Author: rakesh

While I was visiting my sister in Berkeley over the July 4th weekend, we got out and did some hiking in El Cerrito (town just North of Berkeley). Here’s my first attempt at a stitched together panoramic shot…

(you really want to see large or larger version)

Some quick lessons learned for myself for future panorama attempts:

• use the same the shutter and aperture speed on every photograph (I had to manually adjust brightness and contrast on each photo above to even get close and I lost more detail than I would have liked in the process)
• I used AutoStitch to build this image — but it unfortunately only worked on 5 out of 9 of my images. It didn’t link the other 4 into the panorama above. And it started out only stitching together 3 of the 9 — I had to tweak the alpha, beta and number of retries parameters to get it to recognize 5. I could have done with less intelligence on the part of AutoStitch. I would gladly have just told it the sequence of my images. Is there better photo stitch software?
• A tripod would have been nice. 🙂 Without one, the alignment of each frame was off the next one by enough that by the end, when I was ready to crop the final product down to a rectangle, I probably lost 5% of the potential height of the Panorama.  Another way to approach this would have be to pad each frame out so that my target image would have remained intact, even after cropping.

We enjoyed ghazals at Anil Uncle’s house last weekend… A ghazal (pronounced just like “guzzle”) is an “Urdu poem, vocal song style” (courtesy of Google Web Definitions). Basically it’s Urdu poetry that is sung. I love the music but can’t claim to have anything more than a broken understanding of the underlying poetry. Shonali, on the other hand, eats and breathes this stuff. Two photographs of the living room (there were two other rooms in Uncle’s house where people were hanging out, eating, talking… it was great):

This emarketer brief says people are paying money for mobile applications like MapQuest (average of $3.99 / month) on their cell phones.

Wacky, when a lot of these things are free (like Google Maps Mobile which I use all the time) with an unlimited data plan.  And with all the other useful things you can do on a cell phone with an unlimited data plan, I have to believe that mobile phones will mimic the web.
But then the mobile service providers also hold the keys to resolving the big problem with the mobile web (at a high level, there has to be better integration betweeen services and phone platforms… a separate post on this later).

What’ll it take for mobile service providers to give up their walled gardens?

Kevin Smith is responding to a movie critic… and how!

This is exactly what I was talking about when I wrote that movie makers should respond to their critics (though I never imagined it would be as much fun as Kevin’s response!)

(hat-tip to Jeremy)

Got this by e-mail yesterday… Two different news sources commenting on the same analyst study.  One says this space will exceed $48B, the other says $44B… hey, what’s $4B between friends?

It’s always interesting to see a flurry of articles loosely relating to the same topic and that’s what I’ve seen in the past couple of days around the topic of content creators connecting with their audiences.

I wrote something recently about how movie makers should respond to reviews of their products.

And then this weekend the New York Times wrote an article about how TV show fans and creators are connecting on the Internet.  An excerpt from the article:

“…television viewers are migrating en masse to the Internet, looking not only to watch their favorite shows online but also for ways to discuss and engage with those shows.”

The same New York Times writes about how theater producers are using the web to connect reach and galvanize their audiences:

“…the Internet has provided a new and, some say, vastly improved set of tools to generate [word of mouth]: not just e-mail blasts but also Web sites, banner ads, search-engine pop-ups and blog coverage. In the last few years these tools have reshaped the way the theater reaches its audience.”

And then, as the pendulum swings the other way, the legal department at Paramount works overtime to alienate their audience, as reported on LostRemote earlier this week.

People who are creating media are beginning to interact with their audiences — it’s such an obvious thing.  It’s happening in software, where small and large developers alike rely on getting direct feedback from customers on their products.  It’s happening in music, as Ethan Kaplan talked about at Gnomedex.  And there’s no doubt that conversations about TV shows, movies, theater, and all other types of media are happening and will continue to happen regardless through the blogosphere and through various online communities.  But, the exciting and new thing here is that the content creators are starting to participate so those conversations are about to get a lot more interesting.

