Flickr is retro-cool

Flickr has officially been entered "retro-cool" in my books. Following the announcement of its $1.1B acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo! went on to re-unleash Flickr upon the Internet. - A whopping 1TB of storage space. For FREE.

Ok now this may not mean much to the generation who just got on the train when Facebook got famous, but for me, I've been using Flickr way before Facebook and Twitter became the giants they are now. Back in 2005, Flickr was the coolest platform you could find that you can store photos, organize them, and if you are willing to pay, you get more storage space and upload quota.

If you go on Flickr today, you will see many curated photos done so beautifully, and that is a result of members contributing their photos. Check out the groups I've created at Planners and Journals and Red Cars. I feel nostalgic looking at them.

I had close to 10,000 pictures on Flickr, which they had conveniently placed in cold storage because I did not renew my Flickr Pro subscription. Since I had backups, I wasn't particularly too concerned. The great news is that today I got them all back with the new pricing structure. YAY!

Last year I paid for the subscription of a new Pro account again because with their new CEO I believed in Yahoo! again. Now I'm not really sure where they can fit into the current digital ecosystem, but I think if Yahoo! can provide that infrastructure and resource support that Flickr and Tumblr needs to flourish, keeping in mind that these products need to play nice with all other sharing and mobile-evolving platforms like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, they stand a chance, because I believe usability and user experience can sometimes trump other tech companies who are more concerned with scale.

Thanks Flickr. And Yahoo!,  I wish you success.

Flickr is back! With 1TB FREE

Rewind - the past two months

Work has started to ramp up and my team is now beginning to work on good sized projects. I'm happy, but sometimes when I look at the amount of time spent thinking about work, I treasure the few hours (or minutes!) I can get either to spend time with my girl, or just zone out and play Candy Crush.

Much has happened the past two months, but here are a few that I remembered:

Samsung S4 - My husband bought it a few days after it was released in Singapore. Everything looks positive so far. You could spot an S4 owner by the Jedi telekinesis action they will demonstrate when interacting with their phones.

Death of Google Reader - Thanks to a recommendation on Twitter, I've started using Feedly and I must say this looks way better than Reader. Way to go, Feedly!

Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In book, I've finished it! - I'm a firm believer of choice and women having that choice to choose what they want out of life and their career. We sacrifice the most and every time at the expense of ourselves. Read this book and start to lean in.

I bought a Nexus 4 - A lot of drama went into this phone, and this is just in the first month of ownership alone! I'll tell you more in another blog post.

I'm ready to get back to a Macbook, and this time I'm getting the Air! - I bought a Samsung Series 9 last year, and even though I enjoy working on it, I'm quite ready to get back to the Mac OS, so I'm waiting patiently for WWDC in June when they announce their laptops refresh.

Penultimate now fully integrates with Evernote

Evernote, my favorite note taking app of all time, has finally integrated their Penultimate app! So now you can scribble in Penultimate and get it saved to Evernote, seamlessly!

From 140 characters to 6 seconds, that's Vine

Back in October 2012, AllthingsD reported that Twitter had bought Vine, a video clip company. Then last week, this app was released, and I've downloaded it on my iPad mini. What you are able to achieve with this app lies somewhere between stop motion video and Viddy.

Here's how it works - you have 6 seconds to take a video, and what's cool about it is that you have control of every second of your recording. Tap and hold the screen to record, release to stop. This results in the ability to create a nice stop motion animation. Check out my first Vine below on how to make an iced latte. You'll get what I mean.

My verdict - I like it. It's easy to do, fun, and can be addictive. Are you using Vine?

My first Vine - how to make iced latte vine.co/v/b1XqTdrIpbW

— Bernie Chew (@berniechew) February 2, 2013

Vine

Blackberry 10 Launch

On January 31, BlackBerry launched BlackBerry 10 with two phones - the Z10 and the Q10. Z10 is all touch, and Q10 has a physical keyboard. As I followed the live blogging of the event on The Verge, I started thinking of why I would want to get a BlackBerry, and I couldn't really think of anything. I think the real target audience of BlackBerry is the Enterprise, because unless I'm GIVEN a BB from work, I will never be compelled to buy one.

BlackBerry Z10

Looking at the Z10
Tech specs - nothing fancy. 16GB is too little. Full specs here
User Interface - yes they have some nice integrations, but with iOS, Android and now Windows Phone platforms, these can easily be achieved.
Apps - Growing, but may be too slow.
Flow, Hub, Balance - nice features. I think I have to test that out to really make comments on that.

Would you get one?