Fun with photos

Paris Captured in 26 Gigapixels Worth of High-Rez Photos
[Via information aesthetics]

Paris 26 Gigapixels [paris-26-gigapixels.com] is a stitching of 2,346 single photos showing a world-record breaking, very high-resolution panoramic view of the French capital (354,159×75,570 px). One can zoom in on famous monuments of the French capital, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Beaubourg and the Notre Dame de Paris.

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This pretty addicting to play with. Zooming in and moving about. Their description of how they did it makes a great story. They used 2 digital cameras with essentially 600 mm lens on a motorized panoramic head seated at the top of a tower.

But, disaster, one of the cameras failed so they had to use just one and sit on the tower for 5 hours, for the 2346 photos that had to be taken.

And then, when they were stitching everything together, they found that they had missed 3 shots, shifting all the other photos. They were lucky and found a way to fiz this but it is an example of how a simple fault could have large ramifications. They also had to color match all the photos since shadows change over a 5 hour period.

Then their lawyer suggested they blur out any recognizable details such a license plate numbers, etc. They had to really do this by hand in Photoshop. BUt photoshop cold not hold the entire image. They took this time to put in 10 Easter eggs for people to find.

How publishing will work

Publisher Experiments With ‘Free’ And Sees Book Sales Increase 20x
[Via Techdirt]

We’ve pointed to numerous studies, at this point, that have all found that, when done right, free ebooks can greatly increase the sales of physical books (and, in some cases, even of ebooks). Here’s another empirical example of that in action. Chris Anderson points us to a blog post by someone at a mid-list niche publisher, talking about how successful its experiments with “free” ebooks have been. In this case, the publisher would offer up the first book in a series as a free ebook, and found that it drove massive increases in sales:

One of our free titles was the #1 download on Amazon for the entire month of February. The subsequent sales of books 2 and 3 in the series increased by a rate of 20 to 1. For this series, digital sales are approaching 20% of the total product sales distribution and growing. With the visibility of the digital sales on Amazon, we have seen a substantial increase in print sales to the brick and mortar book chains. In this one instance, digital is driving print sales.

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I wrote about how another publisher, Baen Books, was using a similar technique – putting the first in a series online for free. As this letter states, for many books, obscurity matters more than piracy. Free books is one approach to try.

Or perhaps renting will work.

Or perhaps providing tiered levels of access for your really big fans whom you can identify now directly and service with all sorts of goodies.

More fail from Nexus One

by search-engine-land

USPTO denies Google ‘Nexus One’ trademark for their Android ‘superphone’ flop
[Via MacDailyNews]

“Google failed in its bid to own the ‘Nexus One’ name for its Android 2.1 smartphone, as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected its application for a trademark on the moniker,” Clint Boulton reports for eWeek.

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Not only have they shipped about 1/8 as many phones as Apple did in the same time frame, but now they can not call them what they have been calling them. They will either have to change the name or give the current holder of the name a lot of money to transfer it.

Not a good beginning to selling their own hardware.