You know how listening to music on a friend’s pricey Bose headphones makes it harder to tolerate your tinny little speakers at home, or watching your favorite show on a high-definition screen spoils you for regular TV? I’m at a moment like that in the way I look at photographs. For the last few weeks, I’ve been playing around with a new computerized technique called high dynamic range (HDR) photography, which can lend a stunning level of brightness, contrast, and detail to digital images. And now every traditional non-HDR image that I see looks flat and dull by comparison.

It’s a dilemma, actually, because the HDR “look” can be peculiar, artificial, even surreal. If you lived in a world where every photograph was made this way, you’d have a constant migraine. But for now, I’m a little bit addicted to HDR. And at the risk of getting you addicted, too, I want to talk this week about how the technique works, what you can do with it, and how it can help all of us question some of the conventions and expectations we’ve built up around the art of photography, and around the related art of looking at photographs.

HDR images are unusual because they don’t represent a single moment in time, like most photos, but rather are digital fusions of several images of the same scene, taken at different exposure levels. (In photography, the longer the exposure time, the more light gets captured by a camera’s film or digital sensor, and the brighter the resulting image.) To collect raw material for an HDR image, photographers generally take at least three pictures: one that’s underexposed, one that’s overexposed, and one at a normal exposure. This is called exposure bracketing. The easiest way to explain is to do a bit of show-and-tell:

1. Normal Exposure

2. Underexposed

3. Overexposed

Digital cameras have come a long way in the last 10 years, but the sensors inside them are still nowhere near as good as the human eye at handling the huge variations in luminance that occur in the natural world. (Photographers call this variation dynamic range.) As you can see from Photo 1 above—the one taken at the standard exposure level that my camera chose automatically—the trees look okay, but the sky is pretty washed out. That’s because the camera, in choosing an exposure that would capture some detail in the hills and leaves, wound up gathering too much light from the much brighter sky above.

The HDR process offers a way to compensate for this technological limitation. If you examine the underexposed image (Photo 2) above, you’ll notice that the landscape is pretty dark, but there’s a lot more detail in the clouds—you can actually see how shapely they are. Conversely, in the overexposed image (Photo 3), the sky is a featureless white blur, but you can see a lot more stuff happening in the trees—detail that was largely lost in the shadows in the normal exposure.

…Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

My friend Brad King, a journalism professor at Ball State University, makes fun of me for being such a Web and gadget geek while at the same time shunning social networking tools like Facebook. He’s got a point. I’ve written a lot about Facebook, MySpace, and their predecessors, but I’ve never wholeheartedly joined in, the way I have with most of the other digital media technologies that are the loose theme of this column. I guess I never quite saw the point. Also, though it’s probably a sign that I’m growing prematurely crotchety, I keep telling myself that that social networking is a fad, like some fashionable night club that will empty out as soon as something new opens up down the street.

Well, Facebook may still be a fad, but with 300 million users and growing, it’s a remarkably enduring one. It’s probably time for me to get used to it. On top of that, I’ve had some experiences over the last couple of weeks that have started to change my attitude about the site.

It started with my iPhone. Two weeks ago, as you might remember, I wrote a column about “The Best Camera.” It’s an iPhone app created by Seattle photographer Chase Jarvis as part of a cross-media campaign promoting his message that “the best camera is the one that’s with you.” The app lets you apply some intriguing digital effects to the photos you snap with the iPhone’s built-in camera. It also lets you upload your processed images directly to Facebook, where every new shot will show up on your Wall and in your friends’ news feeds.

I’ve sent a few of my Best Camera shots to my Facebook photo albums, and a truly surprising thing has happened. People have been commenting on the photos. Not a huge crowd of people, but enough to make me realize that there are Facebook users who actually pay attention to the new stuff they see every day, and that some of them care enough to leave feedback.

I don’t mean to sound naive—I know that posting and reading updates and commenting on other people’s updates are the main order of business at Facebook. The wake-up call for me was the realization that Facebook has now become what Flickr was originally supposed to be.

I’ve been a Flickr user since ancient times—back before it was part of Yahoo, when it was a funky little startup based in Vancouver and was mainly a place where people could comment on each other’s photos by decorating them with little thought-balloon captions. I’ve got thousands of photos there, and it’s going to remain my default online photo storage location. But nobody ever comments on my photos at Flickr anymore. At Facebook, by contrast, I can upload a camera-phone shot and get five comments within an hour.

What’s up with that? I thought at first that the sheer volume of photos at Flickr might be one explanation. There are so many new ones every day that my shots might just be getting lost in the crowd. But from what I’ve read, the world’s largest photo-sharing site these days is …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

[Corrected 9/28/09: Chase Jarvis is based in Seattle, not San Francisco. I regret the error and apologize to our Seattle readers!] Seattle-based commercial photographer Chase Jarvis is known for his arresting, color-saturated images of people in motion—skiing, swimming, somersaulting. He’s also known for (literally) trademarking the phrase “the best camera is the one you have with you.” His point is that you don’t an expensive SLR to take great pictures. You can do a lot with the camera in your pocket or purse—which more likely than not is a camera phone.

This week, Jarvis took his slogan to the next level, launching a trio of products—a book, an iPhone application, and a photo-sharing community on the Web—intended to encourage all photographers, pro and amateur alike, to get more creative with their camera phones. This cross-media campaign is a brilliant concept—both as a digital-arts-education project and as a piece of self-promotion for Jarvis and his studio—and it also happens to fit in really well with the theme I’ve been writing about in this space throughout September in “Seven Projects to Stretch your Digital Wings,” Parts 1, 2, and 3. So, if you’ve got an iPhone, go spend $2.99 on Jarvis’s app, called “Best Camera,” and consider today’s column Project #8.

Original

Jewel

Paris

Slate

Candy

There are more than 1,300 photography-related apps in the iTunes App Store, but as far as I know, Best Camera is the only one that comes with a dedicated community of other iPhone users. The app allows you to take a picture with the iPhone’s built-in camera, apply a range of cool digital filters and effects, and then upload your finished photo to a gallery that’s constantly being updated, in real time, with new photos from other Best Camera users. You can give the photos you like best a thumbs-up, and browse photos either by popularity or recentness.

