Archive for the ‘images’ Category
- In: Dazzle | images | Jaded | New York Times | The | To | TV
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Modern tech life teems with longstanding quandaries, questions that never seem to go away. Mac or Windows? Turn off the computer every night or let it sleep? Plasma or L.C.D.?
Fortunately, that last question will soon have an answer. There’s a new TV on the block, and its picture is so amazing, it makes plasma and L.C.D. look like cave drawings.
It’s called organic light emitting diode, or O.L.E.D. This technology has been happily lighting up the screens of certain cellphone and music-player models for a couple of years now, but Sony is the first company to offer it in a TV screen. It’s called the XEL-1, and it’s available only from SonyStyle stores. Its picture is so incredible, Sony should include a jaw cushion.
At a cooperative Best Buy store, I did a little test. I set the XEL-1 up next to state-of-the-art plasmas and L.C.D. sets — all hooked up to the same video signal for easy comparison — and recorded the reactions of shoppers and employees. Their adjectives for this picture included “astonishing,” “astounding,” “incredible” (twice) and “amazing” (five times).
They were right. The XEL-1’s picture is so colorful, vibrant, rich, lifelike and high in contrast, you catch your breath. It’s like looking out a window. With the glass missing.
Name a drawback of plasma or L.C.D. — motion blur, uneven lighting across the panel, blacks that aren’t quite black, whites that aren’t quite white, limited viewing angle, color that isn’t quite true, brightness that washes out in bright rooms, screen-door effect up close — and this TV overcomes it.
Plasma is supposed to offer darker blacks than L.C.D., but O.L.E.D. trumps both of them. Next to this TV, even the blacks on the critically adored Pioneer Kuro plasma screen look very dark gray. Blacks on Sony’s O.L.E.D. TV are jet black. Absolute black. Black-hole black — and kuro even means black in Japanese.
(If you’re a TV-technology geek and you’re getting a distinct feeling of déjà vu, congratulations. All of this does sound exactly like the descriptions of S.E.D. television prototypes demonstrated years ago by Toshiba and Canon. Unfortunately, that equally impressive picture technology never made it out of the lab.)
To make this thing even more drool-worthy, the XEL-1’s screen is only three millimeters thick — shirt-cardboard thick. If they could build a laptop with a screen this thin, it would make the MacBook Air look like a suitcase.
- In: DailyTech | Devise | for | Google | images | Researchers | VisualRank
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Google creates PageRank for images
When Google introduced its PageRank algorithm long ago it allowed web searchers to have a metric they could look at and easily determine the authority of a webpage. Google researchers are now saying they have developed technology to do for images what PageRank did for web pages.
The New York Times reports that a pair of Google scientists presented a paper called “PageRank for Product Image Search” at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing. The software technology is being called VisualRank and is at its core an algorithm that blends techniques for recognizing images and technology for weighting images and ranking them based on what looks the most similar.
Google already has an image search engine that is widely held to be one of the largest image databases online. The current image database pulls images based on clues from text associated with each image. This for instance is why you might get an image of President George W. Bush if you did an image search for Republican.
What the paper the Google researchers presented proposes is a method to actually rank images based on things in the image. Technology has been in place to recognize faces in images for a while, but identifying other things by computer in an image that humans can identify at a glance like a car or mountain has lagged.
Google researchers Shumeet Baluja and Yushi Jing told the New York Times, “We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework.”
Five Best Instant Messengers
Posted on: April 4, 2008
- In: Adium | Best | Digsby | email | Five | Google Chat | Google Talk | IM | images | Instant Messengers | Meebo | Miranda IM | Pidgin | social networking | Trillian
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On Tuesday we asked for your favorite instant messaging applications, and over 550 comments later, we’ve culled it down to the most popular five. From web-based chat to desktop clients to tools that combine IM, email, and social networking, your nominations spanned a wide range of instant messaging applications. Let’s take a closer look at the five most voted-for apps, and face them off against each other in a final showdown to crown the ultimate favorite.
Digsby (Windows)
The youngest application by far to make the Hive Five, Digsby has taken the world by storm since we first mentioned it in February. Boasting integration with all of your IM networks as well as your email and social networking (Facebook and MySpace included), Digsby is converting new users left and right with their simple but appealing formula: IM + Email + Social Networking = Digsby. Currently a Windows only app, Digsby’s developers promise that Mac and Linux versions are in the oven—and that they’re constantly squashing bugs from the still-young Windows version.
Pidgin (Windows/Linux)
Formerly known as Gaim, this cross-platform, open source IM client has a huge following on both Windows and Linux platforms, estimating over 3 million users in 2007. Much like Firefox, Pidgin is open and extensible, meaning you can add your own improved functionality and tools to Pidgin by simply installing a plug-in (like one of these 10 must-have Pidgin plug-ins.)
Meebo (Web)
By far the most popular web-based chat application, Meebo boasts support for all popular chat networks, video and voice chat, and even an iPhone interface. Meebo’s main appeal is that it works wherever you are, no matter what operating system you’re using, as long as you’ve got a web browser and an internet connection. Can’t go wrong with that.
Adium (Mac OS X)
The overwhelming favorite chat app for OS X, Adium puts Apple’s default IM application, iChat, to shame. Like Pidgin, Adium is highly customizable, extensible with plug-ins, and works across all your favorite IM networks. In fact, Adium is kind of like a brother from a different mother to Pidgin; it got its brain from Pidgin’s daddy, libpurple, but its looks straight from the dangerous maiden that is OS X.
Trillian (Windows)
Once an overwhelming favorite for cross-network instant messaging, Trillian has lost a lot of users to newer apps like Digsby or fresher ones like Pidgin. That said, the long-awaited update to Trillian, Trillian Astra, is still in alpha, and those who have tried it continue to place all of their IM trust to Trillian. In the future, Trillian is also promising a Mac release along with an iPhone version, so it may have plenty of life in it yet.
Now let’s see if we can’t crown a favorite.
Honorable mention goes to Miranda IM and Google Talk/Google Chat, both of which barely missed the cut.
Whether or not your chat app of choice made the top five, let’s hear what you love about it in the comments.
- In: Crunchbase | images | Need A Job | photos | TagCow | TechCrunch | Upload
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New service TagCow caused a bit of a stir over the weekend. The product seemingly solves the problem of auto-categorization and tagging of photos, something that seems to still be beyond the processing power and software skills of most startups.
Users upload photos – thousands of them if they like – and within a few minutes the photos are returned with stunningly accurate descriptive keywords that facilitate searching and browsing later on. The product worked so well, and the site had so little description of the technology behind it, that I speculated that humans were doing the work in the background.
And….I was right. A reader sent in a tip that they saw the service on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, which is a web service that gets people to do things that are fairly hard for computers to do. TagCow is actually a perfect fit for Mechanical Turk.
Users are paid 4 cents to properly tag a group of five photos. I tagged a few photos with “TechCrunch” twenty times each, collected my 4 cents, and moved on. My guess is it would take about two minutes to properly tag the five photos. That means if you work steady and without breaks, you can make $1.20/hour. More if you are speedier.
| Website: | www.tagcow.com |
| Founded: | March, 2008 |
TagCow, launched in March 2008, is a service that tags your photos with descriptive keywords. If there’s a mountain in the photo, it’s tagged. A dog? yep. A yellow cup? Absolutely. It does people, too. Upload an image of a person and say who it… Learn More
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