Webware

It seems like a natural fit: Evernote, a Web service that turns random pictures of information into a searchable database and Eye-Fi, a company whose SD cards enable you to turn random information into pictures and upload them to the Web. In theory, it's a great idea. Evernote, which requires input ubiquity to be really useful, gains another data stream, and Eye-Fi gains a relatively compelling productivity application.

Eye-Fi Share

Having used both Evernote and an Eye-Fi card, however, I suspect a bit less than that rosy scenario. With Eye-Fi you predetermine the various places you want to send your photos--to your laptop, to a sharing site, and so on--via the Web site. Evernote will be added to this configuration process as a target for photos--all of your photos. There are no controls with the Eye- Fi card to send select photos to a particular location, just a global enabling and disabling of locations via the Web site. That's OK, sort of, when you're uploading to a photo-sharing service or sending them to your computer, but the stuff you'll want to send to Evernote is a more intermittent and selective stream. And you can already send to Evernote selectively from a variety of phones, though in many cases not as transparently. Still, there are some situations where I think the pair could greatly complement each other, such as for house or apartment hunting, documenting accidents, or assets for insurance purposes. What do you think?

One of the coolest things to be shown off at the TechCrunch50 conference might not ever become something any of us can use. It was a mythical technology demo from a company called Tonchidot Corporation, which showed off its "Sekai Camera" application. It uses both the camera on your phone and GPS to offer up a near real-time tag of what you're looking at.

The funny thing is the entire demo could have been a complete hoax. We never saw the service in action--just a video of it placed in the gadget-saturated Akihabara district of Tokyo. It identified things like restaurants, local shops, and even products with links to user reviews, ratings, and of course buying options.

If the technology is working, objects on the touch screen get tagged in near real time. Users can then interact with those objects, making use of their handsets' interface. In this case it was the iPhone, so users could manage what they're seeing into ordered lists and candy-colored floating tags that moved as they moved.

According to its creators, the technology does not pull as much information from the camera as it does from your location. The information gets piped over to Tonchidot's servers, then filtered into tags. It also uses a similar model to some of the location-based social networks seen on the iPhone, so users can leave little virtual "hobo codes" for one another around major cities. So say, for instance, you ate somewhere and didn't like it, you could visually tag it and leave your review. Others would then be able to see it when they use the application.

Things we still don't know about the technology include:
-Who will be serving the advertisements attached to local shops and products
-If it's limited to the iPhone or any device with a camera, GPS, and a fat data pipe
-What happens when things change in local areas, since the visual tags are based partially on things the technology recognizes
-When this would be available as something you'd get in the iPhone apps store

(Credit: Tonchidot Corporation/CNET Networks)

(Credit: Sony)

I'm fairly certain the world didn't need another photo-sharing site, but Sony disagrees. Its newish Digital Darkroom Web site is, however, a little more than just another Flickr with marketing for Sony's cameras.

Digital Darkroom (not to be confused with the other site by the same name and no relation to 1988's Beyond Photography: The Digital Darkroom book or 2007's The Creative Digital Darkroom book) is part of Sony's Backstage 101 online learning center and features online photography tutorials along with a way to share and view pictures.

There are public galleries and "assignment" galleries, the latter displaying examples of photography concepts such as depth of field, contrast, and rule of thirds, and members can vote on their favorite shots.

Becoming a member--which doesn't require much more than an e-mail--also enters you into a sweepstakes to win a $500, $300, or $200 Sony Style gift card. And every time you post to either gallery gets you another entry to the random drawings that will happen in October and November. There's also a photo contest on the site with a chance to win a grand prize of $1,000 gift card.

Photobucket is launching a mobile version of its service today and can be found at m.Photobucket.com. Users with any browser-enabled handset will be able to search and browse both public and privately uploaded photos at up to five at a time using keypad shortcuts. Additionally Photobucket is pushing user uploads of both photos and videos from their phones as a new feature, although this functionality has been around since late 2006 using the slightly less glamorous MMS and e-mail route as opposed to coding an app for phones on the Windows Mobile or Symbian platforms.

Photobucket's internal research study from late last year concluded that 36 percent of its users use their phone as a camera, making it a reasonably important step in expansion. Unfortunately, the experience isn't a whole lot to write home about compared with some of the iPhone-centric mobile apps we've been seeing in the last six months (especially when viewed on the iPhone) that manage to look pretty good on regular phones too.

Some of my gripes include the inability to view uploaded videos via the mobile site, even over a speedy 3G or Wi-Fi connection. Also, using your phone's built-in zoom doesn't improve the resolution of any pictures you're viewing, and they can't be resized. I suppose the saving grace is that Photobucket users who want to pull up a photo to share with their friends won't have to keep it on their phone if they've offloaded it to the service, although you can accomplish similar feats with far more nimble apps like Shozu, which tie into the community (in Shozu's case it's Flickr) with a little more depth.

Other recent additions to Photobucket include a living room photo browser through Tivo set-top boxes, as well as a new universal tagging system--which launched in November--that's a cross between Facebook and Flickr.

If you've been playing with Google's new Street View feature--that $25 billion time suck--you may well have wondered how the heck they took those 360-degree images while driving down the street.

The camera used by Immersive Media for Google's Street View images.

