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Scrapblog New Release Coming
Tomorrow, Scrapblog, a hybrid media-sharing and online journal site, will be demoing the new version of their Flash-based online scrapbook application tomorrow at the We Media Conference in Miami. The public version of the new product will be out in March. Co-founder Carlos Garcia let me in for a quick look around at the redesign, though, and I liked what I saw. Scrapblog was already a great product. The new version runs more smoothly, has the look and feel of a proper desktop application, and has incorporated more types of media and editing tools.
The new version has the same drag and drop functionality of the original, but more closely mimics a desktop application by following the same menu bar metaphors along with a full screen option. They have also beefed up the editing features a bit without making it too intensive for the web. Users will be able to use “edit” and “properties” toolboxes to control transformations on photo and layers, effects, as well as photo cropping. Transitions between frames have also been added (various types of fades and wipes).
The release will allow users to import photos from more sites sites, such as Webshots, Photobucket, and Yahoo!. They only supported Flickr previously. Audio and video will also be added to the product. Users will have the option of having songs play along with their Scrapblog slide show and embedding YouTube videos into their pages. You will be able to rotate and scale the videos just like photos. Scrapblog also hopes to have the slide shows import into YouTube as well. Scrapbook pages can already be exported into Flickr accounts.
Scrapblog is shaping up nicely and looks to be branching out of the scrapbook niche as it more closely resembles slide show web apps like RockYou, BubbleShare, Slide, Photobucket, and Filmloop.
Scrapblog is currently privately financed through Carlos Garcia’s previous company Nobox.
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Apple Vs. World at CrunchGear
At CrunchGear this week, we have “Apple Vs. World,” an exciting match-up complete with in-depth analysis from both sides of the ring. We examine the gamut of Apple criticisms and commendations in an effort to satiate sympathizers lying in either trench. So be there this week to witness the continuation of the most epic battle in tech.
Only at CrunchGear!
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Condé Nast Launches Flip
Condé Nast can’t really be called a pure magazine publishing company any longer. They acquired Digg-clone Reddit last year, adding a user generated news site to their stable of offline and online magazines. And today they launched a social networking site aimed at teen girls called Flip.
The majority of Flip is content created by users, called Flipbooks. It consists of customizable, rich media blog/journals and include text, photos, music and videos. Users can also customize their Flipbooks with stickers, templates and other decorations available on the site. Flip also has four content channels: My Life; Entertainment; Style; and The World. Each channel highlights user content and also has professional editorial, presumably grabbed from other Condé Nast publications.
One thing Flip doesn’t seem particularly concerned with at this time is security of its users. Unlike Piczo, which also caters to a young teen audience, Flip profiles are freely browsable and searchable. This allows the site to create more networks and generates extra page views, but it also allows predators to browse profiles of young teenage girls. Given that Piczo has seen tremendous growth even with these precautions in place, I’m surprised Flip didn’t copy them.
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Google Embarrassed in Australia
Reporters at a Sydney, Australia newspaper discovered an embarrassing flaw in Google’s Map product - Google recommends a 10.4 kilometer trip, across the harbor and back, to go the thirty steps from Google’s Sydney headquarters to a hotel located across the street. The suggested route would also include a AU$3 bridge toll. Any query for driving directions from areas east, south or west of Google’s headquarters will suggest the same detour across the harbor, using a toll tunnel or bridge.
Google is blaming MapData Sciences, the Sydney-based company that supplies the mapping data to Google, for the problem. I imagine MapData is working on a fix rather urgently.
Another humorous image of this is here.
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Social Networking For Change(.org)
Nonprofit social networking site Change.org is launching this morning and hopes to change the way the average person or activist interacts with nonprofits. The site focuses on getting users to issues they care about - ending hunger, stopping global warming, etc. Users can sound off on issues, but the site also recommends that these users donate their time and money to the causes they support. Unlike other recent sites we’ve seen, Change.org doesn’t reek of smugness.
The site consists of social networking’s usual suspects, profiles, friends, messaging, groups, and a personal blog. Groups, in this context, are called “changes” and are meant to join together like-minded people around social changes they feel passionate about. In private beta, groups have been formed around topics such as “Stop Global Warming” and “Save Net Neutrality“. Each group gets a comment thread and blog to chat on along with a photo gallery to post pictures or videos.
