A new version of Phanfare Photon, our industrial-strength photo and video sharing solution for the iPhone, is out today. New features in include:

• Delete an album by swiping across it
• Hidden images are shown with an hidden-indicator in thumbs view
• Upload progress of each image is shown underneath the thumb using the same little blue progress part that installing apps uses.
• You can see all your albums by fetching 25 more at a time. Once, fetched, they are there on the phone.
• Phanfare Photon new prefetches new albums so you don’t need to browse to each one to have it be there when offline.

This version is also re-built from the ground up to provide more scalability and robustness. That is actually the largest difference to this version, but it will enable rapid development of new features going forward.

We have our own roadmap for Phanfare Photon, but I would love to hear from the community what you would like to see it do. I am also interested in knowing how useful you would find us implementing Facebook Connect. With facebook connect you would be able to login to Phanfare using your facebook credentials and potentially your facebook friends could see your content on Phanfare without having to be your friend on Phanfare.

I have been in search of a compact camera that offers some of the creative control and low light performance of my digital SLR. DP Review recently reviewed a bunch of cameras in this category and gave high marks to the Panasonic LX3. I got one yesterday and took it for a spin in a typical situation where usually only an SLR will do the trick: an indoor holiday party in a house.

What first strikes you about the camera is that it looks like an old Leica rangefinder. it has more heft and a more traditional design then a Canon digital elph. it also has a hot shoe, which seems a waste of space. If I am going to put an external flash on the camera then I will just carry the SLR.

Indoors, shooting with available light you need a low noise sensor and a fast lens. The LX3 has one of those; the f2.0 lens is fast enough that you can often shoot at ISO 400 and below, where the noise is manageable. But you pretty much need to stay at wide angle (24mm equivalent) to avoid having to use ISO800 indoors. The lens slows down to f2.8 when zoomed. At f2.8, typical home lighting requires ISO 800 or higher, something my digital SLR handles just fine but the LX3, not so much. The LX3 is supposedly less noisy than most of its competitors at ISO800 but compared to a digital SLR like the Canon 5D or 40D, there is a ton of noise.

Where does that leave me? I like the camera. It fits very nicely between the Canon 880IS that I carry when skiing and the digital SLR that I take out when image quality is my number one concern. I see myself using it when hiking, when going to indoor parties and other casual events. I do wish the camera had a lower noise sensor, which means that I wish it had a physically larger sensor with a lower pixel density. But for some reason, manufacturers don’t want to build a compact point and shoot around the sensor found in the Canon 40D. In the interim, this camera is probably the closest thing to my dream camera.

The Canon 880IS is still my choice when i want to carry a camera that will disappear entirely when not using it. The LX3 certainly won’t fit in your pocket. They know that. It has a full strap like an SLR. The Canon 880IS has just a wrist strap.

Oh yeah, the camera takes video too. performance in 4×3 aspect ratio mode, where it shoots 30 FPS, is excellent. Performance at 720p, 16×9 ratio, 24 FPS (the other option) is not quite as good. there seems to be some stuttering and motion does not seem quite as smooth. There are more artifacts in the video at 720p too to my eye. Both modes produce motion JPEGS in a quicktime container, a pretty dense format with lots of wasted space, but Phanfare’s video conversion takes care of that for me.

You can’t zoom while shooting video, pretty typical for the genre. But I don’t find that a big problem.

My biggest complaint about the camera so far is that i can’t change the ISO without going into the menus, but I read that I might be able to re-assign a button to do that.

I am happy to announce that we now show video fullscreen when you play Phanfare slideshows. Fullscreen video is a popular feature request. We debated for a while whether to offer this feature because the video must be stretched and hence will be pixelated. But the consensus is that full screen video is more immersive and when you watch slideshows, you are often further from the screen and don’t mind some pixelation.

You can still watch video unstretched (non-fullscreen) by watching it within the album context versus the slideshow.

To review how video works at Phanfare, we keep multiple renditions of each video uploaded. We keep your original video (or a 4 megabit per second MPEG4 version) that you can download through the “download high quality” link on a page. We also keep three h.264 versions, the highest bit rate being 1.3 megabit/second. The lowest bit rate we encode in is 512 kilobits/second. And, we keep two Flash 7 compatible version for viewers who don’t yet have a version of Flash that supports h.264.

When a viewer first watches a Phanfare video, we measure their CPU speed and the bandwidth between them and us, and based on our measurements, we select a video that is appropriate for the situation. The goal is to give the viewer the highest possible bitrate that their computer can play without stuttering.

Hence, the degree of pixelation will depend on how high a bitrate video you are viewing. You can override our choice of video bitrate if you believe that a different version will work better for you. You do this in the right bottom corner of the video in album context. The slideshow respects this setting.

Our videos are not HD, but most users can’t support high enough download rates to show true HD video. Most videos shot with point and shoot still cameras are 640×480 (not HD) and we do support showing that format at original resolution and high quality.

So gather around the the biggest monitor you have this holiday season and enjoy our full screen slideshows with music and video.

As part of this release we also improved the downloadable version of the slideshow with full-screen slideshows. You can download a Phanfare slideshow and show it offline in all its glory, great for situations where you are not sure you will have a network connection when showing the slideshow. The downloadable slideshow for the Mac is now a universal binary, no longer running under Rosetta, and hence is much snappier on Intel-based Macs.

