Ash K. Gilpin

Starting today, millions of online photo service users will have an easier time uploading and sharing their pictures thanks to KODAK Gallery and Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser. The Firefox Companion for KODAK Gallery combines the award-winning Firefox browser with the world’s number one online photo service making it easier than ever to upload, share and print your digital photos and create amazing photo gifts like books, calendars, collages and more. The Firefox Companion is available today for free download at www.firefox.com/kodak.

Kodak and Mozilla’s release of the new companion will provide a seamless online experience for this growing group of photo enthusiasts making it easier to:

• Drag and drop images from their computer directly to the companion
• Easily create a new photo album or add to an existing one
• Add captions in the browser that will be uploaded with their pictures to KODAK Gallery’s online site

“We want to provide consumers with easy and convenient ways to do more with their pictures and thanks to the Firefox Companion for KODAK, they can now upload and share faster than ever before,” said Madhav Mehra, general manager, KODAK Gallery.

“The Firefox Companion for KODAK Gallery makes uploading large numbers of photos fast, easy and reliable,” said Christopher Beard, vice president, marketing and product management, Mozilla. “We’re excited to offer an online photo solution that combines the ease of use of Firefox with the quality and convenience of the KODAK Gallery experience.”

By 2010, nearly 83 million people in the U.S. will use online photo services annually, according to market research firm InfoTrends.

Condé Nast can’t really be called a pure magazine publishing company any longer. They acquired Digg-clone Reddit last year, adding a user generated news site to their stable of offline and online magazines. And today they launched a social networking site aimed at teen girls called Flip.

The majority of Flip is content created by users, called Flipbooks. It consists of customizable, rich media blog/journals and include text, photos, music and videos. Users can also customize their Flipbooks with stickers, templates and other decorations available on the site. Flip also has four content channels: My Life; Entertainment; Style; and The World. Each channel highlights user content and also has professional editorial, presumably grabbed from other Condé Nast publications.

One thing Flip doesn’t seem particularly concerned with at this time is security of its users. Unlike Piczo, which also caters to a young teen audience, Flip profiles are freely browsable and searchable. This allows the site to create more networks and generates extra page views, but it also allows predators to browse profiles of young teenage girls. Given that Piczo has seen tremendous growth even with these precautions in place, I’m surprised Flip didn’t copy them.

Source: TechCrunch

After spending over a year in development, Cuts.com is just about ready to launch to a small group of beta users, and expand from there.

Like Jumpcut (acquired by Yahoo) and Motionbox, Cuts aims to help users edit video online using the latest Flash tools.

Cuts lets you pull in and cut apart videos from sites like YouTube and Myspace, with wider support upon launch. To edit a video, you just need the URL of your favorite video or click a bookmarklet to cut the video on your current page. Cuts imports the video and takes you to their editing suite. As of the private beta, Cuts will let you add captions, add a group of sound effects, loop sections of video, and trim out parts of the video. Each of these functions runs on a separate track you use to sync the effect to a time frame in the video. 

Not only will you be able to cut up a video once, but each video made with Cuts will also be able to be cut up again, and again. It’s sort of like the video version of music remixing sites JamGlue and SpliceMusic. Cuts will add a few more bells and whistles after their public launch. Check out some screen shots of the service below, or sign up for the beta on their site.

Source: TechCrunch

PriceProtectr is a neat new tool that helps you take advantage of guarantees by many online retailers to refund the difference on purchased items if the price drops in the 30 or 60 days following your purchase (example - Best Buy’s policy). Those guarantees are great, but few people go to the trouble of following up and checking on any price changes for items they’ve purchased.

The company has put together a very simple website, even using a vowel dropping name and the generic web 2.0 logo generator that we’ve previously written about. To use it, you simply paste in the product URL from an ecommerce site (example) and your email address. The company will notify you if the price drops within the time period allowed by the retailer.

The site claims to have found over $57,000 in savings, with few people aware of the service. This might be something someone just put up for fun, but it is a useful tool. Frankly, retailers should email you themselves if the price drops, and if a service like this gets popular enough, they may start doing that. Supported sites include Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Backcountry.com, BestBuy.com, BestBuy.ca, Bike Nashbar, Circuit City, Cooking.com, Costco, Future Shop, Jenson USA, Office Max, Sears, 6th Avenue Electronics, Staples.com, Staples.ca, and Target. See Thrillist for their review as well.