The other half of the site is the nonprofits the users can organize around. They have already populated a database (powered by Guidestar) of over one million nonprofits, but I could only find 100 profiles through their search engine. Each of the profiled nonprofits has a bio, user reviews, photos, videos, and community blog. Users can befriend a nonprofit and let everyone else know by becoming a supporter of the organization.
Each nonprofit also gets a project page, where they can ask members to donate money to fund special projects or just the general fund. Donations are either taken by credit card ($10 min) on the organization’s page, or can be solicited by individual Change.org users who write up a pitch highlighting why it’s important to give. All donations are redistributed to the respective nonprofits through JustGive.org. Change.org takes 1% of every dollar donated. Change also hopes to support its operations through promotional campaigns nonprofits would launch on the site.
Members can also donate time instead of money by participating in the “Actions” page, which is a Google maps enabled classified listing of volunteer activities, resolutions, events in your zip code. Anyone, including the nonprofits can post to the list.
The site has been a project for Ben Rattray over the past two years, joined by Stanford friend Mark Dimas and a supporting team of Darren Haas, Rajiv Gupta, and Adam Cheyer. Change.org is currently funded by friends and family.
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Possible Snag in Google/Fox Renegotiations
The renegotiations over Google’s $900 million advertising deal with Fox may have hit a snag, the Wall Street Journal is reporting. And that snag may be eBay.
MySpace has been talking to eBay for several months about ways they could partner on what MySpace calls “peer commerce,” according to people familiar with the matter. The idea is to let MySpace users buy and sell items from each other using eBay’s online-commerce technology and its PayPal payment system, these people said. MySpace users would be able to post items for sale on their profiles, and their eBay auctions would be automatically updated, according to one person close to the discussions…Google isn’t likely to favor any deal that promotes eBay services that compete with its own. In the past 18 months Google has been increasingly encroaching on eBay’s territory. Google has added a listings service called Base where sellers can post products for sale and an online payment service called Checkout that competes with eBay’s PayPal.
I wouldn’t quite say that Google Base is a competitor to eBay, but certainly Google Checkout is driving hard at PayPal.
Like us, the WSJ is infatuated with Google and Fox, and reports often on their activities. They’re sometimes wrong, though. Last month the WSJ reported that Fox had invested $12 million in ROO. It turns out it was a pure stock-for-performance deal and no cash changed hands. Whoever is leaking this info to the WSJ may have their own agenda and the information may not be entirely accurate. We have an email in to Fox for a comment.
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Amazon Partners With Tivo; Steals Walmart’s Thunder
On the same day that Walmart launched a competing movie download service and then fell flat on their face over simple browser compatibility issues, Amazon announced an incredibly cool, long rumored new partnership with Tivo.
After several months of rumors, Amazon and TiVo have partnered to make Amazon Unbox content available from user PCs to their broadband-connected TiVo units.
The service hasn’t fully rolled out yet — a few hundred users are testing now. Plan is to roll-out the full service to all consumers by year end. Also, not all TiVo units work for this ( e.g. DirecTV or Comcast) and not all Unbox content either (e.g. Sony and Disney, yet). Other restrictions include: Mac users still can’t watch Amazon Unbox films on their computers, but are able to download them to TiVos; and limits cover two PCs, two TiVos or one of each — PCs can link with two portable devices. Still, this gives Amazon a horse in the race against Apple, which just started selling their Apple TV product. Now both Apple and Amazon have a way of getting their content into your living room even if you don’t have a PC connected to your television.
TiVo owns a coveted spot in millions of living rooms and has terabytes of aggregated viewing data on millions of consumers — when is someone going to wake up and buy? Could you imagine the targeted ads Google could deliver to the TV based on all that mined data? Or does Yahoo / Microsoft want to get that first-mover advantage and have instant ad inventory on the broadband-connected TV?
Editor’s Note: This post was written by guest contributor Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.
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Apple Openly Supports Death of DRM
Steve Jobs has stepped up to the plate and written an open letter to the music industry in the fight against DRM. We wrote our thoughts on the eventual demise of DRM just last month. Bill Gates gave his own thoughts on DRM back in December.
Despite Apple’s near monopoly on legal digital music sales, he discusses how they got to where they are now with DRM and options moving forward. The record labels then and today demanded protection of their songs — and thus Apple created their internal DRM called FairPlay.
