Take programs and data with you
Thumb drives are handy little storage devices. They transport documents, picture files and the like with aplomb. But they can also be used to run programs.

This portability allows you to use a program on a computer that doesn't have it installed. For example, you may love using Firefox at home, but your office's computer policies forbid installing it.

Portable programs also allow you to surf without leaving too many tracks. This is useful on a public computer, such as at a hotel or library.

Thumb drives range from $20 for a 128 megabyte unit to over $600 for 8 gigabytes. Look for 2GB or 4GB units. They provide a lot of storage and can be had for under $100.

There are other models of thumb drives called U3 smart drives. They generally cost more than standard thumb drives. Often they come pre-packaged with software. For a listing, check www.u3.com.

Here are four useful programs that will run on any storage device, even your MP3 player:

1) A free office suite. Imagine showing up to give a PowerPoint presentation, but the computer you are given doesn't have PowerPoint installed. You can download a free viewer from Microsoft, but forget about last second changes in sale figures.

That's where Portable OpenOffice.org (portableapps.com) comes in. It's a free suite of programs. Included are a word processor, a spreadsheet, multimedia presentation program, drawing program and a database management program. All of the programs are compatible with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Access. They are also compatible with other programs like Word Perfect and Lotus.

Even though it's a portable version of OpenOffice.org, it still requires a lot of space - 167 MB.

2) A Web browser. Surfing the Net on a public computer is, well, public. Purchasing something online and failing to sign out could be dangerous. Clearing the browsing history, and dumping the cookies and cache should erase your tracks. But what if you forget?

Portable Firefox (portableapps.com) allows you to surf the Net without leaving tracks. Extensions used on your home computer can be carried over as well. Ditto for your bookmarks (a listing of favorite sites) and passwords.

Portable Firefox takes up 16.9 MB on a thumb drive.

3) All-in-one Instant Messaging program. Imagine talking simultaneously on Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger. And using only one program.

Well, you can do it with Portable GAIM and Portable Miranda (both at portableapps.com). Portable GAIM is best suited for users who want to avoid settings. Miranda, although more complex, gives greater customization.

Portable GAIM requires 8.9MB of free space, and Portable Miranda, 1.2MB.

4) Password security. There's a user name and password for everything. Strong passwords require a combination of letters, symbols and numbers. Those passwords are difficult to remember. And each account should have a different password. That's a lot of information to keep in your head!

The free KeePass (keepass.sourceforge.net) stores passwords in an encrypted database. It will import your list of passwords from various file formats, such as CSV. Or, you can enter each user name and password manually.

KeePass requires less than 1MB of space.

Internet Karaoke

MSNBC.com

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Internet karaoke gets serious

Cyber sing-along sites are betting that everyone loves a talent show

By Rachel Rosmarin

Forbes

Updated: 8:38 p.m. ET Aug. 2, 2006

BURLINGAME, Calif. - Technology changes, but popular taste doesn't. Everyone loves a talent show, which is why audiences tuned into the Major Bowes Amateur Hour radio show in the '30s and why they're watching “American Idol” today. Now a crop of entrepreneurs want to move the talent show from the small screen to the computer screen.

The Internet already serves as an unruly gong show: Would-be stars can put their performances up on sites such as YouTube or GarageBand.com and hope that someone, somewhere notices. In a few cases, that's even panned out, bringing a tiny bit of fame, and very little money, to the new cyber-celebrities.

But startups KSolo, Bix and SingShot — which opened the doors to its virtual Karaoke club Monday — aim to create sites where performances are evaluated and the cream rises to the top.

All three sites ask people to sing along, Karaoke-style, into their computer microphones. Listeners rate their favorites. At KSolo and SingShot, only vocalists are eligible to share renditions, but at Bix singers, lip-synchers, dancers, comedians and artists are welcome to show off through their Web cams.

One challenge facing these sites is that, unlike YouTube, they’ve taken the legal high-road: Users cannot upload copyrighted music or video. This means they’ve spent months wrangling with music publishers such as EMI, Warner Music Group's Warner Chapel and Sony BMG for lyrics and music licenses, and with Karaoke library companies such as Songdog and Soundchoice for rights to instrumental tracks.

“It takes resources to navigate those licensing waters,” says SingShot CEO Ranah Edelin, who relied on his background negotiating content licensing deals for RealNetworks' Rhapsody music service.

If they didn't make nice with the publishers, the startups could be liable for up to $150,000 per song, according to Holland and Knight copyright attorney Edward Naughton. “Since these companies are encouraging people to manipulate copyrighted works, they’ve got to go the old-school route of buying licenses,” he says.

