June 09, 2006, 3:17 PM PDT
Microsoft's photo op: digital imaging and Windows Vista
Posted by: Lori Grunin

I've received a boatload of e-mail from readers asking about the future of my lost-in-limbo Pixel Perfect column. (OK, it may only be a toy rowboat full, but I'll take my warm fuzzies where I can get them.) Unfortunately, I tended to approach each column with the curiosity and determination of a grad student confronting her thesis, which gets really difficult to do with any regularity. So instead, along with the rest of the known universe, I'm taking advantage of the more fluid structure of a blog in order to address similar subjects; that way, if I can summon only enough thoughts to fill a paragraph, a paragraph is what you'll get.

As in an election year, the months leading up to the significant release of a major operating system engenders vast amounts of punditry: analysis, criticism, praise, mockery, and advice. I hope to offer all of those during the coming months as I delve into Windows Vista and its impact on PC-based digital imaging. I don't really care about what the dialog boxes look like unless they help or hinder my productivity. I want to know how it will affect the way I manipulate photos and videos, the impact on print quality and color matching, compatibility implications for my favorite imaging hardware, and how it might change your experience of digital video and photography. I want to know how it compares to the Mac as a graphics platform and how essential an upgrade it represents to current Windows XP users--consumer, enthusiast, and professional alike.

That's the plan.

If you've any doubts about the necessity to reflect on these issues, just look at all the words spent on propagating the mistaken idea that Windows Media Photo, Microsoft's proposed new photo format, is some nefariously intentioned JPEG/JPEG2000 usurper. In fact, when you look at Vista's color engine, you realize that Microsoft had to come up with a new format, because no existing compressed format can handle all that Vista will throw at it. The real question for Microsoft imperialism theorists should be: did the company have to come up with a solution to a problem of its own making?

But that's a subject for another day.

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June 09, 2006, 3:14 PM PDT
Yahoo Video breaks down barriers between video search and hosting
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

Why do so many people post their videos on YouTube? It's not any easier to post a vid to YouTube than to another service. You don't get better quality or more video time. The editing features aren't great. The only thing that makes YouTube better than other video-hosting services is that people surf the site looking for entertainment. When you want your vid to go viral, you put it on YouTube.

YouTube does allow you to put a viewer for your videos anywhere on the Web, but otherwise, like most other video services, it's a closed system. Videos go in but they don't show up on other video destination sites. And videos from elsewhere don't show up on YouTube.

As far as I know, there's only one video system that both hosts video and searches video on the Web: Yahoo's relatively new Yahoo Video. Just like with YouTube, you can post your video to the Yahoo site and have it host it for you (although as I write this, the posting service appears to be broken). But Yahoo also searches other sites and displays video from them alongside its own. Even Google Video doesn't do this.

The one criticism I have of Yahoo Video is that it doesn't convert all video it finds into a streaming format. Some of the videos it indexes need to be downloaded to your PC before they'll play.

But overall, this is the way online media and search is supposed to work. It's maddening to have to scan multiple sites for a media file you know one of them has, and it's insane that video uploaders have to work around this problem by posting their video to multiple sites. Yahoo makes it possible to use just one site to find all content. That was the original idea behind Yahoo's Web search engine, and it still makes sense today.

There's still a lot to be said for hanging out on YouTube or any other site that features user-generated content (UGC), since how the community rates content and comments on videos is part of the experience. But Yahoo, because it allows users to both upload video to the site and to search all the Web for video, is much more than a YouTube competitor. It's online video the way it's supposed to be.

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June 09, 2006, 1:23 PM PDT
Nokia and Pantech partner up
Posted by: Nicole Lee

Pantech is making additional headway in the North American market with a recent partnership deal with Nokia. The deal is worth $129 million and has Pantech agreeing to manufacture two handset models for the Finnish company by December of this year. Pantech hopes to focus its sights on camera phones and CDMA handsets with EV-DO support. On the GSM front, Pantech has also made a deal with Cingular to carry a few of its GSM phones--looks like Pantech is slowly trying to make itself known on U.S. soil.

