Let’s face it: we all have a folder full of digital photos that never get viewed, shared, or worst of all - never backed-up. Local apps that manage photos never quite get the job done and typically only accomplish one thing - moving that digital shoe box into a fancy user interface where photos never get viewed, shared, or backed-up. Granted you could probably accomplish those task individually with multiple local apps, but as the complexity increases our desire to follow through with an action diminishes. Fortunately, there’s a plethora of photo web apps that act as an all-in-one solution.

Facebook is a social networking platform, or so they say. Over 70 percent of monthly Facebook visitors spend their time viewing or uploading photos. And with over 21 billion photos uploaded, Facebook has undoubtedly become the de-facto standard for photo sharing on the Web. The team over at Facebook have done a phenomenal job in making the experience as simple as possible.

Flickr is another popular photo web app, and it’s the app of choice for many pro and pro-consumer photographers. Flickr offers a compelling set of features - simple but powerful editing tools, geotagging for photos, and versatile sharing tools. But the biggest draw for Flickr is it’s large community of users. It’s an amazing arena to share and showcase photographs to friends, family, and other photographers. And of course, with unlimited storage it’s a quick and easy way to do back-ups for your photos.

Fotki was built with a similar premise as Flickr. What started as a photo sharing site for a close circle of friends has blossomed into a photo printing, selling, and blogging site. The interface is slick and streamlined and makes browsing public photos fun.

SmugMug offers unlimited photos, unlimited storage, no ads, easy uploads, and sharing - it’s easy to see why it’s an up and coming web app. There’s an option for a Pro account where users can even sell photos as stock art.

Web applications, or web-apps, are full applications that can run in the browser, accessible from any computer with Internet access. Everybody here at DeviceVM is a firm believer that this is the future of applications. If you take a quick glance at the applications I have open, a majority are web-apps - Gmail, Twitter, Google Docs, Mint, and Flickr. I do use Photoshop quite often and as of this time I’m unaware of any web-app powerful enough to replace it, but I’m sure I’ll find something someday. In the meantime, I’d like to share some cool web-apps that I’ve come across while stumbling around the Net.

(my netbook looks just like hers)

Three months ago I got my first real netbook - A Lenovo S10 with Splashtop. I blogged about it here and tried to share some pointers about how I was using Splashtop. Well, three months have gone by and that Lenovo has become my best friend. I don’t know about you but I’m constantly place-shifting. I go to the office in Cupertino, I work out of my house in Santa Cruz and work in just about every coffee shop in-between. I travel a bit here and there and when I’ve had to much coffee you can find me sitting in my car right outside the local Starbucks “borrowing” some wifi. It’s amazing what the right netbook with Splashtop has done for me.

What do you do on your netbook?

Like I mentioned earlier, I’m a rambling man - I don’t like to sit still. I’m in a lot of coffee shops. Whenever I see a netbook (which is every day lately) I ask people, “what do you do on your netbook?” This has been a fairly informal poll - I’m no scientist but I’ve probably talked to close to 50 men and women, mostly in Northern California about their netbook usage. Again, I’m not claiming that this is the right target demographic for a study but these Valley-types tend to be early adopters and technically proficient. Without exception every individual I’ve talked to with a netbook is using primarily their web browser. You’re thinking that this is obvious, right? I mean, we are all primarily using our web browser for most things?

Clearly this is true - but if you dig a little deeply you’ll find out that this is all people use on their netbooks. They *might* use Skype in addition but they are emailing, watching video, facebooking, tweeting, reading news, chatting and studying all through their web browser. On our normal computers we might spend a lot of time in the browser but we’ll have a whole host of other applications open. Netbook users seem quite content just using their browser.

I’m in the same boat. I can blog, email, chat, tweet - do everything I want through my browser. I don’t have any other applications open because I don’t need anything else. To be honest, I have another OS (that shall remain nameless) on my Lenovo. I haven’t started that OS in over a month. I just don’t need it. Splashtop gets me online instantly, doesn’t waste a ton of battery when I’m not using the S10 (instant off) and works ridiculously fast. It doesn’t have all the overhead of a full-blown OS. It starts faster from a cold boot than the other OS does out of sleep or hibernate.

The Lenovo S10 was the first device with Splashtop that I could buy in the US that matched my needs. I pledged 3 months ago that I would start using it every day. The more I use it, the more confident I am that the simplicity of Splashtop will appeal strongly to computer users. More than that, even, I find it an essential element of any netbook.

See you in a coffee shop soon.

