2006 to 5 billion files in April 2007 to 10 billion now in October. So usage of S3 alone has doubled since last April. Companies like Zillow already base their Websites on Amazon's back-end infrastructure. Amazon wants to get a lot more.

The $100,000 will be split in half between $50,000 cash and a $50,000 credit for Amazon's infrastructure services. The winner will also get an investment offer from Amazon. The deadline for applying for the prize is October 28.

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