Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Have you heard of web 2.0 but don’t really know what it is? Did you try reading lengthy articles but just see words on a page? Check out this (in my opinion) great video that offers a top-line view of the new web.

The company that brought you myfabrik has been busy developing a tool to let you share your files with virtually anyone.  Next Monday (11/20), Fabrik will be launching the new myfabrik lite, which allows you to embed hosted media right into your blog or website.  With their new offering, you can make slideshows, photostrips, as well as music play lists.  Another great use for it is if you have a large file that you want to send to someone, but don’t have the email capacity to do so. 

Also, Fabrik is ending the beta-period of the standard myfabrik on Monday, as they launch to the general public.  With the service, users can store up to 1GB for free, and $0.49 per gig per month beyond that - and according to the company, this includes unlimited bandwidth, uploading and downloading.

With myfabrik, it’s like having a combination of YouTube, Flickr, .Mac and G Drive all wrapped up into one, with a free GB of space.

Head over to the site and get yourself a preview before they officially launch on Monday.

Read more about Fabrik here, and see a screenshot of their new homepage after the break…

We’re so used to seeing products in TV shows and movies these days that we almost don’t even notice them anymore.  Product placement has been around for sometime now, but until now, there has been no way to keep track of it.  SeenOn! is a social bookmarking site where you can post and confirm products that were placed in the show you were watching.

Search for placements by show, movie, actor, or the product that was spotted.  SeenOn! is a fantastic idea and looks like they’re making a strong entrance into the dawt-com bubble.  The site is in beta now, so check out what they’re cooking up here.

Read [SeenOn!] Via [E-Gear]

Location-shifting television is definitely the wave of the future - next to full-out IPTV of course.  Blake Krikorian, CEO of SlingMedia, mentioned at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference last week that his company (makers of the SlingBox) has hooked up with European mobile carriers to show “place-shifted” TV on mobile devices.  He also stated that they have formed a partnership with a major carrier in the U.S., and will announce it very soon.  Lets analyze who it could be.  It won’t be Sprint, because they already deep into Sprint TV; It won’t likely be T-Mobile, because they just don’t have the mass reach.  I’m going to go with either Verizon or Cingular on this one.  If Krikorian was telling the truth, we’ll be finding out shortly.

Read [MocoNews]

Are you like us and have so many pictures, videos, and documents on your computer that you don’t know what to do with them?  What if we told you that there’s now a way to organize all of that mess...and even share it with others.  Myfabrik, a new service from none other than Fabrik, allows you to “store, find, manage, share, link and access the media content from your personal library using any computer with a Web browser.” The myfabrik service has been out for some time now, but it officially goes into final beta on Monday.

Myfabrik is what the company is calling a “WebTop” application, meaning it resembles a desktop application - only the content lives on the web.  Monday, the hosted/shared Myfabrik application will be available for free until their public launch in early-to-mid September.  In September, they will begin charging $0.99 per month for 1GB of online storage.  For each additional gig beyond that, an extra $0.49 will be added.

If you’re the kind that would rather have your data sitting next to you, you can get your hands on the Maxtor Fusion personal Web server - a 500GB storage device that allows you to host your own Myfabrik content.  This bad boy can be connected up straight to the Internet and shared with anyone in the world.  They can be purchased at Fry’s, JR, or anywhere else they sell huge hard drives.  Pick one up for the low low price of $799 (sarcasm).  The company sent us over a Fusion, so a review is just around the corner.

“While many sites and services allow users to host only one media file type like photos or videos, we provide the same intuitive but powerful interface to tag, search, share and combine videos, photos, music and other files quickly and easily – either by context or file format. We let you be the conductor of your own personal media symphony.”

Fabrik is definately different than any of the Web 2.0 start-ups that we’ve seen...it seems that they actually have a business model (but that’s another topic for another day)!

Check out Myfabrik

More screenshots after the jump.

Farecast, which was available in only select markets until yesterday, has been rolled out in 55 cities across the country as a beta with a new approach to airfares.  Basically it will tell if it is a good time to buy your plane tickets or not.  Are prices going up or down, or staying steady?  They call it predictive modeling using simulation technology.  As a wanna-be mathematian, this is really great stuff.  Read more about here.

Farecast.com’s development was led by Oren Etzioni at the University of Washington.  According to Farecast.com, “We use data-mining algorithms to search for patterns, in the accumulated airfare data, which are associated with significant price changes.” I have to say...I know exactly what that means, but it just sounds so intellectual, doesn’t it?

Via [TechCrunch]
Read [Farecast]

Do you have completely no clue what people mean when they say Web 2.0? We have tried to cover it in the past with a two part series (1, 2) explaining the present and future, as well as offering a great writeup from O’Reilly, but in case that didn’t work check out this little bit Mike Arrington did.

A couple of weeks ago Michael Arrington got together with a number of startup CEOs and executives to video a discussion about Web 2.0. The topics discussed included:

1. What is Web 2.0?


2. Are we in a bubble?


3. What are the business models that will work on the web today?


4. What is the role of publishers in a user generated world?


5. How important and how big is the early adopter crowd?

Click over to TechCrunch for the video. Remember that this is not the end-all-be-all on the topic, but a nice explanation none the less.

Diigo (pronounced as “dee’go") allows you to add highlights and sticky notes on any web page you read.  Think of a giant transparency overlaying on top of all the web pages. You can write on the transparency as you wish, as private notes or public comments. And you can read public comments on the transparency left by other readers of the same page, and hear their “two cents” and interact with them. Essentially, Diigo overlays a Web 2.0 skin on top of the entire web and makes the entire web into a writable, and even more participatory / interactive media.

When you need to forward some web pages to friends, and colleagues, instead of the whole page, you can highlight specific paragraphs and forward the annotated pages. You also get other cool features such as full-text search of all your bookmarks, notes, subscriptions to bookmarks by your friends or people with common interests.

Marc Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, co-owner of 2929 Entertainment, co-founder of HDNet, co-founder of Broadcast.com, and fellow IU alum has voiced his opinion on the net and this Web 2.0 craze. As expected, he just doesn’t buy they hype of excitement anymore.

The biggest compliment I can pay to the net and to all those pioneers who got it to this point is that its boring. It works. It’s not perfect, but it works and has absolutely become a utility.  We get water, electricity and now digital bits shipped to our homes. Its our choice whether to purchase any of the above, and we tend to choose all 3.

Cuban hits on points such as the ever decreasing costs of memory and how much easier it is today to launch these “hot” companies such as YouTube. He also makes a point and jab at software engineers because of the ever inflating amount of disk space and memory that today’s programs take up as opposed to in the past. Are web-based applications better than local applications? (I am surprised he did not reference web-based applications back to the day of mainframe computers because that is the direction we are going once again).

I don’t want to spoil the great article for you so go on over and read it at Blog Maverick.

This week we called up Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr.com and Director of Product Management at Yahoo!. We talked to him about how he and his team transitioned from creating a PC game to the photo sharing service Flickr, what impact being acquired by Yahoo! had on the company, what to do about the industry competition, and how the company stays out of copyright issues.

This podcast was once again sponsored by GoDaddy.com and comes with a 10% off coupon. It was also made possible by Gizmo Project, PodServe, and Logitech’s 350 USB computer headsets.

Listen In
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Host: Adam Berger
Guest:  Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr.com and Director of Product Management at Yahoo!
Producer: Greg Cherniet
Music: Dvir Tzadok
File size: 12.7MB
Length: 00:18:36

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