Webware

AOL-owned social network Bebo announced Monday that it has launched a U.S. site for Latinos. According to the company executives, they decided to open a version of its site catering to the Latino community after enjoying success in offering a similar experience to those in the U.K., Ireland, Poland, and elsewhere.

Along with the launch of the new site, Bebo also announced that it has partnered with Hearst Magazines Digital Media and AOL Latino to incorporate offerings from both companies into Bebo. Hearst will be providing interactive content syndicated from its MisQuince Magazine, and AOL Latino will give users access to music and entertainment. The new site is live now.

Aviary, a company that provides browser-based design apps for free, announced Monday that it has acquired Digimix.com, a company that offers an audio-editing Web app called Digimix. According to the Aviary, it plans to incorporate Digimix into its own suite of applications. Digimix was created with Adobe Flex and Flash technology and can mix 15 tracks in real time directly in a browser. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Mozilla reported on its Labs blog last week that it has developed improvements for its Firefox tab system. According to the company, it has added two new features for beta users to test out: a quick-access bar and contextual actions. The new quick-access bar will make it easier to open a tab and enter a URL. Contextual actions will allow users to use a one-click action that will open a URL sooner or open a closed tab quickly to recover it.

Online radio service Slacker has added a new station called "BlackBerry at SXSW 2009 Radio." According to the company, the station will stream acts from SXSW 2009, including Glasvegas, Cold War Kids, Ra Ra Riot, Okkervil River, Fastball, The Decemberists, Youth Group, and more. The station is up and running now, and is available only on the Web and on mobile devices like the BlackBerry and iPhone.

When online image-editing site Aviary released Raven on Monday, the Holy Grail of image-editing tools had finally hatched. If you're new to the term, vectors are what allow graphic designers to create an image and scale it to any size without pixelation or degradation of quality. The Wikipedia vector entry does an excellent job of going into more detail about the differences between vectors and rasters, which degrade as you change their scale.

Raven's main editing window.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Beautifully, Raven only requires a Web browser and the latest version of Flash. In the words of Michael Galpert, co-founder of Aviary, "If you can watch a video on YouTube, you can use Raven." Because Raven supports vectorized images and is part of the Aviary toolset, users can share their images and critiques. This also saves the effort of e-mailing cumbersome, large, and layered vector image files to collaborate.

Raven uses a proprietary image format, called EGG, but can import and export files as SVG--the standard vector format. Because it's Flash-based, Raven does have some limitations. Importing images that are larger than the 2800x2800 pixels that Flash supports will cause them to be automatically scaled down, but that shouldn't be a big deal unless you're designing billboards. Many users should find Raven extremely useful for Web design needs.

You can open any Aviary user's images in Raven to create your own version.

(Credit: CNET Networks; art by Harry122)

The actual tools that Raven provides are perfect for basic vector editing. Once you've created your drawing, you can edit path nodes, transform a shape, or drag it to a new location. There are also tools for creating Bezier and lines and drawing freehand and calligraphic lines. Tools for making rectangles and gradient fills are also available. For each tool, a window pops up with helpful hot-key commands. For example, the edit path node tool tells you how to select multiple nodes, as well as editing or deleting a path's vertex.

The tools are laid out in a classic design, with the tool palette on the left and editing palettes on the right. The Layers and Fill and Stroke palettes are hideable to free up more screen real estate, as are the rulers. Surprisingly, there was practically no lag time in loading images, creating new shapes, or filling in gradients.

Raven's tools should be instantly recognizable to anybody familiar with vector editing.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Normally, I'd recommend a freeware vector image editor like Inkscape, but there are some distinct advantages to Raven. The built-in tracking and display of image size, creation date, most recent modification date, comments, sources, derivatives, and versions, as well as the use of tags, makes your vector images immediately Web 2.0-ready.

Also, if you're working on a Netbook, you don't have to worry about blowing out your system resources since Aviary is all Web-based. In my attempts to get Raven to crash, I ran 20 tabs, including Gmail, YouTube, and Aviary in Firefox. Although it ate up a massive amount of RAM, 825MB, that's not a lot if you consider that included working on naturally resource-heavy vector images.

