Wrapping up the school-year in photos can be done beautifully in a photo book for as little as $9.99. Budget-minded consumers will also appreciate that through June 30, 2009, Picaboo is offering a Buy One Photo Book Get One Free special*. In addition to being easy on the pocketbook, making photo books with Picaboo is fast. Busy parents may opt to utilize the auto-create feature that allows rapid photo book creation, often in a matter of minutes.
Photo Books Made Simple
To help pique creativity and set direction for topical photo books, Picaboo offers advice and sample albums within its Idea Center (http://www.picaboo.com/ideacenter/). Relevant topics like Graduation and School Years can be found here. Customers can tap hundreds of page layouts, thousands of page backgrounds, numerous fonts and text colors – for a highly customized photo book.
Photo book pricing starts at just $9.99 and shipping is additional. Once made, Picaboo photo books can also be easily shared online free of charge. In order to secure the most affordable photo book shipping, U.S. customers should allow 3-5 business days for ground shipping, while also allowing 3-5 business days for photo book production.
*Use coupon code JUNEGF at checkout. Buy any qualifying photo book(s) and get one of the exact same photo book(s) for free when the coupon is applied (for example, order one Large Classic book, get a second copy of the same Large Classic book for free). The cost of the free book(s), including extra pages, will be deducted from your order total. All Classic, Classic Leather, Classic Custom, and Regency photo books are eligible for this offer. The discount does not apply to taxes or shipping fees. Coupon does not apply to additional shipping costs for the free book(s). Coupon expires June 30, 2009 at 11:59 PM (Pacific Time). Valid for US and Canadian customers only. Cannot be combined with any other coupon or offer. Picaboo reserves the right to change the terms and conditions of this offer without notice.
Utilizing RocketLife patent-pending technologies, such as ultra-fast import of hundreds of photos, multi-layered photo themes with new enhancements, Smart Arrangement Technology, and 3D Digital Merchandising, RocketLife Touch expands touch capabilities to a variety of new venues and environments for rich photo product creation, from stunning collage prints and posters to professional designed lay-flat photo books.
RocketLife Touch can be branded to the reseller partner and supports both localized and centralized fulfillment. RocketLife Touch is being launched and demonstrated at PMA 2009 running on HP’s Touchsmart™ PC, and supports many other kiosks and touch screen environments.
RocketLife Touch is unique in its ability to offer customers flexibility of product, design, and ordering. Current kiosks severely limit a customer’s creative choices, because their technology allows only rudimentary, flat, fixed template designs and little, if any, creative control. In far less time than it takes to create and order products with other solutions, RocketLife Touch allows customers to easily and instantly play with very sophisticated and beautiful photo and theme capabilities, including full and free positioning of all elements, image processing, multi-layer compositing, placeable graphics, advanced text and more.
Using a consumer’s natural desire to touch and move things, RocketLife Touch provides fast, intuitive touch capabilities which give the user more power to explore his or her creativity to make a professional photo book, designer mug, poster or any other personal photo product featuring dramatic enhancements, such as full placement and layering of photos, graphic objects and text, and even image processing and special effects. RocketLife Touch allows this for the first time in a kiosk, photo lounge, or home environment.
While other solutions provide rudimentary products in order to move customers in and out quickly, RocketLife Touch encourages customers to be more creative; yet RocketLife is able to do so in far less time. Testing in major retail environments show that customers create and purchase more products at higher dollars per minute with RocketLife Touch than with competitors. Customers preferred RocketLife Touch’s creative solution, because it lets them quickly create what they actually want instead of having to compromise their vision of the end-product.
RocketLife Touch uses advanced software techniques (such as high-speed assembly language) to create the quickest, most responsive system, so that a customer’s experience is fast and fluid. This, combined with advanced themes, graphics, and compositing capabilities, gives RocketLife Touch its unique power and creativity.
