Author: rakesh

photograph taken by j-a-x, featured on houstonist.com.

I’m looking for a “Google Alerts”-like service that’ll notify me when certain keywords appear in certain forums (example: I’d like to be notified everytime someone posts ‘snapstream’ or ‘beyondtv’ or ‘beyond tv’ on byopvr.com). Or I’d like to be notified when a particular user makes a post within a particular forum.

Something like this would make it a lot easier for me to track and monitor conversations in the forum-o-sphere (yes, that is a term that I just made-up… 1:15pm central time, Sunday, September 10, 2006 — you heard it here first!). Forums are pretty darn popular, at least they are for us over at SnapStream and my sense for it is they are more practical and accessible to the general population than blogs are. ie random Joe customer is more likely to post something in a company’s forum or in a community forum than he is to create a blog and make a posting about it there. Even if he already had a personal blog, he’s probably still post to a company or community forum, knowing that he’s likely to get more traffic and responses that way.

If a service like this doesn’t exist, it’ll be one of those “shit, why doesn’t this service exist?” moments for me. With blog search being such a hot area, Technorati and Google duking it out, how can everyone be missing out on being able to search and track conversations in the forum-o-sphere?

One of the fun things about taking photographs of friends and family is sending them copies afterwards so everyone can enjoy them. And sharing photographs online is a relatively simple process. Choose the photographs worth sharing, click some buttons to get them to a reasonable size, upload them somewhere and then e-mail a link to “somewhere” to family and friends. Or maybe there are just one or two photographs of interest so you e-mail those to a friend. Some of these things are even simpler if you are using photo management software (like Picasa) that’s integrated with a website for sharing photographs (for Picasa, this site is Picasa Web Albums).

But what about sharing actual prints that people can put up on their fridge, in their photo albums or mail to grandparents? This is more cumbersome. In my case, the process to do this goes something like this:

1) Select “worthy” photographs in Picasa

2) Export those photographs (I set the “resize too” option to 1200 for 4×6 prints, 1600 for 5×7 prints)

3) Login to Sam’s Club Photo Center

4) Upload all the photographs

5) Tell Sam’s Club that I want 4×6 prints (singles or doubles)

6) Tell Sam’s Club where to send the photographs

7) Complete the checkout process (including credit card info)

So this isn’t so bad — after all, I’m just clicking buttons. No phone calls, no physical trip out to the photo lab, the whole process is virtualized. But it’s still labor intensive, even if it only takes a bunch of clicks.

So first of all, Picasa could stand to have much better integration with photo printing services (or maybe they just host their own like Apple does). The key points for better integration would be:

– Integrate my contacts, so I don’t have to go digging for people’s addresses.

– Save my credit card information

– Automatically resize photos before uploading, depending on the size I want to print photographs at so I don’t have to do it manually (or so that uploads don’t take excessively long when I’m just looking to print wallet sized photographs)

And then the other more innovative thing to do would be to integrate some sort of facial recognition technology into the process so I could take an album and choose a “Send Prints to Detected People” option. My photo printing site/software would then order and mail photographs that John was in to John, and the photographs that Suzie was in to Suzie, and so on and so forth. Each person’s face would need to be associated with their name and address.

The upside to an approach like this is ordering and sending photographs to friends becomes really easy. Your photo printing site or software, with the help of some facial recognition, basically does it for you. What photo site wouldn’t love something like this? If it worked reasonably well, it would surely increase photo printing sales for customers using the feature. And, all that heretofore useless facial recognition software would finally do something useful!

There’s an assumption here that people are only interested in photographs of themselves. I think people ARE, generally, very interested in seeing photographs of themselves, definitely more than most people would be willing to admit. But this approach certainly wouldn’t be complete. To get better coverage, maybe a social network could be thrown at the selection process, after all the problem here is basically one of relationships. “Send person x all photographs that contain person x and of all of the people person x has designated as friends and family.” Fundamentally, though, the question of whether someone would be interested in seeing a photograph of someone else isn’t something that’s easily answered (nor is the opposite question — who a person would want seeing a photograph of themselves, or, say, a photograph of their child).

Another problem here is a problem of physical addresses. With e-mail, fine, you can send separate emails out to people even if they live in the same place — no big deal. But I’d feel silly sending two sets of photographs to husband and wife that live in the same house. This could kind of be solved by working backwards from the address, if two people are designated to live at the same address, then those batches would get merged.

So it seems obvious that the facial recognition + photo ordering feature like what I’ve described wouldn’t be a slam dunk — I’d classify it as potentially interesting enough to try out and experiment with. At a minimum, photo sharing software like Picasa should make the printing process easier. My fingers are getting tired of clicking so much!

