If you had to boil down Autodesk‘s business to a few simple words, it might be “helping people create new realities”—whether that means constructing new objects or structures first envisioned on the company’s computer-aided design (CAD) programs or generating new Avatar-like movie worlds using its modeling and animation software. But increasingly, the first step in the process of modeling a new product or environment is capturing an existing reality, then building on it. And a new cloud service hatched by Autodesk Labs, the company’s San Rafael, CA-based experimental design group, helps professionals and amateurs alike do exactly that, by synthesizing eerily accurate 3D computer models of almost any object or space from a few dozen conventional photographs.

Released in early November as an official Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK) beta product, the service is called 123D Catch, reflecting its place in a growing family of amateur-accessible design tools under the 123D brand. It uses a technique called photogrammetry to identify common features in a series of photos snapped from multiple angles. From those reference points, Autodesk’s servers can recreate the scene as a 3D mesh, like the model of my head shown below. The 3D models can then be modified using simple CAD programs like 123D, or even printed out and reassembled as real world sculptures using yet another Autodesk program, 123D Make.

It’s pretty amazing stuff for anyone who has a bit of maker in them. Until recently, building detailed photogrammetric models of everyday objects wasn’t possible without a battery of expensive laser scanners. But 123D Catch is just part of Autodesk’s larger plan to reach beyond its traditional audience of professional architects and designers with tools that can help advanced amateurs create, explore, and build their own 3D objects. And it’s a first step toward a future world where small-scale custom design and manufacturing may be widespread—and where Autodesk hopes to stake a big claim.

The “things industry” is gradually going the way of Netflix, argues Autodesk Labs vice president Brian Mathews. “We used to use money to buy things—shoes, glasses—but now we will effectively buy ideas,” Mathews says. “That is our prediction.”

And since the ideas will be digital, it will be easy to tweak them to our own tastes before they’re brought to life. Autodesk describes this as the “scan/modify/print” worldview. “In the music industry, people rip songs and deejays put them together in new ways,” Mathews observes. “That is also going to happen with the things industry. We’ve got the ability to modify things with 123D and do 3D printing with 123D Make. But what we haven’t shown is the scan part, and that’s what [123D Catch] is one aspect of—bringing laser scanning down to the consumer level.”

Autodesk first shared a preview version of 123D Catch under the code name Photofly in early 2010. I visited Mathews at Autodesk’s San Francisco offices this fall to learn more about Autodesk Labs, and we ended up focusing on Photofly as a soup-to-nuts illustration of the group’s mission and working pattern. “Everyone [at Autodesk] is inventing and improving, but an invention is not an innovation,” Mathews says. “An innovation has to be more in the practical realm; it has to work. We make real-world prototypes instead of research stuff, and our key differentiating feature is that we involve our customers. When we have something really new like Photofly, we are involving the customers in the R&D process from the beginning.”

Indeed, makers using early versions of Photofly have come up with some pretty stunning creations. One of the most impressive is this music video from the Brisbane, Australia-based electronic-pop band Hunz; it’s populated by haunting Photofly models of lead singer-composer-programmer Hans Van Vliet. But users have also employed Photofly to model more mundane scenes, from archaeological digs to ratty jogging shoes.

Photogrammetry—the process of measuring objects from their images—is a science that dates back nearly to the invention of photography in the mid-1800s. But it’s gotten a huge boost in the last decade from the introduction of digital photography and … Next Page »

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The mobile Web is fostering a remarkable renaissance in traditional art forms such as photography—surprisingly, right alongside the explosion of videos, games, gossip, tweets, and other distractions. And if there’s one organization that has figured out how to use the Web and the latest mobile gadgets to showcase great images, it’s Paris- and San Francisco-based Fotonauts, creator of the online photo curation community Fotopedia and seven related mobile apps. I’ve been following this company for three years now, and I think they make the most elegant photo apps available for tablets and smartphones, including the marquee Fotopedia Heritage and National Parks apps and the more self-contained travelogues Above France, Dreams of Burma, Memory of Colors, North Korea, and Paris.

Today Fotopedia is announcing some big news—the company is branching out beyond its online presence and its one-off mobile apps to introduce a tablet-based photo magazine within the travel section of Flipboard, the popular social media reader for the Apple iPad. Starting today, Flipboard users can add the Fotopedia magazine to their favorites list and explore photo stories consisting of a series of images and captions on a single theme. The company plans to update the magazine with new images several times a day, drawing from its database of images contributed by the community of 30,000 professional, semi-pro, and amateur Fotopedia members.

With the Fotopedia magazine on Flipboard “the goal is to push the stories everywhere, so that we extend our ecosystem in a huge way,” says Jean-Marie Hullot, the Apple veteran who founded Fotonauts in 2006. “I think we are the only one in the industry equipped to deal with thousands of pictures, absorb them, make sense of them, curate them, give them the right structure, and distribute the product.” Even as it makes its Flipboard debut, the company is rolling out other publishing and business-model changes designed to make the venture-funded startup into “a photo platform for the 21st century,” in Hullot’s words.

Though the Fotopedia collaborative photo encyclopedia has been around for three years, most people probably know the company through its Heritage app for iPads and iPhones, which Apple recently named one of the top 50 iOS apps of all time. Heritage is a collection of 25,000 photos of UNESCO-designated world heritage sites, all used by permission of the Fotopedia members who contributed them. Apple likes the app so much that it’s installed it on iOS devices in every Apple store in the world, the better to show off the gadgets’ photo display capabilities. Cumulatively, Heritage and the six other Fotopedia apps have been downloaded 4.8 million times, according to Hullot.

As with all of the Fotopedia apps, the photos in the Fotopedia stories on Flipboard can be expanded for an immersive, full-screen view. Already, Fotopedia has 500 stories in the queue for the Flipboard magazine, on themes ranging from shipwrecks to ghost towns to body piercing. People without iPads can check out the stories on the Fotopedia website, a redesigned version of which is being unveiled today.

