mug

Crowdsource your social causes, lawsuits

One rule of thumb in business is to make use of money-making models that work. In this day and age, recommendations, matching algorithms, and online advertising are tried and true--when done right. Yelp, Pandora, and Google Ads prove it. Everywun, Mylawsuit.com, and MyGameMug are three companies that presented at the Plug and Play Expo on Thursday that have also applied these principles to their services.

Everywun knows that most people have a pet cause, and that for some, recruiting allies or advertising their volunteerism is a badge of pride. To that end, Everywun has created a money-making system that … Read more

SmugMug goes after prosumer photags with SmugVault

SmugMug, a photo host geared toward prosumer and professional photographers, launched a new service Monday called SmugVault.

As the name would suggest it's all about storage, but not just for the standard slew of files you'll see supported on sites like Flickr or Google's Picasa. Instead, SmugVault is all about the files professional or advanced users end up with, like the RAW and TIFF files from high-end digital SLRs, and the PDF and PSD files from post-processing.

The service is tapping into Amazon.com's S3 cloud storage to serve up all that space, and offering users … Read more

Save your spoons and stirring sticks

If you're a rabid coffee drinker like I am, then you're familiar with the one-time coffee stirring stick. Most convenience stores stick (no pun intended) to the plastic straw variety, while some bigger coffee corporations like Starbucks go for the wooden skinny popsicle sticks.

But have you ever stopped to think about how much wood and plastic is wasted in using the one-time swirlers? According to the Daily Green, a sort of consumer report site for green-lovers, we use and throw out more than 138 billion of the non-biodegradable plastic sticks every year. This comes out to (give … Read more

SmugMug smiles for Amazon S3

When photo site SmugMug initially contacted me, it was in the context of some of the pieces that I had written about competitor Flickr and some of the issues associated with protecting photographers' works online.

In a nutshell, relative to Flickr, SmugMug has opted for less of a open-community orientation than for ways to store and display photos with a rather granular set of access controls. (See some discussion by CEO and "Chief Geek" Don MacAskill.)

These are important topics that I'll be discussing further in due course, but today, I'm going to focus on SmugMug'… Read more

Underexposed blog: Links of the day

Olympus E-430 rumor: Photography Bay - "Rumors and photos of an alleged Olympus E-430 have surfaced on the web." If true, the wacky, swoopy design breaks new ground for an SLR. Nikon D300 firmware 1.02 fixes rare issue - Nikon says this addresses a problem that "in rare cases, caused vertical bands (lines) to appear in images captured at shutter speeds slower than 8 seconds." Corbis makes marketing push for its microstock site SnapVillage | about the image - Corbis says it will now start to "aggressively target customers, including introducing its first advertisements, launching … Read more

What's the best Web site for geotagged photos?

Readers of this blog will have inferred I'm a fan of geotagging--in fact, I'm trying to label all my photos with the tags that show where the picture was taken, even though the geotagging process is complicated.

I'm betting that much of the value of geotagging lies in the future, for example, when I might have a harder time remembering which hike a particular picture came from. But can anything useful be done with those geotagged photos today?

Based on my scrutiny of a handful of sites--Google's Picasa, Yahoo's Flickr, SmugMug (the only … Read more

Smugmug adapts for large, small screens

Correction: I updated the blog to correct a misspelling of Don MacAskill's name.

SmugMug, a site popular among photography aficionados, has been retooled with a more adaptable interface and overhauled video-sharing technology.

The new interface, which the Mountain View, Calif.-based company calls SmugMungous, automatically displays one of nine different sizes of a photo on the screen, with a patch of thumbnails of related images to the left side. The reason for the SmugMungous name: the largest of these images is 1600x1200 pixels, enough to fill up very large monitors.

In addition, the new site comes with an iTunes … Read more

Report: Microsoft planning a Flickr clone

Judging by a Microsoft job ad, the software giant wants to add a Flickr-like service to its online efforts.

According to text from the ad, republished by Long Zheng's istartedsomething blog, the company is looking for a program manager for a new division of its Windows Live effort.

"This feature team is building a next-generation photo and video sharing service that will compete with Flickr, SmugMug and other photo web solutions today. This is a 'v1' opportunity," the ad said. And video will be a part of the effort, too: "This role will work across … Read more

Interrogation camera in a coffee mug

It may seem surprising, but it's not often that Crave gets to write about an item with this kind of description in its product literature: "Great for use in interrogation rooms for law enforcement agencies."

We'll have to take StarTech Outlet's word for it, as that's how the site describes its "2.4GHz Coffee Mug Wireless Camera." In fact, with a name like that, there's really not a whole lot more that needs to be said.

The mug is outfitted with a minuscule camera and video transmitter that sends images in … Read more