DadApp Blog

Julian was asked to do a guest post over at Techcrunch on the need for transparency in privacy settings and policies.

Read it here

Privacy Levels - where are we exposing ourselves? - Click for bigger picture

Great infographic on how storage has grown and serves as a good reminder of what memory hogs we’ve become. (via Geekologie)

Click for bigger version

One of the best books for any aspiring photographer is “The DAM Book – Digital Asset Management for Photographers” by Peter Krogh.  In this book, Peter highlights the Prime Directive and Other Goals for photographers as follows:

The Prime Directive:

• Don’t lose the images

Other Goals:

• Find images when you need them
• Save time
• Make the images look right
• Software independence
• Ensure forward compatibility

These are really rules which any photographer of any standard should try and follow.  The good news is that DAD can help you do all of these, except for “making the images look right” for which you will need specialist editing software.

Taking each in turn:

Don’t lose the images. DAD incorporates an easy to use Backup, Archive and Synchronisation process.  Using DAD, you can copy your photographs, wherever they are, however organised or disorganised they may be on your computer disks, to other safe locations.  This DAD process can be manual or automatic and is very easy to set up.

Find images when you need them. So, you’ve got images on one or more of your computers.  How do you find them?  The answer is ‘easily’, using the DAD Index, which allows you to find any image quickly.  You can search not only by filename, but by any title you’ve given an image, any tag or any other attribute of the photograph, e.g. date, camera type, location, etc.  And, if your image is on a backup/archive disk, then no problem.  Unlike most other back/archive products, DAD will keep an index of what you have backed up and to where.  You no longer have to remember and trawl thorough lots of CDs or remote disks – just query the DAD Index and you’ll have the answer instantly.

Save Time DAD has lots of time saving features for any level of photographer.  This includes the ability to organise your photographs rapidly into albums and to share your photographs quickly and easily.  (Plus, you can do this automatically, based on easy to set rules – saving you time over and over again).  With DAD, you can also backup and sync those photographs automatically, quickly find and display any photograph(s) – and more.

Software Independence One of the greatest strengths of DAD is how it frees your data and ensures this data is not locked within one particular software program.  Many people would like to annotate their photographs with tags, e.g. who is in the photo, where the photo was taken, what the event was etc.  They spend hours and hours in a in a particular software program doing this tagging.  They also like to organise their photographs into albums and use software programs to do this.  However, when they want to share their photographs, disaster  They can’t share the tags they spent so long entering as these can only be viewed in the program in which they were created.  Or, they may want to use a newer and better software program to organise their photographs but, disaster again.  All their prior organisation is lost and all that effort tagging is lost too.

Surely this must be unacceptable? – well we think it is.  That is why DAD provides the one index that can be used by any program so that you never need to retag or reorganise your photographs ever again.  AND, any tags you have created will be shared too when you share a photograph through DAD.

Get true software independence with DAD.

Ensure forward compatibility The Software Independence feature of DAD means your tags, other information (known as Metadata) and your organisation is held in our central index.  So, with DAD, you are not locked into one particular data format either.  Our index format, which is based on international standards as far as possible, will remain open forever, allowing you to tag and organise once and use forever.

It is the beginning of July and we are just about to launch DAD – so what is it and what is our vision?

As you have access to ever more technology, you probably create and consume increasing volumes of digital ‘stuff’ – photos, music, words, contact details, that sort of thing.  You use programs and web applications to enhance and share this stuff, but this causes even more disorganisation as your data is everywhere and enhancements made in one place cannot be used in another.  DAD creates a central index of all your digital stuff, bringing organisation from chaos, allowing you to view all your files.  You can then reuse enhancements and links you’ve made between your stuff in any program that is DAD aware.

All programs and web applications today create their own databases to hold your digital data and require a high degree of expertise, or tedious copy and paste type actions, to take this data from one program to another.  In our vision, all applications and web apps will either use the DAD index directly or will provide bridges to a your DAD index, so that you always have a central index of your data and any enhancements made to that data wherever the enhancements may have been created.

Once you have everything indexed and linked the uses to which it can be put are numerous.  Out of the box DAD gives you private and secure sharing capabilities – manually or automatically via its built in rules engine. You can for example have your music available on multiple computers, send photos to friends just by tagging them, synchronise photos taken on holiday in 2010 with your family to create the perfect holiday photo album or set up the perfect backup solution by sending your precious digital memories to multiple computers and devices. In fact the list of things you can get DAD to do is limited only by your imagination. We will be working with 3rd party developers, who have full access to the DAD API, to ensure there’s always something new and helpful waiting for you.

As an example: I have a photo on my computer.  I want to share that directly with some users via DAD, but also share on Facebook.  On Facebook, friends tag that photo with other friends who are in the photo and add comments.  To get all the data on that photo today I have to look at email and Facebook separately – all aspects of that photo are not linked.  With DAD and a 3rd party application linking Facebook to DAD, I can have all aspects of that photo available to me in my DAD Index to view, reuse, share as I wish.

The Semantic Web is a major initiative which will give many benefits to users across the web.  DAD is the Semantic Desktop and it is here now.

There have been some cheap shots at Mark Zuckerberg recently which detract from the main concern Facebook users are waking up to. One of Facebook’s original core aims was to encourage sharing and openness. It was able to do this by providing a safe and secure environment as standard. Users didn’t have to worry about privacy settings, who might see what and whether something someone once said, would come back to bite them.

