Ajax Girl

Fotowoosh, a new service from Maryland-based startup Freewebs, will turn any image (preferably an outdoor image) into a 3D model. They went live on Friday.

The 3D image is constructed in Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) format, meaning you currently need a VRML reader to see it (future browsers will likely build this functionality in). In a week or so, the company say, users will be able to upload a picture and have a 3D animated image returned to them in a Flash widget that can be embedded on any website.

When you upload an image to Fotowoosh, their software tears it apart and distinguishes the sky, ground and vertical elements within the photo, then cuts and folds it into a 3D model:

Our system automatically constructs simple “pop-up” 3D models, like those one would find in a children’s book, out of a single outdoor image. The system labels each region of an outdoor image as ground, vertical, or sky. Line segments fitted to the ground-vertical boundary in the image and an estime of the horizon’s position provide the necessary information to determine where to “cut” and “fold” in the image. The model is then popped up, and the image is texture mapped onto the model.

The images below were processed by FotoSwoosh. The 3D results are immediately below the 2D images.

This is the creation of Derek Hoiem, a PhD candidate in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, who’s now working with the company. Additional information on the intellectual property behind Fotowoosh is here and here (these links auto-download a pdf and a powerpoint document).

Microsoft is working on something related to this in their Live Labs group called Photosynth (more information here). The product will construct a 3D model based on lots of photos of the same thing or general area from different angles.

Freewebs raised $11 million in venture capital in August 2006 from Columbia Capital and Novak Biddle. The company’s main product is a website building tool that draws 18 million or so visitors per month. Shervin Pishevar, the company’s president, say that Fotowoosh will be a standalone service, and they’ll also integrate it with offerings from partners as well as the Freewebs service itself.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/109339412/

Conduit (Disclosure: They are a current TechCrunch sponsor), which has created a white label toolbar that 130,000 individuals and companies use to create their own branded browser toolbars, released a new product tonight called myConduit. I’m writing about it because it’s a good solution to the problem of toolbar overload.

Instead of having each toolbar you’ve downloaded appear in the browser window, which takes up a lot of screen realestate, Conduit now lets users switch toolbars via a drop down menu. This only works for Conduit-powered toolbars, but it would be a nice browser feature in general in my opinion.

Given the advertising relationship I won’t go into more detail. But this is something that publishers might want to look into. Our Toolbar, linked in the navigation bar above, has been really useful particularly around getting event updates to attendees. The company now has 130,000 unique toolbars and 12 million toolbars installed (Major League Baseball has one for every team).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/109389617/

San Jose based LeapTag is part bookmarking (like del.cio.us) and part discovery (like StumbleUpon). It’s a good way to keep track of websites that you like using tags, and it’s also useful for serendipitous discovery of new sites you might like, based on the things you’ve already bookmarked.

Usage occurs through the browser via an IE or Firefox plugin There’s a sidebar that lists each of the tags and associated bookmarks. You can easily skim through tags to find your bookmarks (although it is slower and less organized than Del.icio.us via their Firefox plugin). Frankly, if all you want is a bookmark manager, this is not a good choice.

Like StumbleUpon, though, LeapTag will present new sites to you that you might find interesting.

StumbleUpon asks users to vote on sites they visit, and then compares those up or down votes to the votes of others. By analyzing the vote streams of many users, StumbleUpon can throw you to a random site with a fair degree of confidence that you’ll like it.

LeapTag does this as well, but suggests sites only when you click on a particular tag in the sidebar. When you do that, it shows you your bookmarks for that tag in the sidebar, and also shows you additional sites that you might find interesting. Results are delivered based on the voting patterns of you and other users, but isn’t limited to sites bookmarked with LeapTag. They also scour search engines and RSS feeds for additional content that might be relevant to the tag. If you want to see it visually before trying it, see this video of their presentation at the DEMO conference last year.

I found it to be very useful for randomly discovering sites based on a descriptive tag. I bookmarked a few gaming sites and then looked at what it recommended. The results were good.

It does, however, require some work and organization to get things going. If you use another bookmarking service, it will be awkward to bookmark sites to both services.

I could not get the plugin to work properly on my Mac, although it worked fine on my Windows XP test machine.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/109164084/