Dorrian Porter is founder of Northern Imagination.

On January 1, 1999, I immigrated to Silicon Valley from Canada to work as a corporate attorney for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. I watched in amazement as 400 companies went public that year (about a quarter of them through my law firm), and in March 2000 I felt compelled to leave the firm and start a company called HigherMarkets. It was around the same day that the Nasdaq peaked at 5132.52.

The experience and timing of my departure — and the name of my first company — sadly signified a tight connection for me between money and entrepreneurship.

Money has a nasty habit of invading the definition of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, where we tend to measure success by funding rounds, valuations, and liquidity events. I often run with a definition of an entrepreneur defined by money: People who don’t know your financial situation think you’re rich, and people who do think you’re crazy. An entrepreneur can be a person spending $10,000 to open a shop or $100 million to build a new kind of car.

Long before the car company, there was an inventor named Nikola Tesla who navigated choices of money and entrepreneurship as we all do in the Silicon Valley. Tesla immigrated to the east coast of the United States in 1884, initially to work alongside Thomas Edison. That relationship didn’t last, but Tesla is credited with the inventions that fueled the rise of electric company Westinghouse and made alternating current the standard of electricity we rely on today.

Larry Page of Google, who mentioned Nikola Tesla on a recent earnings call and describes him as one of the greatest inventors ever, has said you might want to be more like Edison than Tesla. In fact that comparison may only be true in textbooks.

A closer study of the events of the 1890s, for example, reveals that Edison faced similar entrepreneurial challenges to Tesla: Edison was kicked aside from General Electric, the successor company to his own, leading him to swear off the same financial backers for the next 30 years. Tesla, on the other hand, generously allowed Westinghouse to renegotiate a patent deal that enabled the financially strapped company to establish the electricity standard we rely on today.

Tesla made it clear that being a great entrepreneur — one who commercialized a critical standard that powers innovation 125 years later — isn’t necessarily about the money.

Despite the fact that I couldn’t live without two famous early inventions of Edison’s — photography and film — Tesla’s contributions are the ones that can spark Silicon Valley’s imagination on an even bigger scale now. Tesla made a commitment to the study of wireless energy and wireless information transmission beginning in the 1880s that led him to explore communication with other planets, to evaluate ways to transmit energy wirelessly around earth, and to care about taking advantage of the sun’s radiation and earth’s vibrations to prevent the squandering of natural resources that was occurring rapidly around him.

Sound useful today?

I love Instagram as much as anyone, but my nine-year-old daughter points out that less time on my iPhone can equal more time on things that really matter. Tesla focused on discovery in areas that really mattered, and he faced a great deal of ridicule — and no doubt financial impact — for it.

As the need to invite more immigrants to the Silicon Valley only increases, we need to send the message more than ever that our love for creative invention and a focus on the biggest challenges are more valued than money. There are some outstanding financial backers in the Silicon Valley, but the majority of venture capitalists face their own short-term problems that don’t always allow them to live up to the long-term horizons mentioned on their websites.

Whether you’ve just helped fund a startup or raised money for one, or whether you’re running a big company or working at one, we all need to be looking for ways to hail the inventors around us regardless of financial outcome. We don’t necessarily need to shift our models of capital allocation or stock grants to do it, but we do need to change where we spend our time celebrating. I’ve heard a lot of lip service paid to words like innovation and creativity in the Silicon Valley. It’s up to each of us to defend those words in a way that means something more than the next acquisition.

The free exchange of information and affordable access to sustainable energy — both issues worked on by Nikola Tesla in his time — have the potential to solve critical issues of poverty and education, and inspire peace, around the world. Wireless information transmission and energy remain two of the Silicon Valley’s biggest opportunities.

Hail to the inventors who are working on those challenges today without regard to financial outcomes. Hail to Nikola Tesla.

Dorrian Porter organized Northern Imagination in 2013, a company that seeks to positively impact the wellbeing and happiness of people via creative projects, ideas, and inventions.  He just launched a Kickstarter campaign to build a statue of Nikola Tesla in the Silicon Valley to fuel creativity on the big issues of energy and wireless. You can watch a short video and participate in the campaign here:  http://kck.st/ZWLzgG.

photo credit: Recuerdos de Pandora via photopin cc

The main selling point of the $1,299 Pixel is its large, high-resolution, touchscreen, which is appealing to people who work a lot with photography. Thus, a complementary photo app for uploading and organizing pictures makes sense.

You plug your camera’s SD card into the laptop, and the app automatically uploads the images in full-resolution to your Google+ account. From there, touchscreen-friendly features make it easy to select photos to place in albums, and the app even suggests which pictures are the best. Once the albums are ready, they are easy to share.

The announcement of the newest laptop from Google put the tech community in a flurry this morning. Google said in a blog post that the 2,560 x 1,700 resolution and 239 pixels-per-inch mean the Pixel has the highest pixel density of any laptop screen on the market today. The display offers “sharp texts, vivid colors, and extra-wide viewing angles” and is geared towards “power users who have fully embraced the cloud.”

According to a report in Engadget, the app will at first only be available to Pixel users but will eventually roll out to all Chromebooks.

Photo Credit: Google+

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Alan Bailward is a programmer, sysadmin, and photographer living near Vancouver, BC.

If you’re a photographer, or interested in photography in some way, the iPhone and the iOS app store have been an incredible boon. Not only has there been an explosion in creative new ways to take, edit and share photography, but there seems to be a myriad of different choices for each of the steps. In creating a high quality device that has the power of a computer, a great (well, decent enough anyway) camera on it, and a platform that application developers can easily use to design and create apps, Apple has created a truly disruptive force in the photography landscape.

There are, however, some downsides.

As you can see from the screenshot, I have a fairly serious iPhone camera app problem. I haven’t been checked out by a doctor, but the prognosis isn’t good. This is just the one screen of them, mostly ones I don’t use. The rest are organized in folders for taking pictures, taking video, editing images, sharing them, the business side of photography, and even a separate “Photo GPS” folder.

This isn’t the biggest issue though, the issue is that the 86 (yes, you read that right, 86) iOS apps that I have currently on my phone are some of the better ones in their respective categories. Yes, there are a few that were impulse downloads during a sale, but for the most part they were curated through trusted sources or my own research.

There’s a lot of stupid, photography apps out there. A LOT. Sometimes you really have to wonder how you can make it through them all.

FIrst there are the scam apps.

A quick search of the great iPhoneography.com for “scam” reveals a lot of stories. What is a scam app? Well, in general it’s someone taking someone else’s app, slapping a new logo and maybe a coat of paint on it and selling it for some low price point ($0.99) with either ads or prominent links to other apps that have had the same treatment. These are generally inferior, deceptive, and sometimes epically rage inducing.

Generally these apps also have a ton of (purchased I’m sure) five-star reviews to put them on the radar, and many times are duplicated many times over with different names and in different categories, but are all the same. Apple has done some work in this department, but there is still a lot of crap out there.

Next up are the truly silly “single use” apps.

Take for example 1×1 Camera, an app that appears to do nothing more than take images cropped to a square format. There are some more serious takes on this, with Michael Hardaker producing several (actually quite high quality) camera apps named 645 Pro, 6×7 and 6×6, with the main difference between the three of them the aspect ratio.

Now this is a case where the app itself is fairly decent, or at least, the author has put a fair amount of time and effort into producing something that’s good quality (the 645 Pro app and his new PureShot app (obit of which I own — I told you I have a problem) allow the fairly unique ability to save in a high resolution TIFF image, instead of the standard lossy JPG).

There are a lot of cases where the apps aren’t high quality, or for that matter any quality at all.