The current tally: Bix has 1,000 songs, KSolo has 4,000, and SingShot launched with 2,500. That's the rough equivalent of a standard night club Karaoke catalog, but they all promise more are on the way. Each site features tunes by the Beatles, but none contain recent radio hits such as Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.” Bix’s current catalog is quite small, and doesn’t even contain perennial Karaoke favorites like the Righteous Brothers. Apple Computer's iTunes store, by contrast, sells 2 million songs at 99 cents each.

While these deals are a boon to the music companies’ profit — they represent a new revenue stream based on inventory they already have on hand — they’re a hardship on the startups who must spend time, and money they haven’t yet earned, negotiating for as many song rights as possible.

Video-upload companies like YouTube and Google's Video search product, however, escape buying licenses from publishers. If their users upload copyrighted works, the companies are betting that they'll be protected by the Digital Millenium Coypright Act, which stipulates that as long as they don’t encourage or profit from infringement, and agree to take down infringing videos, they aren’t liable. The Recording Industry Association of America has already begun serving users of sites like YouTube with “cease and desist” letters, but thus far hasn’t targeted YouTube itself.

There’s always a chance YouTube could join the Karaoke party and begin offering its users the chance to perform, warns Inside Digital Media analyst Phil Leigh, thus putting a damper on the startups’ grand plans. YouTube already serves 100 million videos per day. “If this karaoke and lip-synching stuff looks profitable, YouTube will get into it,” he says.

On a panel at a conference in Palo Alto, Calif., last week, YouTube Chief Executive Chad Hurley said his unprofitable company is more interested in creating a stage for its users rather than telling them what kind of content to create. But he did leave the door open to other, rights-based business plans. “We’re not building our business around the DMCA,” he said.

The online-performance companies hope to pay for their pricey licenses in different ways. Bix, which is currently in a closed beta test, is free to viewers and contributors, but hopes to make the bulk of its money with advertisements and contest sponsorships.

Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin thinks Bix’s business model is strong. “Imagine that Coca-Cola hosted a contest asking people to submit videos doing the funniest thing they can think of with a Coke bottle,” he says. “That’s great for the brand, and because Bix will let them control what user-generated content makes it in, advertisers won’t be afraid of it.”

But Bajarin’s not as confident about the audio-only subscription-based models of KSolo and SingShot, who both charge $9.95 per month. “I think the audio-only sites will have a tough time of it because Karaoke is not a personal delight, its something you do in a group.”

Leigh agrees. “While these types of sites have the potential to become as big trends as podcasting and blogging, I think advertising is the way to make it work. Consumers don’t want to pay a toll every five miles on this road.”

But KSolo Chief Executive Nimrod Lev has no illusions that his year-old subscription site will match YouTube’s popularity. “We never saw our service as viral, and that’s because of the subscription,” he says. “Subscriptions kill viral elements.”

Instead, Lev says KSolo will hit the mainstream with partnerships inside its new family--the startup was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media division in May for an undisclosed sum. News Corp. also owns MySpace, “American Idol” and the popular reality show's Web site, so the tie-ins are obvious, says Lev. “We were afraid FIM would build their own service like ours, but we didn’t feel mature enough to approach them. Instead, they came to us.”

In the three months since the acquisition, FIM hasn’t done anything to integrate KSolo into “American Idol,” but the company has beefed up its “Idol” site, which until late 2005 was treated as a marketing site rather than a revenue-generating destination. The site received 9 million visitors in May. Lev says a direct relationship with “Idol” is in the works.

But even if FIM does bring KSolo to the masses through “Idol,” there’s still room for another subscription-based competitor, argues SingShot’s Edelin. “Thanks to ‘American Idol,’ this universe is only growing,” he says, noting that tryouts for the next season of the TV show begin in August. “FIM’s purchase of KSolo is exhibit A in the proof of validation of this business.”

© 2006 Forbes.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14142291/

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© 2006 MSNBC.com

August 3, 2006

Basics

Was It Done With a Lens, or a Brush?

By IAN AUSTEN

Like many amateur photographers, Joe Dejesus posts his photos online and compares them to the work of others on the photo-sharing site Flickr. At some point last year, a number of landscape photos caught his eye with their vibrant tones and colors.

Their secret was a software technology known as H.D.R., for high dynamic range photography. And Mr. Dejesus quickly became one of its practitioners.

“You can get different combinations of colors you cannot achieve with photos,” said Mr. Dejesus, who lives in Granada Hills, Calif., and posts his work under the pseudonym Kris Kros at www.flickr.com/photos/kros. “You can easily come up with something that looks like a painting.”

