Creative Commons announced today that Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, Ann Wojcicki of 23andme, have donated half a million dollars to the non-profit. Creative Commons focuses on expanding and improving copyright and licensing in the digital era. The money will go to help Creative Commons as a whole, but will have a special focus on Science Commons, an initiative that focuses on lifting legal and technical barriers on research. The Creative Commons blog states that
Today’s challenging economic climate has made it difficult for nonprofit organizations like Creative Commons to raise funds, making Wojcicki and Brin’s wonderful gift all the more appreciated. CC is busier than ever – we’re working with artists, scientists, educators, students, programmers, entrepreneurs, companies, universities, governments, and cultural institutions around the world to increase sharing and improve collaboration in ways that benefit all parts of society. As a nonprofit, we simply couldn’t do this work without the generous support of people like Wojcicki and Brin, as well as the other private donors, foundations, and corporations that enable Creative Commons to operate.
This private donation is in addition to the support Creative Commons receives from Google.
As a blogger, I use Flickr a lot to find relevant images that correctly portray what I’m trying to express in my words. That means I’m often mired in Flickr search. Yesterday, the Flickr blog announced a redesign of their search page.
The page now allows you to search based on keyword through the individual images/videos, as well as search for groups and people. As always, you can search through the entire text associated with an image or just the tags. You can also change the view from Small and Medium (Small is shown in the screenshot) to Detailed view, which is similar to the old Flickr search results. Small view resembles CompFight, which I occasionally use to search for Creative Commons-licensed photos. In Small and Medium view, every photo has an i button in the lower right corner. Clicking the i provides a pop-up with detailed information, such as date, location, and number of comments.
The right-hand column now provides a new perspective as well.
On the right side of the page we try to provide a new perspective on your search. Based upon how our members are tagging their photos and participating in the Flickrverse, you’ll see links to the groups, photographers, tag clusters and places that are most closely related what you’re looking for. We hope these will occasionally provide a little extra inspiration for your search.
My only complaint is that there is no easy way to search Creative Commons-licensed photos. You still need to go into Advanced search, click the appropriate checkboxes, and then Search again. I’d love it if Flickr would add a CC button to the main search page.
ZOMG Our angel and VC friends have done it again. They’d rather roast our insides than roast the turkey. Turn that portfolio company from turkey to turnkey. Joke’s on us, VC billionaires.
“”The best part was his reply to a question on how Fred changed his life: “I get attention from the senior girls in school, which is cool”. Excellent.”
This morning, fotonauts,Inc debuted at TechCrunch50. Not without a large mission, fotonauts would like to “enable the creation of the definitive pool of images for everyone to contribute to, discover and use, covering all areas of human interest. fotonauts will deliver the world’s best tools to discover, organize, and collaborate wtih images, whereever they are stored.”
Sometimes I forget that as an early adopter, what is natural for me is not necessarily natural for everyone else. I always upload my photos, for instance, and don’t really think anything of it. fotonauts states that although more than 500 million digital images are captured daily, only 5% of those are uploaded to the major photo sharing sites. They see several problems: uploading is hard, images aren’t accessible to everyone, different services can’t work together, and collaboration is mostly through commenting. fotonauts aims to change all that. They don’t want to be your next service provider; they’re shooting more for a Wikipedia for photos.
They plan to use sync technology that makes uploading images to any service simple. I like that they also plan on unification: multiple users, subscribed to any service with an API, can work together on common creations. fotonauts also automates tagging of your images and albums. ImageRank, their specific search engine, uses tags and date to provide what they’re calling the global standard for image search.
Albums are apparently a big part of fotonauts, as you can enable albums made of up images from more than one photographer, and allows multiple collaborators. Albums, it would seem, have an seemingly unlimited size. In a beta conducted by the company, a World Heritage Sites album was made of up more than 10,000 pages and more than 15,000 from hundreds of photographers across the Web. Using widgets, the albums can be shared to any web site. From the screen shots, it appears that there is a discussion area where even the discussion, such as this from Wikipedia, can be credited and rich content such as Google Maps can be added.
It’s worth mentioning that they use Creative Commons licensing for all the photos included. One of the issues fotonauts has with the status quo is that the default on many services is All Rights Reserved. I point this out because some folks, myself included, choose All Rights Reserved for a reason. Using fotonauts will open your photos to conversation, collaboration, and sharing.
fotonauts is aimed at three distinct audiences: creators, photographers, and searchers. Creators can, quite simply, use the platform to create photo collections from the overall photo pool. Photographers can share their images with the world. Searchers, and I’ll probably fall into this category, help you find the most relevant photo for your search and will always display the photographer and their licensing choice. That’s right. You now have no excuse about using Google images when you can search fotonauts and get the information for giving credit to the creator.
Keep in mind that I’m currently limited to screenshots, press releases, and video from this morning. But thus far, I’m pretty impressed. I’m at least intrigued to start playing with it. At the end of the presentation, Scoble interestingly calls it “Flickr done right.”
fotonauts was originally formed in France by several ex-Apple employees, including Jean-Marie Hullot. Jean-Marie is the CEO of fotonauts but was previously the CTO of Apple’s applications division and former CTO at NeXT. The team also includes several developers who were all part of Jean-Marie’s iSync and iCal teams at Apple and fotonauts President Keith Teare. The company formed in 2007 and has since received a seed round of $2.3m from several VCs and angel investors.
Beta invites are available, albeit slowly, on their web site. Their TechCrunch50 presentation available on UStream. There are some interesting questions at the end as to whether their business plan of integrating advertising is even feasible.
Creative Commons announced today that Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, Ann Wojcicki of 23andme, have donated half a million dollars to the non-profit. Creative Commons focuses on expanding and improving copyright and licensing in the digital era. The money will go to help Creative Commons as a whole, but will have a special focus on Science Commons, an initiative that focuses on lifting legal and technical barriers on research. The Creative Commons blog states that 
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