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Posterous is a new blogging tool that forgos some of the traditional dashboards and will simply let you write the post in your favorite e-mail tool. Any photos, music, or videos you attach to your message will show up in a new blog post, which can later be administered on the Web. There's no sign-up, and in fact the first time you send a message to post@posterous.com it'll automatically create your blog and Posterous account for you.Once registered you'll still get a way to create posts in your browser. There's a simple WYSIWYG editor, and a way to go back and edit previous creations. Like Tumblr, there's also a [...]Go to site
Amazon today announced that it is releasing its persistent storage option, called Elastic Block Service (EBS), to its suite of Amazon Web Services cloud computing options. The company announced this direction in April.Previously, data associated with EC2 jobs was attached to the jobs themselves; developers did not have access to their files and information except through EC2. With EBS, developers can create cloud-based file systems that they can access from whatever applications they wish. Amazon's other cloud storage systems, S3 and SimpleDB, don't offer this low level access. Based on the scalable Amazon Web Services infrastructure, EBS will be tolerant of most failures, but "not as redundant as S3 storage," according to the RightScale blog. However, Amazon customers will be able to backup snapshots of their EBS installations into S3.EBS volumes will be available in sizes from 1 GB to 1 TB. The service will cost ten cents per gigabyte per month.Further reading:Werner Vogels: Elastic Block Store has launched.AWS blog: Bring us your data.RightScale blog: Amazon's Elastic Block Store explained.
On Wednesday night, Photosynth, a technology demo from Microsoft Live Labs, is graduating from its "ooh, that's pretty" status to being a viable Web service for consumers.The technology, which takes a grouping of photographs and stitches them into a faux 3D environment, can now be implemented with photos you've taken on your digital camera or mobile phone, and converted right on your computer. Previously, the process of stitching these photos together took weeks of processing on specially configured server arrays. With its latest version, Microsoft has managed to shrink that into around the time it takes to upload your photos.Microsoft is giving users 20GB of online storage for their Photosynth collections. Photosynth product manager Joshua Edwards tells me this can easily fit 60 or more "synths" made up of around 150 to 200 photographs apiece--the higher end of what's recommended for what Edwards calls an optimum or "synthy" experience. Users who are making really neat collections will be granted additional space.I spent the past few days building my own Photosynths and finally managed to get the knack for how to shoot correctly by the third one. While Microsoft has largely pushed it as a way to build jaw-dropping 3D-like environments, I'd argue to say it's a far simpler way to take super detailed shots of a wall or single room without breaking the bank on a high megapixel SLR. That said, Photosynth will take any resolution of photos you throw at it.
This synth I created uses close to 300 photos, although you can make ones with many less. Part of the creation process involves learning how to take photos for it to recognize how objects relate to one another.(Credit: CNET Networks/Josh Lowensohn)One of the most impressive parts of Photosynth is how damn fast it is. Over a decent broadband connection you'll immediately see large thumbnails that quickly begin to sharpen as data fills in the missing pixels. You can continue to zoom into these areas and they'll sharpen up even more on some of the super high-resolution shots. The streaming and rendering technology behind Photosynth is Seadragon, another project from the Microsoft Live Labs universe. Users have always had to download a special Seadragon-based plug-in to view other people's synths. The new twist with the latest plug-in now comes with a desktop uploader that can be used to add your own collection to the Photosynth universe. This runs with complete autonomy from your browser, so you don't have to worry about it stopping if you close out your browser. It also works in both IE 7 and Firefox 3, making it cross-platform--at least for Microsoft. If you're a Mac user looking to get your hands on some Photosynth action you'll have to keep waiting. The focus on Photosynth will remain on the PC for the time being.One thing that's missing from this version of Photosynth is a way to synth pre-existing photo collections, or sets of photos taken from community sites. This is the most useful for things like common landmarks, and is clearly something that can be done with the right photo database--something we saw in that really nifty video from Siggraph last week. In the case of Photosynth, once you've uploaded a batch of photos you can't simply upload more to it later. Gary Flake, who heads up Microsoft's Live Labs, says this is something that's coming later on down the road. For now, you'll just have to plan ahead.Note: We've got a video coming up soon with Flake and News.com's Ina Fried chatting about the technology behind Photosynth. In the meantime, if you want to explore my synth of the outside of the CBS Interactive offices in downtown San Francisco, go here.
