I recently returned from a family vacation in Puerto Rico.  Aside from having a great time and seeing some great sights, I was able to play around with an iPhone app I’d installed some time ago.  I say “play around” but really the app became a core part of my vacation photography.  AutoStitch is one of the most impressive photography apps I’ve seen on any platform, iPhone or otherwise.

You may remember my review of an app called Pano.  AutoStitch one-ups Pano by removing the need to manually align subsequent photos to create the panorama.  Before I go into detail, let me show you a couple of the pics it created.  (All panoramas have been reduced to 60% of their original size to help them fit better on most screens.  Click on the images to see them in their full glory.)

The image quality is not bad at all, considering I took these using the iPhone 3G’s junky camera.  This app actually made me want to upgrade to the higher resolution/quality of the iPhone3GS, because I think the same pictures would have turned out even better.

If you recall, Pano used its own interface to the iPhone’s camera to do its thing.  You took a series of pictures that overlapped guidelines that Pano provided.  While I originally really liked Pano, I found it really difficult to use in real life because it’s tough to get the overlap Pano needs to make its panorama.  I also found that Pano was slow to snap and save successive images, making picture taking a pain.  AutoStitch solves both those problems.

Read more…

Accordin to Seth Godin, networking is always important when it’s real and a useless distraction when it’s fake. We all know the Facebook or MySpace guy or girl with over a thousand friends. A “friend” on social networks like Facebook or MySpace requires commitment by the recipient to accept. This has been played out so much that it really doesn’t mean anything if there is no continuing engagement between the two parties. Twitter is slightly different in that it has “followers”. You can follow a person’s update status without commitment from the other to follow you. Facebook, similarly, now has Pages with fans which work the same. You can become a fan of a Facebook celebrity, artist, or business page without the page having to follow you.

Via Brand Infection

Urban Farming

This is a very exciting and much needed change in our food culture especially in the urban areas where access to fresh produce is limited or expensive for minorities. What you tend to find is more fast food is located in the poor urban areas which are one of the causes of obesity and diabetes. Urban farming promotes a self sustaining food supply system in a community garden.

Benefits

• Use of Solar Energy and reduction of carbon foot print for trips to grocery store
• Quality fresh vegetables and fruits
• Less reliance on fast food and thus reduction in obesity and diabetes
• Less waste
• Implicit excercise through gardening

I think this is SOOO important for us to really take back our food communities from fast food nation like McDonald’s (McDeath), Burger King (Murder King), Taco Bell (Taco Hell). It benefits us in so many ways.

Via CNN

There are a lot of different communication platforms to choose from: email, facebook, twitter. Google Wave is a very promising new unified communication tool that combines all these and more.

What Is Wave?

Google Wave allows people to communicate and collaborate using objects like rich text, photos, videos, maps, and twitter. But also share these conversations with other participants at any point. The new participant can then watch a playback of the history of the communication.

Wave is also live so a person on the receiving end can see letter for letter what is being typed for real-time communication.

Just when you think you are up to date with the latest technology platform running Web 2.0 principles. Web 3.0 is now upon us. In fact, this entire post is written with Web 3.0 technology while I was in bed.

Just what is Web 3.0? Well beyond the usual content management, social networking and widgets that weere introduced in Web 2.0, this is really about mobility and integration of devices.

GadgetMETER.com is built on the WordPress blogging platform and uses a plugin that renders the pages to various mobile devices.  If you view www.gadgetmeter.com on your iPhone, this website will be rendered very appropriately. I highly recommend having your own hosted WordPress installation rather than using wordpress.com or blogger.com because essentially, you own your own site and can install additional plugins without restrictions relatively easy.

Web 3.0 Example - Our own GadgetMETER.com site

Web 3.0 Example - iPhone 4G Post

Web 3.0 Example - Website Pages

Web 3.0 Example - Website Categories

Mobile Plugins
There are various free WordPress plugins to convert your site for mobile devices. Feel free to experiment and install it. There is usually a few configuration you can do (but not required). These plugins detect the devices and renders the proper theme with managed content. GadgetMETER uses a combination of WPtouch: Mobile Plugin + Theme for WordPress, WPhone Admin Plugin, and WordPress iPhone App by Automattic, Inc.

Once you have the plugins installed and activated, just visit your site on a mobile device like the iPhone.

Web 3.0 Example - WPhone Admin

Web 3.0 Example - WPhone Admin Menus

Web 3.0 Example - Write Your Post

To capture photos and upload to WordPress, we use the WordPress iPhone App since the web based mobile WPTouch doesn’t allow file uploads (yet).

Web 3.0 Example - Upload Your Pictures

Now, save your draft and go back to WPTouch and set the version type (draft, scheduled, published) or assign an author

Web 3.0 Example - Assign Author

Using Web 3.0 is an absolutely wonderful experience. We will be live blogging at CES 2010 using the iPhone capturing photos at booths and uploading it here. We also have a Twitter Plugin that updates our twitter tweets automatically whenever a new blog post is updated. Another feature of Web 3.0 is write once, publish everywhere.

WEB 3.0 FEATURES

• Integration between mobile devices, Web, and Internet
• Even easier to use
• Write once, publish everywhere
• Portability
• Usability

Another example of a Web 3.0 website is my personal site www.quangly.com. (yeah, yeah, it’s a shameless a-hem, plug). It uses the almost exact principles and plugins of GadgetMETER.

We are excited to let you know that we have finally implemented Google Custom Search to provide you with a better user experience. It took us a few tries but we happily made it!

You won’t see much difference in the user interface but our search results are now indexed by Google rather than WordPress (the wonderful blog platform we use).

Give it a shot and let us know what you think!

To see how to you can incorporate Google Custom Search on your site, visit http://www.zparacha.com/how-to-incorporate-google-custom-search-engine-with-adsense-into-your-wordpress-blog. They did a great job explaining it.

Cheers!
Your folks at GadgetMETER

Gmail Labs Lets you Undo Sent Email

Have ever accidentaly sent a message that was incomplete or something you immediately regret? Have you ever sent a message that you forgot an attachment. Now, Gmail let’s you undo the sent email within 5 seconds after pressing send.

Visit this link below to find out how. It’s a great feature.

Via Official Gmail Blog