PALM DESERT, Calif.--Gwabbit, the contact-slurping tool that launched at last year's Demo conference has made the much-needed shift to the cloud.

The new tool offering, which the company is calling the "gwab-o-sphere," takes the contact information gathered from incoming e-mails and syncs it with updated information from places like Twitter, Facebook, and Salesforce.com. If changes are made by these users in any of these locations, the updated information is ferried back over to Gwabbit, where it's synced back out to all the clients with the Gwabbit plug-in installed.

The need for services like this has become greater, due mostly to the rise of people having to maintain profiles or personal information in a number of different places at once. While this works fine if those contacts are good about updating the information across all of these networks, it breaks down when you go searching for it in one of the places they haven't yet updated. This is especially true if someone on your contact list switches jobs.

On the other end of the spectrum to Gwabbit's gwab-o-sphere, is Atomkeep, a company we blogged about back in late-2008. Unlike Gwabbit, it solves the problem of updating information in different places by letting users sync a profile change across more than 30 services at once.

Gwabbit said the gwab-o-sphere will be launching as a free feature to its paying users in the next month or two.

See also: Competitor Xobni, which popped up on BlackBerry phones last week.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

It looks like Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom 3 will begin to nibble at one of the new areas of digital photography: video.

Point-and-shoot digital cameras have been able to shoot video for years, but SLR cameras that photography enthusiasts enjoy now are getting the ability as well, including some advanced capabilities compact cameras lack. A second beta of Lightroom 3 due Monday will get the ability to import and manage videos, according to what looks like a legitimate if prematurely posted Adobe news release at Digital Photography Now.

Adobe didn't respond to requests for comment. But according to the release, these features also look to be in the new version:

• Tethered shooting, a feature professionals like that lets photos be sent directly from the camera to a computer as they're shot. It works with Canon and Nikon cameras.

• A second crack at a reworked import process--a change from Lightroom 2 that forum commenters seemed either to loathe or like. Images also import and load faster.

• Fleshed-out noise reduction that's central to the Lightroom 3 promise of better image quality: instead of just offering chrominance noise reduction that deals with color variation, the new beta adds luminance noise reduction that deals with brightness variation.

Lightroom, which can be used to edit, catalog, and print photos, is geared for enthusiasts and professionals. It's particularly suited to handling raw images taken directly from a camera's image sensor with no in-camera processing, a technology that offers higher flexibility and quality than JPEG but less convenience.

Apparently still missing from the beta, though, are some other features on the digital photography frontier: face recognition to help identify subjects in photos, geotagging to attach location information, high-dynamic range support for images that span a wider than usual spectrum of light to dark tones, panorama stitching, time-lapse video creation, and the top item on my personal wish list, automatic correction of chromatic aberration, distortion, and other lens defects.

Originally posted at Deep Tech