Underexposed

Bruce Livingstone, founder and leader of microstock pioneer iStockphoto, is leaving the company he sold to Getty Images three years ago.

iStockphoto founder and former CEO Bruce Livingstone

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Livingstone, who launched the low-cost photo-licensing company nine years ago, said he's leaving of his own volition, according to a forum posting from iStock COO Kelly Thompson, who is taking over Livingstone's duties.

"This is my last communication as CEO of iStockphoto and SVP Consumer at Getty Images. It's been a difficult decision, but it's the right moment to move on," Livingstone said. "I need more time with my family, and time to figure out what I'm going to do next. Anybody who knows me, knows I'm a bit of a workaholic. So I'm finally going to make some time for myself and the people in my life."

Thompson will lead iStockphoto and report directly to Getty CEO Jonathan Klein, the company said. iStockphoto got its start licensing royalty-free images for relatively low prices, and over the years expanded into video, Flash animations, illustrations, and, most recently, audio.

Livingstone's departure was unrelated to 110 layoffs at Getty Images reported last week by Photo District News, the company said.

"Bruce's departure was a personal decision and has been planned for some time, with a potential April 1 announcement date, which is within the wry character of Bruce," Thompson said in a statement to CNET News. "But due to the inherent difficulty in keeping something like this contained, we felt it prudent to move the announcement up."

Livingstone said he'll continue with some involvement at iStockphoto. "Don't think for a minute that I'm going away, though. I'm still a photographer after all, and I'll finally have time to take pictures now," he said in the forum posting.

Mike Horowitz, product manager for Google's Picasa software for managing photos and the Web site for sharing them, has left the company for Fetch Technologies.

"Mike was a valued member of the Picasa team and Google, and we wish him well in his new endeavors. We have a talented team working on Picasa, and we're excited about the future," Google said in a statement. The company didn't say who would replace Horowitz.

According to Horowitz's LinkedIn profile, he began his new role in December as chief product officer at Fetch, an El Segundo, Calif.-based company founded in 1999. The company sells an artificial intelligence product called Fetch Agent Platform "for extracting and integrating information from multiple Web sources, and transforming the data into a form that is useful for business applications," according to the company.

Horowitz has held a variety of high-profile positions at Google, including the product manager for Google Apps and for AdSense. He also launched AdSense for Domains and Google's personalized start page.

In September, Google launched Picasa 3 with a variety of photo-editing features, including better retouching and the ability to make slide-show videos and big collages. On the Web end, the new service groups similar-looking people to make them easier to identify. And the software and Web site can stay synchronized so editing changes on a person's computer are mirrored on the Web site.

(Via The Inquisitr.)

Only two and a half months after announcing Picasa 3 beta, Google has done the uncharacteristic and on Thursday has issued Picasa 3.

Here's the clincher:Picasa 3 is the exact same desktop organizer and editor it has been under the beta flag. (This is a good wagon for the Gmail team to climb aboard--Google's e-mail service has been in beta since 2004 and its latest releases have been earthshaking themes and emoticons.)

Although Version 3 beta users won't see changes in this release, those switching from Version 2.7 will enjoy the substantial boost in features. Version 3 stacks on over a dozen more tricks to refine the editing, creative, and sharing options in what has for years been a solid consumer app. Highlights below.

With a little creativity, you can make gorgeous collages like this in Picasa 3.

(Credit: Tara Morrison/Google)

Syncing and sharing
Instead of manually uploading new photos to Picasa Web Albums from Picasa 3, you'll be able to click "Sync to Web" to keep the folder automatically updated. You can exclude photos by right-clicking and choosing "block from uploading" from the context menu.

Sharing has also gotten much easier. In previous versions, you would upload the photos from Picasa and then click within the Web album to e-mail the link to friends. The 'Share' button next to Picasa's syncing button helpfully auto-uploads the album and sends the Web link without compelling you to go online.

No more leaving Picasa for the Web to update or share photos.

(Credit: CNET)

Movie Maker
A terrific but light addition, Picasa 3's new movie maker can take videos from your digital camera and other clips and intersperse them with any other file Picasa supports. You can then upload your video to YouTube or to Picasa Web, or share via e-mail.

Bare-bones editing tools will trim the clips and add a song for background. However, they don't do fading and there's no template to carry your caption style from frame to frame. Video output is currently only the WMV format, and encoding takes a little time--be patient while it renders.

