Google has released SketchUp 7 (download), the latest free version of its 3D modeling software, along with its premium counterpart, SketchUp 7 Pro.
Like previous iterations of the software, SketchUp 7 will enable you to model just about anything you'd like as long as you start with a predesigned template. The new version, released Monday, offers simple templates that help you gauge size through feet or meters, but it also includes architectural design, Google Earth, and a product design template to aid you in your modeling endeavors.
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Google)
Once you choose a template, you're brought to a relatively simple design page that allows you to create squares, rectangles, arcs, circles, and lines, or to draw freehand to design your model. Overall, SketchUp 7 is designed well, and the icons toward the top of the template make choosing tools easy. The "Instructor" window to the right of the template helps novices understand each tool, and drawing is simple.
Aside from drawing, you can also access Google's 3D warehouse, which allows you to search for 3D models while in the software and place them into your creation. The sheer number of models is impressive. You can choose from people to buildings to cities to just about anything. I searched for a dog to place in my model and the 3D warehouse returned almost 2,000 results. Simply put, you'll be able to find almost any object without much trouble.
Dynamic Components is new this year to SketchUp 7 Pro, which costs $495. Unlike previous iterations, which allowed you to create and use models that all acted the same way during scene creation, Dynamic Components gives each object self-awareness. In other words, if you design a staircase, it will know what it is and by using the Scale tool, it automatically adds or removes steps as you make it larger or smaller. Generally, the Dynamic Components tool works well, but there were times during my testing that it failed to maintain proper scaling, which proved troublesome during the modeling process.
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Google)
SketchUp 7 is still a relatively simple tool. It won't provide the kind of modeling capabilities you'll find in high-end tools, like Caligari's software, which starts at $895. But it's a fine solution for beginners and advanced users alike who want to quickly create a model and share it through Google Earth or with others via the 3D warehouse.
SketchUp 7 does ensure that it's easy to take and attribute credit for important creations by acknowledging the designer when the models are shared. For simple dog designs, that probably won't matter much. But for professionals creating 3D models to show to clients or to show off their ability, the credit feature becomes an important part of using the product, especially as the 3D Warehouse grows.
It would have been nice to see Google add more of the "pro" features from SketchUp 7 Pro to its free software, like the ability to make presentations with LayOut 2 and the option to make your own Styles, but the free version is still a fine product for those who want to test their modeling skills and don't necessarily need top-of-the-line features.
If you're a novice modeler, SketchUp 7 is ideal. Its free version will teach you how to perform simple tasks and you can eventually choose to graduate to its Pro version to enhance your skills. And although it's just a gateway to more capable software on the market, it's certainly worth downloading and trying out for yourself.
Goodrec is a service for mobile browsers that features recommendations from people you trust. Rather than rambling reviews, GoodRec has a simple thumbs up, thumbs down, or mixed rating (no stars) and short text messages for evaluating restaurants, bars, movies, books, and other entities. The service also allows posting of photos and other content associated with making recommendations.
The challenge for GoodRec is getting distribution and users to create a social web of recommendations. Users are already giving recommendations on Facebook, MySpace, Yelp, and a variety of other other services. "We learned that a barrier to making reviews is that a lot of people are willing to do it privately, so GoodRec has Facebook-like capability to limit who sees your recommendations," said Goodrec CEO Mihir Shah. Goodrec also has proprietary technology for providing recommendations to users based on personal taste and recommendations from friends, he said.
"This kind of functionality married to Twitter is a powerful application," said TechCrunch judge and former Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner. As a standalone application, Goodrec has a lot of competition. Integrating deeply with a Twitter-like service and other social networks may be the best route for Goodrec to succeed.
An estimated 500 million images are captured every day, but less than 5 percent end up on major photo sharing sites. Uploading photos is not the easiest task and most photos are locked into a specific photo sharing service and have all rights reserved licenses. Jean-Marie Hullot, wants to liberate photos from silos and offer news ways to organize and discover images.
Fotonauts is a smart registry for images that come from other photos services, according to CEO Jean-Marie Hullot.
The former CTO of NeXT and Apple's application division, Hullot showed off fotonauts,a kind of Wikipedia for photos at TechCrunch50. Currently in private beta for Windows and Mac users, the Web application stores 1080p thumbnails of photos from major services and provides synchronization of photos across multiple services. As a result, fotonauts allows users to share, remix and reuse and enrich images across multiple services, Hullot said. Fotonauts includes an event stream for people or albums a user is following, and a drag and drop facility for moving image into different albums.
