Carl Conrad

For sure, recent PMA was the opportunity for numerous announcements. Quite logically, my interest went to digital camera manufacturers showing photo sharing connectivity.

The first pretty impressive was the Samsung GX-20 with its optional battery pack featuring Wi-Fi connectivity. Demonstrated at the show was upload to Picasa. Flickr also showed up in the menus but not done due to contractual reasons.

Lumix previewed a nice implementation allowing both upload to Picasa and sending by e-mail.

My preference goes to Eye-Fi, a small SD card featuring 2 Gbytes of storage and an automatic Wi-Fi based upload of the photos either to my computer or to photo sharing sites. Once connected to the defined Wi-Fi network, the card automatically uploads the pictures as defined. The list of supported photo sharing sites is already impressive. No doubt that KoffeePhoto will be added soon.

Links :

• Buy the Eye-Fi from Amazon.com

Looking to include video screenshots on your web site or your blog? In United Kingdom, PC Plus Magazine offers a free license of Camtasia Studio 3, screen recorder software, until January 7th.

Links:

• Download Camtasia
• Register and get your license key from TechSmith.com

I just started using RivalMap, a powerful online market intelligence tool provided by RivalSoft. “RivalMap is web-based collaboration software that gives companies a central place to share and address information about competitors and their industry. If your company spends any time watching competitors and their activities, RivalMap will make the management and communication of competitive information much easier and more effective.”

A great tool for collaborative analysis of competition. Free for up to three users.

Links:

• RivalMap Market Intelligence tool

People ask me what kind of processing I used to get the picture I’ve placed on the home page of this blog.

Well, believe it or not, none!

In fact, it’s a picture taken with my last century’s digital camera, a Konica Q-M100… Low resolution and low speed (when I pressed the button, there were no cars). But I really like the result.

The picture was taken at a traffic light on South Lasalle Street in Chicago in October 2002 with the Chicago Board of Trade Building in background.

Android introduced by the people from Google. Really looks awesome… Let’s see how Microsoft will react to this.

Everybody now heard and read about Microsoft’s decision to take 1.6 % of Facebook. A 240 M$ deal. Not so bad. But what does this mean?

The official answer is that Microsoft will be Facebook’s exclusive advertising company. Is that truly worth 240 M$?

There probably more behind this.

What will this mean for Microsoft’s Live Spaces? It would not be the first time that creativity comes from acquisitions. Look at Yahoo! recent decision to drop Yahoo! Photos for Flickr which they bought two years earlier.

More, on the operating systems topic, many people say that Microsoft’s Vista could probably be Microsoft’s last operating system and that the future will be to Web based operating systems. Could this step be seen as a way for Microsoft to acknowledge this and a move to a future answer to the Google’s Google Aps initiative?

Obviously there is far more behind this move, probably a first step for the necessary future move for Microsoft to go for more online business, but it is too early to say in an ever changing world. Many open questions but a good topic to follow up.

While I have not tested Fring yet, I have no suitable WiFi phone but it should not last, I already love Fring !!!

Having a one-stop solution to my mobile phone, my landline-over-ADSL-with-low-rates-phone, my Skype phone nightmare is more than a dream.

In a couple of words, Fring is a piece of software designed to run on your mobile phone and that routes the transmission to the media available: standard mobile, mobile data (3G), WiFi and so on with regards to the dialed number in order to optimize the cost of the communication. Fring also support various IP based solutions such as Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk and SIP. For sure mobile phone operators won’t like that. Running on one single device means that all my contacts’ information does not need to be replicated on various devices, what a relief!

It seems to like Symbian OS as numerous Nokia phones appear to be supported by now. Windows Mobile based devices is also an option but it crashed on my HP IPAQ nx2495… No doubt an iPhone version of Fring will come with time.

No business model is claimed by now. Advertising based operation or big player buyout?

We had the Audacity project for a powerful audio recording and editing environment. We now have the ardour project for a true audio workstation that targets to compete the major options available.

According to the Ardour project web site: “Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal. If you’ve been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Pyramix, or Sequoia, you might have found it.”

Ardour currently runs on Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X.

More, SAE recently announced its support to this project.

Links:

• Ardour
• Audacity
• Wikipedia page dealing with free audio software

Great news! Safari for Windows!

For those asking what I’m talking about, Safari is the name of Apple’s Web browser. Available only under Apple’s Mac OS X until now and the foundation of Apple’s iPhone.

Such news can not be left without a reaction.

So I’ve downloaded and installed the application. So far, so good. Everything went fine as expected.

But when browsing to some of my favorite sites some major display defects appear. Looks like some defective CSS support… What so ever! This is quite disapointing… Luckily, a simple button allows for bug report to Apple’s development teams… Some bug reports later I switch back to Firefox… Too bad, may be was Safari launched too soon!

Mozilla is experimenting a service that lets users store online content on a remote server and access that information on cell phones. Using the Firefox browser on a computer, users select portions of Web sites, including images, text, and videos, and save them onto their personal page hosted by Mozilla. Later, the user can access that Joey page and all the stored items from a computer based browser or a cell phone

Requires both a Firefox extension for uploading content and a Java application on your mobile phone for browsing…

Read the complete description on Yahoo! News.

While Joey is probably still under heavy work (uploads fail on my computer) but looks worth a try. A new way of thinking bookmarking.

Links:

• Joey