The number of apps on the app store that are either deceptively named (any query combination of camera pro, camera plus, or the like will end up with a lot of similar looking icons and feature sheets), or look like someone went through a iOS programming tutorial and then packaged up the result and is trying to make a couple of bucks off it by selling it for $0.99, is massive.

Nothing wrong with that, but as a consumer, you need to be aware of these things.

Let’s look at the “silly” apps in the store. Not just silly, like the Fatify app, which lets you take a picture and then make the person look fat, but bordering on the truly bizarre.

Bazinga Camera (App Store Link - $0.99) As far as I can tell, this is a “joke” that puts your victim in a loop of taking pictures and answering the phone. I think. The app description ends with: “This app is intended for entertainment purpose only and does not provide true “camera” and “phone call” functionality.”
Ultimate Funny Camera Sound Effect App Free-Great, Addicting, Gun, Fart Shutter & Ringtones Sounds Box Gratis Apps Lite (App Store Link - free) I think you can tell from the name of the app that it’s terrible. In fact it’s nothing to do with cameras, but more a soundboard of fart sounds.  Not sure how this comes up in a search for photography apps.
Old Fart Booth (App Store Link - free) Lets you age a picture you take, but to get all the cool effects you’ll need to shell out $4.99 in in-app purchases.
Abs Fun Booth (App Store Link - free) Basically lets you put great abs on a picture. Honestly it seems that about 90% of the camera related apps are about putting things on a picture.
Amazing X-Ray Funny Booth (App Store Link - $2.99) View an X-Ray of your friends and totally fool them.  Well, if using the accelerometer to let you tilt the iPhone to move over a pre-defined body part to show an X-Ray image is totally fooling them.
Cool Finger Faces (App Store Link - free) Lets you put faces on your fingers (seeing a trend here yet?) either from the $1.99 in-app purchase, or “draw it yourself.”
Fat Booth (App Store Link - free) Take a picture of your face and make it fat.  I can see this being fun for a few minutes, or until you use it on the wrong person and get your butt kicked.  Note this is completely different than the other ‘make a picture fat’ app I mentioned.

So how do you avoid the scams, the fakes, and the crap photography apps?

• Use trusted sources to find apps such as friends, peers and trusted sites
  If you hear someone like Mostly Lisa on a podcast of good repute such as This Week In Photo you’ll know to go directly to the website for the app, such as Tap Tap Tap to find the “real” Camera+. Letting someone else curate the good apps is great. I keep an eye on various photo blogs and keep myself informed of what’s new and cool.
• Next is to look at the reviews in the app store itself
  Take any reviews on an app with a grain of salt, but they will generally tell a story. Lots of reviews, distributed over the different star ratings is fairly normal. One or two or three glowing 5 star reviews and nothing else? Unless the app was just released today you might want to ask around. A few 1 star reviews are normal enough, if an app is good enough a few people will find an axe to grind with it, but a lot of one star reviews and those two glowing 5 star ones? Might be time to head for the hills.
• Use common sense
  Ask yourself that even if the app you’re about to hit the buy button is awesome, will it do anything that your current set of apps don’t do? Is having an app that only shoots in 4:5 ratio for $0.99 worth it when you can open up one of the 18 other apps you have that will crop an image in 3 touches? Sip your $4.99 latte and let that sink in.
• Click the developer’s name and see what their other apps are
  If they have a bunch of other similarly named apps, you might be looking at a shovelware producer, where you’re going to (in general) get lower quality apps. For example, this developer has five different apps for putting funny things on your face and three different ones for stretching your face, eyes, and mouth (each a separate app at $1.99, $0.99 and $0.99 respectively). This company has 8 different apps to “oldify”, “browify”, “baldify”, “beardify”…. you get the picture. While I haven’t tried any of these apps, my gut feeling is that they’re pretty much carbon copies with a few different images cranked out with the aim of quantity over quality.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, here are my recommendations for the five essential camera apps photographers  should have on their iPhones:

• Camera+ (App Store Link)
  A great app for taking pictures and editing. It’s “clarity” adjustment has to be seen to be believed and the speed of the app is amazing.
• Snapseed (App Store Link)
  Image editing from the folks at Nik software. Again, best of breed for editing on the go.
• GeoTagr (App Store Link)
  Shooting with a DSLR and want to record your GPS locations? This does that, and allows you to sync the data back to your computer or flickr, dropbox and Google+ images.
• Autostitch (App Store Link)
  When the built in iOS 6 panorama app just doesn’t cut it, Autostitch is built off the respected autopano library on the desktop and will do amazing things with your panoramas, vertical, horizontal, or both.
• Top Model Release (App Store Link) or Model Release (App Store Link)
  If you’re a photographer dealing with models you need model releases.  Paper ones are best, but if you only have an iPhone or iPad with you, this app will get you there.  Cloud sync and an iPad version are just the icing on the cake.

Alan Bailward is a programmer, sysadmin, and photographer living near Vancouver, BC.  He can be found posting links to interesting things through the day at UFies.org or on his photography site at Bailward Photography.

photo credit: MomentsForZen via photopin cc

Google announced today that it has updated Google Earth for desktop with 100,000 new tours and a million photos from Panoramio, a geolocation-oriented photo share site that Google acquired in 2007.

“As you navigate in Earth, tour guide acts as a local exploration expert, suggesting interesting places near the location you’re visiting,” Google said in a Google+ post announcing the update.

Google last added significant amounts of new imagery to Google Earth in October last year, unveiling 3D imagery for 21 global cities. At the time, Google said it had 11,000 tours, such as the one below of  Rome. The tours are not all terrestrial; you can also explore Mars, the Moon, or a variety of Hubble Space Telescope images.

100,000 new tours means that Google has created 89,000 in less than three months — a fairly staggering feat. The tours include fly-overs, Wikipedia snippets, and the photos sourced from Panoramio. Panoramio focuses exclusively on natural photos of the planet, excluding photos of people or vehicles, but allowing city scapes.

No software update is required to view the new content.

Image credit: Google

In other words, the perfect blend of old Google (fast, reliable) and new Google (usable, pretty).

Old Google image search returned a grid of images, which users could click on to see larger, and click again to go to the originating site. New Google image search will show a large image with detailed metadata and and ribbons of other image results:

Google image search, old and new

The good news for webmasters — and, presumably, owners of photographs and other images — is that Google will now be showing image metadata and the name of the website the image is from right on next to the image, with a link to the originating website. Google says there are now “four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two,” which Google says that in user testing has resulted in more traffic to the original hosting websites.

All of which means that Google is showing greater respect for the owners of images, which is good news.

The new image search is not yet live, so I can’t actually test it. One question that occurs is that while it’s clear that the image-by-image experience is likely better, the new image search might make it harder to quickly scan a large number of images to narrow down a search for a particular file.

One other bit of good news for those of us who like to keep our fingers on the keyboard: Google says that image searchers will be able use their keyboards to quickly flip through images.

Cloud storage titan Dropbox has agreed to acquire photo-focused startup Snapjoy, a move that could help Dropbox own the photo organization and backup space.

Snapjoy, a young company that graduated from the Y Combinator program in summer 2011, offered consumers an online photo library that uploaded your photos and organized them into categories like who, what, when, and where.

The move will likely help Dropbox expand beyond the idea of a photo backup and make it more of a place to organize your memories. The acquisition comes just a week after Dropbox agreed to buy Audiogalaxy, which could help Dropbox users with music backup and streaming from the cloud.

