I checked out PicLens a while back when the tool first came out. They’ve added a whole bunch of new features so it seems like a good time to revisit them. PicLens by Cooliris is a plugin that integrates with your web browser to display you the photos (or whatever media) on whatever website you’re on in glorious fullscreen 3D.
Screenshot of PicLens on my Flickr Page
Basically the way PicLens works is when you are on a page with images, you mouse over an image and you’ll see a PicLens icon. When you click on the icon, PicLens takes over and you switch you a fullscreen view of the images in 3D. PicLens takes advantage of 3D hardware acceleration to provide a really smooth browsing experience even if you are flipping through 1000s of photos.
Screenshot of PicLens on my Flickr Page
What’s cool about PicLens since I’ve last saw them is that they’ve added support for so many more things. You can view images from Flickr, PhotoBucket, Facebook, MySpace. On top of that, you can also browse Youtube, MSNBC, ESPN and movie trailers. PicLens has definitely come a long way. PicLens is definitely worth checking out especially if you like browsing in totally cool immersive experiences.
This week will be a mixed bag of links from every and any subject matter. It’s whatever I thought was funny or cool or just wanted to share with my readers.
I performed some more motion capture for the upcoming Midway game: Mortal Kombat vs DC this week. Check out my Flickr photos.
An internal memo written in 2003 by Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, chewing out his people over his horrendous experience with XP and the Microsoft website. The guy knew what he was talking about. Maybe it was a combination of bureaucracy and incompetency that mired the XP experience.
Yelp.com, for those of you not in the know, was started by 2 former PayPal employees. It’s a website that features reviews of local businesses submitted by users of the website. Yelp has some great social networking features as well as a reputation system that encourages users to stick to the site and submit more and more reviews. It’s actually quite neat.
Let me preface this with the fact that I started out loving Yelp. I came to rely on it for every restaurant I wanted to try out. I even introduced my wife to it who then proceeded to go on a Yelp rampage. Within a period of a month she had written about 60 reviews and proceeded to become a Yelp Elite member – a status bestowed on users who are both prolific and write good quality content.
My love affair with Yelp started to turn sour when I used it not from the point of view of a review consumer, but as a business owner. I teach Chinese martial arts (aka wushu) at one of the most reputable schools in Chicago. Working in technology, I realize the importance of having an Internet presence that extends beyond just having a static website. In order to build a good online reputation for the school, I asked all my students to write their review of the school on Yelp. Most of the students aren’t so Internet savvy and hadn’t even heard of Yelp. I was basically recommending Yelp to this group of people.
I got a total of 28 students to review the school. Everybody wrote their honest impression of the school. I didn’t force or coach anyone to write what they didn’t want to write. I just told them to get on the site and review us. My thought was that if you were looking for a wushu school in Chicago on Yelp, you’ll gravitate to the one with the most reviews provided that the reviews were meaningful.
This is when the problem began. After a few days, the reviews started disappearing one by one on the Yelp site until I went from 28 reviews to 18 reviews. I was pissed. I know you can flag reviews, and I suspected that maybe a competing business who’s reviews weren’t so glowing was flagging my students’ reviews. I emailed Yelp, and they didn’t tell me anything useful. Their response was a cookie cutter legalese mumbo jumbo saying that their only concern was the quality of the site and that they had final say of what when on the site. Since my wife was an Elite member, I thought maybe she would have more pull. Again she was given the exact same cookie cutter response. I wasn’t ready to give up on Yelp just yet and found out a friend of mine in Palo Alto knew a Yelp employee. I contacted that Yelp employee and ran into the same brick wall. At that point I just threw up my hands and said screw it.
Nowadays I never go back to Yelp for any reviews. They’ve totally lost me as a visitor. I just can’t help but wonder what other perfectly good businesses reviewed on there have totally been shafted. When you have a lot of reviews, losing a couple here and there is not a big deal. But if you had a small business and all you had were 4 glowing reviews and 2 of them got deleted, that could make the difference between the visitor going to you or to the next guy with 2 equally good reviews.
Social review sites are popping up all over the net. All the major players like Google, MSN, Yahoo, and AOL have them. We’ve reached the point where users no longer trust in traditional marketing and advertising. Proclaiming you’ve got the best tacos is town is not enough. People want to read what other people have to say about your tacos. In the future, as people get more and more net savvy, the differentiating factor of these review sites is whether the user can trust these reviews or not. As for Yelp, they’ve totally lost my trust and until they make it right I’m going to keep telling people not to go there.
Every blogger’s dream is to either to have a large readership or to make money blogging. Until your an A-list blogger with crazy traffic and advertising deals, you’re going to have to find easy ways to generate what little income you can get.
