Zoto is a highly regarded photo sharing site with lots of AJAX, social features and blogging plug-ins. It's been getting good write ups since Om Malik covered it in 2004. Late last year the company switched to a paid-only account model (like Smugmug) and last week it put the codebase up on the Google Code open source repository. Non-commercial use is free and commercial licenses are available.

Is this a sign of Zoto's immanent demise? Possibly, but in a world with lots of nice photosharing sites, there may be no meta-lessons to learn here. At the very least, there's some very nice photo sharing software now available for use on your site.

In a 2006 comparison of photo sharing sites, our own Alex Iskold called Zoto "very well designed, [with] the most social web features." To be fair, the site's aesthetics could be improved, but perhaps you can do that now on your own server. It really is quite feature-rich.

In these "everything must be free" times, it's interesting that no one but the CEO has written about Zoto's latest move. It's move to a paid model was heavily criticized. Pete Cashmore, for example, wrote about it in a February 2007 post titled "How to Lose Your Users and Kill Your Web 2.0 Company: Zoto."

Open sourcing your software, asking for paid commercial use and offering users only paid accounts sounds like a reasonable business plan to me. Those steps alone are certainly not enough to kill a company. A lack of follow-through, marketing and community management could do that - and there are indications that Zoto is guilty of all three of those shortcomings. Maybe one of you brilliant cynics out there can do a better job with it on your own server.

Filed under: Digital Cameras, HDTV

Sony launched the hot little HDR-SR12 HD camcorder in a overwhelming barrage of new models at CES, so it hasn't really gotten the love it deserves, but the crew over at CamcorderInfo recently took one for a spin and found that while the $1399 cam isn't the cheapest option out there, it's still a strong competitor to popular options like the Canon HF100. Although the video bitrate is a bit lower than the Canon at 16Mbps, image quality was overall comparable due to the Bionz image processor and Exmos CMOS sensor, which is the same chip found in Sony's Alpha DSLRs, and it's got the most storage available at 120GB. The only other potential dealbreaker is the fixed 60i framerate, but if shooting in 30p or 24p isn't important to you, the HDR-SR12 looks like it's worth a spot on your list.

 

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If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s “hit” song Never Gonna Give You Up.

YouTube is RickRolling its own users on April 1. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia actually link to the Rick Astley video. We’ll see if YouTube.com does the same at midnight EST tonight, too.

This is ok, but not nearly as funny as it would be if the YouTube team broke into the Google search servers and simply redirected Google.com to the video. Now that would be funny.

More coverage of this here.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Mxplay is a music sharing site that we’ve covered in the past. It’s latest major release was its browser plug-in that lets you take the mxplay network with you as you surf the web. In an effort to make its service even more social and easier to use, mxplay has been working for the past 3 months on a new release that debuts today.

Some of the new features include an Amazon mp3 store, music search that’s now powered by Hype Machine, and improved people search capabilities. The Amazon store allows some third-party interaction that also brings some direct purchasing options for users that would like to keep the music they hear as they surf the web. You may recall that mxplay can detect the music on a given webpage and play it for you, through its plugin.

What the Amazon store does is allow mxplay to take the music experience a step further, and purchase more music for keeps. Improved search and discovery, for both music and other users, improves the overall usability of the mxplay service, and encourages even more networking behavior.

Additional features include support for all major instant messaging networks, enabling you to share audio streams with your buddies, as well as sharing capabilities for audio/video streams via Facebook. This of course takes an integrated approach to sharing music across the web, through third-party networks where you have existing friends. Given the direction in which several IM clients are moving by layering in media-sharing and activity-sharing capabilities, it looks like mxplay is fully taking advantage of these incentives for enhancing the services from both perspectives.

What’s more, is that mxplay has always managed to touch on several of the trends that have been taking shape in the past couple of years. As we’ve seen with some of Yahoo’s initiatives for socializing and personalizing music, there are a number of overlapping features that can be seen between Yahoo’s Blog Remix and mxplay’s network. Hopefully the new features will help boost mxplay’s presence in its space.

ShareThis

I can’t say much about this right now but you will be amazed and trust me, it’s not what you think. Ben has one as well.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Details are still shaky, but GigaOM is reporting that the futures of certain AT&T executives may also be dubious. In addition to a recently replaced CTO and recently departed USi CEO, apparently VPs are being offered exit packages or demotions (their choice!), possibly to trim some of the fat at the top of the pyramid before the US economy gets any crappier. We can't say for sure, but hey, those billions of dollars in 700MHz auction funds have to come from somewhere -- immediately, too, you don't want the FCC sending over hundreds of goons to kneecap thousands of employees. AT&T had no comment on matters both of downsizing and the FCC's mafia-like collection practices.

 

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Details are still shaky, but GigaOM is reporting that the futures of certain AT&T executives may also be dubious. In addition to a recently replaced CTO and recently departed USi CEO, apparently VPs are being offered exit packages or demotions (their choice!), possibly to trim some of the fat at the top of the pyramid before the US economy gets any crappier. We can't say for sure, but hey, those billions of dollars in 700MHz auction funds have to come from somewhere -- immediately, too, you don't want the FCC sending over hundreds of goons to kneecap thousands of employees. AT&T had no comment on matters both of downsizing and the FCC's mafia-like collection practices.

 

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It's not at all clear what's going on yet, but apparently the EPA has banned IBM from getting any contracts for some unnamed (serious) infraction. Apparently when one gov't agency does such a thing, others follow suit, meaning that effectively IBM may be barred from getting any new government contracts for an extended period of time (potentially up to one year). This is rather unusual, and no one seems to be saying why this ban was put in place, but needless to say, it suggests some sort of pretty serious infraction on the part of IBM.

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It's not at all clear what's going on yet, but apparently the EPA has banned IBM from getting any contracts for some unnamed (serious) infraction. Apparently when one gov't agency does such a thing, others follow suit, meaning that effectively IBM may be barred from getting any new government contracts for an extended period of time (potentially up to one year). This is rather unusual, and no one seems to be saying why this ban was put in place, but needless to say, it suggests some sort of pretty serious infraction on the part of IBM.

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Tom’s Hardware has been doing a feature for the last week comparing the performance of six systems: budget (sub-$1000), mid-range (sub-$2000), and high-end (sub-$4000) PCs and then the same PCs overclocked as far as they’d go. The object was to find what offers the best value for the dollar. They ran about five billion tests, but I’ve got the Cliff’s Notes here. And the survey says:

The low end machine wins — sort of by default. Because most games were basically playable on <$1000 of hardware, that's what really matters and then what you start paying for is rapidly diminishing returns. In the end, they determined that to double the performance of the budget PC, you triple the price, or more. Fortunately, you're not bound by the rules of their experiment, and you can spend however much you want. I'd say the real winner is the mid-range overclock, since that’s what I’m running. You can still get a lot more performance and OC potential up to about $1500, I’m thinking, but after that you’re moving into the ridiculous zone.