Written on 30th May 2009
15 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
MacRumors has posted images of what appears to be a new iPhone alongside the current model.
There are obvious differences between the two models, and in my opinion at least, the matte black is far slicker. Unfortunately, there’s not much else to go on but the image certainly matches the descriptions circulating – but then again, if its a hoax, it’s bound to isn’t it.
The new iPhone is expected to be unvelied this summer and may announce details at WWDC in early June.
Written on 25th May 2009
12 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Despite the humor in the photos below, web addiction is apparently a serious problem. According to recent research, one in four employees are addicted to the Internet.
It’s not the midday coffees or cigarette breaks that waste the most time – it’s surfing the web. Highlighted as the one of the most highly addictive activities to make its way into the modern workplace. We say ‘workplace’ because this isn’t just an office problem but one that can take place wherever you may be working.
According to the latest metrics from comScore, day-to-day mobile Internet usage in the states doubled over the last year. In January 2008, 10.8 million people visited the mobile Web at least once a day. Now there are some 22.4 million. Most do so looking for news or other basic information, though many are looking for interaction as well. Social networking, for example, saw a massive spike in usage, its audience growing 427 percent year over year.
Professionally, “Studies have shown that from 25 to 50 percent of cyber addiction is occurring at the workplace,” said Dr. Marlene Maheu. (more…)
The Facebook photos application has been by far Facebook’s biggest success, the easy to use interface for uploading pics from your computer and then brilliant point-and-click tagging of friends has proved intensely viral; there are now more than fifteen billion photos on Facebook, making it the largest collection of pictures in human history. More than 850 million new photos are uploaded a month with no signs of slowing down, and Facebook’s servers display twenty billion photos every month.
The question is; how many of those pictures are of you? Well you know how many of them you’ve been tagged in but how many photos are out there that you have no idea about? A new application launched today aims to answer that question.
Photo-Finder will go through all the albums in Facebook that your account has access to, and using their fast, powerful and accurate facial recognition technology, scan Facebook to find untagged photos and let you browse through the results. There’s no need to train Photo Finder, it does that for you. Photo Finder shows you all of the results sorted by accuracy or date, letting you review its findings so that future searches become more accurate. With Photo Finder you also get notified whenever a photo of you gets posted, even if no one tagged it. Photo-finder lets you know first and gives you the chance to hide potentially embarrassing photos from other Photo Finder users.
Photo-Finder also has the ability to push information on newly discovered photos to your FB news feed, giving this app a real chance to go viral as more and more people discover pics they never knew about.
The Technology behind this app was developed by the app’s creatorsFace.com. This patent-pending technology is based on Face.com ’s own proprietary algorithms that allow them to achieve high accuracy for recognizing faces in the real-life photos of the web on a massive scale. In an experimental real-life faces dataset (“Labeled Faces in the Wild”) organized by the University of Massachusetts, an Hybrid descriptor-based algorithm published together with the face.com team outperformed significantly best-known algorithms to date; comparison at http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html .
It seems that Photo-Finder has a very real chance of changing the way we interact with the Facebook photos platform and perhaps give us a real taste of a future where computers can actually recognize very complex visual data like faces and correctly tag them. The founders behind Face are close friends of mine and knowing their combined set of skills and technological abilities, I am certain that this application will be more technologically advanced than any other we’ve seen so far.
Written on 26th February 2009
3 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Google Street View (part of Google Maps) can optionally now show you user contributed photos of various popular locations grabbed from Google owned Panoramio.
In Google’s words, the new feature
“allows you to explore on a level that our cameras can’t go…”
To view the photos, simply browse to a relatively popular location like Times Square, drag the little man icon on the left on to the map and click on the photos icon to the top right of the screen.
Written on 24th October 2008
1 COMMENT Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
pic via spacedive on flickr
Poladroid is a really classy little desktop app which lets you convert pictures instantaneously into awesome Polaroid style shots like the ones you can see to the right. The program is currently Mac only with a Windows version in the works so it’s worth keeping an eye on.
All you need to do is download the app, launch it, drag n drop your photos into the Polaroid icon and let the app work it’s magic. The beauty of the tool is sitting back and watching the app “develop” your photos, you’ll see what I mean once you’ve given it a shot. The application is completely free although they are accepting donations.
There’s a flickr group with a great selection of Polaroids that people have uploaded which is worth checking out. Here’s a video giving you a run through of the app, really cool stuff.
Thanks to Matthew Packer for the heads up and the both interesting & entertaining video! :)
Written on 15th October 2008
1 COMMENT Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Facebook engineer Doug Beaver published a company blog post today about the fact that users of the wildly popular social networting site have now uploaded over 10 billion photos to the site. And since they apparently actually store four image sizes for each uploaded photo, that’s over 40 billion files.
