Archive for the ‘Cloud Computing’ Category
PC Magazine Reviews Phanfare Photon
PC Magazine reviewed Phanfare Photon. The review is quite thorough and captures the essence of what we are trying to accomplish on the mobile platform.
USA Today article on Phanfare Photon
USA today covered our Phanfare Photon app in today’s print and online editions.
The article talks about our belief that the iPhone is disruptive technology to the digital photography market. Phanfare Photon combines our industrial-strength cloud-based photo and video sharing service with the convenience of management and viewing of your whole collection from a mobile device.
We know that the iPhone is not quite there yet for acquisition of photos (and you can’t take a video) but these problems are easily solved, as many companies know how to make small form factor cameras that are awesome.
I take most of my photos with a traditional point and shoot camera or DSLR, but having my whole collection wirelessly synced is a great convenience. I hardly ever tether my iPhone. My email, contacts and address book come over the air via ActiveSync to our Exchange server. My photos and videos come over the air via Phanfare.
Interview with Jefferson Graham at USA today
I spoke with Jefferson Graham at USA today from the floor of CES. I showed him Phanfare Photon for the iPhone and talked about our vision for mobile photography.
If you are a Phanfare customer at CES, feel free to email me at aje@phanfare.com and we can meetup on the show floor.
Phanfare iPhone app now allows you to manage your collection
We just released a new version of the Phanfare iPhone app that brings rudimentary album and image management to the palm of your hand. From the app you can now:
- Edit the album name, description and sharing settings
- Add or edit image captions
- Save a photo to the iPhone camera roll
- assign a photo to someone in your iPhone address book
- Email a photo
- Delete a photo
With the iPhone app you can take your entire photo and video collection on the go, wirelessly synchronized to your iPhone. You can also shoot photos with the iPhone and upload them in the background to your Phanfare site.
The Phanfare iPhone app works on the iPod touch as well as the iPhone. On the touch you can’t shoot photos, since there is no camera, but the viewing experience is just as good.
Once your photos and videos are wirelessly synchronized to your iPhone, you can show them even when there is no network connection present.
Phanfare iPhone app now wirelessly synchronizes all your stuff
We are thrilled to announce a new version of the Phanfare iPhone app that improves upon the viewing experience by wirelessly synchronizing and caching your recent albums right on the phone. The viewing experience is buttery smooth, includes videos, and works (for photos) even when the iPhone is in airplane mode.
New photos you take on your iPhone are integrated directly into your collection. With this new version your iPhone is transformed into a managed wireless digital camera. Your whole collection appears on the camera and new content is automatically uploaded to your account in the background.
This new version of the Phanfare iPhone app is available for the iPod Touch as well. While the touch lacks a camera, you can still view your photo and video collection via the app.
For many shooters, the iPhone is only one of the many devices they use in their photographic life. Phanfare brings all the content together, viewable from the web and on the iPhone. We also support TV viewing via our media server software combined with the PS III and Xbox 360. We would love to be in TVs directly (if you manufacturer TVs, contact us – we would be happy to provide API keys).
Phanfare iPhone App Version 1.3 Released
We released version 1.3 of the Phanfare iPhone App that focuses on rounding out the sharing features available from the application.
- You can now add friends and family from the app
- You can accept connection requests from the app
- Your Phanfare newsfeed, telling you about photos and videos in your circle, is now available from the app.
- You can signup for Phanfare from the app; not important to existing users but great for new users.
As always, you can view your own photos, create albums, set security on new albums and caption your photos. Videos don’t play within the app, although they do play if you browse to your account using Safari on the iPhone.
This release also addresses stability problems in the previous version. The app was dying suddenly when it hit memory limits on the phone. We don’t have complete control over memory usage but we did trim down the footprint a bit. The phone seems to provide less memory to applications after the phone has been running for a period of time. Restarting the phone alleviates the issue.
Apple has publicly said that some of these issues will be addressed in future firmware releases for the iPhone. In the interim, we now show a message if memory is running low to warn you that you will need to serialize your photo taking (we normally overlap more operations to reduce latency).
We will continue to optimize the memory foot print of the Phanfare app to improve its performance and decrease the likelihood it gets killed by the operating system for memory usage. We are also hoping that the underlying iPhone libraries become leaner and faster over time to improve performance.
We would love your feedback on the Phanfare iPhone app. We have a whole list of things we want to do with it, but we don’t see it with fresh eyes as some of you will.
Please comment on this post if you want to discuss the direction of the app.
Surviving an Amazon S3 outage
We use Amazon S3 to store our 80 terabytes of photos and videos. We like the service and it works well. Yesterday, it went down for nearly 8 hours. And during that time, we were mostly up. Cloud computing is all the rage, but sometimes, the weather is really bad and you can’t see the clouds. We planned for that rainy day. Hence, on a day when Amazon S3 was entirely down, I was at the pool, literally. I will tell you about how we did it.
