More information here http://code.google.com/webfonts and here http://blog.typekit.com/2010/05/19/typekit-and-google/
With iphone application development, the Princeton University Press and Project Catalyst widgets, design and an interactive presentation at denmark’s cop 15 United Nations climate change conference, Lucidcircus is proving it is a one-stop shop for media technology.
Get “the world’s smartest op-ed page” on your iPhone. Every day, Project Syndicate provides new and EXCLUSIVE commentaries on economics, international politics, science, ethics and public affairs, and much more – all written by the world’s leading academics, statesmen, policymakers, and activists, and all completely FREE OF CHARGE. Download today and see why readers of more than 400 quality newspapers in 150 countries turn to Project Syndicate for a range of provocative, expert analysis that no other news service can match – and that news leaders like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times frequently cite.
http://phillycreativejobs.com/jobmarket/job_market_20091101.aspx
by Bruce Pales, 1 Nov 2009
Bruce Pales heads up commercial activities at Prague based 360 Cities. Bruce is pleased to play a key role in bringing virtual reality photography into the mainstream, specifically via the creation of commercial propositions for panorama photographers. Bruce can be contacted at bruce.pales@360cities.net
Like most people, I was struck by the beauty of the photography when I encountered 360cities.net for the first time back in late 2007. I’m a commercial guy with a finance background and extensive experience in Business Development and Sales, and I get as big a thrill hanging out in gallery cafes as I do viewing the exhibits and an even greater thrill when I see a particularly attractive income statement or balance sheet. I’d seen panoramic photography before, on real-estate and travel websites, but I’d never seen such beautiful, high quality photography (“fully-spherical, high-resolution immersive imagery” is the way its devotees refer to it) of such interesting places neatly located on a map as I encountered on 360 Cities, and I was hooked.
I got lured into 360 Cities by a couple of beer drinking friends – one who invested in the company as an angel and the other who had helped the young founder of 360 Cities create a business plan and raise seed capital. So here I was, January 2008, sitting in our office in Prague with the founding visionary team of two, looking at the various possibilities of making 360 Cities commercially viable. At the time, 360cities.net had published about 5,000 immersive panoramic images (“panos”) taken by a small but enthusiastic member base of about 40, with the goal of growing that to 100,000 images from 1,000 members someday, and we were keen to generate sufficient revenue to allow this to happen.
Creating and selling virtual tours was an obvious way for the company to earn money. You’ve seen virtual tours on tourism and other websites. Many of our photographer members with sufficient programming skills were already creating virtual tours for clients in which the panos and the tour itself rest on the clients’ sites, which is not a bad proposition. Nevertheless, there are three disadvantages in following this approach:
The performance of the tours depends on the robustness of the client’s server, which can result in tours where panos either load slowly or don’t load at all.
The photographers spend a lot of time and effort creating and integrating the virtual tours into the client’s website.
The tours are static and cannot be easily distributed to other websites in order to be seen by a wider audience.
The 360 Cities platform is a powerful and time-saving way for pano photographers to publish their work as individual images. So we decided to extend to our members those same benefits for the creation of virtual tours (which we call “Immersive Tours”). We wanted our members to be able to build tours for their customers easily on our platform using only a web interface, such that the resulting tour would appear on 360cities.net and be easily embeddable in the client’s site and elsewhere with one line of HTML.
360 Cities is also a Premium Content Partner of Google Earth, which means our content is automatically included in Google Earth’s Preview and Gallery layers. This is of big value to our members and their clients, who like the idea of the additional audience for their tour images.
We began creating our online Immersive Tour Builder in early 2009 and officially rolled it out to our members in the summer. Commercial success thus far has been encouraging:
A growing number of our photographer members are building “Immersive Tour Widgets” on the 360 Cities platform, citing the fact that the Immersive Tour Builder is easy to learn and use.
Members have experienced some early successes in selling the Immersive Tours to businesses, who appreciate the unique distribution of their tours on 360cities.net and images on Google Earth.
