I started online photo sharing in 2001 with Pixum, a German photo service site, after I bought my first digital camera. Missing more contemporary features beyond albums and unlimited storage – as long as you have a look at every album once in a while -, I switched to Flickr mid of last year. From the beginning I tried to avoid the pro account, and thus struggled with limited monthly upload capacity (20 MB) and many other limitations. Of these I did not bore in mind that only the 200 most recent ones are shown in the photostream – hope they do not delete the others after 90 days of inactivity.

However, after recognizing this today I took the decision to look at Zooomr a bit closer again. The team around the 18-year-old Kristopher Tate took the basic ideas of Flickr and all its clones further with many enhancements, such as geotagging, trackbacks for single pictures, etc. They combined these in a very easy to use multilingual user interface. So, my decision to move over to Zooomr was even made easier after having read that they give all bloggers a free pro account.

But beyond all the praise for Zooomr, the site still needs some development when it comes to more user-friendly upload possibilities beside the web-based one, easier to understand geotagging – I still have to figure it out for my pics (too bad it is not yet integrated in Plazes ;) -, and albums. Therefore, I am really looking forward to Zooomr 2.0.

Find below a picture two weeks ago, when my university colleagues Harald and Thomas visited me here in St.Gallen.

Technorati tags: Flickr Zooomr web2.0

Technorati tags: Plazes MoSoSo web2.0

Technorati tags: RFID CeBIT METRO

After I have discovered the travel website 43 Places closer this week, I could not resist to enter as much places I went to in the past and those I would like to visit in the future. The degree of interaction among users is stunning. Others can cheer on your goals, subscribe to your travel activities and comment on these. Additionally, every location can be tagged and these tags are connected to del.icio.us or Technorati – pics are linked to Flickr tags. It’s real fun exploring others opinions about places you wanna visit.

Currently, 43 Places has over 27,500 user – growing with about 1.5% per day – after its launch July 27, 2005. The team behind 43 Places is Robot Co-op, who already setup 43 Things and recently All Consuming – both more market research sites where user’s can be targeted very precisely with ads. Read some background information about 43 Things here. I am curious how they will develop 43 Places further, not only in terms of technology used – so far only cumbersome manuel entry is possible – but more in terms of their implemented business model – hopefully it goes beyond just ads.

Technorati tags: 43Places 43Things MoSoSo

ERA – the leading mobile brand in Poland – has kicked off last week a phenomenal campaign promoting their launch of UMTS with Blue connect.

Such as the Vodafone UMTS card “Blue connect” is a dual mode PC Card allowing download rates up to 384 kbps if you are in Warsaw, where you can also use an extensive W-LAN hotspot network. Otherwise you fall back to GPRS/EDGE mode as UMTS is right now only provided in Polands capital.

But the lessons to learn from their entry is ERAs pricing model: They are offering a monthly fixed flat rate for just 100 zl (excl. VAT), which is about 25 EUR, including all data traffic.

Maybe Deutsche Telekom in Germany will also be more innovative in their pricing after implementing UMTS here, when realizing the probable success it will have in Warsaw.