Source: TechCrunch

Over the past few months, Google has been hard at work making it easier to find and compare local businesses and services right from the standard web results page.

In addition to providing the basic contact information and map locations for several choices at the top of the page, they will also show ratings and provide one-click access to reviews on the search results page so that you can make more informed decisions about where you want to go.

Here are a few specific examples of how you can use Google to search and compare local businesses and services.

• Find the location of and driving directions to the Googleplex (or any specific address).
• Find and compare Mexican restaurants in Pasadena, CA
• Get directions to and read reviews about a local eatery in Pittsburgh.
• Find movie showtimes for films that are playing in your neighborhood.

In 1993 Adobe published the full specifications for its Portable Document Format, or PDF, granting royalty free license to those who chose to build PDF tools into their applications, and helping PDF to become a de-facto standard for document creation.

Tomorrow they will announce that they are relinquishing control over the PDF format to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

One of the primary reasons for this appears to be hesitation by many governments to embrace proprietary formats, including PDF. With this change, Adobe hopes to sell many more copies of Acrobat, the primary software used to create and edit PDFs.

Today, the reputation network Rapleaf is releasing a new service called UpScoop, which joins a number of startups trying to add a meta layer above social networks. There are a lot of these networks, and a lot of people belong to more than one. Keeping track of your own networks, and those of your friends, is complicated.

Upscoop is designed to help you figure out which networks your friends belong to, based on their email address. You give Upscoop your email credentials (including the password) for your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo email account. Upscoop grabs your contact list, and then searches across a number of social networks and tries to find profile pages of people that you know among the 10 million profiles they’ve indexed across the major social networks. The process of searching is not instantaneous - it actually takes a few hours.

Clicking on any result will (sometimes) bring you to the profile page for that person. You can then add them as a friend or otherwise interact with them.

Asking people to give Upscoop their full email credentials to complete the search is going to be a tough sell. But this is a lot easier than searching for friends one-by-one on Wink. For people serious about connecting with friends, Upscoop may be for them.

Source: TechCrunch

Google has decided that only allowing certain users to run AdSense and IntelliTXT on the same page is not fair to all the other AdSense publishers. Therefore, Google has ruled that AdSense can be used with other contextual advertising services, provided they do not look like Google ads. That means everyone can now run AdSense and Vibrant Media IntelliTXT on the same page!This new rule applies to all contextual advertising service. Therefore, if you’re using Kontara, or any other contextual ad network, you can run them as long as they don’t look like Google ads. It is good to see Google finally give some good news after releasing their latest TOS update. The only problem I can see for new publishers is Vibrant Media requires 500,000 page views per month in order for a site to run IntelliTXT. But at least you can run it on pages with Google ads now!

With this ruling, Google is really putting the screws to Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN). If you wish to run YPN, it cannot show up on any pages with AdSense ads in them and the YPN ads must not use the same color scheme as the AdSense ads. Given that choice, many publishers will either give up YPN or give up Google. Google feels most will give up YPN because of AdSense superior ad targeting technology.

Yahoo! launched a new personal finance website, which brings together the Internet’s most useful tools and information to help consumers manage their personal finances. Yahoo! Personal Finance offers consumers a suite of new financial centers, covering every major area of personal finance, ranging from “Banking & Budgeting” to “Retirement.” The site continues the company’s media strategy of bringing together the best tools and information around a particular topic from the industry’s leading providers, while also expanding advertising inventory in one of the largest advertising categories.”The goal of Yahoo! Finance has always been to help our users make informed financial decisions, and now we’re able to do that across every aspect of their financial lives,” said Peggy White, general manager, Yahoo! Finance. “Not all of our users manage an investment portfolio, but we all manage a checkbook. This presents a huge opportunity for Yahoo! Finance to expand beyond our core investing-focused offerings.”

Yahoo! Finance has already established itself as the Internet’s number one destination for investing tools and information, and aims to expand its audience size and engagement with the addition of a new personal finance home.

iJigg is a new, easy-on-the-eyes music site that launched a couple of days ago.Think Digg for music, plus lots of Flash functionality. Songs are presented on the home page and can be “jigged” by members. Songs can also be embedded into web pages (I’ve done so with one of the popular songs below), commented on, etc. Songs are tagged for easy browsing, and there are most popular and recently posted areas as well.

As a music discovery service, it’s compelling. And the Digg way of having massive numbers of people vote on stuff to make the cream rise is a good way to sort stuff. Others are giving glowing reviews.

Source: TechCrunch