lucidCircus

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

Top 10 Web Collaboration Tools That Aren’t Google Wave – Collaboration – Lifehacker.

10. Cc:Betty

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)

9. MediaWiki

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)

8. TimeBridge

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)

7. Google Groups

“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)

6. TextFlow

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)

5. DimDim

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)

4. MindMeister

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)

3. present.io

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)

2. Campfire

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)

1. Zoho

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)

7 Fresh and Simple Ways to Test Cross-Browser Compatibility.

Often a web designer/coder will need to test their creation out on browsers or platforms they don’t possess. This list will surely come in handy.

I’ve cut/pasted the intro and the list; check the link to FreelanceFolder.com for brief reviews of each one.

This post is written for designers, developers, or anyone else who has struggled with testing their websites across multiple browsers.

As little as one year ago, there were almost no good options for testing cross-browser compatibility of websites. The tools out there usually had significant drawbacks — either in cost, capabilities, or time required. Lately, though, there have been a lot of newcomers to the browser testing world, some of which offer truly excellent services.

In this article we’ve listed 8 (7 +1)  fresh and simple tools for cross-browser compatibility testing, tools that actually make this stuff pretty easy. Not only that, but every single one of these tools can be used for free.

#1 — Xenocode Browser Sandbox

#2 — CrossBrowserTesting.com

#3 — IETester

#4 — BrowsrCamp

#5 — Litmus

#6 — NetRenderer

#7 — BrowserShots

Bonus #8 — Adobe MeerMeer

I tend to forget music that I hear once, like, and mean to check out again.  So this time I’ll make a note of it here.  I’ll call this Music To Work To.

http://www.diwonmusic.com

diwon defies musical stereotypes. As a multicultural maestro, he produces a mix of Yemenite and Sephardic music blended with electro hip hop beats. He frequently collaborates with non-electronic musicians, creating textural fusions of live and recorded sound. diwon’s music, style, and presence get famous US clubs to resemble the craziest festivals abroad.

Plus Diwon contacted my himself via Twitter so that makes this post relevant to Social Media Marketing as well.

There is one thing I know to be true about myself.  I move slowly.  I’ve been in business for 10+ years and I’m finally  getting organized.  SaaS (Software as a Service) is the hot thing this year.  Or last year or well… these days.  I’m migrating lucidCircus’ accounting and contact management away from pen and paper onto web-based applications.  It took me 7 years to go from hand-coding HTML to using Dreamweaver… of course that had as much to do with how bad WYSIWYG editors sucked in the early days as my speed at adopting new methods.

Two things got me started on blogging and using “web 2.0″ services.  First, I’ve been helping clients as of last year ramp up their Social Media efforts.  Primarily LinkedIn (I just linked my linkedin page to my brand new corporate blog! How meta is that?), Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and corporate blogs.  I figure those are the basics.  As I go I’m discovering new tangential services like GetSatisfaction which tracks people talking about your company on Twitter as well as starts conversations with customers.  I signed up yesterday, saw Twitters corporate profile with a question about spam and wrote a mini rant:

I have not had a problem with spam. My problem is noise. When I first heard of Twitter I thought “what a retarded idea… who cares about other peoples minutia? Especially a 24/7 stream of minutia.” But then Twitter started to become useful for business. So now it’s a battle between Signal to Noise ratio. I don’t want to read about people’s cat sneezing or how much coffee they need but I also don’t want to unfollow them because they have shared good information in the past.

What I suggest is a radio button where you label each tweet as Signal or Noise. Then the users can set a slider to all Signal (relevant info) to all Noise (sleeping cute things) or anywhere in between. M-F 9-5 I want useful intel but maybe on Sunday afternoon I want funny links.

I have not had a problem with spam. My problem is noise. When I first heard of Twitter I thought “what a retarded idea… who cares about other peoples minutia? Especially a 24/7 stream of minutia.” But then Twitter started to become useful for business. So now it’s a battle between Signal to Noise ratio.

The second thing that got me started on this blog other than wanting to be walking the walk is my recent use of SaaS  has me all atwitter (sorry) about the holistic interconnectedness of it all. Wordpress to Flicker which goes to Facebook which goes to Twitter etc… That’s social aspect, then there is the business end.  In the last month I’ve signed up and started using first Curdbee and then Freshbooks for invoicing, Batchbook for contact management, iDevDirect for affiliate software, MailChimp is amazing for email newsletters… and lastly, I’m trying out this accounting software from IAC-EZ.

I almost forgot… we’re on YouTube as well.  Although much to my shame… I also have uploaded cute videos of my dog.