While the addition of HD video is the big news in the latest release, there were lots of other goodies tucked in as well.

• Play It Again Sam – Or Not. Add multiple songs to the same slideshow, including the option of having different playlists for each album section. You can choose from our stock music or upload your own music.
• Look Sharp. Phanfare now sharpens photos by default for web presentation. You can control the degree of sharpening applied. We use the unsharp mask algorithm. Sharpening occurs on resize only, so to see the effect on older images, rotate the image and then revert within Phanfare.
• Orwellian Reporting. Improved analytics information on who clicked through your Phanfare invitations and when. You can now adjudicate disputes around who opens your email first, your Mom or your Dad.
• A Codec a Day Keeps the Tech Support Away. Phanfare now supports AVCHD videos directly. You probably know if your camera is producing this troublesome format. The extension on the files is MTS.
• Look Mom, No Wires. Phanfare now supports wireless video transfers from Eye-Fi wireless SD memory cards. These cards make great gifts, especially for the parents, as they solve the ancient question of “how do I get these photos and videos off my camera?”
• Dating Yourself. You can now buy gorgeous 12 month wall calendars customized with your own photos and custom personal dates.
• Who Moved My Cheese? Navigate web albums without your mouse, using only the arrow keys.

All of these features were top requests by our customers. Be sure to let us know how you like them.

We are delighted to announce the immediate availability of HD video support for Pro customers. You can now watch your videos in full-screen, HD glory.

We are busy reconverting all the videos for web presentation, but if you are eager to see what it looks like, here are some soccer videos and some photos too, taken with the Canon 5D Mark II. This is not professional quality video, but it gets the point across (and probably looks a bit more like what you are going to create at home versus what Hollywood produces).

Most computers can’t even show HD video without stuttering unless the hardware presentation is accelerated by special-purpose hardware built into most graphics cards. To get the benefits of HW acceleration, click the full screen button. Our full screen player uses the hardware acceleration that is likely built into your computer.

Our HD video is at 720p and runs at 3 megabits/second. Most viewers won’t be able to stream that without some significant buffering but when it does start to play, it is gorgeous.

Although HD video is reserved for Pro customers, everyone enjoys a significant improvement to the video experience in this release.

• A new video player that looks good and hides its controls.
• New controls to switch between video quality and a larger sized player at all quality levels.
• A new embedded player for blogging of video. Caveat: you will need to put out new links to get the new player but old links continue to work.
• A better experience for videos transferred to facebook.
• AVCHD files are supported.
• Eye-Fi Video transfer are supported, including HD video if your camera shoots it.
• full screen video with hardware acceleration.

We are busy converting our entire library of videos for Pro customers from the archival versions that we keep. We keep those versions for Premium customers too, so if you upgrade to Pro, your video experience will improve as well. We estimate that it will take the better part of two weeks to convert all our videos to HD for current Pro customers. But any video you upload should get converted with higher priority.

We hope you enjoy these improvements to the video experience. Let us know in the comments how it is working for you.

There is a new version of Phanfare Photon for the iPhone available in the app store. This version fixes the nasty bug where you get knocked offline because you created an album when your default music pref was null.

However, this version also removes our super cool image import flow and replaces it with the default image import picker. That picker forces you to import one image at a time and is much slower. You also can’t choose what album the image goes into.

We removed our custom import flow and associated user interface screen at Apple’s request. Apparently, their developer agreement changed and they no longer permit modifying that flow or allowing us to access the camera roll except through their interfaces.

While we understand the need to enforce standards and keep the platform stable, there is no doubt that Apple has failed to provide alternative methods that work as well as the ones developed by third parties, like ourselves.

It is our hope that Apple will eventually modify the rules to allow extension and customization such as we provided, or improve the native interfaces to provide the same interface. Until such time, any third party camera application for the iPhone can’t provide an experience that matches what Apple provides in their built in app.