Snapjoy co-founders Michael Dwan and JP Ren wrote in a blog post today:

As a fellow Y Combinator company, we’ve always admired Dropbox and loved their product. From the moment we met the founders, it was clear we shared a common goal. By combining forces with their amazing team, we can leverage the technology and scale of their platform and focus on what matters — delivering an incredible photo experience to over 100 million people.

So what happens next? First and foremost, don’t worry — your photos are safe! Though we won’t be accepting new signups, existing users can continue to use Snapjoy to share and enjoy photos just as you do now. We’ll be in touch with more information over the coming weeks.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Photographer silhouette via Dominic Alves/Flickr

That’s one of the reasons Facebook is reportedly working on a new app that will let users send photos — and maybe videos — to friends that will self-destruct. According to AllThingsD, Facebook is testing an app to compete with SnapChat, the social network that deletes photos and videos seconds after they’ve been viewed.

SnapChat’s app, which has been accused of being a sexting tool, allows users to take pictures or short videos, add short, superimposed text messages, and send them privately to a friend. The sender can also chose how long the message should be viewable. As soon as the receiver gets and views the message, the timer starts. Once the message is deleted, it disappears from the receiver’s phone, the sender’s phone, and Snapchat’s servers.

Too bad there’s such a thing as screen captures.

After perhaps a slow start in mobile that Mark Zuckerberg blames on an over-reliance on an HTML5-based strategy to build cross-platform apps, Facebook has moving into the app space aggressively with standalone apps. Of course, it bought photo-sharing service Instagram for $750 million. It also has Facebook Messenger, a sort of SMS-replacement app on which messages do not disappear, and the apparently Instagram-competing Camera.

In addition, as part of a strategy to improve quality and get better faster, Facebook is now pushing out refreshes to its core mobile Facebook mobile apps every one or two months. Just in the past week, Facebook updated its Android and iOS apps, which are both now native apps, with better performance than ever.

The new SnapChat competitor is rumored to be going live sometime in the next few weeks. Little hint to Facebook: before Christmas would be a nice gift to your users.

photo credit: Shandi-lee via photopin cc

Postagram, the mobile app that takes your Instagram photos, prints them, and sends them to your friends as postcards, published a beautiful little love story today. Two long-distance lovers kept in touch with Postagrams … and then received a wonderful, creative gift at their eventual wedding.

I talked to Postagram’s CTO, Bryan Kennedy, about the story.

“Apparently it was a couple that was doing the long distance relationship thing,” Kennedy told me. “The boyfriend sent a Postagram every week. Then, at their wedding, the bride’s sister presented them with a gift made up of those Postagrams.”

Here’s the story, from the Postagram blog in the words of the former girlfriend, now wife, LaDonna Consolo:

Source: Sincerely

Postal love via Instagram and Postagram

When my husband and I first met and started dating we lived about an hour apart, so we could only spend time together during the weekends. The five weekdays would stretch long but Mike would always send me a Postagram with pictures from our weekend and sweet captions that totally melted my heart.

After eleven months of dating, we were married, and my sister used my Postagrams from Mike to create a set of wall hangings to decorate at our reception. These sweet hangings now adorn the wall over our bed, and are a constant reminder of our love story. Most people might think to put these in a typical photo album but these meant so much more to us and we love being able to look at them every day and reminisce.

Thanks for making an app that gives us such a unique way to commemorate special days and preserve our memories. We love you Postagram!

That’s a great story, and great example that connecting with people doesn’t just have to happen via social media or pixels on a screen.

Postagram is a service by Sincerely. The San Francisco company recently launched Sesame, a new gift-in-a-box product line, just a day before Facebook announced its own gift plans.

Image credit: Sincerely

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

Taking photos with your iPhone or simple point-and-shoot camera is one thing, but upping the ante by going all in on a DSLR camera is something entirely different. When you finally pull the trigger and go DSLR, you’re going to want to take full advantage of everything it can offer you, and the latest VentureBeat Store offering has got something that’ll help take your skills to the next level.

With The DSLR Camera Course Bundle, you’ll be able to master your DSLR camera and digital photography skills at the same time…and for just $39!

Between these two video courses you’re going to receive over 11 hours of instruction that will show you how to master the capabilities of your DSLR camera and will help take your skills from good to great.

Let’s look at what you’ll get in this bundle…

Digital Photography Course for Beginners (regularly $39)

Most new DSLR camera owners use very little of the potential of their cameras. (DSLR = Digital Single Lens Reflex). The thought of moving off “auto” can be daunting but to really get creative control over your photos you need to grasp some basic photography principles. This course is designed to fill that gap in knowledge so you can get into the more creative modes of your camera and start taking better photos.

What You’ll Learn:

• What Essential Items you need in your DSLR Kit
• The Photo Triangle – secret weapon to explaining the Basics
• Compose better Photos using the same Principles DaVinci, Botticelli, Van Gogh and many more used
• Exposure and ISO and why it matters
• Creative use of Shutter Speed
• …and much more!

Advanced Digital Photography Course (regularly $49)

This course will take the basics you learn from the beginner course above and will explore more creative scenarios, including: Better Portraits, Night Photos, Nature (including Sunsets), Macro Photos, HDR (High Dynamic Range) Imaging, and Time Lapse (those cool videos where 12 hours happens over a few seconds). It also includes chapters on image editing and DSLR Video.

What You’ll Learn:

• Key Elements to getting Better Portraits
• The most important setting in Night Photos and How to use it
• The Tools and Tricks to get Great Nature Photos
• How to set up a Time Lapse sequence
• Basic Image Editing using Photoshop and free software
• …and much more!

You can learn more about this bundle – and the man who’ll be training you, Ken Schulz – at the VentureBeat Store page. And while you’re there pick up this great bundle at 55% off the regular price and start mastering your DSLR camera today!

TourWrist is an iOS application where users can rate, label, and submit 360° panoramas. People use the platform to share their photography and to check out travel destinations, homes, and businesses. Instead of old-school panoramas, TourWrist leverages mobile technology to create high-quality, dynamic footage. Users shoot their own pictures using the camera on their iPhone, and then preview, edit, stitch, and share from the app.

TourWrist presented new features at DEMO Spring 2012, including new APIs and SDKs, and the ability to link multiple panoramas together, as well as to other photos, videos, audio, websites etc… It is used by amateur photographers, professionals, and businesses alike. TourWrist aims to reach tens of millions of people in the next six months, and already claims to operate the world’s largest professional panoramic photographer community.

This investment will help expand marketing initiatives with brands such as hotels, cruise lines and vacation rentals, as well as with tourism organizations and online travel agents that want to incorporate panoramic photography into their campaigns. For example, a Royal Caribbean cruise near the Hubbard Glacier:

Thayer Ventures, which focuses on hospitality-centered startups, and General Catalyst Partners participated in this seed round, along with angel investors. General Catalyst first invested $250K after TourWrist won the General Catalyst Award for Travel Innovation. Combined with $500K from a friends-and-family round, this brings TourWrist’s total amount raised to $1.75 million.

TourWrist is based in San Francisco. Read the company’s blog post.

Def Con recently celebrated its 20th birthday, and to mark the occasion, the famed hacker conference welcomed something it had strictly policed in prior years: A film crew.

This year, Def Con creator Jeff Moss decided that someone needed to preserve the con’s history while it is still in its heyday. Def Con brings in tens of thousands of people to Las Vegas each summer to talk about hacker culture, new exploits, current security policy, and the computer underground. Indeed, Def Con is now a staple event for the most unlikely of groups: press, law enforcement, and hackers.

So Moss chose a film crew headed up by Jason Scott Sadofsky (pictured above), who is known in the industry for his documentary on the old bulletin board systems (the predecessor to today’s social networks) as well as his website Textfiles, which archives content from those systems.

