Mark Evans

NitroDesk: A New Way to Manage Photos, Video

It has never been easier to take photographs and video but managing everything can be a huge challenge given there a variety of places on the Web where your photos and videos are stored and featured.

NitroDesk aims to solve this problem with the launch of software that makes it easy to upload your photos and videos from your desktop to multiple photo sharing sites at the same time. It also allows you to transfer photos from one site to another, as well as synchronize photos from your desktop with your online albums.

Among the sites supported by NitroDesk include PlanetEye, SmugMug, Zenfolio, Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Shutterpoint, Windows Live Spaces, Vimeo and YouTube. The software (Windows only) can be downloaded here; people will want to purchase a license can get $10 off $29.99 retail price by using MARKEVANS in the coupon area.

NitroDesk is the self-funded creation of Goutham Sukumar, who started it as a side project. I had a chance recently to do a Q&A with Goutham about NitroDesk and why he created it. (Click the “more” button at the bottom for the second part of the Q&A)

What’s the genesis of NitroDesk? What problem did you see and why did you decide to create NitroDesk to solve it?

I have been taking pictures for a long time. Naturally, sharing photos online is something I always do. However, different photo sharing sites are slanted towards different goals: PlanetEye is for travelers to highlight the places they have visited, Flickr has a good community slant to it, SmugMug and Zenfolio are typically used by professionals to host their portfolios and PicasaWeb is simply great for sharing with family and friends.

When I started using more than one site, I realized the need to use different tools to upload the same pictures to multiple places. I also quickly lost track of what I had uploaded and where. Having come from an EAI and thick-client world, I came to realize too, that the same principles we use for integrating legacy backend systems could be leveraged to make all photo sharing (and similar) services work/play well with one another. Photo site integration is just one example which I decided to tackle right away.

Can you give me an overview of NitroDesk’s features? What does it do, and how do you expect people to use it?

I think i can best answer that by talking about how I use NitroDesk:

Multi-Loading
Every time I take pictures at an event or a trip, I put them on Picasa and do the necessary corrections to the images (back-lighting, auto leveling etc.) Once I’m done, I select the pictures that are worth sharing, and upload them through NitroDesk to one or more sites simultaneously (SmugMug, Picasa primarily, and now PlanetEye). Waiting around for uploads to finish is something I did not like to do, so NitroDesk has a mechanism where the images are uploaded in the background without making the user wait. This was especially useful when loading the hundreds of MBs of HD video to SmugMug for showing in the challenges page on our Web site.

Management:
If you had 100 photos in an album, 20 of them being taken at Niagara Falls and you wanted to set their titles to “Niagara Photos”, you will quickly see some pain points. I use NitroDesk to multi-select these photos and set the title/keywords once and apply them in bulk. Same thing with privacy settings, categories, etc. This is not unique, Flickr provides you with some bulk-editing functionality, but NitroDesk extends it to all other sites that allow individual image property editing. You will also notice that each site has its own unique set of properties that you can edit. NitroDesk handles that too. Depending on the site you work with, some functionality may be unsupported, but we take a best-effort approach.

Transferring:
Once in a while, I feel that some of the photos I have on my Picasa or SmugMug albums are probably going to fetch me a fortune on ShutterPoint (it has never come true but there’s nothing wrong in dreaming). Or maybe a friend on Facebook asked me to share pictures from an event, which I had originally uploaded to Picasa. For this, I drag and drop the pictures from the source album to the destination (say PicasaWeb to ShutterPoint/Facebook).

Technorati Tags: NitroDesk, Photography, PlanetEye

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No More Upgrades

I’ve learned a really important lesson this week: if your computer is humming along, then ignore any temptation to upgrade or tweak it.

Earlier this week, one little upgrade of a Firefox extension (Better GMail) suddenly caused my GMail password to stop working. We’ll see if it returns to life in four days when Google lets me answer a security question.

This morning, Apple wanted me to upgrade iTunes and Quick Time. No, thank you. Unless it’s a major security flaw, I’m sticking with the status quo.

The beauty of Web 2.0 is that everything happens through the browser so you can dabble with all kinds of different services without threatening the health of your computer. It’s a long way from the days when you had to using a dial-up connection to download cool-sounding shareware.

More: One more thing - I shouldn’t have been so excited to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard. If I was smart, I would have waited a couple of months before taking the leap.

Update: Google Operating System has a post looking at how small new features are making GMail 2.0 better. Given my experience, the new and improved GMail is not necessarily a good thing.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Google

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Mossberg Sorta, Kinda Disses Vista

When the Wall St. Journal’s Walter Mossberg talks, people listen. So, I suspect many people at Microsoft must be somewhat disappointed with Mossberg’s take on Vista, which is sees as a “worthy, but largely unexciting, product”.

“Vista is much prettier than previous versions of Windows. Its icons look better, windows have translucent borders, and items in the taskbar and in folders can display little previews of what they contain. Security is supposedly vastly better; there are some new free, included programs; and fast, universal search is now built in. There are hundreds of other, smaller, improvements and additions throughout the system, including parental controls and even a slicker version of Solitaire.”

My take on Vista is pretty much the same as Mossberg’s. Vista is a definite improvement from a user-interface perspective with some really nice, user-friendly features, particularly the multi-media players. That said, my overall reaction is akin to what my mother says when goes to a movie or play that’s alright but not amazing. Her default phrase is “It was very nice”, which is a mild praise, at best. (I’ll provide a more in-depth review of Vista in a few days.)

As one of the bloggers who received a Ferarri laptop pre-loaded with Vista, one thing I can say is I’m more impressed with Vista than the laptop. The Acer machine has a great screen but it’s fairly heavy, difficult to open and the exhaust fan blows on your hand (if you’re right-handed).

