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I am excited, awestruck, humbled and overall happy and serene, all at once! What brought on these emotions is my first interaction with newest version of Google’s amazing Picasa product. But of course, it’s years of photos in my collection that bring on these wonderful memories, and combined with amazing new technology to present and organize them, is where Picasa really shines.

And Yes, Picasa is FREE, fully featured edition.
Thank You Google!!!!

The latest edition finally brings us Face Recognition, taking this already excellent photo organization and editing program to Whole New High!! I found a spot in Picasa that shows me all my photos in collection, hope you sitting down – 57,975 is the number, occupying 66.1GB space! Yes, that’s almost 58 Thousand Photos!!!

I find tagging experience especially amazing. I tried to start it off with tagging more recent (higher quality, clear faces) photos, and it went back and picked up same people over the years. Including Baby and Childhood photos!!! The mere process of tagging, where it presents the many stages of person, in one quick/easy to navigate view, is spectacular.

Yes, I do have 4-core computer, and it still takes a while to scan all the photos. It does that in the background, or I would recommend tagging few people in recent photos, and let it work overnight if you have a lot of photos.

Another tip is to find Confirm All button on top of Name tagging frame – do a quick scan to see if any need to be excluded (mistakes, especially happen during baby years, or with brothers and sisters, naturally). After that, quick press on Confirm All, and voila! I already have over 1000 faces confirmed and only 16k more to go

The recognition algorithm is really impressive, there were few rare occasions where I wasn’t even sure myself, but computer was right in face recognition!!! Even partial faces like this one here, recognized correctly!!!

There are countless other features, here is a quick run down of major new additions. Charge Forth and download this amazing piece of technology. It is Priceless (aka: Free) and is sure to improve your experience of this living we are all doing.

PS: Maybe I missed it, but I did not see much news about this in main media. Where are CNET or TechCrunch folks, or Scobleizer perhaps? No-one mentions this amazing leap forward, not just in face recognition technology, but in producing this overall package with such Ease of Use and convenience (and I didn’t even touch on massive web sharing options available).

I normally enjoy Robert Cringely’s insightful articles, but the one I heard today was nothing like his other works. In fact, my first reaction was “Grow Up, not the whole World revolves around you!”. But few seconds later it hit me – this is a modern reincarnation of Sales Pitch!

I’ll give you my two sentences summary, or you can read the entire post on his blog. It starts of by complementing Google for their focus on efficiency. Then proceeds to emphasize the importance of the relevant component (hard-drive), and ends with “why not check out this awesome product” pitch. Classic Marketing Formula: Gain Favor via Complement, Gain Trust by presenting logical arguments about importance of “X”, and finally mention a better “X”.

Brilliant or Sleazy? You decide… But sure way to get the message across, which is the hardest part of any marketing effort. I am sure that Google employees monitor the “tubes” for their company name, and certainly one or two (likely more) will forward a link to relevant Senior decision maker, and with enough incoming emails, that decision maker will take notice, enough to probably learn more about this technology. This is 90% of the sale effort, right there! Think about how hard it would normally be to get senior management’s attention to even agree to hear out your Sales pitch?!

Everyone is talking on the web about Social Marketing (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) and other such silly obvious things. For me, as soon as I see someone continuously taunting their own product(s), I un-follow, no matter how fancy the product is.

Maybe I am approaching this completely wrong, and Bob has nothing to gain personally from Google buying all these (apparently yet Non-existent) MFD drives. Either way, this approach is definitely novel, especially the ending, turning the discussion away from product and into personal unjust conflict?

Sensational (pun intended)!!!

EDITORS NOTE: I used a little-known hack in WordPress 3.1 to actually adjust a time stamp of this post, originally posted December 24, 2009 – to timewarp into December 2008. Enjoy!

Wow, so  much has happened this past year, that I find it virtually impossible to even try and predict next year. But, I guess it’s somewhat of a tradition on this blog, so I will give it a go:

• Since this is the great year when Gaming finally “took off”, I want to start things by reflecting on PlayStation 3 (R.I.P). Most people say that the introduction of Nintendo’s Wii HD is what killed it, but I felt the troubles brew right from the start, with their strange bet on now-dying Blu-ray format, and the problematic design of Cell CPU. Ironically, the competition now finally ripping the big rewards, especially from offering all those Excellent and Free Ad-Supported games this holiday season.
• Speaking of home entertainment – I believe Microsoft should put even more focus there. After taking such a big beating this year with the dramatic decline of Office and Windows market share, they really need to push their new Microsoft Home product, and get more builders signed up to having homes come with Windows preinstalled. Yea “Your Home with Windows!” would have been such a great pun, shame their silly marketing named it “Microsoft Home – Ultimate Edition”, instead of plain “Windows”. Their Entertainment unit is already the most profitable in the company, keeping the whole thing “afloat”, so it’s only natural…
• The Operating System wars are only likely to intensify in 2010. The introduction of Google OS this year, especially with it running so many Windows Apps faster than Windows, changed so much. I predict that in addition to further growing their already dominant market share on the ever so popular Netbooks, Google will finally build and market their custom business Client appliance (aka: PC). iNetBook (seriously Apple, creativity much!?) is a serious contender here, but their insistence on charging premium even over Windows 7 netbooks, is keeping their market-share still around 35%.
• I am still shocked and saddened by the recent demise of nVidia, as are many of you, I am sure. It’s a shame too, I always loved their products. So the big question now remains whether AMD can survive and even thrive, just on their excellent line of embedded chipsets for Netbooks, with those amazing 3D capabilities. Intel’s offering is finally on-par, now that they woke up to the importance of proper 3D and 2D graphic acceleration. I almost wish that AMD rename themselves to ATI, a brand that should make it easier to compete with Intel, in this great Brand war that we got now.
• Who could have predicted that Adobe would buy Sun this year, certainly not I… Or that they would so quickly release this amazing business cloud platform offering, integrating fully complete high-performance backend, with the amazing and visually appealing front-end framework? This only deepened the many troubles at Oracle, and I don’t see them coming back with anything next year either. Makes me wonder if Larry is asleep at the wheel, or just planning to abandon rapidly sinking ship soon? On a personal note, I was saddened at first to hear that Adobe chose to abandon Sun’s Java, in favor of ActionScript 5 standardization on client and server. I am a long time Java fan, but I guess I’ll have to get over it.
• In other personal news – I am still torn about exact specs of my “New Year Gift” for myself. I got my eye on that 14″ Dell beauty, the half a pound thin netbook, with desk-projected keyboard (though I will mostly use on-screen keyboard and speech input). Even though I am a Microsoft shareholder, I can’t seem to justify the “Windows 7″ premium for choosing that OS. In fact, I have a suggestion for Microsoft, why not simplify the tough choice consumers are faced when they walk into Best Buy today? Instead of them having to choose between Google OS, Mac, Windows 7 or Ubuntu, just give them “Windows 7+” option (Just don’t call it ULTIMATE!!). Beat Googlers at their own game, and pre-install the Open Source Google OS, alongside Windows 7, tightly integrating the two. That should also make it feasible to justify your price premium!
• Finally, I was as excited as many of you to hear that they are taking pre-orders on Robo-girl this holiday season. Though the thought of never cleaning, washing dishes or doing laundry again is very appealing, I found the price to be a deterrent for me. I think I’ll give it another year to mature, and for the price to come down a bit. Of course, I am afraid to ask what my wife thinks about the idea…

To conclude, I want to remind everyone the gloom and doom atmosphere of a year ago. Back in 2008 when all you heard around the holiday time was Recession, Depression, etc. Oh, how quickly we tend to forget, and how readily we spent a record 15% more year-over-year, this holiday season. Now that economy is booming, I suppose it is only natural for people to “overcompensate” for such a dismal holiday last year…

PS: More Editors Note – Kudos to Matt and the team at Automattic. This new Time-warp feature you guys put together, is really amazing. At first I tried accessing a post from 1988, just for the fun of it, but it was coming in too slow over 2400 kbps modem..

Happy Holidays and Have Fun!

Hi, Happy Thanksgiving!

This is just a quick post to tell you that Google has released Picasa 3, and it is even better than the earlier versions. This is undoubtedly best software to manage your photo collection. I have been using it since version 1 and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

It is absolutely free to download and use – Kudos to Google! Here is a quick rundown of features in this new release.

Yesterday I attended Google Application Engine Hackathon in Atlanta. I guess it’s the kind of thing that one could call Geeky Weekend Fun, programming all day, with like-minded folks, trying to create something.

My application was a bit too ambitions, so it didn’t get finished, but I will get back to it in the coming days. Best app that did get finished, and someone in that group even snagged a domain name for it, was LangWar.com . The source code is here, and yes, it’s all in glorious (gore-ous?) Python.

My thoughts? I still love App Engine as a concept, but it still remains Love/Hate relationship because of Python. With all due respect to the language, it doesn’t feel like it is best suited for web development, even when using popular Django template framework. I am sure it will become Love/Love, if Java becomes supported by GAE! So, Googlers, grab OpenJDK and get right on it!

The whole Hackaton experience prompted my thinking again about the characteristics of “good” or “best” programming language. As always, the big thing about defining “best”, is identifying characteristics to rate on. So, I am going to try and put short list together:

• Ease of Expression – How easy is it to put into “words” what is it you want computer to do for you
• Speed – How fast can computer accomplish what you wanted from it
• Integration – This one is an attempt for catch all category, from how well it works with other existing tools, to cross-platform / cross-OS compatibility, to Visual Editor integration

I am really trying to keep list to top 3, but many people will argue that best programming language is simply the one that you know. That’s fine when you developing something by yourself, in a Tundra, with no hope of survival or escape. In real world, however, software gets developed by many people, and usually goes through many cycles of corrections and improvements. You need other people to be able to locate piece of code that does “X”, and be able to easily read and modify it.

Turning into long post, so I will stop. The idea is mostly to provoke some thought. Some people will argue that in today’s world, the Speed factor is irrelevant, since computers are getting faster and faster. Others argue that “Ease of Expression” is overerrated and entirely relative. For them, code that says ‘ a = !regex(‘[dfqwer]x643DA*-’,*&x) ’ is easy to write and quick way to express what they mean… hmmm…