Huge numbers indeed, if you consider the fact that it’s only one aspect of Facebook, as it’s not a photo sharing site per se. Caroline McCarthy from CNET’s The Social writes:
To compare, the News Corp.-owned Photobucket, which has a real-time ticker of photos uploaded, stood at slightly less than 6.2 billion photos on Wednesday morning. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, hit 2 billion photos just less than a year ago.
On a sidenote, Webshots isn’t talked about in this comparison, and probably for good reason: CNET sold the photo-sharing site to American Greetings for $45 million, having spent about $70 million on acquiring three years ago.
Some more interesting stats released by Beaver:
2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day
We have just over one petabyte of photo storage
We serve over 15 billion photo images per day
Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second
Do you like looking at photos? Who doesn’t? Especially when they are beautifully made! So far, browsing photos has been quite boring, no matter which photo website you chose. Most of them have a linear browsing style which isn’t fun if you just want to look at pictures (if you browse for other purposes, like finding pictures for your website or buying, then the linear style is more appropriate).
I’m guessing that many readers use StumbleUpon. It lets you browse websites in a random manner and leaves room for plenty of surprises. Last.fm offers the same type of service. People like surprises, right?
Introducing Photoree, the Stumbleupon for photos
Now the same concept is applied to photos by a service called Photoree. The Romanian service was launched in December 2007 and founded by serial entrepreneur Daniel Racovitan (other services he established: Colegi.ro – the Romanian version of Classmates.com sold to Neogen.ro, Ghidoo.ro – a social bookmarking service like Reddit, Cafeneaua.com – an online discussion community). He’s one of the Romanian Internet pioneers creating several other services which were among the first in Romania at that time.
The service is bootstrapping so far and has several thousands users a day. But if it takes off more clearly then probably they should look for financing to grow it.
The photo selection
Photoree has a recommendation engine based upon your personal settings. Once you are registered you start rating pictures and the engine starts to learn your taste. It needs about 100 ratings before figuring what you like and don’t like and displays pictures accordingly.
At the time of this writing, it has over 1,000,000 pictures indexed in its database and most of them come from Flickr (using the Flickr API). Almost all are under a Creative Commons license so you could use them if you want. The owner plans to add other images repository sites like Zooomr, PicassaWeb, Devianart and maybe others as long as those sites offers an API.
Open up, please
One drawback of the service is that you can’t do anything unless you are registered. It would be better if they opened up a bit and let people explore without the need to register. They could also implement a cookie or session based recommendation system, which would eliminate the need for registration for that session. This could give a boost to their number of visitors. You know, it’s nice to get a sample of what you might buy..
The selected pictures are very beautiful (most seem to be HDR pictures which not everyone will like). I don’t know why, but during the period of time I had to rate 100 photos (you can’t escape that) only landscapes and women pictures were recommended to me. Is this a universal behavior of the service or the engine just guessed my taste :)? A look at the online forum proves that I was not the only one who was getting this selection.
Nudity can be turned off if you desire and I think they could serve more diversified genres, besides just landscapes and women (could become boring after a while).
Even a 100 votes is not enough
During the learning period the engine keeps notifying you about how many times you have voted (you can skip some photos but the pop-up notifier will show up after a while). After you vote 100 times these notifications hopefully will go away (Oops! Even after 100 votes that pop-up still didn’t go away ot at least to come less often).
I tried to turn off the nudes but it seemed not to work (I also unsuccessfully tried to change the Current Method of showing pictures). Maybe I still have to make up those 100 ratings so I can do whatever I want after that…this rating it’s a bit of a burden, I should be able to browse pictures without any conditions if I want that. After all, it should be fun to get surprises, right? They could have a Surprise Me! page with totally random pictures being shown. Another idea is to display the number of votes I have done in real time on the browsing page so I don’t have to view the Stats page or wait for the notifier to tell me. Now, I’m just thinking about usability. Other than that, the layout is simple and clean. You don’t get lost in tons of options.
The service has very crude social networking options (no profile pics, no personal details, no sharing with friends, no messaging). You can only add a user as a contact. Sometimes the loading can be slow (I don’t know if they use some kind of caching system but if not then they should – caching the next 5 images for example and that requires some kind of prediction calculation based on what the user voted so far).
Make it more viral
Overall, Photoree could be a good service, but it still need some more work to reach the status of StumbleUpon. I hope the developers will improve the site and make it more viral (send a picture or a bunch of pictures to a friend, send emails invites to friends using the address books from Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, make it more social, etc). Otherwise, if they don’t move fast enough, somebody else with a better and faster execution could take their place.
Take your Flickr photos – or the way you view them – to the next level by using any of these thirteen tools. Are you missing a specific service? Post it in the comments and I’ll update this post.
