The Crunchies recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. So be sure to nominate Memeo Share and MemeoPhoto: http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/nominations/, the deadline is December 10th.

Every year without fail I receive a slew of Holiday cards from friends, family, and inevitably my Mother’s family newsletter. There was a time when I used to mail my own holiday card, but those days are over! Everyone that I know – even my grandmother – has an email address, it just doesn’t make sense to buy dozens of cards and pay for postage when I could send it electronically.

If you are trying to save a few dollars (and your sanity), you might want to consider looking at software that helps you easily create personalized cards or collages.

After hunting around for something that was easy to use and a reasonably priced I settled on WonderShare’s Photo Collage Studio. The software has theme templates, colorful embellishments, special mask effects, photo editing and it lets you make high-quality prints. If you want to get extra creative you can even use their templates to produce a personalized calendar!

I personally like that you can drag and drop photos in to the templates, it makes the process so simple. Then you just use the tool bar to get the look you want, voilà, professional looking collages and cards.

This was my first attempt using photos from my recent family reunion (the watermark is there because I am still using the evaluation copy):

There are actually ways to add more clip art and effects to the collage, but I wanted to keep it simple.

Next I tried out the collage feature, here is what I produced:

This one isn’t as easy because the frames are pre-formatted and I had to slide the photo around and zoom based on the dimensions. But overall, I think it turned out pretty well. Another nice feature is that you can save these in a variety of formats such as .BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, .ICO, and .PCS.

And don’t forget, you can add text to these as well. So if you want to add a personal note before sending them on, it is a very easy process:

So before you send out holiday cards this year, consider saving yourself the headache and making a fun collage. And with Memeo Share you don’t have to worry about emailing them. Just set up your Holiday Sharing Circle™ and send your collages along with all your other holiday photos.

Hooray for xkcd humor! Have a great weekend and be sure to use Memeo Share to send all your photos!

I, for one, am a little tired of hearing about the economy. It isn’t that I don’t care, I just never hear what I am supposed to do about it (other than not panic). All I know is, I am tightening my belt for leaner times, and part of that means fewer gadgets and toys.

Maybe you are like me and you have a camera that is a couple of years old, has some scratches and dents and is no longer the best/smallest/coolest camera available. I remember when I bought my Casio EX-Z600, it had the largest LCD screen available. It was so sleek and tiny, I didn’t bother to read the owner’s manual, I just dove right in.

And now, a few years later, rather than buying a new camera, I am breaking out my owner’s manual to see what features I may have been over looking. Luckily, I save everything, so I still have a hard copy handy. But, if you threw yours out along with the packaging I recommend checking out Digicamhelp. They have a large collection of owner’s manuals from a variety of vendors.

You can learn all sorts of cool stuff about what your camera can do. For example, I didn’t know that my camera could adjust its flash from one flash to two based on the lighting. I also realized that the hole in the bottom of my camera is for a tripod – I might have figured out that one on my own - but I never gave it that much thought. I also found out I had a white balance indicator, an anti-shake indicator, and a continuous shutter mode. Now I know I can take a series of photos in rapid succession! Now that I know how to take better photos I can use some cool photo editing software to really take them up a notch (learn about free photos editing sofware in my previous post) .

Once you feel you have photos worthy of sharing you can use Memeo Share to send them directly to your friends and family, bypassing email and avoiding the hassle of posting them on a website.

If you have already bought a new camera and have an old one just floating around the house I highly recommend reading Make Something New with Your Old Digital Camera. The article makes a few very creative suggestions on what to do with that extra piece of hardware, such as turning it in to a webcam.

When you purchase something like a digital camera, you know you should take steps to be certain that you get the most from your investment. Doing things like buying a camera case to keep the lens from getting scratched, and to keep debris from getting in can help lengthen the life of the device.

But have you ever given any thought to the optimal operating temperature of your camera? Living in sunny Southern California, I don’t think I have ever given pause and wondered if it was too cold to use my camera. Which is why I was interested to learn that most cameras can be damaged if they are exposed to temperatures above 110F, or below 32F. While you can purchase special cameras to withstand these extremes, unless you plan on taking a lot of outdoor photos in Vermont, you are better off learning how to make do with your every day camera.

There are some common sense things you can do in cold weather to keep your camera safe, such as storing it in an inside pocket close to your body. This will keep it from getting unnecessarily cold and it will help your batteries last longer. Also, don’t breath on the lens, this might sound silly, but some people breathe on the lens or LCD screen and then use a cloth to wipe them off. If the weather is cold enough your breath could actually freeze on them and ruin your camera.

