Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Which mobile Skype client will win?

from GigaOM by Om Malik

Skype’s lack of desire to release a mobile client has opened a small window of opportunity for a few start-ups - iSkoot, Mobivox, and EQO. These companies are creating clients that run the Skype service inside a server farm, and allow you to make and receive Skype calls on your mobiles. It is no surprise, that they have received major infusion of venture dollars.

The latest to get a big fat round of funding is EQO, that just announced that it has raised $9 million from Venture West, Growth Works and BDC Capital. The company has raised over $12.5 million in funding.

EQO is also benefiting from VC interest in mobile VoIP, though I have some serious questions about the potential payoff. The big question, however, is that which of these three will emerge as an eventual winner. Will it be Skype, that will finally release a mobile client of its own? (Skype currently offers a Windows Mobile version of its client, though its functionality is limited.) Have your say in our poll.

Newsvine Relaunch Today: Build Your Own News Site

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Seattle-based news site Newsvine will relaunch this afternoon with significant changes to the user experience. They’re calling the release “Evergreen.”

Among the changes: like Netvibes, Pageflakes and other personalized homepages, users will now be able to move most modules on the Newsvine home page around, or delete them altogether. Users can also add whatever news feeds they want to the home page by adding a RSS feed module.

Until now, web services that allow customization generally put the feature in a standalone area. Yahoo has my.yahoo, for example, but doesn’t allow users to make changes to the main Yahoo home page. Like their often-copied feature of allowing user comments to news items, this may be another way that Newsvine reshapes the online news industry. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the New York Times, USA Today and other sites allow users to create their own version of the newspaper, possibly even allowing outside RSS feeds in, in the next year or so. This builds intense user loyalty and makes it much more likely they’ll spend even more time on the site.

Other features include the addition of local headlines and weather and a slideshow called “News In Pictures” that shows a continuous stream of AP pictures.

Newsvine also just got bigger, stretching from 900 to 1240 pixels. The extra width can be collapsed with a click.

Newsvine has raised just $1.25 million in a single round of financing in July 2005 from Second Avenue Partners. They have six employees. The site currently brings in 600,000 monthly unique visitors generating 3.5 million monthly page views.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Cameraphones Pass 50% Penetration Mark in USA

M:Metrics says that the number of cameraphone owners has climbed to 106 million in the United States, crossing the 50% threshold. Cameraphones are even more ubiquitous in European markets, led by the United Kingdom where three out of every four mobile subscribers own a camera phone. The measurement firm reports that the proliferation of this technology is driving a decline of one of the first sources of mobile entertainment revenue: the sale of wallpapers and phone graphics, as increasing numbers of people personalize their phone with photos taken on the device.

Cameraphone Penetration and Graphics Purchases: February 2007

Country	Penetration	% Who Purchased Screensaver or Wallpaper	% Who Saved Camera phone Photo as Screensaver / Wallpaper
US	51%	3.3	16.7
UK	75%	2.0	28.3
Germany	70%	2.0	20.4
France	63%	2.1	26.6
Spain	74%	2.6	31.2
Italy	69%	2.9	31.7

"While a cameraphone in the pocket of most mobile phone owners may have picked the proverbial pockets of graphics publishers, the penetration of this technology has a positive impact on operator data revenues overall as consumers increasingly purchase photo messaging bundles," said Mark Donovan, senior vice president and senior analyst, M:Metrics.

Despite a slackening of demand for graphics, Donovan notes that such content is used to good effect by purveyors of off-portal content to entice subscribers to sign up for subscriptions. "Graphics remain a preferred type of content because of the more attractive terms typically associated with licensing of branded graphical content compared with the revenue splits that music labels and publishers expect from ringtones. However, graphics publishers have to work a lot harder and offer compelling, branded content to generate consumer interest."

Photo messaging has consistently been among the most popular mobile applications across geographies that M:Metrics measures, with as many as 31.3 percent of mobile subscribers sending photos or videos to other phones, e-mail addresses or posting to blogs.

Used network services for photos/videos

August 2006			February 2007
Country	Subscribers	Percent	Subscribers	Percent
France	8,796,960	20.5	9,432,842	21.2
Germany	9,238,968	20.5	9,590,281	20.8
Italy	13,156,342	31.3	13,779,059	31.3
Spain	8,671,452	28.4	9,316,644	29.1
UK	13,363,233	30.7	13,187,929	29.6
US	28,218,336	14.5	30,692,545	14.8

"As the technological abilities and habits of mobile users evolve with the capabilities of the devices they own, new mobile content business opportunities are both created and destroyed," observed Donovan. "As we reported, the proliferation of musicphones is also expanding rapidly, so a natural question is how the music industry will respond as these connected creators potentially take a bite out of the ringtone market."