“The idea is to have all sorts of interesting, enriching stories spoken in pictures,” says Hullot. The stories will have “the same combination of immersiveness and the ‘Wow!’ feeling we always try to create with the Fotopedia apps,” he says.

Though Hullot is currently based in Paris, he’s also been a fixture in Silicon Valley, where he was chief technology officer under Steve Jobs at NeXT Computer and then CTO of Apple’s Applications Division. Fotonauts has collected $6.3 million in venture funding from … Next Page »

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Animoto would have knocked my grandfather’s socks off. A freelance photographer, he spent countless evenings assembling his Ektachrome transparencies into multimedia slide shows—but back in the 1970s and 1980s, “multimedia” meant a pair of carousel slide projectors with a dissolve unit controlled by time codes embedded on a musical cassette tape. At Animoto’s site, by contrast, you can upload a few dozen digital photos and video clips to the Web, select some music, get back a professional animated video within minutes, then share it with your friends via e-mail, Facebook, or YouTube. It’s one of the slickest and easiest ways to package and share all those photos and clips from your last trip or party—and sharing, after all, is what photography is all about.

“It really is digital storytelling,” says Brad Jefferson, co-founder and CEO of the New York- and San Francisco-based startup, which is expanding into a gleaming new office on Kearny Street. “My co-founders come from the film and TV industry, and at the end of the day what we are trying to do is help people create short-form documentaries from the photos on their SD cards and computers. We like to call it ‘Hollywood production with the click of a button.’”

And just as in Hollywood, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. It was around 2007, when Animoto was founded, that cloud-computing platforms like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) were beginning to make it possible for companies to offer such services online without having to build their own huge data centers. In fact, Animoto has always used EC2′s computing power for most of its hard-core rendering work—taking users’ photos, adding fancy motion graphics, dissolves, and other effects, and putting it all to music. But it was always a bit of a stretch, because Animoto was trying to get Amazon’s plain-vanilla CPUs to act like graphical processing units (GPUs), which are specially designed to speed the mathematical operations behind 2D and 3D rendering.

Now there’s an alternative: in November, Seattle-based Amazon Web Services announced that EC2 users could rent access to actual GPUs as well as CPUs. And that has allowed Animoto to take a big leap forward. Starting yesterday, Animoto upgraded its standard videos from 240p or pixels of height—the size of a small embeddable box on a blog page—to 360p, the size of a standard YouTube video.

Premium users previously had the option of upgrading their videos beyond that to 480p, which is DVD quality. But now they can also scale beyond that to 720p, or HD quality. And on top of all that, videos handled by Amazon’s GPUs are rendered about 10 times faster than before—and at lower cost.

“We knew that the direction our video rendering had to go was GPU, but the problem was that [until recently] there were no cloud providers with GPUs,” says Jefferson. “We looked at buying a bunch of servers and putting them in a colo [a colocation center]. But it was not having to invest in hardware that made us very nimble and allowed us to focus on what we’re good at, and we still don’t want to. Using Amazon GPU instances is the next evolution of that vision.”

There’s one caveat: Animoto offers 24 styles of videos, from abstract to cutesy, and so far HD videos and faster rendering are available for just one of them, the “Animoto Original” style. (For a look at that style, see the 2-minute Animoto video below, which I created last night using photos from a trip last weekend to California’s Sonoma County.) The reason is that Animoto has, in essence, …NEXT PAGE>

… Next Page »

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Newton, MA-based TripAdvisor, the travel review site owned by Bellevue, WA-based Expedia (Nasdaq: EXPE), said today that it’s buying EveryTrail, a Palo Alto, CA, startup that helps users create multimedia travel tours using their GPS smartphones.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, so it’s hard to say whether the acquisition represents a sizable return on investment for GlobalMotion Media, EveryTrail’s parent company. (GlobalMotion raised $1 million in seed financing from Menlo Park, CA-based investment association Band of Angels in 2009.) But the acquisition itself is not a surprise, given the current wave of consolidation in the online travel industry—e.g., Google’s proposed takeover of ITA Software and Redmond, WA-based Concur’s recent acquisition of San Francisco’s TripIt. And it’s an interesting combination, potentially allowing TripAdvisor—which is mainly known for its user-contributed hotel and restaurant reviews—to offer more interactive content, and to enhance its presence on mobile platforms.

The Massachusetts company already has decent mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Palm, and Nokia phones, but they largely consist of mobile-optimized repackagings of TripAdvisor’s online listings. Adam Medros, TripAdvisor’s vice president of global product, implied in today’s announcement that his company was interested in EveryTrail because it wants to serve mobile users better. “Every day, more people are opting to use mobile apps as a way of consuming travel information,” Medros said. “EveryTrail bolsters our continued commitment to grow TripAdvisor’s mobile offering, and enable travelers to access walking tours, city guides and hiking trails directly from their smartphones.”

The heart of EveryTrail’s service is a mobile app, available for the iPhone and Android phones, that travelers and outdoor enthusiasts can use to create map-based slide shows on the fly. When you turn on the app, it uses GPS to track your movement across a city, region, or trail. Every photo that you take while the app is running is geotagged, and when your trip is done, the app uploads the pictures and the GPS path information to the EveryTrail website, where everything is assembled into a “Trip”—a map overlaid with a slide show. (I’ve personally used EveryTrail on several occasions, and have embedded an example below from an August bike trip around San Francisco.)

Last year EveryTrail also introduced “Guides”—formally produced Trips around famous locations such as Yosemite’s Half Dome. EveryTrail Guides are downloadable as individual iPhone apps from the iTunes App Store and are intended for on-the-spot use by travelers. Individual EveryTrail users can create their own Guides and submit them for sale. If their Guides are approved, they get points that can be redeemed for gift certificates at Moosejaw.com, an online outdoor-gear retailer.

