Boomtrends

Orb 2.0 - Half-baked Bride of Frankenstein (In a good way)

If Orb 1.0 was Frankenstein, Orb 2.0 is definitely related but prettier and more useful. For the mass-sumer, you may still want to wait for 3.0. As a traveling consultant, I’ve been using Orb for months to remotely access TV shows, mp3s and photos on my home PC. Think of it as a Slingbox for all digital media on your PC and it works as advertised when accessed from another PC. Orb 1.0 mobile access on my 2.5g phone was slowish for photos but uselessish for music and video.

Orb 2.0 was released just yesterday and I was stoked to see improved performance and features. On top of that there was the promise of beating youtube to deliver user-generated content to the phone. Orb delivers on features but the performance is SLUGGISH. I started my test by installing the new Orb client and directing my browser to mycast.orb.com. Upon login I was greeted with a full customizable state of the art AJAX infused RSS reading start page. It kinda felt like I was back in Yourminis world! Maybe Goowy and Orb can merge these into YourGoowyMinisOrbMyCast.com? The name can be worked out later…

Orb differentiates itself from the flock of startpages with the “Home” menu that lies in the top left. This is where Orb ties back into the desktop client the access to photos, videos, music and now documents. Pick the category you want and you are off to see a Windows Explorer-esc interface to all your shared media. Orb adds the ability to download ala Soonr but I see Orb as a media application where Soonr is a business application. You can find your media by searching or sorting a million different ways. So far, very impressive technology but a bit slow.

I took a moment before to install the “Orbthis” browser plugin and Orbthis’d my favorite music video and my favorite sneezing panda. Then I busted out with the hardware. I started with a Nokia E61 on Cingular’s EDGE network. I pecked my way to mycast.orb.com and was greeted with a new mobile interface…a nice improvement. It took me a while scouring through the menus to find my videos and when I attempted to play each, I was asked which of the five video formats I wanted to use. I tried EACH ONE AND NONE WORKED! BOO… I cannot take my youtube videos to go afterall.

Thinking that perhaps it was an issue with the phone (I could not find anything on the orb site indicating a requirement for certain mobile hardware), I brought out the super fast LG CU500 on the fastest 3G connection available this side of the pacific. After the same routine, I was buffering a video…and waiting…and waiting (I do realize that Orb offloads the transcoding to the local PC, but this was a buzzkill). A minute later I saw some dorky LG animation playing with Weird Al music. Audio yes, video no. I gave streaming an mp3 a shot to no avail.

Orb has kicka$$ technology but it isn’t ready for primetime. I am a total geek and I struggled to get results with some of the best hardware available. I will keep slinging my media using Orb but I have to recommend that y’all wait for 3.0 to be a charm, just like with most Microsoft products

Microsoft Photosynth Tech Preview - Photo Sharing 3.0?

Back in the day rich people used to get pictures painted of themselves and their family. Then came photography and that put a lot of painters out of business. Until relatively recently the photo album didn’t change much. When people wanted to show off their vacation photos, friends were invited to endure endless hours of slide shows and sticky vinyl pages of photo albums. From now on I will refer to this pre-digital period as Photo Sharing 1.0.

Next came the digital age with cracked LCDs, increasingly awesome picture quality and photosharing (including the most unknown site atpic.com). This is the age we live in currently and it’s pretty good. I can upload great photos of my adventures to show my friends and family and they don’t have to get off their a$$e$. Or I can send terrible photos from my cellphone for instant gratification at a drunken moments notice. This I will refer to as Photo Sharing 2.0.

Now comes Photosynth Preview from Microsoft. To get it working, you’ll need IE and it’ll take a couple minutes to load the plug in. Once loaded, the navigation is very fluid. Zoom with the mouse wheel, and click to fly around from photo to photo. Photosynth currently only has sample photos loaded but it greatly differs from all photo sites because the metadata of these photos includes location/position information. What this means to you is that the photos create a 3D world.

Current digital cameras can create panoramic pictures by weaving together multiple shots. This takes it to the next level by recreating the whole location. Today’s digital cameras don’t include GPS hardware to note the specific location of a photograph, this technology is coming to mobile phones in the US and it is only a matter of time before it is tied into the camera on the phone (which will be pretty decent in the next couple years).

This is a preview, so you can’t do anything except play around right now with the preloaded photos. However if this is what photo sharing is going to be in the future then it is going to be the shiznit!