In addition to introducing you to a bunch of other creative souls, Best Camera will let you play with your own images and perhaps invent your own new styles. That’s thanks to a surprisingly flexible interface for applying various filters to your raw images and changing the order in which the filters are “stacked.” The filters themselves go well beyond the typical gray-scaling, contrast-enhancing, or redeye-reducing algorithms you’ll see in other iPhone image editing apps: working with Übermind, a Seattle software development firm that specializes in photography-related applications for desktops and mobile phones, Jarvis dreamed up a dozen effects altogether, including four “signature filters” inspired by his own photographic styles.

It’s hard to describe the signature effects in words, but one filter, called “Jewel,” gives photos a warm, rich, almost antique look, while another called “Candy” creates an intense, high-contrast, caffeinated feeling reminiscent of Jarvis’s advertising photography. At left, I’ve lined up examples of the same photo from my own iPhone album, altered using the “Jewel,” “Paris,” “Slate,” and “Candy” filters, respectively.

As someone who loves to spend time looking at other people’s photos and trying to understand their styles—I could spend hours using the “Explore” feature at Flickr—I think the community feature of Best Camera is especially fun. It’s a nice feeling to upload a picture and then see it appear in the public gallery, which is accessible right from the app. You can browse the gallery from a desktop browser, too, at www.thebestcamera.com; the bonus, if you go there, is that the “recipe” used for each photo—that is, the combination and order of digital effects the photographer chose—shows up right alongside the image. (You can see all of my Best Camera photos here.)

Jarvis certainly isn’t the only professional photographer singing the praises of camera phones. Shawn Rocco, a staff photojournalist at the News & Observer in Raleigh, NC, shoots with a long-since-obsolete Motorola E815 mobile phone. In fact, the American art world seems to be developing a bit of a fetish for …Next Page »

Comments (10) | Reprints | Share:        

If you’re under 25 or so, you probably don’t need much training on how to share digital photos, make a digital sketch, create an animated cartoon, make a personalized online map, or the like. I wrote the last three installments of my World Wide Wade column for everyone else: The majority of everyday computer users who are vaguely aware of all the amazing tools popping up in the digital media world, and who might even enjoy putting some of them to creative use, but who could use a few handy pointers.

But my “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” series appeared in three episodes over the course of two weeks, which isn’t too handy. So I thought it might be useful to list all seven projects in one place. Here we go:

1. Make a Digital Painting with Brushes. Relive your finger-painting days using the same iPhone app used by artist Jorge Colombo to create the June 1 cover of The New Yorker.

2. Start Lifestreaming with Friendfeed or Posterous. Set up a “lifestream”—2009’s replacement for the old-fashioned blog—as a locus for all your social media activities.

3. Document a Space with Photosynth. Use Microsoft’s amazing experimental software for collating hundreds of digital pictures of a single space or object into an immersive, three-dimensional environment.

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo. Learn how to use this UK-born iPhone app to make mini-podcasts that all your friends can listen to.

5. Create a Short Animated Film with Xtranormal. Be the first on your block to script your own computer-animated short feature, using a nifty new “text-to-movie” technology.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial. Learn the basics of photo-enhanced storytelling using digital maps.

7. Become a Virtual Architect in Second Life. Try your hand at building 3-D virtual objects inside the world’s most flexible and welcoming social virtual world.

Have fun and let us know what you created!

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:        

I love September. There’s a back-to-school crispness in the air that always gets me jazzed to learn something new, even though I’ve been out of school for 15 years. Maybe you feel it too. And with a long holiday weekend coming up, perhaps you’ve got a few hours free to experiment with a new tool or craft—something that will help you express a bit of your own creativity. The question is, where to begin?

Well, if you’re like me and you’ve got a weakness for gadgets, software, and Web tools, you may find something of interest in the following list of easy digital projects. This is just a smattering of the options popping up every day for people who want to use new media to explore the world around them and express and share their own ideas. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a creative type, I urge you to give these new tools a try. Everyone has something unique, valuable, and personal to say about their life experiences, and in many ways, the new digital technologies make it easier than ever to say it.

In this week’s column, I cover three projects in the areas of visual art and Web publishing; I’ll outline four more ideas involving different media next week. [Update 9/18/09: Actually, this turned into a three-part column. Be sure to check out part two and part three.] Some of these items involve technologies I haven’t written about before, and others are things I’ve introduced in past columns. Most of them require a bit of basic equipment, such as an Internet-connected computer, a digital camera, or smartphone—but the Web-based tools that I list are all free.

Pick one and have fun! I encourage you to post your results online and share a link in the comment section here. And if you have your own favorite tools for digital self-expression, let us know about them.

1. Make a Digital Painting with Brushes

There are plenty of powerful programs for creating computer art, like Adobe Photoshop Elements and Corel Painter. Creative professionals often put these programs to work using high-end gadgets like Wacom’s Intuos pen tablets and Cintiq pen displays. But using inexpensive software from the iTunes App Store, anybody with an iPhone or iPod Touch can try their hand, literally, at painting digitally.

My favorite iPhone painting app is Brushes, a $4.99 program created by independent developer Steve Sprang. It sprang to fame this summer when The New Yorker published a Brushes painting by New York artist Jorge Colombo on its cover. The program is extremely easy to use—you just point and draw with your finger—but its features, like a color picker, a transparency adjuster, zooming, layers, and undo buttons, make it surprisingly flexible.

I’m amazed by some of the art Brushes users have created: they’ve used the software to evoke styles ranging from hard-edged, Mondrian-style modernism to a misty softness that reminds me of Japanese scroll paintings. (You can see more than 7,000 Brushes paintings uploaded by more than 1,400 Flickr members here.) But the program is also great for plain old doodling.

And there’s an extremely cool feature that allows you to share not just your finished Brushes paintings, but animations documenting your work, brushstroke by brushstroke. You just log into the app’s built in Web server from your Mac’s browser, copy the special “.brushes” file, then open it using the free Brushes program for the Macintosh. Here’s a video showing how I made my first Brushes painting—it’s amateurish, obviously, but I had fun with it.

2. Start Lifestreaming with Friendfeed or Posterous

Blogging is so 2006. All the cool kids, like Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital, have moved on to lifestreaming. Definitions of lifestreaming vary, but I’d say it comes down to having a central online clearinghouse for everything you …Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Wireless digital photo frames, considered one of the hot new categories in consumer electronics back in 2006 and 2007, haven’t taken off as quickly as expected. People love digital frames, but they’ve tended to buy them as gifts pre-loaded with photos they uploaded to the Web, meaning many frames still don’t come with their own connection to the Internet. That’s a problem for Wellesley, MA-based Frame Media, whose whole business, when I last profiled the startup in 2007, revolved around providing fresh digital content for the frames, such as news and sports headlines, weather, and photos shared by friends.

