Morpheed » Technology

Organize, edit, and add effects to your pictures.

Giveaway of the Day project team — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 07:00:47 +0000

Zoner Photo Studio leads you step-by-step through the process of managing and working with your digital photos: acquiring, editing, archiving, and publishing them. The all-in-one solution is exceptionally easy to use and saves you time and money: create great photos using just one program!

Zoner Photo Studio 10 Xpress is a lighter version of Zoner Photo Studio 10 Professional. Unfortunately, we cannot give out version Professional to Giveaway of the Day, because we have to pay royalties from used technologies, but we are offering this version Xpress with 2 months functionality of version Professional and then the version Xpress stays as full version and you can use it anytime.

New functions of version Professional here.

Try this Pro version for 2 months and then get full version Xpress and we wish you great photos with Zoner Photo Studio 10.

Taking Suggestions: What Else Should We Ban While Driving?

Michael Masnick — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:33:00 +0000

With California's law banning driving while talking on a mobile phone without a handsfree device set to take effect next week, the author of the original bill is already working on a followup to ban driving-while-texting as well. He says this is necessary because driving-while-texting "wasn't an issue" when the original bill was put forth. Of course, there are an unlimited number of different driving distractions -- so if we really need to come up with a law for all of them, why don't we put our heads together to come up with a list. After all, we've already heard of worries that involve driving while using a laptop, driving while using OnStar, driving while faxing (which also includes something about driving while playing a video game). And, of course, everyone's favorite: driving while having sex.

Rather than coming up with all these laws banning each particular action, why not recognize that you can't ban stupidity, and just focus on already existing laws against reckless driving? If you're doing something other than driving that puts others at danger, that should be plenty. We shouldn't need a list of "banned" activities while driving. We should just be focused on teaching people to actually drive when they're driving.

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Yahoo Loses One Of Their Top Deal Guys - One More Exec Gone

Michael Arrington — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:14:04 +0000

As anyone could guess, the Yahoo executive exodus continues. Kent Goldman, Yahoo’s Director of Corporate Development and one of their top deal guys, is rumored to be leaving the company. Goldman joined Yahoo in 2004 as Director of Business Strategy, reporting to Toby Coppel (at that time Yahoo’s Chief Strategy Officer - now Managing Director of Yahoo Europe). If this is accurate, the total number of Yahoo execs who have exited the company since January 2007 is approximately 115. 18 top execs have left this month alone, including Brad Garlinghouse, Jeff Weiner, Vish Makhijani, Qi Lu, Caterina Fake, Stewart Butterfield and Joshua Schachter.

The fact Yahoo is now losing deal guys isn’t necessarily a sign of good or bad news in particular. In 2007, Yahoo Director of Corporate Development Michael Marquez left Yahoo to become the Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development for CBS Interactive (he was recently promoted to EVP). It may just be that Goldman was given an offer to go somewhere else that he couldn’t refuse.

Update: Interestingly Kent recently joined the ever-growing Yahoo Alumni group on Facebook, and a couple days earlier he became a fan of First Round Capital. We’ll be contacting them to see if he has any connection to the firm.

Top Photo Credit: Ian Kennedy

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easyJet Wants To Sue Websites That Send It Business

Michael Masnick — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 02:15:00 +0000

I'm always amazed at people who get pissed off at anyone who makes their products more valuable -- especially when they threaten to sue. Like the whole ridiculousness surrounding the Associated Press threatening a blogger for sending more attention its way, for example. The latest case is even more bizarre, as European discount airline easyJet is threatening to sue various travel websites that send it business. It's difficult to see how this could possibly make any business sense for easyJet.

Now, obviously, some will claim (as easyJet does) that easyJet should have the right to only sell flights off of its own website. But if these other sites are merely scraping the content and then linking back to easyJet, then what's the problem? These sites are sending more business to easyJet, and it wants to sue them. The lawyer quoted in the article discusses copyright issues (which again, seems to go against what the company should want) and also database rights -- which is recognized in Europe rather than the US. But even if it's true that easyJet has a legal right to block these sites, it still seems like a bad business idea to sue sites for giving you free advertising -- especially when those are the sites people go to when they want to buy airplane tickets.

