The price per megabyte of storage and data transfer is going to approach a per user cost that is less then the value of one advertisement per year. Assume that a typical user generates 5mb of content per day. I may generate more from photos while most of my relatives will generate far less. Over a year that’s that’s under 2GB of new data.

If we use Amazon S3 as a pricing guide the current cost of storing and uploading 2GB is conservatively about $16/year.

That’s not terrible but now consider that while the speed of transistors has been following Moore’s law of doubling every 18 months the storage density of drives has been doubling about every 12 months.

This means that 12 months from now the cost will drop to $8… $4… $2… $1 and so on. In 5-10 years we can expect storage costs to be well under a penny for a 1GB of storage. At that price it’s essentially free since any add on services or products sold will be far more significant to the bottom line then the actual cost of the storage.

Since content is personal and sticky the companies that will succeed in this space are the ones that can provide such a service today at a loss in order to aquire the customers of tomorrow.

If you’re in New England and interested in design, software and usability you’ll want to check out the Mini-UPA one day conference. It’s a one day event so you won’t be tied up all week and it’s jam packed with great speakers. There are over 30 speakers talking about all sorts of things from Web Apps, Interaction Techniques, Analytics, User Experience and design. Best of all the event is really affordable for a full day of speakers and classes. The event is May 28th so go put it on your calendar and sign-up now.

I’m on the board of UPA Boston and my company is also co-sponsoring the event but don’t let that stop you from showing up. I hope to see you there.

The key feature of a phone is to be able to place a call. This IP based phone fails at this task in a spectacular way. Not only was I unable to place a call using this phone but in the process it displayed a nice error messages telling me that it couldn’t render a web-page.

The problem arrises from the fact that most companies have a special code to dial outside the company. If you guessed “dial 9″ you guessed wrong, and so did I. No matter what I tried I couldn’t get an outside line. I couldn’t get a dial-by-name directory. I couldn’t get an operator and there was no help available.

There have been several companies that have tried to automate tagging of images with meta-data to allow end-users to easily search pictures. The techniques currently break down down into three categories:

- Recognize the images through facial or image recognition (riya)
- Allow others to tag them for you (tagcow/google/facebook)
- Inherit tags from objects that someone else tagged (photosynth)

Image recognition can get 80-90% accuracy. While this sounds pretty good it’s actually pretty frustrating because 10-20% are incorrect.

If you allow othes to tag your photos they only tag or recognize things that are obvious. The first image just looks like a building while to me it’s Coolidge Corner, Brookline. The second photo looks like a car while to me it’s a Ferrari I saw in Itally while on my honeymoon. While strangers can solve part of the problem they lack the context to do so correctly. (Plus you give up on privacy)

Auto-tagging based on other people’s photos has a ton of potential. But only for comonly shared items or locations. It may be able to tag the Golden Gate Bridge but it’ll be a lot harder to find photos taken inside or photos of non-descript locations.

For true auto-tagging to work facial recognition needs to improve. Cameras need to save their GPS coordinates and those coordinates need to be translated into the names of locations and places. Historical data (email, twitter, facebook) can be correlated by inference and proximity to photos. A lot of tagging solutions focus on creating new meta-data while ignoring the mountains of un-tapped data that already exist.

I love logos and a while back I tried to compile the logos of all the Fortune 500 companies. This was a while back and I ran out of steam at 150. I had started compiling these for a financial services company that wanted logos next to company symbols when we realized that there wasn’t a central database for company brands and logos. Perhaps one day one will exist, until then this makes for an interesting reference.

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Let’s say I do a dollar of work. My employer wants to pay me a dollar but he can only pay me $0.65 because the state took a nickel, federal took a dime, unemployment insurance took a penny, medical insurance took a couple pennies and social security did too.

Now I go to spend my $0.65 and the state charges me another couple cents on my purchase. Of course the store owner where I spent my money doesn’t get to keep the whole $0.65 either. They get taxed on the earnings made from the sale.