Yahoo's Widget Channel software lets TVs run network-enabled applications such as this one for Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing service.(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo on Wednesday announced an effort to provide the software underpinnings of network-enabled TV, a move that could transform not only what it means to watch TV but also what it means to advertise on it.Though the TV experience has been spiced up by voting for American Idol contestants, it generally has retained its famously passive character. Yahoo wants to change this by bringing a version of its Yahoo Widget Engine, a software foundation that can run small applications called widgets, to network-enabled TVs.This new version, called the Widget Channel, will resemble the version that's available for PCs, but will come with a different user interface to let programmers build widgets that can be controlled from a distance with a remote control, said Patrick Barry, Yahoo's vice president of connected TV at Yahoo.Yahoo's hope is the move will bring its clout on the Internet to a new domain."Our goal is to aggregate a very large, multimillion-person audience across a number of devices with our standard platforms so we can start to address the audience in a unified consistent way, and ultimately create a liquid advertising market," Barry said.Yahoo is working on partnerships with TV makers to have the software built in and integrated with TV functions. "I'm quite sure there are going to be products on this," Barry said. "I expect to see some things next year."A first example of the technology emerged at the Intel Developer Forum on Wednesday during a speech by Eric Kim, general manager of Intel's Digital Home Group. A demonstration of the technology showed widgets for monitoring eBay auctions, using the Twitter microblogging service, and viewing Flickr photographs.Natural alliesIntel and Yahoo are natural allies in the technology effort. Both companies are powerful in their current markets, but as much in the giant consumer electronics market. Intel wants to sell processors--in this case the newly named Media Processor CE 3100 that had been code-named Canmore, and Yahoo wants to expand the reach of its content and ads.But history shows the effort won't be easy; the consumer electronics industry has withstood years of attempted incursions by computing companies employing various "convergence" strategies.One of Intel's chief advantages is that so much existing software and programming tools already are compatible with the widely available x86 processor family used in all of today's PCs. "We see the PC architecture coming to consumer electronics over the next few years and that driving a ton of value," Barry said.Though the Intel-Yahoo demonstration used a system based on Intel's processors, the Yahoo technology will run on other hardware, Barry said. And because it uses platform-independent standards such as HTML and Flash, programmers won't have to worry about having to adapt their widgets for the underlying hardware, he added.The software can work in different modes, including a sidebar that overlays part of the TV image and a full-screen mode that takes over completely.A new ad marketNaturally, Yahoo is eyeing the ad business that it expects will come with the Widget Channel, though it won't be the sole conduit for advertisers.Yahoo believes the Widget Channel will come with the best features of both TV and Web advertising, Barry said."We're not getting into this game for our health," he said, pointing out that television ad spending is still five times that of online spending. "Yahoo will provide advertising services to this platform, but we're not going to be the only ones. And we're not going to be a gatekeeper or tollkeeper," Barry said.Users will be able to select TV widgets from a gallery, but the Widget Channel software will be built into the TV, Barry said.Among those developing TV widgets are Blockbuster, CBS Interactive, CinemaNow, Cinequest, Disney-ABC Television Group, eBay, GE, Group M, Joost, MTV, Samsung Electronics, Schematic, Showtime, Toshiba, and Twitter, Yahoo said. (CNET is a division of CBS Interactive.)
Facebook has simply gotten too big for downtown Palo Alto, where it has been headquartered since founder Mark Zuckerberg uprooted the company from dorm rooms at Harvard. With over 600 employees now on its payroll, Facebook will be moving to a bigger facility at the Stanford Research Park outside town--a former HP building."This new space is the next step in our growth and positions us well to continue looking for a long term campus solution while also allowing employees to work together as much as possible," a statement from Facebook read. The company plans to complete the move in the first quarter of 2009. They will, however, probably keep the downtown headquarters around, both for space and nostalgia's sake."Palo Alto has been a great home for many start-ups and we are confident that with our move, other companies will occupy and thrive in the vacated spaces," the statement read. "We will likely continue to have space in downtown Palo Alto as well. We have loved our time in downtown Palo Alto and consider it part of the DNA here at Facebook. Many of our employees live in the area and will continue to be a part of the downtown community."Facebook has, however, gotten rid of a housing subsidy offered to employees who opt to live in Palo Alto.
(Credit: Zoho)Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet, is not afraid of the going up against Microsoft Office or Google Apps. He is also the CEO of Zoho, which recently announced that it had achieved one million registrations (between 300,000 and 350,000 log on to the service monthly) for its cloud-based set of productivity applications. Vembu is now making a financial case that Zoho is better positioned than Google to take on Microsoft in the upcoming office suite sweepstakes.Vembu's analysis is based on a comparison of revenue per employee and profit per employee metrics. "The gap in revenue per employee between Google and SAP and salesforce.com, for instance, indicates that Google would more likely be more interested in what eBay does or in monetizing YouTube than in Zoho or salesforce.com's barely profitable business. Companies invest in what generates the best return on investment," Vembu explained to me. 
(Credit: Zoho)In an email explaining his financial analysis, Vembu wrote:We simply don't believe Google has the rational business incentive to go deep into the business/IT software category. The lower revenue and profit per employee figures would be tolerable if there were huge growth opportunities there; but when very successful companies like Adobe and Intuit pull in revenues well shy of a Yahoo, when even the enterprise software leader SAP is the same size of Google (Google makes more in profit per employee than SAP makes in revenue per employee), it is fairly clear this market is not going to make a material contribution to Google's growth and profitability objectives. So what is Google's plan here? It is fairly obvious they are in it to put Microsoft on the defensive on its home turf, so that Microsoft's offensive capability in the internet is diminished. It is also perfectly clear why Microsoft wants to be an internet player -- as Google has shown, it is a higher margin business even than its monopoly-profit core business. "Google's margins are a once in a lifetime occurrence, and Google will move in that high-growth direction--that's why Microsoft is so desperate about search. It has a higher growth rate. We are more worried about Microsoft than Google. Microsoft will address the Internet, but pulling down Office margins is a challenge for them. No company peacefully accepts a lowering of margins," Vembu said. "Our intention is to help erode Microsoft's profit margin, coming in from below." Zoho has built a more comprehensive suite of cloud-based apps than Google or Microsoft, and most of them are currently free to users.