Phanfare Photon synchronizes your media wirelessly to your iPhone and provides a full set of management and editing tools. Hence, it provides features and functionality unmatched by Apple’s built in app or their MobileMe service. But prohibiting us from modifying the camera to take photos as quickly as the built in camera app or allow fast import from the camera roll means that Phanfare Photon’s utility for capturing photos from the iPhone is somewhat limited.

This turns out not to be a huge deal for Phanfare customers, most of whom own digital SLRs and find that the iPhone is much more interesting as a multimedia display and management device than as a capture device.

We can’t possibly divine Apple’s motives for creating the set of rules that they did. The iPhone ecosystem is enormous and successful. There are over 100,000 apps. They could be trying to impede competitors to the built in iPhone experience, or they could be trying to keep the platform stable and not care what the impact is on camera apps. Unlike many out there, I think it is their right to do whatever they want with their platform.

If you don’t like what they are doing, let them know, because we have little say here. We try to follow the rules, support the platform and Apple ultimately decides what gets accepted into the app store.

It’s kind of funny, because the iPhone was a huge step forward for developers in opening up a mobile handset to third party development. Compare how open the platform is to what it was like under the old regime convincing Verizon that you wanted to go ‘on deck’ in their terrible ‘get it now’ experience. Walt Mossberg used to refer to Verizon and the other service providers as “the Soviet Ministries.”

And yet, as much as Apple broke new ground in opening up a mobile platform to developers, there is much left to be desired. For that, we may need to look to Android. Android is not competitive with the iPhone today, in my opinion, but for an app developer the platform is more open and updates can go out with no review. That’s a double edged sword. It means that developers can respond more quickly but it also means that consumers need to be more wary about destabilizing their phone by downloading an app.

We will see how it all plays out. Right now, it seems that Android is providing the open, cross hardware platform that will take longer to mature but may in fact be much larger than the more controlled Apple experience. Apple is very good at providing a strong paternal hand in crafting experiences that are seamless from end to end. The iPod and iTunes is a great example. But control by its very nature stifles innovation and drives up costs. There is a good chance that it will be Android that powers the majority of the smart phones in 5 years. If so, it will be another example where Apple led and then left open the door for someone else to be the market share leader with a lower cost solution that is more open, has a bigger ecosystem and more rough edges.

I have been a subscriber to Zagat.com for about 10 years. It costs $24.95/year. They provide online access to the information that is in the books. As New Yorkers know, where the guide got its start, The Zagat survey was for a long time the goto book for figuring out where to eat in NYC.

They put the ratings together through an annual survey that diners completed.

They charged for the book and when they went online, they charged for online access to the same data. Why? Because they did not want to cannibalize the sales of the book.

Well, they don’t need to worry about that anymore because I am sure book sales are close to zero. And as for online, Yelp does a better job with their free ad-supported review site.

Online reviews is a natural online business. There are huge network effects. You want to review a restaurant where people are reading and you want to read reviews where there are lots of reviewers and reviews.

Yelp also has lower costs than Zagats. They don’t run a customer service team to take calls from people cancelling and they dont need to run the annual survey. The survey is ongoing and automated.

Yelp has more data too.

In just about every way, Yelp is better than Zagats now. And its free to use. So even though Zagat.com is cheap, even one penny is too much because the free product is actually better.

How did this happen to them? They were clearly the leader in 1998 when they started moving online. But their fatal mistake was an unwillingness to cannabalize the books sales when they went online. And by doing so, they left an opportunity for someone to do it to them.

I think a lot about not being Yelped. Phanfare has few network effects. It’s really high quality web hosting for your photos and videos. We are archival, holding the original bits, something I know is outside the cost model of facebook. And we are just about the photos and videos. Hence, I think a high end to our market will continue to exist: people willing to pay for a better product with better ingredients that is purpose built for the problem.

But at the same time, the mass market will go to the free ad-supported solution. For us, that is not a problem. But for Zagat it really is, because in restaurant reviews, its winner take all.

