Forward Looking Statements

CrunchGear

Mike Arrington just launched CrunchGear, a "a daily journal of all things gadget-tastic".

Sounds promising - Mike seems to be as passionate about gadgets as he is about start-ups, and he's hired a good editor in John Biggs.

Blog software is pretty incredible.  It's amazing how the same software can be used by a 14 year old girl to write daily rants to her 10 (100?) friends, and also be used by a small team of passionate editors to launch a media property.  Are they all bloggers?  I guess. 

Amazing to think that CNET had to build a pre-caching content management, template, database and server system when it launched CNET.com 11 years ago.  The concept of a presentation template being separate from the content was a new one.  flat html ruled the day.

Anyway - I wish them luck.  Wonder what we'll be ruminating about in the year 2017.

Microsoft Photosynth

TechCrunch highlights that MSFT live labs is working on a product called photosynth - essentially a new way to group photos and view images based on pattern recognition.

My description doesn't nearly do it justice - it's a very cool UI - sort of virtual reality meets slideshows and albums, with zooming, 3D flying etc.   Here's a tour. 

Live labs architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas likens the potential to Narnia worm holes, where you can use the pattern matching and UI to go from one of your photos of the basilica to more photos of the basilica taken by others.

It looks slick - I am very curious to see how they plan to integrate photos from outside photosynth.  Wonder whether the pattern matching works at scale at all the various places in the world.  They definitely should include geotagging and maps also.

Oh yeah - if you want to see the Basilica, we have a few (44,214) photos from Webshots here