Animoto photo videos - pure fun for your ordinary flickr collection

Posted June 6, 2008 by stephanv
Categories: entertaining
Tags: , , , ,

I’ve recently discovered Animoto, a service that lets you easily create inspiring photo presentations, with music and motion. You just have to deliver some photos from your laptop or from services like flickr, select a music from Animoto or again your laptop, and done. Animoto analyzes both, photos and music and creates a inspiring video which you can distribute by email, download or post in your facebook account or blog.

Even some less good pictures make a good presentation, like my poor shots from Silvester 2007. Unfortunately the posting to my blog didn’t work out, so you have to go to Animoto.com to check it yourself.

It is plain fun. It is easy to use. And it does the artist part for you.

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Echoes

Posted June 3, 2008 by stephanv
Categories: business, news & trends
Tags: , , , ,

macro water drop

Originally uploaded by Hypergurl.

Most of my old friends might think by this title of “Pink Floyd” with the identical title from the B side of their album “Meddle”.
Anyway, the Echoes I wanna talk today is Microsoft’s latest platform offer for telco’s.
Mary-Jo Foley writes in her ZD-blog that summary I’ll quote at first:

“1. Echoes will assign a local mobile number to each Windows Live contact
2. Via its Address Book sync capabilities, Echoes will push these new new contacts into any mobile phone (no client required)
3. The user will be able to compose an SMS or place a voice call to these contacts
4. Echoes will ensure text messages are delivered to Windows Live contacts as chat conversations, and replies will be sent back from Messenger as SMS
5. Voice calls can be connected through Echoes directly from the mobile to the Windows Live Messenger user’s PC
6. As the mobile user will appear always “online” to friends (using Echoes client emulation server), conversations also will be able to start from the Windows Live cloud, pushed to the mobile as SMS.”

some remarks on that:
1. The idea is simple and great. SMS and chat are basically the same:
short messages between 2 people. To combine computer chat with sms is just a extension to an other device.
They by Microsofts nature try to push only their own chat service (Messenger). Thats short thinking. Soon other providers will deliver the same with any chat system. Guess what the telco’s will choose?

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Salesforce dumping 4000 PC’s

Posted April 28, 2008 by stephanv
Categories: business, news & trends
Tags: , , , ,


massgrave

Originally uploaded by Zunkkis.

Rumors told, that Salesfore is dumping it’s PC’s when the lease runs out and replace them by macs. All 4000. I’ve heard that from smaller companies already. Salesforce might be the first big one doing that. It is not only a good reference for Apple, it’s a good one for Salesforce too. Because it shows the platform independence of their business applications. (I suppose they only use their owns web based software)
So they replace the hardware by some more reliable low administration demand macs which will streamline their employees work.
Smart move at all.

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Consuming news change

Posted April 11, 2008 by stephanv
Categories: business, collaboration
Tags: , ,


Daily News

Originally uploaded by swanksalot.

I was inspired by Mathew Ingram’s post “If the news is important, it will find me”. Let that line sick in for a while:

“If the news is important, it will find me”

It signals a slight change in news consuming. The traditional way was that you have (at least one) a trusted source like times magazine, CNN, or “Der Spiegel” and “Tagesschau” in Germany which you read/see from start to end to get the information, which is important to you. Those “trusted sources” did the filtering for you, they decided what’s important and what not.
Today, some keen folks are part in social networks where they get kind of alerts like: Read the rest of this post »

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OpenCoffee Club Berlin

Posted March 31, 2008 by stephanv
Categories: business



SSL22896.JPG

Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place.

Last Friday I’ve attended at the OpenCoffee Club in Berlin, a place for monthly meetings with (mostly) entrepreneurs. The guy on the left side of the picture is Oliver Beste, a entrepreneur by himself who organized the meeting.
It was a interesting mix beyond my usually software stuff and therefore very inspiring to see the wide range of ideas coming to live.

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Sleeping Beauty

Posted March 24, 2008 by stephanv
Categories: miscellaneous


SSL22878.JPG
Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place.

This Easter Monday we used the nice weather to have a walk in the landscape behind Mühlenbeck in the Brandenburg March. Like in the romance of the sleeping beauty behind the Mühlenbecker lake we stumbled upon that forgotten manor-house “Dammsmühle”. It has seen during its history people like Napoleon, Wilhelm II. , Nikolaus II., Harry Piel, Heinrich Himmler and Hildegard Knef.
Now it’s abandoned and mostly forgotten deep in the forest. Too bad. But still a beauty.

For those who can read German here is a short summary of it’s history.

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Your daily flickr photo slideshow

Posted March 13, 2008 by stephanv
Categories: entertaining, longtail
Tags: ,

A nice entertainment during a break, especially for flickr fans: flickrvision shows the current uploads to flickr from all over the world. This endless slide show gives you a feeling for the size of the flickr community.  And (mostly) nice and random photos too.

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Online Workspaces for the Masses

Posted March 10, 2008 by stephanv
Categories: better software, business, collaboration
Tags: , , ,

I’ve managed to get a Beta account of Office Live Workspace. That offers free upload of files to a workspace. The GUI is well done so far, but the upload has a strong limitation: no folder structures are supported. This might be the application I’ve so long waiting for, but that limitation shows me once again the big loss when Mindquarry was closed down. Synchronize your team files including the full directory structure with one click is a feature I’m still missing so much. That was the best solution ever.

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Flickr in Windows Life?

Posted February 1, 2008 by stephanv
Categories: better software, business, collaboration, entertaining

So Microsoft finally akquires Yahoo. That means my flickr account (which is now a Yahoo aaccount) becomes finally a Microsoft account. When they rise the fees, I’m leaving the service. Time to think about backups.

Comments: 2 Comments

A limit for ads

Posted January 10, 2008 by stephanv
Categories: business, news & trends

The FAZ, Germans “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” reported yesterday in their article: “XING meets the borders of growth” (German), that XING has removed it’s advertisements from premium customer pages after massive protests in their forums. Many customer extensively use Xing as their online business card, their virtually profile. So is happened f.e. that (invisible to them self) other users saw their profile with ads from (in worst case) competition companies.

I did always suspect, that plain advertisement in the web is overrated. It is just a contribution to information overload. And more and more people will treat it as spam. So a business model based on advertisement will work well as long as someone pays for it. But if customers start to systematic avoid ads, advertisement business will meet it’s borders. Anyway, there are better ways to promote things like reputation or referral models.

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