Only last year, all the H1B visa slots available to hire foreigners to work in the US were snapped up in a single day. We hired someone through the program a few years back when tech hiring was tight. It seemed ridiculous that more slots were not made available. The fear in Washington is that tech companies like us were hiring foreigners over US citizens. This could not be further from the truth.

We went looking for someone abroad because we could not find someone qualified here. We prefer to hire US citizens. There are no language or cultural barriers to overcome and it does not require an immigration lawyer.

Fast forward to today and we find out that the H1B program is now undersubscribed, according to the WSJ. Interesting, now that unemployment in the US is above 9% and there are good engineers looking for jobs, companies are once again hiring US citizens and passing over the non US citizens.

To me, this is just more evidence that there should be no limit on the number of H1B visas we allow. The cost to hire an H1B is lots of paperwork and at least $5000 in legal bills. That tax alone guarantees preference for US workers. Beyond that, limits only make US tech companies less competitive in boom times.

Truth be told, I am pretty pro free market. I think the market allocates resources somewhat efficiently and when we tinker, we always create some secondary effect that may or may not be desirable. Rather than prop up dying industries with stimulus money or try to pick winners in new industries, I would have sent the millions of unemployed workers back to school to retrain them in industries that are expanding. Ultimately, our prosperity will be related to our individual productivity multiplied by the number of people working.

Disclaimer: this is my blog and these are my opinions. They don’t necessarily represent the views of every Phanfare employee. I have been scolded by readers for talking politics on this blog before, but I have a right to my opinion just like everyone else. That is what makes this America.

Photography enthusiasts of a certain age remember that it was not long ago that the SLR camera was declared all but dead, a niche product for die hard tinkerers. The date was 1995. Film was the name of the game. Point and shoot cameras (P&S) were getting better and better. Enthusiasts were buying Yashica T4 cameras and leaving their heavy iron at home. I remember a series of articles by Philip Greenspun, founder of photo.net, talking about point and shoot cameras being more than adequate for most purposes (some of those pages have been updated).

The thinking went something like this: Most people buy P&S cameras and hence there are more R&D dollars to develop them. P&S cameras were improving at a faster rate than SLR cameras and you could see the day when the quality of the images and auto-focus systems would mostly equal that of the expensive cameras. Back in film days there was no difference between the light sensitivity of P&S cameras and SLR cameras since they both used the same film.

Cannibalization from the low-end is a common phenomenon in technology. As technology improves and prices come down, the low end, mass market product eventually satisfies the performance needs of most applications, marginalizing the high end product. I saw this painful effect first hand when I worked for Silicon Graphics. Every year the PC graphics boards satisfied the needs of more and more people and the market for graphics workstations shrunk.

Digital Photography reset the camera market. Camera prices more than doubled overnight. In 1999, entry level P&S cameras were $700. Digital SLRs that could rival film were $10,000. For all the enthusiasts moving over from digital, there were some painful choices to make. Digital had clear advantages in immediacy and the incremental cost of shooting, but most enthusiasts were priced out of the cameras that could deliver image quality equal to their $700 Canon A2E film camera.

As prices dropped and technology improved, Digital SLRs became the tool of choice for the enthusiast. Starting with the Canon D30 in May of 2000, which was priced at $2400, enthusiasts gradually started buying digital SLR cameras.

Digital SLR cameras came down in price over the years. Now once again, digital SLRs cost approximately what prosumer film SLRs cost in the 90s ($700-$900). In the last few years DSLRs were one of the fastest growing segments of the digital camera market. Only a digital SLR could offer the shot-to-shot time, auto-focus speed, and low light performance that enthusiasts demanded.

But there is no fundamental technological advantage to the SLR format where you look through the lens through a pentaprism equipped with a mirror. In fact, the whole concept of having a mechanical mirror that pops up to expose the sensor is a complicated mechanical contraption that seems almost odd in a modern digital camera. Furthermore, the SLR format has some disadvantages, including size, weight and frame rate (you have to move that mirror out of the way).