Jobs speaks about how DRM is an ongoing fight — there are a lot of smart people in this world that have spare time on their hands, and like to discover the “secrets” that keep the songs protected. As soon as the DRM is hacked, Apple works to update the DRM by updating the iTunes software, as well as the software found in their hardware devices (iPod). He says that if their DRM is compromised, they have only a few weeks to fix it, or the labels are able to exit their agreement with Apple entirely. Rolling out these security updates is a difficult task with just one company, but if they were to license out their DRM to multiple software and hardware vendors, it’d be a nightmare — this is not an option that Apple will consider.
Another option is continuing the same course — software/hardware vendors writing their own DRM and consumers purchasing songs that only work in certain software/hardware. He brings up that Microsoft decided to ditch their own ‘PlaysForSure’ DRM technology and create a brand new (proprietary) one for their Zune.
The third option that comes as a bit of a shocker is Jobs promoting DRM-free music. He discusses how 90 million iPods have been purchased and 2 billion songs — equating to an average of 22 songs per person on iPods that hold 1000 songs. Internal research at Apple shows that the average iPod is full — meaning that only 3% of songs on an iPod are DRM-protected, with the remaining 97% unprotected (ripped audio CDs; illegally downloaded tracks).
Jobs discusses how 90% of record label sales revenue comes from the billions of CDs sold — CDs that are not DRM-protected (consumers can go home and rip their CDs). In 2006, 2 billion songs were sold DRM-protected, while 20 billion were sold unprotected (as audio CDs).
He makes a good point — and he likely feels Apple could sell more digital music than the mere 3% that occupy iPods, by selling unprotected songs. The question on everyone’s minds is whether the music industry would sell more than the 20 billion total songs in a year if they opened the DRM-free floodgates online. Emusic has been the poster-child for the DRM-free sales of straight MP3s by the Indie labels. Amie Street is another model we like.
Editor’’s Note: This post was written by guest contributor Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.
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Network Solutions Acquired By General Atlantic
We’re just getting news that domain name registrar (the original one) Network Solutions has been acquired by General Atlantic, a private equity firm. The price hasn’t been disclosed, but it will be leaking soon.
Network Solutions was the original domain name registrar and was part of Verisign until it was spun off in 2003. Since that time, they’ve lost a stupendous amount of market share to discount operations like GoDaddy, eNom and others. They now have about 6.6 million domain names under management.
Update: As I suspected, the price is leaking all over the place. The rumor is this was an $800 million deal.
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Nice One, Walmart
This is what Walmart’s brand new video site looks like in the Firefox browser. It works fine in Internet Explorer, but the CSS is not loading properly in Firefox. One designer’s opinion: “Somebody really fucked up. I could fix this in 30 seconds. Did they even test this in Firefox before launching?”
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Walmart Officially Enters Movie Download War
After dabbling in movie download tests, Walmart is now jumping into the movie and television download business head first, and will launch their new site later today at walmart.com/videodownloads.
This is an extremely crowded market already, although Walmart has locked up deals with all of the major studios - Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal. See the chart included in this post for the studio deals locked up by other movie download services - CinemaNow, MovieLink and Amazon Unbox all have similar deals as well. iTunes and other competitors don’t.
Television networks who’ve agreed to provide content include Fox, CW and Viacom’s MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Logo and VH1. The television download market is currently dominated by iTunes.
Prices for movies will be $10-$20. Television shows will be $2. Downloading and watching content will require a Windows PC, as with all of the services mentioned above except iTunes.
Will This Be Successful?
Walmart has had mixed results in their online initiatives. They’ve completely bailed out of the movie-rental-by-mail market when they couldn’t make headway against Netflix. In this case, however, there is no established player to try to kill. The movie download market is in its nascent stage and anyone can win.
CinemaNow and MovieLink should be particularly worried. They operate on very low margins, are being attacked by iTunes and others already, and now have to contend with Walmart. It’s unlikely they’ll have the staying power to make it, and it doesn’t look like any of the major sites are looking to buy in this space. It’s cheaper to build a Windows-based DRM-laden player and do deals with studios directly.
However, iTunes still has the only service that works cross-platform, plays on an iPod and now on the living room television with Apple TV. And they already dominate the television download market. Walmart will not be able to easily hurt iTunes in the short term.
And don’t forget that Netflix has already released a very, very good free(ish) movie and television download service, and Joost is another service coming soon. None of these companies are going to lie down in the face of competition from Walmart, and they know that Walmart will bail out of markets that they can’t dominate.
All of this is good for the consumer, but prices are still too high. Movie downloads are still more expensive than simply buying a DVD.