But while Wi-Fi-equipped frames are still playing catchup, another channel for the company’s programming is emerging: so-called “connected screens,” meaning a whole variety of Internet-ready displays that are turning up in homes and offices. As a result, Frame Media is rechristening itself Thinking Screen Media, and going after what CEO Alan Phillips calls “a whole category [of displays] defined primarily by the fact that, unlike PCs, they are limited in their ability to easily search and configure content.” That includes not just digital frames but high-definition TVs, cable set-top boxes, game consoles, Internet radios, and even printers.

Through its FrameChannel platform, Thinking Screen works with publishers such as Time magazine, the New York Times, People magazine, and Weatherbug to offer more than 1,000 channels of content customized for such screens. (Users choose and configure the information feeds at Thinking Screen’s website.) The company is also partnering with virtually every consumer-electronics company on the block—names like Kodak, Motorola, Nintendo, Philips, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba—to make it easy for device owners to activate the feeds on specific devices.

“Most of the connected screens haven’t hit the market yet, but they will over the next six months,” says Phillips. In particular, Phillips says, “We’ll see an aggressive push by TV manufacturers to enable TVs to go beyond video.” A taste of what he’s talking about already familiar to millions of video game fans is the home screen of the Nintendo Wii, which, in addition to games, offers links to news, weather, shopping, and photos.

The 15-employee startup collected $5 million in Series A funding from Longworth Venture Partners and CommonAngels in May 2008, and there are plans to raise a Series B round this fall, Phillips says. When it comes to supplying content for tomorrow’s connected screens, Thinking Screen has both technical and strategic advantages over existing and potential competitors, he says.

San Diego-based Chumby, whose interactive media player displays information through “widgets” analogous to Thinking Screen’s channels, is the company’s closest competitor, in Phillips’ judgment. But he thinks Chumby will have a hard time delivering …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

In an online photo mini-apocalypse, three Web 2.0-era photo sharing and management services—BubbleShare, Riya, and PicMe—announced late this week that they’re shutting down operations.

The closings aren’t entirely coincidental. Greg Raiz of Raizlabs, the Cambridge, MA-based software development house that built PicMe, says he accelerated plans to mothball and hopefully sell the application after he learned about the other shutdowns. “We had seen a number of other photo companies close shop and felt that if someone was ’shopping’ for technology we should toss our hat in the ring now while the opportunity was hot,” Raiz says.

But the bigger picture, so to speak, may be that a few big players—names like Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, and Google (with its Picasa application)—have sucked all the oxygen out of the photo management and photo sharing market. “Ultimately it’s very difficult to be in the consumer photo space,” says Raiz. “Google, Flickr, and Facebook essentially set the bar and give away their services for free or close to free. While we still feel certain aspects of our solution are better we can’t compete in a feature war and we can’t out-market them.”

I reviewed PicMe way back in my very first World Wide Wade column in April 2008. The cool, unique thing about the downloadable desktop program is that it shows your digital photos in 3-D stacks, with one stack for each folder on your hard drive. It lets you flip quickly through the photos in each stack, as if you were riffling through a pile of physical photo prints. To quote myself, “It’s a very nice way to browse through a big photo collection, and is a bit reminiscent of other recent interface innovations such as the Cover Flow feature on iPods and iPhones.” The program also offers drag-and-drop photo sharing: to e-mail or post a photo (or a whole stack of them) you can simply drag them onto the right icon in your contact list.

PicMe gained a respectable following through word of mouth, but Raiz was never able to line up the right partner to help spread PicMe more broadly. “As a small company we couldn’t get a desktop application licensed or distributed,” he says. “We talked to all the large desktop software players: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Kodak, Adobe, HP, et cetera, and they just were not interested. Or rather they were interested but not enough.”

At the same time, Raiz says, the company’s focus was shifting toward mobile app development, especially on the iPhone. Raizlabs did key development work on the Runkeeper app from Boston-based FitnessKeeper, for example. Even before Raiz decided to cease support for PicMe, “we had already decided internally that for now we wanted to spend our time working on Mobile apps,” he says. The company might build a mobile photo application at some point in the future, he adds.

“We’ve seen so much more success on the mobile side in just a year that we’d rather focus on what works,” Raiz says. “There are still companies trying to make a play for the consumer desktop such as ILovePhotos so we know it’s a valid opportunity, it’s just a really, really hard one to monetize.”

Both BubbleShare and Riya—which I reviewed in two articles for Technology Review’s website in March 2006—were largely moribund, so the news of their shutdowns does not come as a huge surprise. BubbleShare’s big innovation was an easy way to record an audio clip to go along with each photo you uploaded, then assemble the photos into a narrated slide show. The Toronto startup behind BubbleShare was purchased by Canadian media firm Kaboose in 2007; the BubbleShare technology became part of Disney Online when that company acquired some of Kaboose’s assets this April. Disney posted a note yesterday on the BubbleShare website saying that the service will close down as of November 15. All photos stored on the site will be erased.

Riya, based in San Mateo, CA, was probably a bit better known than BubbleShare, at least among the digerati, for its face recognition capabilities. After a bit of training, the site’s software can identify the faces of people who show up in multiple photos, offering a nice way to organize family albums. Riya founder Munjal Shah sent an e-mail to users this morning (reproduced at TechCrunch) explaining that similar capabilities are now available from Picasa and Apple’s iPhoto software, and that Riya will shut down as of August 21. In any case, Shah and the rest of the team behind Riya had long since shifted their efforts to Like.com, a shopping site based on similar color and pattern matching technology.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Being neither heterosexual nor much of a sports fan, I’ve never quite understood the annual excitement generated by the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. But lots of folks out there will no doubt be glad to hear that the swimsuit models, like everything else these days, are now available as an iPhone app.

Azuki Systems, the Acton, MA, mobile developer that raised $6 million back in May, created the application for Sports Illustrated. The SI Swimsuit app, which sells for $2.99 and is rated “17+” for “Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes” and “Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity,” appeared in the iTunes App Store today. The news hounds over at TechCrunch broke the story.