Why can’t point and shoot cameras produce images that are as good as an SLR in a smaller form factor? Well the answer is that they can. Panasonic and Olympus have led here with the introduction of the micro 4/3rd format, which is really nothing more than a line of point and shoot cameras with interchangeable lenses and big image sensors.

The Panasonic GF-1, which I own, is the first camera that makes me want to leave my 4.5 lb Canon 5D Mark II with 24-70 f/2.8L at home in some situations. Not all situations mind you. But some. the GF-1 is 1lb with its 20mm f/1.7 lens. It can take a photo in low light. It autofocuses well. Challenges remain. Auto-focus speed is not equivalent to what a DSLR can deliver. Low light performance is not equivalent to a Canon 5D Mark II. But you can see where this is going.

DSLRs are not getting better at any significant rate. They are already amazing. The gap between P&S camera performance and DSLR performance is closing. When P&S cameras deliver anything close to the performance (image quality, low light performance, auto-focus speed) of SLR cameras, the market will once again shift back to point and shoot cameras.

Why? Because consumers mostly don’t care about tinkering with settings (aperture, shutter speed). They care about image quality, auto-focus speed, and low light performance. Once point and shoot cameras close the gap, the market will shift away from the heavy, clumsy digital SLR cameras.

I believe that when we look back, Panasonic’s GF-1 will be seen in the industry as heralding the second rise of the point and shoot camera. In five years, I predict the DSLR market will actually have shrunk relative to the market for compact, 1 lb point and shoot cameras with digital viewfinders and amazing performance. These cameras will be under $400.

And after that? well, technology is merciless. Don’t count the smart phones out. It will just take a long time before they satisfy the performance needs of the mainstream.

You can now automatically tweet when you publish an album at Phanfare. You just need to associate your Twitter account with your Phanfare account and then choose which Phanfare sites and subsites (pro feature) are covered.

When we tweet an album on your behalf, we tweet the album name and a link through a Phanfare redirector (phanfare.com/t/shortname) so the viewer knows when clicking on a link that it really comes from Phanfare.

The tweeted links don’t include any authentication so if the album is published to a site that is password protected, then the viewer will need to know the password.

Last week we learned that Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, has lost huge amounts of customer data. Danger makes the sidekick smartphone, and they offer a service to synchronize the phone (contacts, photos, etc) to hosted servers, aka, the Cloud. The critics wanted to know “why was there no backup?” And of course then there was the inevitable refrain that if you want to keep your data, you should be backing it up yourself and not relying on cloud services.

I think this is entirely wrong. Using a cloud service should free the consumer from having to do backup. Most times when you use a cloud service, backup is not even possible. How do you backup your gmail account? How about your facebook account?

The whole reason to use a hosted service is to free you of having to deal with the muck of running your own servers and doing backup. It makes sense precisely because building a reliable service is so difficult.

I am not on the inside at Danger, but I think I know how this happened. While people think that Danger lost a lot of data, the truth is, they lost very little. The type of data they hosted (contacts, text emails) is small compared to photo and video data, of which they had relatively little. My guess is that they lost under 10 terabytes of data. It might have been under a terabyte. And when you don’t host huge amounts of data, you might be tempted to just put it on RAID’ed servers and try to do nightly backups. Turns out, its very hard not to lose all your data when you use RAID.

RAID pretty much requires you to run nightly backups or rely on a proprietary replication scheme. RAID is sold as being completely reliable but anyone who has used RAID knows this is far from true. Double disk failures are more common than expected, especially when drives are from the same lot. Sometimes you lose the whole RAID chain. Replacement of disks is a manual process and sometimes people replace the wrong disk. Corruption of a RAID volume is not unheard of.

Then there is the backup window, which becomes longer each day until you finally start spending more hours backing up the data than there are hours in the day (been there, done that). And when backups are occurring, the performance of the RAID is significantly degraded. In sum, RAID does not scale. And any service that gets large enough eventually abandons RAID for some distributed solution that scales better, and coincidentally, is a lot more resistant to losing all the data at once.