Drop Box
Drop Box is the new default storage locker for newly uploaded photos, for pictures you don't want to assign to an album, and for multitaskers who tell Picasa to take it easy on the bandwidth so they can simultaneously surf and upload. The Drop Box also holds photos uploaded via Orkut, ShoZu, and other third-party photo uploading services that integrate with Picasa Web Albums. This is one of those features that some users will love and many will ignore.

Screenshots
Picasa 3 hooks into your keyboard's PrintScreen key to index captures of your screen, Webcam input, or a video. For casual users, this feature may replace independent screen-capturing software like Gadwin PrintScreen, Capture.NET, and SnagIt. Those who continue to use those apps may find the cataloging amusing or mildly annoying.

You can upload photos to the drop box and start making a movie from Picasa 3's toolbar.

(Credit: CNET)

Other notables
Picasa 3's red-eye reduction tool detects and auto-corrects all the red-eyes in a photo. This substantially cuts out the hassle of clicking and dragging over individual eyes to wipe out the redness, and it works well most of the time. For blotchy faces and other minor blemishes, the retouch tool will awkwardly but fairly effectively let you blot out problem areas.

Finally, the collage tool has gotten more customizable. Before Picasa 3, you couldn't delete, drag, angle, or print in full resolution. Now you can. These substantial additions make the tool an easy way to get really creative (see photo).

There's always room for improvement, especially with the movie maker and red-eye tool, which could use some more precision controls, but this Version 3 release is an excellent effort that will give people much greater control over their photos and Web albums without sacrificing simplicity. All without clinging to beta.

>>Want more detail? See the full list of additions and changes in Picasa 3.

F. Mark Gumz, president and chief executive of Olympus Corporation of the Americas

(Credit: Olympus)

Olympus has promoted F. Mark Gumz, president and chief operating officer since 2000, to be president and chief executive of the North and South American operations of the Japanese camera and optics company.

In addition, the company is changing the name of Gumz's division. Olympus USA, a holding company that represented all of Olympus' American operations and that employs 2,500 people, now is called Olympus Corporation of the Americas.

"His appointment will...help position the organization to better respond to customer needs, and his knowledge of Japanese culture and of our company makes him the perfect choice for CEO of this new company," said Tsuyoshi "Tom" Kikukawa, president of Tokyo-based Olympus, in a statement Tuesday.

Gumz worked for Olympus from 1977 to 1983 as vice president of Olympus Camera, the first American hired for the company. He left for 16 years of work consulting and doing other jobs, then returned in 2000 as president of Olympus America, Olympus said.

The Leica M8, the company's first digital rangefinder camera, costs $5,500 without a lens.

(Credit: Leica)

Leica Camera, the German manufacturer of high-prestige but high-price photography equipment, has replaced its top executive, Steven Lee.

"The supervisory board of Leica Camera AG today removed Steven K. Lee as member and chairman of the board of management of Leica Camera AG with immediate effect," the company said in a brief statement Friday.

The board also named Andreas Kaufmann to be chairman of Leica Camera's board of management until February 28, 2009. He and Andreas Lobejaeger will lead the company jointly, the company said.

Leica was an influential brand in the 20th century, pioneering the use of 35mm film and supplying cameras to notable figures such as Henri Cartier-Bresson. However, the company has had some missteps making the transition from film to digital photography.

Leica has a cultlike following for its equipment, and the company sets prices accordingly. The M8, its first digital member of its decades-old M family, costs about $5,500 with no lens. And though its core components are upgradable, the price tag for a new shutter and LCD cover upgrade announced recently is $1,775--about the price of an entire Nikon D300 SLR.

According to a Leica representative quoted in Amateur Photographer, one of Kaufmann's first priorities will be to "review all options for the M system's future."

In an interview earlier this month with Amateur Photographer, Lee hinted that Leica is working on an M8 upgrade that would give it a full-frame image sensor, which is the size of a 35mm film image. Leica's M8 today, as well as most entry-level and midrange SLRs, use sensors about two thirds that size.

(Via 1001 Noisy Cameras.)

Mozilla has released a third beta version of Firefox 3, bringing about 1,300 changes to the widely used open-source Web browser.