Vembu cites the cost of sales and support as a drag on revenue per employee and profit per employee. "If salesforce is a proxy, it would be difficult for Google to justify the investment. More costs are associated with support then in R&D, even with on-demand software. The moment you have paying customers, the expectations are different and Google is finding that out with recent Gmail problems, Vembu said. In addition, he noted that selling into small- and medium-sized businesses is difficult, but the margin is higher than for large enterprise accounts. Adobe and Intuit, for example, have more revenue per employee than Oracle or SAP. Zoho's revenue per employee is mostly non-existent given most of the Zoho suite is currently free and not-ad supported. Vembu estimates Zoho's revenue per employee will be in the $200,000 to $250,000 range when the revenue spigot is fully turned on at some undetermined point. While Zoho behaves like a scrappy startup, it is well funded by India-based parent company AdventNet, which develops enterprise IT management software. AdventNet has 900 employees and is profitable, according to Vembu. "One of the privileges we enjoy as a private company is to not disclose revenue/profit numbers, which lets us do the kind of analysis on competitors they can't do on us," he joked. The problem with Vembu's logic is that Google has an enormous pool of cash to invest in improving the economics of business and consumer productivity software suites. And, part of being a software company is having multiple and adjacent revenue and user data streams. Microsoft is a highly profitable software company with many adjacent divisions. Google Apps won't be as profitable as search, but it will be profitable and ties users into the Google platform and monetization engine. 
If Google can attract consumers with its apps, gaining entry into small- and medium-sized business won't be a huge profit-sucking sinkhole of sales and marketing. The search giant claims that more than 500,000 businesses and schools have signed up for the free and $50 per-user-per-year Google Apps. According the Dave Girouard, head of Google's enterprise division, the Google suite has about 10 million active users. Google can afford to invest in building the the market for Google Apps, and Microsoft will be forced to alter the economics of its Office business as cheap and capable cloud-based suites, with offline capabilities, gain traction.What does than mean for Zoho? Run faster and hope that Google and Microsoft move slowly.
Google, ever eager to make some money off YouTube, is testing ads for the mobile version of the video service."You may have noticed that we started running a test of display ads on select pages of the YouTube mobile site in the U.S. and Japan. This is our first step in testing mobile advertising for YouTube," Christine Tsai, a YouTube product marketing manager, said on Google's mobile blog on Monday.The test "will give you (YouTube viewers) a new way to interact with content on the go, while allowing us to learn how video viewers engage with mobile advertising. Our test advertisers will also have an additional branding tool at their disposal and the opportunity to reach the millions of people who visit YouTube every day on their phones," Tsai said.A top Google priority is finding a good advertising model for YouTube, and Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has said finding the right form of advertising on YouTube is the "holy grail."
The online personal finance service Mint is getting a fresh coat of paint today. It's a good update, led by a former designer of Apple.com. I've been a fan and occasional user of this app since it launched a year ago, so I took this opportunity to talk with Mint CEO Aaron Patzer about what's happened to the product and the company in the last twelve months. Mint, as you may recall, was the audience winner of the TechCrunch40 event in 2007. That honor carried with it a $50,000 prize, which Mint didn't really need - Mint was already well-funded when it showed up at TechCrunch. (Patzer says the money is sitting in a high-yield savings account, earning interest.) The award did generate press coverage for the company, though, which has helped it grow. Patzer says Mint now has about 400,000 users. That's small number for a consumer service, but it makes Mint the largest online personal finance service so far. While traditional software giant Intuit has more users of its Quicken software, there are more Mint users than users of the Web version of Quicken (review), or any of the other online personal finance tools like Wesabe and Buxfer, Patzer says.