H.D.R. is one of many digital darkroom techniques catching the fancy of amateur photographers. With the rising popularity of digital single-lens reflex cameras and more powerful personal computers has come a growing interest in visual experiments.

At the same time, software makers like Adobe are increasingly automating many of those processes, including H.D.R. While they may not always be straightforward, tricky digital techniques no longer require months of experience or hours of study.

Although H.D.R. photos are often compared to paintings, they are an attempt by software makers to allow photography to more accurately mimic human vision.

Dynamic range measures how great a difference between light and dark can be captured by a digital camera or film. Relative to the human eye, all photography has a limited dynamic range, and digital photography suffers even more than film.

It is this limitation that leads to landscape photos where a dramatic sky appears as a washed-out smudge. A classic example of the problem is trying to photograph a room’s interior while still capturing the view outside its windows. In that case, photographers are usually forced to choose either the room or its view as their subject.

While it is certainly possible to darken skies and lighten shadows using Photoshop and other image editing programs, even Adobe, the company that makes Photoshop, acknowledges that those methods fall short.

“You’re just not going to get access to the whole range of the scene,” said John Peterson, a senior computer scientist at Adobe who helped develop Photoshop.

The problem, quite simply, is that the data image editors need is not captured by cameras, even if the image was saved as a RAW file, which holds more data than a conventional JPEG photo.

The concept of H.D.R. photography is fairly simple. It starts with a photographer harvesting every bit of difference in brightness by taking several different photos of the same scene, with large exposure differences between them. Software then sorts through the resulting images, which range from underexposed views that are nearly black to washed-out overexposures, to calculate the full dynamic range of the view. Using that vast amount of data, it then constructs a single, high dynamic range photo.

At least that’s the theory. While the actual practice can be highly automated, it is slightly more complicated.

While Adobe did not invent the idea of H.D.R., it popularized it by making it a feature in Photoshop CS2, the $650 professional version of its program introduced last year. (H.D.R. is not part of Photoshop Elements, the considerably less expensive consumer version of the program.)

Mr. Dejesus uses PhotomatixPro, which is available for $100 from a French company, HDR Software (www.hdrsoft.com). And a German programmer, who prefers to call the process full dynamic range photography, sells a program called FDRTools for $53 (www.fdrtools.com).

After a software package, the next thing aspiring H.D.R. photographers need is a sturdy tripod. While the programs try to align the multiple images, a task Photoshop performs most successfully, they have limitations. A single exposure that is too far out of line can cause an unpleasantly blurry final photo.

For perhaps obvious reasons, H.D.R. photography works best with motionless subjects — very motionless subjects. Disturbed waters or winds strong enough to move clouds and flutter leaves and flags between exposures can create effects that are, depending on the viewer, either curiously artistic or unpleasantly peculiar.

There is no absolute rule for the ideal number of photos or their exposure differences. Some experimentation, however, showed that three photos, each two exposure values apart, usually did the trick. (Two exposure values is the equivalent of two f-stops on a lens, but it’s best to get the same effect by changing the shutter speed instead to avoid variations in focus.)

Seven or eight exposures were involved in efforts to create a scene where interiors and exteriors matched. But more pictures usually led to greater alignment problems.

Processing the pictures is a two-step affair. After the programs go through the selected images, they produce a true high dynamic range photo. Unfortunately, because current monitors and printers cannot render H.D.R. pictures, this generally looks terrible.

The next step, tone mapping, creates a useable photo that can be saved in a common format like TIFF or JPEG.

FDRTools, at least in its Macintosh version, is an unpolished and sluggish piece of software, which is probably why Photoshop CS and Photomatix appear to be more popular among people who post their work on sites like Flickr.

The H.D.R. pictures produced by Photoshop CS and Photomatix vary in much the same way as photos taken with different brands of film. The Photoshop images are technically more accurate and make details visible in all areas of the photo, regardless of their lightness or darkness.

Photomatix pictures after one mapping are far more dramatic, although sometimes at the expense of some details and an increase in image noise. (The Photomatix tone mapper is available separately as a Photoshop plug-in.)

Géraldine Joffre, the managing director of HDRSoft, said that while Photomatix was popular with amateur photographers, some professionals told the company they found its results unnatural.

But Ms. Joffre’s theory is that the pros’ assessments are based on photography’s traditional limitations — in effect, how people think photos should look, rather than the actual dynamic range of scenes.

“People sometimes say it doesn’t look like a photograph, it looks like a painting,” Ms. Joffre said. “But if your camera was perfect it would take an H.D.R. image.”