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AllTheCode Launches New Code Search
AllTheCode have today launched a new code search engine which has joined a group of existing solutions including site such as Krugle, Koders and Google Code Search, no less. We previously wrote about the state of code search in a post about the then new Google Code Search, and we pointed out that in our own tests that none of the sites seemed to return adequate results.
Today we put AllTheCode to the same tests, and the results were varied. While AllTheCode does return very relevant results, it doesn’t allow the user to filter the results based on the programming language or any other variables. The press release for the launch of AllTheCode mentioned that the ranking is based on how frequently the code snipet has been implemented, which seems like common sense for a code search engine but it seemed to be lacking in the other code search engines the last time we ran them.
In the last post, one test was to search for an implementation of the MD5 algorithm, with AllTheCode the first page of results are mostly Java implementations - we couldn’t find a way to filter the results (the site says they are returning Java results only for now). If you are a programmer, your best results might be to use a mix of the various code search engines, at the moment there is no clear leader which means that there is a clear opportunity for one of these apps to take the lead.
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Brilliant New Startup: Useless Account
The trick to any good humor or hoax site is an attention to detail and a seriousness about your work. Useless Account is the best recent example I’ve seen. It’s clear, for example, that more work has gone into this joke than many of the startups we see every day.
The site has a single function - to create a new account. “Open ID is a pipe dream” the site argues, which also has a fake quote from “TechLunch” that says “Slightly more useful than Twitter.” Once you’ve created your account, you can log in, and edit your account. That’s it. The reason this is really, really funny (for us) is because that’s what we do all day - create new account after new account at every new Internet startup that comes along. I am a seriously huge expert on account creation.
The best part of the site are the FAQs. Note the email for customer complaints and their plans to give away “free pro accounts.”
Useless Account was a fun diversion for a few minutes, and for that we are sharing it with our readers. It was created by Jim Whimpey and the Brisbane Creative team.
Other recent humor stories on TechCrunch:
Google TV - An Elaborate Hoax
Make Your Own iPhone (does not actually function)
Forget Second Life. Get a First Life.
Social Network Backlash
bullshitr
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Sports + TVGuide + Digg = RUWT?
“Are You Watching This” (RUWT?) is a new sports fan site you can use to follow the most popular sports games on TV based on votes from the community and the real-time score of the game. It’s meant keep people from missing the really spectacular sports games as they develop. The main page consists of a TV schedule listing all the sports events across the different TV networks that you use to vote on upcoming games. The default feed is based on east coast time, but you can customize by postal code and cable provider within the US and Canada. Each game in the TV schedule tells you where and when it will be aired, a written preview of the match, lets you vote, and lets you “shout” your opinion to a comment thread. The site also tracks news, standings, and teams across 15 sports.
The other major way to follow games on the site is through their sport specific scoreboard page where they list the votes for each game in real time by sport or team. As games get closer or work their way into overtime, the scoreboard automatically adds points to reflect a more entertaining matches. The NCAA Basketball board has been pretty active today and the NHL board includes game highlights pulled from YouTube.
It’s a good application of the community voting model that benefits greatly from the automated analysis of scores to determine interestingness. They also tie it all together by letting you track your watchlist by RSS and iCal feeds, check if your friends are getting a game you aren’t.
Via TechCrunch Forums Company Reviews
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Fast Releases White Label Adsense/Adwords
Norwegian enterprise search provider, Fast, released its AdMomentum product today. The new product is private-label contextual advertising platform similar to Google’s Adsense and Adwords platforms paid for by a software licensing fee instead of a revenue split. The product is aimed at high traffic sites taking part in the $6.7 billion search advertising market (PDF download). The product was born out of market research and their WebAds and Platefood Performance products.
AdMomentum provides publishers with a GUI to manage their site’s ad zones from purchase to delivery with tracking analytics. The system supports a variety of familiar advertising models that can be applied to the different ad zones: keyword auction, CPM, CPC, CPA, and flat rates. Ad zones can host ads based contextually on user input and page content in various formats such as videos, banners, and text links on the web and optimized mobile sites. Context can be determined based on keywords, geography, content, and a users click stream data. Having your own ad system also allows for finer grained tweaks to the system, such as how often the ad bot crawls pages to determine the advertising context. Australian search engine Sensis and US local search engine Local.com have been trialling the product for a while now. The sites have been selling ad inventory through their own marketing departments and through branded self-serve platforms. Sensis’ Bidsmart ad market allows anyone to bid on keywords or buy spaces in ad zones which can then be placed in an approval queue.