Mint's getting a fresher look, but the company's real innovation is its clever ad model. Paxter believes Mint's #1 position is an indicator that he's hit on the right formula for the category. "Mint delivers organized finances without a lot of work," he says. You can set it up in a few minutes and do what you need to do in it in five minutes a week, and "put your finances on autopilot." I concur: Mint provides useful insight and requires very little maintenance. Mint's different design has made it popular with a different set of users than what Quicken has. Mint's users are younger than Quicken's, and 40% of its new users are women. Quicken and Microsoft Money are still "85% men," Patzer said. But Mint's user base is, "1/100th its potential size," Patzer says. Paxter has the Quicken app in his sights. The old-school app is vulnerable, he says. "For many years, they viewed success in the wrong metric." He believes Intuit focused on getting users to spend time in the app, and thus layered in more and more features over the years. Mint, by contrast, is being built to get users out of it as quickly as possible. Plus, he says, Intuit abuses its customers with "sunset policies" on Quicken that force paid upgrades onto users. Quicken, even the online version, never made "the transition to free," which appears to surprise Patzer. "They have all this information," he said. "They should have been able to help people." As a Quicken user, I would take issue with the assertion that Quicken doesn't offer help. In fact, it does much more than Mint does. I use it because it has rich tracking for all kinds of financial products and situations, and because it lets you pay bills, not just view balances and trends, which is all Mint can do so far. Quicken has never made "the transition to free," Patzer says. "They have all this information. They should have been able to help people." But Patzer has found, with Mint, a very clever way to help users while still offering the service for free. Mint's business model is to examine a user's finances and accounts, match it with offers from advertisers, and then pitch custom offers to users. For example, if there are credit cards or savings accounts with better rates than you are currently paying, Mint will show you what you would save with the new product. That clever model, Patzer says, "is two orders of magnitude more effective than banners." It's "personal, contextual, and quantifiable." It means Mint is making money on its free service. This model will be expanding into new financial vehicles as Mint gets new features. For example, as the product gets the capabilities to track investing and retirement accounts (in limited rollout so far), Mint will begin to evaluate the fees users are paying for their holdings. If it notices that you're holding a mutual fund with high expenses but that there are more efficient funds available with the same profile, Mint will make the recommendation, and, of course, pocket the referral fee. Patzer said he's looking at "fixing mortgages," too. Challenges for the coming year include awareness of the app, and although Patzer won't admit it, security. While Mint has never suffered a breach and does not allow users to actually move money from the service, the over-30 crowd (the ones with the money) have a reasonable fear of putting their financial passwords in the hands of a startup Web 2.0 outfit. Mint's new design is not just a coat of paint. It's the realization of several rounds of A/B testing (testing design elements on subsets of users) that add up to 20% higher "conversion," or engagement with the site and its new features. I like Mint's model I'm glad to see that it's doing well. I do not attribute Mint's success to the product itself, but rather the process the company takes in expanding its offerings and its user base. I think this is why it's worked out for Mint: Management. "We take a systematic approach to understanding our users," Patzer says. "It's something every Internet startup should do." It's obvious, but few Web 2.0 startups really do it. Mint will officially exit its beta test period at the TechCrunch50 event next month.Previous coverage:Mint adds investment tracking, burger buying trends.Mint: Solid but incomplete online personal finance.
Tim Westergren, the founder of popular Web radio start-up Pandora, has said in an interview with the Washington Post that his company may be close to a shutdown."We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," Westergren said in the article, published Saturday. "This is like a last stand for webcasting."The problem, he explained, is last year's royalty hike for Web radio, which makes it extremely expensive for an independent start-up to stay afloat in the business. The royalty increase will eat up 70 percent of Pandora's $25 million in revenue, Westergren said.SoundExchange, an organization comprising representatives from record labels and performers, believes that Internet radio owes a bigger cut of profits than traditional radio does. Activist groups like the SaveNetRadio Coalition, along with start-ups like Pandora, have fought the fee hikes.A few Web geeks weren't convinced that Pandora's situation is as dire as Westergren says it is. "I love Pandora like my old baseball glove, but they can only pull this Chicken Little move so many times," marketing consultant Brian Oberkirch posted to Twitter on Monday morning.But Westergren assured in the Post interview that he's not exaggerating. "We're funded by venture capital," he explained. "They're not going to chase a company whose business model has been broken. So if it doesn't feel like its headed towards a solution, we're done."
Six Apart, which makes the Movable Type blogging platform and hosts blog services TypePad and Vox, on Monday is launching Blogs.com, a new site designed to help readers find the best blogs on the Web.Normally we wouldn't cover the launch of a blog here at Webware. Technically, Blogs.com is simply a content site built on the new Movable Type Pro platform. But this blog lives in an interesting space, and has an important background.Before coming to Six Apart, CEO Chris Alden (disclosure: once my boss at Red Herring) created a company, Rojo, around an RSS reader. Rojo is no more. Rojo.com has become Six Apart's curated guide to the Web. Blogs.com will replace Rojo.com. It's clear that driving people to blog content is a good thing for a blog platform company to do. But one might also assume that Six Apart, which is in competition with Automattic's WordPress, might tilt its recommendations to blogs running on its platform and not the other guy's. Alden say that will not be case. He told me that Blogs.com editor Wendy Taylor (another former co-worker of mine), who will run a staff of about five people, will have editorial independence.Blogs.com will also be running top 10 lists of favorite blogs from "celebrities" like Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson and Ning's Marc Andreessen. I put "celebrities" in quotes here because they also asked me to do one. So the bar can't be that high.One thing you won't see in Blogs.com, at least at launch, is the capability for users to vote items up or down on the system, Digg-like. And although Movable Type Pro has impressive social-networking features, they won't be turned on at launch.Knowing the people involved and after reading Blogs.com's precusror, Rojo.com, I expect that Blogs.com will be a very good read. But I don't quite get how this is a strategic win for Six Apart. Considering the company's push into social content, launching yet another editorially driven (in other words, expensive) directory of blogs and sites seems to be a bit retrograde.
