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Not just crowd-sourcing — it’s herd-sourcing!

Using satellite images on Google Earth, German scientists were able to see that all over the planet, cows stand with their bodies pointing to magnetic north.

As one of the researchers said, “This is an incredibly neat use of Google Earth. This is a study we would not have dreamed about doing five years ago.”

Studying photographs of 8,510 cattle in 308 herds from around the world, zoologists Sabine Begall and Hynek Burda of the University of Duisburg-Essen and their colleagues found that two out of every three animals in the pictures were oriented in a direction roughly pointing to magnetic north.
The resolution of the images was not sufficient to tell which ends of the cows were pointing north, however.

You have probably seen how cows will tend to face together in the same direction in a field, usually to face head on into a wind (reduces heat loss) or sideways to the sun (maximize heat gain), but because the photos on Google Earth are so widespread and taken in generally good weather, it appears that cows have a “default setting” of north-south orientation when local conditions don’t override it.

My grandparents in England had cows on their farm so I’ve always had a lot of affection for them, and was delighted to read this story from the Los Angeles Times indicating a “hidden cow power.” Turns out cows may have internal compasses much like birds and bees do for orienting themselves to magnetic north.

PutPlace is launching at the end of the month. Until then, it’s in private beta.

Putplace is an online storage provider. The service links together all your files with digital signatures and then puts it on a huge file map. These signatures track where you’ve shared those files online so you can view the past history of any given file.

The service is launching in beta next week with plans to open up to everyone in late summer. Rafe will no doubt be doing the hands on and sending me and everyone he knows a million alerts of said food smearing.

CrowdSpring, a start-up we listed as one to watch, is a marketplace for creative ideas. The site lets you put out a project and get it crowd-sourced. The winner gets cash and potentially a job depending on what idea hunters are looking for. The service keeps track of completed projects and ideas in progress, which you can see in this logo contest, which had nearly 200 submissions from independent designers who were called upon to help rebrand a site.

The site is launching this summer with plans for an application programming interface that developers and content creators can plug into in 2009. There’s also an upcoming
Wii-optimized version of the site that will let you channel surf from your couch–that is, in case there’s nothing good on TV.

Lil’Grams works via e-mail, SMS, and Twitter. You just send an item to a special address and it will organize it and archive it for you. Webware’s Rafe Needleman attempted doing something similar with Gmail starting last month, but if you don’t feel like filling up your in-box, this is a more organized solution.

Coming up next is the last session of the day with a handful of start-ups that specialize in useful eye candy. Stay tuned, and catch up on all our coverage here.

Ffwd (pronounced “fast forward”) is the creation of former iLike and Garageband.com CEO Patrick Koppula. I got a demonstration of it earlier Tuesday and it’s a really fun idea, blending a little bit of the fun of channel surfing Web videos in a similar fashion to what’s been seen on StumbleUpon. Instead of random Web videos though, Ffwd is all about channels and exploring other sets of videos as they’ve been sorted into those channels.

The site got its name for the ridiculously oversized fast-forward button that skips to the next clip in whatever channel you’re on. Users also have the option to jump to three other channels where the same video they’re currently watching is housed.

Lil’Grams is a real-time publishing tool for parents for text and media of their children. Like Tumblr, it separates what type of post you’re about to do by what type of media it is, and adds on an extra layer of protection by letting you pick the privacy options before it even goes live. Likewise your friends and family members can choose what type and how much of any updates they want to receive, keeping them from getting spammed by your 500th picture of your child smearing food on his or her face.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–The second to the last group rounding up Tuesday’s presentations at the Under the Radar conference comes from all walks of Web services. There’s a tool to post your baby photos, one to have artists and creative types scramble to create something for you, an upcoming video channel surfing app, and one that organizes all your files online and off.

The service will also estimate how much online storage you should use based on what you’ve got laying around on hard drives and what services you’re using. When it comes time to get some online storage, you can buy it from PutPlace based on how much you need.

Google Moderator, earlier named “Dory” after the inquisitive fish from Finding Nemo, started out as an internal tool. It was originally intended for the audiences at Google’s “Tech Talks” series, then was extended to company all-hands meetings and other lectures at the company’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

When I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, many of the panelists and speakers invited the audience to ask them questions by submitting Twitter messages. A Google engineer named Taliver Heath has gone one step further by creating Google Moderator, an application that lets the audiences at lectures and discussions submit questions and vote on the ones they’d like to hear answered.