Firefox 3 Beta 3 should be more stable, perform faster, use memory more efficiently, and fit in better on various operating systems than its predecessors, Mozilla said.

Beta 3 of Firefox 3, shown here running on Windows XP, uses new interface elements made of vector graphics. It helps improve performance, Mozilla said.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Having tried the new version out for a while this morning, my top impression hasn't changed since beta 2: the best thing about the new version is faster performance. Pages load faster.

Other improvements, according to the Firefox 3 release notes, include a better tool for seeing who owns a Web site; better protection against sites known to install viruses, spyware, or other malicious software; the plugging of 350 memory leaks that previously could waste more and more computer memory; the ability to locate downloaded files; a better tool to find and install plug-ins; and , now enabled by default.

The new Firefox beta can be downloaded from the Mozilla Web site, including versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux localized for several languages.

The new Firefox beta also adopts more of the native style of Mac OS X, Windows Vista, and Linux--the latter having been a point of some contention earlier given some technical difficulties. Also interesting from an interface standpoint and giving the beta a new look is the use of vector graphics for elements such as the back arrow and reload button.

I like Firefox 3's new location bar drop-down feature, in which Firefox presents various sites I've visited or bookmarked. For example, typing "can" retrieves a list that includes various Canon Web sites I've visited as well as Icanhascheezburger.com. (Alas, though, everyone's favorite LOLcats site seems to have a rendering problem with the new browser in the form of 10 "favorite" buttons.)

Beta 3 apparently improves the "frecency" formula that selects what to display in the drop-down list based on how frequently and recently you visited the sites. My only beef with the location bar drop-down so far is that it's a visually chaotic jumble of URLs, favicons, and titles in different fonts and colors.

Coincidentally, I was able to give the new Firefox 3 beta a short stress test, and it fared much better than its predecessor.

I found a misbehaving Flash ad Tuesday that made Firefox 2 chew up about 98 percent of my CPU power and thereby caused my system--especially Firefox--to slow to a crawl. Today, I found that same ad on another Web site while trying the Firefox 3 beta, and although it, too, maxed out my CPU, Firefox now was usable, though sluggish.

Firefox 3 sports a new add-on manager to find, add, disable, and uninstall plug-ins.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

There are some reasons I won't be moving full time to the new beta, though.

Unsurprisingly, given warnings in the release notes, several plug-ins I use still aren't compatible: Foxmarks, del.icio.us, Fotofox, and FireFTP. And Yahoo Mail only can be used in its older classic mode for me.

For the Yahoo Mail problem, there's some hope: Mozilla is waiting on Yahoo for a bug fix for the mail site, and the Firefox release notes now offer a less pessimistic warning that the newer Yahoo Mail interface "may not work for all users right away."

The release notes also warn that Windows Live Mail doesn't work; a plug-in must be installed to play Windows Media Player content on Windows; Firefox often will stop responding to keystrokes when using Google Documents on Mac OS X; and printing is broken on many versions of Linux.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Adobe Systems brought the chief technology officer title out of retirement Tuesday and applied it to Kevin Lynch.

Lynch, previously chief software architect and senior vice president of Adobe's platform business unit, joined Adobe in 2005 when it acquired Macromedia, where he led product development.

At Adobe, he'll lead work with Adobe's Flash Player, Flex development tools, and Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). Those products are gaining in importance at the San Jose, Calif.-based company.

"Adobe has transformed itself through several technology waves, from desktop publishing, to multimedia and to the Web," said Adobe's new chief executive, Shantanu Narayen, in a statement. "Kevin's insights and passion for rich Internet applications, and what they signify for the future of software across operating systems and devices, will help enable the next generation of innovation for our customers."

Adobe last had a CTO in early 2001, when John Warnock took the title after stepping down as chief executive, Adobe spokeswoman Katie Juran said.

Creative Suite products such as Photoshop are a step removed from Lynch's purview, though. "The CTO role will include core technology that spans across our businesses, and that could include elements that become features in future versions of our applications. But the main development for those applications will continue to be run by the individual business units," Juran said.

Mozilla's new CEO, John Lilly

(Credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla Corp., the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, has promoted Chief Operating Officer John Lilly to chief executive, the organization behind the Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird e-mail software said Monday.