“Like TripAdvisor, EveryTrail is possible because of a global community of travelers who share their stories every day,” EveryTrail CEO Joost Schreve said in a statement. “The mobile platform that we provide lets travelers turn these stories into highly engaging mobile travel guides that help other travelers enjoy their trips even more. We are delighted to join TripAdvisor in this exciting new phase that will give us the ability to bring our tours and guides to TripAdvisor’s 40 million travelers all over the world.”

In a blog post today, Schreve said TripAdvisor “recognized that EveryTrail has created important elements for the mobile travel age that would be tremendously useful for the TripAdvisor community.” He didn’t detail exactly how the EveryTrail-TripAdvisor integration will proceed, but he did promise that “we’ll bring EveryTrail functionality into the TripAdvisor suite of products.”

I’ve reached out to TripAdvisor for more comment on the acquisition, but haven’t heard back yet. I’ll let you know if I find out more. [Update, 2:45 p.m. ET, 2/3/11: I just talked with Adam Medros and got more of the story about what TripAdvisor saw in EveryTrail and how their respective apps might be woven together.]

San Francisco Circuit

EveryTrail – Find the best Walking Tours in San Francisco, California

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Path, the San Francisco-based startup offering an iPhone app that allows users to share photos and videos with small groups of friends, announced in a blog post Tuesday that it has collected $8.65 million in new venture funding, on top of approximately $2.5 million already raised. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures led the round, which was joined by Digital Garage Japan; Kleiner partner Chi-Hua Chien and Index partner Mike Volpi have joined Path’s board. Path also announced that users can now share photos they snap from within the app via e-mail.

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In a blog post this evening, San Francisco-based Path announced that it has added video capabilities to its photo sharing app for the Apple iPhone. “Wonderful personal moments can be captured and shared with a photo. But, they would be infinitely better with video,” the company writes in the post. The addition of the video feature, which allows users to share clips up to 10 seconds long, could help to mollify critics who’ve argued that the Path app lacks key capabilities; the company’s decision to limit photo sharing to a “personal network” of 50 people provoked the ire of critics such as Om Malik, who wrote that “the idea of a restricted, personal network has the utility of a toy poodle.”

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A San Francisco startup called Stipple has raised $2 million from big-name investors to help make images on the Web more interactive. Specifically, the company wants to help publishers who puts lots of photos online to turn them into gateways to various kinds of interactions, including online purchases.

When you think about it, images on the Internet are weirdly static. The Web is dripping with them, of course, but they lack the interactivity that we expect these days from audio, text, and video. Stipple’s technology lets anyone with his own website layer interactive labels atop each image, including captions and what it calls “dots” offering details and links about specific people, places, or things. The information is invisible until a Web user mouses over the image. (Check out the images on Stipple’s home page for a taste of how this works.)

“Generally speaking you’re doing the same thing on the Web with images today that you were doing 10 years ago,” says Stipple founder and CEO Rey Flemings. “They are the forgotten media type on the Web. There hasn’t been a tremendous commercial focus on making it super-easy for people to discover what’s in photos. That was the initial idea of Stipple.”

That idea resonates with customers who’ve been using Stipple’s technology since the company’s August 2010 launch, including blog hosting company Six Apart, the E.W. Scripps newspaper chain, and record labels JIVE Label Group and Atlantic Records. And it appeals to the startup’s eclectic group of investors—it’s not too often you see singer/actor Justin Timberlake and staid Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers backing the same company.

Other contributors to the $2 million round include Mike Maples’ Floodgate Fund, Parkview Ventures, Quest Venture Partners, Global Brain Corporation, and individual investors John Ferber, Rick Marini, Eghosa Omoigui, and Naval Ravikant. In a press release announcing the investment today, Maples offer this buzzword-ridden yet succinct summary of the startup: “By marrying the ubiquity and engagement of photos with a business model and user experience that harnesses the power of community and network effects, Stipple has created the underpinnings of a company with disruptive potential in a massive market.”

Massive indeed: there are well over a trillion images on the Web, yet the only data available about most of them is their file names—and that’s usually something cryptic like “IMG_7149.jpg”. (Some images also come with metadata tags using the exchangeable image file format, or EXIF, but this usually only covers technical details like the date and time the picture was taken, or the settings of the camera used.)

Companies like Munjal Shah’s Riya have tackled the problem of making images more discoverable using computer vision techniques. Such algorithms are getting better at recognizing faces and certain kinds of objects, but aren’t yet able to … Next Page »

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On Sunday, San Francisco startup Path launched its photo-sharing app for the iPhone, and by Tuesday night it had already climbed to the number 5 spot in the Lifestyle section of the iTunes App Store. iPhone users seem to appreciate the new app, which is designed to let users share candid photos and a few bits of context (“Lunch at the office,” “Sunset at the Golden Gate Bridge”) with a small network of friends—no more than 50, in fact.

“I don’t want to share my life with the public or all the ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ I have on Facebook or Twitter,’” one user commented in the review section of the store. “Those services are good for other things. For sharing personal memories, this app is perfect.”

That’s exactly the kind of reaction the creators of Path must have been hoping for. Dave Morin, formerly Facebook’s senior platform manager, co-founded the company earlier this year with Napster creator Shawn Fanning and programmer Dustin Mierau, with investment support from early-stage venture groups like First Round Capital and well-known individual investors such as Ron Conway and actor Ashton Kutcher. Morin told me in a conversation Monday that Path’s mission is simple—”making the world a happier place”—and that one of the easiest ways to spread happiness, nowadays, is to share personal moments with friends via camera-phone pics. But not just with any friends.