“There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn’t clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked,” Heath wrote in a blog post. “And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate.”

After a few requests, Google has now released Moderator to the general public as part of its Google App Engine platform, and it’s now available for free use. I’ll start by asking a question about Moderator: What if audiences are too busy reading and voting on question submissions to actually listen?

A range of sources are suggesting that Google Android and Symbian are likely to merge before the end of the year, but they all seem to be trading off the same research note by J. Gold Associates, which made this claim, as reported by InformationWeek:

Nokia and other users of Symbian, which has the largest share of smartphones in the market, do not want to compete in the OS market, the firm said. With Google, the search engine entered the OS market to push the industry toward openness and a level playing field in offering applications and services on the devices.

It definitely makes sense, and would make Symbian the absolute de facto standard for mobile open source (and, really, for mobile, period). It’s already the market leader. Having Google’s brand behind Symbian could very well mean “game over” for mobile Linux in the mobile phone market.

“We expect that within the next three-six months, Symbian and Android will combine to provide a single open source OS,” J. Gold said. “Many of the same sponsors are involved in both initiatives.”

Some won’t like this because they want Linux to win. I’m sympathetic to that view. But this isn’t about Linux. It’s about open source. Symbian is open source, and is an exceptional mobile operating system. Why reinvent the mobile open-source wheel?

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I really liked this Ina Fried interview with Microsoft’s new CIO, Tony Scott. It gives good insight into how Microsoft “eats its own dogfood,” and how it can improve in understanding customer requirements.

Now Microsoft’s customer base just needs the company to also experiment with seriously mixed environments: open source, proprietary, and different blends of proprietary software. Scott acknowledges in the interview that Microsoft “predominately” uses its own software internally. This is appropriate, but it would be useful for Microsoft to see how the other half lives, as well.

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On this last item, Scott’s commentary was intriguing:

This is a great move on Microsoft’s part, and a testament to the innovative role a CIO can have, particularly at a software vendor.

By the way, I’m very interested in having a fishbowl debate at OSBC in 2009, involving the CIOs of Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft. I’ve been trying to reach Ben Fried at Google, with no luck. Can anyone help gather these people? It would be fascinating to have them talk about the relative strengths and weaknesses of their respective approaches in front of a live CIO audience.

One of the changes I am trying to bring is…we are going to take some segments of the company and use them to experience what customers experience and go through the normal upgrade process. I think by doing that we can be more relevant to the ultimate consumers of Microsoft’s products.

Microsoft used a very different process than what customers would use. We never historically went from production bits to production bits in terms of the upgrade process. We went through a series of betas.

What I am trying to do is improve our world in all three areas. On the dogfood side, I think this is where maybe I bring some value as an outsider. I’ve been going to Microsoft for years…What I was always disappointed in was the relative degree to which Microsoft could talk to us as external CIOs about what the upgrade experience was like….

Whether Semel will be successful in acquiring IMG and creating a digital giant has yet to be seen, but his track record in turning around Yahoo isn’t in his favor.
The Internet search pioneer has been struggling to win back market share against younger competitor Google and currently is weighing its options on whether to hook up with Google or Microsoft in a business transaction or go it alone.

Semel, who apparently is looking to buy IMG from Ted Forstmann, is reportedly meeting with private equity firms and others to carry off the deal. Forstmann, however, apparently wants a hefty $3 billion price tag to carry off the deal.

Former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel is reportedly on the prowl for sports, entertainment, and media company IMG.

Semel is apparently banking on his Internet experience at Yahoo to give IMG’s Internet operations a boost, as well as beef up its media and content offerings, according to a report in the New York Post.

oCERT, short for the open-source computer emergency response team, will aim to remediate security vulnerabilities and exploits in a wide range of open-source programs by coordinating communication among publishers. According to Google’s security blog, the group “will strive to contact software authors with all security reports and aid in debugging and patching, especially in cases where the author, or the reporter, doesn’t have a background in security.”

Google is lending its security expertise to the open-source community to help plug security holes with its oCERT team. While much remains to be seen as to how successfully or actively oCERT will operate, it’s a welcome addition to the open-source world by Google.

