(Credit:
Microsoft)
Almost 30 years ago, as Microsoft was preparing to leave Albuquerque, N.M., for Seattle, the original team gathered on Dec. 7, 1978, to pose for a photo. Pictured are, back row, from left: Steve Wood, Bob Wallace, Jim Lane; second row, from left: Bob O' Rear, Bob Greenberg, Marc McDonald, Gordon Letwin; front row, from left: Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Marla Wood, Paul Allen.
(Credit:
Microsoft)
In this recent update of the original "Albuquerque Group," almost all are in their same positions. The notable changes are the addition of Miriam Lubow, an office manager who missed the original seating because of a snowstorm, and the absence of Bob Wallace, inventor of the term shareware, who died in 2002.
For more on the photo participants, see Newsweek.
Some Photobucket users trying to access the site on Tuesday afternoon were sent to an incorrect page as a result of an error in the site's DNS hosting services, according to an e-mail from the Photobucket support team.
The error was fixed within an hour, but some users were not expected to regain access to the site for a few hours as the fix was rolled out.
"It is important to note that only a portion of Photobucket users encountered the problem and that no Photobucket content, password information or other personal information was affected by the redirect," the e-mail said.
The PoGo inkless printer produces wallet-size pictures that can be turned into stickers.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET News.com)Polaroid, the company that brought the world the iconic snap-and-print camera, is ready to introduce a new instant-photo product fit for the Digital Age. The PoGo, a mobile, inkless printer with a cute name, is small enough to fit in a pocket and prints wallet-size pictures that can be turned into stickers.
The company--which continues its attempt to transition from an analog past to a digital future--hopes the Polaroid-on-the-go will revolutionize instant photo printing.
The PoGo is small enough to fit in a pocket.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET News.com)Polaroid showed the little 8-ounce PoGo to CNET News.com on Tuesday. The product receives images via Bluetooth from a camera cell phone or through a USB cord from any digital camera. Then it uses inkless Zink technology to heat up the photo paper and bring out the colors embedded in the paper's dye crystals.
Without ink heads, printers can be smaller and save money on ink. However, the Zink paper will still cost extra--an average of 35 cents per print. Future plans include larger prints that rely on the the same mobile, inkless concept.
Jon Pollock, vice president and general manager of product planning and new technology at Polaroid, said the product is aimed at teens and young adults who want to print from their cell phone cameras and get instant access to their shots.
The back side of the photos can be peeled, turning pictures into stickers--perfect for slapping on an unsuspecting victim's back, but ideally used for decorating or making collages.
Although Polaroid sells digital cameras and other gadgets, it almost missed the digital wave. Pollock admitted the company suffered about five years ago when it still dealt with analog cameras, but it appears ready to climb back to the top of the photography world. By 2009, the classic instant Polaroid camera will finally fall by the wayside. Pollock said the PoGo is its replacement.
Polaroid's PoGo will be available at Best Buy on July 6 and in most department stores by the fall. The printer retails for $149.
Google Maps launched a new feature on Wednesday that shows you photos, videos, and maps that people have created about different locations around the world.
After typing in a city or address there is a new "Explore this area" link near the top left. Clicking on that brings up thumbnails of photos and videos with links to more of each, as well as custom maps for that location.
For instance, a search on San Francisco brings up photos of the Golden Gate Bridge, the city enveloped in fog (a not uncommon sight), and sunsets. There are videos of penguin chicks at the San Francisco Zoo and video from a YouTube user event.
(Credit:
Google)
Underneath that is a list of popular searches (such as parking garage, De Young Museum) for the location and then user-created interactive maps, including one showing the scenic 49-mile drive and car chases from the movie "Bullitt."
Dragging and zooming in on the map brings up different options for those results, and clicking on the icons on the map brings up a pop-up box with more information.
In separate but map-related developments this week, Google also has added real estate listings to maps and has been testing face-blurring technology in Street View.
The news is coming out of the Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame, Calif., where Poly9 unveiled on Tuesday a Flash-based Google Earth competitor, Free Earth, which doesn't require a client-side download.
(Credit:
Google)
I've been on a bit of a de-cluttering jag over the past year or so. Too much paper, too much "stuff" around the house. So I've been slowly dumping the junk and selling or donating the rest.
ScanCafe Bangalore office
(Credit: ScanCafe)This includes photographs. I had stacks of snapshots of family, friends, places, and so forth sitting around in various drawers and boxes. I had made a half-hearted effort to digitize some of the old slides previously, but scanning is really tedious work. Scanning the hundreds of photos involved here was just more than I realistically felt like tackling.
Over the past couple of years, I'd had some slide scans done locally by a small photo store and a large one. I wasn't impressed in either case. I paid about $1 per scan and the results were pretty mediocre. I don't doubt that I could have eventually tracked down someone in the Boston area who could do a better job for a reasonable cost, but we're still talking pretty big bucks for a mass scan-athon.
That's when, after reading some reviews and surfing some forums on photo sites, I decided over Christmas to box the whole lot up and send them to ScanCafe.