“On the 20th anniversary, [Jeff Moss] wanted to do special things,” said Eli, who is otherwise known as “Dead Addict” in hacker circles and helped Moss create Def Con. “One of those special things was to try to capture the spirit of the event and the history of the event while it was still possible.”

A history worth preserving

Source: Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

Jeff Moss, the founder of Def Con.

Def Con began in 1992 as a small get-together that Moss, otherwise known as The Dark Tangent, helped coordinate after an online friend suggested they create a real-life gathering for people in their “bulletin board.” His friend, however, disappeared from the network after his father moved their family for a new job before the event ever happened (yes, people were actually disconnected from their friends due to a move back then), leaving Moss to put on the whole party by himself.

“Back in the day, back when Def Con started, people learned everything they knew about hacking and the computer underground by … searching out all these documents — which were hard to find, hidden in places — and trying to distinguish between bullshit and truth,” said Dead Addict.

Moss set the event in Las Vegas and invited all types of people connected to the “computer underground,” such as hackers, phreakers, police, and government officials. Thus was born one of the most unique characteristics of Def Con: its openness toward all people in the security industry. It even accepts us lowly security reporters.

But because of this, it needed rules.

“There’s a lot at Def Con that’s on the record. Every speech is on the record, things people say are on the record, but there’s also a lot of private conversations and a lot of people hooking up with the people that they know,” Dead Addict said. “[But] there are tourists here, as it were.”

The tourists are the Feds and the media. Hackers don’t love it when someone identifies them. At Def Con, they obscure their identities, sometimes wearing masks to panels, hoping to not get caught by the undercover cops who show up each year. Moss and some of the co-creators of Def Con, such as Dead Addict, decided that cameras and videotaping should be outright banned. You’d get thrown out for snapping a quick picture of the crowd because it disrupted the flow, because it made people feel uncomfortable. But the photography rules are starting to relax.

“To pretend there’s actual anonymity here was always delusional,” Dead Addict said. “We invited the Feds from day one to just highlight that, you know, you’re being watched. Don’t do stupid shit while you’re here.”

He went on to say, “Don’t commit large felonies with witnesses you can’t trust, which should be an obvious thing.”

A director, a Segway, and a whole lot of hackers

Source: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

The documentary crew wore bright orange jackets to make their presence known.

Flash forward 20 years to the latest Def Con, which took place in July at the Rio in Las Vegas. Sadofsky was milling around on a Segway, wearing a bright orange construction vest that said “DOCUMENTARY” on the back and with a hoard of cameras running around him.

“We worked very hard to make it so the film crew was totally obvious. We would travel in packs. That was on purpose,” said Sadofsky in an interview with VentureBeat. “When we came into a room, people saw us.”

This is not Sadofsky’s first go around at Def Con either. He has attended Def Con for 10 years, and the attendees and organizers alike know of him.

“Jason’s one of us, so there’s a deep level of trust that the entire community has for Jason,” said Dead Addict. “People that didn’t know him know his work.”

Dead Addict is directly involved in changing the photography and film rules. He says it doesn’t make sense to keep up the practice. This is especially important now that phones, tablets, and laptops can snap a picture fairly stealthily. But it also means the media will have an easier time capturing the essence of Def Con, its busyness, and the action.

“It was starting to seem ridiculous to have a much more restrictive rule for press than we have for our attendees because the distinction between bloggers and people that use interactive media and the official sanctioned press is very, very blurred,” Dead Addict said.”It seems a little absurd to not let the good photographers take photographs and to let everyone else take photographs.”

Over the course of Def Con 20, Sadofsky and his film crew interviewed over 200 people, 15 to 30 of which were sit-down interviews with Moss himself. In total, they recorded around 280 hours of footage. The crew itself was made up of Sadofsky, a few trusted friends — including Eddit Codel of Boing Boing TV — and some of his Kickstarter backers. He referred to Codel as his “ringer” and said he was “comfortable in a chaotic environment.” Those are good qualities to have, as Def Con is an inescapable organized chaos, with up to 12,000 people pushing through hallways to hear the next revered speaker show off their latest exploit.

The documentary’s debut

When I caught up with Sadofsky last week, he said he was still “editing like crazy.”

“The plan is still to provide the documentary for free for Christmas, with a for-sale version with bonus material coming in the new year — early 2013, if I can make it happen,” he said.

Once the editing is complete, the feature film goes to Moss for the final cut. As Sadofsky mentioned, Moss plans to give it away for free, though Sadofsky hopes the con can make a buck off of its story. He sees no reason why Def Con’s organizers would “turn away from a TV network or film festival-type deal.”

Source: Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

The non-human (e.g. press) registration line at Def Con.

The film itself is not meant to be a yearbook and has no narration. Instead, Sadofsky wants the people to speak for themselves. Some of his favorite moments thus far include a couple of attendees who brought their children, and the sweet moments (yes, hackers can have sweet moments) when long-time attendees looked back on all their Def Con memories. Part of his inspiration for the documentary was The Dark Tangent himself. He describes Moss as a “mysterious figure who [attendees] see for a few seconds in the hallway.” Indeed, Moss told Sadofsky that he doesn’t actually know what happens at Def Con. He’s busy in the back, making sure the gears are turning, and misses out on much of the core of his own event: the people.

“The fact is that people are not ashamed to be at Def Con. It’s not a crime to be at Def Con. It’s not a black mark on your record,” Sadofsky said. “I would have been fine walking without a camera.”

And posted, naturally, to his 3.3 million followers on Google+.

Which of course, did not happen accidentally. Google is giving us a preview of the company’s big Monday event at which we even more confidently can now predict the Nexus 10 tablet will be unveiled. The big deal with the Nexus 10 — besides that it’s coming to market — is that it is even higher resolution than the retina iPad 3 and iPad4, with 2,560 by 1,600 pixels on its large screen.

As Google+ helpfully informs us, the image is 2,048 by 1,536 pixels, making the 10′s camera at least 3.14 megapixels … coincidentally, also the value of pi (at least to two decimals).

However, since Google+ limits the maximum dimension on uploaded images to 2,048, it’s likely the actual  camera on Google’s new tablet is actually higher quality.

Commenters on Vic’s post are generally happy to see that the Nexus 10 is real, with one, Derek Ross, gently chiding the Google exec:

Vic, you’re such a tease

VentureBeat will be at Google’s big event on the 29th, bringing you all the details of the Nexus 10 and the rumored LG Nexus 4 smartphone.

The event seems to be a fairly hasty Google attempt to respond to Apple’s big product announcements, including the iPad mini, and Microsoft’s Surface.

Another of Gundotra’s vacation photos with the Nexus 10:

An all-new header photo — somewhat reminiscent of Facebook’s cover photo — now helps your Twitter profile stand out better. Rather than just a few pixels for a headshot or a logo, the new header photo can display much more: multiple images, a portrait in a setting, or whatever your creativity allows within the limits of about 520-by-260 pixels.

It also, not incidentally, creates a clear differentiation between Twitter controls, menus, and space on the left, and your personal photo, tweets, and account information on the right.

Here’s a simple visual overview:

According to Twitter, the same profile photo will appear on Twitter.com, iPad, iPhone, and Android.

In addition, Twitter updated its mobile apps to create a more visual experience, introducing “photo streams” thataggregate photos uploaded in tweets over time in one location within the Twitter application. It’s a swipable element — simply scroll forward and back in time by swiping from side to side.

On iPad, the photo stream looks like this:

New Twitter photo stream on iPad

Tapping on a photo will bring it up fullscreen, much like this image of a T-shirt someone gave me at a conference:

Full-screen images on Twitter for iPad.