So $1 of work gives back only a fraction as spendable money. The rest of the money is lost to unknown forces, governmental friction perhaps. How can you avoid this? Consider bartering.

Two chickens for some site design anyone?

A reader, Josh Weinberg, wrote in to comment on my CSS Sucks article. The article gets a ton of traffic mostly from people typing: “CSS Sucks” into google. I think I’m onto something.

Josh put together a number of example of how broken CSS is by showing examples of the CSS Zen Garden with different content. He literally took the CSS markup with no modification and simply changed the content to be smaller. The results broke some designs beyond recognition other designs had varied results. Take a look.

The point here is that CSS Zen Garden is an artificial utopia that doesn’t exist in the real world

• Content is dynamic
• You can’t rely on the content length or it’s presence
• You can’t expect a custom class for every text element
• You can’t do image replacement if the text is dynamic

Thank you CSS Zen Garden for helping prove my point that CSS still sucks.

If you make a selection in Adobe Photoshop and try to paste it into Microsoft Word it won’t work well (and sometimes won’t work at all). Microsoft and Adobe are trying to use OLE (object linking and embeding) a novel concept from the 90’s that just doesn’t work very well. Once you paste the PhotoShop file into Word it’s litterly embeded and you can double click the object to open it back in Photoshop. Nice concept but it doesn’t work well. Once pasted in Word you can’t do even simple manipulations in Word such as resizing, cropping or anything else using Word.

The file size gets significantly larger because you have now pasted a bunch of extra info into Word and in addition the quality tends to be much lower. As an extra bouns instead of just loading Word you’re now loading Photoshop and Word at the same time. Ugh. OLE is pretty terrible and only programs that have been around since the 90’s still support it as a legacy thing.
The solution is to copy from PhotoShop, Paste into MS Paint, Copy from MS Paint and paste into Microsoft Word. The extra step is a pain. I’ve been using this trick for years and every time I get a new version of Word or Photoshop I hope that someone will have fixed this ‘feature.

P.S. You can also use Word’s ‘paste special’ to work around this as well but there’s nothing special about what I’m doing. Pasting an image without the embeded part should be the default.

A while back I wrote a freeware Vonage call dialer that would work with the Vonage API and allow you to place calls. I created a small tool that would recognize callto: links and place phone calls through Vonage. The Callto link was originally used by NetMeeting, now not many people support it (Skype does) however it’s really powerfull.

Interestingly someone recently contacted me about using Vonage and Excell as a call list to contact prospects and make sales calls.
They had a spreadsheet of calls to make:

Using a little Excell magic you can place a call now link into the C column and easily go down the list making calls. The code to place in Cell C1 would be:
=HYPERLINK(CONCATENATE(”callto:”,A1),”Call Now”). The sales person who asked about this was really excited so hopefully this is usefull to others as well.

Other experiments.

• You can use the same trick on Google Docs but the hyperlink function doesn’t seem to be implemented yet. The formula works but the hyperlink doesn’t show up when clicked.
• If you create an HTML file for the iPhone you can do the same thing just change the link to be tel: instead of callto: and the file will allow you to have a call list from your mobile phone. Unfortunatly links in Excel spreadsheets don’t work on the iPhone so you do need to output as HTML. More info on the iPhone call links is here.

Online printing prices for many online providers:

This week we added photo printing to the many features of PicMe Photo Sharing. I put together a quick table of the many online printing options to show you that not only is it easier to order prints with PicMe Photo Sharing but most of the time it’s cheaper as well. I’m of course biased but I think we’re pretty competative to Kodak. The other savings that’s harder to calculate across providers is shipping costs. We don’t mark up our shipping so we’re cheaper then the other providers in most cases. A lot of the larger providers mark up the shipping costs to encourage in-store pickup. We don’t do that and instead we make shipping very affordable, (under $2 for most orders).

If you haven’t tried our software yet you can get it free at http://picme.raizlabs.com