Former CEO Mitchell Baker will remain chairman, the organization said, where she'll focus on high-level issues such as standards, interoperability, and issues around people's data.

"John Lilly is the right person to guide the product and organizational maturity of MoCo. John has been doing more and more of this since he took on the COO role in August of 2006. John understands Mozilla, is astonishingly good at operations, and has an innate facility for our products and technologies and the directions in which they should develop," Baker said on her blog on Monday. "Once I allowed myself to think about this, I realized that John will be a better CEO for the MoCo going forward than I would be."

Before Lilly joined Mozilla in 2005, he had been founder and CEO of Reactivity, a software company Cisco Systems acquired in 2007. On his blog, Lilly said his priorities will include shipping Firefox 3.0, currently in its second beta version; helping out with the new Mozilla mail company launch; and improving communications about Mozilla's economic situation and its hybrid for-profit/not-for-profit state.

Red Hat's new CEO, Jim Whitehurst

(Credit: Red Hat)

Some folks paused when they heard an airline executive was taking over as Red Hat's new chief executive. But Jim Whitehurst thinks his job as Delta Air Lines' chief operating officer will serve him in good stead.

In an interview Friday, the 40-year-old said he believes his experience running much of a 50,000-person company and focusing on top priorities will serve the Linux seller well as it tries to increase revenue.

Whitehurst also has at least a touch of the open-source zeal of his predecessor, Matthew Szulik, who left the CEO job January 1 because of family medical difficulties but who remains chairman of the Raleigh, N.C.-based company. Whitehurst has been a Linux user since the Slackware days of the mid-1990s, and he's already got the open-source sales pitch down pat.

He faces plenty of challenges, to be sure. The integration of the JBoss Java server software has been a rocky process, Red Hat has no shortage of competitors--some of them also close allies--and Whitehurst will have to make the abrupt shift from Delta Air Lines' bankruptcy-induced bunker mentality to the growth challenges of Red Hat.

But Whitehurst seemed nothing if not game in a conversation today. Here's an edited transcript of our chat.

How did you first hear about this Red Hat job?
Whitehurst: It was from a recruiter, a cold call from Nosal Partners. I was thrilled and basically said, "When can I get up there?" (Red Hat Chairman) Matthew (Szulik) and I met early on a Sunday morning two days later. We hit it off well.

What was your first reaction when you heard about Red Hat? Was it "Who?" or was it "This is the opportunity I've been waiting for"?
Whitehurst: It was "This is the opportunity I've been waiting for." I've used Linux since the mid- to late 1990s at home. I screwed around with Red Hat since before the enterprise version and it was free. I've been using Fedora for quite awhile. I'm very familiar with the products and the company. As my wife said, it was the first thing I came home with absolutely lit up about.

Why did you leave Delta?
Whitehurst: I was COO at Delta throughout the bankruptcy. Delta emerged in May, and I was the leading internal candidate to be CEO. The new board of directors decided to go outside. I don't have any issues with that. When the new CEO came in, frankly, the entire company other than finance reported to me, and it wasn't reasonable for him to come in and have one report. He needed a wide berth. We agreed it would be a good thing for me to go for him to be able to take the reins fully. It was very amicable.

When you look at Delta vs. Red Hat, there's a dramatic difference in business models. Should your employees, customers, and investors be concerned that somebody from an old-line industry is taking over at a software company with a fairly revolutionary business model?
Whitehurst: I don't think so. I'm now a Red Hat shareholder. I do think I bring a set of skills that will augment skills here. As a large customer of technology at Delta, I think have a good sense of what CIOs look for. Airlines in general are very reliant on technology, so having a customer perspective can be very helpful. This company has massive opportunity. One of the big issues is how to scale the company. I bring some big-company process skills to ensure this company has the capability to grow from $500 million to $5 billion (in annual revenue) and continue to run smoothly and to offer excellent service.

Another parallel is that airlines have very low barriers to entry. The way the established companies have developed is they're not particularly customer-friendly. No one talks about their wonderful airline experiences. A thrilling thing about Red Hat is that with open source, we don't have big barriers to entry, and it's a chance to define a company around customer service. We'd better never lose our focus on the customer, because you can't lose it and get it back. That's why I feel good about competing against the proprietary-software guys. Service used to be an afterthought, it was the hassle that you had to do if you wanted to sell the next version of your software.