Two people have described themselves to me as ‘foodies’ in the past couple of days so that got me thinking…

How about a restaurant review blog that goes into the kitchen at restaurants and tells the story of the people who prepare the food, how they prepare it, the tools they use, and the environments they cook in? The site would focus on making the behind-the-scenes story of restaurants interesting to average people.

There’s an Indian saying that when someone cooks you food, their disposition and emotional state go straight into the food they cook. Is the person cooking your food at a restaurant happy? Do they love you? Are they sad, bitter, or angry?

It would certainly be something different from your typical restaurant review site and for the information hungry (like me!), it would be welcome new data about restaurants.

Took a break this evening and we found ourselves at the Apple Store as we meandered through the Galleria.  There, I introduced Shonali to the wonders of Apple Photo Booth.  How long have web cams been around and no one else thought of this brilliant little application?

Our private session with Andy Warhol:

…and then Shonali said something that made me very mad:

Check out my blowfish face:

Look deep into my eyes…

And a semi-normal photograph (I was happy, but not quite *that* happy…)

Steve’s company, Spur Digital, does most of the online marketing for the Houston Museum of Natural Science and he had highly recommended the Body Worlds 3 exhibit. So I’d been meaning to take Ananya and anyone else in the family interested to the exhibit. Turns out the exhibit is closing this weekend after being here in town for 6 months so I went online yesterday looking for tickets… sold out, sold out, sold out. Almost every timeslot for the exhibit was sold out, except for the night-time showings. What night-time showings?, you ask. Well, it turns out that when demand is high, the HMNS starts exhibiting 24×7 to fulfill as much of the demand as possible. So I wasn’t too excited about it, but I went ahead and bought two tickets for a showing this morning, Sunday, at 5:45 in the morning. I figured I’d get someone to go with me. Well, when morning rolled around, I was up and ready to go but couldn’t manage to get anyone to join me — not Shonali, not Ananya, not my Dad (my Mom actually told me she thought I was crazy… 🙂 ).

I went anyways and it was worth it. The exhibit was a strange and intriguing mixture of science and art. Some might dispute calling what was there ‘art’, but I’d certainly call it that even though it was positioned more as science. I mean, what else can you call it when you take the remains of two humans and a horse and create this:

Or when you take the remains of four humans and put them around a table, making it look like they are playing poker? I suspect that if the exhibit had been positioned as art, it would have upset a lot more people. As it was, I’m sure that at least some people came out of the exhibit offended.

Now the other part that was interesting… Going this morning, I was, in part, simply interested in who else would be attending an exhibit so early in the morning. I figured that I’d be among the few that had signed up for the crazy early morning viewing. I was wrong. The place was packed from wall to wall. There was a dense line of people that inched along through the exhibit. Anyone who thinks Houstonians are an inert bunch that don’t get out and take advantage of the great art, culture, and science that this city has to offer would have changed their minds this morning!

I’m a part-time Macintosh user. It’s a long story, but my wife and I actually got one of the original iMacs as a wedding gift. Yeah, I know, really nice wedding gift (shout out to John!). The best part is that we use it and love it… but I digress. Being involved full-time (and then some) in the “media center” software space and being an occasional Macintosh user, I was intrigued when Apple launched Front Row, a full-screen interface to photos, music, DVDs and videos on the Mac. But I haven’t seen Apple market this very much — no TV ads with mentions of Front Row, not a lot of play in Jobs’ keynotes, etc. I suspect it was the equivalent of someone’s 20% time at Apple and got the greenlight because people at Apple were intrigued by it, but who knows, maybe it was a requirementthat came from the top down.

Anyways, Apples seems to finally be giving Front Row some airtime in their marketing, as evidenced by this e-mail that I received last night:

(cross-posted from the SnapStream Blog)

I caught some TV last night, two quick highlights:

• Letterman’s Top 10 last night was “Top Ten Signs Osama Bin Laden Is In Love With You”… How did “You jihad me at hello” only make #4??
• Jon Stewart talked about the absurdity of the media’s attention to the meal and champagne eaten by the Jon Benet suspect on the flight that brought him back to the U.S. from Thailand.  I agree, completely absurd.  Then I was watching CNBC this morning and what do I see?  Again, some news anchor talking IN RIDICULOUS DETAIL about what the guy had for breakfast this morning.  Is there some new discipline within criminology that ties what people eat to crimes they may or may not have committed??

It looks like the folks over at Gist have launched a new mobile program guide service called UGuide… I’m downloading it now and looking forward to trying it out.  It’s a java midlet so it should work just fine on my Windows Mobile 5, Cingular 2125.  Does anyone out there have any experience with it?