5min: A collective encyclopedia in form of 5 minute videos

from Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold

(Thanks, Trebor!)

5 mins combines several different smartmobby ideas and technologies in an excellent way: User-generated short videos, collective knowledge creation, peer-to-peer media sharing, open educational content:

5min is a place to find short video solutions for any practical question and a forum for people wanting to share their knowledge.
The vision behind 5min is a very simple one: any solution can be visually explained in no more than 5 minutes. Our aim is to create the first communal Life Videopedia allowing users from all over the globe to contribute their knowledge by sharing visual guides covering arts, business, fashion, sports, health, tech, food, and much more.

5min's basic philosophy is that everybody is an expert in something. The video era gives us the technological opportunity to share our collective knowledge and gather it onto one platform. This is what 5min aims to be – a platform for users, a platform for creators, a platform for talent and anyone that has something to teach.

In order to bring to life our vision of creating a comprehensive Life Videopedia, 5min gives each creator a private promotional Studio – a space to show his/her skills, and share his/her secrets.

Kyte Launches: More Rich Media Streaming Presence

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Keeping everyone aware of what you are up to every fleeting, uninteresting moment of your life is a hot area for startups right now. Newly launched Kyte seems to fall somewhere between Twitter and Ustream, two services that let users send a constant stream of data about themselves to interested friends (albeit in very different ways).

Kyte is at its core a media player. Users create an account and set up channels. They can then drag photos, video and text into the channels and interact with people viewing the content.

The service is extremely flexible in its approach to getting content into and out of the service. Users can access their account and add content from their (java enabled) mobile phone, the browser or via email. Viewers can interact with content on the Kyte website, their phone and other websites where users embed content via a widget player.

Kyte can be a place users put occasional content, or a live, Usstream-style live stream of their life. The company says “You could even create a “LifeStream”, a minute-by-minute live show that is published in real-time directly to your MySpace page, website, blog, or mobile phone.”

The company has raised a round of financing ($2.25 million, says Om Malik) from Atomico Investments, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards and Ron Conway.

OpenDNS Adds Short-Cut Service

from TechCrunch by John Biggs

DNS is boring, but OpenDNS has added a new Shortcut feature that lets you visit URLs without all that nasty typing. Shortcuts are short, multi-letter abbreviations for your favorite sites. Instead of typing “www.nytimes.com,” you can just type “NYT.” You can also create short-cuts for popular search sites (”g monkeys” to search Google for Monkeys, for example).

Tiny Startup Mozy Nails Multi-Million Dollar GE Storage Contract

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Online backup and storage service Mozy has quietly grown to 175,000 customers since launching in April 2006. That’s not bad for the Utah-based company that runs the service, Berkeley Data Systems, which raised just $2 million in venture capital back in 2005. The company went big time today, however, when they announced a multi-million dollar deal with General Electric, which bought MozyPro (the enterprise version of Mozy) for all of its 300,000+ worldwide employees.

MozyPro is similar to the consumer Mozy service, but includes server backups, 24/7 support and admin control for the IT department. The service launched last December and 3,200 businesses are now using. GE is now one of those businesses.

Mozy and MozyPro are administered through a desktop client and automatically backs up data on the PC every two hours. Thirty days worth of versions are retained, and users can go back and restore any of those versions.

Rate card pricing for consumers is free for up to 2GB of storage, and $5/month for unlimited storage. Businesses pay $4/month for each employee, plus $0.50/GB/month of stored data. Bandwidth is free. As a side note, GE certainly didn’t pay rate card rates - a deal this large would have a substantial discount.

The company is backed by Wasatch Partners, Tim Draper and Drew Major. They have 25 employees.

We first mentioned Mozy back in 2006 when we covered the major online storage providers. On the consumer side, Mozy competes with Carbonite and others. At the enterprise level, Iron Mountain and EVault are the entrenched competitors, although Mozy says they have a 10x cost advantage over those services. Google and Microsoft will also have products in this space.

A very large untapped market for online backups are the OEM PC manufacturers, who should be providing a free trial with every PC. Mozy is now positioned nicely to land such a deal. After a grueling due diligence process by GE, the PC guys should be confident that Mozy is as secure as their competitors. And charging 1/10 of what they do is great for the bottom line.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

JS-Kit: Web 2.0 For Lazy People

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

We first covered JS-Kit last November when we talked about their quick embed code that lets you add comments to any site where JavaScript is accepted. Since then, JS-Kit has been creating more widgets making adding user interaction to any site dead simple (2 lines of code per widget). JS-Kit has also grown from a one-man-show into a full company after adding 5 of the 12 engineers from Filmloop (which shut down earlier this year). Since then, they’ve been turning out a new widget every two weeks.