I recently received the results. Bottom line? Good quality and, at $0.24 per slide and $0.27 per print, the price is hard to beat.
I'll dig into my experience in a bit more detail, but let's get one thing out of the way first. The reason the prices can be so good is that the Burlingame, CA-based company does the scans at its facility in Bangalore, India. The way it works is that you ship your box of photos to Burlingame (you print out a UPS label when you place your order online), where they are batched up in a palletized air freight container and shipped to India.
Unsurprisingly, the "ship to India" part causes some intake of breath in a lot of people. However, having gone through the process and thought about it some, I think the incremental risk is pretty small. If you have a handful of photos that you would be especially heartbroken to lose, it's perfectly understandable that you might not want to trust them to a shipping company at all to send them out and get them returned. But once stuff is being shipped around anyway, the international air transport step wouldn't seem to make a big difference. In fact, given that ScanCafe is understandably sensitive to this issue, they seem to have put particular thought into both the whole logistics process and its transparency to customers.
(For what it's worth, for many years I've had slide film processed by Kodak using prepaid mailers. I had one batch of several rolls lost; I'm pretty sure it was the local Postal Service's fault on the return leg. And a couple of years ago, Kodak made such a hash of closing down its Fair Lawn processing facility that I had film missing for months. In other words, staying domestic is no guarantee.)
With that out of the way, how about the rest of the experience?
Quality. I ordered basic 3000 dpi JPEG scans of my slides and 600 dpi scans of my prints. For $0.09 more you can get higher-resolution TIFF scans. I didn't bother given that these are really "memory shots" and I'm not planning on making big prints. The overall quality was quite good. Many of the photos were old. Slides dating back to about 1960 were faded and dirty in many cases. I found the corrected color balance to be spot-on, and the general cleanup to be well done--especially for the price.
A minor caveat is that the JPEG files are relatively highly processed. This means that they look pretty good "out of the box" with relatively high saturation and dark blacks and bright whites. That's great if you want to look at and share the photos more or less as-is. It's not so ideal if you want to process them further yourself. (For $0.14 per slide you can get a TIFF scan with no processing plus a fully-processed JPEG.)
Turnaround time. This was not a particularly speedy process. In fact, it took close to three months door-to-door. As I noted earlier, there's a nice portal that lets you see where your order is, so I wasn't concerned or anything; I just wanted my scans. However, the company has recently significantly expanded their scanning facility (now 20,000 square feet) with the goal of getting turnaround down--although the nature of their operation means that's it's never going to be an especially fast option.
Customer service. I had one slight billing problem (my 8"x10" prints were charged at the rate for larger pieces of paper). I received a prompt reply to my e-mail to customer service, and the matter was resolved within a day.
Pricing. This is one of the real strengths of the service so long as you're sticking to "standard" media. This includes 35mm color negatives, 35mm color slides, and paper photos up to 8"x10". They'll do other types of scans (such as newspaper clippings and black & white negatives), but those are $0.99 each. I note that they've actually increased the price for newspaper clipping/letter/paper artwork from $0.37; they've obviously decided to focus on a specific set of high-volume media types. You get to review the scans before they're shipped back to you. You can delete up to 50 percent and not pay for them. In practice, this is probably most useful if you're having negative strips done, given that you can't specify that only specific frames be scanned. (Standard color negative scans cost $.19 per frame.)
Overall, I give ScanCafe high marks. I combined the photos on the DVD I received with other scans and digital images and was able to give my brother a nice selection of family photos. Who knows when I would have gotten to it were I doing the scans on my own?
Let your fingers do the swiping.
(Credit: Pandigital)It's hard to say whether this is innovative or just another company jumping on the touch-based gesture bandwagon, but Pandigital's announced a new line of digital photo frames with "intuitive" touch controls. Not surprisingly, the line's called PanTouch, but what's weird about it is that the whole touch part doesn't apply to the screen itself but the frame around the display.
What's this mean exactly? Well, check out the image and you'll notice that good looking index finger is touching the edge of the frame, not the screen itself. The press release says, "Customers can use touch and swipe motions on the surrounding matte to access to digital images, MP3 music and video clips." On a more mundane level, PanTouch frames will come in three models and sport 512MB of internal memory.
OK, this isn't exactly the way Apple would do a photo frame, but Pandigital appears to be doing its best to inject a little flare into the digital photo frame game. We'll let you know if it's a stupid idea--or not--when we get our hands on one, which should be soon.
Google says the "BlogThis!" button in Picasa uses the button API.
(Credit: Google)Adobe Systems is getting all of the attention today in the digital photo world with the launch of Photoshop Express. Google, meanwhile, continues to add features to Picasa, Adobe's main online rival.
Google has released a new application programming interface (API) for Picasa that makes it easier to transfer pictures from Picasa to other applications, both online and offline.
Developers can use the Picasa Button API to make custom buttons that can open image files in local applications and upload selected image files to the Web via Google's Picasa Web Uploader service.