Naturally, the app includes “spectacular high-quality pictures” of the swimsuit models from the print magazine. But it isn’t just about skin. “SI Swimsuit 2009 not only provides pictures and videos of nearly two dozen gorgeous models from the 2009 ‘Bikinis or Nothing’ issue of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, but also a feature-rich sports calendar,” the app’s description in the iTunes App Store reads. “It’s a convenient way to keep track of schedules and scores for up to six of your favorite American pro and college sports teams and lets you choose a different girl to feature for every month of the year.”

Rotating the iPhone to landscape mode starts a full-screen slideshow. But I’m sure users will be too busy trying the team-tracking feature to notice that.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Today Bedford, MA-based Zink unveiled the winning designs in a $25,000 contest called “Zero Boundaries,” launched to elicit creative ideas about how Zink’s inkless printing technology might be built into devices that young people and future mobile consumers could use to capture, modify, and share digital photos.

We’ve told you the story of Zink, the Bedford, MA, startup whose pocket-sized printers can make instant, 3-by-4-inch prints from any digital image without using ink. In essence, the company reimagined a thermal printing technique that was invented but never commercialized at Polaroid. In a contest announcement earlier this year, Zink (whose name stands for “Zero Ink”) asked designers and design students around the world to reimagine Zink’s own products.

The winning ideas hail from designers in the U.S., China, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Romania. They vary from an iPhone accessory to a little robot that crawls around on a giant piece of Zink paper, printing as it goes. The company has published slide shows and descriptions of the winning entries on its contest website.

Zink’s basic technology involves a thermal print head that applies precise pulses of heat to special paper impregnated with crystals that turn various colors when they melt. Contest entrants had to build their designs—whether physical models or 3-D CAD renderings—around the basic mechanical and electronic elements of the Zink printer.

“The designs were incredibly well thought-through and truly showcase the breadth and disruptive nature of the future of printing that only Zink can enable,” said CEO Wendy Caswell in today’s announcement.

In the “Youth” category, the company’s challenge to designers was to “make today’s youth crave Zink products in the context of their digital and mobile world.” The winner, Zink Mix, consists of an iPhone application that searches a user’s photo albums and social networks for pictures they might want to print, along with a fancy iPhone docking station with numerous sliders and dials for photo editing that give it the appearance of an audio mixer. Patrick Schuur, of design firm Maketropolis in the Netherlands, won a $10,000 cash prize for the design.

In the “Future” category, Zink wanted designers to reimagine printing altogether. The winning design certainly does that: called the Mini Giant, it’s a self-propelled, large-format poster printer that rolls across a piece of Zink paper the way a farm combine traverses a wheat field. A thermal head on the Mini Giant’s undercarriage exposes paper as it goes. The design came from Paula Adina Sumalan, a recently graduated design student from Romania, who also won $10,000.

The company also handed out $1,000 second prizes in each category and $500 third prizes, along with a $500 “People’s Choice” award, with the winner determined by voting at the contest website. Brazilian Arthur Ditlef’s design for a portable business card printer, called the SmartBC, won the popular vote.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

If you read Xconomy, chances are that digital information is a big part of your day. You spend quite a bit of time absorbing, manipulating, and repackaging it. So here are a few questions for you: How many different devices do you use to channel all those bits? Is the number going up, or down? And if—as I suspect—it’s going down, what’s the minimum set of devices that you think you could get along with?

Here’s my current list:

1. Apple iPhone 3G
2. Apple MacBook, OS X 10.5
3. Dell Inspiron 8600 Windows XP laptop
4. Amazon Kindle 2 e-book reader
5. Sharp Aquos 32-inch HDTV
6. Microsoft Xbox 360
7. Canon PowerShot S5 IS digital camera
8. Roku digital video player

Note that I’m not counting the key infrastructure devices, like the Comcast-provided cable modem and my Netgear Wi-Fi router, that support several of the devices above.

But even without those two indispensable items, there would still be 12 or 13 devices on my personal list, if it weren’t for the Internet and the creative geniuses at companies like Palm, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. I’m betting the same thing is true for many readers.

Here’s my tale of the disappearing devices:

Ah, the good old days. In 2005, just for fun, I arranged this group picture, which includes every device I owned containing a microchip.

The PDA. I used a series of Palm devices to manage my calendar and contact lists from 1998 until 2003, when Palm folded those functions into its Treo phones, allowing me to say goodbye to the standalone organizer.

The MP3 player. In 2005 or so, I had a running debate with a fellow tech journo named Eric Hellweg about whether there would ever be a successful music phone—meaning a cell phone with a built-in music player. At the time, the only examples were devices like the Motorola ROKR, which, to put it politely, was a piece of horse pucky that could only hold 100 songs. I argued that not only was the technical problem of building a more capacious music phone too hard (what manufacturer was going to put a hard drive into a mobile phone?), but people didn’t want such a device anyway, since they already seemed perfectly happy to be carrying around separate devices for these two purposes—an iPod for music and a cell phone for communications. Well, obviously Eric won that debate in the end. The Apple iPhone, which came out in 2007, is arguably a better iPod than the iPod itself, thanks to its larger screen and a multi-touch interface. And even the low-end models can hold four times more music in their solid-state memories than my first disk-drive-based iPod.

The DVD player. No need for it after I got the Xbox 360, which also plays DVDs.

The DVR. When I jettisoned premium cable TV back in March, I had no more need for the Comcast set-top box, which also functioned as my DVR. I now get all of my video entertainment through Internet video sites like Hulu, Netflix DVDs, and the …Next Page »

Comments (11) | Reprints | Share:        

If this column has a repeating theme, it’s the amazing new capabilities we’re all gaining as a result of the digital media explosion. Yet like all revolutions, this one is destroying old values, attitudes, and behaviors even as it creates new ones. I would never trade the Web, mobile computing, and the instant access to digital culture that they enable for the media universe that existed before, say, 1995—but I also think it’s important to be aware of what we’re leaving behind. So this week I want to get down a few thoughts in remembrance of a little something called going out of your way.

Do you find yourself listening only to the music you can download from iTunes? Watching only the movies you can find in your cable provider’s video-on-demand lineup? Reading only the books you can order from Amazon? Going only to the restaurants you can find on Yelp? I certainly do. And I think this is a growing tendency, thanks to the ubiquity of cheap digital content and devices that can access it. At the risk of being taken too seriously, I want to coin a pseudomedical term for this pattern: On Demand Disorder, or ODD.

The main symptom of ODD is an aversion to any experience, product, or piece of content that can’t be obtained more or less instantaneously. And the main long-term consequence may be a narrowing of one’s world-view to exclude ideas and materials that take a little more work to uncover.

