While writing my previous post on the Canon 400D camera, I came across a site that advertises one such camera at €380 – with ‘free international shipping’. The 30D they sell for €480 and the professional 5D for €1400. At a respectable online shop like Foto Konijnenberg, those prices are €739, €1199 and €3139, respectively. So is this too good to be true? Yes indeed, it is!
Uk-based(?) webstore DexDigital.co.uk (gone, but resurrected as MobiTeh.co.uk, EastElectronics.co.uk, Gonex.co.uk, AnviDirect.co.uk, cxMusic.co.uk, wMusic.co.uk, aigars.co.uk, orvisinc.co.uk and StarkDigital.co.uk) has given this concept a new, and far more sinister, twist. Read on to learn how the scam works.
(from heim.ifi.uio.no)
Continue reading ‘Starkdigital: fake web shop’
The new Digital Rebel
It might be me, but it’s like everyone around me is buying the new Canon 400D. OK, that’s exaggerated, but I’ve spotted at least 2 people I know per week in this last month.
At €739 for a 10 megapixel digital SLR, it’s a sweet deal. The ‘old’ 350D (now €649) was already a really nice camera, but the added resolution (10 MP instead of 8 MP), the EOS Integrated Cleaning System and certainly the larger screen will probably make this one even a bigger best-seller. Which means I will have to cope with a lot of “Yours has only 8 megapixels? Mine has 10!” For the record: that doesn’t matter!
We blew up a photograph to 16 x 24 inches at a professional photo lab. One print had 13-megapixel resolution; one had 8; the third had 5. Same exact photo, down-rezzed twice, all three printed at the same poster size. (…) I’m telling you, there was NO DIFFERENCE.
Continue reading ‘The popular Canon 400D’
Published on
November 21, 2006 in
Google.
Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, has written an internal memo (that leaked, obviously) stating that it is about time for Yahoo! to bite the bullet and start reorganising/refocusing.
I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.
online.wsj.com
One of the issues he addresses is that they have internal competitors for a lot of services:
• YME vs. Musicmatch
• Flickr vs. Photos
• YMG video vs. Search video
• Deli.cio.us vs. myweb
Let’s focus on the picture hosting sites: Flickr is an early-adopters darling, while Yahoo Photos is vastly more popular, but (imho) ugly. One option could be to merge both brands, like Richard MacManus proposes:
My feeling though is that Flickr’s technology should be utilized more in Photos -i.e. why not re-brand Flickr as Photos. I can hear the gasps of horror from early adopter Flickr fans (of which I am one). But these are the kinds of hard decisions which Yahoo probably needs to make.
Yahoo could also try and re-brand Photos as Flickr, but that is a more risky proposition – and may I say, not Yahoo’s style.
readwriteweb.com
What I think they should do, is to focus on their low-end, high-volume product, Yahoo! Photos. Yahoo! should put Flickr on the market. Google has the deepest pockets and only a photo hosting site (Picasaweb) that is not a community. Google should buy Flickr and integrate it with the Picasa desktop software. Yahoo would make a nice profit on the original $20mio they invested and would be able to focus on photos for the masses, Google would finally own the photo community that has lead the pack in adding relevant metadata to pictures and it would make me happy too. Why? Because it would make my life so easy.
Published on
November 20, 2006 in
movie.
“Babel” links up three stories on three continents in a clever way. Mexican director Iñárritu has probably made one of the best movies of 2006. I’m not gonna tell anything more about the plot (but girls: it features Brad Pitt and Gael García Bernal). Just go and see it!
One very pleasant discovery halfway was the excellent Japanese remix of “September” (Earth Wind and Fire). It starts off all sampled and cut up, but I recognized it quite fast (I have a thing for sampling). So who was responsible for this funky rework of an already fabulous original?
Continue reading ‘Babel: Japanese “September” remix’
Published on
November 20, 2006 in
Belgium.
In 1987 it was decided that a high-speed train connection between Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam and Köln would be built. Ten years later, the Thalys train already achieves a travel time of 1h25 to Paris (over 200km/h). So the Thalys is this High-Speed-Train? Well, not always, as I experienced recently. While travelling to Paris is fast enough for daily commute, the train to Amsterdam is even slower than driving.
I actually had to go to the Hilversum Mediapark, the nerve center of the Netherlands’ broadcast industry. Apparently you’re supposed to take your car there, because the only train connection from Amsterdam to it is a small stop-everywhere train that only runs twice an hour. That combined with a Thalys that only runs once per two hours, is the reason it took me almost six hours to get back to Brussels in the evening. When I had to wait for an hour and a half in the Amsterdam station, I went to the only reasonable restaurant there, and when I asked the waiter for the non-smokers zone, he frowned and said “This is a restaurant designed like a ‘grand café’, sir, smoking is just part of that”. So I had to take a table next to the toilet, to be able to enjoy my meal without disgusting smoke in my face. As you might guess, it was not the best of evenings.
Continue reading ‘Thalys to Amsterdam is way too slow’
Published on
November 9, 2006 in
Web2.0.
Le Web 3 has just passed the 400 attendees, and of those, 12 are Belgians – that’s an extra 10 after my last post. Quite some familiar faces, and some new ones:
(from leweb3.com)
If you still want to join, hurry: in 2 days the price jumps from €300 to €500 !
That 24″ screen not big enough for you? Now you can a rent a movie theatre for a half hour to play Playstation games on the big screen in Kinepolis Brugge.
Thanks to the widespread digitalisation of Kinepolis cinemas, Kinepolis is developing further ‘alternative content’ in conjunction with Barco and Technicolor. In addition to digital full-length films, cinema-goers can now also experience more and more alternative content in digital format, such as prestigious events, television series, live concerts and sports competitions – and now XL Gaming, too.
Imagine you could rent a movie theatre and show whatever you want, without the necessity of 35mm film, to a public of, let’s say, 20 to 50 people. What would you project?
- movie DVD: classic movies that never get to the screen anymore, like “Spinal Tap”, “The Party”
- music DVD: stuff like “Woodstock”, “Sade – Lovers Live”
- series DVD: 3 seasons of “Friends” in a row, or series that never made it to Europe like “Curb Your Enthusiasm”
- comedy DVD: a night full of Eddy Murphy, George Burns or Da Ali-G Show
- documentary DVD: Carl Sagan or the BBC’s “A Brief History of Infinity”
- Powerpoint presentations: if they add a crane, you can even do an “Al Gore” (cf “An Inconvenient Truth”)
- software demos: e.g. Final Cut Pro, Second Life
- live Skype session: with the webcam in that little top right 10m² block
- …
What would you want to see on a huge screen like that?
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