Fotonauts albums can mix images from multiple photo sharing services.
But Hullot isn't satisfied just to create an collaboration environment for images. "We have one goal--create a great search engine," he said.
At the core of fotonauts' search engine effort is tagging that comes from adding relevant content, such as maps and Wikipedia content, to images and albums and applying tags from other services. Fotonauts also created its own ranking algorithm, ImageRank, which combines tags and usage data to deliver the most relevant results. But, search won't be very effective until fotonauts reaches a critical mass of users.
Jean-Marie Hullot
The same goes for the business model. Hullot said that users will be creating content useful for the whole community, and like Wikipedia, fotonauts could offer contextual advertising as well as product placement. "We know lots of things about what users like. For instance, if person interested in cars, we have an event streams and we are very graphically oriented and Toyota could push an image into the event stream or add it into a widget," Hullot said.
In addition, fotonauts public albums can be turned into widgets and easily distributed to any Web page. Fotonauts provides a unique URL for each album for sharing.
Fotonauts has received $2.3 million in funding, from Ignition Parnters, Banexi Capital, SoftTech and Digital Garage, as well as from angel investors.
Fotonauts allows users to add comment and follow the albums and photos of other people.
"Fundamentally, a lot has been done in the photo space in last 4 to 5 years, but no one has built a proper photo search that is one or two times better than Google's search," fotonaut investor Jeff Clavier of SoftTech told me. "The fotonauts feature set allows individuals to collaborate and take the world's pictures from Flickr, Picasa and other services and create structured datasets with metadata. When you have tens of thousands of photos organized and structured by people, you have a huge dataset, which also becomes an index--a Wikipedia of photos."
Clavier said that Hullot's track record gave him a lot of confidence in the future of fotonauts. Indeed, fotonauts has a better shot at going into orbit than most startups on the stage at the TechCrunch50.
Just bought a domain and don't know what to do with it? Maybe you need to set up a blog, or are in the midst of hiring a designer. Don't just let it sit there while you get your act together--get a page to let people know what's going on. A service called LaunchSplash is offering a simple tool that does this for you.
All you have to do to get started is drop in a simple headline and description. The site provides an RSS feed people can subscribe to in order to get updates, or a simple mailing list that you can use to send out a blast when your site goes live.
Mapping the new landing page to your domain is pretty simple--you just plug in a special address provided by LaunchSplash into the management page where you bought the domain. From then on it will send visitors to your landing page instead of a blank "server not found" page. You can also plug in Google Analytics to track how many people are coming to your site before it's even up.
To make its cash the site offers a premium service that gives you more complex control over the page including four extra themes to spice up what people see (note: experts can simply tweak the CSS file).The higher plans also let you ramp up the amount of pages you can have up to 50 sites.
[via SimpleSpark]
Make a landing page for a site you're not ready to launch yet with LaunchSplash.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
VaultStreet is a clever new company that you'll instantly get if you're sick of dealing with paper financial records from your bank, brokerage, employeer, and so on. It's s simple pitch: You sign up for electronic statements from your financial providers, and direct them to be sent to VaultStreet. It then collects them for you and keeps them organized.
Of course, you can sign up for electronic statements without using a third-party organizer. Few people do, however. VaultStreet CEO Carter Kirkwood says it's less than 10 percent of U.S. consumers, despite the growing awareness of the environmental benefits. There are reasons to stay away from electronic documents, some of which may be the reasons consumers are doing so. For one, getting statements via e-mail is a good way to lose them: You might not see them when they come in, and there's an even better chance they won't be archived in any useful way. Also, the electronic statements are not usable as proof of income or assets if you're trying to sign up for a loan.
VaultStreet organizes your electronic statements. Beats e-mail by a mile.
(Credit: VaultStreet)ValueStreet solves these and other problems. It organizes your statements and keeps them safe, although you do have to trust the company a great deal if you send it all your paperwork. If you later need official financial documentation, Kirkwood says banks will accept the veracity of a statement from VaultStreet.
In the future, VaultStreet will offer a scan-and-shred service to help you deal with your paper archives, as well as new statements.
