flickr

With Instagram, Google+, Picasa, and Facebook breathing down its neck, Flickr has had to play catch-up to stay in the photo game lately.

Flickr's head of product, Markus Spiering, told tech news site BetaBeat today that the photo-sharing Web site is planning a major makeover to begin rolling out next week. Big changes include larger photos, less white space, and a more polished photo layout. There will also be a new drag-and-drop upload interface, according to BetaBeat.

The co-founder of Flickr and Hunch is out with her latest startup, called Pinwheel.

Caterina Fake just launched it in private beta, and the site--and its name--at first glance seems similar to Pinterest, one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web.

Fake raised $7.5 million, with Redpoint Ventures leading the round. Other investors include Ron Conway's SV Angel and The Obvious Corp., run by Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone.

That's big money for a startup that's just rolling out and so far has no users. But investors bet on people as much as an … Read more

Google has released Google Earth 6.2 to smooth over earlier versions' unsightly patchwork caused by stitching together widely varying satellite photographs.

The result is a more realistic and less distracting (though still optimistically cloudless) view of the planet. Update: It turns out that by turning on the weather layer, you can dispel Google Earth's sunny optimism and see if it's really cloudy by showing live weather data.

Google Earth offers a terrific interactive view of the planet, complete with 3D buildings in some parts of the world. But I have to say, though, that I was more … Read more

Yahoo has changed its Flickr Pro premium service into a subscription plan, a modest but reasonable change that I hope presages bigger adjustments to compete better against new photo-sharing rivals.

Flickr, a fixture in online photography, has lost luster as alternatives such as Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and 500px have advanced the state of the art and attracted millions of users. Flickr is shucking old baggage as part of a promise of new vitality in 2012, though. And although the new Flickr Pro pricing scheme is hardly a dramatic new course, at least it shows somebody's at the tiller.

With … Read more

What's it like to be a top manager or engineer in Silicon Valley and a woman? Google's Marissa Mayer, Flickr founder Catarina Fake, and Padmasree Warrior of Cisco Systems talked about that and more today at the CNET Women in Tech panel.

The three agreed that progress has been made, but that there's still a long way to go to get more women into the technology field.

Mayer said she believes we need to get more people interested in technology overall--men and women. Warrior said we need to find ways to keep women in the workforce and … Read more

The natural evolution of software is to go from beta to fully launched. So the decision today by Tiny Speck to revert its recently launched virtual world back to beta may leave some scratching their heads.

After a long period in closed beta, Tiny Speck in September formally pulled the curtains back on Glitch, a virtual world that takes players "inside the imagination of ancient giants." The company was founded by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, along with fellow Flickr veterans Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov. Butterfield explained today's decision to CNET by saying that as … Read more

According to a keen eye from MacRumors, the iPhone 4S, in just over a month after its release, has become the second most popular camera phone on Flickr, trailing only the iPhone 4.

Flickr provides data on the most popular cameras used to post photos on its popular image-sharing site. The data is collected by automatically detecting the camera type using the image file's metadata, which Flickr claims it can accomplish on about two-thirds of image uploads.

These graphs are also constantly changing, which makes the page an interesting gauge at current camera usage and popularity as it relates … Read more

We're going hands-on with the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, released ahead of schedule to a few lucky customers today.

Also leaked from today's 404 podcast: Apple replacing original iPod Nanos, breaking up on Facebook, waging war on infographics, and tap-to-pay apps coming to Ultrabook laptops.

Also, a big congrats to CNET's Bonnie Cha, the new chief correspondent at Crave!

Stream the podcast on audio or video after the page break!… Read more

Chances are you have heard of the popular photo-sharing iOS app called Instagram. What makes the app so appealing is its broad range of filters and effects the average photog can apply to photos to make them, in some cases, look amazing. … Read more