tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57268272008-11-29T13:40:54.491-05:00Myron Kassaraba's weblog about digital photography on the webmjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.comBlogger90125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-84377590818510618942007-11-16T15:43:00.000-05:002007-11-16T20:56:57.806-05:00

I have now been using the Eye-Fi card, from Eye-Fi, Inc. for a few weeks and though it does some things very well there are several major issues that keep it from being a "gotta have" product. The Good: I must complement the company on their packaging and user experience. Installation was very smooth and easy and their Eye-Fi Manager control panel and web interface is clean and easy to use with

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-8244406892422724902007-06-11T20:11:00.001-04:002007-06-11T22:24:03.884-04:00

Eye-fi, a Silicon Valley startup announced that they have closed a $5.5 million dollar A round of venture financing. I first read about these guys last year and signed up for their beta in October (though wasn't selected). They are estimating that a 1GB Eye-fi SD card will be $100 - I just saw 1GB SD cards in a Sunday circular for $14.95. The idea of being able to instantly get my

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-68331160971106864372007-05-19T21:05:00.000-04:002007-05-19T21:33:17.322-04:00

If this is your first visit to this blog, I'll let you know up front that I am partial to Nikon cameras. That said, Nikon has once again hit the mark with a great marketing campaign for their Digital SLR products. Nikon has been reporting great financial results based on largely on the success of their dSLR products. Profits were up over 50% last year. Some of this success can be attributed

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-12843885800055581522007-04-11T09:38:00.000-04:002007-04-11T09:51:05.267-04:00

Digital Railroad (DR) launched the Beta of their Marketplace today. DR has already built a great platform for photographer's and agencies to manage their own assets/archives, workflows and storefronts - now with the launch of the Marketplace, all of those archives can be searched through a single sign-on for photo buyers. The real impact of Digital Railroad has been to return the control of

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1167968818262458032007-01-04T22:45:00.000-05:002007-01-04T22:46:58.273-05:00

You have got to watch this....... I hope it's not too little too late........

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1164425887138928702006-11-24T22:03:00.000-05:002006-11-24T22:41:14.033-05:00

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch had a post a few days ago on the data that was being collected by Flickr about the different cameras used by their users. I hadn't see this before and have had some fun poking at the numbers. Flickr currently claims to host about 230 million photos. Though some users can withhold their EXIF data from view and some photos have has it stripped out by a

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1161642223817313412006-10-23T17:44:00.000-04:002006-10-23T20:40:23.856-04:00

There are a number of new companies offering to provide online backup services for your photos (and in some cases other data). These include: - Box.net - Carbonite - PhotoSafe from PhotoSite - ProtectMyPhotos - Streamload - Swiss Picture Bank I really like the idea of automated backup. I've been using an external hard disk with Retrospect and Picasa 2.0's Backup to DVD-R for my photos but

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1158864103944664952006-09-21T14:23:00.000-04:002006-09-21T14:41:43.983-04:00

Thanks to Steve Garfield for this tip on an interesting experiment being run this Saturday in Times Square using camera phones called the Manhattan Story Mashup. The group behind this is Sensor Planet, a project of Nokia Research. Though I can't say that I completely understand all of the rules of this particular game, it is part of an intersting trend for using mobile and web technologies to

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1156814376126017632006-08-28T20:24:00.000-04:002006-08-28T21:33:27.823-04:00

So I'm late on this one but the rumored geotagging features on Flickr went live today. Right now you have to go to the Organizr to access the map and tag your photos - I'm sure they will add more links to add geotags (like from a photo's detail page) in the future. If you have already added geotags, they are picked up automatically. Once a photo has a geotag you can access it via a "map"

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1155607806305623852006-08-14T22:10:00.000-04:002006-08-14T22:10:06.323-04:00

Ryan and Brian from YouShoot, a Boston-based startup, had a great interview on ABC News today.  Their business is renting digital cameras for events and then providing an online platform for sharing and printing. Their primary events have been weddings though the service is also great for corporate events or other functions where you want to capture some candid photos.   They have bootstrapped

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1154551312139427172006-08-02T16:27:00.000-04:002006-08-02T17:27:21.053-04:00

PhotographyBLOG has a report of the announcement from SONY today of the GPS-CS1 GPS Device that will be available in September for $150. Thought this is not technologically revolutionary (you can buy a portable Garmin GPS for about $100 and use software like Picasa to link your photos to Google Earth or Google Maps) what is significant is that finally a major camera brand is going to promote the

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1154378776987816092006-07-31T16:17:00.000-04:002006-07-31T16:46:17.086-04:00

Microsoft's Live Labs will be demonstrating Photosynth, a prototype implementation of research from the Interactive Visual Media Group combined with some technology they picked up with the acquisition of Seadragon. For those of you visiting Boston for Siggraph, Richard Szelinski from Microsoft Research will be presenting their paper, titled Photo Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3D on

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1154318872676466862006-07-30T23:20:00.000-04:002006-07-31T00:09:59.240-04:00

From my friends at Future Image is a tip on a new service called Xcavator from San Fransico-based Cognisign. I highly recommend the Cool Video Intro link and demo with Flickr. What I really like about Xcavator is that rather than trying to rely 100% on computer vision to do fully automatic similarity matching - it takes simple input from the searcher to improve the results. By clicking on