Excerpts from interesting things read in the past week or two:

• Guy Kawasaki’s Ten (Actually Fifteen) Questions with Dr. Sandor Gardos: an interesting and personally relevant excerpt:
• “Question: What can an ecommerce startup learn from your experiences selling sex toys online?Answer: Find a niche that is currently under-served in the way you want to serve them. Then, continue to mine the data, listen to your customers, and keep creating ever more experiences that are *amazing* for them. Also, stop thinking that you are selling a product—that puts you into commoditization and the only thing you can compete on is price. You are selling a *solution* to a problem that your customer may not even know they had. Finally, forget about all the latest trends and gee-whiz technology; if it doesn’t really help the majority of your customers, it is worthless or worse.”
• Guy Kawasaki links to three essays on social networking:
• 5 reasons why social networks fail5 reasons why social networks can succeed

  Situational Relevance in Social Networking Websites

• Another link from Guy Kawasaki (I’m learning a lot from this guy):
• AdAge published its annual Largest National Advertisers report. Great info for every marketer and any company that is using an advertising business model.
• Quick skim of the report shows that $8B of the $150B in advertising that was measured in 2005 was spent on the Internet. This is the disparity in ad dollars spent online vs. those spent on television that Pud mentioned in his talk at about at Gnomedex.
• John Batelle Tips on Ads that Work from Neilsen/Norman eyetracking study:
• …people do not look at static ads with graphic treatment. Users seem to “zone out” (with their peripheral vision) ads and other site elements that have clearly distinguishable ad features such as graphics and colors that make the ads look different from the rest of the site, or animated ads….When users DO look at ads with graphics, those ads usually have:
  -Heavy use of large, clear text
  -A color scheme that matches the site’s style
  -Attention-grabbing proprieties such as black text on a white background, words such as “free” and interactive (UI)
• KP’s Seven Rules for Software Startups from Paul Kedrosky
• Instant Value to customers – solve a problem or create value with the first use
• Viral adoption – Pull, not push. No direct sales force required
• Minimum IT footprint, preferably none. Hosted SaaS is best.
• Simple, intuitive user experience – no training required.
• Personalized user experience – customizable
• Easy configuration based on application or usage templates
• Context aware – adjust to location, groups, preferences, devices, etc.
• Scoble says, “Sorry, I don’t do Social Networks anymore“
• TED conference videos available online
• Venture Capitalist David Cowan links to “Television 2.0” companies (including Delivery Agent, which he covers in another post) that Bessemer has made investments in
• Many to Many is a great group weblog focused on social software
• From Lost Remote, Nielsen is planning on measuring video viewing on “alternate” platforms including PCs and mobiles
• Also from Lost Remote, a new research study shows people don’t mind watching video over the web.

I’m going to try to do this more often — it’s largely for my own benefit, as a way of archiving interesting things that I’m reading and thinking about.

I spent July 4th hanging out with my sister and her housemates at the Berkeley Marina Pier, where they had a sort of carnival going on.  While we sat in our front row seats for the fireworks, an idea occurred to me.  It seems pretty obvious, but here’s the idea:

People are always in groups at events like these — some couples, some families, some friend groups.  And people may or may not have a camera amongst their group, and even where there is one, most people shy away from asking someone to take a photograph of their group.  So the idea basically goes like this:

1) someone from an online photo printing company, say Ofoto, should be at events like these

2) they should run around taking pictures of families, friends, and couples that they see

3) they should hand out cards with a URL on it that will take them to the photographs from the event on the Ofoto website

You’d have a certain number of people visit the Ofoto website and from there some people would share the photographs by e-mail with other members of their family and some people would actually order prints of their photographs.  Ofoto entices potential customers with something free, gets referals to other potential customers and potentially also drives sales of photo prints.  Everyone wins.

(a larger version of my favorite from the group below…)