Free Online Watermark Tool with Text & Box Transparency

You have spent hours and a lot of effort to shoot some magnificent photos or work on some wonderful design. If you don’t want your masterpiece spread across the internet or get posted on somebody’s websites or blogs, one of the effective ways to protect your hard work is to add a custom watermark to your digital images. Adding in texts such as your name, URL, brand, etc in watermark form won’t cost you anything.

It’s free and even if it can’t stop others from copying or using your images, at least the source of the images is prominently displayed and acknowledged. You can do this by using the Watermark Tool, a free web application that helps you to add a custom watermark to your digital images.
Watermark Tool is a free web based service. To add in watermark texts, just go to Watermark Tool, upload your file and add in the texts that you want to trademark your photos. This application features some basic text editing tools for you to customize the text size, font type, text color, text transparency, box colour, text position and other attributes.

Once you have finalized the watermark, just click on to the “Generate” button and your new watermarked image will be produced. You can thence download this new watermarked image. Watermark Tool is a pretty straightforward tool for those who want to add in watermark to their photos. The downside of this tool is you can only add watermark once at a time.

Yo can visit Watermark Tool Here

Web 2.0 is so over. Welcome to Web 3.0

Social-networking companies such as MySpace and Facebook have loyal fan bases, but they're not exactly minting money. MySpace's projected $600 million revenue in 2008 falls far short of parent News Corp.'s (NWS, Fortune 500) billion-dollar sales target for the site. Messaging service Twitter has no business model. Video-sharing site YouTube was the only big sale; Google paid $1.65 billion for it two years ago but still hasn't figured out how to make much money off it.

Social media's champions hoped 2008 would be a watershed year for Web 2.0. (That's the term tech publisher Tim O'Reilly coined four years ago to describe a new wave of Internet innovation that let users publish and share content.) Instead, the past 12 months have been a disappointment. Almost no new game-changing companies have emerged since Twitter burst on the scene in 2007, and while it's true existing sites have changed the way we interact on the web, they've failed to deliver new ways to cash in the way their Web 1.0 predecessors, such as Amazon and Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500), did.

One reason is that the economic climate for today's web startups is a lot chillier than it was during the first dot-com frenzy. The door for initial public offerings has all but closed: Just six U.S. venture-backed companies went public last year, and none were web outfits. And potential acquirers - from Internet companies like Yahoo to traditional media conglomerates like CBS (CBS, Fortune 500) - have big problems of their own.

Not that being bought is a panacea for social-networking firms. Few of them have seized on a viable business model. Most rely on display advertising - a.k.a. banners - to make money. But marketers have cooled to display ads on the web, and they're especially skeptical of such advertising on social-networking sites.

Fact is, when you're looking at photos from last night's holiday party on Facebook, you're probably ignoring that teeth-whitening ad. And with all the user-generated content, these sites have so many page views that Web 2.0 companies can't command the same rates as, say, portals. Yahoo's news site, for example, can charge more than 30 times as much as Facebook for a banner ad.

Most industry watchers bet on Facebook to develop the silver bullet for advertising on these sites. In fall 2008 CEO Mark Zuckerberg debuted Beacon, first billed as a "social ad" strategy that would monitor and distribute information about a user's e-commerce preferences to his friends. Zuckerberg caught flak from the privacy police, and Beacon was significantly downplayed.

The site recently launched Facebook Connect, which lets users access other sites with their Facebook log-in. Web publishers are excited about it, but for now, the company still relies heavily on "traditional" slow-growing forms of web advertising. Revenues for 2008 are expected to be about $275 million this year, according to several sources, and it is still not profitable.

Accel Partners' Jim Breyer, the largest outside investor in Facebook, remains optimistic. "Thus far the home-run outcomes have not yet appeared, but I firmly believe we will see them over the next couple of years," he says, explaining he thinks these companies are still in their infancy. In fact, Accel just announced two new funds, totaling a billion dollars, dedicated to investing in early-stage social-media companies.

Indeed, the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world could still grow up to be economically powerful. Consider that Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) once was just an online bookstore, and that Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) started out simply as another search engine.