Amazon S3 (Also: Google App Engine)When: February 15 (Amazon); June 17 (Google)What happened: These massive infrastructure services, Amazon's S3 especially, underpin many Web 2.0 companies. When they go down, big sites go down. When the sites go down, they lose money.Corporate coping behavior: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels banished to the lecture circuit to explain why S3 is still more reliable than any servers you could run yourself. The damage: Companies forced to re-consider their reliance on "cloud computing."
TwitterWhen: April, May, June. July too? Who cares?What happened: Twitter began to get unreliable. It's up, then it's down. Repeat. Corporate coping behavior: During the bad spells, Twitter turns off key features of the service -- like access from Twitter helper apps, or the "replies" tab on the site -- to decrease the load. Twitter also buys the search engine Summize, which adds a new level of utility to the service. The damage: Twitter was becoming part of the social fabric of the technology community. When it began to get flakey, marquee users abandoned the service and fled to rivals like Friendfeed. The problems appear to have been resolved, but the damage may never be repaired.
FirefoxWhen: June 17What happened: Mozilla announced the release data of the Firefox 3.0 and its goal to get a million downloads on that day. When the day comes, the download doesn't work. The downloads start up later, and Mozilla goes on not just to meet its download goal but utterly crush it.Corporate coping behavior: Mozilla changes "Download Day" to "The 24-hour Period that Starts When We Say it Does."The damage: Temporary embarrassment, which is overshadowed by insane success. 
AmazonWhen: June 17What happened: Amazon went offline for a big part of the U.S. workday. Millions of users had to go back to work.Corporate coping behavior: Mad scramble to fix. What did you expect?The damage: Estimated at $16,000 a minute. But long-term damage to the company is negligible (unlike the S3 outage).
Google DocsWhen: July 8What happened: Online productivity apps went offline, stranding users' files in the cloud.Corporate coping behavior: Apology. Google has offline support (Google Gears) for an increasing number of its online apps. Which is fine, if you remember to set it up before the next outage.The damage: Credibility. Online apps are being pitched by companies like Google as credible replacements to traditional apps like Microsoft Office. Outages like this shake users' already tenuous faith in the reliability of services that hold their most important data files.
MobileMeWhen: July 10What happened: Apple launched its 3G iPhone with a new data sync service to replace .Mac. Sadly, it didn't work. For many users, key services like e-mail wouldn't update.Corporate coping behavior: Jobs berates his staff in public; Apple gives subscribers 30 days of free service.The damage: Poor uptake of the service, many disgruntled users, negative halo effect on the iPhone.
CuilWhen:July 27What happened: Google scientist leaves Google, builds competitive search engine. At launch, it sucks. By the time it's working as advertised, nobody's paying attention anymore.Corporate coping behavior: Company claims millions of users are so anxious to dump Google that they overload the new engine. Begs for time.The damage: You only get one chance to make a first impression. Cuil's growth will be seriously clipped by its botched launch.
ScrabbleWhen:July 29What happened: After finally getting off the stick and suing the much-loved Scrabulous off of Facebook, Hasbro releases its own online Scrabble app on the social platform. It crashes.Corporate coping behavior: Scrabble owner Hasbro claims that hackers killed the service. No surprise: As Caroline McCarthy reported, "if you just look at the Scrabble application wall, it's pretty clear that there are a few people who are angry enough at Hasbro and EA to want to sabotage the game."The damage: What's a seven-letter word for "global acrostic withdrawl?"
Gmail (Also: Hotmail)When: August 12 (Gmail); February 26 (Hotmail)What happened: OMG, Gmail is down. And unlike with client-based e-mail (Outlook), when your Web mail is offline, you can't even read the old stuff sitting in your inbox. Corporate coping behavior: Google apologies, knows users will be back.The damage: In the recent Gmail outage, upset users flocked to Twitter to complain. Miraculously, Twitter stayed up, despite a crushing load of hundreds of tweets a second from disgruntled Gmail users.
NetflixWhen: August 14 and March 24.What happened: Undisclosed troubles fell all 55 Netflix shipping centers. Twice. Users don't get their discs.Corporate coping behavior: Netflix plans to refund fees to affected users, and reminds them they can watch streaming Netflix on their PC or Roku box. Although the company refuses to use the word "fallback" to describe this benefit.The damage: Netflix customers have to watch old DVDs, live TV, Tivo, Unbox, Hulu... Wait a minute, do we really need Netflix?And don't forget...It's just August. There's plenty of time left in the year for more Web 2.0 disaster.See also: Technologizer: A Brief History of Internet Outages
A photoshoot in Japan, captured by Google Street View.(Credit: Google)The pattern is familiar. Cars mounted with the Google Street View cameras scoot through a neighborhood, taking 360-degree shots of all they surveil. When the feature finally goes live, amused netizens find images of people in compromising positions, while others decry the end of innocence--uh, privacy.In Japan earlier this week, the real-world Google Street View effect saw images of two high-school lovebirds playing dentist, a photo shoot in a park, a person collapsed or asleep in a street, the wife of a CEO of a major Internet services company, and the expected shots of couples entering love hotels, which is basically a motel with hourly rates and vibrating beds. The irony of this is that the Japanese are often obsessive about their privacy and ''saving face'' can often be taken literally, where people will cross their arms in a big X in front of their bodies or faces when you threaten an unwanted photograph. When I was living there, I even had a shop owner come out and demand that I not take a photo of the exterior of his trendy shoe store. That's quite a different attitude from what we experience in the U.S., and ironic given the popularity of photography there.
