Software as a Service

I was in a Skateboard shop at the weekend (yeah, I know I am 46!) and they had a till that was running as a web app over a VPN. I could see it was running in browser - the guy (or should that be dude?) on the till was using FaceBook until interrupted him to buy something!
I quizzed him about the till and how it worked and although it isn’t as integrated as it could be (the Card machine was separate), it was still pretty impressive. I asked about the business model behind the device, but I think I lost him at this point and he said he didn’t own the shop (man)!

However, I did ascertain that the software (or rather Service) is from an English company called Cybertill (http://www.cybertill.co.uk/). The other part of their business is eCommerce sites which uses the same data being used by the Cybertill. Cool!

This is a very clear example of the sort of thing to come. I can imagine that this works exceptionally well for small independent Retailers (like Bath's only independent owned skateboard shop!), but it also demonstrates the way for lots of other Retailers. I can imagine that it will be the smaller retailers and the emerging markets (i.e. India, China, etc) that first adopt this technology - it will be a while before the rather conservative High Street Retailers are confident enough to go this route. But the smaller Retailers will drive this change.

What's more important here are the business models that can be used to underpin this technology. For example, it would be very straightforward to bill Retailers on a transaction basis - thus the Retailer's costs would increase in line with their sales and the technology provider can scale out the technology as and when it is required. What a change from the current situation!

Social Computing in top 500 US companies

OK, so this is a US based study, but interesting nonetheless. It shows that of the top 500 companies (as listed by the US magazine "500 Inc"), 39% of them are using Social Computing today compared to 19% a year earlier. You can find more information here: http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studiesresearch/blogstudy5.cfm

I guess the thing that I find intriguing is what these companies are using Social Computing for! The term covers such a wide range of topics, it is difficult to imagine that they are all doing the same thing. In my experience, many of these companies know they should be doing something - they just don't know exactly what!

What is really needed here is a framework that allows us to position all the different offerings in the marketplace and then enables us to make some intelligent decisions about our choices. I haven't seen one yet.

Small is the new big

I have just finished reading Seth Godin's Small is the new big and can't recommend this book enough. It is a thought provoking collection of nearly 200 short pieces originally published on his blog, but they also work exceptionally well as a book. Very easy to dip in and out of, but a great read nonetheless.

I always find it funny that some people say that digital media will kill off the paperback book. Yet I find that the more blogs I read, the more books I buy. There is about as much chance of digital media completely replacing books as the radio did for completely replacing the television.

And the fact that this book is a collection of blog entries is even more amusing!

My name's Paul and I will be your frogman today.

So, how do you take someone who isn't really interested in sea life and make a visit to an aquarium fun? In this case, the answer was simple - you put a guy in scuba gear in the tank along with the fishs and you mike him up so the visitors can ask him questions. Technically, I can imagine the most difficult part is getting a decent sound inside the divers mask, but the rest is relatively straightforward. This is a great example of someone creating an amazing customer experience. It was thoroughly compelling for young and old alike.

"What's that big green fish called?" a little girl asked. "Charlie" said Paul.

You can meet Paul daily at the Seattle Aquarium.

Restoring the old movies

Here an interesting article from the BBC news website on film restoration. It appears the old films are starting to deteriorate as the physical media ages. The answer? Digitise the movies and while you are at it, why not fix the colour and clean up the image?

I was intrigued by the amount of data generated by some of the film scanning - upto to 12TB per film when scanned at the higher resolution (with around 6,000 lines per frame). The article points out that this isn't a problem for the studio since they have a Petabyte of disk storage. But this is only 1,024TB. By my calculations that is enough for just over 80 films. Mmmm...sounds like it might be a good time to be in the storage business.

Guerilla Gardening

This is an ad campaign run by Addidas and on the front cover of this month's Dazed. Essentially, it is instructions on how to mix a wild flower seeds with some compost and make a "seed bomb". They even attach a packet of seeds to the front cover to help you on your way.