Fast’s AdMomentum fits in a niche between contextual ad networks like Quigo, Miva, and DoubleClick and third party advertising engines like those offered by Google, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and MSN adcenter. Dylan Fuller, a Senior Director of Product at Fast told me sites with as many as 5 million impressions a day have turned a profit on the platform. ContextWeb is another end-to-end solution in this space, but only supports text link ads.
Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim is skeptical about AdMomentum. Rob Hof believes publishers will welcome the change.
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Social Music Overview
Keeping with the theme of Mike’s Online Photo Editing Overview, I wanted to cover some of the entrants into social music. Music was probably the first type of rich media to really go “Web 2.0″ and it’s become a pretty popular place for startups. As a result, there are some great Rich Internet Applications built around social music. Anyone who makes music a part of their daily lives has no shortage of options when it comes to finding new music and sharing with friends.
FineTune
Finetune is a relatively new application written in Flash. It’s my favorite out of the bunch and I covered it on my ZDNet blog. What makes Finetune stand out is that in addition to the standard “artist radio”, it allows users to build playlists of specific songs. The minimum playlist is 45 songs and you can have up to three songs per artist. With custom playlists, you can make sure you’re only listening to songs you want. Finetune also gets points because in addition to the web version, it runs on the Wii and there is an Apollo-based desktop client.
Pandora
Pandora is the granddaddy of the bunch and it’s one of the Web 2.0 applications that Mike can’t live without. It is built using OpenLaszlo and provides the cleanest experience out of all the applications on the list. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to generate a stream of songs that you’ll like based on how you rate previous tracks. You create stations around artists, songs or albums and you can provide feedback (thumbs up or thumbs down) on the songs Pandora chooses. Tech Crunch’s coverage of Pandora is here.
Last.Fm
last.fm is another Web 2.0 veteran and is more socially-slanted than the others. Tagging is a big part of the last.fm experience and you can tag any song that comes along in addition to being able to listen to “user tag radio” which is based on tracks that users have tagged with a specific genera. last.fm has a separate desktop application that “scrobbles” the songs you listen to and generates a music profile that you can share with friends. See Tech Crunch’s coverage of last.fm here.
MOG
MOG is all about a music community. It’s very blog-centric and revolves around user pages, or “Mogs”. You build your Mog around songs you’re listening too and artists you like. That builds something like a profile for you that users can browse to and comment on. It also uses this profile to suggest other people or music that you might like. Tech Crunch’s coverage of MOG is here.
RadioBlogClub
radio.blog.club is another music service that builds playlists based on an artist or song you specify. I’ve heard the least about it, but the interface is good. When you browse to the site and type in an artist or song, it builds a playlist of 10 songs for you. In my experience the recommendation system for radio.blog.club wasn’t the best, but they do allow you to embed their player on your blog. This seems to be the least robust of the applications but still worth a mention.
MyStrands
MyStrands started off as MusicStrands and is a downloaded desktop application that works with your current music players to build recommendations based on what you’re listening to. In many ways it’s similar to last.fm’s “Scrobbling” but MyStrands ties in with your mobile device and seems to provide a more social recommendation system. By tying in with music on mobile phones, MyStrands is a bit ahead of the others and it helps tie all of your music collections together. Tech Crunch’s coverage of MyStrands is here.
iLike
iLike is an iTunes plug-in that makes your music library more social. It tracks what you’re listening too and recommends songs and people with similar tastes. It hooks in nicely with the iTunes interface and recommends music as you’re playing songs. I listen to some pretty obscure stuff and the recommendations were good. They also have a widget for MySpace that is formatted to sit nicely in the “Music” section of the profile. Tech Crunch’s coverage of iLike is here.
iJigg
iJigg is a digg-esque music discovery service that I had a lot of fun playing with. Users vote on individual songs and the most popular rise to the top of the front page. You can’t do any “related artists” with iJigg, but you can browse by genre so that you can target your music discovery. The iJigg player can also be embedded on other sites so you can share it with friends. As this service gets more popular, I think it will be a great way for bands to get discovered. Tech Crunch’s coverage if iJigg is here.
Ryan Stewart is an expert in Rich Internet Applications. Ryan writes his personal blog here and also writes a RIA blog for ZDNet called The Universal Desktop.