Because the images are vectorized, you have to export them before you can send them outside of the Aviary. When you're finished, though, you can Export it as a rastered image, and that will make it socially acceptable. There are a number of online tutorials for Raven, and 62 in total for Aviary, making getting started just about as easy as possible.

Online image editing suite Aviary is now open and available to all after serving out a lengthy private beta which lasted about a year and a half.

The suite is comprised of four Web-based image editing tools that aim to compete with traditional software solutions like Adobe's Creative Suite by putting all of the applications right in your browser, making them accessible from anywhere.

The opening comes with the imminent launch of two new premium levels of service, which offer paying members more control over their creations than free users have. While all four Web applications are available to users at each of the three levels of service, the higher tiered plans let them save more items, remove and customize watermarks, and get access to professionally produced tutorial content.

The premium plans, which go live next week (November 3rd to be precise), cost $7.99 per month or $79.90 per year for the "green" plan, and $14.99 per month or $149.90 per year for the top-of-the-line "blue" plan. You can see a full sheet of the differences here, with the key one being both the number of creations you're able to save, and the option of keeping them private.

We've got 100 subscription discounts available, which knock $55 off the yearly subscription price of either premium plan. To claim yours go here before signing up. Embedded below is a quick video to show you what you're capable of doing with Aviary's tools.

Previous Aviary coverage:
Under the Radar: Eye candy that's actually useful
Aviary's creative suite is more than a pretty Flash app
Flash apps are taking over--Phoenix is the latest proof

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The Web has come a long way. The aesthetic of a site can oftentimes determine whether or not a wary user will dig deeper and explore your site. The four companies below offer some of the most beautiful products shown off Tuesday at the Under the Radar social media and entertainment conference, but are they really useful? For the most part, yes. Read more about them below.

Animoto, one of my colleague Elinor Mills' favorite slideshow tools and as CEO Brad Jefferson calls it "The end of the slideshow" (in the boring, stodgy sense, of course). Jefferson says he's seen a large amount of users taking advantage of its premium services, which offer the capability to create full-length videos as opposed to the 30-second clips that free members get. In the future, the company is moving toward offering artists and companies a branded player and tools for users to create videos that involve products, songs, TV shows, and feature-length films.

Previous coverage:
Animoto adds personal music videos to Facebook
Video-creation service Animoto has lit my fire
Can Animoto make you the next Spielberg?

Michael Galpert, the co-founder of Aviary, a Web-based photo editor we've covered several times here on Webware (see link dump below) showed off the service's latest layer tracking technology (video here).

Galpert only had six minutes to talk about the suite of Web-based graphics tools, but managed to throw in a mention about an upcoming vector-based editing tool akin to Adobe Illustrator. He also announced a 3D modeling tool that will take advantage of its sister-service that lets users create complex textures. Galpert didn't reveal the names of the two forthcoming apps, but said that a less confusing name convention was on the way.

Previous coverage:
Aviary's creative suite is more than a pretty Flash app
Flash apps are taking over--Phoenix is the latest proof
Web-based multimedia suite Aviary invites beta testers

BigStage is a 3D avatar service that puts together a rendered head based on three photographs it takes with your Webcam. It'll figure out your bone structure, how much your nose sticks out, and how large your ears are.

Co-founder Jonathan Strietzel's demo of the face maker reminded me a lot of Gizmoz, which does the same thing, except with Big Stage you can make live changes to your avatar in moving video clips and pictures and see the changes reflected right away.

The site is opening up with pictures in two months, and a version that integrates live videos about six months later. Strietzel thinks the future of the technology will be tie-ins with social networks to pull in faces from your buddy lists to make adjoining advertisements more targeted with rendered 3D heads of your friends. Creepy.