To read more easy tips on how to protect your camera through the long winter months I recommend:

Winterizing Your Camera

Cold Weather Pictures: How to Use Your Camera in Cold Weather

Also, be sure to check out your camera manufacturer’s website, they may have more specific instructions for your camera. 

Once you have taken all your winter photos don’t forget to use Memeo Share to send them to all your friends and family.

Have a great weekend and don’t forget to add Memeo to your twitter http://twitter.com/Digital_Life.

More humor from xkcd:

So the Second Annual Open Web Awards by Mashable is now accepting nominations. We would be honored if you would nominate Memeo Share or MemeoPhoto. It is really simple, and only requires four simple steps. Go to http://mashable.com/openwebawards/home/

1. Choose “Video Sharing” for Memeo Share or “Mobile Application” for MemeoPhoto

2. Put down Memeo as the company name.

3. Provide your email address

4. Respond to the confirmation email after you have submitted.

We would be incredibly thankful if you would go and nominate us.

One of my new favorite tech toys is the Flip digital camera made by Pure Digital. I just bought mine a few months ago and already there is a significant upgrade, the latest version records in Hi-Def. I haven’t used it yet, but chances are my current camera will be gifted to a family member this holiday season so that I can get the new one.

It comes in a bunch of colors, but if you want to customize it even further you can upload your own graphic, and they’ll put it on the camera and ship it to you!

So why all the excitement?

First, the video camera is tiny. It is smaller than any cell phone and it weighs nothing.

Second, it is brain-dead easy to use. I don’t love the menu system (for example, you have to sometimes press the trashcan button to NOT delete a photo, which is distressing) but you can’t go wrong with the BIG RED BUTTON to start and stop recording. It is so easy my three girls can use it – and use it they do!  Each start/stop creates a new file, so it is simple to watch without doing a lot of editing.

Third, there is a big pop out USB plug that both charges and makes the camera look like a removable disk.

The included software is okay. It is cleverly installed on the camera itself, so you don’t really need to do an install, and there are some good basic functions, although I find that it runs pretty painfully slow on my PC. You can do things like upload your videos to YouTube if you want, and you can email them… neither is particularly satisfying for the obvious reasons.  However, (and here’s the cool part) because I use Memeo Share, I can literally just plug the camera in and without doing anything, start sharing my videos.

They will get posted to the Memeo online gallery (these can be either public or private) and they are also delivered directly to friends and family. Recipients might need a special codec to make it work since Pure Digital uses one that isn’t available on every PC or Mac. They do play perfectly on the Memeo Share online gallery without downloading anything. You can check out http://share.memeo.com/dnadir/Mino+Test for a few examples of videos that came straight off my camera. They should give you an idea of the quality for both action and low-light. The second video even does a bit of zooming, although I don’t typically use zoom very much.

Have a Flip Mino or its new sibling? Leave us a comment and tell us what you do with your Mino and how your share your videos!

Dan Nadir
Vice President, Product Management

When the fridge has no more magnets and the holiday season is in full swing you have to wonder, as a parent, what you are going to do with all the scraps of paper and art work that is sent home weekly with your child.

You want to praise them for a job well done; you want them to feel creative and appreciated. But short of wall papering your dining room with all their homework, there isn’t a convenient way to display everything. And forget about trying to save it all, unless you have an attic or you won’t miss your garage…

Well never fear, Memeo has a solution! The trick is to take things that are hard copy, and make them digital. So the first thing you need to do is take the items that you want to save and put them in to a digital format with either a scanner or a digital camera.

Once you have completed the first step you can create a Sharing Circle with Memeo Share so that Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, family friends, etc. can see this year’s “hand turkey” (we all know what those are).

Don’t forget to use Memeo AutoBackup to automatically back up the files to the external drive of your choice, whether that is a hard drive, USB drive, iPod, FTP site, Network drive, etc. This way, in case something happens to your computer, you have an extra copy.

Today we launched our latest version of Memeo Share for Windows. This release has a ton of enhancements, almost all of them are based on the great feedback we got from existing Memeo Share users!

In this release we focused on usability and added 30+ enhancements that we believe will help everyone share videos and photos faster and more reliably.

You can try out the newest version here:

http://share.memeo.com/download_client

We always want to hear from Memeo Share users. Please email memeoshare@memeo.com if you have feedback, good or bad.

Memeo Share is now available for PC (Vista and XP), Mac, and iPhone.

Dan Nadir
Vice President of Product Management