You know we love us some Twitter! One of the reasons we love Twitter is because we get to more easily connect with people that are using Splashtop AND we get to be real and actually develop awesome relationships. A few of us marketing types are on Twitter from Splashtop. You should follow us because we’re cool, good looking and have our own idiosyncrasies which make us endearing (like an old stuffed animal). Here’s the rundown…

follow Sergei!

Sergei is our fearless leader. He’s like the Marketing MacGyver, plays hockey with reckless abandon and keeps tabs on all things Splashtop. Sergei keeps the ship pointed in the right direction. He really cares a lot about Splashtop and making instant internet something that everyone can enjoy. Follow Sergei!

follow Kevin!

Now K2 (we call him K2) is a trip. First of all, the man changes computers more than anyone I know. And he doesn’t just buy a new computer every 3rd day…he also configures them, hacks them and buys special stickers for them. Also, little known fact, he has a webcam on his puppies so he can keep an eye on them all day long. He’s good at all things marketing and is a pretty handy product designer. Follow K2!

follow Sol!

Sol is clearly the best looking of the three. He writes the blog (shocker) and loves to update his Twitter using video (he’s vain that way). Sol, too, loves gadgets and anything that makes the consumer experience on a PC better. He’s an expert badminton player and schools the rest of the DVM employees during company outings. Follow Sol!

As I’ve said many times, Splashtop is perfect for Netbooks. I can recall the very first time I saw the very first netbook, the EeePC. I wondered if it would ever take off. I think it is safe to say that it has taken off and inspired a huge market. Recently I’ve been using the Lenovo S10 a lot because Splashtop is available on it and because it is definitely one of the very best netbooks out there. I travel around a lot. I spend a lot of time in coffee shops and between a couple offices so I’m a great target for a netbook. Also, I have embraced web apps which makes a netbook even easier to use. I’ve been working on how to really configure my netbook to suit my needs. Here’s what I’ve done:

Made sure that when I get into Splashtop it has all my “stuff”

1. Setup wifi in my favorite coffee shops (and work) and saved the location
2. Put all my Music and Photos (mostly music) on a 16GB SD Card
3. Under Tools/When Splashtop Browser Starts - set it to “show my windows and tabs from last time”
4. Went to the Configuration Panel and had the bottom dock auto hide
5. Setup my chat accounts in pigeon and my Skype to remember me.

Web applications I use - because I auto-populate my tabs these generally all open up upon starting the Splashtop Browser.

1. Gmail - Gmail is my favorite webmail application, so easy!
2. Peoplebrowsr - this is my web-based Twitter Client - a must for anyone who uses Twitter
3. 12seconds.tv - I utilize this video community a lot - the integrated webcam makes it awesome
4. Zoho for documents - Sometimes I also use Google Docs.
5. Blip.fm - I’ve really been enjoying this site for music and I also regularly utilize Pandora. Of course I use our built in music player to listen to music off of my SD Card.

These 5 generally cover what I’m doing when I first start my machine.

From there, I’m all over the place using Google Reader to check my news feeds, I read Engadget religiously, I’m all over Hulu whenever my boss isn’t looking when I have time and I’m not working hard and I check Woot at least once a day.

Several people have wondered about the real utility of netbooks. For many people it is their 2nd (or 3rd) machine. It’s interesting that people tend to create a bond with their machine. Your mobile phone, for instance, becomes an important part of your life. Will netbooks also serve that role? For me, spending the time to configure my netbook and think about how I use it has made all the difference. Next up I have to figure out which stickers I want to put on it.

I wanted to share a really cool thing I found tonight that you can take advantage of in the coming weeks. No matter where you are in the world, the elections in the United States are very important. There are several scheduled debates by the Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates. These are generally well covered by all the major television networks. So far this has been a one-way experience. Other than the arguments that may erupt with your spouse, the debates aren’t exactly “interactive.” Until now.

Current, which is an amazing user-directed news television service, teamed up with Twitter to provide something that is very unique. They call it: Hack the Debate.

Here’s an overview:

It’s really cool to watch user-generated commentary stream live across the screen as the debaters are going at it. It definitely made me feel like I was in the room with millions of people. In fact, at times, the commentary became more interesting than the debate itself. Give it a chance next Thursday when the Vice Presidents have it out.

Everyone’s been looking tired this week. It seems like all my friends at DeviceVM have been staying up late to watch the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Whilst watching last night, I got somewhat tired of the same advertisements over and over again. I got out my laptop, powered on Splashtop and (instantly) began searching for online Olympic options. I found some great resources that pointed me in the right direction so I thought I’d forward them to you…

Note: thanks to SmartMobs for most of this info…

1. Qik - Qik is a live-streaming platform for your phone. It basically allows you to take out your phone and start streaming live to the web. Pretty cool, eh? Apparently they have about 18 people roaming around Beijing doing live Qik streams. Hope they charged their batteries.