Previous coverage: CIA technology will map your face

Overlay.TV is a company that's doing something very similar to VideoClix.TV (see coverage). It'll link up the items, people, or subject matter that are found in videos to online stores so people can buy or get more information on what they're watching. Some of the demos I've seen of competing products are incredibly engaging, albeit a far cry from the virgin, ad-free purity of what's seen on most video sites.

What makes Overlay.TV interesting is that it's going for both media creators and consumers. It's got a Facebook app that lets you tag up your videos. It also works with over a dozen popular hosts like YouTube, MySpace.com, and Yahoo Video.

That's the end of the conference sessions for the day. Stay tuned for the fireside chat about how start-ups can get noticed among all the noise from competitors.

I finally got a chance to catch up with Avi Muchnick, the CEO of Flash software maker Aviary and of the art contest site it spun out of, Worth1000 (a Webware 100 winner).

Aviary is an ambitious project to create a full suite of online applications for creative professionals. The first application, the image editor Phoenix, is now in private beta (read to the end of this post to get an early invitation). The second, pattern maker called Peacock, was recently added.

Coming up after these applications will be Toucan, a color swatch program for designers (like Kuler on steroids), a 3D-sketching program and modeler, a vector-based editor, and a smart image resizer.

Who needs software? This is a layer-based image-editing application running in a browser window. It's pretty snappy, too.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

After the graphics applications get some traction, the team plans to ship video and audio editors as well.

There are two goals driving Aviary's development. The first is Muchnick's belief that design tools need to be more collaborative. He's trying to build a Google Docs for designers, it appears. While you can't yet do simultaneous editing in Aviary applications, the fact that all the files are stored online, along with all the raw graphics materials that went into them, can greatly simplify the games of "Photoshop tennis" that designers, artists, and their clients have to deal with during the design-and-review process.

The second is economics. Muchnick is trying to bring Photoshop-quality tools to all designers. He points out that the high price of Photoshop--the Design version of Creative Suite 3 retails for $1,799--is "not fair" for freelance designers, most of whom make less than $35,000 a year. Also, the wikilike versioning and revisioning capabilities built into the Aviary suite will enable all contributors to a media project to get their due credit and, if appropriate, to get their share of revenues from a project.

Everybody who sees the Aviary product calls it ambitious. But the ambition to build a Flash-based competitor to Adobe's tools is only half the story--and half the ambition. Muchnick is trying to enable a new economic system for creative professionals. I think that he's onto something and that he's reflecting the reality of creative work today, rather than trying to ram through his own utopian vision.

Internet economics are changing other creative endeavors: music, photography, and writing. The graphic-design field is also in turmoil, and it needs not just new tools, but also new systems.

Aviary is still in private beta testing, but the first 200 people to sign up here can get priority access to the tools. Note that you must click this link from Webware.

Previous coverage: Flash apps are taking over. Phoenix is proof.

There are invitations to Phoenix, the new app discussed in this post, set aside for Webware readers. Read on to learn how to get yours.

As I reported from Demo 2008, new Flash- and Flex-based Web apps are putting traditional desktop apps to shame. The database Blist, the widget maker Sprout, and the photo manager Joggle are all Web-based apps that give up almost nothing to run inside a browser.

Flash-based applications are inherently cross-platform, because there are Flash runtimes that work in Internet Explorer and Firefox; on Macs, Windows, and Linux. (There are even Flash runtimes for mobile phones and set-top boxes, although Adobe's expensive licensing schemes for those platforms do a lot to keep Flash apps off them.) With Adobe's new AIR runtime environment being basically a wrapper for Flash and Flex, we can expect that many of these Flash apps will be released as independent app-like products, but with Flash's cross-platform and Web-native advantages.

Flash has its downsides, of course. It's yet another layer of platform software for an app to run on. For the most part, today's overpowered personal computers and fast broadband connections punch through this inefficiency. However, in some cases, Flash just doesn't offer up enough performance. The personal finance app Voyant, for example, eschews Flash for Java; a Voyant developer told me it's faster at the math his app needs to perform.

Online apps in general have other advantages. Most offer Web-based storage and built-in access to the world's largest collaboration network: the Internet. Nobody likes hassling with LAN-based workgroup software installations, and with Web apps you don't have to.