But today's Web 2.0 companies may find themselves transformed or even eclipsed by yet another wave of web innovators. New companies are cropping up to expand the utility of the web, creating location-based services and financial payment systems that can be bolted onto existing sites. Often bootstrapped, they are frequently profitable and may get acquired quickly. Even in today's tough environment, these upstarts are the ones raising money and trying to score a life- or business-altering hit. Welcome to Web 3.0

Super Screenshot: Web based tool for creating an image of any site

Want to take a screen capture of a web site? Not just the part you can see on your screen, but the whole page, even the parts you have to scroll for 20 minutes to find? Super Screenshot is a web based tool that will let you capture any page and save the output as a JPG or PNG image file.

You get a few options with Super Screenshot, like the ability to capture a whole page or just the top of the screen. You can also select the size of the final picture, but you don't get to set pixel heights and widths. Instead you get some rather unhelpful options like X-Small, Small, Medium, Large, and Full. So you might need a little trial and error time to find the right size.

If you want more control over your screenshots, you can always use a desktop application like Snagit. But if you're using a friend or coworker's computer and need to make a quick screenshot, Super Screenshot could come in handy.

A Cuil reaction to new search engine

A new search engine launched yesterday. Cuil (that's "cool", phonetically) is today's buzz word on the web, primarily because the Cuil's founders - Tom Costello, Anna Patterson, Louis Monier and Russell Power - are respected search experts. Patterson, Monier and Power are former Google employees, and comparisons with the 300lb gorilla of internet search abound.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch compares sizes. At launch, Cuil boasted an index of 120 billion webpages. Cuil claims this makes it larger than Google, although Google begs to differ.

"Even if Cuil is bigger than Google, it doesn't mean Cuil is more relevant," points out Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land. "Nor does it mean adding more documents in a "I'm bigger than you" game would improve the state of search overall."

Indexing is only part of the problem, says Om Malik at Gigaom. "Analysing and displaying all the information is extremely resource-intensive." Cuil claims to rank pages by content rather than the popularity rank. But this isn't a black and white issue, says Sullivan.

Google relies on more than just popularity to rank pages, and preliminary results suggest Cuil actually does use popularity to rank some sites - else a search for Harry Potter wouldn't bring up the official movie site at the top of the list.

That leaves a rather nice 'magazine style' results layout as one of Cuil's USPs - something that's likely to be loved or hated depending on the user.

But Cuil's real selling point might prove to be the privacy issue. It claims not to log IP information - something that Google, Yahoo and Teoma (the engine behind Ask) all do.

"That may be reassuring to some searchers, but to date, even scare stories about what Google could do (not that it does) hasn't kept searchers away from it," says Sullivan.

Cuil is no more than 24 hours old - Google has been with us for a decade. Clearly, it's too early to say whether the king of search is about to be usurped.

Visit Cuil

Will Google, Facebook and Apple Own the Web?

Time looks at Google (GOOG), Facebook and Apple (AAPL) as likely winners of the Web wars. They do make think of the 3 Cs:

• Google = commerce
• Facebook = community
• Apple = content.

Interesting that none of the three create any of the underlying C, they just enable it. That being said, I don’t buy any of these “the future of this” or “how this will kill that” pieces, nor do I buy many of these “X company is the future of so-and-so”.

Google’s place in business is cemented: It’s catapulted itself to IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT) status and while it may or may or not change, it won’t go anywhere.

Apple today is kicking ass and won’t be disappearing, but just a decade ago it was going nowhere.

Facebook is a great story but has yet to prove itself. It can become Friendster, quickly, and last time I checked, MySpace remains much bigger…

But the bigger reason why I take these articles with a grain of salt is two-fold:

• Didn’t an analyst from Sanford Bernstein argue just last week that - on the strength of their respective 20-30% revenue growth - Amazon and Google would own the future of the Web?
• Isn’t the future of the Web a video-based one? Sure, Google has video mojo thanks to its YouTube acquisition. But Facebook? Not really. Apple can’t really claim leadership either.

This makes me wonder: If video is the future of the Web, who will win between the technology players versus the content players? Hmm… let me think about that, a post is coming soon.