I’ll illustrate with a few examples from my own life. As a gadget freak, and as someone whose job is to keep abreast of the latest digital technologies, I may be an edge case. But perhaps you’ll recognize similar patterns in your own routine.

1. In the three months since I bought a Roku Player—a $99 wireless device that lets you view movies from Netflix and Amazon on your TV instantly—I have watched dozens of movies and TV shows on the Roku. In the same time, I’ve watched exactly two physical DVDs from Netflix. My “Instant” queue keeps turning over, but I haven’t made any progress on my regular DVD queue. This despite the fact that the selection of DVDs at Netflix is still far greater than the selection of so-called “Watch Instantly” movies. In effect, I’m sacrificing choice for availability.

2. I used to be a fairly regular buyer of books from Amazon. About six weeks ago, I decided to splurge on a Kindle 2 e-book reader. Guess how many physical books I’ve ordered since then? One. Partly, I’m just trying to get my money’s worth out of the Kindle. But now that I have the option of buying a book through the device’s built-in catalog and having it delivered wirelessly in under 60 seconds, instead of ordering it online and waiting for it to arrive three to seven days later in the mail, I’ve become far more cognizant of my own impatience. When I get a hankering to read a book, I usually want to read it now. By the time Amazon can ship me the physical book, the feeling of urgency may have passed, or I may have found the information I needed elsewhere. The one book I did buy was an out-of-print monograph from an academic press that will likely never be made into a Kindle Edition.

3. I’ve been an active amateur photographer ever since my grandfather gave me one of his old Nikons when I was a teenager. My collection of thousands of photographs fits into roughly four buckets: a) 1980-1990: Ektachrome slides—my grandfather’s preferred medium—now stored in carousels and in plastic sleeves in binders. b) 1991-1997: Color prints, stored in albums. c) 1998-2004: Digital images, taken with my first two digital cameras, stored on CD-Rs. d) 2005-present: Digital images, taken with my various camera phones and my third and fourth digital cameras, stored on hard drives and on Flickr. It’s probably not hard for you to guess which pictures I view most often and least often. The sad truth is that because I can pull up my Flickr photostream instantly on my PC, my Mac, or my iPhone (or even, thanks to programs like Slickr and Boxee, on my television), the Flickr images are the only ones I ever look at.

My personal media consumption habits, of course, are of no great consequence to the larger world. What worries me is that as the amount of material available in digital, on-demand form grows, our familiarity with the non-digital world may atrophy. That would be a real shame, because …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Needham, MA-based SnapMyLife, which runs a photo-sharing community for mobile phone users, said today that it has released two new applications for RIM Blackberry smartphones. The apps, available from the Blackberry App World (launched by RIM this month), include a straightforward camera app that lets users take photos and upload them to SnapMyLife’s mobile site, as well as a “Snap2Twitter” application that posts a link to each new photo to the user’s Twitter stream.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

I’ve been writing World Wide Wade for almost a year now; this is the 44th installment. A year is a long time in the technology world—long enough for many of the gadgets, services, and websites I’ve covered in the past to evolve cool new features. So I thought I’d revisit a few of my previous columns and fill you in about what’s changed.

1. Beyond megapixels. In my April 4 and June 6 columns, I wrote about the Gigapan community site, where you can upload super-high-resolution photos stitched together from lots of regular digital shots. In January of this year, a new company called GigaPan Systems introduced a $379 robot camera mount that puts gigapixel imaging within the reach of hobbyists. It takes care of the tedious part of gigapixel imaging by guiding your camera through hundreds or thousands of individually-angled shots, with just enough overlap to give the stitching software something to work with.

2. News aggregators on steroids. Last April 11, I wrote about my favorite news-tracking tools on the Web, including Netvibes and Alltop. Netvibes hasn’t changed much in the last year, but Alltop, a cool aggregator that uses pop-up windows to squeeze a lot of news onto a single page, has exploded beyond all bounds. It had about 55 categories of RSS feeds when I last wrote about it; now there must be well over 500, on everything from Atheism to Zoology. And for tech-news enthusiasts, there’s a site called TechFuga that recently got a nice overhaul that makes it more competitive with the uber-popular but somewhat tired TechMeme. The new features at TechFuga include Twitter searching, reflecting the fact that more and more people are getting their news from each other via the red-hot microblogging service. (Speaking of Twitter, you can follow me there at “wroush“.)

3. Earth as you’ve never seen it. On April 18, I wrote about Google Earth 4.3, which featured improved navigation and a larger crop of 3-D buildings. The latest version of the world’s most popular geo-browser, Google Earth 5.0, came out in the middle of last month. The coolest improvements: a fantastic view of the ocean floor, the ability to delve back in time and see aerial imagery from the 1980s and earlier, and imagery for Mars as well as Earth and the Moon.

4. An art museum in your living room. If you’ve got an HDTV already, there’s no reason to buy one of those expensive digital photo frames. My April 25 column talked about GalleryPlayer, a company that provided software and imagery for turning your TV into a digital art exhibit. Unfortunately, GalleryPlayer went out of business in July (though founder Scott Lipsky, an ex-Amazon exec, hinted that it had merely been sold and might re-emerge). Luckily, there are still plenty of ways to find and display high-resolution images on your big screen. DeviantArt is a great place to browse and download free HD-resolution images created by professional artists and photographers. And if you hook up your computer to your TV, you can use software like Slickr or FlickrFan to display those images—or your own—in the form of animated slide shows.

5. An elephant never forgets. My July 18 column was about Evernote, a fantastic cross-platform system for storing and tracking all the info-flotsam in your life: Web pages, photos, receipts, you name it. I still add material to my Evernote account every day, and the company just keeps making the software better and better. There’s now a version for Android phones (on top of the existing Web, Windows, Mac, Windows Mobile, and iPhone versions). In December, Evernote (whose logo is an elephant) added a file synchronization feature, so you can use it to keep copies of important Word files, PDFs, PowerPoints, and other electronic documents, and more recently, it rolled out a vastly improved version of its Web Clipper, which is the tool I use most often. A feature I plan to try soon is the recently-announced Shoeboxed, a service that will scan that pile of business cards and receipts on your desk and put them right into Evernote. And if you used Google Notebooks—which Google gave up on in January—you can easily import all of your notes to Evernote and pick up where you left off.

