Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 29, 2007 by CyberNet.

I thought a good way to wind down the day (filled with iPhone madness) would be with a fun, yet challenging game. A game called Everybody Panic is sure to frustrate you as you race against the clock to complete this maze-like game.

There are several different levels in Everybody Panic, and I have a feeling that the throbbing red dots found throughout the course will spark some anger in you. After you feel like you have experienced it all jump to the last level where you are sure to throw a couple cuss words at your monitor, but don’t blame your mouse or keyboard for screwing up because you’re the one who is responsible. 🙂

The good thing is that you can go as slow or as fast as you would like, but sometimes that just doesn’t help. While you can control it with the keyboard I don’t recommend it. I’ve found the mouse to be the best way to get around those throbbing and quickly rotating obstacles.

Let us know how you do…just make sure you don’t panic!

Play Everybody Panic!

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on February 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

Photagious is a web-based photo service that ads fun to sharing your photos. For a small monthly fee, you’re able to upload all of your favorite photos to put in a slideshow with music, graphics, and other tools to make sharing a little more exciting.

Instead of using ads to make revenue, Photagious charges $3.95 per month for a personal account. This is actually a great price when taking into consideration that you get unlimited space and a pretty nifty slideshow editor.

Compare this to Picasa Web Albums and it’s an awesome price.  Picasa charges $25 per year for 6.25 GB, all the way up to $500 per year for 250GB.  You’ll pay around $47 for an entire year with unlimited space to upload as many pictures as you’d like with Photagious. Flickr on the other hand offers unlimited uploads and unlimited storage with their Pro account for $24.95 per year.

Photagious also offers a Pro account for $10 per month. The difference between a pro account and a personal account is mainly that you can upload videos and create video galleries to integrate into your site. They have a nice comparison chart of the differences in features here.

My favorite features:

1. Unlimited Space – With high resolution pictures, you can never have enough room!
2. No ads– This makes sense because you’re paying for the service.
3. Slideshows– Make it easy for your friends and family to view your photos.  They offer 35 different themes to give it a more customized feel.
4. Tagging – I’m getting really used to tags with just about everything these days. It’s great to tag your photos so that it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.
5. Password Protection – Maybe you don’t want everybody to see your photos? By adding a password, your photos will be private and available only to those who have your password.

A free trial is offered which I was pretty excited about, except that you still have to provide them with credit card information before your trial starts.  I was going to give it a try, but i didn’t want to have to pull out my credit card or worry about canceling the demo before I got charged, but also because they have a demo of the slideshow editor which gave me a good idea of what it was all about.

I really like the slideshow editor (pictured above) because it’s easy to understand.  Even my parents who are near computer-illiterate would be able to understand it.  You can add graphics, adjust the order of the photos, and the zoomSpot is pretty cool as well.

Photagious is all done in flash, and the entire process is smooth from start to finish.

The free trial sign-up can be found here (7 days).

Source: Go2web2

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on June 27, 2006 by CyberNet.

Do you want an easier way to tell your friends your phone number? Well Phone Spell will do just that. You can enter in 3 to 10 digits and it will try and find some words that spell out your phone number. Unfortunately it wasn’t able to find anything for my phone number 🙁 .

It can be especially useful for those people starting new businesses because it also accepts words. After entering some words it will tell you a phone number that matches them. CyberNet News would be 292-376-386397…I guess that doesn’t work out to nicely.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on November 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

A new Microsoft job advertisement gives us a glimpse into Microsoft’s plans to take on Flickr- yes, they’re moving on to photos! You can’t tell me that you didn’t know this was coming given that Microsoft already took on YouTube (or tried to) with Soapbox. Flickr has become one of the more popular photo solution on the web that it only makes sense that Microsoft would try their hand at this too. This time around though, I think if they do it right and spend some quality time developing it, they can make an awesome web-based photo solution that works seamlessly with the Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows in general.

Here’s what part of the job description reads for a Program Manager:

Come make Windows Live the best place to share your digital memories! Heard of Flickr? YouTube? How about. Mac? This role will work across the new Windows Live division with teams like Spaces, SkyDrive, Messenger and Hotmail to construct a winning strategy for Microsoft in photo and video sharing. This role involves leading the team to design the strategy then build and implement a winning solution that will be loved by millions of customers. This feature team is building a next-generation photo and video sharing service that will compete with Flickr, Smugmug and other photo web solutions today. This is a “v1″ opportunity.

While I was snooping around the Microsoft Careers site, I came across yet another job ad that tells us that Microsoft is serious about this.  The job was posted back on June 20th and reads:

Do you love photos and videos? Want to help people connect and share memories? Then help us build the next generation solution for sharing photos and videos. The Windows Live Digital Memories team (DMX) is looking for Software Development Engineers in Test to drive quality in our products, processes and tools.

The main difference with this job advertisement is that Microsoft didn’t come out and say that they were looking to compete with Flickr like they did with the more recent ad we listed first. If Microsoft happened to come out with a top-notch photo and video sharing service, do you think they’d have a chance at taking on Flickr and others who’ve established themselves? Or once again, would they entering the scene a little too late?

Source: I Started Something

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on October 28, 2006 by CyberNet.

Weekend Warrior

Videos have turned the Internet upside down ever since YouTube popped its head out of the binary world. Since Google recently acquired them for $1.65 billion that gives other video hosting companies hope that they can be the next big thing to get bought out. Hey, for users that can only mean better quality sites that are well maintained, right?

The new service this time is called Travelistic and its goal is to collect videos from around the world. It is already well on its way as you can see in the screenshot above which was taken from this page. At the time of this writing it has movies from 37 different countries and there are 30 cities from the United States alone that have videos. I’m from around Chicago, Illinois and there are a few different videos from that area. They are actually professional videos that are informative and even taught me a thing or two about areas that I thought I knew well.

All of the videos appear to be in English and if any of the speakers are not speaking English they will have a translator. The only benefit that I can see with registering is that you can mark places that you have been to or that you want to see. I guess the registered users can also leave comments which could actually prove to be the most useful part about the whole site.

Overall the site is very well put together and the videos offer an insightful look to many different spots around the world. Some of the movies can seem a bit boring but they dive into details that you may not find anywhere else. I hope to see other contributors to the site so that it will continue to become more and more useful.

On a little bit of a side note I would like to bring up their advertising strategy. It is very much what I think YouTube could do in the future to help recoup some of the large bandwidth costs. The first few times that you play some videos they will probably startup without any ads, but every now and again you’ll be forced to watch a 15 second advertisement at the beginning of the video. Its definitely not unreasonable and I think if YouTube did something like that, say a 15 second ad for every 5 movies that you watch, then I don’t think that users would really complain. Hopefully they wouldn’t display a 15 second ad for a 10 second clip but you get the point.

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