And for the really keen among you, there is even a competition for the best judged creations. You can find more information here: http://www.dazeddigital.com/projects/grun/

Power Pack 1 (PP1) for Windows Home Server went live today!

Well, the long awaited Power Pack for Windows Home Server (WHS) finally went live today. You will find the update package here and the release notes here.

It fixes the data corruption issue that some users have encountered (you only run into this if you have more than one hard disk in your home server) as well as providing 64-bit support (which you will need if any of your client PCs are running 64-bit Vista or XP). The install on the server is straightforward (it does require a server reboot) and the connectors on each of the client machines should update themselves automatically once the update has been installed and the server rebooted.

I seemed to run into an issue which required my router to be rebooted as well, but I am going to put this down to coincidence (it does happen, but not all that often).

I am running WHS on a Tranquil 7-HSA and it works really well. I had to get an update to the BIOS from Tranquil to change the boot order. The server seemed to be set up to boot off an external hard drive by default, if one was present. This doesn't matter unless (like me) you use an external hard drive to back up your server. If you leave the external drive attached and the server needs to be rebooted, you have to remember to unattach the drive while it is rebooting. A quick email to the support folks at Tranquil help fix it - they sent me a BIOS update on a flash drive.

Social networking and innovation

Came across this article today which covers the use of social networking in enterprises. This (together with "How do you successfully advertise on social networking sites?") seems to be a common thread amongst much of the social networking research.

Interestingly, one of the benefits that organisations seem to be getting out of social networking tools relates to innovation (see the references to Starbuck's "My Starbuck's Idea" and Dell's IdeaStorm. Since innovation is largely a social activity I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it is interesting to see these two threads being linked together.

Digital negatives

I came across this book recently (ISBN:0240808541) and it has turned out to be really useful. It takes you through the process of producing high quality digital negatives (i.e. negatives created using an inkjet printer and OHP media) which are the cornerstone of alternative process photography (e.g. palladium prints, cyanotypes).

Since most alternative processes require that you contact print the image, the image is ultimately limited by the size of the negative. Thus, many of the traditional photographers who use alternative processes are using large format cameras. The size of digital negatives, however, are only limited by the capability of the printer and many of today's photoprinters are capable of up to A3.

I looked into digital negatives last year when I was doing some Cyanotype printing, however, this book has provided a few clues about how I can improve the images. I used an old laser printer (HP1300) to produce a couple of digital negatives using OHP media. You will find my attempts here. The images were simply inverted in Photoshop to produce a negative and then printed. The images were OK, but weren't exactly stunning - the lack a full black and the tonal range did not match the original image.

In hindsight, the "negatives" produced on a laser printer probably lacked enough optical density to completely block out the light during the exposure to produce a pure white. These OHP negatives are not as dense as a real negative. The other issue is that I had not used a correction curve in Photoshop to map the tonal range of the digital image onto the tonal range of the cyanotype print. This is where this book really helps.

It takes you through the step-by-step process for producing a correction curve for a particular alternative process and then shows you how to use this curve to produce a high quality digital negative. While some of the technology referred to in the book is slightly out of date now, the process of producing and applying the correction curves remains the same.

It is a really useful little book, although it is a little expensive and I do wish it was in a larger format with more gallery images. The associated website (where you can download some of the digital material) could be a little more aspiring and I do think the authors missed a bit of a trick in that it could have been used as a repository for readers to upload their own correction curves for others to use.

Retouching tips in Photoshop

Came across this blog entry today which seems to cover some really useful Photoshop material, particularly for portrait work. Judging from the number of comments on the page and I am not the only one that thinks this is useful material!

The thing that I find amazing is how difficult many of these tips would be in the traditional darkroom.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/15/70-beauty-retouching-photoshop-tutorials/

Viral Marketing Videos: What makes them work?

Came across this fascinating blog entry today from Mike Laurie. It is the first time that I have seen someone try and make some of why viral videos work and why they don't. It is a great read with some thought provoking analysis.

