A new startup has launched in the UK which offers a cost-effective way for mobile phone users to send photos to a large group of people at once, or to include on their blog.

The primary aim of the service is to allow anyone to snap a picture on their camera phone and send it, for the price of a single multimedia message, to their friends’ mobile phones. It also stores all the photos you’ve taken on your profile page.

However, it also includes the ability to embed a widget on your Facebook profile, or any web site where you can use the <EMBED> code — and that includes blogs.

Of course, the service isn’t unique — other photo blogging / moblogging sites already exist — but the mix of sending to a closed, but ultimately large, group of contacts as well as sharing online is an interesting one. It’s pretty cheap, too.

Over two thousand people are already using the site. Three-quarters of the UK population now own a camera phone, so the phenomenon of snapping photos on the move is only going to increase. As social networking and blogging also increase, services like NowThen will become ever more popular.

It’s early days for the service at present, but my initial tests suggest that it works fairly well. It takes a few minutes for photographs sent to the service to be available on your profile page, after which any widgets you’ve placed on a web page will update.

It’s not clear exactly how the service is going to be funded. Posting a photograph to a widget is of negligible cost (though scaled up there could be some significant hosting fees) but sending mobile messages to a large number of people, at no cost to the original sender, might be a harder one to sustain.

Perhaps limits will be imposed, a la Twitter. Concentrating on the moblogging aspect would certainly be cheaper and reach a huge audience.

Anyone in the UK who wants to give the service a go can visit NowThen.com, sign up and activate their phone, then start sending photos.

Bloggers aren’t exactly shy when it comes to adapting online tools and services, it’s one of the strengths of the blogosphere I’d say. Social networking and things like that are quickly integrated, and put to good use (i.e. pushing traffic to your projects), as they come along and fill a void. We all know there’s a bunch of online video services that wants to be the next YouTube, some of them even letting you share a buck on their ad sales going with your uploaded clip. Very nice of them. And then there’s Flickr and friends, giving you the opportunity to not worry about image bandwidth.

Why host yourself when you can upload to an online service, and embed? Why should you take the bandwidth costs from your hot viral video?

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Previous on my site, I discussed the benefits of embedding images into your blog rather than hosting them yourself.

But while there are many reasons to embed your images, there are also reasons to think twice before doing so. Posting your images on a third party site, such as Flickr, PhotoBucket or Webshots provides you some protections, but also costs you some rights. By introducing a third party into the equation, you subject yourself to a whole new set of licensing terms, some of which may cost you dearly.

That’s why, before uploading your image or other media to your favorite hosting site, it is worthwhile to take a moment and understand what rights you are giving up and decide if it truly is worth it. read more

Preliminary results from a survey carried out by the Radio Joint Audience Research (Rajar) — the official body in charge of measuring radio audiences in the UK — suggests that four in five people listen to podcasts at home.

The Press Gazette has gleaned some interesting snippets of information from the UK-based survey, the full results of which are due to be published later this month.

Results suggest that 4.3 million adults have downloaded or subscribed to a podcast, with 80% listening at home on their computer, rather than a portable media player.

On average, each listener downloads one or less podcasts per week, while the most popular time to listen to them is the evening. Most people do listen to the complete podcast, even though it’s much easier to skip and miss sections as compared to a traditional radio program.

(Via The Press Gazette)

It’s no secret that creating sleek and usable interfaces in flash is a big pain in the head. Whether your the average run-of-the-mill blogger who wants to add a little bit of flashy animated navigation or a seasoned web designer working on a tight deadline – creating flash navigation from scratch is almost a death sentence. Unless you really know the inner-workings of animation design, designing visually stunning animation in flash seems far from achievable (or at least not without effort).