As someone who's sitting on more than 15 years of financial statements that I can't throw out and don't have the in-house shredding capacity for, I dig the VaultStreet pitch. What I don't dig is the price: $200 a year (a free trial is also available). That's a lot for a service that most people will see as insurance, not something they use every day. VaultStreet is useful, and needed, but at that price it's going to be a very tough consumer sale.
Selling to corporations and banks as a value-add service might work, though. Kirkwood told me he's in negotiations.
VaultStreet was one of my preview picks from the Launch Silicon Valley conference.
See also: Mint, Quicken Online, and other online financial services.
I'm heading to the Launch Silicon Valley 2008 conference later this morning, where 30 new (or newish) companies will be doing the usual pitch to investors, analysts, and jaded journalists like me. But I did pick out seven new-to-Webware companies from the lineup that I want to learn more about. These are the most interesting ideas from my Web 2.0 perspective.
Cognisign does image matching. It can tell if two images are related by content, or pick out from a pool of images one that matches an input picture. Could be useful for organizing photos or enforcing copyrights.
Dayak is a service that helps employers find not people to employ, but rather recruiters to work with, who then find people to employ. In other words, it's a middleman site for middlemen. Wins my Chutzpah 2.0 award for the month. And it's probably a great business.
Dial2Do is a text-to-speech service that front-ends your e-mail app, Twitter, a dialer (like JahJah). Will have to try this one. See also: Jott.
Emphasis Search helps medical professionals generate appropriate referrals for their patients. Need a good podiatrist? Instead of relying on internist to hook you up with his squash buddy, this system will match your medical needs with a provider's expertise, location, availability, and so on. Smart.
Modiface "after."
Modiface will make you look better. It's a tool that takes your pictures, and then smooths your wrinkles, slims you down, adds body to your hair, etc. It is being marketed as a tool for medical professionals and stylists, and will likely also be used successfully by all manner of snake oil salesmen. Somewhat related: Big Stage.
Previmed is being built to coordinate information about overseas medical care for people considering "medical tourism" to address their needs. Booming business. Very smart. However, barriers to entry for Previmed are not very high.
uTest collects the crashes of the crowds. It's a service that software developers can use to get just the beta testers they need to pound on their products. uTest coordinates all the bug reports and helps developers track them.
Vault Street helps users store their financial documents. You contract with it and then it acts as your proxy to collect bank and other financial statements for you. Better than having all those statements go to your e-mail, and much better than trying to keep them all in boxes in your basement. I don't know what it can do about the documents you already have, though.
Companies at this event that we've already covered include: Capzles, Triggit, and Zuora.
As I've said previously, the Web 2.0 Expo show features a lot of products for developers. But there are still cool new Web apps to find--especially at the Launch Pad, a rapid-fire demo session featuring six relatively new companies. It's kind of like a mini-Demo.
Acquia sells a commercialized version of Drupal, the open-source content management (and Webware 100 winner). If you buy the open-to-commercial model, as executed by RedHat (Linux), and Trixbox (Asterisk), this business makes a lot of sense. I'm glad to see the platform get some business attention.
Chirpscreen is a fun little app that shows you what your friends are up to on Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. It also tracks eBay keywords for you. You can get your updates in a desktop window or on your screensaver. It's like a more graphical version of Friendfeed, and like Friendfeed (and other Twitter clients), you can also reply back to posts you see in the tool. It feels like a shallow app, but that's just because it's pretty. News today: Mac version now available.
Smart question from the venture capitalist panel on Chirp: how do you make money? Answer: ads, affiliate feeds, and bundled downloads. All proven models, but none really light my fire.
JobScore. This is a clever recruiting service. Not only can you outsource your company's jobs page to this company, but it will track applications to your jobs. And in a neat twist, it lets you make money from the applicants you don't hire. See previous coverage: Jobscore pays you for recruiting rejects. Update: launching some of the features now, as well as free credits now if you sign up.
Oortle is announcing Videophlow, a social app that lets you view YouTube videos in lockstep with other people, chat about them, and perform important tasks like throw virtual tomatoes at the screen. See today's coverage: Videophlow tries to enliven YouTube.
Tradevibes is a place to discover new start-up companies. Most of the companies on the service are, not surprisingly, Web start-ups. Seems to be oriented more towards industry experts and entrepreneurs than users, but has a nice community vibe. You can also embed Tradevibes database widgets on your own site. I'm going to spend more time looking at this one. News today: a "top movers" list that shows what the community likes best.