6. Cutting the cord. In my July 25 column, I threatened to give up my cable TV subscription and switch to watching my favorite shows online, via video aggregators like Hulu. Well, it took me a while to gather up the courage, but last week I finally made good on the threat, and dropped my $80 digital cable package at Comcast in favor of a $10 lineup of about 23 local channels (which I kept just in case I ever feel the need to watch live news). While I was at it, I canceled …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

It was a very quiet week for deals in the Northwest, with just a trickle of activity in software, security, and biotech.

—Seattle-based Haute Secure, a software firm focused on computer security against malware, raised about $1.6 million in Series A funding. Investors in the round included Silicon Valley firms Baseline Ventures and Sherpalo Ventures.

—LookStat, a Seattle-area startup that makes software for analytics and workflow automation for the microstock photography industry, has received an investment from Founder’s Co-op, a Seattle-based seed-stage fund. (The news was mentioned in passing by investor Andy Sack at a financing talk.) The amount of the investment and the closing date weren’t announced, but Founder’s Co-op tends to invest between $250,000 and $500,000 in early-stage tech companies.

—Luke reported that Seattle-based VPDiagnostics received a $2.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to run a clinical trial of its MRI technology for determining a patient’s risk of stroke. The technology is based on 15-plus years of research at the University of Washington.

—Seattle-based Second Avenue Partners renewed its investment in Fanzter, a Collinsville, CT-based new media company. The $2 million Series B financing round was led by Steamboat Ventures. Fantzer, which was also backed by Seattle investors Curious Office Partners and Rich Barton (from Zillow), runs a celebrity website called Coolspotters.com.

—Seattle startup TrafficGauge, a provider of road traffic information in real time, was acquired by Networks In Motion, a mobile navigation and search company based in Aliso Viejo, CA. Financial terms were not disclosed. TrafficGauge first rolled out a mobile traffic map in Seattle in 2003.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

People seem to eat up the platefuls of food-related programming fed to them by cable networks like Lifetime, The Travel Channel, and the Food Network. Will cell phone owners do the same?

The folks at SnapMyLife, the mobile photo-sharing community run by Needham, MA-based Mobicious, hope to find out. Last year the company formed a partnership with Zero Point Zero Production, the company behind curmudgeonly cook Anthony Bourdain’s popular Travel Channel show “No Reservations,” to post backstage candids from the show on SnapMyLife. Already the show’s crew has posted some 340 photos to SnapMyLife’s free public albums, which are advertising-supported and optimized for browsing and viewing on mobile phones. Most of the photos show Bourdain visiting countries around the world and—as he does on the show—trying a variety of exotic foods in the company of local chefs or families.

It’s all intended as a way for food and travel lovers to keep up with the show and learn about locations that will be featured in upcoming episodes. David Chang, co-founder and vice president of marketing at Mobicious, says it’s the first time a TV show has turned to mobile photo-sharing to help form connections with viewers. “The problem they were trying to solve is that they’ve got this great program, and they wanted to use mobile devices to reach people—whether to involve existing viewers, to send them alerts about new episodes, or to recruit brand new viewers,” he says. “And since SnapMyLife users come from all over the world and just eat up any content about travel, it was a really good fit, from our standpoint.”

Some 440 SnapMyLife users have signed up to receive alerts when the crew posts new pictures from “No Reservations,” which is now in its fifth season; users can choose to see the alerts on the mobile website or receive e-mail or text messages. (Overall, SnapMyLife has signed up nearly 700,000 registered users since Mobicious launched the service last April, Chang says; users browse 15 million photos every month.)

For all the novelty of a television production company using a mobile photo-sharing network to share behind-the-scenes views, though, the “No Reservations” photo stream is curiously unsocial. It’s a one-to-many enterprise: Zero Point Zero crew members post photos that are then viewed by SnapMyLife users, but there’s no way for users to contribute their own food- or travel-related photos to the stream. And users can comment on the photos, but Zero Point Zero doesn’t engage with users by responding to the comments. (I could only find four comments from the “No Reservations” crew, for 340 photos.) The photos themselves, while less staged or scripted than the show itself, still have the look of studio-produced publicity shots.

There’s an explanation for that. According to Chang, the images that show up in the “No Reservations” photo stream have been extensively vetted by both Zero Point Zero and the Travel Channel, mainly to make sure they don’t show anyone who hasn’t signed a legal photo release.

“Dan, the camera guy, has a camera phone, and he could snap a picture and just use that—which was initially what we were pushing for,” says Chang. “But because Dan is employed by the production company, there are legal constraints in terms of what they can show.”

It’s all an interesting case study in the frictions and ironies that can crop up when traditional media enterprises like TV production crews try to adapt their content for more social, less controlled channels. When you friend Anthony Bourdain on SnapMyLife, there may not be quite as much distance as there would be if you friended, say, Barack Obama on Facebook. But it’s still a case of social networking minus the social.

“We are still trying to navigate these waters,” Chang acknowledges. “This is just stage one—taking content that we know has gone through this vetting process and getting that out to users. Stage 2 will be capturing live media on the spot in a way that is more spontaneous.”

Chang says the Mobicious team is in early discussions with the Travel Channel and other big media companies about mixing photos from users with professionally-produced content, where appropriate. “They recognize that users have mobile devices, and that it’s a great way of capturing content when they are in places that are interesting and relevant,” he says. So while the snapshot of the blowfish-testicles entrée from your last trip to Tokyo probably won’t show up on the Travel Channel itself, it might just be included in its photo stream.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Waltham, MA-based Zink, known for commercializing an inkless printing technique originally conceived at Polaroid, is providing the technology behind a new ultra-mobile wireless printer from Dell. Called the Wasabi, the $149 printer is similar to the Polaroid PoGo mobile printer, which also based on technology licensed from Zink; it’s about 5 inches long, 3 inches wide, and 1 inch deep, and can produce 2 x 3-inch color prints using data from Bluetooth-enabled cameras, mobile phones, and PCs.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

For average consumers, the big complaint about digital photography has always been that it’s too hard to extract the pictures you’ve taken from your camera or phone so you can show them to the rest of the world. But the truth is there are so many ways to move, share, and display digital photos today that there’s no longer any excuse for letting your pictures languish. This week’s column is meant to point you toward a few cool examples of applications to help share your photos—plus one that’s promising but, unfortunately, not quite ready for prime time.