JS-Kit is growing a suite of widgets that will help site owners optimize their website content, eventually allowing website owners to easily optimize their site based on how people surf their site. Think Baynote, but for the little guys.

JS-Kit’s current widget suite consists of comments, five-star ratings, and a polling widget added this week. The new polling widget supports an unlimited number of questions, an expiration date, and only becomes visible after the site owner publishes it. Each widget has a fully customizable look through CSS and consists of two lines of code. The first line is a “div” tag brought to life by a second line of JavaScript code.

Each widget is by default differentiated by the URL of the page it is installed on, but can also be given a unique identifier by the user so that a page can have multiple instances of a widget, such as founder Lev Walkin’s photo site. JS-Kit is combating fraud by logging a combination of user cookies, IP, and user agent. The degree of this security can be throttled by the administrator. However, one major disadvantage of the JavaScript implementation is that it will not run on sites that break JavaScript code (MySpace).

Each widget also has administrative capabilities, assigned by cookie to the first computer to accesses the widget code. The administrator is able to moderate any comments that Akismet’s spam filter may miss or create new polls. JS-Kit has a user settings page that lets you view your activity across JS-Kit sites and reclaim administrator rights on a domain if you switch computers or lose the JS-Kit cookie.

To make these more than just website web 2.0 “bling”, JS-Kit is letting the widgets talk to each other. So far they’ve integrated comments and ratings into one widget that allows people to leave comments along with their individual rating, which combine on the server side into one overall rating for the object the widget is attached to. On top of these widgets, JS-Kit will be releasing a meta-widget later this week so that surfers can receive recommendations for your site’s top content (pictured right).

Comment and rating widget after the jump… (more…)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Ten Minutes with ShoZu

from tenminut.es by Jeremy Wagstaff

What is it: ShoZu is a free service to ease uploading of video, photos and music from your cellphone to the Web. The company calls itself “a provider of mobile media exchange services” and describes its services (quite succinctly as) allowing “consumers to download and upload photos, videos, music, text and other digital content to and from the handset without the need to open a mobile browser, wait for pages to load, interrupt phone calls, start over in the event of a dropped connection, or sync to a PC.”

Exec summary: It does what it promises to do. Well.

My ten minutes: Sign up is easy and free of dodgy and misleading byways (“invite your friends! Oh, we already have!”) Once you’ve given the basics and have an account (free) you need to download the software. This is usually where things get painful, but I didn’t find them to be with ShoZu. Enter your phone number, get an SMS message with a link in it, and download it from there. The software works with most phones, although I noticed Palm OS is not supported (Windows Mobile Treos are.)

ShoZu doesn’t actually host the photos and stuff, so you need to have an account with another provider. In fact, this is a blessing: Who needs another account? It’s an impressive list of services that ShoZu works with, from Flickr to the BBC’s news photo submission service. You can configure settings with your accounts on any or all of these services, either on a computer or on your phone.

Shozu1 Once the software is installed on your phone, just take a photo or video and a menu pops up asking whether you want to post said multimedia work there. Say yes and off it goes in the background. The only sign that something is happening is, at least in a Nokia phone, a little arrow in the corner of the screen.

There are other parts of ShoZu worth a look. You can, for example, back up all your phone contacts securely to a website, if you like. You can add GPS tags to photos, if your phone supports it. There are things called ZuCasts which are like mini TV programs downloaded to your phone in the background.

Quibbles? Couldn’t see any easy way of adding more than one phone to an account, meaning you’d have to have more than one account. Who doesn’t have more than one phone these days? Also, I could never be quite sure on my phone what photos had actually been uploaded. I only discovered I’d backed up my contacts when I wandered around the website. Would be better to get some email notification of this, although one can subscribe to an RSS feed of everything one has uploaded.

Verdict: If you take photos on your phone and haven’t found an easy way to share them away from your computer, give it a shot.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

The two reasons people say no to your idea

from Seth's Blog by Seth Godin

"It's been done before" "It's never been done before"

Even though neither one is truthful, accurate or useful, you need to be prepared for both.

Ramp generates electricity from cars passing over it

from Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder

Mark Frauenfelder: 200704181449

200704181449

Here is a proposal for an energy generation system. The idea is to pump a generator when a car drives over panels attached to the generator.

I hope the people who came up with this idea realize that the energy they get from the generator will be less than the extra fuel the car must to burn to drive the generator. Link Jon-o says:

Mark mentions that this will just result in more gas being burned by cars, completely offsetting any power generated, but cars spend a lot of time *braking* as well -- if a device like this was put near the bottom of a downward slope, or somewhere else where cars need to slow down, it would be making use only of energy that would otherwise be wasted as heat in the brakes.