"Using the web uploader, you can make user interfaces that feel more like sending an email and less like 'Wait an hour to upload...'," Michael Herf of Google's Photos Team wrote in a blog posting Wednesday.
Wow, that was fast!
I contacted Photobucket parent Fox Interactive early Thursday to find out why the site censored a bunch of photos of babies in diapers posted by diaper company Good Mama Diapers. In separate e-mails, a Fox spokesman and Photobucket customer support said the hundreds of photos were deleted because they depicted "nudity" in violation of the site's terms of use.
Hours later I received word from Good Mama Diapers that Photobucket admits that it erroneously dumped the photos.
"My team has reviewed the images that were tossed in your account and it was determined that the images that were removed from your account should not have been removed. We have the images available to restore and are currently in the process of restoring them. Please accept our sincere apologies for the error," writes Monica M. Massad, content moderation manager at Photobucket, in an e-mail.
"It is true that we reviewed our content moderation guidelines to make sure it was in line with Photobucket's terms of service and it made us more strict on child nudity, however, we were over-censoring in this case and are working to rectify that."
Photobucket is also upgrading Good Mama Diapers' account to a pro account for one year.
Pandigital's upcoming 15-inch kitchen set isn't just a TV.
(Credit: Pandigital)Pandigital, which is making a name for itself in the digital photo frame market, is branching out into kitchen televisions. As part of the upcoming International Home and Housewares Show in Chicago, the company will be showing off a new 15-inch LCD HDTV that can display digital photos and act as a digital cookbook.
Here are the highlights and specs from the news release:
- TV's resolution is 1280x720.
- Preloaded recipes are included. Plus, additional recipes can be copied onto the frame's internal memory.
- Copy digital photos onto the frame's memory via the memory card reader or by a connection to Google's Picasa photo sharing Web site.
- Messproof design that's sealed with glass, so it's protected from water, oil, flour, and other common ingredients, as well as from spills and splatters.
- Comes with a countertop stand and an under-cabinet mount, and is also wall-mountable.
- Interchangeable faceplates in brushed stainless, black and white to match various kitchen styles.
- 512MB of internal memory stores up to 3,200 pages of recipes or digital photos.
- Calendar and clock functions keep customers informed and allow photos, video and music to be programmed for play at specific dates and times.
- The alarm function can be set to to noteworthy dates and times, including when it's time for a favorite cooking show.
- Integrated 6-in-1 media reader that supports SD, XD, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro/Memory Stick Duo, Compact Flash, and MultiMediaCard.
- Programmable on and off times.
- Support for JPEG, Motion JPEG, MPEG 1, MPEG 4, and AVI.
Pandigital's multifaceted kitchen TV is scheduled to be available in June and carry an MSRP of $399.99.
Updated 3:15 p.m. PDT with Photobucket acknowledging its error and restoring removed images.
Photobucket is removing photos of babies in diapers from the site, saying they violate the terms of service because they depict "nudity."
Banned from Photobucket. This photo of a happy, diaper-sporting baby was one of hundreds of such images deleted from Photobucket because they depict nudity.
(Credit: Good Mama Diapers)Diaper company Good Mama Diapers sponsored a diaper photo contest on Photobucket and posted hundreds of photo submissions on the photo-sharing site over the past 10 weeks or so. On Wednesday, Jessica Thornton of Good Mama Diapers logged on to the site and noticed they were all gone.
Thornton e-mailed Photobucket customer support to find out what happened. She got a reply saying that the site recently changed its content moderation policies regarding images of children and that the photos violated the new policy, which prohibits content that contains nudity.
"While we understand that in a family album type of setting, these images are innocent, we must remove the content because of the nudity and believe that this restriction is in the best interest of children's safety," the Photobucket e-mail says. "This policy applies to all accounts, public or private. We ask that you keep these images on your personal computers and not host them on Photobucket.com."
Thornton, with images of diaper commercials on television swirling in her head, then asked Photobucket customer support for a clear definition of what constitutes "nudity." How is it nudity when the babies are wearing diapers?
In its unintentionally humorous response, Photobucket writes as if only one image had been removed and describes it as "an image of a baby with his/her diaper falling off, exposing his/her butt. We do not allow images of children or adults exposing there (sic) naked butts."
Indeed, there was one photo that was a take-off of the famous Coppertone tanning ad with the dog tugging on the toddler's bathing suit, Thornton says. But what about the hundreds of others?
Dan Berger, a spokesman at Photobucket parent Fox Interactive, issued this statement in response to questions about the situation: "Per its terms of service, Photobucket removes all pictures that include nudity, regardless of the subject's age, in order to ensure the safety and security of its users."
That doesn't satisfy Thornton, who lost the hundreds of photos and countless hours spent posting the images on Photobucket.
"It's just horrible being made to feel like you've done something shameful when we're in the cloth diapering business," she says.
Update: After this blog was posted, Photobucket informed Thornton that it had erred in censoring the photos and said it would restore them.