And I'll tell you this: I'm not seeing nearly the same creativity today in traditional software that I am seeing on Flash and in browser-based apps. Flash-based apps are finally beginning to compete head-on with standard software. Many new Flash apps aren't just different. They're better.

Even rich media apps will fall

Case in point: the Aviary suite of graphics apps, coming out soon from the team at Worth1000. The first app, the image editor Phoenix, will make you question the value of your Photoshop license. Not that it's a drop-in replacement for Photoshop today, but it gives you a strong indication that the need for expensive apps licensed on a per-PC basis is ending.

Who needs Photoshop?

(Credit: CNET / Rafe Needleman)

I experimented with Phoenix a bit. I can't give it a deep review, since I'm not an expert in image editing. However, it certainly does a lot of the things I've done when poking around in Photoshop: It has rich tools for selected image elements, layering items you're working on, and transforming parts of the image. Lacking, of course, is plug-in support and Photoshop's snappiness when it runs on a fast PC. But the capability to open an image directly from a URL is pretty cool, and I would fully expect to see the capability to write files right back soon as well.

Other Aviary graphics apps to come include a color palette creator, an "algorithm-based pattern generator," a vector editor (competitor to Adobe Illustrator?), a 3D modeler, and other non-graphics tools such as a word processor, an audio editor, a "music generator," plus a network file storage system and a marketplace for the exchange of creative works.

The full rundown of tools the team hopes to build sounds hopelessly ambitious and reminds me of Zoho, which has a too-big suite of not-quite-developed online productivity apps. Probably a better strategy would be to focus on the key moneymakers and open up a plug-in platform so other developers could add to the ecosystem. But I don't really want to critique the company before the first app is even out of beta.

In fact, I want to encourage this crazy ambition. If Worth1000 can build a suite of professional media creation and management apps all at once using new Web platforms--and even if it tries but in the end cannot-- it could encourage other developers to stretch beyond today's current Web 2.0 apps. We certainly could use more real Web apps, and fewer me-too social networks or developers' resumes masquerading as products.

See also: Picnik; and watch for Adobe's own Photoshop Online.

If you want to try out Phoenix, there are 100 early-bird invitations set aside for Webware readers. Go here to enter your e-mail address. You have to click over from this story to get on the list--cutting and pasting the link won't work.

The clip above is a demonstration of the newly announced Aviary, a suite of Web tools for tackling "creation on the fly" (the product's motto and URL). You can think of it as having a similar goal for the creative crowd to what Zoho aims to do for organizational productivity: create a diverse set of light but still functional Web-based applications that enable portability and collaboration.

When the suite is final, it will optimally include more than a dozen applications, each named after a different kind of bird. Each one will handle a different niche of multimedia editing, from typography to audio editing to monetizing the content you create. (Think CafePress.com on steroids). They'll all be compatible so that you can use multiple applications on the same Aviary project, and you'll be able to collaborate with other Aviary users, Google Apps-style.

I know what you're thinking: wow, that's ambitious.

And it is. I saw an in-person demo of the first Aviary application to exit the gates, image editor Phoenix, and I was very impressed by the functionality and speed of the program. But you really can't deny that this is a tough market to enter, as video remix tools and Web-based versions of big-name applications pop up left and right.

The catch is that the folks who make up the team behind Aviary have a pretty unique kind of experience under their belts: they're the same people who run Worth1000, the photoshopping community that stresses artistic expertise over comic value. (No Microsoft Paint here.) That means that while developing Aviary, they've had access to years of direct experience with the Web's creative community. They also now have a loyal pack of early adopters for their new products.

Aviary's success may indeed depend on having those skilled beta testers on board to help shape the new suite into a robust set of applications and spread buzz about it across the rest of the Web.

The beta test of Aviary's first two applications, Phoenix and color swatch tool Toucan, is invite-only, but you can put your name in the hat here. The next Aviary application to be rolled out will be vector editor Raven, with the rest to follow over the next few months.