Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

So you’re trying to explain to your girlfriend which nifty little gadgets are on your wish list for your birthday. She’s confused, well, probably because you have twenty of them and many sound very similar, but that’s beside the point. Problem solved. Now you can simply direct her to the Screen2 website and show her exactly what you are talking about. She can see in real time exactly what you are looking at on your screen. Pretty cool eh? What makes it even better is that absolutely no downloads or installation are required to run the program, so there are no worries of any invasive viruses attacking your system from a third-party site.  The only thing you have to do is make sure to allow pop-ups and cookies while you are on the Screen2 site. (delete ‘em later)

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Developed by the Canadian company Idee, the TinEye search engine is a fantastic new breakthrough in the realm of search engines that allows users to search for their photographs anywhere on the Internet.  Users are able to actually search for a picture by uploading it, and then having the program run a pixel by pixel search across the ‘Net. All found instances of the image are flagged, regardless of whether it has been cropped, merged or digitally altered in any way.

Leila Boujnane, CEO of TinEye, has the following to say about their program.

“TinEye does for images what Google does for text. We are not limited by words, Google can only find an image if a particular search word is in proximity to it. We have the ability on a large scale to tell somebody where one of their images has appeared and how it’s being used.”

The program is also not limited by the quality of the input image according to Boujnane.  She states that “anything you would consider a preview image or low resolution image would work. I can take a photograph of a picture in the Louvre with my mobile and upload it to TinEye and it would dump me on the page of that Wikipedia page related to that painting.”

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Another start up website that well, is attempting to make the world a better place is called Postacrime.com. This is not another one of those social networks that are popping, this website is out for a better cause. It is to identify and share incidents of a crimes such as theft, vandalism and burglary and hopefully serve as a warning to others. People who have experienced a crime or have caught such events on camera or video could upload them to the database to share with the community. However, the website is not intended for posting grave crimes such as murder, assault or rape. It is aimed at crimes like loss of property and only non-violent crimes can be posted. Aside from the video there are tips and some information found in the database about the uploaded crimes.

While Postacrime.com points to a good cause, it could also become a place for attacking people. There is always the potential for an innocent person to be victimized when someone begins to abuse the website and posts a photo of a crime that didn’t happen the way it appears. I just hope Postacrime.com readies the site for those unforgivable crimes.

Via [geeksugar]

While the whole world is all tied up about Microsoft’s shocking bid to enslave Yahoo!, Time Warner’s Internet arm AOL is also busy with its own acquisition of online affiliate marketing network buy.at. As usual, the company did not disclose the financial terms.

Just like the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, AOL wants to boost up its Internet marketing operations and achieve its overall goal of becoming the one-stop shop for online advertisers.

Unlike the popular pay-per-click and display advertising models, buy.at is an online marketing network powered by a commissioned-based scheme. Here, advertisers will only pay its affiliates or Web publishers once a visitor responds to its ad and take the necessary action such as purchase. 

Read [Reuters]

In an effort to pump up the Zune brand name a little bit more, Microsoft launched Zune.net today.  The site goes along with their new look for the product/brand and sports brown...you know, the new black!  Also they’re really taking this Indie artist thing to the extreme by plastering them all over the site - wallpapers and all.  Did they finally realize that Justin Timberlake wasn’t going to cut it anymore?

And in case you forgot, Zune’s “coming 11.14.2006.”

Read [Zune.net]