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Web 2.0 Directory Go2Web20 Upgraded
When we first wrote about Go2Web20 on its release in September 2006, it was a side project of Israeli founders Orli Yakuel and Eyal Shahar. They thought it would be a nice way to show off their passion for Flash and keep a directory of new web startup logos and basic information.
The site proved to be so popular that the two have kept working on it, adding new companies and products (there are nearly 800 now). They’ve also changed the user interface substantially and have added Ajax components to the site. If anything, this is a fun site to just click around on and read about startups.
Logos can be sorted by date added or alphabetically. Clicking on a logo brings up basic information at the bottom of the page, and companies can also add their own code (a video, RSS feed, widget, etc.).
The site is also taking advertisers for the first time (we are advertising on the site to support this project). Information on advertising is here.
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European Startup Plazes Raises €2.7 million
Plazes, which is based in Zurich and Berlin, is announcing its first institutional round of financing this morning. They raised €2.7 million, or about $3.5 million, from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.
We first profiled Plazes on June 11, 2005 (the day this blog started). It’s evolved significantly since then, obviously, but the core idea is the same - Plazes tracks your physical location and shows you other Plazes users and places nearby. Plazes also integrates with Skype, has a widget to place on websites that shows your current location and other information, and a SMS service to find out the current location of your Plazes friends.
I spoke with founder Felix Petersen earlier this evening. He says Plazes continues to see “strong growth” and has 40,000 active users currently. Those users are “predominantly users from the US (40%), followed by Germany, UK, Netherlands, Canada and Switzerland.” A thousand or so users are online at any given time.
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Google PowerPoint Clone Coming
Somebody took what appears to be a header file from an existing Google application and posted it as a document on Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
Based on some of the text in the document, the current code name of the presentation application is “Presently,” a play on the original Docs & Spreadsheets application, an online word processor called Writely that was acquired by Google in 2006 and later renamed.
We found this originally on Google Operating System and then made a quick copy of the Docs & Spreadsheets original file. During the time it took us to write this post the document was edited and all references to “presently” were removed. Just one reference to Google still remains. We’ve copied the entire document as we originally downloaded it to this page (”Presently”) for now. a total of 1,212 characters were redacted.
Some of the text that was in the original document is also copied below (all of this has now been removed, but the original file is here):
var MSG_VIEW_PRESENTATION=”View presentation”;
var MSG_PRESENTATION_SETTINGS=”Presentation settings”;
var MSG_DOC_TO_PRESENTATION=”Convert document to presentation”;
var MSG_DOC_TO_PRESENTATION_HINT=”Once your document is converted to a presentation, you can insert\nslide breaks using Insert > Slide from the main menu.”;
var MSG_PRESENTATION_TO_DOC=”Convert presentation to document”;
var MSG_POPUP_BLOCKER=”Presently is unable to launch your presentation in full-screen mode.\nCheck your pop-up blocker settings.”;
var MSG_NEW_SLIDE_TITLE=”New Slide”;
var MSG_UNSUPPORTED_BROWSER=”Unsupported Browser\nPresently doesn\’t support Opera and will not function properly.\nWould you like to continue anyway?”;
var MSG_SLIDE_INDEX=”Slide %1 of %2: %3″;
var MSG_NEXT=”Next”;
var MSG_NEXT_HINT=”Space, Enter, N”;
var MSG_PREV=”Previous”;
var MSG_PREV_HINT=”Backspace, Del, P”;
var MSG_ZOOM_IN=”Zoom in”;
var MSG_ZOOM_OUT=”Zoom out”;
var MSG_ZOOM_RESET=”Zoom reset”;
var MSG_TOGGLE_AUTOFIT=”Toggle AutoFit”;
var MSG_PICK_THEME=”Choose theme:”;
var MSG_THEME_BLANK=”Blank”;
var MSG_THEME_GOOGLE=”Google”;
var MSG_THEME_LIQUID=”Liquid”;
var MSG_THEME_MONOCHROME=”Monochrome”;
var MSG_TOGGLE_TOOLBAR=”Hide/show toolbar”;
var MSG_EXIT_PRESENTATION=”Exit presentation”;
var MSG_END_OF_PRESENTATION=”End of presentation. Are you sure you want to exit?”;
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SuperBowl Ads (Not Really) From Startups
Today’s the day - SuperBowl XLI. Hundreds of millions of people around the world will eat junk food, drink beer, and watch the best television advertising all year interrupted periodically with a football game.
