The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘pictures’

I love how this is controversial. Sony Pictures (creators of Spider-Man ) chairman Michael Lynton has suggested that movie theaters offer healthy snacks in addition to their usual parade of garbage, and people have reacted with blind rage . How dare you tell me how to live my life, you pinko liberal communist! It’s like, really?

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Sony Pictures learns the hard way: You don’t make friends with salad

Now that winter is drawing to a close in most of the country (it’s still snowing here in the Sierra Nevadas), it’s time to think about getting out and taking more pictures. As a photography enthusiast, I know there’s a few things that I consider critical whenever I’m out shooting, things are I don’t leave home without. Tripod: If you are concerned about taking tack sharp pictures, don’t trust the vibration reduction on your lens.

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Essential Gear for the Outdoor Photographer

Everyone’s favorite Dances With Wolves remake, Avatar, is coming soon to Blu-ray and DVD. Just don’t expect many extras.

Original post: 
Gimped “Avatar” Blu-ray coming soon

It’s no secret, we think that GigaPan’s products are pretty darn cool. The first generation only supported P&S cameras, the second generation worked with SLRs, but not the big boys.

Go here to see the original: 
Next-gen GigaPan system sports new features, better frame

Most concept clocks are high on art, and low on functionality. That’s not the case with the Aspiral Clock, designed by Will Aspinall and Neil Lambath.

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Aspiral Clock makes telling time a ball

We’re big fans of Animoto, a website that lets you easily create photo and video slideshows matched to music. The site is constantly innovating its nifty product, most recently adding an iPhone app and the ability to incorporate video. For those not familiar with Animoto, the startup basically allows you to take your images, video and your music and mash them together to create cool videos. What makes the videos cool is the company’s technology that renders the pictures so they’re in-step with the music you’ve chosen, adding nice transition effects. This morning, Animoto is opening up its API, allowing partners to now incorporate Animoto’s compelling technologies into independent sites

The first API that being rolled out for the Animoto Partner Platform is Animoto Quickstart.  The API essentially allows any website to tap into Animoto’s video creation flow.  The aim is to make Animoto one click away from any website that has photos, videos or music.  Quickstart allows websites to connect their own content, including photos, video clips and music to Animoto as the first step in creating an Animoto video. So partners can integrate Animoto’s video slideshow creation tool into their sites. And the startup promises that Quickstart takes only hours to a partner to set up on a site.

For example, SmugMug, a photo sharing site that caters to professional photographers, uses Quickstart so users can ‘pass’ their photo albums into Animoto’s video creation flow. So is the user now has the option of making a slideshow from their hosted photos and simply needs to pick a song to complete their Animoto video. Once a user slicks to make the slideshow, he or she will be taken to Animoto’s site, where their video and photos will automatically be placed into Animoto’s site.

Another use case is a promotion Animoto is launching with iconic musician John Bon Jovi where fans of Bon Jovi can go to Bonjovi’s site to create an Animoto music video with Bon Jovi’s latest single and footage from his music video.  Pepsi also used the Quickstart API to help users create video slideshows in a contest involving its ShareTheJoy campaign.

With the launch of this API at SXSW, Animoto is partnering with music publication SPIN magazine to allow fans to promote their favorite South by Southwest bands for a chance to win prizes.
From now until March 31, 2010, fans are can create and submit Animoto videos featuring songs from top South by Southwest bands for a chance to win $1000 and a spot on Spin.com, and other prizes.
 
Currently Animoto has 1.4 million users and makes money off of its paid subscriptions. On its site its free to create 30 second videos, but you need to pay $3 per video to make an lengthier slideshow. The site sells a year long subscription to users for $30. A large part of Animoto’s subscription business are composed of professional videographers and photographers who pay $20 per year to create their own branded videos that they can download, and burn to a CD (and the slideshow doesn’t bear the “Animoto” logo). Animoto’s CEO Brad Jefferson tells me that 10 percent of users, so 140,000 people, are currently using some type of paid subscription on the site.The company is already cash-flow positive, which isn’t bad for a startup that’s less than three years old.

In terms of monetizing the API, Animoto isn’t charging any of its partners. In fact, its actually paying its partners in terms of affiliate fees. So if any partners lead new or existing users to the site who end up buying a subscription, Animot will give the partner a 40 percent cut of the first year’s fee.

The Quickstart API seems to be the first of a few sets of APIs that will extend Animoto’s technology onto the other sites. It’s a smart move. While many photo sharing sites have the ability to make slideshows, the technology is not nearly as fun and easy to use as Animoto’s. And Animoto is undoubtedly a compelling tool for an brand marketer to use for a campaign. Frankly, the possibilities are endless because Animoto is such an easy tool to use.