This is the first year we are selling holiday cards and photo books and we are still feeling our way a bit. Some of our old-time customers told us that it was very typical to offer quantity discounts on cards. We had not considered doing so because as rational engineers we know that our costs are actually fairly linear with respect to card quantity.

Nevertheless, we looked around the competitive landscape and now realize that these discounts are completely standard. So, we got with the program and now offer significant discounts on cards depending on the quantity ordered.

We are also running a promotion until this Sunday, December 7th for free ground shipping on card orders over $50. US shipments only. We truly hope that some of you will give our new cards a try. We designed most of the cards for 2008 so you will see a lot of fresh stuff in our collection.

We did a small release of the Phanfare Photon app for the iPhone and iPod touch that shows help screens and and allows you to add albums from the main play screen. There are also a few bug fixes.

The help screens are designed to guide new users through the process of creating albums, adding friends and viewing content.

As faithful readers of this blog know, we have been focused on delivering a next generation photography and video experience on the iPhone. But of course, most people don’t have iPhones (yet). They do have a variety of cell phones ranging from competent smartphones like the Blackberry, feature phones like the LG Dare and basic cell phones like the Motorola Razr.

For all those folks, we now offer a rudimentary mobile viewing experience for your photos (no video). You won’t mistake it for what we offer on the iPhone. On the iPhone, you can download Phanfare Photon to view and manage your collection or view in the Safari browser.

If you are an avid Phanfare Phan, please try our new mobile viewing experience. You should just be able to navigate to www.phanfare.com but if have trouble with that, navigate to m.phanfare.com.

We just introduced a photo book product that we are pretty proud of both in terms of the quality of the book itself and the software that is used to configure it. We are selling 8×8 and 12×12 inch books on 100 weight glossy paper, with wrapped photo covers. The binding is side stitched (sewn), not glued as many of the more mainstream print/book players provide.

The Phanfare book builder (on the web) enables you to create a book in under a few minutes or dig deep down and configure just about every aspect.

To celebrate the introduction of our new book product, we are offering 25% off until this sunday. No special code needed, just complete your book before sunday.

David Pogue of the NY times tackled a subject near and dear to my heart recently: Why do we shoot photos and videos. I come out approximately where he did. That you do it for yourself, and the hope that maybe somebody might be interested in seeing the media in the future.

And it is because that inevitably the media is most valuable to the shooter that it makes sense that if you want to preserve it, you will have to pay. Personal photos and videos have a small audience, and hence advertising can not monetize their storage. To make money on advertising, people need to look at the media. If the media is only interesting to the author and a small group of friends and family, it has little advertising value.

This is something that Shutterfly, Snapfish and Kodak Easyshare Gallery know all too well. They store your media for free, depending on the purchase of prints and gifts to amortize the cost of storage of that media for perpetuity. But since most purchases of prints and gifts come right after the shooting, in the long term, they are left with this huge liability of photos and videos with no clear revenue stream associated with them.

Snapfish and Kodak both impose the rule that you must make at least one purchase per year for them to continue to store your stuff. I know the economics of this industry well enough to tell you that one purchase won’t pay for the average users’s lifetime of photos and videos.

I predict that longterm, the big 3 “print to share” sites will all impose fees on users or delete all their stuff; that is if they don’t go out of business all together. Long term, it is likely that prints and gifts will be a declining business with the electronic display and presentation of media being the area of greater interest. Hence, their primary business will be cannibalized by technology; fairly ironic given that those companies were founded to capitalize on the explosion of digital photography, which replaced analog photography.

A module on an network switch connecting our servers to the internet failed at 950pm EST. After several attempts to get the switch to operate normally, the switch module was replaced. Phanfare was available at 10:59pm,

Upon analysis, we could have avoided downtown by further replicating some of our network and firewall infrastructure to provide for multiple network paths through redundancy. We are evaluating the cost effectiveness of adding the required hardware to avoid this type of outage in the future.

To give some perspective, being down one hour per month provides us with 99.86% uptime, not the 99.999 that Ma Bell used to provide, but pretty good. It is believed that Amazon, for example, strives for 99.99% uptime for their systems.

Sorry for the disruption in service!

We had an outage tonight for about an hour. We don’t yet know exactly what went on, but it looks like a network outage at the datacenter level at our Somerset, NJ datacenter.

Technically, Phanfare was not down; the servers were just hard to reach - as in, impossible. On the bright side, they were fast and responsive during that time period, if you had a laptop and a parka (its pretty cold in the datacenter, which is where your laptop would need to be plugged in to reach the servers).

We should know more soon and will figure out how to avoid this in the future.

Next topic: some of you *may* have noticed two strange phanfare phacts in the last two days:

• Video conversion is kinda slow. We realized at the beginning of this week that videos converted last week were converted in a way that prevented them from playing on the iPhone. So, we are reconverting all the videos from the archival renditions that we maintain, forever and ever, amen. That is slowing the queue a bit. Should be over in a few days
• You may be seeing some really old albums on your dashbaord in the section on the left that usually shows recently modified albums (using a recently-modified date that is otherwise invisible to you). Since this is glasnost November, we are also fixing a bunch of small problems with image renditions from old bugs. Problems like, some images had height and with of zero in our database. Again, because we have the original images, we get a second bite at the apple and fix stuff like this.

You can see, i am a little punchy tonight.