Immersive Tours embedded in clients’ websites are performing at the same level as they do on 360cities.net.
Today, almost two years later as I write this, we’re approaching 40,000 published panos on 360cities.net by over 700 photographers. That 100,000 panos from 1,000 photographers dream will become a reality next year in 2010. Our team has grown to five – although we still have the feeling that we’re understaffed. Best of all, we now have a solid revenue model in our online Tour Builder and Tour Widget product. More reasons for pano photographers to join and grow with 360 Cities. Cheers!
360Cities is a partner of and represented by lucidCircus in North America. For more information contact ezra@lucidcircus.com
This post is copied from Insightr. Please visit their site for more information.
The Ultimate Comparison between Google Analytics & Yahoo Web Analytics – Blog – Insightr Consulting.
At Insightr Consulting we are big fans of free web analytics products for our clients. Free used to mean less capability, less reliability and less confidence that the product would be able to service the needs of business.
The last 12 months have seen the Google Analytics (GA) product evolve into a serious contender for a do-it-all product for most businesses, a period that has also seen Yahoo! get serious with analytics through the purchase of the not-so-well-know European product called Indextools – the decision by Yahoo! to make the Indextools product free with a rebrand into Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA) has turned the free market into a rich, dynamic, competitive space that’s seeing incredible product innovation.
Insightr Consulting are certified in Google Analytics through the Individual Certification programme as well as being a pioneer member of the Yahoo Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN). Our clients use a mixture of Google Analytics, Omniture Site Catalyst and Yahoo Web Analytics, with the majority of new businesses adopting either GA or YWA. In Singapore where we are based (and indeed across Asia) budgets for analytics are not as formalised as they are in markets like the US and Europe, so free tools are very popular here.
This article is the outcome of over 5 weeks work carrying out a feature by feature comparison of the Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics products – a project that required a large overhaul after Google announced new features on the 20th October (more examples of the product innovation we’re seeing). Yahoo Web Analytics is still a largely unknown product to business and analysts alike as the product is only available through the YWACN or via Yahoo! advertising sales teams – this comparison should give you a pretty good feel for what you’re missing.
As our friends at Yahoo would say, this is perhaps an unfair comparison – as Indextools always liked to think of the old product as 80% of Omniture at 10% of the price. They weren’t wrong. In fact as an Omniture Site Catalyst user for over 7 years (how many of you can recall SC7?) the Yahoo offering is in many ways more powerful than Site Catalyst; especially when it comes to ‘advanced’ features such as segmentation which for Site Catalyst are only available with an additional “Discover on Demand” license.
Some of you will disagree with our analysis, and particularly with our scoring system – we’re hoping that the comparison is a thought starter and something that will lead to your consideration of the YWA product as a tool worth considering. We feel the scores are fair based on our usage of products and the way our clients will use them.
So, here’s the presentation – it’s best if you view it in full screen otherwise the screenshots will be too small. We apologise for the low quality of some of the screenshots – this was required to keep the file size down. It’s also a long document, over 50 pages – but that’s because both of these tools are powerful and are feature packed! We hope you enjoy it and get value from our work:
Oxford, United Kingdom: Areté Magazine relaunches with the release of Issue 29. The old flash site was recreated in XHTML/CSS/JS using WordPress as the core and Content Management System. Custom PHP, jQuery and some AJAX enhancements were implemented to compete the job.
http://www.aretemagazine.co.uk/
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“‘Areté is a journal as exquisite in its execution as in its intentions.” – John Updike
“Incredible value – and no one interested in contemporary culture (novels, poetry, plays, films, reputations) should miss this fiery, funny, robustly intelligent commentary on our arts and times.” – William Boyd
“Areté carries a list of contributors which any editor would do hoopla for.” – Irish Times
“Vous m’avez donné un grand plaisir … votre revue m’est très sympathique et proche.” – Milan Kundera
Top 10 Web Collaboration Tools That Aren’t Google Wave – Collaboration – Lifehacker.