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1153419109990908162006-07-20T14:05:00.000-04:002006-07-20T14:18:44.620-04:00

I've finally made it beyond the huge obstacle of signing up/logging on to Zooomr (they use some bizarre link to OpenID) to give it a try since I'd like to check out the geotagging. They are offering bloggers a free upgrade to a pro account. That requires you to post a Zooomr photo to your blog. So here's mine, a panorama of Fenway Park from a few weeks ago when we had some great seats on the

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1150603225626258492006-06-17T23:49:00.000-04:002006-06-19T17:32:30.213-04:00

I installed the new Picasa 2.5 Beta a few days ago to check out the new PicasaWeb online photo sharing capabilities called Picasa Web Albums that Google released as a beta last week (announcement from GoogleBlog). Picasa Web is a very clean and fast (if a bit basic) photo sharing site that when using Picasa 2.5 is effortless to upload to. Here's my first album from a recent Red Sox game. As

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1149995158239509072006-06-10T22:53:00.000-04:002006-06-17T00:01:32.983-04:00

Munjal Shah, the CEO and founder of Riya/Ojos has been providing a riveting chronicle on his Blog of the launch of Riya.com this spring and their recent change of strategy and focus. Riya 2.0 as others like Mike Arringon at TechCrunch are calling this new strategy - is focused on visual search of pictures anywhere on the internet. I've got to say that I'm a bit disappointed. The automation of

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1149292041320229642006-06-02T19:25:00.000-04:002006-06-02T19:47:21.410-04:00

Are you a pro photographer or "industry influential" (in MS's words)? You might want to look into attending the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit. Microsoft has slowly and methodically become a force in digital photography, not just because they control the OS on 90% of the world's PCs but because they've worked at it. Their first digital imaging application other than Paint was PictureIt! which

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1148591300851768212006-05-25T16:38:00.000-04:002006-05-25T17:11:47.886-04:00

Webshots today announced a free image hosting service called AllYouCanUpload.com, here's the full story from Yahoo! (since CNET News had not yet covered their own announcement!) As far as I can figure, this is a way for Webshots to boost their comScore Media Metrix numbers. In a recent WSJ article Photobucket showed one year growth of 81% while Webshots was down -16%. Even though I have yet to

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1148412970182699402006-05-23T15:13:00.000-04:002006-05-23T16:13:08.806-04:00

My friend Sharon Chiarella, who was the first product manager for Kodak's online printing services, just sent me a note about the coming out of her new startup called Presto (I keep on wanting to put a Yahoo-like exclamation point after Presto!). They announced today $10 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Clearstone Venture Partners. Their stealth name was

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1147795500629896872006-05-16T11:56:00.000-04:002006-05-16T13:15:54.570-04:00

Not only did Nikon announce a 20% increase on profits yesterday, they also sent out a very provocative email to their mailing list directing users to a new flash-based microsite Stunning Nikon that features model Kate Moss promoting the CoolPix S-6 Camera. Looks like digital camera marketing is "heating up"!

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1147711789259103542006-05-15T12:29:00.000-04:002006-05-15T12:54:33.616-04:00

Congratulations to the team at Tabblo as today marks the release of their public Beta! I've known the founder, Antonio Rodriguez for several years and his passion for making a great and different photosharing service is infectious - give Tabblo a try, you'll see - once you start, it's hard to stop. This initial release is just the beginning of a platform for personal expression with digital

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1142373360004291892006-03-14T16:22:00.000-05:002006-03-15T00:07:05.326-05:00

I was reading the comments on Fred Wislon's blog about how MySpace seemed to be loosing some of it's buzz among teens and how Facebook seemed to be getting stronger so I decided to log into my Facebook account (not many NU alums from '81 hanging out there!) and see what was happening. What I found was that Facebook users have a lot of pictures and more significantly, that the people in those

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1141446075187100412006-03-03T23:21:00.000-05:002006-03-03T23:21:15.243-05:00

SiliconBeat: Tiltomo: a visual search engine Tiltomo's Beta is pre-loaded to search over 250,000 images pulled from Flickr to show off their capabilities. Corbis has been using similar technology from LTU Tech to enhance their royalty-free image search though VIMA Tech looks like a formidable player based on their technologists and technical advisors. As more image-based content is uploaded to

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1139427161687488362006-02-08T14:32:00.000-05:002006-02-08T14:32:41.746-05:00

picturephoning.com: Geocoding Photos: The Future Is Now Picturephoning has a story about Merkitys, a new Symbian app for Series 60 phones that let's you tag your pictures on the handset and upload them to Flickr. It's a little hard to figure out who is behind this effort. Looks like they are affiliated with 3eyes, a UK-based consulting firm. I'll have to give this a try. I've become quite fond of

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5726827.post-1139375192536943272006-02-08T00:06:00.000-05:002006-02-08T00:10:47.593-05:00

Looks like Riya's performance at DEMO 2006 was a hit! Harry McCracken at PC World has them in the early lead for Best of Show. PC World's Techlog - Riya's Amazing Face-Recognition Photo Search And Fred Wilson had this to say about Munjal, Riya's CEO: "This guy is a demo god in the making if he isn't already one."Great to see these guys doing well. They have chosen to tackle a really hard problem

mjkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09594378962407334934noreply@blogger.com0