Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > May > 07
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Milkscreen makers and Babble Soft team up on baby offer
Two Austin companies are teaming up to offer a deal for parents of newborns who want to try out each of its products.
Babble Soft, which offers software online for parents to track feedings, diaper changes, vaccinations and to create photo albums, has teamed with UpSpring Baby, which offers several products for babies, including Milkscreen for detecting alcohol in breast milk.
Shoppers at Babies “R” Us and other retailers will be able to try Babble Soft’s software when they buy a $4.99 three-pack of Milkscreens. The three-pack will include a three-month subscription to Babble Soft’s “Baby Insights” and “Baby Say Cheese” services.
Babble Soft and UpSpring are part of a proliferation of parenting-related Web sites, video productions and startups that have taken off in Austin. It’s not surprising that some of them would partner up to continue their baby steps into the national market.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Baby-daddy, Gadgets, Internet
Next big thing in digital photos: geotagging?
A friend of mine who travels quite a lot recently bought a tiny little gadget that he plans to carry around with him, along with his SLR digital camera, as he walks around cities and explores.
The device is a tiny GPS-enabled device for “Geotagging.” It works like this: as you’re walking around taking digital photos, the Geotagger keeps track of where you are a given time. It uses an internal clock to record this data as you move.
Later, software takes the photos you shot and the data inside the GPS device and synchronizes the information. As long as the clocks are set to the right time on the camera and the geotagger (which pulls its time data down from the satellite automatically), the data should accurately enter data into the photo file that specifies where the shot was taken.
Now comes the fun part: photo sites like Flickr.com and Google’s Picasa Web Albums now support these features. When someone browses your photo, they can also pull up a map that shows exactly where the photo was taken.
If you had an especially eventful day, you could display a map showing where you went:
Some of the devices I’ve seen online that geotag cost anywhere from $60 to $130. As digital cameras evolve, though, I would expect to start seeing this as a built-in feature in cameras, or at least to get cheaper as more people get interested in geotagging.
Here are some resources to get you started if geotagging interests you:
- A quick review of some hardware for geotagging.
- Flickr’s Geotagging group, which also has links to plenty of other resources and tutorials.
- A great blog entry (where the photo came from above) that talks about the basics of geotagging.
- Some geotag devices on Amazon.
- Microsoft on geotagging.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Gadgets, Internet, Shopping
