Archive for September, 2007
One of our users - Abhishek Baxi from New Delhi has done the groundwork to initiate Photowalking in India. Now if most of you are wondering what that is.. here’s quoting from Wikipedia -
“Photowalking is the act of walking with a camera for the main purpose of taking pictures of things you may find interesting“.
Photowalking has been catching on in several countries as a fun way to discovering interesting sights, possibly even in your near vicinity, which otherwise went unnoticed in the rush of daily life. Its a great way to meeting new people, spending some quality time with your attention deprived camera (if you’re like me!) and sharing your tips and techniques, and hopefully learn a few nuances of this wonderful art :)
So this is a call to everyone interested to spread the word and join in this fun past time. The first Photowalk is this Sunday (16th September) and you can sign up on the mailing list at www.photowalking.info to get the updates. Its great to see that Abhishek took the time to get things moving. I’ll try my best to make it Abhishek, hope to see you then.
Update: Check out Trevor’s article on Photowalking. Trevor has a great blog on photowalking at http://photowalking.org
September 13th, 2007
Here’s unveiling a new feature on itasveer - Upload by Email. This one has been raring to see the light of the day. It has been available on itasveer for some time now, unannounced though.
Got that friend’s photo on email you wanna make him a b’day mug with? Need to upload those dozens of forwarded party photographs to your itasveer account?? No need uploading-downloading, Upload by Email has come to your rescue.
To use this feature: -
- Go to “Upload by Email” page from the Upload page on itasveer.
- Generate an Upload Email Address for yourself (this email address is unique for you and better kept a secret)
- Launch your email program (Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook et al)
- Compose an email to your Upload Email Address, attach the photographs and just press the send button. Or forward emails you already have in your email account.
- Let the magic churn! You’ll get an email when it’s done uploading! Wouldn’t take more than 5 minutes.
You can even use your desktop email client (like Outlook) as a silent upload client. Just compose an email in the same manner and send it to your itasveer Upload by Email address. Outlook will keep the mail in your Outbox and send it silently in the background.
itasveer is a better home for your photographs than email accounts, don’t you think? If you have suggestions to make this feature better, please write to us.
September 11th, 2007
Hey! We bring you the first ever review of the top cameras and camera phones on itasveer.com.
While 65% of our traffic is from India, much of the remaining is from the Indian diaspora, thus this is probably one of the first statistical analyses on camera usage from an India centric perspective.
So, without further ado, here’s what we found.
For those who want a quick summary: Sony and Canon are the top camera brands with more than 50% of itasveer members using them. The top Point & Shoot model is the Sony Cyber-shot DSC W5, the top DSLR is the Canon EOS 350D and the top camera phone is the Sony Ericsson K750i. About 10% of users uploaded images clicked from a camera phone on to itasveer.com
For those who love graphs and charts and more data, here are the details. [Warning: This is a long post, but with lots of tasty graphs and charts.]
The Top Brands
Canon and Sony are the most widely used brands on itasveer.com with as much as 50% of our members using them. Noteworthy is that a surprising 10% of our users use cameraphones and Nokia and Sony Ericsson figure in the top 10 brands.
The Top Camera Models
The Sony DSC W5 is the most widely used camera on itasveer.com. Interestingly, the Sony Ericsson K750i figures in the top three! Canon EOS 350D is the most used DSLR camera. Animesh, the photography aficionado among us also owns the 350D and swears by it (which, by the way, did not lead to any skewness in the data :)).
The Top Cameras by brand
We also thought it would be useful to list the top 3 cameras, both Point & Shoot and DSLRs for our top camera brands. These are the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC W5, Canon Powershot S2 IS and the Nikon E4600 in the case of Point & Shoot and Canon 350D and Nikon D50 in the case of DSLRs. For your reference, we have also added the camera’s rank within its brand on flickr.com in brackets next to the camera model. (Click to enlarge)
The Top Cameraphones
Finally, the top camera phones in general, and also by brand on itasveer.com. After the Sony Ericsson K750i which figures in the top across all kinds of cameras, it’s Nokia all the way with the N70 being the most popular cameraphone from the Nokia stable.
Methodology
The data used for the analysis is actual data from itasveer.com for the period April 2006 to August 2007. The top cameras have been evaluated based on the number of users using a camera model. The model is automatically detected from the photo’s EXIF data, however, this is not possible for about 10% of the images uploaded on itasveer.com which haven’t been included in the analysis.
So let us know what you guys think! Which are your favorite cameras?
September 5th, 2007
We were making a pretty much regulation (bug fixes) release today, and we kept running into problems. So sorry about the frequent “itasveer is out on a coffee break” page. All batch uploads also got turned off during that time!! Also, users might have experienced a 20 minute outage yesterday night, we moved our DNS servers to new ones, and it seems we were impatient in updating that in our system, which translated into unwanted outage :(. Our sincere apologies for the trouble.
BTW the new release has some speed optimizations, so itasveer should feel zippier. Doodlepad has cut down on its already feather light weight (it has gone down from 225kb to 200kb) and is better than ever. So you’all.. keep the feedback coming :)
Update: We’re still facing some issues it seems, we’re trying hard to get things back to speed.
Update (late in the night now) : We’re finally looking good. Spent our whole day figuring out what was wrong with our Mysql server. Turns out it was a DNS resolution problem and had been lurking there for quite some time!
September 4th, 2007
