Big Huge Tools Flickr Picture tools

This website has some fun tools for messing with your pictures. Although designed to work with Flickr, few (if any) seem to require Flickr at all. But some fun, free tools for messing around with pictures.

More fun than useful, but worth checking out.

Big Huge Labs

Google is the worlds #1 Brand...

As a student of brands, the web, free tools, and marketing, I find it amazing and simultaneously not suprising that Google is the worlds #1 Brand, according to Millward Brown. They define the value of the brand as "Brand Value is the financial value of a brand, defined as the sum of all earnings that a brand is expected to generate." Even more remarkable, they are a brand that gives away much of their product. Read the full report - BrandZ-2008-Report.pdf (application/pdf Object)

I started thinking about the Google services I use frequently, and it's an impressive list (listed in rough order that I use them).

Gmail
Free

Blogger
Free (mostly, I pay to have the custom domain)

Bookmarks
Free

Notebook
Free

Calendar
Free

Search
Free

AdWords
Pays me

Google Maps (on the computer and my phone)
Free

Picassa
Free

Picassa Web Albums
Free

Google Talk
Free

Google Groups
Free

Google Documents
Free

Goog-411
Free

SketchUp
Free

YouTube
Free

Groups
Free



Something makes me think I'm missing a few. Impressive.

For a full list of available Google Products, click here.

Using the power of crowds for bicycling and commuting

No hybrid will ever match the efficiency of a bike for getting around, I've been an avid cyclist since I was 13 or so. But finding good routes can be difficult. Bikely uses the power of crowds to develop a database of bicycle routes, with descriptions, that are mapped on Google maps. Pretty sweet.

Bikely

Craigslist Image Preview in Firefox

This tool combines two tools I really like, and makes them easier to use. I shop and sell and recycle on Craigslist. There is a firefox extension that displays the images from with the ads, without having to click on the links. Looking for a bike or a car? Scroll quickly and see what looks like what you are looking for. Simply, but super effective. I used it recently while shopping for a tandem bike, and it worked super well.

Get it here

Google Notebook

Here's another tool I've been using for awhile. As often as I use it, I haven't blogged about it before. Over at Google Operating System they noted that Google has rolled out some new features for google notebook. But first, what is Notebook? It's exactly what it sounds like. As you cruise the web, if you see something interesting, highlight it, right-click (with Firefox or Explorer extenstions installed) and save it to your notebook. You can have as many notebooks as you want, so it's easy to have Notebooks for different subjects. You can also share Notebooks with other users, which is awesome. When I was in school, we used features like this to create a central Notebook that several of us used to work on group projects. When my wife and I were planning our last vacation, we used Notebook while planning. I use it all the time for work. Simple, but very useful.

Some features:

• Publish a notebook online, so anyone can see it. Or not.
  
• Share you notebook for collaborative notetaking.
  
• You can publish an RSS feed of your notebook.
  
• You can clip text, pictures or links. They are saved with a link back to the original page.
  
• Of course, you can search your notebooks.
  
• You can export to Google Documents. From there, you can export to Word. For those of us that still work in Desktop apps part of the time, it'd be very nice to be able to do this in one step instead of 2.
  
• Your notes are available on any net connected computer
  

Give it a try, and let me know if you come up with any really cool uses.
Google Notebook
The FAQ

Bird Identification - WhatBird

We have a bird nesting in our backyard, and I didn't know what it was. (I'm a tiny bit of a bird geek. ) I went online to look it up, and discovered this cool site.

It takes you through a series of questions to identify the bird. Sort of 20 questions. I found it remarkably fast, and the final answer certainly looked just like the bird outside.

Very cool. I'm almost enough of a geek that I want it on my phone for remote identification.

WhatBird.com

Jott - How I love thee....

Jott is one of those super simple tools. It really has one trick, it does it well, and I find myself using it all the time.

Jott is a voice to text transcription service. You call it with your cell phone, and then are asked "Who do you want to Jott?" These have to be set up ahead of time, but you can Jott any email address, your Google Calendar, RememberTheMilk, even Blogger. After you select your Jott, simply speak the message. You're done.

I use it for two things primarily, and it works great. I have an email based ToDo list, and since I drive a lot, I have a lot of time to think. When I have an idea or something I need to do, it's speed-dial 2 on my phone and I speak. When I get home or in front of a computer, there is the reminder, sitting it my ToDo box. I also find it easier to add events to my calendar than using the interface on my smart phone. I find the translations are mostly surprisingly accurate.

Caveat-
I've heard there might be humans involved in checking the translation, so this might not be the place to share your plans for global domination through insider trading and assassination.

Jott is free currently. Not sure how they make money, since I rarely need to go to their web interface and the notes have no ads.

www.Jott.com

Fotoflexer - Better than Photoshop Online

Since we're on the topic, I just discovered another nice online photo editor. It has all the normal editing tools, a fast and intuitive interface, and lots of neat effects, some of which I've not seen elsewhere.
http://fotoflexer.com/

Photoshop online - eh. Not so much.

