styled-designs.com

The slide show editor is pretty simple to use, although it swipes a lot of look and feel from sister site Flektor.

Did you know photo slide show service Slide.com is used to create over a million slide show widgets a day? With those slide shows comes serious business, pulling in a monster load of traffic. Taking a cue from that, photo host Photobucket has stepped up its in-house solution with a new slide show tool that’s been significantly enhanced from the previous version.

I’ve embedded one of the new slide shows after the break. To check it out, click the pink “read more” link below.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Despite these new changes, I found the new slide show creation tool to be a little short on features. It’s easy to skin the thing with one of the 20 new themes, but many of the themes don’t offer control over transitions or skipping ahead through the photos. This might not be a big deal with a few shots, but once the number gets up to 50, it would be nice to have some form of navigation, regardless of what theme the creator has chosen.

Using some design elements from Flektor, which parent company Fox Interactive Media picked up alongside Photobucket in mid-2007, Photobucket users can now skin and theme their slide shows in various fashions to match the theme of the shots. As an added incentive to step up to the service’s $25-a-year pro membership, paid users get an extra 20 shots on top of the 30 that everyone else gets.

Acer has been the fastest growing PC company in the world over the last year, rising through the ranks to become the No. 3 PC vendor at the end of 2007, with 8.9 percent of the overall market, according to research firm Gartner.

It’s also set about making its presence known, scooping up U.S. PC maker Gateway in August for $710 million, and declaring its intentions to snatch Packard Bell even when rival Lenovo also publicly expressed interest. Buying Gateway was key for Acer to get the much-smaller Packard Bell, since Gateway possessed the right of first refusal, or right to make any counter offer if another company tried to buy it.

Through a rather circuitous route, Acer finally brought home the prize it had long been eyeing: European PC vendor Packard Bell.

The Taiwan-based computer maker officially purchased 75 percent of Packard Bell parent company PB Holdings for $48.5 million, according to a statement made to the Taiwanese Stock Exchange Thursday, PC World is reporting.

Why Acer wanted the small PC maker with a negligible market presence outside Europe so badly seemed puzzling to some initially. Now the move is seen as a smart defensive strategy to block any attempts by rival Lenovo from increasing its presence in Europe.

On a final note, it’s also been fascinating to see how the iPhone has caused the federal government to take a new look at phone locking. Though that practice has been entrenched in the industry for years, the hype surrounding AT&T’s exclusive on the iPhone drew criticism from members of Congress last summer. And speaking of phone locking, we also have to consider Verizon’s surprising announcement in November that it would start unlocking its phones this year. While the iPhone may have nothing to do with Verizon’s decision, perhaps Google’s Android platform is a more likely suspect, the timing is interesting.

Thursday at the iPhone SDK event, one attendee asked an intriguing question at the end of the program. “What is the relationship with the carrier? Up until now, apps have been released through the carrier.” In response, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said: “We have great relationships with our carriers, and we struck a new relationship with our carriers where Apple is responsible for the software on the phone.”

Sure, I may be oversimplifying things just a bit, but U.S. carriers ran the show on everything from the handset’s design and features to its price. It’s been that way for a long time and it looked like such a model would last well into the future. That is, until the iPhone came along. From the start, Apple ran this show. The company didn’t cede ground to AT&T on the iPhone’s design, its features, its interface, or its price. It worked with AT&T to develop the new visual voice mail system, which is unique to the iPhone. Apple even took over the handset activation process and it secured a revenue-sharing agreement where it would earn money every time an iPhone customer signs a contract.

It can’t be stated enough just how significant that “new relationship” is and just how game changing it is. For much of its life, the process of selling a cell phone in the United States went like this. A manufacturer would introduce a handset and then offer it to a carrier. The interested carrier would test the phone for its network, strip out any features or software it didn’t like or want (remember Verizon Wireless’s Bluetooth-crippling days?), stamp on its logo and signature user interface, and then sell the phone at a discounted price to lure customers into a contract. Once it made the phone and sold it to the carrier, the manufacturer hardly dealt with it again. For all intents and purposes, the handset became the carrier’s property and only the carrier made money off it from that point on. Not only would the carrier have an exclusive on the phone, but also the handset would be locked to that operator’s network. And if customers wanted to buy new applications or services, they usually went to the carrier to do so.

roundup
iPhone opens up for business Click here for complete coverage of Apple’s iPhone SDK announcements, which give the hot-shot gadget its entree into Corporate America and even the gaming world.

From the moment Apple announced iPhone, predictions were rampant that it would be the cell phone that would change the mobile world forever. As it turns out, the “Jesus phone” predictions were a little overblown, but indeed the
iPhone has shaken the U.S. cell phone business to its core. And I’m not talking about the hardware side here; rather, I’m referring to the basic structure of the entire industry.

All of this turned the normal carrier-manufacturer relationship on its head, and it’s no surprise that Apple, and not AT&T, will be the source for new iPhone software and applications. For a long time, U.S. carriers were fearful of becoming “dumb pipes.” In other words, instead of being just a way for customers to access applications and services, they wanted to sell those services themselves. But Apple’s entry to the space is changing that. And while customers may be changing one control freak for another, it’s definitely a new game.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

The iPhone certainly is changing things.

