Google Developing Mac Version Of Picasa, Due To Be Released This Year

Google’s Picasa photo management software is often regarded by many (particularly Windows users) to be the best basic image editing and management software on the market. Although a desktop app it’s crucially a conduit to Picasa Web Album’s, Google’s challenger to the Yahoo owned Flickr.

I was struck this morning as to how prominent the Picasa logo on Google banners and employee T-Shirts was at Macworld, particularly given that there’s no Mac version of Picasa, although there is a stand alone image uploader.

I asked if Picasa for Mac was coming, and as luck would have it I managed to pick the Google employee with the least amount of media training and immediately put her on the spot. Her response: Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year.

She then tried back tracking and pointed me to the people who were suppose to answer these queries. After explaining that I’d been told by their colleague that Picasa for Mac was coming and all I wanted now was the release date, they said that they wouldn’t confirm or deny the fact, saying that the use of the logo was part of a promotion for Picasa Web Albums, but said all of this whilst smiling like Cheshire cats. They then put me in front of a camera and made me tell them how much I liked Google as punishment (after I told them I was writing the story anyway) and gave me a free pair of thongs (flip-flops). Sorry guys, the bribery needs to be better than that

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Proximic Signs Deals With Yahoo and eBay To Turn Product Listings Into Contextual Ads; Taking on AdSense

A tiny 14-man startup in Munich called Proximic wants to give Google a run for its money. But it is not going after search. It is coming from behind with an attack on AdSense. Proximic has signed deals to syndicate product listings from both eBay’s Shopping.com and Yahoo’s Shopping Network as contextual ads on other Websites.

This is the first time that either Yahoo or eBay has syndicated these listings. In one fell swoop, Proximic will gain an ad inventory of 50 million ads (20 million from each eBay and Yahoo, and 10 million from other sources). Proximic estimates that Google, in contrast, has an inventory of about one million unique ads. Proximic’s ad network based on this massive inventory will launch at the end of January.

Prospective advertisers will be able to place an ad widget on their sites. Proximic will index the sites and serve up contextually matching products as text ads along with contextually relevant content links (see demo screen shots below). The ads and contextual Web links will also appear in a sidebar for anyone who has downloaded the Proximic Firefox add-on.

So if you are reading about Mideast peace efforts, books about the Mideast might appear in the ad widget. If you are reading about the Mozilla Foundation, you might get an ad for Firefox track jackets from the Mozilla store, along with a link to Twitter message about Mozilla hiring the guys from Humanized. (This is what actually came up in the Firefox sidebar when I tried it. Proximic also populates its widget results with the content links from 900,000 RSS feeds it has indexed and the top 500 or so Websites.)

What makes Proximic different is that it does not come up with contextual matches based on keyword search like Google or Yahoo would. It doesn’t use semantic or statistical methods either to figure out what a page is about. “Semantic systems are not able to scale,” sniffs Proximic co-founder and CTO Thomas Nitsche, a former computer chess champion. “If you hold more than one million documents, you run into a problem,” he concludes. Semantic search, he thinks, is too slow at this point for ad serving.

Instead of keyword, semantic, or statistical approaches, Proximic uses proximity analysis. Nitsche is vague about exactly how it works, but it boils down Proximic’s algorithm translating each body of text into a pattern of characters that then becomes represented by a mathematical vector. Matches are done through traditional vector analysis. Or, as Nitsche explains:

We look at patterns of letters. We get a profile. The profile is a vector. We compare two vectors, and compute proximity by pattern distance. We can generate proximity between texts. The text can be one word, two words, 15 words, or a complete page.

Using this method, Proximic can also create matches between product listings and Web pages, thus opening up what is now an inventory of product search results to the world of contextual advertising. In tests, Nitsche says Proximic is seeing click-through rates as high as 1.5 percent, which is much greater than the 0.25 percent or less that is typical for an AdSense campaign. Of course, Proximic has to split any ad revenues it makes with Yahoo and eBay on one side and the Web publishers on the other. Proximic plans on giving participating Websites 70 percent of any revenues after eBay and Yahoo take their cut, leaving it with a very small piece of the pie. The only way to make up for it is by generating much higher click-through rates (by improving the relevance of the ads).

It is an ambitious undertaking for a German startup which has raised only 3 million Euros from Wellington Partners in 2006. But what Proximic is trying to do is combine contextual search advertising with affiliate marketing. By analyzing the patterns of characters on a page, it is creating a machine intelligence of sorts. The nice thing is that Proximic does not need to leave cookies on anyone’s browser or track you across the Web. It makes its own judgements about what is contextually relevant based on what you are reading.

