Senior Product Manager at Google, and the head of Picasa Mike Horowitz has left Google. Mike Horowitz joined Google after a short stint at Applied Semantics in 2003, at lead the development of Picasa from what was originally a small acquisition for Google, into a top 3 internet photo property today. During his reign over Picasa, Horowitz supervised and managed the launch of new features for Picasa Web Albums, including facial recognition, search, GData API, mobile viewer, slideshow widget, and geotagging, and expanded Picasa support into 38 languages. Most recently he announced the launch of Picasa 3 late October,...
Google has released a major overhaul for Google Street View, delivering new functionality that makes the service easier and more friendly to use. The new Street View revolves around “Pegman” a Clippy like character that users can drag and drop anywhere to view Street View. Better still, users can hold Pegman over a location for a second to see a preview of what the Street View image looks like before deciding on the full shot. Street View also goes big screen with an inset map, allowing for better viewing of images, and quicker switching, per the screenshot above. Directions...
Google has started rolling out “SearchWiki,” a new feature that allows users to change the order of search engine results. Available only to signed in Google users, the feature allows you to move the sites that appear in rankings up or down, take them out altogether, leave notes next to specific sites and suggest new sites that are not already in the results, or are buried too far down in the results to see. Changes are stored in a users Google Account, so are available from any computer. In a post to the Google Blog, Google was quick to...
I don’t think there is an adult alive today that doesn’t remember at least one iconic photograph that appeared on the cover of Time’s LIFE magazine. Those photographs from as early as the 1750’s to now have chronicled our world and our place on it. Well word comes from Mashable’s Adam Ostrow that Google has begun adding the roughly 10 million images from the LIFE library to Google’s Image archives. At this point they have managed to get 2 million images stored into the archives and to celebrate they have launched a special page for the growing collection. As well...
Dan Tobin Smith’s “still life” photographs have shown us the marvels of exploding teddy bears chronicled in fractions of a second. His new series “Hubble Bubble” places us in the middle of a set of mysterious experiments, in labs filled with immaculate glassware, unusual receptacles, and billows of multi-colored smoke, leaving us to wonder what ends his unseen scientists are trying to achieve. Chaos is a common theme in Smith’s work, and here he uses gas to play with the notion of order and chaos in science experimentation. The yellow and white smoke above appears ready to consume the carefully...
Sometimes I forget how big the Internet is, and then something reminds me just how flabbergastingly, enormously huge the damn thing is. This time it’s Facebook, whose software engineer Doug Beaver announced that it now hosts a total of 10 billion photos. And it’s not even exclusively a photo sharing site! Furthermore, since Facebook stores four sizes for each stored photo, this actually translates to 40 billion files. However, what I find fascinating about this is that Facebook is no Photobucket; it’s not just some repository (at least from what I’ve seen) where people dump all kinds of images just...
Matt Buchanan has touched it, loved it, and put up a big gallery of real-life photographs of RIM's fourth-quarter wonder phone. Of note its is very different approach to touchscreens. No matter how many times your fingers dance on the screen like you've been trained on every other touchscreen, nothing will happen. At least, not until you push the screen all the way down and you feel a click. Yes, the screen is a giant button, one you have to punch for basically every action, even every letter you type, completely breaking the touchscreen paradigm. Surprisingly, it works. Click...