Path’s premise is that the moments you’ll share will be more meaningful if you know they’re only going out to a small circle of actual friends—your “personal network,” to use the startup’s lingo, rather than your Facebook-sized “social network.” Path is far from the only photo-sharing app available to iPhone users (alternatives like Instagram and PicPlz have also been getting a lot of ink in the tech blogs lately) but it’s definitely the one with most highfalutin theoretical grounding. In an essay for the Huffington Post on Monday, Morin argued that personal connections lose their joy and authenticity in groups that exceed Dunbar’s Number (150), and that for this reason, neither Facebook nor Twitter are great places to cultivate a trusted circle of close friends. “The personal network isn’t vast (we actually limit it to a subset of Dunbar’s number)—but it is powerful,” Morin writes.

Of course, whether it’s feasible to build a successful venture-funded mobile startup 50 people at a time has yet to be seen. Xconomy was the first company on Path’s list of media calls Monday morning, and I got a chance to put a few of my own questions about the company to Morin and Path’s vice president of business development, Matt Van Horn, who previously ran business development at Digg. I’ve transcribed our conversation below; Morin joined the interview near the end.

It was clear from the talk that Path is about more than just the iPhone, and more than just photos. Morin and Van Horn seem to see big possibilities in helping people share experiences within small communities. Expect Path, over time, to broaden its definition of “experiences” and the ways they’re captured and shared.

Xconomy: There are plenty of social photo sharing apps in the iTunes app store and plenty more on other platforms. What made you guys feel there was room for another photo sharing app, and what is the unique vision that makes Path stand apart from all those other apps?

Matt Van Horn: I think one of the key things we’re going for is we’re not trying to be another photo blogging site, but we’re interested in building what we call the personal network. Our first stab at that is photos, and that’s the mechanism that we’re using to share and capture moments right now, and adding context around that. But our ambitions are still to build a more personal network.

X: So would it be a mistake to say that Path is mainly about photo sharing?

MVH: Obviously it’s about photo sharing right now. You share photos on Path right now with the closest friends in your life. We see our service as very complementary to the other services in the space. I don’t think we’re directly competing with anyone else doing similar things in the space.

X: But I think you’re implying that the idea of a moment is something you could capture in any number of ways—and right now it’s in the form of photos, but there are any number of ways you could create a documentable moment and share that. Is that a fair characterization of what you said?

MVH: We’ll explore any opportunity or any idea that comes our way. Right now, it’s just photos. But long-term, who knows what spaces we could … Next Page »

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Ex-Facebooker Dave Morin’s much-anticipated Path service has launched on the iPhone. It’s built around photo sharing, and it’s being billed as a “personal network,” with an explicit limit of 50 friends, as opposed to Facebook’s 5,000. The news went out in a note to journalists tonight from Path’s public relations representatives.

Using the free Path app, iPhone owners can snap a photo, tag it with their current location and the names of any people or objects appearing in the photo, and then send it to everyone in their network. Path calls these tagged photos “moments.” If friends’ phones are set up to transmit instant notifications, they’ll see the moments within seconds, and this fact will be transmitted back to the original picture-taker.

It’s all designed to promote a sense of real-time co-presence within a group of close friends. In fact, the Path blog post introducing the service seems deliberately worded to draw a distinction between Path and Facebook, which has grown so large, and is so dogged by public concerns over privacy protection, that it’s rarely seen any more as a site for intimate sharing or even much authenticity.

“Because your personal network is limited to your 50 closest friends and family, you can always trust that you can post any moment, no matter how personal,” reads a post on the company’s blog. “Path is a place where you can be yourself.” (Emphasis in original.)

At the same time, the company is careful to say that it isn’t attempting to go up against Facebook directly: “The personal network doesn’t replace your existing social networks—it augments them.”

Path was co-founded by Morin, formerly senior platform manager at Facebook, along with Napster creator Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, who wrote a Mac Napster client called Macster. The 13-employee startup, which is based in San Francisco, has backing from venture groups Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund, and Betaworks. It also boasts a star-studded list of individual investors: Steve Anderson, Marc Benioff, Paul Buchheit, Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Tim Draper, Joi Ito, Ashton Kutcher, Dustin Moskovitz, Keith Rabois, Kevin Rose, and Gary Vaynerchuk are among the best-known names backing the startup.

Path says it chose to limit friends to 50 per user because that’s the rough maximum number of people with whom any one person stays in regular contact, according to research by Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford. Dunbar is the originator of the “Dunbar Number” of 150—the theoretical upper bound on the number of social relationships one person can handle. Path wanted to stay well within that limit, so that users would feel comfortable sharing. “No following, no friending…just sharing with the people who matter most,” the company’s post says.

Users can invite friends into their Path network directly from their iPhone’s contact list, and they can browse moments posted by people in their circle either on the main timeline screen or on a world map. The post says Path is launching “first” on the iPhone, suggesting that versions for other mobile platforms such as Android may be on the way. The startup’s business model, Morin told Wired’s Steven Levy, will revolve around premium services, not advertising.

Competing with Path in the photography section of the iTunes App Store are a number of other social photo sharing apps such as Instagram, Picplz, and Best Camera. And in the social networking sphere, there’s also a faction of young “anti-Facebook” startups offering private group discussion functions, including The Fridge and MicroMobs. What’s clear is that Silicon Valley serial entrepreneurs (and their investors) think there’s a lot of mileage left in social networking, mobile media, and in Path’s case, the overlap between them. But many of these startups are walking a tightrope—trying to capitalize on the Facebook-inspired wave of enthusiasm for social networking while at the same time pointing out Facebook’s shortcomings.

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Companies building cloud-based services got lots of attention last week, as did those building social applications. And companies building cloud-based social applications? Watch out!

