Earlier last month, Adobe had a financial analyst meeting where they demo'd some new technology they are currently working on. Two of the demos were done by Photoshop PM John Nack and both them related to merging images into a composite scene.

Below, is a screen shot from a cool demonstration. Here, John took a series of macro photographed images with selective focus (meaning, there was an extremely shallow depth of field for each image). When all of the images were merged, a composited "in focus" image was produced. But seeing is believing (and easier to understand). So, go to about 19 minutes into the webinar to see this in action.



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Tags: panoramic, photography, photoshop, technology

Wow, this is cool. You need to watch the whole video.



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Tags: technology

Earlier this week, OnOne Software announced it has purchased Liquid Resize. This product uses a technique known as “seam carving” to reduce the distortion that typically occurs when manipulating the aspect ratio of an image. If you have not heard of or seen "seam carving" in action, I previously blogged about it several months ago.

To get an idea of what seam carving is all about, read the blog post link above and/or check out this YouTube video below:


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Tags: photography, panoramic, technology

A Forrester researcher has just published an interesting paper. Well, I should say the abstract is interesting:

"Corporate employees are beginning to use Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, RSS, and social networking in their daily lives. The adoption, however, is uneven, with some employees willing to go to great lengths to use these tools, while others steadfastly refuse to adopt. On the surface it looks like technology marketers have their work cut out for them and will need to convince prospective customers that mass adoption is both possible and valuable. In reality, this situation presents more opportunity than threat, as smart tech marketers will appeal to employees, IT, and line-of-business sponsors each in turn. A well-crafted marketing plan will target each constituency and use its interests to drive value and revenues — regardless of the firm's initial Web 2.0 adoption level."

While I haven't shelled out the US$279.00 for the report, I must say, this concept absolutely has truth in my professional career. For the last five plus years, I have chosen many "non-sanctioned" hosted applications to assist me as well as my teams in driving our daily tasks, education and communication.
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Tags: business, marketing, technology

Wow. This one is really cool. Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir demonstrate in this video their technique of "Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing."  Basically, these guys have figured out how to keep items in a photograph from distorting when scaling an image horizontally or vertically. The technology looks for paths of pixels that can be removed while causing the least visual disruption. 



Patrick Swieskowski has created a great Flash-based demo so you can see how this all works. Go check out Patrick's Seam Carving Flash demonstration.
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Tags: photography, panoramic, technology

Pretty darn cool. Now in select cities (San Francisco Bay area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver) you can get a “street view” within Google Maps. So I did a search for Moscone Center, clicked on the “street view” button in the window and a new map marker that looks like a person landed on the page. Move the marker to where you want it, and voila a 360 panoramic image of that location pops up.



As you see above, the photograph is pretty darn good. And just like the 360 degree panoramic photos I take, you can click down in the photo and pan left and right to look around in these Google Maps images. Finally, you can also click on the arrows to move up or down the street.

Tags: technology, google, panoramic, mashup

Imagine my delight to come home last night and see that I was given the opportunity to get into the Joost beta program. From the folks that changed the net with apps like Kazaa and then Skype, here comes Joost. From what I have read, learned and seen Joost will be a game changer in the way we think about TV, programming and distribution.

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Tags: technology, joost, marketing

Via Robin Good’s blog, I tripped across this movie (actually a thesis project by two undergrads at the University of Applied Sciences Ulm, Germany) which poses some questions about Google and their intents. Visit the masterplanthemovie.com website to hear what they have to say. I just downloaded it and will watch it on my iPod next week. What do you think of The Google Master Plan?

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Tags: technology, google

A couple of days ago, Jon Stewart and his “Resident Expert” John Hodgman (who is also the “I'm a PC” guy in the latest Get a Mac ads) did a great skit on Net Neutrality. The folks at Buzz Out Loud should be proud. Take a moment to watch the Senator Ted Stevens Net Neutrality segment.

Tags: daily show, jon stewart, technology

Unless you're one of the last on earth to still be using a film camera exclusively, you have no doubt seen a setting on your camera for something called, Raw. No it's not sushi, but a file format. A file format that varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. As a result, you need a special Raw format converter. Sure, each manufacturer has one, but you kinda get the feeling that all this Raw stuff is kinda like the wild west. Something is bound to need to get standardized.

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Tags: photography, technology

I confess. This is something I'd read cover to cover. I always like the gizmo reviews in WIRED. Now, 117 pages of geek bliss. Everything you ever wanted to know about mobile phones, digital cameras, digital video cameras, HD TVs, DVRs... you get the idea. And the best part? You don't have to go to the news stand to pick it up. Instead, you can download a pdf of TEST right here (8 MB).

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Tags: technology, entertainment

Anyone that is moderately interested in digital photography is familiar with the term histogram. Heck, all the camera manufacturers reference histogram in their user's manual like we all know what it is. But really, what is a histogram and why do I care?

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Tags: photography, technology

This one just caught my eye. It appears that the fine folks at Toyota have figured out how to connect about every gadget you own (cameras, MP3 player, cell phone, PDA, kitchen sink) to your car. Toyota plans to show off their new "Toyota Hub" at the Mondial de l'Automobile this weekend. If you can read French, here is the original story: http://akiba.sorobangeeks.com/news_8686.html

Tags: technology, marketing, business

Buyer's remorse. That dreaded curse that plagues us all right after we buy that new widget. Nowhere does buyer's remorse run more rampant than through the darkened home offices of super geeks everywhere--right after they buy that new blinking box (as my wife likes to call them). You know the feeling... about two miles from the car dealer's lot when you realize your shiny new car just depreciated by about 50%. Poof, it's gone.

OK, I got off topic...

I have been a big fan of a small Silicon Valley startup called Slim Devices for a few years. They have a fantastic product that "connects" two of my greatest (geek) loves -- my computer and my music. They call it the Squeezebox and it allows all the MP3s on your computer to be played through your home stereo system. As opposed to the less-than-tin-can-quality of the single speaker in your PC.

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Tags: music, technology, business, digital media

I don't buy a bunch of DVDs, but I do like to purchase live concert DVDs. They (usually) sound pretty good. The bummer of course was that you could only listen to them while firmly planted on the couch in front of the TV.

Well, that has now changed for me. I recently purchased Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba. This application allows you to record the audio from any source playing on your Mac--DVDs, streaming audio, you name it. And yes, it is Mac based. The recording can be virtually any file format... mp3, aif, etc. Read More...

Tags: music, software, technology

About five years ago, I started dabbling in home automation. You know, getting your lights to turn on and off when you want them to... stuff like that. I first had a product called Mousehouse that was, well a good "starter kit." It allowed me to, um... turn off and on lights at certain times. Most of the time.

When we moved into our new house, I really couldn't get the Mousehouse software to work consistently. And to top it off, I upgraded my machines from Mac OS 9 to OS X. Mousehouse was not OS X compatible, so I hung up my X-10 switches for a year or so. Then one day while reading MacAddict, I came across a story on a new OS X native home automation application called Indigo. I have to say, Indigo is hands down, one of the best apps I have used to date. As advertised, it did exactly what it was supposed to do... control my X-10 devices.



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Tags: home automation, software, technology