Scouta Releases Windows Client that Recommends Media Using iTunes

Scouta releases today a Windows client for generating video and audio recommendations based on the podcasts and videocasts in a user’s iTunes collection. This release comes just over a month after the company released a Mac version to do pretty much the same thing.

To use the client, all you have to do is install and configure it with your Scouta user account and set the frequency at which you want it to sync with your iTunes collection. Be sure to have some podcasts in iTunes before trying this out; otherwise it’s pretty pointless (it won’t recommend content based on your music collection alone).

The client will also only create recommendations using the podcasts and videocasts you’ve actually listened to or watched. Once recommendations are generated, users can tweak them by manually rating content in the Scouta web interface.

If you only casually consume podcasts, Scouta may be overkill and not worth the time to set up (even though the process is pretty dead simple). Personally, I discover enough online content through emails from friends and by simply browsing sites like YouTube and the iTunes catalog. But, if you love discovering new content online, this client could come in very handy.

MOG, iLike, and Last.fm also provide content recommendation systems that integrate with iTunes, except they focus on music and not general media.

The screenshot below provides a view of the Scouta recommendation interface.

Multi-Language Image Search Tool Released By University

PanImages is a new search project coming out of the University of Washington that allows users to search for images in their native language and receive far more results than with traditional search.

Emerging search engines such as Like.com allow searches via image queries, but are far from becoming mainstream. Most image search today is conducted by an analysis of the metadata around the image. So an image search on Google for “flower” returns results that have the tag “flower” in the photo metadata - 11.4 million results. But if you only speak Spanish, a search for “flores” returns just 2.2 million results.

Search engines are slowly beginning to allow cross-language queries to return more results to people who speak less popular languages. Google’s effort launched earlier this year, handles just a dozen major languages and does not address image search.

PanImages, by contrast, supports over 300 languages. Users simply type in the query and the language they are speaking and see a result set that includes translations. Clicking on a result returns Google Image and Flickr search results for that term.

The data itself is still somewhat thin, and users are asked to add translations when the site doesn’t already know what you mean. But the early results are useful, particularly if you speak a fairly obscure language. An images search for the Zulu word for refrigerator returns just two results. A similar search on PanImages returns 472,000 results.

Facebook Opens Email Up A Little; I Want More

Facebook opened up their very closed email platform today by allowing users to add normal email addresses in a message. Previously you could only send messages to Facebook friends. Now you can add in others, too.

This is great news for people who use Facebook for most or all of their emailing. But for those of us that use normal email for our day to day business, getting Facebook messages is more of a problem than a feature. That’s because Facebook makes you log on to the site to read messages/emails from your friends. They’ll send a note to your normal email address when a new message comes in, but they make you log on to Facebook to actually read it.

I rarely do that, and have missed some important messages from people trying to contact me. As a next step, I think Facebook should offer to forward the actual messages to an outside email address (and/or provide a password protected RSS feed). Eventually Facebook should offer full POP or IMAP support for their email. They can still restrict it so that you can only receive messages from friends, but at least you could access it from your desktop or web based mail application.

MyHeritage Expands Its Family Tree

Genealogy site MyHeritage is merging with Pearl Street Software. Through the team-up MyHeritage will pick up Pearl Street’s VP of Technology and gain control of the #2 family tree software in worldwide sales (Family Tree Legends), the #2 family tree submission site (GenCircles) with more than 160 million ancestors, and more than 400 million public records in the Family Tree Legends Records Collection.

The addition of the team and products put the company in a better position to deal with upstart Geni, which announced over 5 million profiles in 5 months in July. They’ve also been getting a great deal of the press. However, Geni still has a long way to go when taking on the established ancestry industry. MyHeritage has a large lead on the site with over 10 million registered users of their site. Ancestry.com, the leading genealogy site, has added 5.6 million people to their family trees this week.

As a sign of the competition, MyHeritage will now be making all the Pearl Street Software free.

