Microsoft’s Photosynth

Microsoft is working on something really cool, and I’m not referring to Vista! They’re developing a photo tool called Photosynth that will take digital photos and display them in 3-D. The technology it uses to do so is impressive. Photosynth uses a bunch of digital photos - not just photos taken by you - but any images of the same thing, whether it’s from different cameras, under different shooting conditions, on different dates, times of day, resolutions, etc. Using computer vision algorithms, photos of the same object are linked together & its 3-D postion calculated. What can this technology do? The website offers some ideas: "Imagine being able to see your favorite band from either the front row or the bleachers, walking around that new motorbike you’ve been thinking of buying, or flying over every nook and cranny of a famous landmark." That sounds amazing! Stay tuned…

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The popular bitTorrent client Azureus has accepted funding from VC firm BV Capital and changes are in store. Azureus will implement a new "content layer" where commercial downloads will appear. As an Azureus user searches for content, the results will now contain both free and paid downloads in that category. No promises regarding DRM, either — according to Alon Rohter of Azureus, there will be "No DRM if we can get away without it, we all hate DRM ourselves." But can they get away with it? Doubtful, in the long run. May I recommend some alternate clients, then? BitTornado, uTorrent, or BitComet. Take your pick.

Found this site via TechCrunch - Gotuit is a new, free broadband video portal offering music, news, sports, and entertainment videos. These aren’t the videos of YouTube, these are the videos that aren’t supposed to be on YouTube. Currently, there are 2000 videos available, but that number should increase as they strike more licensing deals. The videos I watched played fast & smoothly. Registered users can create playlists, but you don’t have to register to enjoy the videos. A mobile version is said to be coming soon. Another thing that probably won’t play on my Razr…I want the SDA!

Just a bit of fun - this page will create a Web 2.0 company just for you! The page generates your company name and product. For example, I was given the company name Tivechnojax, and the product was a greasemonkey extension for invites via bittorrent. Too funny!

stu.dicio.us: like del.icio.us, but for students. Social note-taking!

kramkoob: promote your web presence, be it a blog, site, podcast, video, auction, etc.

Some GoogleTalk users will soon get a few new features, if they haven’t already — file transfer, voicemail messages, and a feature that shows your contacts what music you’re listening to. Too bad these aren’t available in Gmail!

See what happens when I step away from my blog & email for just a minute? I miss all the good stuff. Thanks to Peter for catching me up - he sent me a very cool link. This guy, Tony Ruscoe, was digging around and found a Google domain called sandbox.google.com, where he was able to get some kind of Google test account. With this account, he was able to add a bunch of unreleased services to his Google account - Google Events,Google Guess, Google Real Estate Search, Mobile Marketplace, New Service aka Workplace, Google Weaver aka M Scrapbook, Google RS2, Google Online Assessment, and some other codenames like“CF”, “GMT”, and “Voice”. For wild speculation on what these services are, visit his blog!

I saw this on LifeHacker today - a Gmail This bookmarklet! With the Gmail This bookmarklet you can easily email the URL of the page you are on to your friends with a click of a button. Nice link, LifeHacker! Sweet.

For the record, I couldn’t drag it anywhere in Flock - it wouldn’t let me add it to my toolbar. (As you may remember, I’ve been forcing myself to Flock this week). I opened up Firefox so I could add the bookmarklet, though. Firefox, glorious Firefox! It was so speedy and bright. I missed it. I had actually gotten used to these random CPU spikes that slow me down in Flock every few minutes.(..moments). Did I install a bad extension, I had wondered? I uninstalled the Google Toolbar extension, remembering when this had screwed up Firefox, but the spikes continue. I closed some tabs. Too many? Is hansoexposed.com eating up some precious cycles? It didn’t help. I type, the CPU spikes. I can’t even blog with Flock (well I can, but when I insert pictures into the post, the text doesn’t wrap. Pointless). So for me, for now at least, Flock is a great concept, not so great in practice. Firefox beckons, I must return. The week’s up anyway. (The weekend doesn’t count, right?)

Kazaa, a popular peer-to-peer program, has now gone legal after losing several court battles with the record industry. The company has also agreed to pay $100 million in damages as a result of these rulings. The fact that Kazaa agreed to this fine goes to show just how big they had become. Last year, the federal court ruled that Kazaa owners had to modify their software by implementing modifications that included a filtering system on 3,000 keywords so as to prevent users finding copyrighted material. Apparently, this was not enough to stem the tide of illegal dowloading across Kazaa’s peer-to-peer network. As the program has been downloaded 239 million times, even if a small fraction of its current user base begin purchasing tracks, Kazaa should stay in the blank.

Today Google announced the release of their new open-source project code hosting space, simply called "Google Code." The service, designed to compete with SourceForge, has a simple interface, although whether this makes it more or less user-friendly than SourceForge is still up for debate. According to the FAQ, Google Code will offer the following:

• Project workspaces with simple membership controls
• Version control via Subversion
• Issue tracking
• Mailing lists at groups.google.com

The reliability and stability of the Google servers as compared to SourceForge makes Google Code an attractive new offering for developers.

TypePad just gets better every day, don’t they? Now we TypePadders can add Technorati tags to our posts. For the KB article on how to do this, click here. And like Technorati, TypePad has redesigned their public site and added a new "home" tab within TypePad. Love it!