Correction: I originally posted that Qtrax uses MusicIP. According to a PR representative from that company, Qtrax has no deal with MusicIP–the companies have talked, but no deal has been signed. Apologies for not double-checking all my facts.

I was finally able to get the Qtrax 0.2 beta client, and it’s clearly based on Songbird.

The ads work, the downloads don't.

(Credit:
Screenshot)

Songbird defies easy summarization: it’s an open-source project, based on the Mozilla platform, that intends to ease the creation of digital media apps. The basic app is a straightforward music library organizer and player (some of Songbird’s founders worked on Winamp), and Songbird offers resources for developers to create customized versions of this basic player (think APIs, documentation, sample code, a loose license, and so on). It’s an intriguing project, but I hadn’t seen any compelling reason to download it.

The experience is akin to using a skinned version of
Firefox: the “browser” appears in the middle of the screen, and defaults to a Qtrax page that offers featured artists, such as Foo Fighters and Amy Winehouse. Surrounding this screen are various other UI elements, including the all-important advertisements. From the home page, you can register via a link on the upper right-hand side of the page (see screenshot), and once you’ve confirmed your registration via e-mail, you’re ready to use Qtrax’s search engine to find songs. These songs aren’t stored in any Qtrax database.

Qtrax found my test case, UFO’s “Love to Love”–about 10 different versions, in fact–but the download button gave me an disappointing but not surprising message that downloads are coming soon. Apparently until the licensing deals are worked out, there’s no there there.

To register with Qtrax, download the client, follow a download link from the front page, and follow the "Register" link from the upper-right hand corner. But once you've done that, you'll still be waiting for downloads to be enabled.

(Credit:
Screenshot)

In case you forgot the names of all four Monkees, WikiFM automatically puts artist bio information side-by-side with your Last.FM player.

(Credit: WikiFM)

Ever catch yourself hearing a new band on Last.fm, then popping open a new browser tab to look them up? WikiFM saves you a step by creating a two-frame page that keeps your Last.fm online radio player on one side, and an automatically populated Wikipedia biography page in the other.

The advantage of viewing Wikipedia’s artist biographies over Last.fm’s puny artist pages is the sheer depth of information (Tom Jones was born in Pontypridd, Wales?). The WikiFM page layout isn’t the most elegant treatment we’ve seen (we’ve got FoxyTunes for that), but sometimes a blunt tool is all you need.

The Last.fm player embedded in the WikiFM’s left browser pane lets you plug in any Last.fm username or call up an artist, tag, group, or specific Last.fm page of your choice. If you give it a try, come back and fill us in on a random band factoid in the comments section.

(via Listening Post)

One of the most daunting tasks in video archiving is getting the footage digitized and transferred to an easily accessible storage device. This is especially tiresome and tedious if the original is in tape format.

For this reason, I am impressed with the Video Transfer from Pinnacle.

About the size and weight of a cigarette pack, this little device is capable of converting analog videos from any source into MPEG-4-quality video files and saving them to any USB 2.0 storage device, including thumb drives, without the need for a PC. You can also choose to convert video footage directly into mobile devices such as an
iPod, PSP, or any other MPEG-4 video player with built-in storage.

Pinnacle Video Transfer is compact enough for you to easily carry on the go.

(Credit:
Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

The device can also charge or power the target mobile device during the transferring if the device is USB bus-powered, such as the iPod Nano or pocket-size external hard drives.

Unfortunately, the Pinnacle Video Transfer can only convert/transfer from an analog source (like the VCR, analog TV turner). With digital footage (like recorded TV shows from a DVR) you will still need to play it with a device with an analog output before you can take advantage of this device. This also means the time it requires to transfer is as long as the video itself. However, it does significantly simplify the task down to pressing only one button.

The Pinnacle Video Transfer provides high-quality MPEG-4 encoding in H.264 at up to 720×480/576 (NTSC/PAL) resolution and supports multiple inputs including S-Video, composite video, and stereo audio. You can choose to set the quality of the digitized footage to be good, better, or best. The lower the quality, the less storage space the video requires. The device uses high-speed USB 2.0 connection to offer digital video transfer speed up to 480Mbps.

You can get it now for $99, which is a very reasonable price if you have a lot of tapes and want to transfer them into digital clips without the hassle of using a computer or fiddling with conversion software.

New trend in New York media: White People Trying To Look Serious. Clockwise from left: Gawker Media's Nick McGlynn, Richard Blakeley, Dealbreaker.com's John Carney, budding Tumblr trendsetter Katie Baker

(Credit:
Nick McGlynn/Randomnightout.com)

In the tech world at large, Gawker Media video producer Richard Blakeley is better known for getting kicked out of events than organizing them himself–he’s the guy who was served a lifetime ban from the Consumer Electronics Show after running around shutting off displays.