In addition to the new profile and photo-display opportunities, Twitter users still may upload a custom background, which displays on the web but not mobile platforms. Conversely, the photo stream doesn’t show up on the web.

The goal, according to Twitter, is to “get to know people better through their pictures” and announced the updates with a blog post titled “because you have more to show.”

I’m not sure what the pic above says about me, and I’m not sure there’s much more that I want to show.

But I do know I now have some work to do to update my Twitter profile. …

photo credit: [phil h] via photo pin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google bought “photography first” mobile app developer Nik Software today, meaning it now owns Instagram competitor Snapseed. But while Snapseed gives Google those sepia filters, it also provides an arsenal of photography apps the company can use for its social network, Google+.

Snapseed raises eyebrows because it’s a competitor to Instagram, which Facebook bought for $1 billion in April. Instagram is wildly popular and was already showing signs of its dominance when Facebook picked it up. At the time Instagram had roughly 30 million users. Today, it has over 100 million users, according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The social network wrapped up the deal last week after the Federal Trade Commission OK’d it, which may be putting pressure on Google to compete.

Snapseed, of course, doesn’t have the following or fame of Instagram. It’s more likely that Google wants Nik Software, which creates a number of different photography apps, to add functionality to Google+.

While we often push Google+ off to the side as “Google’s attempt to do a social network,” photographers have actually flocked to the site. Google+ displays photos in a lightbox and did so before Facebook switched to the feature, which displays photos in a larger format, separated from the rest of the content on the screen. Indeed, photographer Thomas Hawk even created a list of the “1,500 Kickass Photographers on Google+” (after which Facebook contacted Hawk to talk about what it could do for photographers).

Nik Software’s other apps could be used to improve the photo features of the Google+ Android and iOS apps.

Image via Snapseed; hat tip The Verge

But here’s the deal: you gotta view them on your phone (or tablet).

Here’s why: On your laptop or desktop, you need to click your mouse in the middle of the pano and move around. It’s cool-ish … but more ish than cool.

On your phone or tablet, however, you simply load the pano, and move your phone around in space: up, down, around. It’s like augmented reality, except it’s even more augmented because your phone is showing you things that aren’t there. It’s virtual reality, but it’s real. Ohhhh …

The best description I can think of: Your phone becomes a moving window to the place and time in which the panorama was created.

You may have heard the words 360-degree panorama tool and yawned (honestly, so did I). But when we played with these in the newsroom at VentureBeat we were soon moving our phones through the air like complete idiots … and enjoying every second of it.

But don’t just take my word for it: Check them out on your phone. You’ll be glad you did.

Pano #1: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus

Click this link on your phone … or, if you’re truly obstinate and want to view it on a larger device, I warned you:

Pano #2: VentureBeat writer Jolie O’Dell on stage

Click the link … or view below:

Pages: 1 2 3

Jasbir Patel, a director at Walgreens Photo, said that almost a third of photos taken today are snapped on a smartphone, not a dedicated camera.

Already, photo apps such as GroupShot, Kicksend, and StillShot have partnered with the company and integrated printing to Walgreens into their apps. In addition, Walgreens is aiming for massive scale by partnering with Aviary, a software library or set of components that enable developers to very quickly and easily integrate photo functionality into their apps.

Aviary is currently in use by about 1,200 apps with eight million users … and as TechCrunch revealed today, Walgreens participated in the company’s recent $6 million round of investment.

This announcement helps Walgreens’ photo printing business remain relevant in an Instagram age in which no-one is taking rolls of film to their neighborhood drug store for developing.

But the real story here is that what we think of as traditional businesses are no longer traditional businesses.

Brick-and-mortar enterprises need APIs just as much as Google and Amazon need APIs. In an era when the government has APIs and your neighborhood drug store has APIs, it’s getting hard to imagine a business with any scale whatsoever that couldn’t use one or more APIs.

“An API shows a business is mature and successful … it’s become a platform,” Yossi Mlynsky, founder and chief executive of Alt Tab Mobile told VentureBeat. “Walgreens should release an API for prescription drugs next.”

It’s part of the digitization of everything. Grocery stores need APIs. Businesses of all kinds — stores such as Walgreens and other non-technology companies — that five years ago could never have imagined building and offering an API, may now see the utility in providing multiple APIs: for shopping cart integrations, for integrating project management for a large construction company, for photo printing of course.

With this announcement, Walgreens just became one of the leaders of the followers.

Image credit: Phillip Pessar/Flickr

So why does the Facebook photo posting experience suck so much?

I compared posting a photo on Facebook to posting a photo on Google+ just this morning. The difference is frankly startling. There’s a reason Google+ is hot with photographers, and it’s not just because of the full-screen image viewing experience that Facebook recently copied.

Uploading is just easier on Google+.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the proof: six clicks versus one.

The Facebook image uploading experience would be familiar to internet users of the 1990s — it takes little advantage of modern browsers and modern technology, beyond an upload progress bar.

Google+ is simple: drag your file, drop it, click post.

In contrast, Facebook takes at least six clicks — and that’s assuming you don’t have to do a lot of searching on your PC to find the image file you’re trying to upload.

First, you have to select what kind of media you’re going to upload. (Seriously? You’re telling me the server can’t figure that out from the file?)

Then you have to click to open a dialog box and navigate a directory. In the age of iOS and directory-less apps that just magically have access to any files they need, this seems more than a little antique.

You then navigate that file directory to find your image, select it, and click Choose (or the PC equivalent, Open). If you’re a power user, you can save one whole mouse click by double-clicking the file you want and dismissing the dialog box in one fell swoop.

And finally, of course, you click Post.

That final click is the only one that Google+ requires. Drag, drop, Share. It’s hard to be simpler:

About four percent of the world’s entire trove of photography now resides on Facebook. At 250 million photos a day, that percentage is growing higher by the minute.

Shouldn’t the world’s most important photo-sharing site also have the world’s best photo uploading technology?

I think so.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Google+ is succeeding in small bursts, feature by feature. As a social network competing with Facebook it’s a flop, but its video-chat tool Hangouts is a winner. Now photo sharing is poised to be the service’s next breakout hit, thanks to an enthusiastic community of photographers who like the focus on attractive full-size images, Google+’s new photo-centric iPhone app, and a uniquely Google passion for metadata.

In fact, Google+ is pushing hard on the photography front and is in a great position to dominate the floundering Flickr.

The Google+ team teamed up with Kelby Training for a two-day Google+ Photographers Conference in San Francisco, or as it was adorably called, a HIRL — Hangout in Real Life. Vice president of product for Google+ Bradley Horowitz (pictured above), who led Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr in 2005, kicked off the event Tuesday by talking about the future of photography, how Flickr changed his outlook, and whether ads will ever make an appearance in Google+.

A camera that records your blood pressure

“I feel photos are the lifeblood of our service,” said Horowitz. “They are the way we can most immediately and viscerally connect as human beings.”

For the past four-plus years, Horowitz has pushed his passion for “social computing” at Google: combining photos, algorithms, and human interaction. While some of us may see the rising flood of images and data — from camera settings to GPS location — as overwhelming, Horowitz sees it as an opportunity. He thinks the future lies in capturing even more data, sharing more information, having more sensors, and recording more dimensions.

For example, we generate so much information that going through it to find gems is becoming more and more difficult. Ironically, even more data can be used to bring order to overload.