—Evernote, the Mountain View, CA-based online notekeeping service with nearly 5 million users, collected another $20 million in venture backing in a Series C round led by new investor Sequoia Capital. I interviewed CEO Phil Libin about the investment.

—I took a close look at Zoho, the Pleasanton, CA-based company offering small and medium-sized businesses free and low-cost alternatives to desktop productivity software such as Microsoft Office and even newer cloud-based services like Salesforce.com.

—While the Apple iPad may lack a camera, there’s no shortage of cool photo apps for the device, and I reviewed 10 of them in my regular Friday column.

—Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers announced the formation of the sFund, a $250 million fund that will be used to invest in startups building social Web applications. Facebook, Amazon, and Zynga each put some money into the kitty.

—I profiled AudioPress, a San Francisco startup that recently launched a versatile audio management app for the iPhone. The app lets users organize podcasts, streaming radio, and spoken-word articles into personalized playlists.

—San Francisco-based Siluria Technologies, which is developing a way to make natural gas into ethylene as a precursor for many types of plastics, raised $13.3 million in a Series A venture round, as Luke reported. Alloy Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Altitude Life Sciences Ventures, Lux Capital, and Presidio Ventures participated.

—I Went to Startup School, and All I Got Was This Lousy Video. Just kidding—I had a great time attending Y Combinator’s Startup School event at Stanford on October 16, and as a bonus I was able to make of video recording of a 30-minute interview between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston. Zuckerberg talked about what the makers of The Social Network got right, and what they weren’t so careful about.

—As a follow-up to my column two weeks ago comparing two leading run-tracking apps, Abvio’s Runmeter and FitnessKeeper’s RunKeeper, I staged a virtual “smackdown” between Abvio co-founder Steve Kusmer and FitnessKeeper founder Jason Jacobs.

—San Francisco’s Crosslink Capital participated in a $12.5 million Series B financing round for SiOnyx, a Beverly, MA-based company working on a method for making “black silicon,” a highly photosensitive form of silicon that could eventually be used in image sensors for camera phones, as Greg reported.

—In other tech deals news, Sharethrough raised $5 million, Causes raised $9 million, Revolution Analytics raised $8.6 million, and Kontiki raised $10.7 million.

—In Xconomy news, we announced our first-ever San Francisco event: a public forum with Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital. Moritz is widely respected as one of the leading venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and I’ll be interviewing him on stage at San Francisco’s Kicklabs on Tuesday November 30. You can register for the event now.

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The Apple iPad doesn’t have a camera—yet. But it does have a big, beautiful, multi-touch screen. And that makes it one of the best devices ever built for browsing and manipulating images.

Mobile app developers have realized this, and have created a profusion of fascinating apps for editing or simply exploring photographs. In fact, there are way more iPad photo apps in the iTunes App Store than anyone has time to check out. So, having explored the breadth of what apps can let you do on your iPad back in a June column, “26 Apps to Drive Your iPad Wild!,” I thought this week I’d take a deeper look at photo-related apps.

I actually mentioned two photo apps in the “26 Apps” column. One was Photo Pad, a great tool for accessing your photo collections on Flickr, and the other was Guardian Eyewitness, an amazing app that brings you one arresting example of photojournalism each day, curated by the editors of the UK’s Guardian newspaper. Those are still among my favorites, along with the 10 apps listed below.

There’s one app on this list that isn’t actually an iPad app—it’s Instagram, a fun iPhone app that works just as well on the iPad. The other outlier is Camera for iPad, an unusual app that acts as a wireless bridge between your iPhone and your iPad and only works when you have it installed on both devices.

I should say that as cool as all of these apps are, I don’t think we’ve yet seen the true killer photo app for the iPad—something like an iPad version of the newly updated iPhoto application for the Mac. That may have to await the next version of the iPad, which is certain to have at least a front-facing camera for FaceTime and, unless Apple wants to disappoint me greatly, will also include a regular camera at least as good as the one in the iPhone 4.

PROCEED TO APP LIST >>

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Viewdle is one of those technology startups that probably should have stayed in stealth mode a lot longer. The San Jose, CA-based company created a stir around the time of its public launch back in September 2007 with demos that promised real-time facial recognition for digital video—a still-unsolved problem that, if definitively licked, could help to make Web video just as easy to search as text. Building on computer-vision algorithms first developed for the Soviet military by Ukrainian computer scientist Mikhail Schlesinger, the company said it would help large media organizations index and better monetize their video archives—claims that propelled the company to first place in the LeWeb startup competition in Paris in 2008.

But then Viewdle did a slow dissolve, so to speak. Three years after its public debut, the startup still hasn’t brought any products to market, and its website, which once featured examples of its facial recognition software detecting the faces of celebrities like George Clooney and Britney Spears, now shows just a logo and a “Stay Tuned!” notice. So it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for an outsider to conclude that Viewdle was no longer really on the air.

Except that it is. In July, John Albright, co-managing partner of RIM’s BlackBerry Partners Fund, told Beet.TV that the fund had put some Series B money into the startup. And today the company revealed more details about the funding round, which totals $10 million and also includes Best Buy, Qualcomm, and existing investor Anthem Venture Partners, which put an undisclosed amount of Series A funding into the company in 2007. The startup will be launching “exciting new consumer applications” within the next few months, CEO Laurent Gil said in the announcement.

Mikhail Schlesinger

The company isn’t talking about exactly what those applications might be, but chief product officer Jason Mitura told me that the strength of Viewdle’s latest facial recognition technology is that it can run on many platforms, including smartphones. “One of the differentiators of our technology is that it works everywhere from the palm of your hand to the cloud, for pictures and videos,” Mitura says. He says the company’s philosophy is that the billions of digital photos and videos that consumers capture every year would be much more useful if they could be automatically tagged—at the moment they’re captured, shared, or uploaded—with the names of the people who appear in them.