I assume that oCERT will focus on community, as opposed to company-maintained projects, which perhaps limits its utility. But then, it would be unrealistic to expect Google to take on the full burden of open-source security. By lending some expertise to projects that may lack security prowess, Google is doing the open-source world a favor.

Now if we could just get Google to contribute back all of its modifications to these projects…

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Facebook users can now import YouTube, StumbleUpon, Pandora, Hulu, Last.fm, and Google Reader into the social network’s Mini-Feed.

Facebook had already included Flickr, Picasa, Digg, Yelp, and Del.icio.us. in Mini-Feed. Facebook executives have said that it intends to focus on adding data from third-party sites.

By doing this, Facebook users will be opening up their actions at these sites to their friends. The service, which was announced on Facebook’s blog on Friday, is similar to one offered by FriendFeed.

One snag I ran into is that it’s nearly impossible to add other panoramics you’ve done into a single slide show viewer without first saving them as their own photographs, then plugging them back in. It’s kind of irritating, but easily fixable. Otherwise get used to making panoramics one at a time. The panoramic tool also requires Internet Explorer, as ActiveX fuels the photo-stitching tool.

MagToo is a service for creating really simple slide shows and interactive panoramic photos you can share on your blog or social-networking profile or by e-mail. To help put what you share into context, MagToo also throws in geotagging, letting you stamp any of the content you’ve added with a specific place where it was taken. Other users can then browse through the items on a large world map like they would photos and videos on Flickr.

Like software that comes with some digital cameras, MagToo will take up to five photos across and several down and stitch them together into a single image. The final result goes into a small viewer that will automatically scroll back and forth, or let you casually pan around with your mouse. It’s quite engaging, especially with large photos that have a lot of detail.

(Via SociableBlog and MoMB)

The service isn’t nearly as jaw-droppingly beautiful as ViewAt.org, a geotagged panoramic photo viewer I looked at in September of last year, but it’s far easier to compile casual shots into some really beautiful panoramic pictures. You could also just shell out for a DSLR with an $800 panoramic lens, but MagToo will let you get by with that point and shoot you can fit in your pocket.

Of all the tools my favorite is the panorama maker. While I couldn’t get any of the three tests I did to look as good as the example shot, the site offers up a small guide to help get your panoramic-photo-taking skills up to snuff.

“Think of this as user-generated video for businesses,” Glotzbach said.

Google is introducing video into Google Apps with the hope that companies will be attracted to a service that helps with training and internal communication but also removes the hassles of hosting video.

With the help of Google Video for Business, a company’s employees can upload and share clips with the same ease as posting a clip to YouTube, according to Matt Glotzbach, Google’s product manager director.

According to Google executives who spoke to CNET News last week, the search giant has tailored some of the technology developed by YouTube specifically for corporate clients. The offering is part of Google’s continuing efforts to replace traditional office software with so-called cloud-computing services.

A demo video provided to reporters illustrated the ways that Google employees use the service, which goes live to the public on Tuesday.

Glotzbach said Google has an opportunity to cash in on corporate video, a segment that many predicted would one day be huge but has been too complicated and costly for wide adoption. For Gmail, the company offers 25GB per mailbox. For Google Video, the company offers 3GB per user.

The service will be wrapped inside the Google Apps Premier Edition which costs $50 a year per user. For that price, each user receives all the Google Apps, such as Gmail, Docs, and Calendar.

Some of the service’s other features enable administrators to track usage, and employees can leave comments, insert tags, and embed a video into any Web page. Companies control who sees the video because only authorized users are able to watch.

One Google executive said during the demo that instead of distributing an e-mail with a wrap-up of quarterly results to his team, he posted a clip of himself discussing the quarter. It was more personable than just sending an e-mail “especially for Google employees that work in remote offices” the video’s narrator said.

Google is hoping that companies will flock to a service that doesn’t require them to host servers or worry about huge amounts of data. This is a bottom’s up approach, according to Glotzbach. It used to be that companies were willing only to pay for high-level executives to make videos for internal communication, but Google Video for Business enables a company to allow employees at any level to distribute video content.

The coolest feature by far is the Scene Browser, which presents a series of thumbnails that a user can click on to locate a specific segment within a video. It’s slick and one has to wonder why it isn’t offered on YouTube. Glotzbach said he didn’t know for certain but speculated that it might be because YouTube’s clips are generally shorter in length.