More tone mapping

Just for the sheer hell of it! More tone mapping. These are shot in Osterley Park, West London earlier today. They consist of 3 images - one stop over exposed, one stop underexposed and one image correctly exposed. Shot using a Nikon D100 and auto bracketing. As you can see from the images, I only had a wide angle lens!

In terms of the settings, they are way over the top producing rather weird graphic type images. I am using Photomatix Pro 3.0 to produce these. You don't need any other software to produce these although I have resized these in Photoshop (click on any of the images to see a slightly larger version).

Tone mapping using HDR

HDR is a technique for producing a digital image with High Dynamic Range. Digital cameras unfortunately can only capture a limited range of exposures. So, if you take a picture in a room with light streaming through the windows, the camera often struggles to capture the scene outside. Here's an example I took in my living room - the image of the street outside is largely over exposed and parts of the room inside are underexposed (e.g. the shadow area of the chair in front of us). And even if we could capture such a wide dynamic range, an LCD monitor would struggle to display it!

On film, the situation is slightly different. Film has a much wider dynamic range and if I had shot the same image as above on a film camera, if we looked at the negative we would see that the details of the street outside would have been recorded as well as the details in the room (assuming I had exposed it properly!). However, photographic paper (required to make a print)- just like an LCD monitor - is not capable of displaying such a wide dynamic range. This is why traditional photographers end up dodging and burning prints in the darkroom - "burning" refers to exposing the highlights for additional amounts of time under the enlarger to bring out the details. In the example above, the details of the road outside would have been "burnt in" to have produced any detail on the print. Anyway, I have digressed, back to HDR.

HDR is a digital technique for combining images of the same scene that have different exposures in order to capture a wider dynamic range. In other words, you might take three images - one over exposed (to capture the darker areas), one under exposed (to capture the brighter areas) and a normally exposed image. Using HDR software, you can combine these images and effectively "flatten" out or compress the dynamic range. This will add detail to the darker shadows and bring out the detail in the over exposed highlights. It is a pretty handy technique and something where digital photography just beats traditional methods hands down.

Now, often when you see a HDR image, it has often been "tone mapped". Tone mapping is the process of associating a set of approximate tones with an image. Wikipedia covers the topic if you want more details. The resulting images have an almost graphic feel to them. It is possible to adjust the effects in the HDR software, so find something that you like.

Here's a test image I produced using Photomatix (you can see it is the trial version by the watermark) with three images - one exposed normally, one over exposed by 1 stop, one under exposed by 1 stop. I have made the effect pretty extreme in this example, but it is possible to turn down effects. You can download the trial software from here on the HDRsoft website. If you want to purchase a license (which allows you to produce images without the watermark), it will set you back around £50.

Video testimonials for car insurance

Came across this today. Apparently, here we have a car insurance company using user generated videos as testimonials. You will find the press release here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/7/prweb1073734.htm

This links to the previous blog about the power of social networking being in personal recommendations. And this would seem like a great way of making those personal recommendations just a little more personal (and presumably a little more powerful).

Predictions for 2008 - how is the year doing?

Well, we are part of the way through 2008 and I wondered how the predictions made at the beginning of the year are fairing. Here's a good list to start with: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/2008_web_predictions.php

Toxel.com

Stumbled across this today. As it says, Toxel.com it is a "Design, Inspiration and Technology Blog". Take a look at the unforgettable advertisements page or the creative adverts pages. You will find a list of the most popular pages on the About page.

Michael Adams in Yosemite NP

I found this on Robert Scoble's FastCompany.TV website and found it really interesting. It is an interview with Michael Adam's (Ansel Adam's son) shot in the Yosemite National Park. The backdrop is truely awe inspiring (even when watched over the web!) and the content is a "must see" for any Ansel Adams fans (I hadn't realised that Ansel Adams' original interest was music!).

We are promised more videos to come featuring Ansel's darkroom, so it is well worth keeping an eye on!

You will find the interview here: http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/michael-adams-yosemite