There’s one word for the hurdle that keeps a lot of people from using their digital cameras more often: cables. To get photos of your camera, you usually have to track down the right USB cable, hook it to the computer, then find the photo-transfer program that came with the camera when you bought it. Wouldn’t it be great if your camera simply sent all of your recent photos to your computer wirelessly, the moment you turned the camera on? Well, that’s exactly what the Eye-Fi Explore, Eye-Fi Share, and Eye-Fi Home cards from Mountain View, CA-based Eye-Fi let you do.

The cards are regular SD memory cards that hold 2 gigabytes of pictures and fit into the existing SD slot in your camera. But they also include tiny radios that allow the cards to connect to Wi-Fi networks such as the one you probably have in your house. From there, the cards can either upload your photos to your home computer or, in the case of Eye-Fi Share and Eye-Fi Explore, send them directly to your favorite photo-sharing site, such as Picasa, Flickr, or Photobucket.

The top-of-the-line card, the Explore, also comes with a year of free Wayport Wi-Fi hotspot service so you can upload photos from any of the Wayport’s thousands of member restaurants and hotels, including many McDonald’s locations. The Explore card also automatically geotags your photos—attaching the latitude and longitude to your photo’s electronic metadata, so that you can view them on a Web-based map. (To find the location where each photo is taken, the card uses Wi-Fi-based positioning software supplied by Boston’s Skyhook Wireless. I wrote about the deal between Skyhook and Eye-Fi last May).

My brother and his wife gave me an Eye-Fi Explore card for my birthday last week (thanks Jamie & Jen!). I’ve been testing it out this week, and it works astonishingly well. A 5-megabyte photo, taken at my camera’s maximum 3264 x 2448-pixel resolution, takes only a few seconds to upload to my computer, and appears in my Flickr account moments after that. I’ve tried setting the Eye-Fi card to upload images to my Evernote account (the wonderful digital notebook service I wrote about last July) and it works great for that too. The added bonus here is that Evernote can recognize words in your photos—so if one of your pictures included a billboard, a street sign, or some text on a whiteboard, you’d be able to find it later by searching for that text.

There are only a couple of downsides to the Eye-Fi card. One is that it uploads everything on your memory card indiscriminately, so you’d better be sure that the photos you’ve taken are really ones that you want showing up on a public photo-sharing account (although you can adjust the privacy settings for Web-bound photos in advance). Also, you can’t change the card’s settings from the camera—you have to do it using a Web-based management interface, which means you must be at an Internet-connected computer to switch between uploading to different sites. That’s a bit of an annoyance, because I share most of my photos on Flickr, but every once in a while I’d like to use my camera to record something on Evernote.

(Update, January 16, 2009: The Eye-Fi card’s popularity appears to be growing; the device just won the “Last Gadget Standing” competition at the International Consumer Electronics Show.)

But you don’t need a fancy digital camera or a wireless SD card to get into the mobile photo-sharing game. If you have a camera phone, you can send your photos off to your friends or to a Web album with no hassle. There are two mobile photo-sharing services that I particularly like, both launched in 2008, and both with automatic geotagging features.

One is SnapMyLife, which is accessible from any mobile Web browser, but also offers a nice specialized app for iPhone users. The iPhone app includes a Google Maps screen that lets you browse photos uploaded by other members. With more than 500,000 people using the service, you’re bound to find shots from a few fellow SnapMyLife users in any urban neighborhood. Some people use SnapMyLife to …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Gadget lovers and other technology enthusiasts suffer from a curious myopia about the past. The general assumption—fostered by the admittedly blinding pace of progress in computing and software—is that everything really cool must have been invented in the last decade or two. Marvels like wearable virtual-reality displays with force feedback gloves are often described as if they were without precedent.

But past generations were far cleverer than we usually imagine. It may surprise you to learn, for example, that the first three-dimensional (stereo) images were created by British scientist Charles Wheatstone in 1845, just a few years after the emergence of photography itself, and that 3-D photo viewers—called stereoscopes—were common appliances in middle-class living rooms for more than 70 years, from the time of the American Civil War to the Great Depression.

If you came across a stereoscope or a stack of the dual-image “stereograph” cards used in them today, perhaps in an antique store or your grandparents’ attic, you’d probably dismiss them as quaint curiosities or toys. That would be an understandable reaction, given that we can now enjoy computer-animated 3-D movies like The Polar Express and Beowulf at Imax scale. But you’d be missing the fact that for at least three generations, in an era before radio, television, and easy geographic mobility, the stereoscope was many citizens’ most important window on the world outside their hometowns; it was their newsreel and their 3-D National Geographic, functioning as the main medium for what we now call photojournalism.

About 15 years ago, I inherited a stereoscope and a small number of stereograph cards from my grandfather. I treated the device mainly as a knick-knack until a couple of months ago, when I came across a book-fair vendor who was selling a large trove of quality stereo views. I picked through them, bought a dozen, took them home, put them in my stereoscope—and was completely bowled over by the images’ clarity and depth.

The cards I’d purchased were mostly made by the Keystone View Company, the largest and most prosperous of the 19th-century stereograph publishers, and their subject matter, composition, and printing exhibited a refinement that had been missing from the handful of cheaper cards I already owned. It was as if the depth in the cards I’d viewed before was a stage illusion; the people and objects in these more cheaply made images could just as well have been a series of scrims or paper cutouts. But the Keystone images had a continuous, lifelike depth similar to the perspective we enjoy in everyday life.

The revelation sent me off in search of historical information and, inevitably, more stereograph cards. I learned, to my surprise, that the household stereoscope—a simple contraption with a handle, two lenses, a hood to block light, and a sliding card holder— was invented in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the great Bostonian poet and physician. Holmes was enchanted by stereo photography and believed that a simple, affordable, handheld version of the heavy, awkward stereo viewers in use up until that time would give ordinary people access to a universe of marvels.

At the Boston Public Library, I tracked down a copy of a 1949 address given by George E. Hamilton, then president of the Keystone View Company, to the Newcomen Society of England in North America, a club devoted to the history of engineering and technology. Hamilton’s address included quotations from two articles Holmes had written about the stereoscope and stereo views for The Atlantic Monthly in 1859 and 1861. I want to excerpt those quotes here at length, because they convey the rapture Holmes felt toward these “painting[s] not made with hands”:

“The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable.