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No, Grand Theft Auto Isn’t To Blame For Dumb Teens Getting Violent

Michael Masnick — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:57:47 +0000

It's been shown over and over again that violent video games don't lead to violence -- but that hasn't stopped anti-video game crusaders from looking for any example that suggests otherwise. It appears they're having a field day with a bunch of stupid teenagers on Long Island who went on a rampage saying they were acting out scenes from Grand Theft Auto. The mistake here is to blame GTA for the acts. These kids were bored and decided to go on a rampage. If it wasn't copying GTA, it would have been for some other reason. Furthermore, just because the kids blame GTA, doesn't mean that GTA was responsible. Of course kids will blame GTA if they think that will get them out of jail: "It wasn't my fault, you see. I was under the influence of some video game..." It's an easy way to deflect blame, but doesn't mean that the blame shouldn't rest squarely on the shoulders of those kids, rather than the video game. Millions of people play GTA every day and have no intention of acting it out in real life.

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EMI Music Sues Hi5, VideoEgg and Ten Defendants To Be Named Later

Michael Arrington — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:50:01 +0000

EMI, which is looking less like a music label and more like a lawsuit label, is at it again. This afternoon they filed a lawsuit alleging “massive and blatant” copyright infringement by Hi5, VideoEgg and ten John Doe defendants to be named later. The core of the suit is over copyrighted EMI content that appears on Hi5, particularly music videos.

EMI is a particularly litigious company. In the recent past, they’vd sued or threatened to sue AllofMP3, YouTube, Apple, MP3Tunes, XM Radio, Infospace (can’t really blame them there) and even The Beatles.

One person close to the litigation says that the parties have been negotiating with EMI for well over a year to avoid litigation, but that they were unable to reach agreement. The shakedown attempt before litigation is standard practice these days. But what is a little different here is that EMI is going deep into the supply chain to find other deep pockets.

VideoEgg, for example, provided video functionality to Hi5 in the past, but the deal ended in April 2008, and they no longer work together. The ten John Doe defendants are presumably other service providers, and/or executives of Hi5, VideoEgg and those other companies. The fact that EMI included VideoEgg in the lawsuit shows that they care little about current infringement - they just want a payoff for stuff that happened in the past.

VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez says that they comply with all DMCA takedown demands, but never received one from EMI. VideoEgg also used AudibleMagic , he says, to identify and proactively removed copyrighted material.

The lawsuit complaint, which was filed in New York, is below.

EMI Music v. VideoEgg, Hi5 and others - Get more Legal Forms

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Selling To The Long Tail Doesn’t Mean You Ignore The Hits

Michael Masnick — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:40:15 +0000

There's an interesting new article in the Harvard Business Review that looks to challenge Chris Anderson's well-known theory of "the long tail." In it, a Harvard professor, Anita Elberse, talks about how hits still make a lot of money, and the idea that all the money is now over in the long tail doesn't seem supported by reality. Chris himself makes some very good points in response, noting that some of this depends very much on where you "draw the line" between the hits and the tail. Since there's a sort of "fat middle," small changes in where you draw the line of what counts in which category can have a big impact. Chris makes a compelling argument that Elberse chose to draw the line in the wrong spot. He uses the inventory of various brick-and-mortar stores to determine where the line should be drawn, rather than at the somewhat arbitrary 10% and 1% lines that Elberse used.

However, I'd like to argue from a different angle as to why the HBR piece is missing the point. I don't think that anyone ever said that you completely ignore the hits. Perhaps it's a problem of the name "the long tail" but it starts to make people focus all the way at the end of the tail -- the part that is the least profitable. It's the point where only one copy of something is sold every so often. The companies that suddenly announced they were going to focus on the long tail seemed to think that you focus only on that tip at the end. That was not the point at all. You don't ignore the hits -- you just recognize that with infinite shelf space, you can now supply much more beyond the hits -- and that aggregate amount can add up to a substantial sum that no store with limited shelf-space can match. So, Elberse is completely correct in suggesting that companies don't just focus on the tail end of the tail -- but anyone who did so in the first place was misinterpreting the point of the long tail concept.

Even more to the point is that the concept of the long tail changes the shape of the market. When shelf space was limited, it made it that much more difficult to even get a creative work produced at all. You had to be able to convince someone that your work would make it into the "hits" category, and then get them to finance the creation of the work. And, anything that didn't actually become a hit fell off the chart completely. You basically had a bimodal distribution of content: the hits that sold, and the crap that didn't and was no longer available. But there was a hidden third category that most people didn't think of: the stuff that didn't get created at all because it wouldn't sell enough alone to justify it.