I use Photoshop all the time, actually own a legal copy of Adobe Creative Suite. It's one of only three pieces of pay software I use regularly. (XP, Office being the others.) It's a great program, and has enough of a market that "Photoshop" has become the generic term for any computer modified photo, from simple adjustments and fixes to creative and artistic modifications.

When I saw that Adobe had released an online version of Photoshop, I rushed to test it and have spent quite a bit of time playing with it this morning. I can't say I'm impressed. It lacks the serious tools that have made Photoshop the standard for professionals, and for casual users, the interface is not nearly as nice as some of the other online editors. It also lacks any really interesting or fun tools. Comparing it to Picnik or others, I can see no reason to recommend it over those.
(See my post about online editors here)

All that said, it will probably do well. When people go online for a photo editor, many will Google "Photoshop" rather than "online photo editor" and will perhaps never discover what I consider to be a better product.

Vector Magic - Convert images to Vector images

There are generally two types of images for computers. Jpgs, BMPs and the like are made up of thousands or millions of pixels. If you take a small picture and blow it up big, you lose resolution, and it generally won't look good at all.

The second type of image is a Vector image. These are commonly used for logos and drawings. They are actually defined as lines and figures, not dots. This means you can scale them infinitely, without loss of resolution. It also makes certain types of edits easier. Vector based graphics are typically needed for signs, stickers, t-shirts and other types of media.

There have been several times in my life when I've had one, but needed the other. Creating a pixel based picture form a vector based one is easy, but the reverse is not true. But Stanford has released VectorMagic. It's not free, but it's pretty cheap, and considering how long and difficult tracing is normally, would be very useful when you need it.

As an example, check out what it did with my header: Significant loss of detail, but it would infinitely scalable.

Google Calendar Sync options - Getting better.

Google has finally released support for syncing to your desktop calendar. This could be a very cool tool for keeping multiple calendars on multiple computers synced. Unfortunately, they don't yet support syncing multiple calendars on multiple computers, which for me greatly limits the usefulness of this. But if you're stuck using Outlook, it could be a start, and if they add support for multiple calendars, it could be killer.

The Google Blog post on it.

I have a Google calendar for personal stuff, and several for work. I like to share those with teammates, without them seeing what I'm doing on the weekend. I even keep a few personal ones to keep organized.

It is possible to sync multiple calendars using Thunderbird/Lighting/extensions.
I used this tutorial to set up my Laptop (Windows XP), my desktop (Ubuntu Linux) and they stay sync'd perfectly. Using a different system to sync my smartphone means all three platforms stay perfectly sync'd. I love adding an event on my laptop, and having it appear on my phone.

Kartoo - Visual Search

Kartoo is one of the search engines on one of the lists I linked to earlier. They offer a very intersting interface that shows how pages are linked together, their relationships, and which keywords they share. The image I have linked to is a quick search I did on my company name. It found my personal site, my LinkedIn page, as well as several contest sites we were involved with.

Interesting. To be honest, I'm not 100% sure how this is useful, but it is certainly neat and I'll give it try in the future.

Fundability.com - Connecting Entreprenuers and Funding

Steve and his team have been around the Sacramento/Northern California entrepreneurial community for a while under a different name, and have recently launched their website,
fundability.com/. At one point we had set up a basic profile for High Merit Thermoelectrics, but I'm not sure if it's still there. In any case, they've got a very cool idea, it's a web based storehouse and showcase for entrepreneurs and investors. Entreprenuers can post video clips, funding requests, due diligence information, and more. Investors can view profiles, join together for due diligence, etc.

Like any networking tool, it only becomes valuable when people use it, but they seem to have a solid product and a niche I haven't seen before. I'm probably going to give it a test and will report back.

http://fundability.com/

Google and Yahoo aren't the only search engines.....

When most people think of search engines, most people tend to go to one or two specific sites. Google is so common that it's become a verb. Like Xerox, the brand is so popular it's become a generic term for an online search. And it does a good job, but there are many, many other search choices, many of which are specific to a type of search. You can search for people, search for images, or even get a graphical return that shows the relationships between web pages that contain similar keywords. Interested? Here are two sites that list hundreds of alternatives, grouped by the type of search being done.

http://www.philb.com/whichengine.htm
http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html

I will be highlighting some of my favorites over the next few days,click here for my impressions.

Pingg - Invitations

http://www.pingg.com - Evite may be the most commonly used, but Pingg is a new invitation company with some interesting features.

• Much better looking images than Evite, and the ability to upload your own pictures.
  
• Can purchase other stock images for a truly custom look.
  
• Invites can be sent via Email, SMS, Web, Facebook or even Snail Mail. For a surely classy twist, for a $1.50, you can send printed invites via postal service.
  
• You can import Contacts from Plaxo, Gmail, and more.
  

I haven't had an event to try this on, but I built some trial invites, and they look very nice.