The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘images’

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.

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.

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

In his keynote speech today at the Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed off what could end up being a crucial tool for anyone trying to figure out a menu in a different language or a street sign in a foreign country. Google Goggles, which creates search queries based on images instead of typed-in keywords, will soon start to be able to translate from foreign languages using Google Translate. It will do this using optical character recognition to first convert the images of letters into words it can understand, and then put those through Google translate.

Schmidt showed an image of an Android phone translating “Spring salad with wild herbs and parmesan cheese wrapped in bacon” from the German. (MobileCrunch editor Greg Kumparak took the photo at left). Of course, Google Translate often gets the translations wrong, to humorous effect. But even a partial translation is better than nothing when you don’t speak the language. Google Translate works in more than 50 languages.

Schmidt also revealed that 60,000 Android phones are being sold each day now.

Google’s Street View has gone to many strange places, even off-road. But in preparation for the Winter Olympics it equipped a snowmobile with 360-degree cameras and took it to the top of Whistler, the Canadian ski resort where the Games will take place.

The slope-side views can be seen in the map on Google’s new Winter Olympics information page. Google should do this for all major ski mountains. It’s a great way to see if you really want to go up to the top of that double black diamond chair lift.

Here is a video showing how they got the images:

GuestofaGuest found some pix of Bill Gates rocking out at Robert Redford’s party at Sundance. Curious as to what he was dancing to, we ran “ENHANCE” in Windows 7 and were able to pull the audio by sensing the vibrations in each person’s hair as well as a reflection of someone’s Zune in the blond woman’s right eye.

Then, by using Windows Movie Maker we grabbed all of the images and interpolated them into one video and then pulled the audio from the metadata. The result? Bill Gates busting a move.

Click through for video.

Pageonce has quietly built a solid business by aggregating its user’s various online accounts into one place. They’ve got over 1.3 million registered users and recently raised a $6.5 million Series B round. And though Pageonce hardly gets neither the fame nor the fortune of its competitor (Mint), it is still a very solid way to manage your online accounts. Unlike Mint, which focuses on personal finances, Pageonce’s goal is to provide you with a one-stop view of all of your online accounts, including financial, travel, e-mail and social networking.

Though a single web interface for all of those accounts may be unnecessary, it is a perfect service for mobile devices. Specifically, the Pageonce iPhone App - “Personal Assistant” - is done extremely well, and I still use it to this day. It blows Mint’s iPhone App out of the water.

Today, Pageonce launches TripTracker [iTunes Link]. This is a free iPhone App ($1 removes the ads) that enables you to keep track of all of our trip itineraries - hotels and flights specifically - on the go.

Twitpic might be in a bit of a pickle.  In what looks like a cruel joke, its main competitor, ImageShack (the company behind the yFrog Twitter photo hosting service), went ahead and filed to trademark the name “Twitpic” before Twitpic did.  According to filings from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (via Trademarkia), ImageShack filed for the Twitpic trademark in August of 2009. Twitpic filed for the same trademark only in October of 2009.  Both Twitpic and yFrog serve the same purpose: they are image sharing sites for Twitter.  But it’s hard to see how Imageshack can justify its claim to the Twitpic trademark.

According to ImageShack’s filing, the application is in non-final action mode, which means that the USPTO’s attorneys are investigating the application since the documents and images that Imageshack filed don’t contain the word “Twitpic.” Meanwhile, Twitpic’s filing is in suspension mode, which indicates that the USPTO has suspended action on its application (perhaps pending its decision on ImageShack’s application).  I’ve embedded all of the filings and correspondence to and from the USPTO below.

All in all, the situation is unfortunate, but still pretty funny. While ImageShack has been around for awhile, the company didn’t launch its Twitpic competitor until a full year after Twitpic launched in February, 2008. And to our knowledge, ImagesShack has never used the name Twitpic for any of its products.  So this has all the signs of a competitive prank.  Still, it’s a little surprising that Twitpic waited so long to trademark its name. And sadly for Twitpic, it looks like revenge is out of the question. ImageShack owns the trademarks for both yFrog and ImageShack. We’ve contacted both companies for responses.

Thanks to Justin Khoo for the tip.