This email-organizing service is openly pitching itself to those left out of the first round of Wave preview accounts, and not entirely without reason. It doesn’t do half the things that Wave claims to do, but it does free your coworkers from having to read through freakishly long “RE: FWD: FWD:” letters just to understand what the original question or discussion was. Add CC:Betty to your cc: list on a topic you want to get started, and the webapp does the work of organizing each person’s contributions, different attachment types, chronology, and who’s been left out of the chain. Even if everybody doesn’t bother to check in at the Betty page for the discussion, the person trying to make sense of it all will be glad they can do so. (Original post)
It is, of course, the software that powers Wikipedia, and might seem a bit dated in the light-speed-paced world of webapps. Still, MediaWiki’s power lies in how easy it is for multiple people to make and commit changes to a document, link inside and out of other pages, create page structures and hierarchies on the fly, and work from pretty much any browser on Earth. Nobody needs to sign into any account unless mandated by the administrator, and everybody gets the information they need without having to fiddle any knobs. (Original post)
This meeting facilitator aims to eliminate the mess of emails and mass confusion over whether it was meeting room 130 at 2pm, or room 230 at 1pm. Create an account, plug in your coworkers’ emails or SMS numbers, plug in a few times that work for you, and TimeBridge takes on the work of contacting them all and asking which of those times work, then presenting the results for your consideration. The webapp also reminds participants of the details by email or SMS, and a just-released iPhone app helps you keep things moving along with an agenda and details view. (Original post)
“Isn’t that the thing that Google turned Usenet into?” Yes, but Groups lets a, um, group of like-minded folks hash out arguments, answer questions, and point to helpful resources without software or constraints. Users of a group can rate posts for helpfulness, search out answers across their own groups or other similar-themed topics, and get their answers and responses delivered from an easily filtered email source. It’s an oft-overlooked tool in an age of fancy-pants social tools, but it gets everyone hooked up and talking pretty quickly. (Original post)
It’s easy to ask everyone’s take on a piece of text, but much harder to actually incorporate their ideas, revisions, and word choices without spending twice as much time as on the original. TextFlow, a free Adobe Air app that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, takes in all the documents spawned from an original, analyzes the changes, and presents them to you to show what’s different, accept what you want to change, and make it easy to see how far you’ve moved off the original draft. For a certain kind of work, it’s a real time saver, and it makes it easy to respond when your collaborators ask why their masterful lead-in sentence didn’t make the cut. (Original post)
Makers of “webinar” software are feverishly pitching the idea of at-your-desk conferences as a money-saving alternative to travel these days. DimDim, an open-source meeting platform, offers web users a truly money-saving experience, with up to 20 users able to view a presentation, three of them with microphone access, with no software installations required. It’s a nice step up if you need something a little more professional than a social video chat room, and is surprisingly responsive on freehand drawing, text, audio, and even screencasting across a variety of connection speeds. (Original post)
How many 10-minute verbal explanations would have worked much better as a one-minute cocktail napkin sketch? Plenty of them, we’d suspect. For ideas and projects where drawing a line through your thoughts helps keep them together, MindMeister is a great helper. Not only does their web-based design tool allow for easy branching, notating, and organization, but if you just want to jam in a few ideas to be molded into shape later, it allows for email additions. You can, of course, share, publish, and collaborate on your mental diagrams, and doing so might just save you a really unnecessary phone call or stop-and-chat. (Original post)
File-sharing service Drop.io is really convenient because it lets you store up to 100 MB of files without a sign-up, password, or software. Present.io, a group-focused tangent, lets you gather a team of chatters around a set of images, text, audio, or even video files and let them tell you what rocks and what stinks about them. Those away from a computer can call in mid-stream and leave MP3 voicemails for all to hear or join in a phone conference call. Meanwhile, the “drop” administrator keeps the show moving by queuing up new files on viewers’ screens, and nobody has to log in or be accepted to join in—they just need the right URL. (Original post)