SpiralFrog: Free Music Alive And Hopping

Remember SpiralFrog that free music download service that announced itself nearly a year ago? Well, after slowly releasing invites to Canadians, we received a private beta invitation.

SpiralFrog originally made a splash when they sealed a deal with Universal BMG to give away free downloads of some of their songs in exchange for a share of on-site ad revenue. Later they closed a deal with EMI and have since added a bunch of smaller labels totaling over 700,000 songs. However, now we know a little more about how their free system works.

Songs on SpiralFrog are not ad-supported through interstitial advertising or free in the sense that you can bring them anywhere. Instead, you get DRMed songs (WMA) leased to you for a free 30 day membership (or you can buy on Amazon). You can renew your membership, and the lease to play your songs, by answering survey questions (# concerts per year, how you discover music, etc). All that data helps SpiralFrog know what kind of ads to serve on the site.

To keep the whole system secure, they’ve locked down the download process end to end DRM controls. First you have to get a download manager, and then ensure you have Windows Media Player 9.0 or up. The system is kind of annoying and only works on Windows machines since it uses Microsoft DRM. Although, Microsoft DRM has already been cracked. The DRM requirement also means the songs only play through Windows Media Player, making them unportable. Unlike other DRM setups, though, there doesn’t appear to be a limit to the number of computers you can download to as long as you set SpiralFrog up on them.

Once the system is in place, you can search for artists and download their songs/videos individually. The songs are queued in a download manager and stored locally by artist and album in your SpiralFrog folder. The system seems to have intentionally been crippled so you view more advertising, with downloads happening one at a time and only while on the site. Using the site, I was able to download a bunch of songs and play them with no problem, but other early beta user have had trouble.

I don’t know if SpiralFrog will be able to sustain their business off of on-site advertising and affiliate music sales. A lot of other services are simply going DRM free, not download free. Blogmusik also recently went legit in France, but the US courts and music industry are a lot harder to sway. However, limiting the lease time on the songs means they can continuously tweak what hoops their users need to hop through to keep playing the music they download. For now it may be a simple option if you want a (legal) source of free tunes.

Spock Open Public Beta

People search engine Spock, which we’ve been covering for a few months, has publicly launched.

Spock differs from differs from recently launched WikiYou and other people search engines by using algorithms to find and merge the majority of their content into a unified profile. User generated content such (tags, links, photos) then augment the auto-generated content they spider from other sources such as wikipedia, IMDB, or social networking sites.

Note that competitor Wink seems to be moving toward a more automated model as well. They recently crossed 200 million people profiles and have been incorporating some of the same data sources as Spock.

A key Spock feature is a widget that shows results for a given tag (see embed below). Making the service public makes the widget a lot more useful. You can use it to make any number of lists around a how Spock ranks search terms. See, for example, the results for blogger and tech blogger.

Spock is certainly fun, and encourages user interaction by adding and voting on descriptive tags. It could easily become a definitive source of information about people. It will, however, likely take a massive number of page views to properly monetize the product - people searches do not generate the kind of advertising rates that ecommerce and other searches command.

Casio EX-Z1000 digital camera

Casio EX-Z1000 digital camera

Casio EX-Z1000 digital camera The EX-Z1000 is a stunning new addition to the growing family of Exilim Zoom series of digital cameras. With ease of operation, this 10.1 megapixel camera can take users to new heights of photographic expressions with its multitude of functions. It reduces image deterioration and also provides the facility to crop beautiful images out of a main image. The wide, high-brightness 2.8-inch LCD makes images crisper, clearer and brighter. A 1200 cd/ sqm LCD backlight makes screen images easier for outdoor viewing. The camera can be configured to adjust to screen brightness automatically in accordance with available light, or one can select from four fixed brightness levels. Priced at Rs. 29,995, it is the latest entrant to Casio’s international range of digital cameras. These cameras are available across India at all leading stores.