Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Upload Picasa People Photos to Google Contacts

Picasa 3.8 makes it easier to upload pictures for your Google contacts. After scanning all the photos from your library and adding name tags to your photos, you can go to the Tools menu, select Upload and click on Upload People Thumbnails.


Picasa asks if "you want to upload and replace all the thumbnail photos from your People Albums to your Google Contacts". If you click on "Upload", Picasa saves the photos to Google Contacts and you can see them in Gmail or in any other application that synchronizes with Google Contacts (for example, Android's Contacts app or iPhone's Contacts app, if you use Google Sync).

If you don't want to upload photos for all your contacts, you can click on one of the people from Picasa's sidebar, right on a photo and select "Set as Google Contacts Thumbnail". You can also enable "Upload people album thumbnails to Google Contacts" from Tools/Options/Name Tags (or Picasa/Preferences/Name Tags on a Mac) to upload the new thumbnails you select in Picasa.

It's strange to see that Google didn't add this option to Picasa Web Albums and that the photos tagged in Picasa Web Albums aren't displayed in Google Contacts. Google could at least offer the option to pick one of the photos tagged in Picasa Web Albums when you add a picture to one of your contacts. Right now, you can only select a photo from your public albums.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Half of apartments in Shanghai, Beijing vacant

At least half of the apartments in Shanghai and Beijing are empty, the China Daily reported yesterday, citing an online investigation by volunteers conducted in 100 Chinese cities.
About 51 per cent of Shanghai apartments, 66 per cent of Beijing flats and more than 70 per cent of units in Hainan are vacant, according to the survey, based on counting the number of apartments observed to have no lights on at night. It was conducted on more than 1,000 real-estate projects and was organised by news website Sina.com, according to the report.
The finding comes as Shanghai Securities News reported yesterday that Shanghai property sales by floor area jumped 26 per cent last week from the previous week
“Investors and speculators are the owners of the vacant houses” as they wait to sell their properties at an appropriate time, said Mr Lu Qilin, a Shanghai-based researcher at Uwin. “It’s important for the government to introduce more measures to curb speculation,” he added.
Property prices in 70 major Chinese cities climbed 10.3 per cent last month from a year earlier, according to China Information News.
Source : Today – 18 Aug 2010