…Oh, infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this small library of glass and pasteboard! I creep over the vast features of Rameses, on the face of his rockhewn Nubian temple… and then I dive into some mass of foliage with my microscope, and trace the veinings of a leaf so delicately wrought in the painting not made with hands, that I can almost see its down and the green aphis that sucks its juices.

…If a strange planet should happen to come within hail, and one of its philosophers were to ask us, as it passed, to hand him the most remarkable product of human skill, we should offer him, without a moment’s hesitation, a stereoscope containing an instantaneous double-view of some great thoroughfare.”

It’s worth noting that while Hamilton had an obvious financial interest in promoting the stereoscope, Holmes never did. He gave his design to a Boston merchant named Joseph L. Bates, who manufactured and sold the device from his “fancy goods” shop at 132 Washington Street. (The “Monarch” stereoscope I inherited, made by Keystone, bears a 1904 patent, but its design had not changed in any important way since Holmes’ time.)

By 1890, stereoscopes and stereo views had become a huge industry in the U.S. and Europe, with four companies in the U.S. alone dispatching photographers to every corner of the Earth and competing to sell stereograph cards to the public. Every summer, the companies hired hundreds of college students to fan out across the countryside, hawking the latest series of travel, documentary, educational, comic, burlesque, or “sentimental” views. Weddings and railroad scenes were popular, as were …Next Page »

Comments (15) | Reprints | Share:        

With only two eyes apiece, spanning a mere 180-degree field of view, humans have an innately limited understanding of what it means to see. Some insects have compound eyes with hundreds or thousands of facets that can form a nearly 360-degree picture of the world around them. The shells of many scallop species are rimmed by 100 or more brilliant blue eyes; a scallop can’t actually see much (since it doesn’t even have a brain), but its eyes can detect motion from any direction, warning it when to clam up.

Inspired in part by the scallop, engineers at Tenebraex—a small Boston company that makes optical equipment for the military—are unveiling a new type of surveillance camera today that combines images from five separate image sensors, each equivalent to the camera in a typical cell phone. Each camera has a roughly 40-degree field of view, and when stitched together, the five video feeds span a full 180 degrees, giving security personnel a comprehensive real-time view of a scene without the distortion created by traditional fisheye lenses, and without the delays created by remote-control pan-and-tilt cameras. Tenebraex’s engineers call the device the Digital Window, and it’s the debut product for Scallop Imaging, a new Tenebraex subsidiary that hopes to sell its technology to camera makers and system integrators in the security industry.

“Using multiple, lost-cost imaging sensors allows you to do things you couldn’t do otherwise,” says Peter Jones, president of Tenebraex. “They’re small enough and cheap enough that you can put them anyplace where you want situational awareness, without having to install a big eyeball with a motor turning it back and forth.” That could be a big advantage in locations where purse-snatchers and other wrongdoers have learned to look for remote-controlled cameras and strike when they’re pointed away. “There’s no motion to catch your eye, because the sensors are looking everywhere at once,” says Jones.

The Digital Window device is so small it will fit into a hole in the wall the same size as a light switch or power socket. It’s powered by the same Ethernet cable that connects it to a building’s surveillance system.

The Digital Window is only the latest in a eclectic series of vision-related technologies from Tenebraex. The company’s first product was a honeycomb-like screen that fits over the lenses of military-grade binoculars and rifle sights to keep out glare and prevent reflections that might give away a user’s position. (Reflections off optical devices are a more serious problem in wartime than you might think: a glint from Moshe Dayan’s binoculars during the 1941 Allied invasion of Syria showed a Vichy French soldier where to shoot, costing the future Israeli general and politician his left eye.) Using a similar type of screen, Tenebraex licenses filters to Philips Lighting that make vehicle headlights look black, red, or blue when they’re turned off. The company also makes a full-color night vision system, as well as a system called EyePilot that helps color-blind people distinguish different colors on a computer display.

Jones says the impetus for Digital Window originally sprang from a request from the Department of Defense, which wanted to add a large bulletproof window to the door of the M2/M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The window would give soldiers about to exit the vehicle a better look at what awaited them. But it would also create a huge reflection, so some kind of camouflaging system was needed.

In the end, the project was dropped. “But what they really wanted to do in the Bradley was to make that door, in effect, transparent,” says Jones. “It doesn’t really matter how you get there—you just want an undistorted view. That was the genesis of the idea; it got us thinking about using multiple, low-cost sensors on the outside of the vehicle and having a display inside.”

Digital Window is the first instantiation of that idea—it’s just built for stationary installation as part of a security system, rather than the outside of a moving vehicle. (Not coincidentally, however, Scallop is investigating automotive applications of the technology, including distortion-free backup cameras for the rear ends of trucks, vans, and SUVs.)

In a way, Digital Window is the video equivalent of the low-budget panoramic and gigapixel imaging techniques that are becoming popular among amateur digital photographers (a subject I covered in a column last summer). The key to making a decent panorama or gigapixel image is to …Next Page »

Comments (11) | Reprints | Share:        

Back in April I wrote about Mobicious, a Needham, MA, startup that once focused on publishing a directory of mobile applications but took a dramatic turn in direction by launching a free, advertising-supported photo-sharing community called SnapMyLife that’s optimized for mobile phones, especially the Apple iPhone. After just eight months, SnapMyLife has signed up more than 500,000 users, and today Mobicious announced that it has raised $5 million in new funding for the project.

Existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners and Carmel Ventures put up the new funds, which bring Mobicious’ total venture financing to $9 million. Mobicious said it will use the money to add new features to SnapMyLife, market the service to more users in other countries, and pursue international partnerships.

“SnapMyLife is the first mobile-oriented service to allow a wide range of consumers to easily share photos, while building a global community of friends,” Mobicious founder and CEO George Grey said in a statement. “SnapMyLife’s premium demographic, high quality content, and location-based services set us apart and offer advertisers a unique opportunity to reach older and more affluent consumers.”

SnapMyLife can be accessed via a Web browser on a mobile phone or via a specialized iPhone application that the company released in July. The application lets users take pictures, upload them to online photo albums, and see the locations where the photos were taken displayed on a map. Users can also easily browse photos that were taken near their current location or uploaded by friends, as well as comment on other users’ images. The service is supported by small text ads that appear at the bottom of most photo pages.

“We expect SnapMyLife to do well in the current climate,” Rina Shainski, general partner at Carmel Ventures, said in the company’s funding announcement. SnapMyLife has “a strong management team and a compelling service that provides advertisers with high quality, targeted content and users,” Shainski said.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share: