By Evan Ackerman Back in January, we posted a video from Those Aren’t Muskets called World wide web Celebration, exploring what would happen if you got a bunch of popular websites together in one room. It’s damn funny stuff, and now comes the second installment, in which MySpace’s friends tell him that enough is enough. The video is […]
By Evan Ackerman
Back in January, we posted a video from Those Aren’t Muskets called Internet Celebration, exploring what would happen if you got a bunch of popular websites together in one room. It’s damn funny stuff, and now comes the second installment, in which MySpace’s friends tell him that enough is enough. The video is probably NSFW (language and some same-sex mackin’), and will autoplay after the jump.
By Luke Anderson It’s finally warm again here in the Midwest and it is beautiful outside. I realized that I’ve been putting in some long hours in front of my computer for the last few weeks, so I decided it was time to unplug. One of my favorite things to do is hike, which means I head […]
By Luke Anderson
It’s finally warm again here in the Midwest and it is beautiful outside. I realized that I’ve been putting in some long hours in front of my computer for the last few weeks, so I decided it was time to unplug.
One of my favorite things to do is hike, which means I head to one of my favorite say parks. The great thing about this place is not only is the scenery beautiful, but I also can’t get a signal on my phone. That’s right, no matter how important the matter is, everyone is simply routed to my voicemail.
It’s been a great day, but unfortunately it’s already time to head back to civilization.
Image search is a hard problem. That’s especially true when you’re searching with no information other than the image itself (no tags, titles, or descriptions, just the photo). I’ve seen my fair share of image search demos, and they usually promise far more than they deliver. But last week, I […]
Image search is a hard problem. That’s especially true when you are searching with no information other than the image itself (no tags, titles, or descriptions, just the photo). I’ve seen my fair share of image search demos, and they usually promise far more than they deliver. But last week, I finally saw one that deserves the name. It is called TinEye. The first 500 readers to send an email to techcrunch [at] tineye [dot] com will be pre-approved for the private beta.
You can upload any image file to TinEye or paste in the URL of an image in the search box. It then will scour the Web and find sites that contain the same image (see video). As long as the image has been indexed by TinEye, it can be found. For instance, it identified 39 sites that use the famous Steve Jobs image at left and in the screen shot below. It only launched earlier this month, but so far TinEye has indexed close to 750 million images on the Web, and should reach one billion sometime next month. Google, in comparison, is estimated to have indexed between 4 to 6 billion images. (Polar Rose, on the other hand, has only identified 21.5 million images on the Web).
TinEye works even if an image has been altered, cropped, made into black and white, or photoshopped. The image-search algorithms behind it were developed by a company in Toronto called Idée, which already offers a service to news photo agencies such as the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Getty Images to automatically identify whenever one of their photos is used in a newspaper or magazine. Idée digitally scans thousands of print publications for this purpose (before, it was actually someone’s job to leaf through each page looking for the photos). Digg also uses the technology to make sure no duplicate images are submitted to its image section, and Adobe licenses the technology in Photoshop for the “find by Visual Similarity” feature.
At this point TinEye still is not much more than a technology demonstration. After all, most people search for images by putting in a keyword that describes it, not by showing it the image they want. (If they already have it or know where it is, why do they need to look for it?). Its main appeal right now is for photographers and pic agencies who want to find out where their pics are being used on the Web.
But you can imagine other ways the technology could be applied. Personally, I’d love to see Apple license something like this and incorporate it into the next version of iPhoto. Add an auto-tagging function, and it would be able to find all the photos of, say, my sons and automatically label them with their names. I’d actually pay extra for that feature.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
By Andrew Liszewski Why be humiliated by your bleeding edge smartphone or other electronics? Instead of hiding them in a drawer you should be proud of your expensive investments, and this wall-mounted Contactbox grants you to display them in plain sight. The front of the box features a series of elastic cords (it’s actually just one […]
By Andrew Liszewski
Why be humiliated by your bleeding edge smartphone or other electronics? Instead of hiding them in a drawer you should be proud of your costly investments, and this wall-mounted Contactbox grants you to display them in plain sight. The front of the box features a series of elastic cords (it’s actually just one cord) that can securely hold your device, while the inside of the box can be used to hide and organize a power strip plus all of your various charging cables and adapters. Moral of the story? Electronics are cool, cords are for losers.
The Contactbox comes in a red, white, black or oak finish and is available from the Scandinavian Design Center for $88.36.
By Evan Ackerman Most of the time, flash absolutely blows. Even if you’ve got an high-priced off-camera flash system, there’s just no way to get high-powered directed fake lighting to look anywhere near as good as natural ambient lighting. Presslite’s VerteX “light modifier” attaches to the head of your off-camera flash, and features two twisty surfaces […]
By Evan Ackerman
Most of the time, flash totally blows. Even if you’ve got an pricey off-camera flash system, there’s just no way to get high-powered directed fake lighting to look anywhere near as good as natural ambient lighting. Presslite’s VerteX “light modifier” attaches to the head of your off-camera flash, and features two twisty surfaces that you can flip around (with one hand) to redirect some or all of your flash. One side of the panels has a specular surface for direct light, and the other side has a diffuser surface. Combine the surfaces and the twistyness to bounce your flash where you want it to get your best lighting. Looks like fun, and it’s only 35 bucks for a limited time.
Most TV studios have caught up with the internet and made their shows available online, either with their own websites or with an aggregate effort such as Hulu. However most studios are still far away from offering live TV online, leaving web users having to revert to an alternative means to source live Television web […]
Most television studios have caught up with the web and made their shows available on the internet, either with their own websites or with an aggregate effort such as Hulu. However most studios are still far away from offering live TV on the internet, leaving web users having to revert to an substitute means to source live Television web feeds. TVChannelsFree is a website that has aggregated live streaming video sources for almost 3,000 TV channels, and they have the ability to all be viewed with just a web browser.
Channels originate from over 80 different countries - from Eurosports through to local US governement programming. The site couldn’t be easier to use and access, and the performance of the streams is usually excellent. Some of the streams that are available originate from the stations own website, but in most cases the stream is either pirated, has bypassed geo restrictions or has bypassed a pay wall. Most streams are in Windows Media format, but there are others in Flash, Quicktime or SopCast.
In most cases it isn’t clear whos bandwidth you are using, but a swift look under the hood shows that the host servers range from being Akamai and Limelight, to network websites through to private servers. Technically this site, and others care about it, are simply linking to the content (via a media embed) but as has been seen before this usually isn’t solid grounds for a defence when the copyright lawyers coming knocking. With the the huge US networks imposing geo-restrictions on their web content, and thousands of other Television channels around the world without a web presence, the only choice at the moment for many is sites like TVChannelsFree.
If you are bored of the selection at TVChannelsFree or can’t find a particular channel, take a look at other similar sites such as ChannelChooser, wwwitv and beelinetv. They’ve a big number of channels in common (and seem to share the same sources) though some have categories of streams that others might not.
Microsoft is shutting down its book digitization initiative, which launched in 2006, the company stated in an email this day (full text is below). The publisher site is already down, the books site itself will be shut next week, and Microsoft posted a blog post on it here. The company has digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 […]
Microsoft is shutting down its book digitization initiative, which launched in 2006, the company stated in an email this day (full text is below). The publisher site is already down, the books site itself will be shut next week, and Microsoft posted a blog post on it here.
The company has digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles to date. Google’s competing product, Book Search, is adding 3,000 books per day to their index, although they’ve not disclosed the total number of books scanned.
The New York Times had a good overview of the book digitization process in an article last year. There are also a few examples of some funny stuff getting into the scans.
The image to the right is the Kirtas APT Book Scan 2400 Gold robotic scanner, which can read 2,400 pages an hour. Microsoft used these machines to scan books.
Email from Microsoft:
Dear Live Search Books Publisher Program Partner,
We are writing today to inform you that we’re ending the Live Search Books Publisher Program, including our digitization initiative, and closing the Live Search Books site. We recognize that this is disappointing news to you and to the users of the Live Search Books service. Ending the Live Search Books program is the result of a strategic decision on our part to focus our investments in new vertical search areas where we believe we can more effectively differentiate Live Search.
Given the evolution of the internet and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for search engines, consumers, and content partners. For example, this past Wednesday, we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers.
With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries. With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content. We will continue to track the evolution of theindustry and evaluate future opportunities.
As we wind down Live Search Books we will be reaching out to you in partnership with Ingram Digital Group with information on new marketing and sales opportunities designed to help you derive ongoing benefits from your participation in the Live Search Books Publisher Program. As part of this initiative, we will be making the scan files we created from your print book submissions available to you for free. We’ll follow-up next week with more information on these offers.
The Live Search Books Publisher Program site (http://publisher.live.com) will be taken down immediately. The Live Search Books site (http://books.live.com) will be taken down next week.
We sincerely appreciate your support and regret any inconvenience that this decision has caused. You can read more about this announcement on The Live Search blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch).
Sincerely,
The Live Search Books Team
books@microsoft.com
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
By Andrew Liszewski I’m not here to defend monopolies, particularly when they negatively impact the consumer. But let’s face it, that’s what makes Monopoly the boardgame fun. Watching another player go belly-up when they can’t afford to pay their rent is surprisingly satisfying. But apparently some people disagree, and for them there’s the Anti-Monopoly board game. […]
By Andrew Liszewski
I’m not here to defend monopolies, particularly when they negatively impact the consumer. But let’s face it, that’s what makes Monopoly the boardgame fun. Watching another player go belly-up when they can’t afford to pay their rent is surprisingly satisfying. But apparently some people disagree, and for them there’s the Anti-Monopoly board game. Players are divided into two groups, the competitors and the monopolists, and they each follow different rules in their quest for profits. Here’s a brief run-down on how it’s played:
In Anti-Monopoly, players play either by monopoly or competition rules fixed at the beginning of the game: COMPETITORS … charge fair rents, build as soon as they own a property, put five houses on their properties and occasionally go to Price War. MONOPOLISTS… extort monopoly-high rents from their poor tenants, build only after they’ve monopolized a color grouping, restrict supply by putting only four houses on their properties and occasionally go to Prison.
The good guys are the small business entrepreneurs and the bad guys are the monopolists. Since players don’t play by the same rules, fairness is reached by a patented probability technique, has given each side equal chances to win.
The game was obviously created to make a political statement more than anything, but if you’re not a fan of the practices of some massive corporations, you can get a copy of Anti-Monopoly directly from the company’s website for $20.95.
By Evan Ackerman If you’ve got a hankering for a seriously huge fish tank but you don’t want to have to worry about the icky stuff (like water and fish), why not invest $32 million in 30 meters by 250 meters (!) worth of LED screen and then play fish videos all over it? You’ll find […]
By Evan Ackerman
If you’ve got a hankering for a seriously massive fish tank but you don’t want to have to worry about the icky stuff (like water and fish), why not invest $32 million in 30 meters by 250 meters (!) worth of LED screen and then play fish videos all over it? You’ll find this monster six stories in the air between two malls in Beijing, with fish the size of Volkswagens swimming around on it. For scale, a football field is a paltry 5500 square meters, while this thing hits 7500 square meters of oceany LED goodness. Video after the jump.
This day marks the one-year anniversary of the release of Facebook Platform. We figured it would be a fitting time to take a look at what the platform promised, what it’s delivered, and where it’s going in the future. The summary: Facebook Platform has been a victim of its own success, offering an […]
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the release of Facebook Platform. We figured it would be a fitting time to take a look at what the platform promised, what it’s delivered, and where it’s going in the future. The summary: Facebook Platform has been a victim of its own success, offering an unparalleled distribution platform that has appealed to both tens of thousands of legitimate developers as well as shoddy shotgun entrepreneurs looking to make a swift buck. Facebook has had its share of missteps, but no matter how much they improve the platform, it is only as strong as its apps (which at this point simply aren’t very good).
Facebook Platform launched on Might 24, 2007 to widespread acclaim. It was heralded as the “Anti-MySpace”, which had until then been notoriously closed and unhelpful to many application developers. Suddenly we’d a platform that offered unprecedented access to a social network’s API, enough so that 3rd party developers could potentially create apps that would rival Facebook’s home-brewed offerings.
Only four days after the platform’s launch, iLike (then the leading 3rd party app) had accumulated 400,000 users - nearly 5% of all Facebook users had it installed. Initial results were promising enough that a number of venture capital funds were established solely for Facebook apps.
But after a couple of months, the novelty began to wear off. The promised “revolutionary” applications were few and far between, and most of the available apps were really, really bad. Facebook users were also notoriously fickle, installing and discarding apps with abandon. To combat this, some developers selected to create an endless stream of mostly useless (but viral) applications that could be pumped out as swiftly as users could get sick of them. The result? Spam. Lots of spam.
Facebook Platform had devolved into a cat-and-mouse game between developers and Facebook, as developers tried to maximize the number of users they could expose themselves to. Many of the most popular app makers, including RockYou and Slide, had resorted to so-called Black Hat tactics, exploiting loopholes to increase their exposure. Many users were constantly inundated with spammy application invites, some of which falsely promised personalized message left by friends.
By August, three months after the launch of the platform, Facebook started to respond to the abuses by changing the rules. Metrics listing the most popular apps began to measure actual use rather than raw install numbers (many popular applications were simply installed and forgotten about). Stricter limits were placed on the number of invites an application could send out. But Facebook didn’t take any steps to punish applications that had gained users through illegitimate means, effectively telling developers they were free to exploit the system if they could figure out how.
On the development side, Facebook Platform also presented a number of problems. Apps that went viral on Facebook often saw their usage rates rise exponentially in a very short amount of time, leading to slow responses and errors. Developers also had to deal with a constant competitive threat from the network itself - at any time Facebook could implement a new feature that could wipe them out of existence.
In September at TechCrunch40, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced fbFund, a joint funding venture from Accel and Founders Fund that would earmark $10 Million for Facebook apps. The project got off to a rough begin - Facebook rejected all applicants after deciding to change its application process (it had previously asked for a easy email request).
One of Facebook Platform’s problems had more to do with stupid users than the platform itself. Many people had friends that, for whatever reason, liked to litter their profiles with obnoxious and annoying apps that destroyed Facebook’s classic clean feel. Finally, in January 2008 Facebook relented and granted users to hide apps from their friends’ profiles. This was an oft-requested feature, and one that should have been available since the platform’s launch.
Facebook continued to further tweak app restrictions. In February the site implemented blocking, which granted users to prevent a specific app from each contacting them. It also added a “clear all” feature, that allowed users to clear their Notifications box of all invites.
Perhaps Facebook’s most unsettling move came during March Madness, when it introduced the “official” CBS Sportsline NCAA Basketball app. The app was given an unprecedented amount of publicity across the network, and its invite restrictions were far more lenient than normal. Other developers were understandably outraged, as Facebook demonstrated that the rules only applied to the tiny guys - pay enough, and you’ll get free reign. Facebook has shown little remorse for the debacle, with its Senior Platform Manager stating “I can’t state it won’t happen again.”
Outlook: Who knows. Facebook is planning to introduce a micro-payment system in the near future, which might finally give way to useful, monetizable apps that don’t rely on spamming invites. But the damage has been done, and some users might be too jaded to enjoy anything the platform has to offer in the future. What’s worse, we probably wont see an end to the junky apps any time soon - a number of venture firms have poured millions of dollars into companies that thrive on cranking these things out, and they’re going to want to see results.
But the important thing to remember is that Facebook Platform is, in the end, all about Facebook. It keeps your data locked up tight under the guise of privacy concerns. What users really want (or what they should want) is to control their own data, and make it known that they, not Facebook, own it. Facebook has taken a few first steps in letting some of that data out. Perhaps if users begin to demand more, the trend will continue.
You can upload any image file to TinEye or paste in the URL of an image in the search box. It then will scour the Web and find sites that contain the same image (see video). As long as the image has been indexed by TinEye, it can be found. For instance, it identified 39 sites that use the famous Steve Jobs image at left and in the screen shot below. It only launched earlier this month, but so far TinEye has indexed close to 750 million images on the Web, and should reach one billion sometime next month. Google, in comparison, is estimated to have indexed between 4 to 6 billion images. (
Microsoft is shutting down its book digitization initiative, which 
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