meta

Meron Gribetz and Ben Sand just rolled into Silicon Valley from New York, landing at Paul Graham's Y Combinator startup incubator with some angel money in their pockets and the bold conviction that they can deliver the next major technology transformation.

Their startup, Meta, is developing wearable computing eyewear, but unlike Google Glass enters 3D space and uses your hands to interact with the virtual world. The Meta system includes stereoscopic 3D glasses, supplied by Epson, and a 3D camera to track hand movements, similar to the portrayals of gestural control in movies like "Minority Report" and &… Read more

You have plenty of choices when it comes to tools for editing the EXIF metadata contained in your digital images and other files, everything from dead-simple freeware to pro-level applications running into three figures. ExifTool definitely belongs among the freeware, but whether it's a simple tool depends on how you feel about the Windows command line. If you have no idea what that is, ExifTool is not for you; much friendlier metadata tools aren't scarce. But if you can handle Perl or have no problem with the Command Prompt (or typing characters and spaces) then ExifTool offers a … Read more

ExifTool is a handy, free Perl-based program for editing the Exif information in digital image files as well as the meta information in other digital files, such as music and movies. It's available in several configurations; we tested the standalone Windows executable version, which doesn't require Perl and omits some of the features of the command-line version but offers essentially the same functionality, including, notably, a command-line capability.

ExifTool downloads as a ZIP file and unpacks as a Windows executable file that we chose to park on the desktop. To use ExifTool, you simply drag and drop a … Read more

Like to get instant player stats and trivia while watching TV sports matches? MetaMirror, a concept software platform out of Ireland, would overlay such data on a secondary device, keeping your television screen free of extra clutter while you watch the big game.

The product would display real-time contextual content over a "mirror" of the television broadcast that simultaneously plays on an iPad, iPhone, Netbook, or other gadget. That might make for some visual cacophony at touchdown time, but Dublin design firm Notion, which came up with the idea, insists that it's a seamless way to connect Web and television experiences, which are becoming increasingly entwined, and make TV more like the interactive devices to which we are all becoming accustomed.

"By bringing together live television, real-time contextual information, and an intuitive user interface, Meta Mirror is positioned to update television from unidirectional broadcast to two-way interaction," Notion says.

It envisions several models for doing this: … Read more

Metasearch engine Scour has new features that provide more personalization to users. It has added a Friends Feed, which keeps track of friends and tells users what others are commenting on. Along with that, the site finally allows users to add an image to their profile, redeem points through the user administration pane, and edit the number of results returned from each engine to match searching preferences.

"There's clearly a trend toward personalization on the Web and we wholeheartedly support it," Daniel Yomtobian, CEO of Scour, said in a statement. "The ability to connect with friends … Read more

Tuesday, I linked to a Dow Jones story on CNN's Money Web site about a virtual teardown iSuppli did on T-Mobile's fancy G1, the first commercial smartphone to run Google's Android. Some readers had issues with the story, and I'm going to address those here.

First, I quoted the price of the G1 at $399 instead of the $179 new customers typically get. This was due to a communications mixup between me and one of my T-Mobile marketing contacts. He was giving me the unsubsidized price, not the retail price, probably thinking I was inquiring to … Read more

EveryZing, a media indexing company, is launching its own media player that lets people search for spoken words within videos.

The player's secret power is that it also indexes YouTube videos, giving a publisher who embeds YouTube content more functionality than YouTube itself provides.

The new video player, called MetaPlayer, uses technology the company already has in the market in its ezSearch and ezSEO products.

EveryZing is a business-to-business technology provider; MetaPlayer is provided to its customers alongside the other back-end tools. On sites that support it (the first announced is the Dallas Cowboys' site), people will be able … Read more

Digital music is all well and good, but who wants to type in album and artist information for each track? With TagScanner, you don't have to. This efficient and powerful tag editor lets you edit metadata automatically as well as by hand, both for individual files and file batches.

The automatic tagging feature is most impressive. Although it can hit up online databases such as FreeDB, Discogs, and Amazon like many other auto-tagging apps, it can also generate tags from file and folder names--that's something many similar apps can't do. It works in the opposite direction, too, … Read more

Web site owners might be amazed to learn that one of the biggest sources for duplicate content isn't externally, but rather internally.

Certainly, popular sites and blogs that syndicate a lot of content have to deal with external duplication, but as I already touched on external duplicate content, we know that there are steps to minimize those challenges and to establish your site as the canonical source.

Internal, or on-site, content duplication tends to come in a few key ways, the first of which is within the key page elements. The second is from the content itself; similar to e-commerce sites using stock product copy, you may be using your own copy over and over again on your site. Third, it simply may come from too little differentiated copy.… Read more