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Last summer, we wrote about the launch of a new service from Google called City Tours that marked the search giant’s first foray into the travel space. The service isn’t exactly flashy, but it’s quite practical: tell it what city you’re visiting, and it can generate an optimized travel itinerary featuring a number of landmarks within walking distance. Unfortunately it had a few shortcomings. For one, its directions were all based on distances “as the bird flies”. In other words, it was up to you to figure out the best way to navigate between these landmarks, because Travel Tours would sometimes direct you to walk directly across a river.

Today, Google is releasing an updated version of Travel Tours that takes advantage of the Walking Directions built into Google Maps, which means you’ll be able to rely on them even if you’re not capable of scaling a building in a single bound. You can see the difference in the images below.

Google’s blog post on the release also notes that you can now import Google ‘My Maps’ into City Tours. My Maps, which launched back in 2007, allow you to manually tag your own points of interest on a Google Map. This means you’ll now be able to build out a map of all the landmarks you’d like to see on your trip, then import those into City Tours to get an optimized itinerary.

The service remains in Google Labs.

New Version

Old Version

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With the launch of iTunes 9, Apple revamped many of the areas of the iTunes online store so that they were rendered with WebKit, the open source web layout engine (which browsers like Safari and Chrome also use). Alongside this, the whole store was redesigned. But one area that remained untouched were the pages for individual apps in the App Store. Today, those are finally starting to be revamped as well.

While the new layout isn’t live for all apps yet, it is for plenty of them. As you can see below, the new pages look much nicer. Instead of being text-heavy by default, the new pages have much of the text area collapsed, and the emphasis is clearly on the images. Instead of just one app screenshot being shown, there are now 3. It’s just much, much nicer.

It will be interesting to see how this change affects the way app developers do their descriptions. Now that the emphasis is clearly on the first few sentences of the description, developers should be more concise in describing their apps, since that’s all that shown by default. If you click the “…More” link, the area will expand to show all the text, but again, that’s not the default look anymore.

[thanks Paolo]

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The overflowing inbox. It’s a problem many a journalist or blogger has had to deal with, but it’s often a necessary evil. After all, we’re all on the hunt for the next big story, cool gadget, or interesting startup, and Email has long been the standard for receiving pitches. Unfortunately, Email is really bad at filtering through the noise, so it’s easy for good stories to fall through the cracks. That’s where eGether comes in. The new site is looking to offer an alternative to the pitch-by-Email method. It’s essentially a social network for people who are pitching, and people who are looking to be pitched.

eGether was founded by Vincent Nguyen and Ewdison Then of SlashGear, a rapidly growing gadget site, so they know a thing or two about some of the problems with the standard Email pitch. Nguyen says that the site combines elements of many social sites, like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, to create a social network that’s optimized for efficiently submitting or reading pitches, as well as for learning about the people behind them.

Like Facebook and Twitter, the site lets you update your status, which you can use to share articles you’ve found interesting or converse with other members using an @reply system. These updates have a 144 character limit, and are shown in a Twitter-like stream. There’s also a second class of update: The Pitch. These are longer updates that allow members to upload text, documents, images, entire media kits, and more. In effect, they’re much like the Email pitches many PR people send out every day. But they’re limited to a maximum of 999 characters.

That’s not much — the previous two paragraphs come out to just over 900 characters. But that’s exactly why eGether is imposing the limitation. Anyone who has read many press pitches knows that they can become overly verbose, filled with unneeded backstory, explanations, and quotes. It can be struggle to tell what exactly a company does when that information is buried in a full page of text. And that problem is only magnified when there are dozens of other pitches coming in every day. eGether forces users to condense their pitches to the most important material. You can see a sample pitch in the shot below.

Of course, tech press aren’t the only people who want to get pitched. When you register on eGether, the site asks you what type of user you are: PR, Author, Consumer, Analyst, or Press. It can use this to break out users out into their own networks based on their field. That means an author could write a pitch for their book that would only be read by a literary agent or publisher rather than the entire site.

eGether has some solid ideas, but it’s going to face the classic chicken and the egg problem: it needs to get press, agents and other people looking for pitches onto the platform. Otherwise, it won’t be very appealing for PR people and authors to submit their pitches in the first place. That said, I don’t know many press who aren’t willing to try out an alternative to their mountains of Email, so eGether may not have such a tough time generating interest, after all.

Disclosure: CrunchGear editor John Biggs assisted Nguyen with some of the site’s functionality.

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