Source: Reuters

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June 09, 2006, 10:55 AM PDT
Pixpo lets you set up your own Internet broadcast station
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

Pixpo is a neat utility that turns your computer into an Internet broadcast platform. You download Pixpo client software to your PC and point it at your content--music, photos, videos--then program what you want to share into "channels." People on the Net can view or stream your content, straight from your PC.

But who needs it? If I want to share a bunch of photos, I'm going to put them on a photo-sharing site (such as Tabblo, my current favorite). If I want people to see a video I've made, it's going on YouTube if I want it to be public, VideoEgg if not. If I have original music to share, I'll want to put it on a big service like iTunes (if I want to share somebody else's copyrighted music, I'll think twice). And if I do put content on Pixpo and it becomes very popular, there's no way my home PC or Internet connection could handle the load. Furthermore, I have to leave my PC on all the time for people to be able to access my files. (Pixpo plans to cache content that gets too popular for an individual's PC to handle.)

Also, Pixpo doesn't (yet) stream live cameras from a PC. Check out Stickam or Orb if that's what you're looking for.

There are, however, some people who could really use this. If you have a lot of media but a small audience, Pixpo is a good solution. Who fits that description? Photographers, videographers, or anybody who wants to share media with their family and doesn't want to hassle with uploading to a Web-based service, says Colin How, Pixpo's founder. He says it's much easier for professionals, in particular, to let customers view their media straight from their PC than it is for them to hassle with uploading the images and potentially paying for hosting. And since you don't have to upload anything to a service, "publishing" files is instantaneous.

This seems like one of those ideas that threads the needle--fantastic if you fit into the narrow definition of who it's good for, but a bit of a stretch for most everybody else.

On the other hand, this technology could have a big payback for companies currently paying through the nose for bandwidth and storage. YouTube, for example, is spending a fortune to stream all those videos. Pixpo pays nothing for streaming, its users do. So because of the economic benefits of direct streaming, Pixpo is of interest to companies that promote user-generated content (jargon watch: it's now known as UGC).

Ultimately, Pixpo-like functionality should be an option on UGC services such as YouTube. It's good technology, but for most of us, managing yet another sharing service--even if it's one that resides on our own computers--is asking too much.

Pixpo will be presenting at the Under the Radar conference next week. I'll be at the event, moderating a few sessions and scouting out companies to cover. Find me there if you have one.

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June 09, 2006, 10:09 AM PDT
World Cup by appointment: Update
Posted by: Molly Wood

OK, so, I installed this little app on Friday, and enjoyed it all weekend long (go, Argentina!). But then (as another poster noted), I arrived at work this morning to find an alert from Norton, pointing out a Trojan.Dropper coming from the bCentral World Cup program. Boo! I don't know what it was, and I'm still investigating, but I will say this: don't drive me to hooliganism, Microsoft U.K.!

Original post: CNET editor Michelle Thatcher turned me on to this awesome Outlook plug-in, which adds all the upcoming games to your Outlook calendars. You can choose whether to have it remind you--and of course, I asked it to. I cannot believe I missed Ecuador vs. Poland, but I will be all over England vs. Paraguay bright and early Saturday morning.

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June 09, 2006, 9:23 AM PDT
Microsoft's anticounterfeit tool is phoning home...daily
Posted by: Molly Wood

Per BetaNews today, Microsoft has admitted that its Windows Genuine Advantage program, which is supposed to sniff out counterfeit copies of Windows, is actually phoning home every day, even after it's determined whether you're running a legit version of the OS. And in case you're wondering, no, Microsoft didn't tell anyone that WGA was checking in with the mothership, even though the software is a mandatory installation for anyone who wants to use Windows Update. After rumors surfaced on the Net about the connections, Microsoft confirmed that the software makes the daily call as a "safety switch," so that the company can turn off the program if it needs to. (Riiighht.) Meanwhile, Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research goes on at length about the evil tactics Microsoft's been using lately in beta software--installing WGA without permission along with OneCare, requiring you to participate in the Customer Experience program if you're using WMP 11, and opting you in to contextual ads and keywords in your Windows Live mail. You know, just in case you'd been feeling a little complacent about the Empire lately.

