The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘through-the-web’

Do you like sounding like an idiot? Does the thought of doing so in front of millions of people appeal to you? Then Yahoo has just the thing for you (or, rather, Y!ou).

Yahoo has just launched Yodel Studio, a site for you to yes, record yourself yodeling. The idea is for Yahoo users to remix the service’s signature sound for a chance at recognition, most notably, on Yahoo’s homepage which is visited by tens of millions of people each month. Yahoo is also pledging up to $130,000 for local and global charities on behalf of each yodel submitted.

So how do you do it? Well if you happen to be in New York City, London, or Mumbai, there are live events happening later today (NYC and London) and tomorrow (Mumbai). Professional recording booths will be set up and celebrities will be on hand to help you with your yodeling. People like Randy Jackson (from American Idol) and LeAnn Rimes will be in New York, along with Jewel, who apparently is one hell of a yodeler herself (watch the video below).

If you aren’t going to be in any of those cities, you have until November 8 to submit your yodel through this site. The recording is all done through the web browser and includes video. It also includes background tracks if you want to yodel along with generic rock or hip-hop beats.

The videos are already rolling in on the site. Wow. Feel free to post links to your yodeling in the comments, if you dare.

Obviously, this is a quirky part of Yahoo’s new It’s Y!ou marketing campaign. Will this bring Jerry back? That seems unlikely; if I heard all these people yodeling, I would run the other way as quickly as possible..

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

One of the cooler things that Nine Inch Nails has done in recent years is release the audio files for many of its tracks for fans to use to create their own remixes with Apple’s GarageBand software. It’s a great idea to get fans more involved in the music, but unfortunately it does require that you have a) GarageBand and as such, b) a Mac. With Aviary’s new Myna audio editing tool, bands will now be able to offer such functionality simply through the web browser.

If you haven’t checked out Myna yet, you should. Aviary released it the other day, and it’s really impressive for software that is fully contained in the browser. It’s not quite as powerful as GarageBand, but most casual users probably don’t need all the bells and whistles that GarageBand provides. Most users will find Myna more than powerful enough, and actually, it seems quite a bit easier to get the hang of as a result of being slightly less complex.

But the really cool potential for Myna lies in using its API and getting some partnerships with bands to do remixes on the web. The first such partnership is with the band Major Lazer. They’re currently holding a contest between now and October 1 for whichever fan does the best remix. There will be one grand prize winner (who gets $500 among a bunch of other stuff) and five runners-up.

In a time when everyone is talking about falling music sales, and wonder if the recording industry as it’s currently constituted can survive, this sounds like a great way for bands to create a more interactive experience with their fans.

Again, Aviary makes this very simple to do. You load up the Myna app from Major Lazer’s website and it’s pre-populated with various musical elements of three tracks that you can remix. From there, it’s simply a matter of dragging and dropping elements to get the mix you want. Cool stuff.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

There have been a bunch of Google events recently, covering a range of products, but the same question seems to rise above all others at each of them: When is Chrome coming for the Mac? Even Sergey Brin is asking it. Google has committed to getting the browser running on OS X sometime this year, but after several months in development, it’s still isn’t ready. Today, we get a nice, bland update from Google: “Google Chrome for the Mac is coming along fine,” says a post on the Google Blog.

The same post points to a more in-depth post on the Chromium Blog which discusses getting sandboxing working on the Mac version. Sandboxing is a security measure Chrome uses to allow to allow it to render sites and run applications without the possibility of harming your overall computing environment in the case of an attack through the web. Apparently, such a technique was tricky to set up for Windows, but it’s much simpler to set up for the Mac and Linux versions of Chrome. Google has posted more information about it here.

So that’s another feature of Chrome that looks good to go on the Mac. I’ve been running the most up to date Chromium builds on my Mac for a while, and it does look like it’s getting close. Certain things though, are still not ready for prime time. While most pages seem to be rendering nicely, and most apps like Gmail not only run, but are very fast, things like Flash implementation isn’t yet a go.

It seems a bit surprising that it’s taken this long for Google to get it working perfectly on the Mac, especially considering that the man behind the excellent Camino browser (a Mac-only browser built by Mozilla) is leading the project for Google. But the keyword is “perfectly” — as Google notes, “It’s important to us that the Mac port of Chromium feels and performs like a native Mac application, and that it provides the kind of high-quality experience Mac users expect.”

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Center’d, a local activity guide headed by former Yahoo Local GM Jennifer Dulski, is getting a major upgrade today. Alongside a completely revamped homepage, the site is launching a reworked search engine that it says should outperform the keyword searches found on most other local sites.

Center’d has compiled a database of around 1 million entries for various activities, each of which is categorized into a number of intent-based classifications. To do this, the site has spidered through the web analyzing ‘conversations’ taking place around each entry, taking context into account to determine if a review or comment is positive or negative. It then maps out the results in bar graphs, as seen below. Dulski says that this kind of semantic analysis is better than standard keyword search, and it helps eliminate inaccurate matches - for example it would prevent a review that said “this place is not for kids” from appearing under a query for restaurants “for kids”.

Using this database, the site can also generate city guides for users with a variety of different criteria (for example, you could generate a guide for San Francisco with romance in mind, or you could create one that would take you through the city on the cheap). The site is launching with support for twelve cities intitially, with plans to ramp up to more in the near future. Dulski says that these guides are mostly-automated (which will help it scale), though there is some editor control involved.

Center’d emerged about a year ago from the ashes of Fatdoor, a social network for neighbors. Until now its primary focus has been to serve as a local search engine and event planning site, and now it’s adding a new goal to that list: helping people figure out what to do with their day. Dulski says that many people have been coming to the site to find something to do, without anything in particular in mind. As with the city guides, users can select from a variety of criteria like ‘cheap’ or ‘for kids’, and ask the site to generate a list of possible activities.

In the next few weeks Center’d will also be deploying its suggestion engine to the iPhone, with a mobile application that will allow users to generate a day-long itinerary based on the amount of money they’re able to spend and the type of activities they’d like to persue.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Today was supposed to be a big coming out party for stealthy search engine Wolfram Alpha. Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram gave the first public demonstration of his knowledge mining search engine at Harvard. But to be honest, not too many people were paying attention because A) who wants to sit through a two-hour Webcast and B) Google decided to tease its own efforts at adding structured data to search during the demo.

Not long after that, we received the screenshot above from an anonymous “benefactor” of Wolfram Alpha asking “which one is computing about the future?” The Wolfram screenshot shows a search for “ISS” and the results show the flight path and current position of the International Space Station, along with its altitude, velocity, inclination, orbit type, and other useful stats. Google population search, in contrast, plots basically one data point over time (although, you can easily add others). The suggestion is that Google quickly ginned up its public data search feature to undermine Wolfram’s debut. And it worked. Nobody really paid attention to the two hour snorecast (except Larry Dignan at Cnet—thank you Larry for sitting through it so the rest of us didn’t have to).

To be fair, some people who have seen it are very excited about the Wolfram search engine (Nova Spivack, for one, argues persuasively that it is going to be big). But it is hard to get excited about canned demos and promises of computer science breakthroughs. Google’s structured data search might be relatively simplistic but at least it isn’t vaporware. Google actually launched it. Anyone can try it out. When will Wolfram do the same and let people actually play with his vaunted search engine? It is going to take more than a leaked screenshot to convince anyone that Wolfram has something Google doesn’t or can’t build in a year.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.