Where did Delta use Red Hat software and where did it not?
Whitehurst: I want to be a little careful because I don't know what Delta has disclosed. There are some specific systems there that ran on Red Hat, some pretty big mission-critical pieces of software.

Is it fair to say it wasn't the core of the operation?
Whitehurst: The core of the systems were the old original TPF (Transaction Processing Facility) systems that have been around forever--the things the airlines know they'll have to migrate off of over time. But while we were all bleeding was not the time to do it.

You talked about being able to scale Red Hat. Red Hat has grown a lot, but the big software IPO in 2007 was VMware, which has grown a lot more and a lot faster. It seems like proprietary software isn't dead yet.
Whitehurst: I don't think proprietary software is dead by any stretch of the imagination. But a couple comments. One thing we'll talk about in early days is innovation and making sure Red Hat leads innovation and drives innovation in open source. Technology is an industry where there's a massive first-mover advantage. Our virtualization is excellent, but we weren't there first. VMware was and has triple our revenues and a gazillion-dollar market cap. Innovation and being there first are extremely important. We were the first enterprise Linux and we have 80-something percent share of the enterprise Linux market. Being first is important. Making sure Red Hat is a leader in the open-source community, to make sure open source is not only iterating but also innovating, is important.

Szulik had a good soapbox about open-source software. Will you be taking on his evangelism?
Whitehurst: I'm very passionate about open-source. It's a fundamentally better way to develop software. Open source is a truly disruptive technology and will continue to take share and grow. Open source is a good. By us doing well, we're also doing good. Democratizing content and democratizing information has an incredibly important benefit to society, and we play a key role in doing that. Does that make me a zealot or not? I don't know.

Matthew is not going away. He'll continue to work with me and continue to be a key spokesman for open source.

What kind of changes can we expect you to bring to Red Hat? How is your management style different?
Whitehurst: I think he and I share similar traits. I'm very open and informal. It's hard for me to say what changes will come. In terms of strategy, I'm brand new. I will say I have a couple of biases. One is focus, focus, focus. This is a company that is almost encumbered by the opportunities we have. But chasing 1,000 things and doing none of them well won't be good for us or be good for open source. Making sure we nail the three or four things we do and absolutely nail them is going to be critical. You won't see us going into five or six new business, but you will see us redoubling focus on several.

JBoss has been a difficult acquisition. Is this a situation like with (Sun Microsystems CEO) Jonathan Schwartz, where you show up after some of the tough stuff has been fixed and you get to take credit for it, or is this something where there needs to be a lot more work?
Whitehurst: I hope I'm showing up to take credit (laughing). Timing in life is everything. As we talked about the third quarter, we're getting some real momentum with JBoss and very good about it. Clearly that is part of our core and we'll have a lot of focus going forward. Does that mean change or not? I don't know. Things are looking quite good now.

Can we look for a push for JBoss on Windows or on various versions of Unix?
Whitehurst: JBoss runs on Windows now.

Right, but how about a bigger marketing push, for example?
Whitehurst: It's too early for me to start talking about strategy at that level. What I will say is that it's simple. Does it add value to our customers that our customers want? There are two things I'm unwavering about: one is we are open-source and we will continue to be open-source; second, every single decision we make is filtered through "is this adding value for our customers?"

Another possible priority is Linux on the desktop. It's something Red Hat has tried for years to make into a reality. Is that something Red Hat is going to focus on and redouble efforts on, or is it one of the things you're going to let fall by the wayside for a few years?
Whitehurst: Hey, I just found the bathroom and the coffee, so I'm not calling exactly what's in vs. out. That's something that as a management team we'll go through a rigorous process and jointly determine.

There are some obvious competitors out there, like Novell and Microsoft, but I'm more interested the coopetition companies like IBM and Oracle that are both partners and competitors. Do you see those companies more as a long-term threat or long-term ally? IBM has a strong server business and Oracle has a strong database business, but they also have straight-up competing products, and Red Hat is expanding into those companies' turf.
The answer is yes and yes. They are absolutely threats to us, and they are also absolutely partners. The airline industry no different. (Delta) had an alliance with Continental, Northwest, and SkyTeam where we partner in some areas, and we are ferocious, brutal competitors in others. It's the same thing with IBM and Oracle. There is no black and white in this world. It's all shades of gray.