Facebook continues to grow, continues to dominate many of our lives, but continues to want everyone to share everything with everyone. Facebook is synonymous with the ‘real’ world now – no longer providing a safe private space for uni mates to stay connected.

Check out Mark McKeon’s post on the evolution of privacy on Facebook to see how it’s changed in the last 5 years.

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook - Matt McKeon

That’s quite a difference and only incredibly concerning!

DAD is not another Facebook but seeing all the attention Facebook has been receiving lately about it’s privacy blunders I wanted to talk a little about how simple, secure and safe, sharing will be this summer with the launch of DAD.

DAD’s primary goal is to provide a really simple way of sharing stuff with each other. Not on the web, not in the cloud, not everywhere. Just directly between you and those you want to share something with. As simple as adding someone’s name to a file, as simple as tagging a bunch of files with a family name; sharing will happen in the background, privately and securely.

It’s coming this summer and is just one of the wonderful services DAD will bring you.

- previewing ‘DAD’ at SXSW, Austin, Texas, March 12–16, 2010 -

Surrey, UK, March 9, 2010: With the amount of digital data increasing tenfold every five years[1], keeping control of your digital life has become a troubling disorder. ‘DAD’ (www.dadapp.com) is a new application that will organize all elements of your digital life simply and effectively and will be previewed at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas this month.

Facebook alone currently contains 40 billion photos and people around the world are grappling with the distressing challenge of accessing, sharing and storing images, music, documents and contact details on- and off-line. The danger is that we have sub-sets of our data everywhere, but nowhere to find it all – creating a syndrome of data disorganization.

However, a cure to this disorder is on the horizon: the DAD application will translate most metadata formats, enabling images, music, contact details, content from social networking sites and document files to be stored in a single DAD index. This index can then be used to manage, share, connect and reuse your digital ‘stuff’ simply and in an open form for all applications rather than another proprietary format. DAD promises to be as revolutionary to digital organization as the Dewey system was to libraries.

Julian Ranger founder of DAD comments: “We believe DAD is the cure for today’s digital disorganization disorder and we’re really excited about attending SXSW 2010 to share how DAD will be able to tackle what is becoming a 21^st Century disease.”

Julian Ranger continues: “From busy parents through to silver surfers and students, we are all suffering from digital disorganization and the problem is only set to continue as the range of social networking and online content sources grows.”

DAD functions will include:

• Full media index and organizer
• Transferable index and easy secure sharing
• Smart search (using metadata)
• Organization, linking and sharing of all digital data
• Open API for third party developers to leverage universal DAD index.

DAD will be available from June this year for an initial free month trial, but then will cost from as little as $3.76 (£2.49) per month. A free ‘lite’ version will also be made available, offering core functionality.

Julian Ranger and Pascal Wheeler from DAD will be available throughout SXSW Interactive and are keen to hear from angel investors, entrepreneurs, as well as developers to discuss opportunities for them to utilize the DAD API.

Julian Ranger: @rangerj

Pascal Wheeler: @pascalw

Editors Notes:

Media contact Information:

Toni O’Sullivan, @toni_jane 01252 899 969

DAD (www.dadapp.com) is a new application currently in development and is supported by iBundle, an innovation hub based in the UK.

Julian Ranger – has been an angel investor since 2007 and an entrepreneur since he formed his first business – STASYS. Julian grew STASYS to a £17m+ business with 230 staff with subsidiaries in the US, Australia and Germany before selling it to Lockheed Martin in 2005. Today, Julian heads up an innovation hub called iBundle where he invites start-up entrepreneurs who are looking for backing and advice to contact him.

Pascal Wheeler – has been fortunate enough to have played with Internet based tools for just over a decade. Most recently known for giving the humble raffle a hearty injection of Internet goodness with Raffle.it, Pascal started his cyber journey by building a location based price comparison site for the independent IT sector. Pascal is iBundle’s Director of Creativity.

There’s no gender bias when it comes to the Internet; 74% of men use it, and so do 74% of women.

The older people are, the less likely they are to use the Internet. 93% of people ages 18-29 use it, but only 38% of people 65+ do. 65 is where the big drop off happens, though; 70% of people 50 – 64 are online.

As you might expect, the higher their income level, the more likely it is that someone has broadband access.

Education is correlated as well. 94% of college grads are online, while only 39% of people with less than a high school education are.

Internet use is up significantly in just the past five years. In 2005, 27% of people surveyed used the Internet “several times a day.” Now it’s 38%.

58% have a desktop computer. 46% have a laptop.

Ages 25 – 44 make up the majority of people who blog. Only 7% of people under 25 do — that’s an even lower percentage than people 55 – 64! Have the youngsters latched on to other new media?

54% of bloggers consider themselves experts on whatever it is they’re blogging about.

Norway is the country with the highest level of Internet penetration. The United States is in fifth place.

Japan has the fastest Internet connections on average. No surprise there.

The average mobile Internet connection clocks in at around 700 Kbps.

Full piece over at Mashable

Race Online 2012 is a body with the aim on giving everyone some level of access to the internet, something most of us take completely for granted. Head over to share your thoughts and ensure they approach this challenging task in the right way.