(Would this work for hybrid and electric cars that use regenerative braking, too? -- Mark)

Daniel says:

My first thought at seeing the title of your post on the electricity generating ramp was that it would be energy inefficient, but then I realized that if it were on a downhill where you would be breaking anyway, it doesn't matter if it slows your car down - it's a little side benefit and less wear on your breaks. Their YouTube video of it is stupid and wasteful, but the idea doesn't have to be. Also, using it as a speedbump as implied by the article is another bonus, in areas where that's necessary.

US exposes 1000's of SSNs for years in web-accessible database

from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin

Xeni Jardin: Tens of thousands of social security numbers belonging to Americans who received loans or financial assistance from the government were exposed for years in a publicly accessible database. Snip from New York Times article:

Officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau, which maintains the database, were evidently unaware that the Social Security numbers were accessible in the database until they were notified last week by a farmer from Illinois, who stumbled across the database on the Internet.
“I was bored, and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what was out there,” said Marsha Bergmeier, president of Mohr Family Farms in Fairmount, Ill.
The first link that appeared in the search results was for her farm’s Web site. The second was for a site that she had never heard of, FedSpending.org, which provides a searchable database of federal government expenditures. The site uses information from the Census database.
Ms. Bergmeier said she was able to identify almost 30,000 records in the database that contained Social Security numbers. “I was stunned,” she said. “The numbers were right there in plain view in this database that anyone can access.”

Reader comment: Gabriela says,

I saw your post on BoingBoing about the USDA privacy breach that The New York Times reported and wanted to let you know The Sunlight Foundation just unveiled a new project -- Real Time Investigations – that also had exclusive coverage of this story and blogged about it moments before the Times piece ran.
Real Time Investigations is an open source journalism effort that reveals the behind-the-scenes research involved in petitioning the federal government to make its information more accessible to citizens, constituents and journalists. We first learned of the extraordinary privacy breach by the USDA when a user of FedSpending.org, an online database of government spending created by OMB Watch and funded by us last year, reported it to OMB Watch late last week.

Download Multiple Flickr Pictures in a Batch [Original Images, not Resized Thumbnails]

from Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Allagappan from NIT Trichy is looking for some Flickr mass downloader tools to help him choose and download Flickr images in bulk from flickr.com website to the hard-drive. It's so surprising that Flickr doesn't provide an official tool for downloading images from their website but thanks to the API, Flickr enthusiasts have developed some excellent Flickr Photo downloading tools and our favorite is Downloadr. Download Flickr Pictures in Bulk

Download Flickr Pictures in Bulk

Think of Downloadr as an offline browser for Flickr photos. [Get Downloadr Windows only, ~300kb zip] With Downloadr, you can search, browse and batch download multiple Flickr pictures based on image tag (s), Flickr username, Groups Pools, Flickr user sets or even Interesting Flickr pictures of any particular day. Images are fetched only from public Flickr photostreams though you have an option to authenticate and download your private Flickr pictures via Downloadr. The developer homepage is in German but the tool itself has an English interface. More discussion on the Flickr groups. If you are using Flickr, Downloadr is a must have utility. Related Flickr search tools - FlickrCash, Flickr Leech

© 2007 Digital Inspiration - Technology, à la Carte | Subscribe | About Us

Friday, April 20, 2007

Google Web Conferencing Software has Full Screen Video and Application Sharing

from Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Google has officially entered the turf of WebEx, Microsoft Live Meeting and Adobe Connect with the acquisiton of Marratech, a web and video conferencing company based in Sweden. There's a possibility that Google will integrate Marratech web conferencing features into Google Apps Primer and Google Office to make these "virtual office" offerings more complete and compelling for the corporate world.

The Marratech video conferencing client is done in Java and available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. But it is possible to participate in Marratech meetings via the web browser without downloading the Marratech client. Currently, the Marratech client is free while companies are required to license their server software. Like other web conferencing software, Marratech allows users to hold virtual e-meetings and share application sceens, webpages, images and documents in the Whiteboard area. Participants can use annotation tools like pointers and markers to highlight presentations or draw on the screen. Marratech video conferencing client allows participants to see other in real time using web cameras. All participants can record and playback the entire net meeting including voice, video and whiteboard.Download Marratech brochures - Client, Server

© 2007 Digital Inspiration - Technology, à la Carte | Subscribe | About Us

ImageKind Scores Partnership With Flickr

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

When we wrote about Photo printing site ImageKind in February, the company said they were close to announcing a large portal distribution partnership.

Earlier this month a reader suggested to us that the partnership might be with Flickr based on some code that appeared on the ImageKind site that accessed the Flickr API. Today, that reader turned out to be right - Flickr launched integration with ImageKind. Flickr users can now create very high quality framed prints of their photos for themselves, or sell them through an online store. More information on the Flickr partners page where they also show the moo, qoop and Zazzle integrations…

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