Category Archives: Web services

Adobe introduces online photo and video sharing

Adobe will bundle online photo and video sharing into the latest versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. The Photoshop Showcase site will be powered by Flash of course, and includes support for geotagging photographs (U.S. only), tagging, creating easily shared albums, and sending your photos to a digital picture frame or photo printer. Adobe views a photo, video, or gallery as one “share.” The fist 1,000 shares are free and users can upgrade to 5,000 shares for $3.99 or unlimited shares for $7.99. I have not seen many details released about the Photoshop Showcase product’s online presence, but…

The Widgetization of the Web

Widgets are taking over the web, small pieces at a time. Big web destinations are opening their templates to custom configurations by users and pre-configurations with special partners. Mix and match your favorite content from around the web on your personal start page from Microsoft, Google, or Netvibes. Share a few live and always updating bits of information in your blog sidebar using widgets on WordPress or TypePad. Small(er) businesses can leverage the huge distributions of users across most of the top web properties. Over half of the top Internet companies for home users currently open up their pages for…

Box.net graduates from college

Box.net had humble beginnings as a Berkeley class project to revamp an industry in need of change. Aaron Levie (pictured above) and his cofounders thought online storage, backup, and sharing could use a makeover and they built a prototype and business reasoning for the class. Fellow students bought-in and encouraged the team to further develop the service in exchange for a few dollars a month. Box.net currently offers 1 gigabyte of free storage, with upgrades available starting at $5 for 5 GB. They don’t offer the most free space or the cheapest but see their strength as integration with…

Amazon Simple Storage Service

Amazon shook up the world of onlien storage with the introduction of Simple Storage Service (S3) in mid-March. The web service is aimed at developers, providing REST and SOAP access to file storage and retrieval for 15 cents a month for a gigabyte of storage and 20 cents for each gigabyte transferred. The service has BitTorrent support built-in, and developers have extended developed many libraries and services in the three months since its launch. I was lucky enough to have Jeff Barr of Amazon present on S3 at this month’s SF Tech Sessions. Amazon needs to store its own…

PodSession: online storage

In this week’s PodSession Om and I talk about online storage and the increased need to backup your digital lifestyle. The launch of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service was just the beginning of online storage utilities. Companies such as Amazon help people feel their data is safe with a company that already manages large amounts of data and will be in business for a long while. We are starting to see some enterprise-level backup and storage technologies applied to the consumer space. Home computer users are consuming more and more storage space by ripping CD collections, downloading music and movies, and…

TailRank experiments with community funding

Kevin Burton has been working on a new ranking system for webpages to help sort through the data overload faced by readers. TailRank is currently in an experimental stage and using the Wikipedia database to make sense of a known set of about 800,000 articles. Kevin is currently looking to expand TailRank to the world of weblogs and eventually to the people behind those weblogs. He would ideally like to link authors to their multiple blogs, podcasts, events, and jobs for a more complete view of online activity and content of interest. Kevin needs some servers. He is a huge…

Stewart Butterfield interview on Flickr

Richard Koman interviewed Stewart Butterfield of Flickr about how people use Flickr through the site, APIs, and how Flickr will make a business out of photo sharing. Flickr has 3.5 million photos, 82 percent are public. 71 percent of the photos have some kind of human-added metadata that was added in Flickr….

Amazon announces new Web services

Amazon.com introduced Alexa Web Information Service and updated Amazon E-Commerce Service. Alexa Web Information service allows for retrieval of site information such as popularity, related sites, detailed usage/traffic stats, supported character-set/locales, site contact information, meta data, and a list of links in and out of the site. The service is currently free and allows 10,000 requests per subscription ID per day. Check out the SDK page for more information. Amazon E-Commerce Service 4.0 allows access to detailed product attributes, product images, customer reviews, and attribute search. The service is free and you may make no more than one request to…