Fortunately, there are a number of readily available flash components that you can avail and can make the job of creating professional animated interfaces really easy and fun while achieve quality results. Today we look at one of such components – Flashloaded‘s photoFlow.

photoFlow is a flash component that showcases photos in 3d stack effect, complete with realistic physics-based flipping animation and reflection. This is similar to an already loved interface prevalent in iTunes and OSX Leopard. For this review I was able to play around with Actionscript 2.0 version of the component. Here are some of the key features of photoFlow:

• Easily update images using the Component Inspector, ActionScript or an XML file
• Adjustable flip speed, spacing between stacked images and image size
• Customizable perspective view and reflections
• Option to flip images as a slideshow
• Add links/hyperlinks to each image
• ActionScript events to perform an action when an image has loaded, is selected, etc…
• Images can be external or included in the library
• Mouse wheel image flipping (Windows only)
• Optionally display a name for each image
• Option to set the number of images to preload
• Option to automatically scale images to fit or to fill the defined size
• Zoom in on selected image or on all images on mouse over
• photoFlow can open on a pre-defined image
• Customizable background color and opacity
• Option to start flipping from left-to-right or right-to-left
• Supports sound effects for image flipping
• Built-in preloader
• Light weight (weighs only 18kb with the scrollbar)

Setting up photoFlow was really straightforward and easy. It took me less than 30 minutes to get an actual working photoFlow interface after installing it through Adobe’s Extenson Manager. photoFlow comes with very thorough and easy to understand instructions that walks you through a basic setup to explaining more elaborate integration points through actionscript events.

One roadblock that I ran to while setting it up was that I forgot that I had the actionscript 2.0 version and proceeded to make an Actionscript 3 project – in which case I couldn’t find the photoFlow component in the Components panel. So it’s important to double check whether you have the Actionscript 2 or 3 version of photoFlow before you make a new flash project.

Aside from that everything was a breeze in using the component. There are a lot of settings to play around with. You can even opt to either manually load files through the component options or load via xml for more advanced users. Skinning is also no problem as you can customize the look of your photoFlow component. Animation and transition of photos can be tweaked to your liking including perspective and depth of the reflection.

All in all photoFlow is one topnotch flash component. Easy to setup, install and tweak – photoFlow is an excellent tool for those who want to setup quick but elegant photo galleries for portfolios, photo albums and even as navigation for a product catalog. photoFlow would definitely cut your time in figuring out how to do stuff and just get you right to creating and designing. It’s something I definitely would consider next time I had to make a flash-based interface.

photoFlow costs $59.95 for the ActionScript 2 version, and $79.95 for the AS2 and AS3 version. Licensees of the AS2 version can upgrade for $20.

Asst. Editor’s Note: this is a sponsored post written on request by Flashloaded.

The number of Americans creating their own online content to share with others is increasing, according to new survey figures.

Around 45% of those surveyed said that they regularly worked on their own web sites, blogs, photo albums, and music online, to share with everyone from family and friends, to peers, to total strangers.

Deloitte’s 2008 State of the Media Democracy marks a twelve point escalation from their Spring 2007 survey, and strongly suggests that such online activities are increasingly popular among more than just a niche of tech-savvy individuals.

“Mass digitization has created unheralded choice and desire for American consumers,” said Ed Moran, director of product innovation for Deloitte’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications group. “Now, more than ever, consumers have the independence to enjoy what they want, when they want it, and where they want it — but increasingly, they are also choosing to create content themselves, or re-working other people’s content.”

36% of respondents also viewed their mobile phone as an entertainment device, with it playing an increasingly important role not just in basic communications but also for photos, music, and games.

The continued move to mobile is likely to affect how and where blogs and other online media are both created and consumed.

The online survey was commissioned by Deloitte and conducted by Harrison Group, an independent research company, between October 25 and October 31, 2007. The survey polled 2,081 consumers between the ages of 13 and 75.

When it comes to blogging, there are very few tools I feel compelled to rave about or wonder how I got along without.

For example, I edit my sites with Mars Edit because it is easier and faster. However, I am just as comfortable with my browser and the vanilla WordPress editor as they get the job done just the same.

Skitch, however, is an exception to that rule and is both a tool that makes my life much more simple and a great service that I don’t know how I got along without.

For any blogger (on a Mac) that takes a modest amount of screen grabs or likes embedding images into his hosts, Sktich provides an easy and powerful service that combines capture, editing and hosting all within the same application. For me, it has sped up the process of taking screen captures and enabled me to include many more in my posts.

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For the past week or so, the two top television networks in my country have been on a word war about their ratings. Network A (let’s call them Networks A and B) has been claiming that Network B is bribing households in a certain town to switch to their channels during noon time (considered prime time here) so that the survey/audit company’s data-gathering will be in Network B’s favor.