Reasoning backward from these clues, and from the identities of the Series B investors, it seems safe to say that Viewdle’s emphasis has shifted from the media and publishing world to the consumer market, and that it’s developing facial recognition software that could be embedded in consumer gadgets such as smartphones, digital cameras, and videocams.

“For consumers, it’s all about real time,” said Kuk Yi, vice president of Best Buy’s venture capital wing, in today’s press announcement. “Viewdle is leading the market by creating compelling consumer experiences that are both real-time and cross-platform—that is why we invested in the company.” Yi has joined the Viewdle’s board as a result of the investment, as has Albright.

Viewdle has an exclusive commercial license to facial recognition technology that chief scientist Schlesinger, a computer vision expert at the Institute for Computing and Information Technologies in Kiev, Ukraine, originally developed for … Next Page »

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Bruce D’Ambrosio wants to make online content sharing easy. Eager to bridge the gap between content owners, and publishers, the 63-year-old serial entrepreneur and computer science professor at Oregon State University founded DigitalScirocco in 2009, and rolled the startup out of stealth mode in March. Since then D’Ambrosio, who serves as the company’s CEO, says the venture has only been growing. Fast.

The Seattle-based startup jumped into the digital content marketplace, positioning itself as a middleman between website owners, and media organizations. The idea is to make mainstream content published online more readily—and affordably—available for website owners, bloggers, and publishers who would like to repost the content on a secondary site. For example, if a local chef wants to publish a related article or photo from, say, The New York Times food section, on their blog or website, they would have to first contact either the Times, or a third-party media organization like the Associated Press or Getty Images, to negotiate a deal and buy the rights to republish the content.

This can be not only a long and difficult process, but an expensive one as well. That’s where DigitalScirocco comes in, providing an automated marketplace for website owners and content owners to connect. Using an online auction platform, websites can search for and purchase rights to content they want, at cheaper prices, while DigitalScirocco earns a cut of the sale for facilitating the transaction.

After being online for a few months under stealthy cover, DigitalScirocco tipped its hand, making its services publicly available five months ago. At the time “We were then in the ‘I know there is a market somewhere’ mode, and, I have to admit, a bit stuck looking under the streetlight,” D’Ambrosio told Xconomy via e-mail. But after carving out their first three partnerships—with global news organization Thomson Reuters, San Francisco-based technology and business news site VentureBeat, and city-specific entertainment information site BeDynamic, DigitalScirocco found new areas for expansion.

“We’ve now found several markets we can reach at a viable cost of sales and are ramping up sales efforts,” D’Ambrosio says.

And as of today, the growing company has teamed up with Atlanta, GA-based sports newswire service US Presswire, to build a sports photo news service targeted at small-market news organizations, bloggers, and personal websites. Through the service, DigitalScirocco and US Presswire will be able to automate and track delivery of recent and historical photos and edited captions to purchasing websites that have limited or no in-house editing resources. Conversely, these sites will have access to all of US Presswire’s new and archived photos almost immediately, with no first-use wait times that many media organizations employ.

“We are building an end-to-end workflow such that images can appear on our client websites within minutes after photographer submission of the image from the venue,” D’Ambrosio says.

The service was scheduled to go live on September 1, but has seen some last minute delays. It will allow website owners to select photo feeds to match individualized topics based on a variety … Next Page »

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The reports of the Web’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Wired has been getting a lot of attention this month for its “The Web Is Dead” cover piece. But, as many observers have pointed out, the article’s central chart, which purports to illustrate the Web’s wane, is fundamentally misleading. Web traffic may make up a smaller percentage of overall Internet usage today than in the past, thanks to the explosive growth of video and file sharing. But absolute Web traffic continues to grow at an exponential clip. It may be wise to wait a few more years before drafting the obituary.

That said, I do think that Wired editor Chris Anderson makes an important and accurate point in the article. “Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display,” he writes. The popular Netflix streaming video app or the Pandora music app for the iPhone and the iPad are oft-cited examples. “For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser,” Anderson writes. “They use the Net, but not the Web.”

That’s a canny diagnosis. In fact, I would go even farther. I think we’re beginning to see the first examples of digital media creations that never really worked on the open Web, but click beautifully into place on touch-based, display-centric mobile devices. Exhibit A is the new Fotopedia Heritage app, released on August 10 for the iPad and iPhone.

Fotopedia Heritage is the creation of Fotonauts, a Paris-based company headed by Jean-Marie Hullot. A computer scientist who worked for Steve Jobs at NeXT and was chief technology officer of Apple’s Application Division from 2001 to 2005, Hullot is an avid world traveler and a talented photographer. He started Fotonauts in 2008 with the goal of building a “Wikipedia of pictures” where Web users could upload and share photos and link them to maps and actual Wikipedia articles. Hullot said at the time that he hoped the Fotonauts site would “enable the creation of the definitive pool of images for everyone to contribute to, discover, use and enjoy, covering all areas of human interest.”

In my opinion, Fotonaut’s Web efforts haven’t lived up to this dream. I reviewed the site in January 2009, when it was still being beta tested, and I didn’t see much to differentiate it from other photo sharing communities like Flickr, Picasa, or Facebook. “I get the sense that there’s a broader technological vision behind Fotonauts,” I wrote then. “But little of that is visible yet. I’m hoping that over the next few months, the Fotonauts community will grow to something closer to critical mass, and that Hullot’s team will reveal more of the features that would make Fotonauts into a true ‘photopedia.’”

Unfortunately, even after Fotonauts officially launched its site in June 2009 under the new name Fotopedia, I don’t think the project really came into focus (so to speak). The emphasis of the new Fotopedia was on creating and contributing to encyclopedia articles, often with a geographic theme. A typical Fotopedia article consisted of a Wikipedia article accompanied by a selection of photos, mostly drawn from Flickr, plus a Google map.

