It is finally summer here in Seattle and I’m trying to get out of the office as early as possible today. Here are a few cool things that have recently landed in my inbox:
Don MacAskill wrote to tell me about his new product, SmugVault. This new service extends the existing image storage capabilities provided by SmugMug, allowing users to upload a wide variety of image files, as well as files of other sorts, for safekeeping. Don used Amazon’s DevPay system to implement a usage-based fee structure — $1 per month and 22 cents per GB of storage, along with fees to transfer data in and out. The entire contents of a 2 GB memory card can be stored for just 44 cents per month. SmugVault can create finished products from raw video and image data, and it can also bundle together alternate formats of an image (GIF, RAW, and so forth).
Animoto For Business adds professional features to Animoto’s existing music video creation service. This version of the service can be used by businesses of all sorts — sports teams, real estate agents, vacation resorts, and trade shows — to produce DVD-quality videos in MP4 and ISO formats. Business users have access to a library of music that has been pre-licensed for commercial use. The product is brand-new but there are already some good success stories.
There’s a new release of Cloud Studio. It now incorporates an S3 browser!
ElasticFox now includes support for Firefox 3.0, as does the S3 Firefox Organizer.
Jungle Dave wrote to tell me that he’s released version 2.0 of Jungle Disk Desktop. The new version includes a revised user interface with a setup wizard, a configuration dialog, and a backup preview dialog; renaming and encryption of files and directories; support for European S3 buckets; bandwidth limiting, and much more. There’s also a beta version of the workgroup version (details on it can be found here). This version allows multiple users to share a single Amazon S3 account without sharing account credentials, and also allows for per-user control of access to S3 buckets.
And with that, I am out of here!
— Jeff;
