Jerome's TOTs

Yesterday evening, through Scoble’s blog, I learned that Microsoft released their Photosynth technology to the public.

Photosynth is an impressive piece of technology now out of Microsoft Live Labs. It allows to stitch together a series of pictures from a scene to generate a pseudo-3D view of the scene that users can navigate while being able to see the original pictures.

It’s not perfect yet as the plug-in required only works on Windows. They say they are working on Mac support.

I gave it a go using pictures from trip to Las Vegas I made with my wife this winter. We took an helicopter trip to the Grand Canyon. The pictures I uploaded to Photosynth were almost all taken from the ground where we landed. You can see the results here http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=5b7540a5-f8b7-4a57-ae20-64db434c5eea

It took a little while to process and to upload with my old desktop at home. Once uploaded, it is apparent that you need to take pictures with overlapping sections to get the best results. There’s a little icon that allow you to see photos that Photosynth could not match to the set. Also, there’s one picture of the main set that’s strangely stitched.

Over all, I am impressed at the results! Next time I take picture of a scene, I will fire a lot of shots to make synths, that’s for sure!

Facebook has recently updated their application metrics measurements from Daily Active Users (DAU) to Monthly Active Users (MAU).

This change has been really enlightening in respect to user engagement. For Status Competition, the application I developed with the help of Kim Vallee, here are the latest numbers:

We are quite impressed with our results! Before, the DAU could fluctuate between 200 and 400 depending on the day of the week. Note that I have 164 friends that are users of the application. Because of this, I viewed the DAU counts with a grain of salt. I agree with Facebook’s move as the MAU gives a much clearer picture of user engagement.

At 2,895 MAU out of 7,005 users, we learn that 41% of our users use the application at least once a month. Keep in mind that this has been reached with near zero advertising. We launched the application in January.

In the last months, we gained an average of 1,000 net users per month. Facebook Insights’ statistics tell us that we had 2,499 MAU a month ago. Because we had about 6,000 users at that time, it translates to 42%. Since the MAU fluctuates on a daily basis, our user engagement rate seems to be pretty stable at about 40%.

I can only hope that with our future (and long overdue) update, things will get even better.