Six startups (Meebo, Meez, Multiply, Plaxo, RockYou and Technorati) who can’t afford the $2.5 million plus for a thirty second spot during the game got together to produce low-budget “SuperBowl” ads and put them on YouTube. Some of them are pretty entertaining. Others, not so much. We’ve embedded all of them below and have a poll to see which one you like the best.
By the way, last year’s real SuperBowl ads are still up on Google Video at video.google.com/superbowl.html. I assume Google will replace those ads with SuperBowl XLI ads tomorrow. Yahoo will also be hosting the actual SuperBowl ads once the games starts at Yahoo Video.
My favorite “startup” ad is Technorati, although they cheated by using footage from one of my favorite movies. Plaxo and Meebo are tied for second place.
The ads and poll are below, in this order: Meebo, Meez, Multiply, Plaxo, RockYou and Technorati:
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Online Photo Editing Overview
The launch of Picnik a couple of days ago brought us yet another online photo editing tool. Like Fauxto, Picnik uses Flash, whereas most of the earlier editing tools all use Ajax for in-browser editing.
Since all computers come with basic software that rotates, resizes and crops photos, there needs to be a compelling reason to use an online service. Uploading a photo to such a service, editing it and then downloading it back to your hard drive too high of a cost. To compensate for this, most services allow you to transfer the edited photos directly to Flickr, Webshots or other online photo services, saving users the trouble of making round trips uploading and downloading.
Most of these online services also offer editing tools that go beyond simple rotation, resizing and cropping and start to creep into Photoshop territory. Here’s a few of the better ones, along with our most recent testing notes:
Fauxto
Fauxto is a Flash-based Photoshop look-alike. It is the only layer-based online tool that we know of, and is by far the best of the bunch. But if all you are looking for is photo editing, and you aren’t familiar with Photoshop, Fauxto will frustrate you with its complexity. And if you are already familiar with Photoshop, chances are you have a copy already. Fauxto is lovely to look at and it is a really nice example of Flash in action, but I’m not sure who their target market is.
Picnik
Picnik is the new kid on the block, and they’re the best so far. It is also Flash based, it is the fastest of the bunch and the user interface is the most intuitive. Once you are done editing, you can transfer your photos directly to Flickr. Picnik has replaced Ajax-based PXN8 as our favorite online photo editing tool.
Picture2Life
Picture2life is an Ajax based photo editor. It’s focused on grabbing and editing images that are already online. The tool selection is average, and the user interface is poor. There are some bugs on the site. Photos can be transferred to Flickr, 23 and Imageshack after editing.
Preloadr
Preloadr is a Flickr-specific tool that uses the Flickr API, even for account sign-in. The service includes basic cropping, sharpening, color correction and other tools to enhance images. The fact that Preloadr is designed specifically to work with Flickr may not be an advantage - some of the other services are just as good or better and also offer Flickr integration.
PXN8
PXN8 is the best of the Ajax based editors (and the best overall until Picnik launched) and has a great user interface with the main features highlighted on large icons. The basic “enhance” feature does a very good job of fixing the obvious problems with pictures. Edited photos can be transferred to Flickr or Webshots’ AllYouCanUpload service.
Snipshot
Snipshot, previously called Pixoh, is another very-good Ajax-based editing tool that stands out because of its above average design and the fact that they have an API into their service. We prefer the features and UI of PXN8, but just barely.
Read FranticIndustries for their take as well.
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Sneak Peek: Video Remixing with Cuts
We first heard of video startup Cuts.com a year ago, although details were scarce. After spending over a year in development, the company is just about ready to launch to a small group of beta users, and expand from there. They let us take a quick look at the current product last week - look for an expansion of their private beta in two weeks or so.
Like Jumpcut (acquired by Yahoo) and Motionbox, Cuts aims to help users edit video online using the latest Flash tools.
Cuts lets you pull in and cut apart videos from sites like YouTube and Myspace, with wider support upon launch. To edit a video, you just need the URL of your favorite video or click a bookmarklet to cut the video on your current page. Cuts imports the video and takes you to their editing suite. As of the private beta, Cuts will let you add captions, add a group of sound effects, loop sections of video, and trim out parts of the video. Each of these functions runs on a separate track you use to sync the effect to a time frame in the video.
Not only will you be able to cut up a video once, but each video made with Cuts will also be able to be cut up again, and again. It’s sort of like the video version of music