Today while browsing Digg I came across an interesting video presentation (shown below) that talks about next generation image resizing techniques. The primary focus for such techniques is to combat today’s wide variety of multimedia devices and screen resolutions. In essence, images today don’t degrade across different screen resolutions adequately, rather they just become smaller and harder to see. Therefore it seems more beneficial to crop and re-target the image to focus on the important elements. According to the video the most practical way to do this is by a using a complex set of algorithms. These algorithms determine what parts of the image are “important” and then snip “less-important” parts as needed.

As a designer who has been taught to never stretch an image out of scale it’s hard for me to see this technique working well and looking good. But I do have to admit the video offers some compelling evidence that, if refined, could offer an answer to resolution independent image viewing. Either way, apparently Adobe feels this could be the future because they just snapped up one of the co-creators of the project.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk[/youtube]

It’s not often that I can give props to two Denver area companies, but today the Imulus crew went out to lunch to one of the frequent stops, Spicy Pickle. Before we entered the store we were greated by a guy obviously trying to solicit business for something; this time it was Boulder based Mocapay. His sell was compelling: send a text message to this number (I forget the number) and you will receive a code which will give you an $8 credit on your next purchase inside Spicy Pickle. Not afraid to sell our souls for marketing purposes, Bruce and I decided to partake.

To my surprise it worked as sold. I ordered my Athena Pizzette plus a Half n Half Ice Tea and my grand total of $10.23 only cost me a $2.23 after the $8 discount. If you complete the account setup and deposit $10 in your account, you’ll receive $700 total of promotional offers, not bad!

Once I had a chance to digest both my pizzette and the Mocapay service, I came to the conclusion that just swiping my credit card was a bit easier. The cell phone was a nice convenience but usually I have my wallet handy and that seems to work fine for me. I really think Mocapay’s target market is the youth between ages of 10 and 16. That age group often lacks credit cards but more and more they are carrying cell phones. Perhaps mom and dad can load their kids up with Mocapay moolah rather then giving them plastico-fantastico. I haven’t completed the account setup yet, but it appears to be a pretty sound service, which I’ll likely mess around with in the future.

Recently at Imulus we started utilizing a new DNS service by the name of OpenDNS. It’s an alternative to the DNS servers provided by our internet service provider. The key to OpenDNS is that it’s a project supported by people who embrace an open source mentality. In essence, people who believe that a fast and reliable DNS server should be a public good.

Here’s the jist — when a computer connects to the internet it talks to a Domain Name Server in order to find locations of websites and then communicate with them. Therefore the speed of a domain server can drastically effect how quickly a page is loaded on a user’s system. OpenDNS provides a huge cache of sites, meaning that a connection to a site doesn’t have to make as many jumps to bring in the content. Further, OpenDNS is smart, it takes a misspelled address like www.google.cmo and turns it into www.google.com automatically. Last, OpenDNS has phishing protection for sites that attempt to spam or steal personal information.

All these factors have lead us to use OpenDNS, and we strongly suggest you give it a gander.

I just got done reviewing SnapPages and my initial impression is WOW! It appears that much thought was given to the user-interface and features that go into SnapPages. SnapPages users aggregate pictures, messages “gabs” and events all under one application. The developers were looking to design a web application for entry level web users, and I think they have succeeded.

SnapPages is one of the nicer Flash RIA websites I’ve seen and I think it will do well with the entry level web-user if the company can market to that audience effectively.

Personally, I don’t see myself using this application since I would rather use the combination of iCal, iPhoto / Gallery2 and straight email to accomplish my daily tasks. I’m also missing the revenue model for SnapPages.

Kudos to the developers for building such a nice app and offering it for free!

For the longest time I’ve been trying to find an web-based answer to managing my 10,000 + photo collection. I’ve had very specific criteria in mind for the ultimate photo management solution:

• It must auto-generate thumbnails, mid-sized images and link to the full resolution version
• The application should be easy to manage and update.
• The management must allow me to upload pictures from several computers, rather then just one machine, al la iPhoto / .Mac.
• Storage cannot be a limitation.

My search led me to several programs before finally selecting Gallery. First off, it’s Free, which is always a good thing. After installing MySQL and PHP5 on my OSX machine, I had Gallery up and running in no time. The install process is very friendly and if you have a rudimentary understanding of Apache you should be good to go.

The next step is to integrate it with Drupal and turn this puppy live.