Check out the Qik Olympic Channel here.

2. Daily Motion - Daily Motion is like YouTube in Europe. There’s a lots of good content including politics, creative content and then official coverage. Daily Motion is pretty unrestrained so expect to see some risque user generated content.

Check out Daily Motion here.

3. YouTube - If you’re in a country without official Olympic Coverage check out the YouTube China/Taiwan official Olympic Channel. If you are in a country with Olympic Coverage - check out this guy who is there and submitting material to YouTube regularly.

4. Kyte is another great resource that, similarly to Qik, allows people to stream live video from their phone (and other devices) to the web. They have 9 channels with a ton of first person content.

Check it out Kyte coverage here.

5. Flickr - Nothing beats the stunning photos of events and relevant places associated with this 2008 Summer Olympics. I highly suggest you take a sneak peak at these photos - it’s almost as good as being there.

Check out Flickr photos from the 2008 Olympics here.

Enjoy your weekend!

I’ve been waiting a while to write a post on one of the hotter web 2.0 startups, friendfeed. When friendfeed first launched several months ago it was definitely an early adopter product. And, perhaps, I didn’t understand it well enough. We all know I love Twitter which let’s you stream short thoughts, events or links. So, I assumed that friendfeed would be an extension of the lifestreaming concept - the never-ending newsfeed which was first made popular by Facebook. And it is. But, it has become so much more.

Check out this image:

You can see that several posts by different people. Some I “follow” and others are suggested to me by friendfeed. I can subscribe to more people, block people I don’t care for and easily configure it to automatically share anything I want from 40+ services including RSS feeds, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Digg. It’ll even let people know what you’re listening to on Pandora.

But, the thing I like best is the conversations on friendfeed that ensue when someone posts something interesting. Lately, it seems that I’ve found a ton of really interesting articles just by watching friendfeed. Once something is posted people can “like” the article or even “comment” on it. From there you get awesome debates and further information. Take for instance, this post about cases for the iPhone 3G (something I’m definitely interested in).

So, give friendfeed a try. There’s much more to it than I’ve even described here. Photographer and Blogger, Justin Korn, talks about how to get started on friendfeed and pick your friends. I think friendfeed is an endless source of great web content and conversation around web content. Let me know what you think.

Those who read this blog probably know that I’m a fan of Twitter. If you’d like to read my overview of the microblogging service check out this post. As someone who is really into social media, like Twitter, I’m always excited to find a tool that lets me take advantage of the constant conversation that’s going on. I love to show this tool to people because for those who don’t use Twitter regularly, it is an amazing, magical thing.

If you go to search.twitter.com you will get an interface that looks like this:

This product was created by a company called Summize which was acquired by Twitter. This is useful information if you want to impress nerdy people at a party. So, here’s a real world use of this tool. I have a friend who just started as a Graphic Designer at Whole Foods. She works at their headquarters and is a great designer. She was told that she should “get on twitter” by those she works with as the marketing team was trying to stay up on new web trends (good for them). But, as a new user to Twitter, it’s sometimes hard to find an entry point or make Twitter relevant for you.

I instructed her to go to Search.Twitter and type in “Whole Foods.” Give it a shot. This is a real-time feed of people whose tweets have the words “whole” and “foods.” Amazing! Check out these results and make sure you note the times:

It’s a real time discussion of any subject. So, think of a subject, maybe your company or baby strollers or a movie you might want to see and watch the conversation!

Here’s an interesting post by Techcrunch yesterday, July 21st. Michael Arrington suggests boldly that we should all collaborate and create a web tablet. As you can see from the image above, it’s really pretty. At least the industrial designer did a nice job imagining what it might look like. It looked so cool, in fact, that it caught my eye as I was doing my regular scouring of the tech presses.

“Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too.”

I thought to myself, “wow, that OS sounds a lot like Splashtop.” I also wondered how interesting that would be to others. Would people want one? Clearly we all have computers that do what he is describing and this doesn’t seem like a device for developing countries or children. Well, as I write this there are 668 comments on that post. Most of those who joined the conversation thought it was an amazing idea, some debated how possible it would be and others thought that the EeePC already did what Arrington was asking for. In the 3 years (is that possible?) that I’ve been reading Techcrunch, I have never seen 668 comments on a single post. It makes the post almost unusable as the load time and scrolling is slow.

A couple of us commented that Splashtop was a good idea for this project but ultimately I have no idea if it’s the right fit or if that device will ever actually be created. The point, I think, is that the most commented post in the history of one of the most influential tech and web oriented blogs hypothesized a super lightweight OS whose main function was Firefox and Skype. This is Splashtop.