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June 09, 2006, 8:01 AM PDT
Are you ready for some soccer?
Posted by: David Katzmaier

Hank Williams Jr. may be the only one not watching football this weekend, as the World Cup 2006 starts--it doesn't "kick off"--with host country Germany playing Costa Rica today. While the attention spans of most American sports fans, myself included, could be sorely tested by the unfamiliar players, the endless "tactical" manuvering, and the lack of scoring (which only gets worse in defense-first World Cup matches, where many teams play not to lose), at least it's in high-def. We'll be able to fill our wide-screens with lots of grass and get a sense of the teams' deployment over the whole field, which apparently plays a big role in soccer. Oh yeah, commercials will also be few and far between.

Thanks to the excellent HDSportsGuide.com, here's the complete high-def World Cup schedule. Between filing copy, I'll be watching today at 11:55 on ESPN2 or maybe 1-ish after my DVR gets some time to spool up and pulling for the boys from San Jose. Are you psyched?

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June 09, 2006, 7:17 AM PDT
Intel Core 2 Duo preview benchmarks--a different approach
Posted by: Daniel A. Begun

Intel next-gen benchmark results. At yesterday's Intel Core Technology overview, Intel had two types of systems available for us to benchmark: one with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 and one with an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800. I would have loved to have spent some quality time with the X6800 system, but Intel permitted us to run only a few select games on it. I was more interested in how the new Core Technology handled multitasking, so I focused on the E6700 system--on which Intel installed a few additional applications.

Intel was very strict about what we could and couldn't do with the systems. As Rich Brown pointed out in yesterday's blog post, this was the same set of tests that Intel has been allowing tech journalists to run on the Core 2 system for the last few weeks, and you can find plenty of results online from many of the journalists who took Intel up on its offer. I decided to take a different approach.

I stayed within the ground rules that Intel established: We could use only the apps and the files that were preinstalled, but we could change the program settings. And the company didn't say we couldn't run more than one app at the same time. So with only a limited time to test, access to someone else's tests and test files, and nothing relevant to actually compare the results to, I decided to spend my time seeing how the systems handled multitasking loads.

I mixed and matched a number of multimedia applications and was pleasantly surprised by the results. The combination of Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 processing multiple JPEG images while Adobe Premiere Pro 2 simultaneously rendered video effects on its own file was especially impressive. With both apps chugging away, the Core Duo E6700 took only 11 percent longer to complete all tasks than Premiere working on its own--and this was despite the fact that Windows was reporting 100 percent CPU utilization when both apps were working.

The other two multitasking combinations didn't have quite as impressive a showing; but nevertheless, the test system still performed the combined tasks in reasonable time, where other systems might have been brought to their knees. Of course, this is all conjecture without being able to run these tests on a comparison system. For that you will have to stay tuned for when we get these CPUs and systems in our Labs and can put them through our own torture tests, er, I mean benchmarks.

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June 09, 2006, 6:57 AM PDT
Mario's midnight madness
Posted by: Will Greenwald

Redmond may be Nintendo of America's corporate headquarters, but New York City has its own home for Big N, and it's going to be a lot busier than Washington this weekend. The Nintendo World Store at 10 Rockefeller Plaza is hosting a midnight madness event to celebrate the U.S. launch of the Nintendo DS Lite. The store will have free pizza, a DJ, and a guy in a giant Mario costume to entertain people waiting in line. The first 100 customers will get a free case with their DS Lite.

The line officially starts forming Saturday at 9 p.m., and Nintendo World opens and starts selling the DS Lite at the stroke of midnight. Considering the large nerd population of New York, if you're not reading this from a sleeping bag parked in front of Nintendo World right now, you might have a problem getting your own DS Lite from Nintendo's store. Thankfully, the portable starts selling nationwide this Sunday, so if you're willing to wait another eight hours, you might be able to pick up one of your very own from your local electronics store.

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