Triggit is a very odd blogger's helper, focused on adding monetization (affiliate links, mostly) to posts. It can also automatically add related videos from YouTube and Flickr. See previous review: Triggit: Weird but handy blogging tool. The news today is a handy new way to drag Google Adsense ads into a page. Pretty handy tool if Adsense is part of your monetization scheme.
Via SMS voting, the audience picked Triggit as its favorite. My favorites: Acquia and Jobscore. They have real business models.
As part of the Consumer Electronics Show extravaganza in Las Vegas this week, Yahoo has opted to announce the next iteration of its mobile offering, Yahoo Go. The new beta product arrives at a time when just about every other huge name in tech--Google, Apple, you name it--is making a bigger push for the handset market, and (slightly) smaller brands like Facebook and MTV have been tweaking their mobile products.
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Yahoo)
Yahoo, however, isn't about to put out a Yahoo Phone. The new Yahoo Go 3.0, rather, is a free downloadable application compatible with about 30 different handsets so far. (The company says that dozens more are on the way.) A "start page" allows Yahoo users to access a number of the company's applications, like Yahoo Mail and Flickr, as well as the requisite news-and-weather mobile features.
Yahoo has additionally launched a developer initiative to put third-party widgets into its mobile offerings. Initial launch partners include eBay, MySpace, and MTV News; these applications can be selected and installed directly from Yahoo Go's mobile "Widget Gallery."
And perhaps more importantly for Yahoo, the company hopes that the latest iteration of Go will enable it to better serve up mobile advertisements.
But, as a New York Times article notes, this isn't actually a mobile operating system, it's a piece of software that piggy-backs on a handset's existing firmware--and that could prove difficult for Yahoo. "Other companies, including cellphone makers like Nokia and Apple, and mobile software providers, like Google and Microsoft, are trying to lure third-party publishers and programmers to create services for their mobile platforms," the story pointed out.
A company eager to put its brand into the mobile market could consequently find it counterproductive to create widgets for a downloadable software package like Yahoo Mobile. The application comes pre-loaded on a number of partner handsets, but the Times article explains that U.S. cell carriers remove this prior to retail, meaning that it has to be manually downloaded. Widgets created for Yahoo Go quite likely won't have the reach of applications created for operating systems like Apple's iPhone firmware or Google's hyped Android project.
It is, ultimately, a question of ubiquity.
View complete CES 2008 coverage from CNET.
It's been quite a while since we visited the subject of best themes for Mozilla Firefox. It took a little while for some developers to catch up with the release of Version 2, but now there's a large number of cool add-ons for spicing up the look and feel of your your browser.
There's also a lot of crap. Luckily for you, I've waded through the morass and found what I consider to be the best themes for Mozilla Firefox. Of course, one of the greatest strengths of Firefox is the ability for every user to customize the browser as he or she sees fit. If you've got a favorite theme that I left off the list, tell me about it in the comments.
For a better look at the themes featured in this article, be sure to check out the related Download.com gallery.
11. Modern Modoki
Modern Moloki theme
Minimalism lives, and quite naturally with this stone-gray theme that's perfect for the Web surfer or developer who wants his or her browser to fade into nonexistence. It's clean, it's clear, hey...it's Netscape 8! Or is it 6? It's both: The look of 8 with the color scheme of versions 6 and 7. Its nigh invisibility makes it a solid choice for the mysterious 11th spot.
Most importantly, of course, it works with most major Firefox extensions with interface-altering features such as the pictured two-paned bookmarks and All-in-One Sidebar.
NASA Night Launch theme
What an appropriate Firefox theme to start off the Top 10 countdown! It's not kicking off the list, but it's blasting off anyway. The only thing that really distinguishes this theme from other polished dark Firefox themes is the shuttle image that "launches off" when a page is loading. See, you're traveling to another planet on the World Wide Web universe!
Snark aside, the shuttle imagery throughout the browser looks fantastic, and it's compatible with a long list of extensions. It's also a nice tribute to the STS-116 mission.
