Scopetech

You’re a computer geek browsing the net, perusing your RSS feeds when it happens: one of your less technically inclined friends pops up an IM asking you how to change a password or something other mundane task that might be easy to do but difficult to explain. The point is: you need to decide if you’re going to start typing mile a minute, describing everything to your best ability or rudely log off, blaming it on your crappy internet connection next time you talk. Tech support is enough of a hassle in real life but doing it remotely is mind-numbing at best. Luckily, the folks over at TechSmith feel your pain and have created a great program to help you out. Consider your remote tech support woes forgotten thanks to Jing Project. Jing is a simple way for you to remotely show videos and pictures of any area of your desktop to people via the Internet and using it is dead simple. Check out the install screen shots below.

When you fire up the program, you get the splash which does a slick animation moving to the top of your screen as illustrated by the screen shots below.

What you interact with is this thing looking like half of a sun at the top of your screen.

Mousing over it will expand the three areas to choose from: Capture, History and More.

Choosing Capture will give you this reticle which allows you to decide what area of your desktop you want to capture. It may look confusing but it’s no different than using the lasso in Windows to select multiple folders in an area, just hold down the left mouse button, drag as large an area you want and let go.

Below you can see the area I chose which is in colour, everything that will not be captured will be in black and white. After choosing the area you can choose to do a picture or a video, redo the selection to make a different sized capture area or cancel the process altogether.

This is what happens when you choose the video option, anything that happens in the yellow box is captured, so obviously if you’re trying to show someone how to do something, keep it within the area. You can make this area as large as your entire desktop if you really want and there are 4 options under the box: stop, pause, mute and cancel. If you have a microphone you can have your voice recorded for audio while your desktop is recorded for video, ideal for that remote tech support. If you don’t have a microphone then obviously you’ll get the visual aspect alone. When you’re done, press stop.

Pressing stop takes you to this screen which allows you to preview what the video will look like. You have 3 options below: share, save and cancel. Share will upload to the web where anyone can see your screencast, saving will save the video locally as a .swf file. Let’s upload our video!

Pressing the share button will start the uploading process. If you don’t have an account, making one is effortless and doesn’t take you out of the experience.

Here the “half sun” shows it is uploading your video.

In no time at all your video will be uploaded and you get this notification. The URL will automatically be in your clipboard, so just paste it into your browser and check it out.

Enough pictures, time for you to go try it out yourself! Some minor details if you want to host your stuff to share with people online:

Jing files are hosted on Screencast.com. To use Jing, you’ll need to sign up for a Screencast.com account. This will provide you with 200 MB of storage and 1GB per month of bandwidth. The normal trial account for Screencast.com has a 60 day limit, but to get the most out of the Jing Project, and to share our appreciation for your feedback, we’re offering a trial account with no expiration until the end of the Jing Project (date to be determined).

Overall, I really enjoyed using the product - it’s slick and just plain cool. Be sure to keep an eye on the Jing Project blog and try out the still image feature.

JingProject

Update: You can now digg this story!

French based video site Dailymotion has been ordered by Paris court to pay damages for a video the site is hosting illegally. The site was ordered to pay a symbolic Euro 1 ($1.38) to Christian Carion for a clip from his film “Merry Christmas” as well as pay the film’s producers and distributors $17, 914 and $13,780 US respectively. The website may appeal the matter. In March 2007, fellow video sharing site YouTube was slapped with a lawsuit of over over 1 billion dollars for copyright infringement.

-Variety

Google is stretching even further into the mobile wireless world by developing an index service specifically for mobile content, this according to Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. The content search service would offer higher placement in results via a bid system, similar to the current Adwords service for search advertisers.

This new service would aggregate content specific to mobile phones and devices, like ringtones, games, and video content. Google already offers mobile-ready versions of their conventional search engine and some of their web applications like Gmail and Google Maps.

No official word on when this new mobile service will ship.

According to DigiTimes, a tech news site based in Taiwan, Wintek has the orders for the touch-screen panels to be used on the next generation iPod. The site claims that the testing stage of the product has already begun and could be shipped as early as August.

So what can we expect from the new iPod? It’s likely that this version could feature that long awaited wide screen that’s been so highly anticipated for the the longest while now, possibly meaning a wider emphasis on video. We’re also hoping that the new model will have its own version of OSX, much like the iPhone.

Of course, much of this is still speculation at this stage but we’ll keep an eye out for any developments.