Around New York, however, people tend to regard Blakeley as a good-natured Randy Quaid lookalike rather than a controversial hardware prankster. So when he announced that he was kick-starting a series of monthly get-togethers called “Media Meshing,” people jumped on the bandwagon. The inaugural event was held on Thursday night at a bar in the Nolita neighborhood (that refers to North of Little Italy, the boutique-and-wine-bar-saturated enclave sandwiched between SoHo and the Lower East Side) called Sweet and Vicious, just a few blocks from Gawker’s new headquarters on Elizabeth Street.

“Tech people really only hang out with other tech people,” Blakeley related to me on Friday when I asked him why he started Media Meshing, “and that’s a shame because the male-to-female ratio on that is totally wacky.” Whether or not his assertion about the insideriness of the city’s Web 2.0 set was accurate, Blakeley decided to do something about it: throw a party, invite his friends from tech and media, whether they knew each other or not, and put up an open invitation on Facebook.

“I sent an invite to nearly all of my 150 (Facebook) friends. About 20-30 replied and I thought, ‘Awesome, cool.’ But then something happened,” Blakeley continued. “It started popping up in people’s News Feeds and then each day, 10 people would sign up… (Each time) I saw that fewer and fewer people had any common Facebook friends with me. That turned out to be the best thing. What I feared would be a bunch of PR d***wads crashing my party was actually bringing old media and new media together.”

The end result was that dozens of folks from every clique of New York’s tech and media community showed up, from newspapers to blogs to tech start-ups. That basically means that there was an extremely high concentration in the room of Tumblr bloggers, Muxtape listeners, and people who know what Hell Square is. (Here’s Dan Frommer’s take from the Silicon Alley Insider.)

Indeed, one of the most prolific discussion topics of the evening was something entirely too insidery for its own good: the identity of the blogger behind Nick Denton’s Brain Droppings (warning: content probably not work-safe), an anonymous Tumblr blog purporting to be written by the Gawker Media czar. Unlike his predecessor Fake Steve Jobs, Fake Nick doesn’t write about celebrities. He writes both made-up and probably-not-made-up stuff (almost all of it extremely crass) about mundane Gawker employees and other New York bloggers, implying that the writer behind Fake Nick is extremely familiar with the intricacies of the local new-media culture, perhaps a little too much so. From what it seems like, more than a few people might be uncomfortable with just how much the guy knows and how much he’d be willing to say about, oh, extramarital affairs.

The funny thing is that, considering the odds, Fake Nick Denton was likely in the room. Real Nick Denton actually was. I have a theory that they’re one and the same.

The evening also spawned a new blogging endeavor, hatched by Katie Baker and launched by Blakeley: the White People Trying To Look Serious photo blog. A takeoff on the wildly popular Stuff White People Like (”white people” is a moniker for Gen-X-and-Y yuppies who worship Target and microbrews, not the Caucasian race), the blog promises to showcase plenty of photos of pasty urbanites giving the camera their best Blue Steel.

Lolcats were getting old, anyway.

The chairman and founder of the One Laptop Per Child initiative said in an interview Tuesday that the XO laptop may switch from using Linux to eventually running Windows XP, according to several reports.

Windows XP could soon be available on the XO.

(Credit:
OLPC)

In an interview with the Associated Press following the departure of the OLPC project’s president, Nicholas Negroponte said the open-source Sugar software, developed expressly for the XO, could run on top of XP. Negroponte cited weaknesses in the XO’s current open-source operating system (right now the XO can’t support the latest versions of Flash animation) as well as the Linux community itself (for being too “fundamentalist”) as the reasons for a possible future shift.

He said the laptop’s open-source software had actually scared away potential adopters.

An XP-only version of the XO could come soon enough. In December Microsoft said it would begin running limited tests in January to see if the operating system would be a good fit for the low-cost device. At the time, Microsoft said it could have XP running on the XO by the second half of the year.

Though CRT monitors have been made practically obsolete for consumers by the LCD industry, a few industries–photography/visual design/filmmaking–still cling to them for their nonpareil color quality.

Hewlett-Packard is trying to loosen their grip on those clunky desktop space-hoggers by offering a liquid crystal display for visual artist types that boasts the ability to show 1 billion colors for “one quarter” of the cost of other LCD monitors in this category.

At the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas on Monday, Todd Bradley, vice president of HP’s Personal Systems Group, announced that HP has teamed up with DreamWorks for a technology it calls DreamColor.

It will offer 30-bit color using LED-backlighting technology on a widescreen display that will work with a
Mac or PC–not just HP products. The displays are intended to keep colors consistent throughout the creative process: from a display on a workstation to film and/or to print. Printers with DreamColor technology were introduced last year.

HP says it’s only a “preview” announcement, which means it’s not announcing pricing yet. The displays are scheduled to start shipping this summer.

commentary

When Microsoft starts making videos like these, even as a spoof (as CNET discovered), its best years are clearly behind it. I have no great love for Microsoft, but I’m blushing with embarrassment for the company. Even spoofs should be better than this.

Wow. Make it go away!