RocketLife’s award winning Smart Arrangement Technology populates every product in just seconds, providing the consumer with a fun and exciting shopping experience. Consumers see their creations come alive with RocketLife’s powerful 3D Digital Merchandising fluidly showing the changes they make on each product in real-time.
RocketLife Touch’s interface is consistent throughout the RocketLife Touch product line. For example, if a customer uses a RocketLife Touch kiosk and then goes home and visits a RocketLife online store using their touch screen computer, the online version would act and respond to their touch just like the store kiosk did, making the interface’s learning curve an easy, one-time step.
RocketLife Touch creates customized products exactly the way consumers want them, removing the belief that it is an impossible task to achieve with a touch screen or in a busy retail environment.
RocketLife Touch is easy to learn because it utilizes our natural desire to touch and move things.
RocketLife Touch becomes a personal experience through the interaction with the screen and instant results through the 3D Digital Merchandising of the products they create.
One easy learning curve – kiosk and home interfaces are the same, making it easy to use.
RocketLife Touch is available immediately for photo kiosks and computer touch screens. For more information, see www.RocketLife.com.
Also read SvenOnTech’s review of RocketLife (Online Photo Processor).
Verizon Wireless, the nation’s leading wireless provider, and Photobucket, the Web’s premier standalone photo and video-sharing site, today announced the availability of a new mobile photo service on select Verizon Wireless handsets that enables Verizon Wireless customers to easily send photos from a mobile device to a Photobucket album. The application will launch exclusively for Verizon Wireless customers and is available for download from Verizon Wireless mobile storefront by texting ‘photob’ to 2777, in the Community and Sharing category of the Verizon Wireless Get It Now catalog or by visiting photobucket.com/mobile.
Jennifer Byrne, director of digital media at Verizon,said, “Mobile phones are adding a new dimension to sharing images between friends, colleagues or family members. Photobucket is bringing Verizon Wireless customers a new and easy way to share their photos and videos in real-time, without needing to move to a PC to upload and send them.”
“Photobucket is thrilled to team up with Verizon Wireless to provide a quick and easy photo sharing solution for people on the go,” said Alex Welch, President of Photobucket. “Photobucket has always been committed to making photo sharing fun and easy. The Photobucket Mobile Uploader for Verizon Wireless unlocks the full potential of camera phone photos, allowing users to easily save and share images online more easily than they would using traditional digital cameras.”
To utilize the application, Verizon Wireless subscribers sign up for a Photobucket account – which can be created for free at http://photobucket.com – and enter their log-in information to link their Verizon Wireless account to their Photobucket online photo album. Once the accounts are connected, the application instantly uploads photos already saved on the phone to the user’s Photobucket account. The Photobucket Mobile Uploader then automatically sends any future photos directly to the same Photobucket account.
Verizon is the first carrier in the United States to be offering the Photobucket Mobile Uploader and the application will be available initially on 13 handsets. The service is available now from Verizon Wireless, which enables the user to send unlimited mobile photos to their Photobucket account for a monthly subscription fee of $2.99.
We all hear it from our wives or girlfriends, “Can’t you make me look better? Take out my blemish. Cover my zits. Make me look thinner.” It goes on and on and anyone that works in PhotoShop knows how much time these requests take. So in the end, we just don’t do them. With Alien Skin’s Image Doctor 2, however, you’ll be able to two out of the three of the requests in no time at all.
Graphic artist and just all around nice guy, Roger Hall has taken the time to learn Image Doctor 2 and use it and abuse it. He used his wife and two old pictures as examples for his review and you can read the results of it.
Anyone that has a collection of old photos or would like to touch up photos of model work quickly and efficiently, will want to take a look at Roger at to say about Image Doctor 2.
Don’t you just love those smug Mac users talking about how easy it was for them to create a photobook of their latest vacation and how they did it in like, “2 minutes; that’s it!”? I know, you secretly wished you had a Mac so you too could be sporting on the iPhoto but you’re stuck with a PC. Well, don’t worry, ’cause you don’t have to wait an eternity for Microsoft to make a good iPhone clone because Rocketlife did it for them.