Do you love Gmail? Have you wanted to show how much you love Gmail with the very clothes on your back? You’re in luck because you can now submit designs for a T-shirt that best embodies the Gmail personality thanks to a new competition in conjunction with Threadless.com. The theme is “Connect!” and what better way to stay connected than by winning yourself an 8GB iPhone? If you’re a designer and you use Gmail then this is the competition for you. Prizes include

* 8 gb Apple iPhone!
* Jawbone BlueTooth Headset
* $400 gift card for JetBlue Airlines
* A TON of Google memorabilia. You won’t even believe it.
* 1-year 12 Club subscription
* $300 Threadless Gift Certificate
* $2,000 in cash
What are you waiting for? The competition ends on August 16th and even if you aren’t a designer you can help pick out the winning designs. Just don’t tell Maddox if you win the phone.

Check it out.

When Maddox updates the internet, the internet gets a little better. That was the case today as he let us know just what he thinks about the iPhone and in case you were wondering: he hates it. If you know Maddox then you know what to expect: insulting family members, the iPhone’s secondary keyboard, Steve Jobs, babies, the list goes on.

While yet another humorous post looks like it’s only the ranting of a madman, there’s actually some stuff here that many have been saying for the longest while, it’s just that now we’re being slapped in the face with it. We couldn’t be happier. In case you want to be as cool as Maddox, or at least attempt it, his phone of choice is the Nokia E70.

Read It.

Before all you Trekkies get overly excited - we’re talking about the latest in searching for people online with Spock. On a basic level, Spock is a people search engine that allows you to search for people and information about them based on what the site has indexed. All of this sounds intrusive but the more I think about it the more it becomes clear: this could actually be a very useful tool in today’s web culture.

I had to try this out for myself so after some time waiting on my invite I was able to give the site a look. Sign in was quick and the interface was pretty basic, seeming simple enough to use and luckily it functions exactly as you would imagine. The first thing I did was what I assume anyone using the service will do: search for myself, and it gave me the information I put in when I signed up. The way this works is most of its information comes from indexing information online and obviously with celebrities having more information out there, their Spock results have significantly more detail. Of course if you don’t turn up on the results you can enter your own information on your profile which then gets listed within the site.

There is really only one kind of search result you get from Spock, lists upon lists of people. They seem to have results for literally every kind of query. So whether you search names, locations, dates or anything you get a list of people related to the query. It even allows tags and relationships to be attributed to queries as well as links associated with whatever you searched for. How does all of this work? Simply by indexing information from websites in the same way Google does. There is also an option to add websites, tags and relationships yourself.

Now this is already a pretty neat service as it is but what I see here are a lot of possibilities among the many networks we have online. With social networking being the main focus here, if a site like this was to merge with another social network such as Facebook, Twitter or Pownce it could be the ultimate social networking tool. You could quickly and easily find a friend and add them to all the various networks and from there find their brother, sister, cousin or any of their friends. With the addition of WHOIS information, blogs and more social networks Spock could effectively have results for everyone listed online making it the most efficient ‘people search engine’ on the web.

Spock really does have a lot of potential and with the constantly growing social networks of today’s web culture it could expand to much more, the beta service is already pretty good but unfortunately isn’t pulling enough information for you to find much more than you can find with a quick Google Search. Keep an eye on it, it’s definitely a service worth checking out.

We’re giving away invitations to Spock.com, leave a comment, include your email address and we’ll send you an invite.

SportSnipe has launched into beta, offering a customizable Ajax homepage specifically targeted towards sports fans. The site boasts 1300+ RSS sources (according to it’s ‘Site Features‘ page) and allows users to easily add their own feeds to the mix. They also offer a commenting system, attaching a thread to each individual item in each feed.

Check out a screenshot of the SportSnipe front page.

Some curiosities exist, in that while users can drag and reorder the modules in each category, they’re unable to actually customize or collapse them, only allowing you to rearrange them. In order to view the custom RSS feeds you’ve added, the user has to browse to a different page specifically for those added feeds called ‘My Page/Added News’. Additionally the comment system gives no indication of how many comments are actually in each thread. A user has no clue as to which items have hot or ongoing conversations attached to them without individually entering each one. The site’s header toolbar does offer a ‘Top Comments‘ page that highlights the most commented on stories but still doesn’t give any indication of how many comments are in each thread.