Fotoviewr – four cool galleries
Fotoviewr started out as someone’s pet project to learn how to program using Adobe Flash and Papervision – and you can tell. Although the service looks very promising, it’s not nearly as cool as it will eventually be. It aims to provide a better experience for viewing photos, thus you it allows you to create four cool galleries. Yet it misses vital functions like an embed option, high-res support, and there’s a max of 30 pics. The usability is great though, so keep an eye on it.
San Francisco-based Vietnamese guy Tinou Bao has built a tool which allows you to create a cover flow slideshow ala iTunes for your Flickr photos. Viewers can browse through the slideshow using the keyboard arrows. Tinou has made quite an effort, as you can specify almost everything that you can imagine, so make sure you have some time available before you click the link below.
This is perfect for someone who quickly wants to create an embeddable slidehow. It’s not as fancy as the creation of Tinou Bao but it sure does the job right. Splashr outputs your photos by username or tag into any number of different slideshow formats, and then creates a link to the slideshow itself that you can share with all your friends and admirers.
Dumpr – get your face on the walls of a famous museum
Dumpr is a site where you can add fun effects to your Flickr photos. You can choose from the following options: Museumr, Amazing Circles, Lomography, Rubik’s Cube, Jigsaw Puzzles, Pencil Sketches, Reflection, Easter Egg, Celebrity Paparazzi, Weave, Lego-ize and Stone Mosaic. The last two are premium options though, so you’ll have to pay a few bucks for them. The picture on the right is an example of the Museumr, featuring Digg founder Kevin Rose and blogger Edial Dekker.
On The Next Web, we try to give our articles a hip and stylish look by using Flickr pics instead of just another logo. Or as a visitor once said in the comments: “Tryin’ too hard to be cool and artsy”. Well, I think we’re doing pretty good job, you may judge for yourself.
Anyway, I’ve stumbled upon two handy plugins that make being ‘cool’ and ‘artsy’ with Flickr pics even easier. One for Wordpress and one for iPhoto.
Flickr and Wordpress
Australian problogger Darren Rowse wrote about Photo Dropper, a Wordpress plugin that finds Flickr Creative Commons licensed images all from within your Wordpress Dashboard. You can choose three different sizes and attribution links are automatically added underneath the images to comply with the Creative Commons license rules. Get the plugin here.
Flickr and iPhoto
Another great plugin that makes it possible to upload your iPhoto pictures. I’ve found it on Jaap Stronks’ blog and was delighted, since it will lower the barrier for me to upload photos to Flickr. I used to just import them in iPhoto, but now I can put them on Flickr with a few clicks as well.
A free iPhoto export plugin for Flickr. This provides a convenient way to upload your iPhoto descriptions, titles, keywords (tags), and ratings along with your photos. It also supports sets (yay!) and preserves GPS tags and other EXIF data. Flickr is a semi-free photo sharing service/site.
Written on 5th February 2008
15 COMMENTS Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
I’ve been checking out a lot of new companies and services, but this was the first time I took out my credit card to buy a Pro account within 5 minutes! The service is called Animoto and my prediction is that it’s going to be huge! So I have to share this with you.
Animoto will turn your photos into a video clip that will blow your audience away. Yesterday I’ve made a videoclip for the Bowlr event of last Thursday. You can upload your photos or import them from a third party. Imports from Flickr, Facebook, Smugmug, Photobucket and Picasa are supported by Animoto. After importing your pics you can upload any mp3 file or choose a song from their music store.
Their software will analyze your pics and music and compiles a sweet, sexy and impressive video clip for you.
Check out my first video clip: Chaos @ Bowlr 2008 (feat Lupe Fiasco).
You can try it yourself and make a 30 second clip with a free account, but be aware of the consequences. There’s a big chance you get addicted to the service, grab your credit card, click the ‘I’ll pay you 30 dollars a year’ button and start making clips of your holidays, events, marriages and may be even your pet.
Is it all one big hosanna? Well no, it doesn’t support MP4 files meaning that music bought via iTunes cannot be used in your clips. The interface works fine, but you need to upload your photos every time you want to make a new video. All together this is still my favorite web app of 2008.
Written on 30th May 2009
15 COMMENTS 
Despite the humor in the photos below, web addiction is apparently a serious problem. According to recent research, one in four employees are addicted to the Internet.
Written on 24th March 2009
Written on 15th October 2008
Written on 6th October 2008
Written on 12th June 2008
San Francisco-based Vietnamese guy Tinou Bao has built a tool which allows you to create a cover flow slideshow ala iTunes for your Flickr photos. Viewers can browse through the slideshow using the keyboard arrows. Tinou has made quite an effort, as you can specify almost everything that you can imagine, so make sure you have some time available before you click the link below.
This is perfect for someone who quickly wants to create an embeddable slidehow. It’s not as fancy as the creation of Tinou Bao but it sure does the job right. Splashr outputs your photos by username or tag into any number of different slideshow formats, and then creates a link to the slideshow itself that you can share with all your friends and admirers. 
Written on 5th February 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
