Emergintex

Update: Om just pointed out what I missed. The new Google Video service brings along with it, a new DRM system to protect the paid for videos. As one of the comments said, this is not progress. Its giving us skews of DRM solutions which are not compatible with each other. We need **one** centralized system/format which would let me play my videos on different platforms. Not sure how this new DRM would be implemented as, this service is just a online service and no hardware is involved.

Update: The news is obviously out in the ethernet. CNN confirmed the news citing un-named Wall Street Journal sources, that Google will offer paid video content in partnership with CBS, NBA and others.

Google is getting ready to uncover some of the speculated services during the upcoming CES. There have been some interesting speculations about these upcoming services, like this and this post here by Garett Rogers. He gives a nice detailed step by step description of how he discovered and speculates about one of the new upcoming services, Google Video (enhanced and probably supporting pay-per-view). It seems that Google might be getting ready to come into pay-per-video market also, using enhanced Google Video service as a vehicle.

Also if you point your browser here, you are asked to login into your Google account and then redirected to your Accounts Summary page. Looking at the initial URL (http://purchases.google.com) it seems everything is ready behind the scenes and awaiting for the keynote by Larry Page.

There were rumors that Google might launch Google PC too on this occasion, which would be a low cost PC available at Wal-mart and likes, but that was officially denied by Google in recent past.

Google is really spreading along all the possible dimensions, which might give the company a nice hold on the market.

Technorati tags: CES,Google Video

37Signals announced in late December about an upcoming offering in their existing suite of fine products.

I am sure the product would follow the neat UI guidelines 37Signals have been following on their existing products. For small business’ I completely agree here that most of the CRM solutions for them are too enterprise’ish, and hence are an overkill for them to deploy these solutions.

As a step towards bringing applications and solutions to web, this would help start with small business’ where the solution can be utilized with minimal footprint and less overheads of infrastructure and deployment. This would be different from ASP model in the past as this would be a complete web app, instead of individual customer facing and support facing applications.

What I would like to see in the application for these business’ is a neat way to migrate their existing data into Sunrise. The historical data is valuable in CRM domain, and if once that is in Sunrise, there is no stopping.

The application code named Sunrise would be launched at Getting Real Workshop, to be held on 27th January 2006 in Chicago. At the moment the workshop seems to be sold out and I guess I am not gonna be there. Unless I get lucky.

Cant wait to review Sunrise.

Hi everyone ! I know its been slow on my blog for last week or so. As we all are busy celebrating the holidays, I will be back in 2006 with some major posts here about everything web !

Untill then, HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Earlier today, the web-ajax based messaging service Meebo posted the confirmation to rumors of it getting funded. Meebo team posted here the news about Meebo getting its first round of funding from Sequoia Capital.

Apart from its support for top messaging services, Meebo has some interesting ideas up their sleeves which could become a part of their undisclosed business model. Meebo was launched officially to the public on September 14th 2005. Three months later the company is getting its first round of funding, which is awesome !

I personally congratulate the team of Seth, Elaine, Sandy on this milestone, and hope that they keep up the good user experience.

Uncomfired posts quote the pre-money valuation of the service at $10M. Thats awesome for this young startup. Considering that this is series-A funding Sequoia Capital would be funding around $2M, which is my ballpark number, and which seems to be good for a service that is only 3 months old.
Technorati tags: Meebo

Seeing so much happening in recent past in digital photography domain, each of us is loaded with options ranging from amateur to professional. Is it becoming too crowded of a domain, or each of the solution out there targets a specific task? I sit down and see Flickr blazing ahead in the space. Reason being its simple intuitive user interface. Its like ‘photo uploading for dummies’. The viral nature of Flickr helped spreading it. On top of that exposure given by Yahoo! laid a solid foundation underneath.
I still use the free account in Flickr, and it has now become my main channel of distribution for my digital photographs, plus images needed for my blog. )

Would an amateur or a prosumer use Flickr for his photographs right off the camera (min ~ 2MB for a 5MP camera) ? I am not sure of the answer, coz I havent looked inside in the pro account. Most of the users in this segment use their local storage to store and use someone like PBase for sharing their stuff online. PBase is managed by Slug and Emily, and has grown from an amateur solution to a high quality professional solution now. Its the first choice with most of the professional/prosumers I know of. You can read about PBase’s growth here. Is Flickr targetting the same segment? No. I see flickr more as a fast way to share pictures and show them off or use them in some other online presentation/blog. The tagging in Flickr is another thing which differentiates it with other online storage areas. As per its tagline, its best used to search,sort and share yourp photos.

Recently Riya was moved in alpha II, and one of the main drivers behind the service is searching. Considering you have a library of 10000 photos, the service would assist you in tagging and searching your library by implementing image recognition algorithms on your pictures. Sounds wonderful. Catch is that you need to upload all your pictures online first and then you can get them tagged by the service. I am not sure if this limitation is in alpha/beta’s but this in release is not helpful. Users just cannot expect uploading their libraries just to get them tagged. If this is implemented as a client side application, it will rock ! This is where Riya can leverage the desktop share of Picasa. I recently talked why Flickr would be best for Riya, but that was in its current form, i.e online recognition.

So what do these services offer you, the end user? Answer is still same, no single service can get to your needs in entirety. No single service is atomic in nature. We might need to wait for another service to come up to quench our thirst here.

Technorati tags: riya,pbase,flickr,Picasa

I have been thinking about Riya lately. Its frightening me. The initial inertia this service had, is it going slack now in last few days. It has slipped down in the Technorati top search. There are absolutely no new posts in last few days either at the official Riya blog or at Munjal’s blog.

Is the team working hard to keep up with the feedbacks of Alpha II, or is the team working hard to integrate with other services like Flickr? Now talking of Flickr, I cannot stop myself from thinking that why is everyone talking of Riya-Picasa linkup? Why cant it be Riya-Flickr linkup? Yahoo! has been on a buying spree, and Riya can tie up better with Flickr, than with Picasa. Picasa doesnt have any ground for social tag & search. Flickr is exactly that, and Riya can help Flickr tag and search better.

Technorati tags: riya,Flickr

Recently we (me and Hemant) started another blog where we would discuss only about upcoming ventures, and a do a unbiased review of the venture. Move on there and bookmark it !

I started uploading some more pictures tonite to Riya. The first question that I asked myself was:

‘Does Riya upload the full sized images?’

This could be a severe bottleneck in the uploader part of the service. At the moment, if it does upload full sized images, then I do not see any reason to do so, because users do not see the full sized image on the web side anyways. If this is required for the image recognition algos to work more efficiently, then there needs to be some trade-off setting which the user can tweak. I tried downloading a photograph from the web site, and it came back as a resized version. So, not sure about what size is uploaded. Would be good if someone from Riya can leave a comment on this one.

My first review on Alpha II is here.

Technorati tags: riya,soalphaithurts,riyarocks