Yet, with the combination of cheaper tools for content creation, combined with cheaper distribution tools and infinite shelf space, that third "hidden" category started to exist in the open, where it was invisible before. And, on top of that, many of the works that fell into the "crap" end of the old model, could migrate into the long tail and make enough sales to be decent. But the point remains that it spread out the distribution, made it possible for much more content to both be created and sold -- and there are plenty of companies capitalizing on that. That doesn't mean that the hits go away or that the long tail concept doesn't make sense. It just means that you don't focus on the long tail by only focusing on the crap end of the long tail -- but on the entire distribution.

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Twitter Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed

Michael Arrington — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:13:47 +0000

A key feature of Twitter has been down most of this week: Replies. The core Twitter service itself is alive, but the team took the Reply feature down on Tuesday when the service started to slow. As of now, Friday afternoon, Replies are still down.

Disabling certain features is Twitter’s recent attempt to keep their frail architecture from failing completely. They tried it out during Apple’s recent WWDC keynote and it worked, so they’re clearly using this approach more often now to deal with problems.

But here’s the problem - Replies was the wrong feature to turn off (whether there was a choice in the matter or not). The beautiful thing about Twitter is that spontaneous, diverse conversations erupt that are almost synchronous, or chat like (see our post about Quotably, which pulls these conversations out and highlights them). Conversations are what makes Twitter magic.

But that magic is created by the simple Reply feature - when you add “@TechCrunch” to a Twitter message, it tells me you are saying something directly to me, to start a new conversation or reply to an existing one. Without Reply, Twitter turns into a one way telephone conversation. Pulling the feature out is equivalent to a frontal lobotomy - Twitter is still walking around, but there’s a blank stare in its eyes.

So why aren’t people screaming about the feature being gone? Because this time, they’re just heading over to Friendfeed to have those very same conversations. Friendfeed for most users was just a place to bookmarks all their activities on other social networks. Now, more and more, it’s a place that people start conversations. The early adopters got that a while ago. Now, the not so early adopters are using it as a Twitter replacement, too.

This message, for example, is one that I would have written to Twitter if the Reply feature was working. Instead I posted it to Friendfeed, and the conversation picked up without a hitch.

If I was Twitter I’d be very worried about Friendfeed. Their young competitor seems to have zero stability problems, and is quietly in the process of pulling away all the special parts of Twitter.

Twitter was mentioned on yesterday’s Daily Show (at about the 10:00 mark). Let’s all hope that when we look back, that mention by Jon Stewart didn’t mark Twitter’s peak, just as Friendfeed ascended.

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Whoisi - Community Edited People Profiles and Tracking

Calley Nye — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:54:28 +0000

Whoisi is a central site that allows users to add people and their associated web feeds, and then track any number of these people and their feed items using a follower model. Whoisi is a side project by open source evangelist and Mozilla contributor Chris Blizzard. Currently it supports feeds from Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Picasa and any Atom or RSS feed. Once you have added a number of people that you follow, it presents their feed activity in a time-based interface similar to FriendFeed and MugShot, making it easy to track a large number of feeds.

In Whoisi, any visitor to the site can define a person or an identity, and add the feeds associated with that person for other users to find and follow. To prevent vandalism, there is a revision history so that changes can be reversed. The database already has a large number of names within it - and when you search for a friend or feed you’d like to follow, if they are not already on the site, you can add or edit their feeds easily. Users do not need to signup for an account with Whoisi, as user data (such as followers) is all session-based using a browser cookie, which means you can’t move your follower list between browsers.

You can edit and customize any persons profile with “aliases” to provide alternate names or groups. What this means is the TechCrunch feed can be tagged “Michael Arrington” or “Mike Arrington.” You can also have a TechCrunch group, so Nik Cubrilovic’s feed could be tagged “techcrunch:nik.” The grouping feature is very simple and it could be developed further by users and used for other purposes.

Whoisi is a very clean site, as there is little on the site except for data. An open API is provided that publishes RSS feeds for each defined user, so that the data can be integrated into other applications.

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O2 to open early, may unlock iPhone 3G after one year

AppleInsider — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:35:00 +0000

British carrier O2 plans a prompt morning launch for the iPhone 3G, AppleInsider has learned, and hints that it may unlock the iPhone for use on any carrier for Pay As You Go customers. Appearing to confirm some recent rumors senior O2 retail sour...