The site doesn’t offer nearly the fulfilling experience of some of it’s competitors like Pageflakes or Netvibes, but as mentioned before, it’s still in beta and an early one at that. Check back here for a more in-depth review of SportSnipe in the future.

Consider me “out of it” if you want, but I just don’t get Internet Masterpiece. From the site’s creator:

The site allows people to upload an image (gif or jpeg) onto a 9 by 6 grid reflecting whats happening now. All changes are recorded meaning that the image page can be viewed dating back until when the site was launched.

And that’s basically it.

The idea is interesting, we can have snapshots of current events to look upon in the past, but pictures only don’t seem like they’ll do the trick. It seems as though a lot of emphasis is being placed on user-driven content when it isn’t totally necessary. For one thing, users uploading pictures of things pertinent to them doesn’t do much. To put it bluntly: who cares? Do you care that I was drawing something in paint at a particular moment in time long gone? I don’t even think I would care what I was doing. Some changes the site could consider are going from content affecting users to content affecting the world - when people put up pictures of their puppy and things get too personal things may end up being uninteresting. Instead, allow users to submit things that anyone can relate to, Facebook, War in Iraq, and have some reasoning for the pictures being there so a person in the future could know what the picture is there for(this feature is already in there, just click on an image). Have a new version of the site published everyday after choosing what best represents the day and then the usefulness of the site may become more apparent. In its current form it seems like a pass. This reminds me of 10×10 which seems to be done much better.

If people really want to know what was going on in the past, couldn’t you just use the Way Back Machine to see how things were then and now?

If you haven’t heard about Kevin Rose’s newest project, Pownce, you officially don’t browse the internet. Sporting a Twitter-like feel with some added functionality, the new social networking/file sharing service Pownce will cater to both the casual blogger and productivity-minded user. The website says the main focus of Pownce is “sharing stuff,” and it does that well. With both a web-based interface and a cross-platform app (thanks to Adobe’s new AIR runtime environment), users are able to post messages, links, files, and events either privately to friends or publicly for all to see. The project is currently in beta, offering 6 invites to every new member in an attempt to keep the load on the site low as they tweak the service.

With all the pleasantries aside, let’s get down to the features:

Pownce sports a very clean interface thanks to the efforts of Daniel Burka who also designed the Digg website. The colors are appealing and the transparencies add a subtle effect..it’s definitely a trendy looking site. A Powncer’s public profile is very similar to Twitter. Posts from both the user and all their friends are shown collectively on their main page along with a short profile on the top. The format is simple and gets the point across: what I’m doing and what are my friends doing. Users can only choose from three different templates for their pages currently, hopefully with more on the way. If opening your browser to use the service is just too bothersome, Pownce offers desktop software to make updating even more painless. In an interesting move, the software was developed using Adobe’s new AIR runtime environment. AIR allows developers to create one application that works on any OS all while using existing web development tools. In the future, I hope to see more sites like Pownce utilize AIR, making reaching everyone with an internet connection a much less daunting task.

The first thing you will notice when you start up the Pownce app is that the GUI is brown. First the Zune, now Pownce. Did I miss when brown became attractive? Besides the odd color choice, the application gets the job done with the posting feature on the top and a box showing recent activity between you and your friends on the bottom. As for posting, the process is simple: just pick the tab of what you want to post (Message, Link, File, Event), put in the content, and say who you want it to be posted to (Public, Friends, Specific Friend). The newly posted content will be shown on both the application and the site.

The people at Pownce have kept their message simple: allow people to “share stuff.” But what does that mean? There’s the obvious statement that Pownce is a Twitter and Jaiku killer, but aside from that Pownce also offers a whole new experience in productivity to the masses. With it’s great price point (free for 10MB files, $20/year for 100MB files), users will be able to share and develop their projects over the internet by combining the features of email, IM, and forums in one neat little application. The ability to create multiple groups allows for private project development, and the web based post storage means that you can access your project from any computer. Imagine Pownce as 37 Signals’ Basecamp with an added social networking flair.

Overall, I think Pownce has taken the things people enjoy from their competitors, and it has taken it a step forward. When it goes public, I can see Pownce converting many Jaiku and Twitter users due to the fact that it offers everything they currently have and more. It will be exciting to see what develops as the user base gets larger and Pownce goes public.

But seriously, brown?

Icanhazinvite? Leave a comment saying if you need an invitation to Pownce because we totally have some and will totally share with you. We’re good like that.