When users upload photos and videos, we first move them to our own servers. In the background, we send the data to S3. If Amazon S3 goes down, we can buffer data for up to two days before we notice. By buffering, we remove the real time requirements of Amazon S3 being up for our users to upload data. We can’t buffer indefinitely, but we are betting than an Amazon S3 outage longer than 2 days is very rare. We always believed short outages would occur. In fact this, is is not the first one.
For serving photos and videos, we act as our own content distribution network (CDN) and cache the hot data. That means that users can view most recent photos and videos, including what was recently uploaded.
All this caching and buffering is done outside of Amazon. We don’t use Amazon’s compute cloud (EC2) for that. We have considered moving more of our system to Amazon Web Services. It is unfortunate that EC2 was built to require S3 to be up in order for to it run. New instances are loaded from S3. So an S3 outage is correlated with an EC2 outage.
Photo and video sharing services that did not plan for S3 outages were completely down yesterday. We estimate that most of the cost savings for our business comes from outsourcing the storage. While we could save some additional money by using EC2, it is not as dramatic as the S3 savings. Hence, we will have to carefully consider before we put all our eggs in that basket.
Preview of iPhoto plugin for Phanfare
For all you Apple iPhoto users out there, we are happy to announce direct support for iPhoto through a plugin that will put Phanfare in the export menu of your iPhoto application.
This is a preview release intended to help us iron out any issues before we more widely advertise the iPhoto plugin in the next Phanfare release.
The iPhoto plugin will allow you to upload any selected images in iPhoto to the Phanfare service directly. you can also create new albums, and control whether or not the album is visible to family and friends.
If you want to import a whole bunch of iPhoto albums to Phanfare at once, while retaining your iPhoto album structure, then please use the Phanfare Mac client and import the albums from that client.
Phanfare for the iPhone
We are happy to announce that we have developed a camera application for the new iPhone store that allows users to share iPhone photos on the web with a single click. The photos are moved wirelessly to the internet where they are immediately visible to friends and family and archivally stored.
We have also released a new mobile viewing experience that targets the Safari web browser built into the iPhone.
Here is a demo of the new Phanfare iPhone application and the mobile viewing experience.
http://albums.phanfare.com/video/4;1003289;2080668;28510947;1309f95956457154c514d89a2c1b4cdd
The Phanfare camera application turns the iPhone into a connected digital camera that takes the PC out of the loop for uploading and sharing. Users enjoy the convenience and portability of the iPhone with all the benefits of cloud-based storage and sharing. After you take a picture, you can instantly add a caption, add the photo to an existing album or create a new album without ever leaving the application. Here is a demonstration of the new iPhone app.
For consumers, digital photography was a huge step forward over film, but uploading digital photos to a computer is just too complicated. The Phanfare iPhone app gets the computer out of the uploading loop and makes digital photography significantly more convenient.
Open public albums are back!
By popular demand, we have put open public albums back into the Phanfare service in a release that went out today. This means that you can publish your albums for all to see at a URL that you can send via email or put on a web page.
We did this as a result of overwhelming feedback from our customers that they want to share without requiring people to register to view.
We are also enabling email invites to view that to go unregistered users. Collectively, these two changes will make the social networking features in Phanfare optional. Use them if you want them.
For those keeping track, we made a set of changes to Phanfare in December, collectively known as Phanfare 2.0, that traded the old website hosting model for one that layered social networking on top of Phanfare. We did this out of a belief that social networks, like facebook, are a fun and collaborative way to share photos and videos.
What our customers told us though was that they valued Phanfare because it was not a walled garden and that the strict social networking permission model was too constrained for them. We took a hard look at what makes the Phanfare service special and decided that being an open platform for storing your photos and videos in the cloud was our core. The social networking within Phanfare remains for those who want to use it. At the same time, we have enabled our customers to display their photos and videos on other social networks if they please.
To that end, we recently released the Phanfare facebook app that will allow you to pick and choose which albums you display to your Facebook friends.
Personally, I actually like the social networking features of Phanfare 2.0 and use them with close friends and family. But I also publish a subset of my albums from Phanfare to my facebook profile. And I enjoy my Phanfare photos on my living room TV via our media server that integrates with the Playstation III and Xbox 360. And I have my screensavers set to show content from friend and family albums.
Aside from open public albums, we also released another user-facing feature today: Editing of photos in Picnik.
We have always had fairly full featured editing in our downloadable applications, and now with the Picnik integration, you can edit photos on the web too. Tell us what you think of it.
An Engineer 