Phanfare uses Amazon S3 for storage of photos and videos. Amazon is fairly vague on how it works, and we are under NDA, but the basic story is that it works much like other modern distributed file systems. It keeps multiple copies on multiple servers, geographically distributed, and has a scheme for replicating data when it programatically detects that a copy of an object has been lost.

As such, there are no backups of Phanfare. Yup, that’s right. We don’t backup the image and video data. It’s on Amazon S3 and that system uses an approach to persistence that is fundamentally different than the approach that bit Danger in the you know what.

Truth is, backups serve two purposes in am modern system. They do help assure that you don’t lose data to a system problem. And they serve as checkpoint against human error of deliberately deleting data.

The problem with S3 is, when you give it to the command to delete a file, it gets deleted, reliably. There is no going back to last night’s checkpoint. To combat this issue, we don’t really run deletes when end users delete their images. We wait a while. And we have a trash can system to make absolutely sure you want to delete data. Waiting on the deletes is really to protect against a systemic failure on our part (rogue code that deletes files).

We still use some RAID storage at Phanfare for some relational database systems holding meta data. The web service caches this data using memcache. (Another rule of large scale systems is that relational databases don’t scale either). At some point, we will scale past being able to use RAID and caching for that. Until that point, we do have to perform old school backups of the relational database to a secondary data center. And I worry a lot more about those than I do about the image and video data at Amazon S3.

The whole Danger incident sends the wrong message. Companies are much better at keeping data reliably compared to consumers. That Danger dropped the ball should not indict the whole industry. Instead, consumers should demand that companies be more transparent about their approaches to keeping data reliably.

In recognition that the ultimate risk is always that you do not know all the risks, we also offer a DVD subscription service that returns your data to you incrementally over time, automatically, so both we have and you have it.

We are announcing today that we have updated Phanfare Photon for the iPhone to enable home printing to HP printers. The updated version of the iPhone app is available in the app store now.

We worked with HP to get this all working. We are the first app outside of HP’s iPrint Photo that will allow you to print directly from the iPhone via Wi-Fi.

For Phanfare customers, Phanfare Photon wirelessly syncs your entire photo and video collection to your iPhone, enabling you to print any photo.

Phanfare Photon also allows you to order prints by mail – but that has been true for a while.

Phanfare Photon for the iPhone is our sandbox for showing how we believe connected digital cameras should work in the future. Every photo and video you take automatically floats up the cloud and every photo and video you have ever taken is available for viewing on the camera.

Truth is, most of our customers have digital SLRs, so they are more likely to view their photos and videos on their iPhone than take new ones, but we find our customers do take a small percent of their photos using their iPhone. And it is nice to be able to get a print in pinch.

This release talks about home printing, but of course, if you have a network connected HP printer at work, it works there too.

What did we do over our summer vacation you ask? Make Phanfare better of course. We are excited to announce that today we introduced a bunch of improvements to Phanfare spanning all aspects of our system. Many of these were top items on the Spring survey.

Welcome RAW files

Over 70% of our customers own a digital SLR and many report to us that they shoot RAW at least part of the time. Phanfare now accepts RAW files from Phanfare Pro customers. You can upload RAW files from Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture, the web, the PC client and the Mac client.

• RAW files are limited to 100 MB each. Tell us if you need more.

• Each RAW file must be associated with a JPEG image in your account. The filename is the key. If you upload an image to an album that has the same prefix as an existing image but a file extension outside of the ones we support for viewing, then it is assumed to be a RAW file. An example works best: If there is an image called IMG3433.JPG in an album and you upload IMG3433.CR2, then we assume it’s a RAW file. Any file that is not one of the core file types we support for regular upload (JPEG, TIFF, PSD and all the video types), is considered a RAW file.
• Our RAW support creates a sidecar for the existing image. You can download RAW files right from your web albums. Of course, you can also suppress that option and control whether new albums get created with RAW download turned on or off.
• The Lightroom and Aperture plugins were updated to support RAW and you can export JPEGS and RAW files simultaneously to Phanfare. Thank you David Holmes for updating the Aperture plugin.
• RAW storage is not included in the Phanfare Pro fee. You must purchase 10GB RAW storage blocks for $24.99/year each.
• Phanfare keeps RAW files the same way Phanfare keeps your JPEG images. Each RAW file is uploaded to Amazon S3, where it is replicated in multiple data centers, assuring that it will always be available.
• To get started with RAW, purchase a RAW storage block by logging in at www.phanfare.com. RAW storage blocks are offered on the bottom left of your logged-in home page.