(Credit: Immersive Media)

Well, wonder no more. Thanks to our good friend Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, we now know that many of the images, at least those shot outside the San Francisco Bay Area--were shot using this fairly disco-ball-esque device by the outside contractor, Immersive Media.

What's not clear just yet is if Google used the same kind of camera in the Bay Area, where the company shot its own, higher-resolution images. But it must have been something similar, though we know from this image that Google used a van, while Immersive Media seems to have used a Volkswagen New Beetle.

Enjoy. Oh, and did I say $25 billion time suck? By now, it's up to $26 billion. And counting.

• StumbleUpon/eBay talks heat up. The Wall Street Journal is reporting (registration required) that a deal between eBay and StumbleUpon to acquire the social networking and content recommendation service is getting closer. No agreement has been made on price, but the rumored amount brings it somewhere near $75 million dollars. If acquired, StumbleUpon's content preference algorithms could be employed on eBay's auction listings to give eBay users a new way to get recommendations on things they might want to buy. (CNET News.com Blog)

• Last.fm launching video service. As reported by the Register in March, Last.fm will release a music video service this week. Last.fm users will be able to make their own sharable music video playlists, using high-quality video content from a number of legal independent content providers, with mainstream content from Warner and EMI on the way later this year. The new video service will still leverage Last.fm's music recommendation technology to introduce people to new music. (via ReadWriteWeb)

• Windows Live Messenger now on the Xbox 360. Owners of Microsoft's Xbox 360 can chat with others using Windows Live Messenger, now a part of the 360's system software. Live Messenger buddies show up alongside the regular friends list, and can live video chat via the Xbox 360's Live Vision camera. 360 users also get special status messages that show what game they're playing for anyone who sees them using the PC client. (via Crave)

(Credit: Tech Digest)

We can't remember the number of times we've come across an old photo and couldn't remember where it was taken. (Sometimes a new photo, even.) That's why we, and our deteriorating brain cells, appreciate Sony's development of a GPS unit for the camera.

The elegantly named GPS-CS1KA saves the location, time and date of photos taken in all areas that have satellite coverage, according to Tech Digest. The device stores about a month's worth of tracking data for the photos, which can be tagged on a Google map as well.

The unit weighs under 2 ounces, but it means you'll still have to carry a separate attachment with the camera. So even though we think it's a great concept, we'll hold out for a built-in GPS tracker. (The cheapskate's way out.)

They say keeping track of the food you eat is one of the necessities of dieting. But who has time (or wherewithal) to keep a log? Health Magazine has a clever tip: Use your camera phone to snap and e-mail pictures of the meals you eat.

Snack detail.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Better yet, Health says, sign up for Nutrax, a online service to which you send pictures of your meals as you go through your day. Later, when you sit down at your computer, you can identify the foods eaten in your pictures. The service tracks the calories, carbs, and nutrients against your goals. Goals can be set based on different diet regimes, like low fat or low carbohydrate.

Then you can slice your data several ways: You can see a table, which looks much like a food-nutrition label, for a meal or a day. There's also a dashboard showing several personal stats (calories, weight, exercise, etc.) Or the system can show you the pictures of meals you've eaten that were high in fat, eaten late at night, etc.

You can also use the service to track exercise (by photographing your running trail or weight bench).

How I'm doing today.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

That's the free service. The paid service, for $8 a week, adds a personal touch: You get a personal dietitian to work with you to develop a plan, and to watch as you upload photos in real time and, if necessary, give you feedback when you need it, presumably by SMS.

To this I say: Yikes. I'll stick with the free, non-Big Brother version, thank you.

There are other diet trackers out there, but Nutrax is nicely executed, and the camera phone integration is very clever.

See also my favorite pictures-of-food site, AirlineMeals.net.

Using Radar on a cell phone.

(Credit: Radar)

When I talk about niches of the "new Internet" that are pretty much totally saturated, usually I mention social networking sites or online video portals. Here's another one: Photo sharing! I'm inherently going to be pretty skeptical of any start-up that comes around and decides to take on the Flickrs and Photobuckets of the world. In order for me to be optimistic about a new photo-sharing site, it's going to have to offer something really new. The subject of this post, Radar, thankfully does. It's designed specifically for swapping camera-phone photos around with your friends, an activity which is growing more and more common in today's world. (I'm even ditching my "vintage" LG handset soon so that I can quickly snap and swap photos.)

Radar's user interface.

(Credit: Radar)

Radar, which is not affiliated with the pop-culture magazine of the same name, is not a mobile blogging platform. Your photos aren't public. Rather, it's a way for you to quickly and instantly share mobile photos with a select group of friends. Much like Twango, one of the most promising media-sharing start-ups these days (in my opinion), Radar assigns you a unique e-mail address that you can use from your computer or your mobile phone to send pictures to the service. Your photos are then shared with all your Radar "friends," who can access their accounts from either their computers or their cell phones. One interesting aspect is that Radar is completely private. There are no social networking features so that other users can find you: it's solely so that you can share photos with people you already know. Which, in a MySpace-driven Internet, is pretty cool and quite refreshing.

Plus, Radar claims that its service--including mobile browsing--will work on any phone, not just smartphones. You'll need a data plan, of course.