10e20 Blog

If you work with graphics or digital photos you know about TIFF’s- Tagged Image File Format. It is a file format for storing images. It is a standard and is supported pretty much by every application and allows for different compression schemes and color spaces.

The maximum size of a TIFF file is limited to 4 gigabytes…till now. .. The BigTIFF was designed as the next version to break the 4 gig boundary. Aperio, Medical imaging specialists, created the format and offered it into the public domain.

Aperio believes strongly in open standards and anticipates that with this enhancement, TIFF will continue to be the standard for storing and managing very large images such as digital slides,” stated Ole Eichhorn, chief technology officer for Aperio.

Aperio debuts this technology with the world’s first terapixel image of 225 pathology slides from a breast cancer sample.

I recently came across this article in the New York Times technology section called “Looking Perfect, One Pixel at a Time”. This article talks about the booming cottage industry of photo retouching and the types of clients they work for and the reasons people or companies seek out these services.

Everything from human vanity (the obvious dominating service), restoration of damaged photographs to age progression for police agencies and missing persons reports.

Yup Phojoe.com even did an age progression of Elvis (sans the drugs and junk food and maybe if Betty Ford was around).

Some clients ask for ex lovers or spouses to be removed from a photo…does anybody remember the fine people of Lacuna, Inc.? Cause that’s were we are heading…slowly.

As presidential hopefuls are looking to strategize their political campaign, new media outlets are being explored as novel ways for these candidates to reach out to a different demographic. Candidates are looking at blogs, search engines, and other popular social networks to reach out to the tech-savvy and the youth that embraces the online social sphere.

Last month, John Edwards announced his candidacy on YouTube. When Barack Obama announced that he was joining the race this weekend, his website was launched with a social network, My.BarackObama.com, which is displayed prominently on his website. Hillary Clinton has a MySpace page, and as of this writing, has 22,310 friends.

Last night Michael Arrington reported that sponsored blog review network PayPerPost would be acquiring Performancing, a blog advertising network. Arrington also noted that:

The popular Performancing Firefox blog editing plugin is not being acquired, and will be spun off into a new brand.

This set off quite a bit of talk in the blogosphere especially due to Performancing’s close ties to ReviewMe (Patrick Gavin is a co-founder of both companies). Leading to comments like this:

Why would the parent company of ReviewMe sell a large blogging network to their rival PayPerPost? Seems like an idiot move.

This morning Performancing founder, Nick Wilson, made some short statements to lend a bit of clarity. First on Tony Hung’s blog:

I wont be staying on Tony. We’ll be moving our ad network and blog editor to new domains and rebranding them as seperate entities.

The first thing that you will do when you read this list is say “This list isn’t just about search!” And you will be right. 2006 was a year that saw the definition of search expand. Search to me has become an all-encompassing word. Search is information. Search is media. Search is social interaction. Search is life.

MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia made their way into the conversations of housewives in Indiana and CEOs on Wall Street. Google’s mantra of “Do No Evil” was questioned over and over. Microsoft and Ask begged to be noticed. Yahoo! just begged for the year to end and 2007 to arrive.

Successful marketers adapted to the ever-changing landscape and saw search as more than algorithms. They embraced social networks and looked to capitalize on their surging popularity. SEO’s cousin SMO was born.

2006 was an event-filled year to say the least..

It’s not as interesting (to me) as trademark search (in my past life, I was a private investigator specializing in trademark research), but Google’s search reach is still expanding (and hopefully trademark search is coming next). Today, Google announced its new patent search service. The patent search engine, still in beta, boasts more than 7 million searchable patents. Results are displayed in a nice little layout featuring images of the original patent, critical patent information (patent number, filing date, inventor, etc.), citations (references to other related patents), claims, and other additional information.

Having used the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) search on a religious basis in the past, there’s a lot of promise for Google’s more user-friendly results. I’d keep an eye on this and see how Google plans to expand their coverage over time in the future.

The New York Times, the third-largest newspaper in the US, has a nifty new feature on their site: a “Share” dropdown box. Once clicked, the articles can be submitted to three major social networks: Digg, Newsvine, and Facebook. Further, a permalink button is intact, implicitly encouraging users to refer to the article’s URL in blogs and other mediums of online social communication.

With this new feature, the newspaper is acknowledging the strength and power of social networking communities. The NYTimes is broadening its readership to individuals who may not necessarily read news websites directly or even touch traditional newspapers. In an interview with the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the new functionality is a strategic move on the part of the New York Times to “tap a tech-savvy audience that is accustomed to commenting on and sharing news stories.”

According to Netcraft, 3.8 million new domains were registered in the last month. There are now over 105 million distinct domain names registered.

Last month, the Internet hit the 100 million website milestone. With the ease and cheap price of domain name registration, this growth spurt is not going to be stopping anytime soon.

Here is the Netcraft data from August 1995 through December 2006:

So why don’t you have a website yet?!

Google and Yahoo’s overseas competition is strengthening. Baidu.com, China’s largest search engine, plans on offering Japanese search services beginning in 2007 and will compete with Yahoo and Google.

According to Robin Li, Baidu’s Chief Executive, the company has been studying the Japanese market for approximately six months. In an article with the Wall Street Journal, Li says:

“We carefully studied the Japanese market. It’s primarily dominated by two players we are very familiar with. We think we can do better.”

Baidu is already faring well in China. Alexa rates it as the most visited site in China, while Yahoo is #6 and Google’s English site is #8. (Google’s Chinese site is ranked lower.)

And so Google, which apparently had plans to use the Chinese search market to its benefit, fell behind. Sixty-two percent of Chinese users prefer Baidu, according to a study released by the China Internet Network Information Center, which is 15 points up from 2005. On the other hand, Google fell 25 points.

What do you get when you integrate Ask’s maps service with CitySearch, Ticketmaster, Reserve America, ServiceMagic, TicketWeb, and TripAdvisor? You get AskCity, which was launched today.

The easy-to-use interface is shown below: a search panel on the left, the results in the center, and a map view on the right.

For now, the company intends to enhance the user experience, so there are no ads on the site. According to an article at ClickZ, ads may be introduced later on.

This promising product is intended to “drive frequency and usage of Ask.com,” and it looks like they’re on the right track.