If Proximic is successful in matching relevant products, imagine what it could do as a general-purpose search engine? But Nitsche knows better than to try to take Google head-on in search. He is happy, for now, focusing on the advertising end.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Y-Browser v0.85

Found under: s60, file, browser

Submitted: 2008-01-14

Summary: Y-Browser is a filebrowser application designed for S60 3rd edition devices Symbian OS 9--gt. Earlier releases include also
versions for 1st and 2nd edition, but since 0.80 only 3rd edition devices are supported. This is due some APIs that are only supported in 3rd edition.


Y-Browser is c...

Download Y-Browser v0.85

Mobile friendly download

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Anime Review: School Rumble, Volume Four

You might want to catch up with my reviews of School Rumble, Volume One, Two, and Three before reading my review of Volume Four!

Summer is still in full swing in Volume Four of School Rumble, and girls are in the middle of a friendship crisis!

plot summary

Eri has subtly insulted her friend, Mikoto, over a misunderstanding involving Harima. Mikoto tries to confront Eri to settle their dispute, but Eri runs away faster than Mikoto can say “It’s not a date!”

Eri has a strange love/hate relationship with Harima, while Harumi despises Eri but is polite to her for the sake of Tenma.

Tenma thinks Harumi is the world’s biggest player and is afraid he might try to woe her little sister, Yakumo while on a co-ed camping trip with their friends.

Misunderstandings seem to follow Harima, Tenma, and Eri around like depressing storm clouds, and the camping trip is no exception. Once again Harima tries to confess his love to Tenma, and once again, Eri gets in the way and becomes entangled in her own emotions concerning Harima.

Harima has issues other than Tenma to contend with, however, as his beloved animal friends have no safe place to stay. Yakumo sees the softer side of Harima and she and her friends lend Harima a hand in helping his furry pals.



Tenma’s classmate, Karen, has fallen for the obnoxious and boob-crazy Imadori. Tenma tries to help Karen out a she goes on an obligatory date with Imadori, but it’d be better if Karen forgot about Imadori since he’s already forgotten about her. It looks as if the heartaches surrounding Tenma and company have finally spread to their classmates!

review

Volume Four of School Rumble was as funny as previous volumes and gave some good insight into a few of Tenma’s friends; namely Eri, Mikoto and the two’s relationship. But what I kept hoping to see never cropped up in this Volume, which was the reason for Tenma’s attraction to Karasuma. I also kept wanting to see Harima succeed once, just once, in his declaration of love to Tenma.

I understand there’s so much going on in School Rumble, that it’s hard to get info crammed into an episode and still have the episode make sense and be funny. School Rumble resembles a comedic, animated soap opera, in that it’s epic, never ending, and becomes more and more convoluted as time goes on.



The series is continuing on in an organic fashion; one set of circumstances has a profound domino effect on the series and grows into a completely new side story. This organic domino effect is thankfully humorous and is what keeps the long drawn out misunderstanding and “he said, she said”s from becoming tiresome and obnoxious. I will say that it’s hard to keep up with the love stories popping up and crumbling just as fast they appear.

School Rumble, Volume Four went by quickly and had the effect of leaving me wanting more- now. School Rumble is an anime worth investing the time in since it delivers what it promises and then some- laughs, laughs, more laughs, and tears.

rating

School Rumble, Volume Four gets 3 out of a possible 4 gummies!

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Switch Between Your Gmail Accounts

An useful feature of Gmail Manager, a great Firefox extension that notifies you when you receive new Gmail messages, is that you can easily log in to a different Gmail account without entering the username and password: after adding your Gmail accounts and Google Apps accounts, select the account by right-clicking on the Gmail Manager icon in the status bar and then click on the icon.


Another way to easily switch between your Gmail accounts is the Google Account Multi-Login Greasemonkey script, but it stores the passwords in a non-secure way.

Hopefully, Google will add a feature that lets you link a main Google account with your other accounts and log in once to access all your Google accounts, like you can do in Windows Live Hotmail:


If you want to minimize the number of times you access your secondary Gmail accounts, forward all the messages to your main account and enable it to send messages using custom From: addresses.

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Google updates iPhone interface

Jeez, get a room you two. Google’s all like, “Oh Apple iPhone, you’re so pretty. Sit at my table won’t you? I’ve upgraded myself to run much faster and sexier on your Safari browser. Look how fast Gmail loads now.”

Then Apple’s all, “Hey Google, sorry I haven’t called in a while. Thanks for the upgrade, you’re looking real good. Have you been working out? I’m gonna bump you up a couple notches in my speed dial. Maybe you could make me some dinner tomorrow night after the keynote. Then I’ll go hit some parties and you can wait up for me.”

Seriously though, it’s a good overhaul. Wise move too, in light of the recent traffic-splosion Devin told us about earlier today. I find myself using my iPod Touch more and more for Google-related activities, wishing it had some sort of phone function built into it so I could take it with me as I skip gleefully about the streets of Boston. Oh well.

Google announces faster, more customizable Google experience for iPhone Users [Google Press Release]

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