Not that we aren’t at least thinking of holding our Lifehacker chat and brainstorming sessions in Wave, but for the time being, Campfire does a remarkably good job of letting multiple people yak it out and learn from each other. It’s searchable, it makes uploading files to everyone easy, it can be a walled garden or open to those you link in, and it sits nicely in a browser tab, changing its page title when new chats arrive. There’s a fair number of third-party clients and input tools available for 37Signals’ collaborative chat platform, but it works just fine as a quiet spot to talk. (Original post)
It’s hard to jump in and describe the best features about Zoho’s vast suite of online editing and group organization tools, because so much changes on a week-to-week basis. That said, if you find Google Docs to be impressive for a single user, but not a great back-and-forth facilitator, Zoho is where you should look next. It’s able to handle both the lower-level tasks of group editing, document sharing, and other work, as well as the milestone tracking, group chat, invoice creation, and other tasks needed by teams that aren’t sitting right next to each other. It’s good stuff, and it’s free. (Original post)
lucidCircus and 360 Cities to incorporate virtual reality panoramic photography in website development projects
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (17 September 2009) – lucidCircus announced today that it has begun offering its website customers high-end virtual tour technology in cooperation with 360cities.net, the leading panoramic photography network on the web. 360 Cities’ Immersive Tour Widget product will form the core of the offering. The Tour Widget, a hosted solution, has been developed to showcase high-resolution, spherical panoramic photography on 360 Cities’ platform.
The announcement was made by lucidCircus US Managing Director Ezra Alexander Cohen, who said, “360 Cities’ position as the leading site for immersive panoramic photography and its extensive network of VR photography experts makes them a great partner for incorporating virtual tour technology in our customer work. Their hosted tour solution is efficient and straightforward and will bring a lot of value to what we offer our web clients.”
Jeffrey S. Martin, CEO of 360Cities.net, mirrored Mr. Cohen’s optimism. “lucidCircus’ track record in winning significant web design and re-design contracts makes them a very attractive partner for us”, Martin said. “As a leading design and integration firm their channels will form an obvious and valuable path to market for our new hosted virtual tour product.”
About LucidCircus
lucidCircus is a graphic design studio specializing in cohesive creative projects spanning several mediums – identity, print, motion, audio, and the web. Established in1998, lucidCircus is headquartered simultaneously in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Prague, Czech Republic.
Contact:
Ezra Alexander Cohen
About 360 Cities
360 Cities, a Premium Content Partner of Google Earth, is dedicated to promoting geo-mapped, VR panorama photography and VR photographers around the world. The 360 Cities community of VR photography specialists publishes its high quality work via the 360 Cities platform to a wide audience of casual internet users, photography enthusiasts, tourists, and anyone who loves a truly immersive web experience. 360 Cities is a Netherlands limited company with a wholly owned subsidiary in Prague, Czech Republic.
Contact:
Jeffrey Martin
World Panoramic Photography – 360 Cities.
360Cities has a new mission and we’d like you to know about it.
Our first mission was to become the world’s #1 website for panoramic photography.
Now that we have succeeded in that, we’d like all our members and contributors to know that membership in 360 Cities can be a means to
earning money. See the following links:
1. GET INSPIRED
We now have a gallery of cool immersive tours, created by members like you:
http://www.360cities.net/virtual-tour/gallery
2. CREATE YOUR OWN
Take advantage of our hosted, server based virtual tour solution:
http://www.360cities.net/account/tour-builder/new-tour
3. SELL TOURS AND MAKE MONEY DOING WHAT YOU LOVE
A brief introduction to selling:
http://www.360cities.net/account/tour-builder/salesman-faq
For general info on our virtual tours, see our FAQ:
http://www.360cities.net/account/tour-builder/faq
(disclosure/plug… we’re helping them put together the Builder using Flex)