An uncontroversial bird caught in flight by Google Street View in Japan.(Credit: Google)On message boards, the debate has mirrored that of other countries, from the expected, ''new technology is ruining our way of life,'' to a bear-hugged embrace of finally being able to see what the place you're supposed to be going to looks like. That's no small accomplishment in Tokyo's notorious neighborhoods, where warrens of streets zig, zag, and loop back upon themselves seemingly without logic.Still, Japanese IT professional Osamu Higuchi was so horrified by Street View that he wrote an open letter to Google explaining how they have acted out of disregard for local standards and could encourage more crime. He called the effects of Street View ''evil''. Heavy stuff.Despite being a country with one of the lowest per-capita crime rates anywhere in the world, Japan's media is obsessed with reporting on any change that could lead to an increase. As such, Higuchi's letter isn't surprising. His concerns that laundry left out to dry and car parking spaces revealed in Japan's densely packed and often-empty-during-office-hours residential neighborhoods could lead to higher theft rates are not without some merit, at least in theory.While it's not as crazy a theory as the Hadron Collider destroying the planet, I've yet to see any reports of increased crime anywhere being linked to Google Street View. Also, as JapanProbe and others have noted, Google has been quick to remove offending images and has been using face-blurring algorithms to try to add a modicum of privacy protection. 
A video from Microsoft Research and the University of Washington has been causing a stir online. The seven-minute clip, which was demoed at Siggraph 2008 gives a small peak at some photo viewing technology that's effectively the next generation of Photosynth, one of Microsoft Live Labs' most eye-popping technology demos.Photosynth's technology puts hundreds of photos on a 3-D map that users can browse and navigate in a similar fashion to real life. This new technology lets the viewer see several sides of a captured object using the varying angles from multiple photos. It also figures out where most of the shots have been taken to automatically create "orbits" that let users sweep around to view alternate angles--simulating distance and perspective.One of the most amazing aspects is how selective the system is to build a better user experience. For instance, if shots come from different angles or heights, the photos will be centered or properly moved around the 3-D space to make it smooth. It will also pick out only photos from a specific time of day, and make automatic color corrections to even everything out. The demo of this around the 4:17 mark is really--really cool.While Photosynth continues to be a technology demo, here's hoping we get fun stuff like this to play with as part of popular photo sharing sites. Users are already geo-tagging their shots on sites like Flickr, but the browsing experience once they're on a 2-D map is a little blah. Going forward it should be all about making that viewing experience both engaging and as realistic as possible.Related: Microsoft touches up video editing
Wuala. This is a cloud storage service that you can use to save files for backup or sharing. But on Wuala, the cloud is made up of the hard disk on your PC plus those on other Wuala users' computers. Data on the Wuala network is distributed in tiny, encrypted, redundant slices among users, so no one can see another person's data. The more space you set aside on your PC for Wuala storage, the more free storage you get on the Wuala network. You can buy your way in if you don't want to share. Although I am very skeptical about relying on the "social grid" for storage, the price can't be beat. We covered the company during its closed testing period; the service is opening up to the public today.
CrashPlan. This is another storage play, but with a strong focus on backup. Unlike services like Mozy and Carbonite, where you pay a fee for access to centralized backup servers, with Crashplan your backup exists on the PC of someone you know (and vice versa; you can back up your mom at your house and set her machine to back up on yours). Since the Crashplan company doesn't have to pay for either storage or bandwidth, it can offer a lower-cost service: a $50 one-time license sets you up; most online backup services charge a monthly fee. Since our previous coverage, CrashPlan has added new features like Web access to your files, business accounts, and a "seeded backup" option: you do your first backup on a spare drive on your local machine, then install the drive on a friend's computer across town, after which only file additions and changes need to be transmitted.
Gomez. Unlike the previous two products, which employ your unused hard disk capacity, Gomez pays you for borrowing your bandwidth. The company evaluates response times and performance of major Web sites, which are its clients, using real-world computers on real consumer Internet connections. To do this, it installs software on end users' machines, and when these users are not using their PCs, the software on them hits the test servers and reports on the speed of access. Users don't get to see the data, and Gomez has no access to users' traffic (or so the company says). The big benefit: Cash. The testing happens when you're not using your PC--like when you're asleep--and you get paid for the bandwidth rental. Company spokespeople say most people make only a few bucks a month but some earn up to $45 a month from the service. Could be a good way to repay yourself for your Internet connection. (I'm going to see if it will work on my always-on Windows Home Server.) Note that if the Gomez network already has enough users in your area, your PC might not get much test work, and you won't make a lot of money. From the save-the-planet perspective, I'm not sure it makes good sense to leave a computer on just so you can use services like these that use up your idle resources. But if you have computers you're going to leave on anyway, your math may show that it is more cost-effective to pay the added electricity bill in exchange for a lower cost of online storage, or income from the test service.