“I want to know everything I can about the environment,” said Horowitz. “I would like to know more detailed information about the roll, pitch, yaw of the camera. About the lens optics, about even the blood pressure of person whose hand is on the camera, even the galvanic skin response.” These biological markers can be used to identify the special and meaningful moments in your life worth remembering, such as the happiness you felt seeing your kid take her first steps.

Tools like Google’s own Google Glass could be a great start for capturing all of this information, but of course there are a few kinks to be worked out first.

“I never know whether Vic is listening to me or not,” said Horowitz of Google’s Vic Gundotra, who sometimes sports the augmented reality glasses during meetings.

We are capable of so much more than Instagram

Capturing pixels is just the beginning of a photo. How it’s processed and used after it’s on a computer is becoming even more important. Google has multiple properties that dabble in photos, including Picasa, Google+, Drive, and even email. The next step is to combine those tools together, something Horowitz admits is still an issue.

“Ultimately the brand distinction between those needs to go away… we’re working hard to erase the seams between these experiences,” said Horowitz in response to a question about the difference between Picasa and Google+. “The fact that you have to ask it is a failing on our part.”

Eventually Google aims to blur the line between the device and the cloud, so all the data you generate is automatically backed up, archived, and secured in a nice non-obtrusive manner. Automating this synthesizing stage would free up time for photographers to focus on the more enjoyable process of manipulating the data.

Horowitz wants to increase the power its own post-processing tools, making image editors scalable so that an amateur can use them as easily as a professional photographer. Replacing the very segmented image editing market and creating a tool that is equal parts Instagram, Lightroom, and Photoshop is an especially ambitious (perhaps naive) idea.

Google wants you to think of ads as little presents

The absence of ads in Google+’s lightbox, the tool that shows your images, is part of what appeals to the many photographers who use the service. But certainly it’s only a beta perk, right? After all, a whopping 96 percent of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Google’s philosophy when it comes to ads is that they can be a very useful part of the user experience (as they are in search results). However, it doesn’t want to serve them where or when they don’t belong and won’t be the most effective.

“We don’t think of ads as punishments the users must endure, we think of ads done well as something that users would cry over if we took them away,” Horowitz said.

The company has not yet found a way to make ads useful in the lightbox. If a Google+ user is looking at photos of their family, says Horowitz, “the last thing you want to do is stick an ad between that intimate moment and intimate interaction.” Instead, Google leans more towards collecting data and delivering it when the context and time are right.

For example, say you review a restaurant. Google will tuck that information away and deliver it when it is relevant, perhaps six months later when one of your friends looks for a restaurant recommendation in the same area. “That’s a gift from me to that person facilitated by Google.”

And it all started with Flickr

Horowitz has a background in photography, like many others on the Google+ team (“We are geeks, and photographer geeks are a sub-flavor of geeks.”) As a grad student, Horowitz worked on some of the earliest image-processing programs and algorithms that analyzed images.

Eventually he landed at Yahoo as the head of multimedia search, which is where he met the founders of Flickr, a “fascinating, tiny little company in Canada.” They asked why, instead of writing complex algorithms to analyze images, he didn’t just ask people to volunteer their knowledge, à la Flickr’s tagging? People can just look at an image and say if it’s a dog, a person, or even if its funny or snarky.

“I realized my algorithms were so far from having a snarky detector that this was a better approach,” said Horowitz. “A little bit of social engineering was better than all the algorithmic approach… it introduced the concept of bringing people and community into the equation.”

Horowitz went on to oversee Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr, and eventually moved on from the company. But now, many years later, the idea of social computing that Flickr planted in his head is being used to turn Google+ into real Flickr competitor.

Kodak may have specialized in cameras, but according some recent revelations, the beleaguered and recently-bankrupt company also tried its hand at nuclear research.

For thirty years, Kodak housed under its Rochester headquarters a research reactor equipped with over three pounds of enriched uranium. Kept secret, the uranium was removed in 2007, Democrat and Chronicle reports.

Though the reactor and its surrounding lab’s existence are perplexing and still a bit disconcerting, the idea behind the operation was fairly solid: Kodak used the uranium and reactor to test chemicals for impurities, as well as run neutron radiography tests. How that research was applied to its actual core operations isn’t clear, however.

It gets better. As it turns out, very few people knew of the lab’s existence, as Kodak had, with a few exceptions, not made it publicly known that the lab was in operation. Then again, that was sort of the idea, as the 3.5lbs of enriched uranium is just the sort of thing you’d want to keep secret from the general public.

Kodak, however, even kept Rochester city officials in the dark, which might have been a bad decision had some sort of disaster befell the location. Fortunately, Kodak says that the lab posed no risk to Kodak employes or the surrounding population, an assurance that may not be worth as much after the fact.

Top photo: Viktor Nagornyy; Below: Kodak’s neutron flux multiplier, via the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Pushing forward the elevated idea of Instagram photographers as modern day artists, a startup called Instacanvas officially launches Tuesday to give IG photogs online galleries where they can display and sell their filtered square captures as art.

On Instacanvsas, amateur and professional photographers alike can sign in with an Instagram account and set up an online gallery. Here they can promote and sell their contemporary, digital photo art as printed canvases and earn 20 percent of sales.

Instagram enthusiasts can purchase prints in 12-inch, 16-inch, and 20-inch square canvases, starting at $39.99, and (in theory) hang something more culturally relevant than a generic print in their homes.

The young company also provides its Instagram artists with a social toolset designed to help with distribution and exposure.

The idea is not a wholly original one. A service called Hashpix offers Instagram photographers a similar way to profit from their mobile shots. The printed pieces of Instagram art even remind us of those offered by CanvasPop, which makes 12-inch and 20-inch square, wall-ready canvases out of Instagram shots. So, the market appears to be there, but it may already be saturated.

Or not. Instacanvas, which first debuted in private beta eight weeks ago, says it powers more than 25,000 artist galleries, is already seeing 1.1 million monthly unique visitors, and is doing “thousands of dollars a day” in revenue. Today, the service will also open up to the “tens of thousands” of galleries on the company’s wait-list.

“[Our] approach sets us far apart from other players in the space,” Instacanvas CEO Matt Munson told VentureBeat. “Because we’re building an incredibly active community and enabling our photographers to promote their own work, we’re enjoying rocketship, viral growth without spending a dime on advertising.”

Ironically, Instacanvas joins an array of revenue-making startups profiting from Instagram — a feat that the service inspiring these third-party marketplaces never managed to achieve prior to its $1 billion sale.

Instacanvas is a graduate of Los Angeles incubator MuckerLab. The company has four employees and has raised roughly $500,000 in seed funding.

Eager amateur photographers with the desire to practice their craft should take notice of new startup Rawporter.

“We are creating an army of cameras, on location, on demand,” said co-founder Rob Gaige at the DEMO Conference in Santa Clara, Calif., “You can earn a little extra cash just from being in the right place at the right time.”

Rawporter is a free camera app for both iOS and Android smartphones that helps photographers earn money by selling their photos and videos. The app sends you location-based assignments from media partners and bloggers who will pay you for getting a pretty visual to compliment whatever piece they might be working on.

Outside of people who enjoy taking pictures, the app will likely get some interest from traditional media because of the low-cost, high quality photos, Rawporter told VentureBeat.

“It’s no secret that the AP and Getty Images are way outside the price range of the average blogger. So, if that blogger wanted to add photos or video to a story they were doing, they’d need to source that themselves…or hope they could find something off YouTube that fit their needs,” said Rawporter co-founder and CEO Kevin Davis.

Rawporter faces competition from big players such as CNN’s iReport and AP-partner Bambuser. What sets the startup apart, however, is fairly compensating and crediting the people who send publications videos and photos, as well as sending specific assignments out based on location so the photogs don’t have to guess what the news organizations are looking for.