Rocketlife is an online photo processor that lets you make calendars, cups, posters, and, yes, photobooks. With just some of your photos, Internet Explorer, a broadband connection, and some creativity, Rocketlife is going to set you up with one sweet photobook…in just minutes. Now you can be like our reviewer, Rebecca, and take your sweet time to nail down that awesome custom look if you want, but it’s not required. Either way, Rocketlife offers a pretty impressive option to iPhoto-wishing PC users to use. Take a look at Rebecca had to say in her review. You may never look at iPhoto again!
Boinx Software introduced today FotoMagico 2.5, its award-winning photo presentation tool for professional photographers. Recently honored with the Apple Design Award (ADA) 2008 - “Best Mac OS X Leopard Graphics and Media Application Runner-up”, the new 2.5 version of FotoMagico now features support for Adobe Lightroom libraries, a teleprompter that shows notes for every slide on a presenter´s display and a new export option for uploading slideshow videos directly to YouTube.
“We want to thank thousands of users who take part on our public beta program and gave feedback to make FotoMagico even better”, says Oliver Breidenbach, co‐founder of Boinx Software. “We are dedicated to making FotoMagico the premier slidehows tool on the Mac, two Apple Design Awards are proof that we are on the right track.”
“With FotoMagico 2.5, keeping your audience at the edge of their seats with a great show is now as easy for Adobe Lightroom users as it was for Aperture and iPhoto users before”, says Peter Baumgartner, lead-developer and “father” of FotoMagico. “The teleprompter enables a Steve Jobs-like performance for everybody and sharing shows with a global audience was never easier than with the new YouTube export option.”
Adobe Lightroom Support
FotoMagico 2.5 now supports the iMedia Browser framework. With the integrated iMedia Browser users can now seamlessly access GarageBand songs, iLife sound effects and their media libraries not only from iTunes, iPhoto and Aperture (Pro version) but also from other software including Adobe Lightroom (Pro version).
Teleprompter
With the new teleprompter of FotoMagico 2.5 Pro users can show their photos on one display and read their notes for every slide on another. Nicely animated, they get a preview showing which pictures come next and can even jump back and forth to every slide in the storyboard with just a click of the mouse.
YouTube Export
The Sharing Assistant feature adds a new export option, allowing to upload photo presentation videos directly to YouTube to reach a global audience. Video encoding for YouTube can be accelerated with the powerful Turbo.264 video encoder hardware from Elgato.
Availability and Pricing
FotoMagico 2.5 is available immediately for download from http://www.boinx.com/download. A built-in assistant will guide users through the process of aquiring the proper license. The update to FotoMagico 2.5 is free of charge to current FotoMagico 2.x license owners at their current license levels. FotoMagico 2.5 Express is available for $49 and FotoMagico 2.5 Pro is available for $129 via Kagi. For all purchase options see http://boinx.com/fotomagico/buy. Commercial multi-user license discounts are available upon request.
There have been a few solutions for this problem, namely dragging your laptop around with you and off load your pictures that way. But who wants to do that? Man, the diaper bag alone is big enough for me to want to ditch it immediately! Other portable hard drive readers, some with screen and some without, have slowly made there way into the alternative space. Of course, you can just buy more flash cards, too.
Digital Foci goes with the hard drive solution. Its new Photo Safe II accepts Compact Flash (including Extreme III, IV, UDMA), MMC, SD/HC Card, miniSD, Memory Stick, MS PRO, MS Duo, MS PRO Duo, and xD-Picture card. Ya, pretty much everything. All the pictures are stored on either an 80GB or 160GB internal hard drive. Once you get home or to the hotel, then you can connect the Photo Safe II to your computer and off comes all those saved pictures of both Shamu and the kids!
Photo Safe II is easy to use and only requires pressing one button labeled “Auto Copy”. At speeds of 5.0/MBsec, a full 1GB card will be copied in about 3.5 minutes. All file formats, including RAW, are supported. A backlit LED screen gives information as to space left, copy progress, and battery life.
