ZunaVision is a video technology that movie studios have had for years, brought to the average user by the computer science department at Stanford University. It lets you place images and videos within existing videos. Want to put a poster or an advertisement on a building in the background of your footage? ZunaVision's got you covered. How about changing the painting in a picture frame? It can do that, too.

ZunaVision isn't very hard to use. You can just select a surface, and it does a capable job of making your image look like it could plausibly be hanging there. It's not just pasted haphazardly on top of your video. It's cool enough that I'm already worried it won't stay free for long. The last Stanford web toy I fell in love with, Vector Magic, turned into a pay service after a while. Zunavision looks like it could be worth selling, too, but maybe the creators can just turn a profit by sneaking ads into other videos.

UPDATED: The URL for Zunavision changed, so the links in this post were broken. They should be working now. Thanks to all the readers who pointed that out!

Here's a question for all our elderly readers: Do any of you remember the primitive era affectionately called 1995, and hearing your college professors speak hopefully (or possibly lament) that soon all the information and media ever created would be up on this web thing and easily accessible and available free of charge? Do you remember how many people went out and bought those state of the art 486s and bleeding edge Pentium I computers, and signed on with AOL or Compuserve or Mindspring to fire up Netscape, stumble on to Yahoo! only to discover the truth.

Even back then, there was a lot of stuff online that was technically information or visual/audible media. It was free, much of it, anyway, as well. I spent way too many hours watching an oddity called a webcam update at shockingly fast one minute intervals, as it delivered grainy black and white stlll images of some forgotten webmaster's painted turtle in California to my desktop in Northern Virginia.

As far as exotic, fine art work or rare, priceless tomes of great knowledge went -- it wasn't all accessible online, or necessarly free if it happened to be available. But for a good portion of the '90s, people who hadn't been online much, or were in denial, insisted it was out there.

There dawns the new century, and the myth of "it's all there, free" started to fade away with the old beige Pentium I and II computers. Things went the other way, though. Every day there was more information on the internet from all sorts of sources, and some of it (shock, awe) was free, or at least accessible to some degree. Is it irony or karma? Who knows? Many people are floored, now, to discover how much useful, cool, credible information is available online free of charge.

So just in time to go back to school (or to impress your friends with your innate intelligence), I've found a few sites and tricks for getting really great information online without additional tuition fees.

When I was in high school my physics teacher once told us, "All physics experiments work. They just may not work the way you want them to."

This encapsulates neatly what software development is all about. On one hand, it is science. It is deterministic. Each programming language statement performs exactly as stated (baring bugs in the compiler, or the SDK, or the OS). On the other hand, software development is closer to engineering where years of experience allows a software developer to spot patterns in the model and apply them to build a system.

Unfortunately, just as in physics, computer science courses do not prepare students for what comes after graduation. Skills that are considered crucial in almost all commercial software projects are either not taught in college or are only touched upon. This disparity between the skills graduates possess and what the industry is looking for means it generally takes one to two years of working in real life project for a graduate to become fully trained.

By now we realize that some of us really cannot live without social networks. Great places like Facebook keep us in touch with friends and contacts, even though those little applications might distract us from work for an hour or two, its all good.

Stanford University has jumped into the Facebook game and opened up a course for students to learn how to build Facebook Applications. Given that there are a number of people that are developing tools for the social network it seems like a great idea. The course will not focus on building the applications themselves, it will focus on designing persuasive and engaging user experiences within Facebook.

The Stanford course is still in an experimental phase, and will not be rolled out over videocast or podcast sessions like some Stanford courses do until it gets sorted out and fine-tuned. It is being taught by Dave McClure, the well known software developer, angel investor, internet marketer and of 500 hats fame, and BJ Fogg who operates a Stanford lab and runs YackPack an online group connector.

[via scobleizer]

Have you ever thought about what you'd build in place of the Internet if you could start over from scratch? No TCP/IP requirements, no backwards compatibility, just a full-on global network designed from the ground up to be global. A Stanford University research program, dubbed "Clean Slate", is dreaming of exactly that, and they're asking for help from students and Post-Doctorate researchers.

The project aims to research five key areas crucial to global networks, from architecture down to economics and policy in the interest of building secure and stable next generation infrastructure. If you're an advanced student of networks and heterogeneous systems, the next call for proposals is up this Spring.

It's always interesting to take a dive into the lives of successful web based entrepreneurs to see what made them, and what their lives are like. Of course the guys behind Google are no exception. Larry and Sergey went from Stanford Ph.D. dropouts with an idea in a garage and went on to form a multi-billion dollar search company. If you are into Google and Entrepreneur life, you might be interested in spending a few minutes reading through Mark Malseed's report on the life of Sergey Brin.

Mark mentions interesting facts from how Sergey and Larry share an office in a far corner away from the public eye in the Googleplex like they did back in the garage days. He describes the office environment and how it resembles a large adult play area with the latest tech devices and comfortable seating arrangements scattered about. (but of course we knew that.)

Mark also had the chance to sit down with Sergey's parents in the suburbs of Washington DC to talk with his Father, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his Mother a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Both of his parents still cannot believe the success that Google has achieved, and how many people it has helped by saving large amounts of time and energy. Mr. and Mrs. Brin take readers on a tour of Sergey's childhood, and how this lead to co-founding a web based company that changed the world forever.

The AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford University wraps up today, but not before making a declaration of something many LAMP developers have known for a long time.

The "AlwaysOn 100" honors 100 private companies for their technical innovation, customer adoption and market potential. This year's 100 innovators are comprised of a majority of companies that share one common characteristic, they all use MySQL in mission critical portions of the enterprise.

"When Joe Kraus launched the Excite search service in the early days of "Web 1.0", he estimated it cost around $3m to get the business up-and-running. Today, after founding JotSpot, Kraus estimates a Web 2.0 company can start up with an investment of around $100,000 (£50,000)"

[via Sourcewire]

Apparently there was a little chatter around the blogosphere lately about how Google supports click fraud. Well, then business product manager for trust and security over at Google cleared some things up on Google's corporate blog.

Shurman Ghosemajumder, the business product manager for trust and security at Google spoke up about the issue at hand, and stated that a blogger quoted Eric Schmidt a little twistedly when he recently spoke about the click fraud issue.

When asked about click fraud at a Stanford economics event in March, Schmidt said there has been some talk about click fraud being a potential threat to the entire advertising business model, and he was wondering what people thoughts were, and if there was an economic solution, instead of a technical one. Eric was answering hypothetically, and was not describing Google's approach to click fraud. Eric went on to discuss the economic issues that can slow down fraud, dropping the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for potentially bad clicks. Thus, self correcting the actual real ad price.

The whole time during the presentation, he kept stating that Google does not take this approach.

You can find a video of the presentation at hand here.