9. MidnightFox
MidnightFox
If you're gonna go dark, do it with style. I'm usually not much of a fan of black-background Firefox themes, but MidnightFox is a rare exception. The colorful buttons look great on the textured black interface, but unfortunately it didn't work very well with All-in-One Sidebar, one of my favorite extensions. It still surprised me enough with its fancy look to make it on the list.
Super Mario Bros. 3 theme
For the Mario fanboy in everyone, live the dream with tunnels for toolbar icons and pipes for scrolling. A recognizable little penny spins and spins as your Web pages load, but there's not much sign of the big man himself, and not a whole lot of polish.
All I can say is: needs more Yoshi.
7. extero
extero theme
I like the brand-new theme extero because it's not afraid to take chances--like black drop-down menus on a near-white interface. Some of the menu icons, such as "Print," are a little cryptic, but its Apple-esque style should prove popular.
The main reason it makes the list, however, is its "throbber," or the icon that animates while a Web page is loading. extero's is the coolest throbber I've seen this year...maybe the coolest ever.
HiVisGnome Jumbo theme
If you're gonna go big, you might as well go all the way. This helpful Firefox theme, developed as part of the Access Firefox project for users with vision problems, is the biggest theme I've ever seen. Some of the options icons look straight out of 1994, but it's hard to beat for customizing an interface that's as easy to see and use.
5. Miint
Miint Firefox theme
Ah, mint chocolate-chip ice cream. I'm personally not the biggest fan, but I send a shout out to my mom and everyone else who loves the stuff with Miint, a Firefox theme full of frosty green and dark chocolate goodness. There's nothing to scream about, but it has its own cool style.
4. Redshift V2
RedShift V2 theme
Take a slide into the darker side, with this black-and-red Firefox theme that could appeal to both goths and 2 Fast 2 Furious racing types. A side bonus: the red highlights throughout the interface may convince coworkers that you bite.
The unique look wasn't enough to keep me around long, however. As pictured, I made much use of the Theme Switcher feature enabled by the MR Tech Local Install extension during my trip into the world of themes.
3. Tinseltown
Tinseltown theme
If you're one of those Christmas-loving maniacs who decorates every inch of your desktop with yuletide icons and loves to torment your coworkers with your holiday cheer, congratulations. Your Firefox theme awaits.
Confusing green and red Christmas lights denote back and forward navigation, respectively; red-nosed Rudolph refreshes your browser (huh?); and Santa's hat means stop. Oh, it's the initials! Hmm. Too bad it does nothing to my "Closed Tabs" taskbar icon (available via TabMixPlus). I was hoping for reindeer dung.
Aside from the seasonal appropriateness, what merits Tinseltown's lofty status in my favorite Firefox themes list are the candy canes that replace your scroll and progress bars. Snazzy!
It's for use during the holiday season only, unless you're "that guy."
2. TrafficFox
TrafficFox theme
Go. Stop. Spin yourself crazy circling an inescapable roundabout. Vous n'avez pas la priorite! TrafficFox is the perfect Firefox theme for anyone who loves the term "information superhighway." Non?
Its sleek style--with traffic icons for navigation functions--and minimally intrusive yet informative interfaces transform Web surfing from a pedestrian experience to a joyride in a fancy European sports car. Really? Well, no. But the design does look slick.
Littlefox for Firefox theme
There are a number of great "mini" themes out there. The goal is to maximize screen space, making it ideal for viewing large pictures or videos with your browser. I'm sticking to the one that I use the most: Littlefox for Firefox by Alfred Kayser.
One of my favorite touches are the gear icons for my little bookmarklets like ZAP. It's clever like a Littlefox, and I'm sticking with it...for now.
In an effort to retool the way users get to the applications on their profile, Facebook has added a new feature in the form of a quick finder for profile apps. If you're used to the row of icons on the left side of Facebook's navigation, this idea isn't too far off. Any apps that have been installed on your profile will show up as small icons in a cluster. Clicking on any of them will jump you down to where the app's box is located, as well as briefly highlighting it with a dark blue border. This is especially helpful on friends profiles, since the menu will adapt to whatever foreign apps they may have installed.
The move seems like a preeminent way to deal with the amount of profile clutter that's made its way onto the service since the launch of the apps platform three months ago. If you're really sick of seeing apps on people's profiles, you can also use the minimize feature I mentioned in my 7 cool, unadvertised Facebook features post from a few weeks ago.
Get to your apps quickly with the new quick jump bar.