The big Sony press conference is underway, and as expected, their motion controller is the star of the show. We can’t be there personally this time, but here comes the news anyway (I’m watching a few liveblogs; the pictures are from Kotaku’s ). The motion controller will be called the Move, not the Gem or Arc as suspected, and you can use two of them (or one and a nunchuk-like non-ball-topped controller) simultaneously to, say, box or use a sword and shield.

Excerpt from:
GDC 2010: Sony’s motion controller is called Playstation Move

We’ve given you a first look at Iron Man 2 way back in June last year, and two months ago, we reported it will be Marvel’s first IMAX movie when it hits screens on May 7, 2010. It’s 2.32 minutes long and very, very cool. This is the official synopsis of the movie: Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment present the highly anticipated sequel to the blockbuster film based on the legendary Marvel Super Hero Iron Man, reuniting director Jon Favreau and Oscar® nominee Robert Downey Jr

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New Iron Man 2 trailer is here (and it’s awesome)

The idea was a way to show people the best food in Japan beyond sushi — to literally show them, in picture form. Then the thought morphed into writing to a book, where the best food in the world was shown. But that’s a lot of travel for one person. So the thought became, why not crowdsource it? That’s Foodspotting.

Foodspotting is an application that allows you to take picture of a food, say what it is, and pin it (with geolocation) to the restaurant where you got it. You may wonder who would use such an app — but just think for a second about how many of your friends on Twitter tweet out pictures of food. People have been doing this long before Foodspotting, this app just gives them more of an incentive to do so, and let’s them organize it.

It’s also one hell of a new food discovery tool. And that’s exactly why the team behind it, Alexa Andrzejewski and Ted Grubb, hustled to get the official iPhone app done in time for the SXSW festival, which starts next week in Austin, Texas. With it, you’ll be able to use the “Guides” to easily find (and contribute to) the best foods in Austin. The Foodspotting team put together a few of these guides (including a scavenger hunt, and a street food one), but other users have already created others as well.

From these guides, you can easily mark which foods you “want” to bookmark them for later. You can also note which foods you’ve already eaten (“nommed”). Of course, you can also use the app to search for a particular food or restaurant. Or simply scroll through the pictures on the main screen to see a stream of food (which can be sorted by “latest,” “nearest,” “best,” etc). And yes, you can use a map view to see the food too.

When you yourself spot a food, you can tweet it out to your followers. Or, thanks to Foursquare’s relatively new API, you can also check-in to a venue simply by foodspotting (yes, the service hopes the name becomes a common verb).

It’s one of the most interesting location-based plays that will be on display at SXSW — a conference that will be rife with location-based services. But Foodspotting is a bit different because they’re not aiming to be a location platform like Foursquare or Gowalla. Instead, they’re happy to use location to augment their own reality-based game. That is, after all, essentially what Foodspotting is. Just like with the other two aforementioned location services, you earn some badges for tagging certain types of foods in pictures (they called them “Expert Badges”). And you earn others for participating in the Guides. And, of course, there are points for doing all of this.

While the “lite” version of the app has been available in the App Store for a few months, the team has done little to promote it, waiting instead until the full version, which launches today in the App Store. Still, the lite version (and the very nice-looking website) proved that there’s a demand for this service. Already, Foodspotting has seen over 15,000 foodspottings. Top cities include San Francisco, New York, and Honolulu.

So how do you make money off of this idea? That’s a question the Foodspotting team has had to answer a lot recently, as they’re currently in the process of raising a seed round of funding. The natural idea is to become popular enough that restaurants and brands want to partner with the service to promote themselves. ”It’s kind of like pumping a scent out of your bakery window to draw people in,” Andrzejewski says. Already, the service is teaming up with 7

Online movie clips site Movieclips has opened up its service to users all over the world and released an API. The site, which launched in beta last December, is a movie clip destination that offers licensed, high quality movie scenes on the web.

Movieclips was previously only available to U.S. users but is now available to users all over the world, thanks to approval from the studios who own the content. The site features more than 12,000 two-minute clips from the libraries of 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures. The company has also developed proprietary technology that assigns up to 1,000 points of data to every scene, making it super easy to find scenes by actor, film title, dialogue snippet, director, genre, etc.

The site allows you to embed clips, share your comments below the video and share the whole thing with your buddies on Facebook, Twitter, and Digg. The API, which is free, isn’t fully open as developers who use the API must be approved by Moveclips. The company is also working on launching a new, specially developed player for move clips on the site.

We’re big fans of the site; what’s not to love about free, licensed clips that you can share with anyone? Movieclip faces competition from TC50 2009 finalist AnyClip.