TechnoCloud

If ever you get bored with uploading and categorising your photos on Flickr, have a play with these tools that make use of their API.

Among the highlights:

• Make your own mosaic
• Warholise your images
• Create a magazine or movie cover

Those source photos you uploaded are becoming for many just the raw materials for an increasingly customised web experience.

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OK - so I should have said one widget API to rule them all. Netvibes have released the Universal Widget API, which, according to the details here, is an API that allows you to write one widget and run it on most platforms (I suspect that the marketing department vetoed the suggestion that it be called the Near-Universal Widget API.)

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Not so long ago, as I posted here, Steve Jobs was setting out a vision for a DRM-free future.  Today, the future has arrrived a little more quickly than some might have thought: Apple have announced that the entire EMI Music catalog will be available DRM-free worldwide starting in May.  The DRM-free tracks will be a little more expensive, and better quality (256kbs as opposed to 128kbs.) Click here for more information about this ground breaking move.

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One of the joys of opening up your product to the development community is that you get applications that you would never have thought of and would never get budget approval to complete. Plus, their quirkiness can lead to great viral marketing.

To illustrate the point, take these examples of Skype ‘hacks’ from VoIP news:

1. From the useful: The Universal Chat and Language Translation add-on uses automated voice recognition and translation software and provides a text-only translation of many different languages. Handy.
2. To the questionable: KishKish lie detector - claims to analyse stress levels in the voice to detect whether someone is lying or not. So, when making that multi-lingual business negotiation, you might use this plugin to have the upper hand.
3. To the downright silly: the glorious Voice Analysis Love Detector. Combined with the two tools above, not only will you have the upper hand in the negotiation, but you will know whether they are lying to you because they are secretly in love with you!

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Another online conversion tool has launched - Hey!Watch.  Unlike Zamzar, this tool is video only, but they’ve used RSS and a RESTful API to provide automation capability.

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Here’s an interesting application of a recommendation engine:  The Filter.  This kind of software is likely to be much more useful that the Playlist features built into your favourite media player.  It only works with iTunes and Windows XP right now, but there are versions in development for Mac and for Windows Media Player.

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Here’s an interesting on-line tool. Zamzar allows you to convert from a variety of formats to a variety of formats. Being properly Web 2.0 it is, of course, in beta. The business model is ad supported, so the file conversions are free - the FAQ mentions a possible subscription model for bigger file sizes and longer storage of converted files.

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