Smilebox - Extend What YOU Can Do with iTunes

For Macsters, here is creative photo and video sharing service I've come across very recently, that extends what you can do with iPhoto, iTunes, and Photo Booth: mix your photos, videos, and music with animated designs you can email, post to a website or blog, or print.

Smilebox is a free service with premium upgrades for print, more music choices, and ad-free playbacks.





Here is a quick rundown on the features:

- Photos, videos, and music: Combine your photos, videos and music, and share them inside animated, interactive designs.

- iPhoto and iTunes integration: Easily drag and drop your photos and videos from iPhoto and Photo Booth directly into Smilebox. You can also easily add your music from iTunes. No plug-ins and no lengthy uploads required.

- Professionally designed content for every occasion: Smilebox's catalog has more than 700 digital scrapbooks, slideshows and greeting, with new designs released each week. Smilebox has partnered with the leaders in digital design including Hallmark, Making Memories, K and Company, DigiChick, Sweet Shoppe and more. Cool!

- Interactivity: Your recipients can click on photos to enlarge them, turn pages, control the speed and flow of their playback.

- Many ways to share: Share your interactive creations via email, post them to a blog, social network or personal website or print pages at home or at a local retail store.

Cybercast credit: YouTube

Search YouTube the 3D PicLens Way

Cooliris, a startup that’s been developing dynamic and immersive new ways to browse the web, continues to roll out new features for its PicLens browser plug-in. Most promising of the new features is the search capability for video site YouTube.

When PicLens launched last June, I was impressed by its ability to browse photo sites like Flickr. Since then, it looks like the service has gotten a lot more sophisticated, creating an image browsing interface that The New York Times describes as “a three-dimensional space that feels like an unending hallway of images.” In essence, your browser disappears and you fly around in front of a wall of content. Sort of like the Apple’s Quick Look and Cover Flow.

This interface moves PicLens beyond other online slideshow companies like Slide and Rockyou, into a much more useful service. And its YouTube compatibility — which seems to be the first of a number of new multimedia search features in the works — PicLens is starting to live up to its promise.

PicLens’ 3D YouTube search can be accessed direct from the video site, as well as via the PicLens button in your browser toolbar. Here’s a video demo:



The plug-in’s latest release includes other new features like Firefox 3.0 support, an improved user interface that lets you zoom in much further than before and optimized media RSS support. Great job, Cooliris!

Cybercast credit: YouTube