Six years in the making, the 1.0 version of Open Source Web and desktop info organizer Chandler finally arrived last Friday. It was not met with thunderous acclaim, nor did it get the kind of press its development cost of eight million dollars and tens of thousands of volunteer hours was supposed to generate.Chandler consists of the Web-based Chandler Hub, and desktop clients for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is meant to be your everywhere digital notebook for organizing appointments, tasks and notes. Chandler lets you import and export calendars to just about any iCal-compliant application, such as Google Calendar and Apple iCal; it creates alarms and reminders; and it provides simple task management.I can remember back then when Mitch Kapor -- the founder of Lotus Development and Lotus 1-2-3, the man who gave reason to put a PC in every office on the planet -- started this project. It was going to free the masses from domination by Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server and triumphantly herald a new age of open-standard killer software. 
Chandler is a capable to-do list manager, but its design and capabilities are dated.Despite some innovations in brings to the category, it has not delivered on the promise. Here's where it fails:Whether you're working in the Chandler web app or using a desktop client, you enter to dos, appointments and notes in a single entry field, then add detail. But the devil is in these details, and you will get tired very quickly of the slow interface for entering calendar items. While Chandler lets you triage your items into Now, Later and Done buckets, this is rudimentary task management at best and will leave practitioners of David Allen's Getting Things Done wondering where the rest of the application is.Chandler's big selling point - seamless web app/desktop synchronization and backup - works as advertised (although it did not work for me out of the box), but a competitor, the free but commercial Evernote, offers superior features, like picture and sound recording, and Web-based OCR of images stored. Chandler organizes your information into collections - but unlike say Google shared calendars, there's no way on the Chandler Hub to discover collections others want to publicize.With any 1.0 app you can expect rough edges and unimplemented features: neither Wikipedia or Mozilla Firefox were much to talk about in their early days. The question about this open source project is whether Chandler 1.0 is the start of something great or the last gasp of a party no one wants to be at.I talked with Mitch Kapor, who underwrote five of the nearly eight million dollars that went into Project Chandler, He said, "It's been a long, long journey. So long that a whole book was written about a part of it. It's obvious to anyone who is familiar with the story and the history that it is one of the project that, to make an understatement, did not turn out the way it was originally planned.""If you view it from the point of view as something that would replace Outlook and Exchange, it has completely and utterly failed."--Mitch KaporKapor pulled the plug on the free money and office space for the Open Source Application Foundation back in January. "Last January I reached the conclusion that I was really ready and needing to go on to other things. And the team on the project had a really strong desire to see it through to competition. The team shrank in size pretty dramatically then. I put a little more money into it in order to enable this transition to happen in 2008, part of which was they were going to ship 1.0," said Kapor."You asked if Chandler has lived up to the dream I had six years ago. And I think the fair answer to that is in part yes and in part no. What has actually been delivered delivers on part of what the original dream was. There's a cross-platform, fully open-source, innovative personal information manager with a very strong calendar. Those were among the original goals. Obviously it's taken dramatically longer than I thought it would, which I would attribute to not good judgment about how long it would take or the complexity of the project."Now Project Chandler is on its own. "It's more of a conventional open source project in the sense that its momentum hereon is going to depend on the extent there is a community of volunteers who find it valuable enough to contribute to it and move it forward." Are there enough volunteers to do that? "The short answer is I don't know, but there are promising signs. The numbers of people involved, while modest, are non-trivial and growing. If you view it from the point of view as something that would replace Outlook and Exchange, it has completely and utterly failed. But from the point of view of having built something that tens of thousands of people are happily using, and were using before there was a 1.0, by those metrics, it's pretty promising."And any advice to the new generation of Internet wannabe millionaires running around the valley? "Well yeah, actually. It's easy when you've been successful to lose calibration about what you can accomplish, about how hard it can be, about how long it will take. There's lots of people on the second time around that have dug themselves into one or another kind of hole. Part of what allowed Chandler to get traction and to get to 1.0 was when people on the project, myself included, where able to have more modest objectives, to have more realistic planning and to get into a more agile cycle of development, on the principle it is far better to deliver something than it is to have huge dreams and deliver nothing. That would be my advice."Disclosure: Bob Walsh occasionally sells a copy of a Windows desktop task manager he wrote three years ago.
Last.fm's music-centered social network is one of our favorite ways to discover, share, and stream music online. Currently in version 1.01, the Last.fm application for the iPhone and iPod Touch allows many of the best features of Last.fm to break away from your computer and go on the road with you. The Last.fm app isn't perfect, however, and people looking for a straightforward Internet radio application would do better with offerings from Pandora and AOL.