“I think that’s a space with Getty Images…that’s right for disruption. I don’t know if they’re really got it figures out,” said SugarCRM chief executive Larry Augustin during the DEMO sage panel following Rawporter’s presentation.

Founded in 2010, the startup’s four employees split their time between Charlotte (N.C.), New York City, and Vancouver. Rawporter is currently in bootstrap-mode and hasn’t raised any significant funding. The startup launched a beta of its service in November that gained a decent amount of traction — thousands of videos from users across 40 different countries, according to the founders.

Check out a screenshot of the Rawporter assignment page below. (Click to enlarge)

Rawporter is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Now the company is taking the images further with an update to its iPhone and iPad app, new APIs and SDKs, and neat interactivity features, which the company presented today at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

TourWrist CEO and founder Charles Armstrong

TourWrist gave a sneak peek of two new features due out in May. First are PanoSpots, which link multiple panoramas together Google Street View-style, and give them more depth by linking to photos, videos, brands, audio, websites, and Facebook profiles. The real fun demonstration was of the trippy planar acceleration controls, which will allow you to physically step forward or back while holding up an iOS device to move between panoramas, go through doors, and check out other linked panoramas or information.

Smartphones and tablets have a few key features that are making these types of immersive photos relevant again: GPS, built-in cameras, touch screens, and accelerometers. Using the free iPhone and iPad app, you can view panoramas by categories or location, and navigate by touch or the neat motion-based gryo mode. You can make a panorama of your own surroundings by just moving the device around and capturing the scene with its back-facing camera. The new app update (v2.3.2) adds image preview, editing, and offline shooting options, as well as improved stitching, shooting support for the new iPad, and Retina display support.

TourWrist has a fun social and crowdsourcing side — any one can easily make and share an image, meaning you don’t have to cruise the map of panos long to find some random shirtless dude playing guitar in his apartment. But as you might expect, the nicest-looking tours aren’t shot with iPads or iPhones. They’re the stunning and seamlessly stitched images created by professional photographers, often for hotels, resorts, and other posh locations trying to woo customers. (There’s a helpful link on the site and in the app for business that want to hire a professional panorama-maker.)

The app is well-timed because location-based images are having a moment: Google has added interior shots to its Google Maps street view, and augmented reality, the overlaying of digital information on a real view, is getting a boost from the forthcoming Google Glasses. Microsoft has a similar product called Photosynth, but the UI is clunky and it has seemingly been forgotten by the software giant.

“With Apple, Google and Microsoft bringing panoramic photography to mobile devices, this is a medium primed for mainstream adoption,” said CEO and founder Charles Armstrong. “TourWrist is pioneering in important fields such as motion control algorithms and virtual tour business methods.”

So far, the app has been downloaded 700,000 times since becoming available in early 2011. There are now more than 40,000 panoramic images on the service of everything including resorts, clubs, nature, music festivals, and really messy dorm rooms.

“I find Charles’ product … to be visually stunning,” Benchmark Capital general partner Bill Gurley said in an investor panel following Wednesday’s demonstration. “He’s accomplished something truly remarkable … but there are some challenges around business model.”

The boot-strapped company was founded in 2010 by Charles Armstrong and has had $155,000 in funding. It currently has 13 employees and is based out of the Hatchery co-working space in San Francisco’s SOMA district. Naturally, there’s a 360-degree image of the office on TourWrist’s site.

Here are some of my personal favorite TourWrist images: The Russian Clown Circus, an honest to goodness man cave, and Alcatraz.

TourWrist is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Google+ is an interesting place for photographers to share their art, according to many photogs we’ve spoken with. So it seems fitting that the first Google+ focused conference would be all about photography.

“There is no more vibrant online community for photographers right now than the one we have on Google+,” said Ivan S. Makarov, photographer and pioneer of the philanthropic Plus One Collection.

“Flickr and Facebook both have groups, and photographers usually spend time in smaller communities, inside those groups. Google+ does not yet have groups, so the community itself is bigger,” Makarov said in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

And now, that photography community will be getting a lot more exposure, thanks to a conference organized by Photoshop User magazine editor Scott Kelby. The first ever Google+ Photographers’ Conference is set to take place next month in San Francisco, and it will be all about the power of images plus the power of community.

While the conference isn’t produced by Google, it has the full support of the Google+ team, including Google VP Bradley Horowitz, who will be speaking at the conference. Other luminaries slated to speak include photo-blogger Trey Ratcliff, tech personality Guy Kawasaki, Google+ community manager Brian Rose, and a number of others.

Content will include sessions on best practices for Hangouts, how to build a brand on Google+, what kinds of content and posts perform best, and photography-specific sessions on shooting portraits and sports photography. The schedule also includes several photo walks in scenic San Francisco locations with conference speakers and photographers.

Makarov’s Plus One Collection is one of the more interesting photographic-related uses of the Google+ platform. It aims to be a photography book for charity, with all proceeds going to Kiva, the micro-lending startup for the developing world. So far, the project includes the work of 516 photographers — something that Makarov attributes to the Google+ community and tools.

“The online photography world is very fast-moving, with the river of images flowing in front of us every day. It’s so easy to forget what impressed us because there’s an overload of information,” he said. “The Google+ tools for sharing and discussing topics are… very powerful. For example, in the first hour we posted the news about our book release, our website got 5,000 unique visitors, as people kept sharing the news about the project to their streams. It’s very easy to spread the word on Google+, as long as one has an interesting message others feel is worth sharing.”

The Google+ Photographers’ Conference is taking place May 22 and May 23 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco. Registration is open now, and tickets are $300.

Image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With all eyes on Instagram’s long-awaited Android app, the hot photo sharing startup today announced a surprising partnership with rival Hipstamatic, opening up photo sharing in Instagram from Hipstamatic’s 4 million users.

“When we launched, it was all about Facebook and Flickr and Twitter, and now we’re seeing a huge shift in our user base toward Instagram,” Hipstamatic cofounder and CEO Lucas Buick told Fast Company in an interview. “We’ve never been a social networking company, but we clearly benefit from social networks. So this will be the first app outside of Instagram that lets you into their network. That’s pretty cool for us.”

Both Instagram (free) and Hipstamatic ($1.99) are iPhone-only and offer photo filters and the easy ability to share your shots — but Hipstamatic also includes other camera tweaks like different lenses and flash options. Hipstamatic has attracted a dedicated community of 4 million users, compared to Instagram’s whopping 27 million users.

The partnership solidifies Instagram’s lead in mobile photo sharing, after seeing explosive growth since it launched two years ago (with only four employees for most of its run). The company is clearly doing something right, if it’s now so big even rivals want in on the action.

As part of the partnership, Hipstamatic users will be presented with the option to share photos to Instagram, along with other social networks. You’ll be able to add a filter and other tweaks as normal from the app, and when it appears on Instagram it’ll show up with a “Taken with Hipstamatic” attribution.

That small bit of text alone could lead to more revenue for Hipstamatic, since users who click on it will be directed to the iTunes Store to purchase the app (it’s not sharing any of the revenue with Instagram). And for Instagram, it means the company gets access to a dedicated community of photo nerds who post 48 million photos a month.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom tells Fast Company that users have already been using Hipstamatic to tweak photos before they get uploaded to Instagram, so he just wanted to simplify that process.

“It’s a step in the direction that we’re testing out,” Systrom told Fast Company. “We’ve been very careful about making sure that Instagram photos are about what’s happening right now in your life, and we want to allow for more of those photos to end up on Instagram regardless of where they’re taken.”