Network B has filed defamation suits in the courts of law, and lately both Network A and B have been having hourly commercial spots airing out their respective positions, in their own defense.

Seems to me like it’s going to be a trial by publicity. At the back of my mind, I laugh about the silliness of it all. For one, the town concerned is miles away from where I live–the country’s capital–and I couldn’t care less about the ratings in that town. Secondly, as a consumer of multimedia, I don’t really give a hoot about ratings or such, as long as I get good quality programs.

However, it dawned upon me that the reason behind all this fuss is money. For us consumers ratings could simply be indicators of how popular a television (or radio) channel or network is, for a given time of the day. However, for the network and for the media industry, ratings represent pricing power. For media that are not able to count exact “hits” or “page views” ratings are used as an indication of popularity and reach. This translates to how much the television network or station can charge advertisers, particularly as they price ad spots on cost per thousand pairs of eyeballs (or impressions, if that’s a better term).

So the ratings game is not silly at all, because we bloggers are also part of that game. In our case, though, “ratings” are easier to come by, with the various metrics software that help us measure and analyze traffic, such as our very own pMetrics. We also have other (more-or-less external) means of rating our sites, such as PageRank, Alexa ranking, Technorati rank, and the like. These, then, affect our pricing power implicitly or explicitly, whether for pricing ad spots, text links or sponsored reviews (some of which are frowned upon by some in the community, I know).

Sometimes it’s implicit because in some cases, it’s purely the traffic and the niche covered by our blogs that affect how well we earn, and we cannot really influence too much the outcome, such as with clickthrough rates and payments per click. In some cases, it’s explicit, like when a higher-PageRank site can fetch higher ad rates than others. In any case, these are analogous to what television and radio networks have with their “ratings.”

Perhaps in the same way that the above-cited Networks A and B are battling it on air, we bloggers have also used our own mediums to discuss the various “ratings” related issues that have affected us, like PageRank drops, and even the ethics of selling links or sponsored reviews. So again, is it silly? Maybe not–if what we are talking about puts food on our plates, pays the bills, and sends our kids to school.

Of course, this is from the perspective of the producer of the media. So for us bloggers–particularly those involved in blogging as a business or profession–traffic matters. PageRank matters. Other ranking methods matter. But for a reader, what does really matter? For some, metrics may influence how we initially view a site. A blog that has a higher PR or Technorati rating could be a more ideal destination than one that is less popular.

However, being an avid blog reader myself, I can say that metrics and such “ratings” go only as far as being helpful as “first impressions” of a blog. What matters more to me is the quality of the content, and relevancy to my interests, and of course, if the writer is able to reach out to me in a way I like. It’s similar to how I would rather watch intelligently-written and presented TV series from a channel with low ratings, than watch crappy programming just because it’s popular among viewers.

So how about those networks with their rating wars? I’d say just focus on fixing the quality of your content, and perhaps the good ratings will follow!

If you’re lucky enough to be squeezing your way around the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas next week, and you’re a podcaster, you might like to head over to Belkin’s stand (booth #30368) with your iPod.

They’ve got a new podcasting tool, the beta version of which will debut at CES 2008.

Though the press release doesn’t give much detail away about the final product, it will work with most iPod models. The prototype works with the iPod classic, nano 2nd generation, and 30GB 5th generation.

All podcasters visiting the booth and demoing the product will get a gift bag that includes Belkin’s TuneTalk Stereo, a voice recorder for the iPod that records in full stereo.

More details are available online to delegates visiting the show.

Vodpod, which we featured last year, has announced four new types and styles of widgets available, offering “new and enhanced functionality”.

The single video sized widget can be popped in top left or right of a blog, offering functionality in a small area of space.

Next up in size are updated top and sidebar video widgets, offering views of four or five videos at a time. The sidebar widget comes in three styles: elegant, floating, and boxy.

The largest new widget is “gallery style”, designed to take up most of a web page, and showing ten video thumbnails and a larger window for the currently playing video.

All of the new widgets make it easy for users to scroll through the video collection.

More information about the new widgets is available on Vodpod’s “New (and beautiful!) widgets for your blog” blog entry.