Photo Safe II works on both Macs and PCs and retails for $139 for the 80GB version and $189 for the larger 160GB drive.
CDFinder, the leading disc cataloging application for the Apple Macintosh, receives a massive update with new features and more speed. Also, as a world premiere, it offers a GPS based photo search that quickly locates any photos taken within a distance of a geographical position.
“We are impressed by the unique new GPS search feature, as it offers a brand new way of browsing and searching large photo libraries with CDFinder,” said Norbert M. Doerner, chief developer of the CDFinder team. In addition, the team added FileCheck, a checksum feature designed to ensure the data integrity of all cataloged files, important for photographers who want to be sure their precious digital negatives are still fully readable and intact. More speed was another goal, and with the quicker updating of existing catalogs, faster creation of photo thumbnails, and much faster parsing of ZIP archives, that goal was obviously reached.
CDFinder for Macintosh is a Universal Binary and works with PowerPC and Intel-Macs. A Windows version is available as well, which is compatible to Windows 2000, XP, 2003 Server and Vista. CDFinder is shareware. The demo version is unlimited in time, but restricted to 25 catalogues. A single license is 29 Euro / 39 USD. Multiple licenses for business or network use are priced depending on the number of clients and features required.
About CDFinder Read the rest of this entry »
Dgital Foci, Inc. www.digitalfoci.com announced today that its Image Moments 8 and Image Moments 6 digital frames have been awarded Consumers Digest “Best Buys” in the “5.6-inch to 8-inch digital photo frame” category in its Jan/Feb 2008 issue. Both models will be displayed at the Photo Marketing Association Conference (PMA) held next week from January 31 – February 2, 2008 in Las Vegas. Image Moments 8 (IMT-083) and Image Moments 6 (IMT-063) were awarded “Best Buys in Digital Photo Frames” in the “Premium Selection” category, defined as a product that “offers all of the features a ‘top-of-the-line’ buyer would want.” On average, a Consumers Digest Best Buy is awarded to fewer than 3 percent of the competing models in any given product category.
“No other 8-inch frame has such an extensive range of file support, including RAW files from digital SLRs. It packs sophisticated file management, including the ability to create folders, on the frame’s [200MB] of memory. Its remote control makes the unit much easier to use than competitive products. The 5.7-inch IMT-063 is also a Best Buy,” said Greg Scoblete, Consumers Digest, January/February 2008.
“Image Moments 8” Has Limitless Custom Framing Options
Peleman Industries, Inc., manufacturer of the award-winning Unibind PhotoBook Creator and high-quality binding and lamination line of products, announced today that it is the first company to introduce environmentally-friendly Unibind “Green” PhotoBooks made from natural and recycled materials. The Unibind Green PhotoBooks will be debuted at the 2008 Photo Marketing Association (PMA) Convention, held next week, January 31- February 2, 2008 in Las Vegas. The Green PhotoBooks are manufactured with a natural cover comprised of 100 percent cotton-flax, made from natural and recycled materials.
35% of Unibind’s Products are Made with Recycled Materials
The environmentally-friendly PhotoBook is one of several initiatives by Unibind to make its operations as safe as possible for the environment. “Guido Peleman Founder of Peleman Industries Worldwide’s (my father) mission was always to be ‘green,’” said Brigitte Peleman-Vantieghem, CEO of Unibind North America. “An example is our commitment to environmental ethics. Thirty-five percent of our products sold are made with recycled materials, and all of our office building’s roofs in Belgium are being solar-paneled. In addition, we have implemented recycling programs at both our Belgium and U.S. operations.”
“We’re proud to be the first company to offer a ‘green’ photo book. The PhotoBook is one example of Unibind’s determination to make its operations as eco-friendly as possible. 100% natural, the Green PhotoBook offers the same high-quality binding capability of the Unibind professional line of books,” said Rusty Redecker, Vice President of Photo for Unibind North America.
For more information, see www.peleman.com.