http://www.defazio-rotary.com Just another WordPress weblog Sat, 04 Sep 2010 03:59:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Polar Rose's facial recognition feature correctly identified half of the photos in this batch of Flickr images. As of March, Polar Rose had agreements with minor Web sites such as Glowfoto.com, Jalbum.net, and 23hq.com, and with the open-source software Gallery. The plug-in still exists, but although some 60 million ... http://www.defazio-rotary.com/2010/09/04/face-recognition-comes-to-flickr/ Terms of the acquisition weren't announced. DoubleClick bought Performics for $58 million in 2004. The group specialized in tasks such as helping Web sites rank high on search results, and Google said planned to sell Performics. "It's clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine ... http://www.defazio-rotary.com/2010/08/30/google-sells-search-marketing-group/ (Credit: Apple) Rural cell phone carriers want to put an end to exclusive deals between carriers and handset makers. But getting rid of exclusive deals won't be easy. These deals are an integral part of the U.S. wireless industry that helps both manufacturers and mobile operators make a lot of money. ... http://www.defazio-rotary.com/2010/08/24/exclusive-cell-phone-deals-called-into-question/ And now, the latest in social network developer platform announcements: Orkut, the community site owned by Google, has rolled out a directory of applications to its users in India and will continue to expand geographically over the next few weeks. India, along with Brazil, is one of Orkut's main hubs of ... http://www.defazio-rotary.com/2010/08/21/opensocial-apps-now-available-to-orkut-users-in-in/ If it seems like many people you know would like to own a hybrid car, J.D. Power and Associates has the data to back up your hunch. The auto market research firm on Tuesday released results of a survey that found a very high interest in hybrid-electric vehicles--even after the substantial price ... http://www.defazio-rotary.com/2010/08/21/most-consumers-willing-to-pay-for-hybrid-cars/ Forget shock and awe. This is more like making a pain in the neck of yourself until the other side caves just to shut you up. Microsoft's making another pass at Yahoo, but this time Steve Ballmer's not trying to go all the way with Jerry Yang. Instead, he ... http://www.defazio-rotary.com/2010/08/21/ms-to-yahoo-never-say-never/ commentary Red Hat gets a lot of credit for being a pure-play open-source company, and rightly so. It's therefore interesting to see the company releasing code that most people probably a) didn't know existed and b) didn't know was proprietary. But so it is with the Red Hat Certificate System, which Red ... http://www.defazio-rotary.com/2010/08/21/red-hat-releases-its-certificate-system-into-the-o/ At the Web 2.0 Expo, I was pushed hard to cover the new Web-based mind-mapping tool, Spinscape. The pitch I got was half demo, half introduction to the topic. I'm a big fan of outliner applications (I miss Grandview and Ecco) but the free-form mind mappers never appealed to ... http://www.defazio-rotary.com/2010/08/21/map-your-mind-20/ It's a virtual arms race among Web-based photo editors. Each one is trying to partner with as many third-party services as possible in an attempt to gain mass appeal. This morning Picnik, which has already begun to get some traction as the primary editing tool for Flickr has teamed up ... http://www.defazio-rotary.com/2010/08/21/picnik-crosses-the-pond-teams-up-with-photobox-q/ commentary We put stuff into computers (and, for that matter, get stuff out) in pretty much the same way we have for a good couple of decades. Of course, we still use keyboards of a fairly standard design as our primary mechanism to feed words into a computer and mice are ... http://www.defazio-rotary.com/2010/08/21/new-ways-to-input-finally-arriving/