The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘image’

We’ve written about FunMobility’s nifty picture messaging app for the iPhone and Android, called FunMail, that allows users to blasts their text into the application, which then breaks down whatever the user typed for context and places fun graphics with your original text. Now, FunMobility has caught the Twitter bug and is launching FunTweet, a web service which turns any Twitter stream into visual messages that are related to the text.

Similar to FunMail, FunTweet will turn text in Tweets into a matching image. On FunTweet’s site, you sign in with your Twitter credentials and the service will draw your Tweets from your Twitter homepage feed and display each tweet as a FunMail image on FunTweet. Users can also enter a @UserName, a HashTag or a Subject as well to the images. If you like the image FunTweet picked, you can publish the Tweet to your Twitter account. If you don’t like the image, click “Try Again” and you can choose from other images. For example, if you tweet about writing a story or reading a book, then FunTweet will come up with images that match “story” – a book, a magazine, a typewriter, or a pen.

FunMobility is hoping FunTweet can be a display tool for parties, conferences and other gatherings where live stream messages may be projected. I find myself wishing I could include my own pictures into my FunTweets so I’m hoping the site will soon include that functionality.

FunMail for the iPhone has gained a bit of traction in a short amount of time with 100,000 downloads since its launch in November. So FunTweet could gain a loyal following a fun tool to spice up Tweets. TwitSig and SayTweet also allow you to make images from Tweets.

This is the lede, verbatim, from a story that appeared in The Hill yesterday: “The Internet allowed extremists to contact, recruit, train and equip the suspect responsible for the attempted Flight 253 bombing on Christmas Day ‘within weeks,’ a top Pentagon official told lawmakers Wednesday.” What’s the implication, that because someone used the Internet to plan something, something bad, we should get rid of it? Fine by me, believe me.

Sonos has now confirmed the Index Ventures investment we reported two days ago. The company has taken an additional $25 million in capital from Index, raising the total raised by the company to $65 million. And Index Ventures Partner Mike Volpi, a former CIsco executive, has joined their board of directors.

The funds will be used for growth equity, says the company, which signals that they are past the proof of product stage (well past, in this case) and will use the funds to speed market penetration.

From our original post:

Volpi will bring real expertise to the Sonos board. As recently as 2007 he ran an $11 billion routing and access products busines for Cisco. He clearly knows how to sell products at scale.

Sonos has been around since 2003 and has raised some $40 million from private angel investors and BV Capital. Until last year the company sold very high end music products that users loved passionately, but the mutli-thousand dollar price point for a complete system made mainstream penetration difficult.

But in 2009 Sonos began selling a new product, the S5 music system, that users control via their iPhone. The S5 is just $400 and has driven “massive growth” says the company.

Like Flip last year, Sonos likely had a choice between selling now or raising new money for major expansion. Flip sold to Cisco. Sonos, it seems, is taking more money, but adding an ex-Cisco exec as well. Perhaps they’ll get their cake and eat it, too.

It’s Apple iPad day, and every early adopter worth their salt is pre-ordering one of the soon to be ubiquitous little devices and counting the days until they get their hands on it on April 3. You’ve been waiting on this thing since December 2008, after all.

We know you’ve already bought two for yourselves, the limit, because that’s how TechCrunch readers roll. We know this because we’ve told our advertisers that every single one of our 9.2 million monthly readers is a high disposable income influencer in technology and media that just loves to try out new things that they see advertised on TechCrunch. And since those advertisers believe us, we have the means to buy an extra iPad and give it to you. Even though you’ll then have three of them. Because you, dear reader, are a high disposable income influencer.

Anyhow back to the iPad. This isn’ the 3G version, which comes later in April. This is the 16GB Wifi iPad, a $499 retail device, that we’ll give away to one lucky reader chosen at random who comments below or retweets this post. Just fan the TechCrunch Facebook page and then do one of two things: either retweet this post, and make sure to include the #crunch hashtag, or leave a comment below telling us why this device must be yours. The contest ends at noon California time on Saturday. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We’ll pick a winner tomorrow afternoon and contact you for more details. Anyone in the world is eligible, as long as you can receive delivered packages (our Nexus One winner lives in Romania). And we’ll throw in a TechCrunch tshirt.

Last August, we wrote about Lunch.com, a reviews site that’s setting out with the goal to make the world a better place by changing the way people think about each other (as I wrote then, it’s a pretty lofty goal). Today, the company is launching a new feature called Communities that lets users build their own review sites around any niche topic. If you’d like to try founding a community, you can do so using the beta code “techcrunch”.

The new feature can be likened to a ‘Ning for review sites’. As a community founder, you select a topic on whatever you’d like, then invite other users to contribute reviews and other content (you can elect to moderate this as it comes in). For examples, check out Strollerland, a new community that’s dedicated to reviewing strollers. There’s also Gluten Free Groupies, for (surprise) people who like to talk about gluten-free foods.

The benefits of this kind of niche-community setup are clear — if you cater to a group of people passionate about a given topic, they’re probably going to be more knowledgeable and engaged than your average user. I’d rather take recommendations from someone who reads about strollers all day than from a guy who liked the one he chose at random at Wal-Mart.

CEO J.R. Johnson says that Lunch’s system allows for the creation of multiple communities around the same topic (for example, there could be ten different reviews communities that revolved around bicycles). Because all of these niche review sites are built on the Lunch.com platform, the site can use its universal search and suggestion engine to recommend content you may be interested in, even if it’s found on a different community than the one you’re currently browsing.

However, it sounds like new communities may have some trouble getting off the ground.  Johnson says he expects that lots of the niche review sites will be launched by existing online communities (say, a Yahoo Group).  For them, the system should work well, but if you just want to launch a review site about stamps but don’t already have many friends who are interested in the topic, you may have trouble getting much traction.  That said, these niche communities will be exposed to search engines, and if you produce relevant content Lunch’s recommendation engine should also help introduce your community to new users.

So we finally have the official press release from Panasonic, we of course got a glimpse of the G2 and G10 the other day , but now we know all the news that’s fit to share. Both look like some decent kit, and a definite step up from most of the P&S cameras out there.

View original post here: 
It’s official: here’s the scoop on Panasonic’s new G2 and G10 cameras

Here’s an interesting item, from artist Sascha Pohflepp. It’s called Blinks and Buttons, and it’s a “blind camera.” Possessing no lens and no viewfinder, the “camera” still takes a picture when you press the big red shutter button.

Read the original:
The blind camera shows you someone else’s pictures

Word on the net is that Apple is working on some cooling related patents, specifically related to venting via the USB and firewire ports.

Originally posted here:
Apple patents using USB ports for venting

Reader Dan of the UK sent us this image of the UK iTunes store, where things are a little more Cool Britannia, if you know what I mean. As I said before , this is all about image in the US

Go here to read the rest:
Quick! There’s still porn in the iTunes store

The idea of having a 64GB card in your camera is a strange one. I take a fair amount of pictures in RAW, yet I rarely if ever run up against the edge of my 8GB card

Here is the original:
Who actually needs a 64GB SD card?