It was easy to see why Fotopedia relied on Flickr and Wikipedia as sources, since both are full of content governed by the liberal Creative Commons license rather than stricter copyright rules. But with all due respect to Hullot and Fotonauts—which has raised at least $1.1 million in venture financing from the likes of Ignition Partners and Banexi Venture Partners—a mashup of Wikipedia and Flickr is the kind of thing that any Web developer worth his salt can whip up in his sleep, thanks to the open application programming interfaces that make Web content easy to grab and repurpose.

Fotopedia did add some value to the Web’s existing image storehouse. Community members selected the images for Fotopedia and voted for their favorites, and only the top images appeared on article pages by default. The site was therefore highly curated, which definitely isn’t true of Flickr. (I plead guilty to using Flickr as my general online photo backup destination—I put almost all of my photos there, without bothering to winnow out the many duds.)

Still, I just didn’t see a compelling win in the Flickr + Wikipedia + curation formula, when all of the content on Fotopedia was already available just a click away on the open Web. But my opinion changed this month when I got the Fotopedia Heritage iPad app, which is nothing short of astonishing. I now suspect that Hullot saw the iPad coming (not unlikely, given his Apple connections) and that the entire Fotopedia website was designed as a way to crowdsource the creation of the app, which amounts to the world’s coolest coffee table book.

In my June 25 column “26 Apps to Drive Your iPad Wild!” I included one photo app, Guardian Eyewitness, that prefigured Fotopedia Heritage. For the Eyewitness app, editors at the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper scour the best images being created by professional photojournalists and … Next Page »

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If you got all your information about Detroit from the blogosphere, the mainstream media, or the photography section of your local bookstore and never actually visited the Motor City, you could be forgiven for assuming that it’s one giant, bombed-out wasteland. That’s certainly the impression conveyed by many of the artists who have been criss-crossing the city over the last few years, lovingly documenting all of the city’s abandoned factories, houses, schools, and train stations.

As a Michigan native and as one of the people who helped to plan the launch of Xconomy Detroit, I want to lodge a plea: Enough already.

At Xconomy, our focus is on the technology-related enterprises working to ensure a prosperous, sustainable future for Detroit and our other home cities of Boston, San Diego, and Seattle. That doesn’t mean we wear blinders: we know that conditions are desperate in southeast Michigan, and unemployment is out of control. It will be a long time before the region finds a set of new industries and employers who can bring back anything resembling the auto industry’s halcyon days from the mid-20th century.

But that’s exactly why we think the public discussion about Detroit needs to look forward. If people can focus on innovation rather than decay, renewal rather than ruins, they might just have a better chance of creating something of value.

I’m not denying that many photos of derelict structures in Detroit have a haunting allure. The crumbling plaster, peeling paint, and scattered furnishings in these emptied-out buildings lend a sort of texture and poignance that you certainly don’t get from images of more modern architecture, or even from old pictures of these same Detroit landmarks when they were new.

But I would argue that the texture in these photos is only skin-deep. What messages are the creators of these images really trying to convey? Often, it seems to be little more than a kind of wistfulness, sometimes tinged with schadenfreude. It’s just so sad that the city that was once the fourth most populous in the United States is now pervaded by emptiness. It’s so shocking what kind of neglect can set in when the bottom falls out of a region’s economy. It’s so ironic that the sort of decay and destruction you might expect to see in Sarajevo or the former East Germany can be found in the heart of an American city. Like drivers who gawk at an accident on the highway, we can’t avert our gaze.

Well, you know what? You can find empty, abandoned structures in virtually every city in the U.S., not to mention the country’s vast rural stretches. Abandonment isn’t always the sign of a civilization’s collapse. Sometimes it just means that people picked up and left in a hurry. The only real message you can take from these images is that the real estate these buildings stand on isn’t yet valuable enough to warrant redevelopment.

In the end, most of the images of Detroit’s abandoned structures have a fetishistic, ultimately unsatisfying quality. They are the industrial equivalent of necrophilia.

I can’t show you the actual photographs of Detroit’s so-called ruins here, since most of them are copyrighted, but you can find them pretty easily online. A pair of French photographers, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, are among the leading perpetrators—Time Magazine thought their work significant enough to put a whole slideshow online. Then there’s … Next Page »

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Thinking Screen Media, the Wellesley Hllls, MA, startup that pushes news, photos, and other content to Internet-connected screens, is tweaking its business model once again. Formerly called Frame Media, the company started out in 2006 with a focus on delivering information to wireless photo frames. But last year it started thinking bigger—wireless photo frames weren’t really catching on, and the company decided to target the broader category of connected screens, meaning not just digital frames but TVs, cable set-top boxes, game consoles, and Internet radios.

Now the Apple iPad seems poised to kill off the digital frame category completely, in the view of CEO Alan Philips. So the company has raised $2 million, through a Series B financing and the sale of one of its divisions, to work on its applications for the iPad and cable set-top boxes, Philips tells Xconomy.

“We now believe in multipurpose devices,” says Philips. “The wireless photo frame category just has not taken off, and because of the introduction of devices like the iPad and the ability for set-top boxes to have Internet connectivity, it’s unlikely that the frame market will take off. So we are focused on consumer devices that will have a push element, and we think that the iPad is the best example of such a device. If you fast forward two years, you could see 30 percent penetration [of the iPad], at least in the U.S. market, in terms of the number of kitchens and living rooms that have an iPad for remote control or photo-frame or on-demand media access.”

Thinking Screen raised $2 million in Series A funding from CommonAngels and Longworth Venture Partners back in November 2007 and extended that round by another $3 million in May 2008. The new Series B funds come from Scala, which runs a digital advertising and signage business out of Exton, PA. Scala paid $2 million total for an equity stake in Thinking Screen and to purchase Thinking Screen’s SignChannel division, which focuses on digital signage. Three of the 12 staffers in Thinking Screen’s Wellesley Hills office are now Scala employees, Philips says.