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Vista, Walter Mossberg

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Iotum Wins Award

Canada's version of the high-tech Oscars was held yesterday with Iotum snagging an award in the emerging technology category. It has been quite a run for the Ottawa-based telecom start-up, highlighted by Demo God honours at the Demo show in Phoenix earlier this year. Now, all Iotum needs is a user-friendly VC so it can boost sales of its relevance engine. Aside from cool technology, another thing Iotum has going for it is PR savvy (it helps having Andy Abramson onboard). COO Howard Thaw's RedBerry was recently featured in a media report. Not content to accept a black Blackberry, Thaw went to an auto body shop for some custom work. Nice.

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Memories of Scott McNealy

So Scott McNealy is finally handing over the reigns reins to Sun Microsystems after 24 years. I've only had the privilege to interview him once but can't say it was the best conversation I've ever had with a high-profile CEO. In contrast to the peppy, funny, irreverant person who puts on a laugh-a-minute show at high-tech conferences, McNealy was unenthusiastic, grumpy and far from newsworthy. It could have just been a bad day or it could have been he was less than thrilled about talking to a journalist from a newspaper he never knew existed. I guess part of being a CEO is you have a role to play - sometimes you're on, sometimes you're just not into it. McNealy must give dozens of interviews a year so it's not like each one will sizzle. Like a professional athlete, I'm sure he gets up for the “big games” when the Wall St. Journal or New York Times comes calling. For the rest of us, we have to hope he's having a good day. It should be pointed out McNealy is a bit of an anachronism these days given the disclosure restrictions that CEOs of publicly-traded companies face every time they're out and about. These rules do little to encourage a CEO to candid or straightforward. While McNealy will no longer be Sun's CEO,  I'm willing to be bet  he'll be as active and outspoken.

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The RIAA's Russian Nemesis

While the RIAA has been on a legal jihad in recent years, a growing number of consumers have been using allofMP3.com. The Russian-based service sells albums for $1 to $2.50 - depending on their popularity and the bitrate quality selected. Apparently, the company has been allowed to operate because of Russian copyright legislation, which lets "phonograms be performed publicly without the authorization of the copyright owner for broadcasting and cable transmission". If the music industry was pissed off with allofMP3 before, they'll be even more agitated with the release of alltunes - a desktop and mobile interface that makes it even easier to find and download music. TechCrunch has an overview on the new application.
  While allofMP3 can argue it's protected by Russian copyright rules, I wonder whether they protect consumers in North America? How do U.S. copyright rules, for example, apply to music downloaded from another country? In Canada - despite the claims of the music industry - downloading is still quasi-legal until the copyright rules over overhauled or clarified. A contentious issue in Canada is the levy regime, which slaps a "tax" on products used to record digital content such as hard drives, CD-Rs and audio cassette tapes. These fees, in theory, are supposed to compensate the music industry for loss sales but it doesn't work because music downloading is still wildly popular in the Great White North. For more on the controversial levy regime, IT Business ran a story on it earlier this month. You can also find a treasure trove of information on the issue on Michael Geist's blog.

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Music to the Ears of Music Fans

The secret project that Larry Borsato has been working on recently is MusicIP - formerly known as Predixis. Billing itself as a global music relationship engine, MusicIP is software that analyzes your music collection and then makes it easy to find new music that you'll like. For musicians, MusicIP promises to help them find new fans who are looking for music with a particular sound. At first blush, it looks like technology that consumers, artists and the labels will embrace given one of the many challenges facing the music industry is exposing new stuff at a time when commercial radio is so uninspiring, generic and targeted at the lowest common denominator. It will be interesting to see what music aficionado Fred Wilson has to say given his public love affair with music. MusicIP, by the way, was discovered by Rick Segal, who stumbled upon their small booth deep in the bowels of a major trade show.

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Ottawa-based Iotum Wins Demo God Award

It's good see Iotum come home from Phoenix with a 2006 Demo God Award - a nice laurel for Alec Saunders and Howard Thaw, who have been toiling away trying to sell their innovative relevance-engine telecom software to carriers, ISPs and investors for the past year. Maybe   this will be what Iotum needs to attract VC support. I'm willing to bet they may even get some calls from Canada's conservative financing community now that Iotum has been given the official stamp of approval. Truth be told, there are simply a lack of Iotums in Canada. For all the talk that we're a world-class innovation country, there's a troubling lack of high-tech entrepreneurs, start-ups and financing to really make it happen. Even Web 2.0 services, which cost little to develop, are few are far between at a time when Silicon Valley is flush with interesting start-ups (even if few of them real business models.)

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IE7 Blues - Part II

I got a nice surprise from Internet Explorer 7 this morning when I restarted my laptop
- an error message about missing DLLs, which is preventing Windows from
starting up properly. So I'm at a conference this morning with a
useless laptop because I jumped at a beta at the urging of Microsoft's
public relations agency. I wonder if Microsoft will peel a few bucks of
its $35 billion war chest to get my technician to get Windows going
again? My advice to anyone thinking about trying IE7 beta 2 is wait for
the upgrade to be released. You could also use Firefox or Opera.
Update: I should have read CNet's Ina Fried's post before I downloaded the IE7 beta.

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Avokia Raises $7.4M

So what do you know, a VC deal in Canada. Avokia, which makes database middleware software, has raised $7.4-million from Globespan Capital, SAP Ventures, BDC Venture Capital and Ventures West. Avokia's CEO is Alan McMillan, who was Think Dynamics' CEO when it was acquired by IBM in 2003 for $50-million.

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