Your Own Online Photo and Video Drop Box, Available 24×7

The Phanfare drop box enables you to collect full resolution photos and videos from anyone, over the web, into your Phanfare account. The drop box is useful when your friends have taken photos or videos that you want to include in your Phanfare album. Normally, moving large files over the internet is difficult, but with the drop box, your friends can drop stuff off as easily as you can upload yourself. Here are the details:

• Every Phanfare site has a dropbox at yourname.phanfare.com/dropbox
• There is an icon that looks like a little inbox, next to the search magnifying glass on the top right of your web albums that links to the drop box.
• The drop box is disabled by default. You enable it in site options from web, Mac or PC client.
• Every Phanfare Subsite also has an optional drop box. For example, if you create a subsite yourname.phanfare.com/soccer then the drop box will be at yourname.phanfare.com/soccer/dropbox.
• When someone drops off photos and videos, you will get email notifying you.
• You have unlimited storage for drop offs.
• When a person drops off photos and videos, Phanfare creates a new unpublished album for the photos and videos.

All Phanfare customers, Pro and Premium, have a drop box, but only Phanfare Pro customers have Subsites and hence drop boxes for Subsites.

iPhone 3GS Video

Phanfare now supports video shot with the iPhone 3GS. We know it’s been few months since that phone was released. Thanks for bearing with us. You can upload the video directly from the iPhone using Phanfare Photon or you can move the video to your computer and upload it with one of our other tools.

We are working on re-converting videos files uploaded to us in the past few months to fix all known iPhone 3 GS videos.

The Phanfare Referral Program makes Friends with the Web

We announced the Phanfare 50/50 Referral program over the summer. To review, when you recruit a new Phanfare Pro member, you receive $10 in Phanfare credit and they receive $10 off the first year. For new Pro members, they get $20 off, and you get $20 in credit. To get the credit, the new member had to put in your email address when signing up or paying.

The Referral program still works with email addresses, but now each of our customers has a unique random referral code, which you can see here, that can be used in links to Phanfare while still giving the new member a discount and you a credit. Here are the details:

• Your referral code can be found in settings,referral program on the web (link only works for logged in Phanfare customers).
• There are two types of links that work, links to our home page and links to the signup page.
• The link is formed by adding r=YOURCODE. For example, to drive someone to our home page, the link would be www.phanfare.com/?r=YOURCODE.
• You can put your link right on your Phanfare web albums if you like.
• Your email address is still a valid referral code, but you can’t use it in links to Phanfare.

We had quite a few requests to enable linking to Phanfare and referral credit. Both old and new ways have their virtues. It’s convenient that a friend signing up for Phanfare can put in your email, which they might know off the top of their head, and get a discount, while providing you credit. But you don’t want to put a link out there on twitter or on a public web page with your email in it.

Similarly, the random referral code is nice for links, but your friends surely are not going to know it by heart. Hence, we offer both.

Odds and Ends

We fixed some bugs in this release, including some bugs in the Mac Client.

We improved the contact manager to support contact groups. You can create a contact group and email everyone in the group at once.

Whenever you share an album within Phanfare, we now automatically add the recipients’ email addresses to your contacts.

We tightened up the look of the table of contents page for web albums . We made improvements to the Phanfare classic style, now called the Hardcover Book layout, and we the new layout, now called “Large Thumbs.” Most of our older customers don’t even realize that we offer 2 choices of layout for the Table of Contents. You can control which one is used in Website Options.