The Last.fm app's main menu offers many ways to hear streaming music...maybe too many.When launching the Last.fm iPhone app for the first time, you'll be prompted to enter your existing Last.fm account username and password, or you'll be offered the option to create a new account. If you're new to Last.fm, we recommend you get started with the service using your home computer, since many features depend on an ongoing analysis of your computer's music collection (also known as scrobbling). Once you're logged in, the Last.fm app offers eight ways to stream music over EDGE, 3G, or Wi-Fi. You can listen to songs Last.fm has already scrobbled from your computer's music collection, treat yourself to recommended songs, do a cold search for new music, or hear what your friends have been listening to. The music playback screen is similar to Apple's own iPod screen, displaying large cover art, volume, pause, and skip controls, as well as an iTunes purchase link and Last.fm's own song rating buttons, which help to steer the quality of song recommendations. On the very bottom edge of the screen you'll find tabs for the currently playing track, artist biography, similar artists, events (such as related concerts), and a More tab that includes the track's tag information and Top Listeners. With all its features, tabs, and buttons, the Last.fm app is one of the most in-depth and dynamic streaming music applications available for the iPhone. Unfortunately, despite its ambitious list of features, the program is bogged down with performance issues that make it frustrating to use at times. During testing in both Wi-Fi and 3G modes, we often experienced 5 to 10 second buffer delays each time we initiated a music stream or skipped between songs. The buffer issues subsided under ideal circumstances where Wi-Fi or 3G reception was strong; however, similar streaming audio applications from Pandora and AOL offered better streaming performance under more realistic conditions.With any luck, future updates to the Last.fm app will improve streaming music reliability and refine the somewhat confusing assortment of menu options and playback screen features. In its current state, the Last.fm app presents a bite-size version of the Last.fm Web site experience in a way that may satisfy existing users, but is unlikely to win new converts.Editors' note: Last.fm is owned by CNET's parent company, CBS Interactive.
Six Apart is announcing Tuesday night the launch of Movable Type 4.2 and Movable Type Pro. The 4.2 platform gives blog publishers better performance, according to Six Apart. But the really interesting thing about this launch is the new social features in MT Pro. Movable Type Pro will enable "social publishing," which is a fancy way of saying readers of MT blogs will now be able to do much more than just reply to posts in the comments. Readers will get profiles pages with "walls," and the capability to rate other posts and comments, and to follow other blog members.Six Apart also has added an aggregation widget called "Action Streams," that allows a blogger to automatically pull in their activity on other sites, like Twitter or Flickr. It's like FriendFeed, but with all the control and formatting you'd expect of a modern blogging widget.
The new Movable Type will have much richer social features for blog readers. WordPress is getting all social, too.Meanwhile, WordPress is converging on social networking as well. A new platform, BuddyPress, which is being built on the Wordpress core, will allow users to set up social networks. Presumably publishers will be able to graft these networks onto blogs.The power of a blog is its network of users, and Web users are becoming accustomed to a culture of participation. Just as blogging is changing publishing, social networking is going to change blogging. So it's appropriate the these products are getting new social features. Related: Salon goes openWired: WordPress-powered social network to arrive late 2008Google's DiSo projectDownload links:Movable Type: PC and MacWordpress: PC | Mac
The popularity of a social site such as MySpace or Twitter is frequently measured in unique users, page views, or user registrations. But a recent ministudy by Pingdom chose instead to look at how much of a proportional lock a given social network has on the countries' Web users. The tool of choice was Google Insights for Search, which was formally launched earlier this week.Facebook, for example, started in the United States and still has more members there than in any other country. But there's more proportional "interest" in Facebook in Turkey, based on Google searches for the term. In second place is Canada, followed by the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Colombia.For MySpace, the U.S. ranks at the top of the list when it comes to regional interest, followed by Puerto Rico, Australia, the U.K., and Malaysia. Beyond that, many American-founded social networks are much more popular overseas than at home: Friendster, which recently affirmed its focus on Asian countries, gathers the most "interest" in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Myanmar, respectively. The top five Google Insights locations for Hi5, founded in San Francisco, are Peru, Portugal, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica.The rest of Pingdom's results can be found on the company's blog.
Utilizing Apple's ad hoc distribution program, Stitcher let a beta version of their iPhone app loose on 100 testers today. While the app suffers from some stability issues, due to its unfinished nature, Stitcher provides a slick solution to those looking for customized audio programming.Stitcher is trying to be to news and information what Pandora is to music. The service provides you with a variety of audio programming, broken down by topics, such as sports, technology, and world news. Sources for the app include CNN, CNET, ESPN, AP, WSJ, Reuters, and a variety of local sources. As you rate the various audio streams and podcasts, Stitcher learns what you might like and serves up content.
My favorite potential application of Stitcher is to create your own customized station for listening to on your daily commute. You could make a station that kicks off your morning with the sports scores from the night before, followed up by the top headlines from CNN, stories from your favorite local news station, and capped off by discussion of the hottest tech stories from CNET.While there is a bigger market for music, I think that there is a sizable market for customized news and information. A lot of people listen to news and sports on the radio and Stitcher makes it easy to have a highly personalized stream to get you caught up on what matters to you.Stitcher is a free, ad supported app. There is no word yet on when the app is going to be available to the general public, but the limited beta test ends at the end of this week.