Today, Jalbum.net launches a new site for sharing of photo albums. The new site will enable the extensive Jalbum community to share their created albums, connect with others and explore thousands of album appearances.

Albums can have any look
The endless customization possibilities of Jalbum’s web album software has attracted millions of users who enjoy the control of the output of their online photo presentations. Since Jalbum albums can have any look, the new site will be a place to browse both great photos and the multitude of presentations that users produce with the software.

Photo albums can be placed on any site
With Jalbum, the photo albums can be entire web sites by themselves. Once an album is created, users may publish them to Jalbum’s free hosting alternative or any other site. The new community site will display albums that are hosted anywhere. Jalbum users will always have control of their content which includes the ability to move albums from one site to another. Jalbum will never copyright user images.

The Jalbum community is passionate about the presentation of photos. With the release of our new site, we are providing a better way of sharing albums created with our software. As our users often express an interest via images, this site will make it easier for them to connect with likeminded said David Ekholm, Jalbum’s founder.

PRESS RELEASE
Stockholm, November 7th, 2007

JAlbum introduces Blurb photo books
Today, photo sharing site JAlbum.net introduces a new strategic
partnership with Blurb, a creative publishing service and innovator
in social print media. The partnership with Blurb allows JAlbum users
to create, publish, share, market, and sell bookstore-quality photo
books.

The endless customization possibilities of JAlbum’s web album
software has attracted an extensive community of users who enjoy the
control of the output of their online photo presentations. Partnering
with Blurb enables JAlbum’s growing user base in the USA and Canada
to make their own custom photo books.

Blurb’s software lets anyone create bookstore-quality books by
dragging and dropping images and adding text into hundreds of
professionally-designed page layouts. Users start by downloading
Blurb’s free BookSmart software straight from JAlbums partner page.
(More info: www.jalbum.net/printing). Once made, users can keep their books private, announce them to friends and family, or include them
in Blurb’s public bookstore for others to see and purchase.

“The JAlbum community is passionate about the presentation of their
photos. Blurb’s devotion to quality and creative expression in books
is therefore a great fit for us. Enabling our users to make real
books opens up even more creativity in sharing images,” said David
Ekholm, Jalbum’s founder.

About JAlbum:
Stockholm based JAlbum AB was founded in the fall of 2006. The first
version of JAlbum was released as a hobby project by founder David
Ekholm in 2002. The JAlbum software is started every 4,5 seconds
somewhere around the world and has been granted numerous awards from respectable companies like Softpedia, About.com, Download.com and Tucows.

About Blurb:
Blurb is a company and a community that believes passionately in the
power of books: making, reading, sharing, and selling them. Blurb’s
creative publishing service is simple and smart enough to make anyone
an author – every blogger, artist, marketer, photographer, traveler,
entrepreneur, poet, everyone. Additionally, Blurb’s bookstore and
online marketing tools let Blurb authors sell and promote their
books, and keep 100% of the author’s markup. Blurb’s community
features – designed to encourage collaboration and communication –
are defining social print media. Founded by Eileen Gittins in 2004
and funded by Canaan Partners and Anthem Venture Partners, Blurb is
bringing book publishing to the masses. Blurb BookSmart™ software is
free for Mac or PC; users pay only when they publish their books.

We had an interesting discussion earlier on countries that have the fastest bandwidth speeds. The data from the OECD however, wasn’t quite up to date. A report from Yahoo! News came up recently stating that a 75-year-old woman is now cruising the Internet with a 40 Gbps fibre-optic connection in Karlstad, Sweden and is believed to be the fastest residential uplink in the world, according to Karlstad city officials. It turned out that she was the mother of Peter Lothberg, networking expert who said he wanted to demonstrate the new technology while providing a computer link for his mother. The report also gave a hint of how fast the connection is:

In less than 2 seconds, Lothberg can download a full-length movie on her home computer — many thousand times faster than most residential connections, said Hafsteinn Jonsson, head of the Karlstad city network unit.

I have an average of about 50 Gigabytes of uploaded and downloaded data per month with my 384Kbps ADSL connection. This is a small figure compared to those with fibre optic lines, assuming that no quota is set by the ISP. If I had a 40 Gbps connection, I’d be an ISP in our village. Too bad Pete Lothberg’s mother only uses her Internet connection to read Web-based newspapers.

According to a BBC article on global broadband prices, countries that had switched to fibre networks had the best speeds at the lowest prices.

Japan has the cheapest price for broadband per Mbps at $0.22. The most expensive is Turkey at $81.13. In the US, the cheapest megabit per second broadband connection is $3.18 while in the UK it is $3.62.

Data is based on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report. The OECD represents 30 of the leading democratic economics, from Australia to the US, France to Japan.

Cheapest Entry Level Broadband Per Month:

1. Sweden $10.79
2. Denmark $11.11
3. Switzerland $12.53
4. US $15.93
5. France $16.36
6. Netherlands $16.85
7. New Zealand $16.86
8. Italy $17.63
9. Ireland $18.18
10. Finland $19.49

*Source: OECD. Figures for October 2006

Read more about Global Broadband Prices Revealed.

I’d compare Yoomba to Skype, but without the registration part. I also also like to call it the Trillian, or the meebo of Internet voice calling.

Wouldn’t it be great if you can chat with your friends even if the network that their account belongs to is different from yours? Wouldn’t it be convenient to have a centralized communication platform where you can talk (or chat) with your friends from various e-mail networks such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL and Hotmail? For example, if you have a Yahoo! account and your friend only has a Google Account, how will you be able to communicate in real time? Chatting through e-mail will most likely be inconvenient. Thank goodness there’s Yoomba! Yoomba acts as a mediator between several e-mail networks so you can use your e-mail account to chat or make calls with your contacts. You simply have to type in an e-mal address in the Yoomba contacts field and you’re one step away to chatting or talking with that person. It’s that easy. No registration needed! I suggest you try it out.

Read more…

I read an interesting report today from SecurityFocus about an online auction site for security bugs. WabiSabiLabi or simply, WSLabi was just launched. According to SecurityFocus, its online portal will allow researchers to sell vulnerabilities they have discovered to software companies and other interested parties through an open market.

From the WSLabi Web site:

WabiSabiLabi is aiming to a single moving target: to bring the world closer to zero risk.

If the world must become a safer place, the first part of the recipe is simple: to provide a better rewarding for the security researchers, organising an efficient and transparent marketplace, here to maximise the results of their efforts.

This is good news for security researchers. Price offerings are attractive too, ranging from $1,000 to $15,000 if based from the offers of security companies like TippingPoint and iDefense.

Will this help lessen the risks online? We’ll have to wait and see.

Have you been reading technology news lately aside from the iPhone hype?

Danger USB! Worm targets removable memory sticks to infiltrate business
The W32/SillyFD-AA worm hunts for removable drives such as floppy disks and USB memory sticks, and then creates a hidden file called autorun.inf to ensure a copy of the worm is run the next time it is connected to a Windows PC.

USB flash drive worm spreads information about AIDS
The W32/LiarVB-A worm hunts for removable drives such as floppy disks and USB memory sticks (as well as spreading via network shares), and then creates a hidden file called autorun.inf to ensure a copy of the worm is run the next time it is connected to a Windows PC.

Harry Potter worm claims teenage wizard is dead
The W32/Hairy-A worm can automatically infect a PC when users plug-in USB drives, which carry a file posing as a copy of the eagerly anticipated novel, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”.

Get a hold of yourself and shut up about the iPhone first. This one’s more important.

Read more…