I expect Instagram to form similar partnerships with other popular photo apps like Camera+, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being directly embedded in iOS, similar to how Twitter is now a core part of the platform. With a more inclusive API and an upcoming move to Android, it doesn’t seem like Instagram’s crazy growth will be slowing down anytime soon.

Photo Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat (using Instagram)

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The 41-megapixel camera on Nokia’s 808 PureView not only wowed the audience at the Mobile World Congress this week, it also landed Nokia the “Best New Mobile Handset, Device or Tablet at Mobile World Congress 2012” award.

A panel of judges selected the PureView as their top device of the show — likely not because it’s a smartphone everyone will want (it’s still running a dated OS), but because it was the only device to truly surprise us at Mobile World Congress. HTC’s One series phone was close in the running, and other devices, like the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 and Asus PadFone, were also on the short-list for the award.

“It’s a fantastic award because it signifies that consumer experience counts,” Nokia EVP of smart devices Jo Harlow said to the Nokia Conversations blog. “It’s about tech, but it’s about how tech is used to make a consumer have a fantastic experience. … These are first signals that we are executing against our strategy,” she added. “That we’re back. That we’re bringing great products to our consumers — and that this is just the beginning. There’s lot more to come.”

The PureView camera technology on the Nokia 808 is more than just hype. A Nokia engineer explained to us how the camera gets such killer shots, and the company has also put some excellent sample shots online at Flickr.

Thankfully, Nokia has said it intends to bring the PureView technology to future phones, so you can expect to see killer cameras in some Windows Phone devices from Nokia within the next few years.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A Nokia phone with a 41 megapixel camera may sound insane, but honestly, that’s my kind of crazy. Nokia announced the 808 PureView today at the Mobile World Congress, and all of a sudden the previously unknown phone running a dated Symbian OS became the talk of the show.

At Nokia’s MWC booth, I chatted with an engineer who spent the past two years on the team developing the 808 PureView and its ridiculously high quality camera. As you can tell from the video below, he couldn’t be prouder of his new baby.

He explains the variety of ways you’ll be able to take pictures with the 808 PureView — either with a full 38 MP resolution image that you can scan and crop with ease, or smaller resolution images that can still take advantage of the phone’s large camera sensor. For this phone in particular, seeing is believing, so pay close attention to how sharp his sample pictures look in the video below (and make sure you’re viewing it in 1080p HD).

I had some brief hands-on time with the phone, though it was shackled with an overblown security mechanism (typical for show floors). Being a Nokia device, the 808 not surprisingly feels like a high quality piece of hardware. What’s most striking, unsurprisingly, is the large camera lens on the phone’s rear. There’s a noticeable bulge around the camera area which makes the 808 resemble a point-and-shoot, but it’s still slim enough to fit into your pocket.

But while the PureView camera technology is undoubtedly cool, it’ll be hard to recommend this phone when it launches because of Nokia’s Symbian Belle OS. It’s a big upgrade over the company’s Symbian S40 devices, but it still falls short when compared to competitors like Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Luckily, Nokia seems to be treating the 808 as an experimental device, similar to the N9.

Hopefully by next year, we’ll see the awesome PureView camera tech in future Lumia Windows Phones.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile photo-sharing service Instagram updated its application today with a new filter, enhancement feature, and a makeover to its user interface.

Instagram lets you take a photo with your iPhone and layer it with different filters for that extra hip look. You can then connect it to your social networks and share it with the Instagram community. Now, the company is introducing a new, sleeker interface that’s easier to navigate. The updates include a new header, as well as different menu buttons on the bottom of the screen. The company explained in a blog post that these were the “first steps towards making it easier to understand and interact with our app.”

Notifications have also gotten easier to use by taking you directly to the referenced comment, photo, or profile when clicked.

The company has also added a new filter called Sierra. Filters are really what give Instagram its charm. They allow anyone to be a photographer with their phones. Sierra makes the yellows pop on your photos. If your photos don’t have exactly the look you want, or if they’re too dark, you can use Instagram’s new Lux feature, which automatically brightens dark photos and brings out more details, again catering to the amateur who loves beautiful photos, but may not know how to take them.

These updates aren’t the only love the application has seen lately. Kaitlyn Trigger, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger’s girlfriend, created an application that lets you turn your Instagram photos into virtual Valentine’s Day cards. She calls it Lovestagram.

hat tip The Next Web

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

It seems Facebook has rolled out its new lightbox photo viewer to more people today, and some are saying it’s a ripoff of Google+.

The new feature is similar to the old “theater view” in that it takes the user into a pop-up carousel of photos. What’s new is that Facebook has moved the comments to the right side of the photo and added advertising below the comments field. In order to like or tag a person in the photo, you must hover over the photo and wait for an action bar to appear.

This is the first new feature to come out of the company since it filed to go public on February 1. While Facebook’s interface tweaks and privacy policy changes often provoke outrage among its hundreds of millions of users, we think most people will like this one. Facebook has long been known as a great place to view, upload, and share photos. It has been held back, however, by its smaller format. The theater view helped expand Facebook’s photo real estate by lifting the pictures off of the actual web page. The lightbox continues on this path, though one photographer, Thomas Hawk, believes the lightbox could be bigger.

“If I were Facebook I’d still make the lightbox view much larger (like Google+),” Hawk wrote on his website. “When it comes to a photo in lightbox view, bigger is definitely better.”

As Hawk notes, some believe this viewer is very similar to Google+’s lightbox. The comments on Google+ also exist on the right side, and the background greys out similar to the Facebook lightbox.

We have reached out to Facebook to see if this rollout has been completed. We will update upon hearing back.

Sad that Google’s online photo editor Picnik is meeting its demise this year? Well, veteran photo editing service Aviary is plotting to take its place. On Monday the company announced it’s bringing its photo editing services to the Web with a new Facebook app.

“We took the best pieces of our original software, made it lightweight, and launched into Facebook. We were founded to try to bring creativity to the masses,” Alexander Taub, Aviary’s lead of business development and partnerships, told VentureBeat.

Aviary started out in 2007 as a powerful editing service for professionals — “Photoshop in the cloud” as Taub  calls it. In 2011, the company moved into the mobile device market with a mobile API.

Aviary lets you do all the basic photo edits you’d expect; crop, brightness, and contrast. Beyond simple edits, Aviary has several photo filters and stickers to add personality to your pictures. The filters give your photos the in-demand retro Instagram-look, a feature Picnik lacked.

With Picnik gone, Aviary hopes to be the better and more powerful answer to Picnik, with more tools and faster photo editing. It also hopes to offer its services on a larger online scale.

“Picnik built their offering into third party apps such as Flickr. We want to fill the gap Picnik has created with those services,” said Taub.

Aviary is based in New York City and has raised a total of $11M from Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, and Spark Capital.

Kodak has been on unsteady ground ever since digital photography began decimating the print photo business in the mid-2000s. The company had an especially bad year in 2011, and the company admitted Tuesday that it would be de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange unless is improves its financials in the next six months. The company’s stock is down nearly 30 percent to a horrific 47 cents a share at time of this writing.

The Chapter 11 preparations, which were first covered by the Wall Street Journal, could make way for a lot of asset sales, chief among them patents. Kodak has a portfolio of 1,100 patents that it could sell through a bankruptcy auction. The company also employs about 19,000 people, and it could start to cut through the staff to create a leaner operation.

Anonymous sources in the Journal’s report say the company is looking secure $1 billion in financing that would keep the company going while it is bankruptcy proceedings. The Chapter 11 filing could happen as early as this month or in early February.

Do you think Kodak can survive or is it time to put the cameras away?

Sad dog photo via Shutterstock