Obama in 3D: Photosynth to Crowdsource Synth of the 44th Presidential Inauguration

Next Tuesday, the eyes of the United States - and likely the world - will be on Washington, DC, as Barack Obama takes the oath of office to become the 44th President of the United States. Attendance is likely to dwarf any presidential inauguration in history - with estimates currently predicting at least one million people at the event. Regardless of the attendance, one thing is for sure: with nearly ubiquitous access to cameras and video equipment, this will be the most well-documented inauguration, ever. Now, the Microsoft Photosynth team has announced that they will be making the event even more memorable - by creating a three-dimensional "synth" of the inauguration from your photos.

Photosynth - a service powered by Seadragon - allows a series of two-dimensional pictures to be stitched and interpolated into a three-dimensional representation of a moment in time. The more angles and photos, the more complete the rendering. So, the girth of photos from the inauguration will be particularly well-suited, given that there will be millions of images from thousands of different vantage points.

The Photosynth project is being run in conjunction with CNN.com as part of their "The Moment" sub-site.

"We'll take your photos from every angle, combine them with CNN's professional shots, and produce what we hope will be an amazing experience that will be shown live on CNN. And you thought the Jessica Yellin hologram was cool! The synth will also be available for everyone to see on CNN.com."

To participate:

1. Take one photo of the moment when Obama takes the oath. If you have a digital camera with a zoom lens, take three photos (wide-angle, mid-zoom, full-zoom)

2. E-mail each photo as soon as possible to themoment@cnn.com (one photo per message, 10MB size limit). Don't forget to include your name in the message if you'd like to appear in the list of the contributors. Please only send in photos you took yourself.

3. Go to cnn.com/themoment to see all of the photos in our photosynth

The good news? Anyone with a digital camera can participate and take part in recording history. In addition to the Photosynth project, all of the photos will also be shared via iReport. Then, there's the bad news. If you want to see the finished work in all its glory, you have to have access to a Windows machine. Photosynth is only fully supported support Vista and XP currently. But they do offer an experimental Silverlight-based Photosynth player for other platforms. (I used the experimental viewer and it worked very well.)

If you're planning to be in attendance at the inauguration, bring your camera. Otherwise, stay tuned to CNN.com The Moment and Photosynth for the results of this experiment.

(Photo credit Joe Crimmings Photography. Used under Creative Commons.)

CLIP Federated Media Shifts Away From Display Ads; Restructuring Includes Some Job Cuts

Federated Media is meeting with its staff now to tell them about a decision to move the company away from display advertising and devote more resources to conversational marketing, paidContent has learned. The company is cutting seven jobs in the display area but publisher and chief revenue officer Chas Edwards (right) tells us FM has added some 25 jobs since July 1 and continues to hire. FM will have about 80 people on staff following the layoffs.

Edwards said when the company reached out to advertisers about their coming needs in the tough economy, small advertisers said they would be disappearing for 12-18 months while larger companies—Fortune 500 and the megabrands—- said: "Our competitors are going to be under a rock for the next 18 months—maybe 12; we're going to take 2009 to steal market share but we're going to do it for less. ... We're not going to do dumb display advertising on the internet, buying display banners through ad networks." The interest was more in conversation marketing and that's where FM is putting its resources, expanding the part of sales that focuses on major accounts and the back-office operations to support them.

Edwards shies away from descriptions of FM as an ad network. "As an ad network, FM is a failure. We're not organized to sell a lot of broad-based banner campaigns across zillions of sites. The approach we take is more of a publisher with a portfolio." FM, which represents more than 150 websites, partners with ad networks to sell remnant inventory.

Much more after the jump

—Revenues: Edwards spoke in broad terms about revenues: "'08 wraps up around $39-40 million in revenues, up 70-80 percent from 2007. We still had a pretty good year of growth, although we had a pretty crappy Q4 like everyone else." Even so, he's projecting 2009 will be up somewhere between 35-50 percent. When I asked why he was so optimistic in such a down time, he responded, "I think the online market overall is going to be flat. The reason we have this optimism is the conversation we're having with marketers. We're coming off of frankly, a pretty small base of revenue in the overall scheme of things." He thinks FM will take advantage of what he expects to be a migration from print during the recession.

Chairman and CEO John Battelle explained the decision in a post on the company blog that went live during the meeting.

Update: Over at TechCrunch, Mike Arrington says he's worried about his company's relationship with FM, which accounts for a third of his company's income, and, though he says the decision is up to CEO Heather Harde, wonders out loud if it's time for a new ad partner. Payments have dipped recently and he contends that staying with FM is more costly: "The biggest issue is that as a market leader among tech blogs, we end up subsidizing others. An example - an advertiser comes to us with, say, a $100,000 spend. They are referred through to Federated, who if they make the sale gets a 40% cut. That cut is fine. But what Federated then does is spread that $100k around to many different blogs. In the end we may only see a small fraction of it spent on TechCrunch." Battelle tells him FM will be focusinbg more on the kind of advertising that;s good for TC.

Justin Davis counters, saying he likes the way FM reps his four sites (Modojo.com, Destructoid.com, Gamersyde.com, and GoNintendo.com): "Mike… you're so dramatic, sometimes. FM makes it EXTREMELY easy for the sites they represent to follow up on leads themselves. They literally have a whole self-serve platform set up you can point ad buyers to, and if they place an ad buy, #1 it doesn't get split with a half-dozen other sites and #2 FM doesn't take it's 40% split - it takes 10% for serving the ads."

CLIP Browser Showdown At The Churchill Club; IE 8 Release Candidate Coming This Month

Representatives from Microsoft (Dean Hachamovitch), Opera (Christen Krogh), Mozilla (Mike Shaver) and Google (Sundar Pichal) met at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley tonight for a panel called “Browsers are Hot Again!”, moderated by Businessweek columnist Steve Wildstrom.

The event is timely. There has never been such robust competition in the browser space. Google recently brought Chrome out of beta, and Microsoft’s GM of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch told me earlier today that the Release Candidate of Internet Explorer 8 would be released in the next two weeks.

Notably absent from the panel was Apple, although their Safari browser was brought up repeatedly as an important mobile platform, and Safari’s underlying Webkit javascript engine was also praised as innovative.

Most of the panel discussion focused on the browser ecosystem, including add-ons, standards compliance and security. The panelists noted that web developers have a harder time today than a few years ago because they have to build for more than one browser. But as Firefox and others have gained market share, competition has sped feature advances, accelerating the development and evolution of javascript and other languages and standards. Krogh from Opera noted that the next big battleground is mobile.

An audience question asked each of the panelists to describe the essence of each browser. The responses were varied. Microsoft’s Hachamovitch said his team starts with looking at what the user wants and building from there (and pointed to IE 8’s impressive feature list). Krogh from Opera said they wanted to supply a standards compliant browser for literally any Internet connected device. Google’s Pichal said speed (of javascript) was their primary goal (Hachamovitch then dubbed him “Mr. Speed” in a later comment). Mozilla’s Shaver said Firefox was about “putting the web first,” and creating a standards-compliant browser in as many languages as possible to ensure that no one was left out of the Internet.

Hachmovitch also confirmed that Microsoft has no current plans to build Linux or Mac versions of Internet Explorer. Google’s Pichal confirmed that Chrome for Mac was coming “very soon.”