My blog is a little over a month old and I can tell you right now what’s worked for me is being an Amazon affiliate. Last month when I just barely started my blog, I had just 1 Amazon referral. That referral was a direct word of mouth recommendation to a friend of mine who ended up buying it from my blog as a thank you for recommending it. It wasn’t surprising since I pretty much had no traffic. This month however, traffic picked up via a couple of social bookmarking sites and has already resulted in 8 Amazon referral fees. A couple more of these and my hosting for the month will be paid for. You can imagine with enough traffic to your site, you could earn a nice chunk of change.
So let me tell you a bit about the Amazon Associates program. Now I don’t have anything to do with them; I am not an Amazon employee. I get no benefits from you joining the program. I just whole heartedly think it’s a cool program and since I shop at Amazon all the time and like their online store, I figure many other people probably do too.
Basically the Amazon Associates program is an affiliate program. What this means is that if you successfully refer any business to them, you get a little kickback. You can earn up to 10% in referral fees. By joining, which is free btw, you get access to the Associates site which provides you with tons of ways to create links and widgets to Amazon products on your blog. What’s cool about this is say you recommend a product: If your visitor clicks on the link and does not buy that product, but browses Amazon and ends up buying another product, you still get a kickback. The visitor can even close the browser and start a new session. If they come back to Amazon on the same day and buys something, you also get a kickback.
Now you think wow, I can just load up my site with tons of Amazon products. That’s probably not going to work for you. Think about it, if I saw a page like that, wouldn’t it be easier for me to just go to Amazon? What I do is review the products that I’ve actually used (or at least experienced through a friend) and think they are worth recommending. Part of this is your reputation. If I recommend a crappy product, people are less likely to trust me and/or buy the products I recommend. If I recommend good quality products that I genuinely believe in, people are more likely to buy it and I’m more likely to make money. It’s that easy.
Here’s an example of a widget you can add to your site:
So this is my 5 minute brush with fame. Since 2001, I’ve been involved with the Mortal Kombat video game franchise as a motion capture artist. In layman’s speak, I do the martial arts moves that the video game characters do in the game. When it’s mentioned people always wonder what my involvement was and I always tell them to look on Youtube. To make it easy for me, I’ve decided to consolidate all the stuff I did for the Mortal Kombat games so far in one easy to find blog post.
Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance
This was the first MK game I was involved in. So I lied about the title because this is not technically an intro, but I didn’t have anything to do with the intro of this game. However, I feel like this teaser trailer clip is reflective of the work I did for the game. Keep an eye out for a 720 front sweep with a broadsword at 0:34. Ah, those were the days.
Mortal Kombat Deception
I have a little beef with this game because somebody at Midway dropped the ball and as a result, my friend Kevin and I were not credited. That said however, I really loved the intro. Kevin, Carlos (Pesina) and I pretty much did the whole intro. During the 3 man fight, I was Raiden – how cool is that? When it was just the 2 bad guys, I was Shang Tsung and Kevin played Quan Chi. What’s funny is at the time – I had long hair and Kevin shaved his head. I wonder if that had anything to do with the characters we played. Personally I had a different idea of where to take the fight. If Raiden could teleport at will, I would have had him simultaneously fight the 2 bad guys, teleporting all over the place. Imagine a Dragon Ball fight scene where he teleports behind, kicks the guy, guy flies over, he teleports above, bashes them down followed by a lightning bolt. I think that would have been pretty cool.
Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks
This game is a departure from the regular MK franchise in that it wasn’t a one-on-one fight game, but a platform fighter ala Double Dragon or Golden Axe from the old days. I don’t recall doing too many moves for the actual gameplay but we were heavily involved in the cinematic intro. Although you see many characters on screen at once, most of it was done by Kevin and I. I got to play Liu Kang in this one. Apparently I ham it up pretty well.
Mortal Kombat Armageddon
The MK Armageddon cinematic intro was probably one of the biggest undertakings of the MK franchise as far as intros were concerned. All the characters in the MK universe were present for one big battle. This cinematic was fun for 2 reasons: 1 we got to play with weapons and 2 we had to work with a staircase for the pyramid fights. I got to reprise my role as Liu Kang – this time as a cool undead zombie wield double chains.
Pek Pongpaet is the VP of Technology and Product for SpotOn Inc. Pongpaet’s expertise ranges from product design and development, and martial arts. Prior to SpotOn, Pongpaet worked at Accenture Technology Labs in the research department coming up with next generation user interfaces. At Roundarch, a technology and strategy consulting firm, Pongpaet’s work included envisioning and designing the dashboard of the future for the Tesla Model S electric car.
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