The spinoff and fundraising frees up Thinking Screen to concentrate on home information devices. The company launched free and $1.99 versions of its iPad app, called FrameChannel, in early April. The app allows users to choose from approximately 1,000 channels or “widgets” such as news feeds, weather and sports information, National Geographic photos, or photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, or other photo sharing sites. (The free version mixes advertisements in with the other content.) “It’s really about how are you going to use the iPad for the 22 hours a day that you’re not holding it,” says Philips. “During that 22 hours, it’s pushing content based on your preferences to the screen, in the kitchen or living room or bedroom.”

Philips says the company is working on improvements to the app, such as additional widgets as well as channels that are more interactive or that present multiple types of data on a single screen. Similar FrameChannel widgets are available to owners of other devices such as the Roku Player, Tivo DVRs, and digital frames from Samsung, Sony, Philips, Motorola, Kodak, Toshiba, and Viewsonic.

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I regret to report that both I and my column are going on a bit of a hiatus, as I’ve been seated as a juror on an extended civil trial in Boston. To fill some airtime, I thought I’d direct you to a few old columns that are special favorites of mine or that have connections to current events.

By the way, if you really have the urge to catch up on all of my past columns, just get a copy of Pixel Nation: 80 Weeks of World Wide Wade, an e-book published by Xconomy last month. You can download a free PDF version here or buy a $4.99 Kindle version at Amazon’s Kindle store. But for today’s installment, I decided to revisit four pieces from the past year or two and offer a few thoughts on each with the benefit of hindsight.

Public Radio for People Without Radios
February 13, 2009

This column was all about the Public Radio Player (then called the Public Radio Tuner), one of my favorite mobile applications. It turns my iPhone into a radio that can pull in a live stream from almost any NPR station in the entire country, not to mention dozens of on-demand shows like Car Talk, Fresh Air, and On Point. The news update is that the fine folks at the Public Radio Exchange (who will be taking part in Xconomy’s Mobile Madness company showcase next week) have recently come out with several great new apps, and are working on more. First, there’s the new, improved 2.1 version of the Public Radio Player itself, which went live in the iTunes App Store last week and has great features such as a sleep timer and a built-in Web browser. Then there’s a dedicated app for This American Life, the cult-favorite documentary radio show from Ira Glass at Chicago Public Radio, which comes with access to the entire 15-year archive of shows. Finally, PRX is working on a dedicated app for my favorite NPR station, Boston’s WBUR. That’s due for release sometime this spring.

The 3-D Graphics Revolution of 1859
December 19, 2008

I was never much of a collector until I started buying nineteenth-century stereoscope views a couple of years ago. We’re used to thinking of 3-D as a recent technological advance—the province of high-tech filmmakers like James Cameron—but these old cardboard-mounted image pairs (taken through separate lenses a few inches apart, like our eyes) remind us that the quest to … Next Page »

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Isabella Products of Concord, MA, announced that the award for Best Embedded Mobile Device at the GSMA World Mobile Congress in Barcelona went to its Vizit digital photo frame today. The competition is designed to encourage innovation among wireless device makers. The $280 Vizit, which will be available by lottery beginning in mid-March, is a touch-screen-driven photo sharing device that can receive photos by e-mail or MMS message over AT&T’s 3G data network. Xconomy profiled Isabella Products last September.

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Xconomy’s Cloud³ Forum on December 10 attracted a capacity crowd of more than 200 people—and now we’ve got the photos to prove it!

We used the morning event, which was hosted by Microsoft, to hash out some of the stickiest issues around cloud computing, such as cost and security, and to bring the audience up to speed on cloud-related offerings from big local players like EMC, Akamai, and Iron Mountain as well as emerging startups like Pixily, Sonian, and Litl. If you missed the event—or if you were there, and you’d just like to relive it—the pictures and captions on the following pages will walk you through the main points made by all of our keynote speakers and “Cloudburst” presenters. We’ve also got some great candid shots of Cloud³ audience members and “unpanel” participants.

CLICK HERE FOR SLIDE SHOW (23 images)

All of our photos were taken by Alexis Hauk, a blog editor at Vernacular who is graduating this month with a master’s degree in publishing and writing from Emerson College and has been doing a bit of freelance work for Xconomy. We’d like to thank Alexis and everyone else who helped to make the Cloud³ a big success. We’ve published the speaker presentations from Cloud³, if you want to check those out. And we look forward to seeing you at Xconomy’s next round of networking forums in 2010, including the Battle of the Tech Bands 3 in February and a big mobile computing event in March.

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The Copenhagen climate conference is in full swing, and if you wonder why it matters, we’ve got evidence of a changing world to share with you. On the following pages is a series of arresting photographs and captions contributed by Alun Anderson, an Xconomy board member and former editor-in-chief and publishing director at New Scientist. Anderson is the author of After the Ice: Life, Death and Politics in the New Arctic, which is being published this month by HarperCollins-Smithsonian in North America and Virgin Books in the United Kingdom.

CLICK HERE FOR SLIDE SHOW (13 images)

Anderson made several trips to the Arctic while researching the book. His photographs and personal stories provide a stark demonstration that greenhouse warming is changing the planet’s climate—and altering both human and animal communities—at a rate few could have imagined just a few years ago.

Whatever your opinion about the “Climategate” controversy sweeping the media this week, a trip to the Arctic in summer is all it would take to convince you of the urgent need for measures to control greenhouse gas emissions. “That is where Xconomy and its readers have their connection to the Arctic,” Anderson comments. “You are the people who can help develop the technology that will slash greenhouse gas emissions cost effectively.”

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