There's a lot of things that have been going on recently on the works of WikiPic. We personally have a couple of announcements to make about the service changes coming very shortly, so let start off by saying thankyou as it has been very minimal however before we go worldwide live we would like to complete our project after almost six months in the works.

1. New design and logo:

WikiPic had a very basic first design, based on the Wikipedia.org design only in green and light grey. However, when the website was revamped in early summer we released the platform as a new blue design (as current) that is designed to easily let the WikiPic team deploy/improve features on the WikiPic platform easily and effectively.

Though we love the current design, as the internet dimensions change so often, we believe we should join by improving our design to something new. Not only that, but we will work on getting a new logo out that should represent our concept a bit better. Though right now we can't explain things properly because of the excessive use of features on our platform, we are looking to make strong changes to make it more easier to work with.

2. Partnership with Image Search facilities

During the past couple of weeks we have been working closely with image-based services and search engines to help them improve or utilize the data we have on the WikiPic platform.

3. Server Upgrade for the new year

That's right. We will work on getting on top of a new multi-million dollar architecture owned by Ferple hopefully between Q1 and Q2 of 2010, and it will highly optimize the data speeds of our rendering engine. To be accurate, WikiPic solely will be capable to handle these amounts of requests after the server upgrade takes place:

- Up to 370,000 requests stimultaneously (per second, including the API). That's around 200 times the size of Flickr and Photobucket, or around 650,000 popular websites using the API architecture or even around half a million users using our bookmarklet at the exact same time.

- Ability to record up to 90,000,000,000,000 (90 TRILLION) image records on our database at optimal speed. We may be moving the database platform from MySQL to Oracle, or MSSQL due to the scalability on the platform.

- As part of our server transition, we will no be longer be using our original copies of images being hosted on the Amazon Web Services platform. Instead we will be building our code on the Ferple platform.

4. Eco-friendly WikiPic in the new fiscal year:

Oh yeah, we are eco-freaks. That means, exceptionally, we're going to make everything on WikiPic as low as in CO2 as possible, and reduce our carbon footprint, that means by reducing the amount of codes and useless features from our service, while also removing inactive data from our servers. We don't want to make features that are from the past if they make an impact to the future environment, because we all live in it and the future generations will too.

5. Relevant images:

We have been testing our relevant images so much, and it is still in a very early stage, so you may find that practically all of the images don't look relevant but acclaim they are 100% accurate. We don't expect you to find it useful at the time, but usually we are looking for feedback from both our team and the community during the testing period. We will keep you updated on this soon.

6. Flagged images

What we've been in demand from since the release our API, and we have finally released it. When you upload an image through our API, a new one at the top will be called "flagged" and if set true it means that the image is marked as adult, copyrighted, inappropriate, or illegal. We work with governments, hosting websites, image farms, and some large outsource data sources to help us load our index and right now we have around 20,000 images altogether and we are rapidly increasing our index. By simply using our API you automatically have access to our index and the ability to change flagged images.

Thankyou,

Bilawal Hameed,

CEO/Founder of WikiPic Limited

Let me introduce you to our new, public tool called "The WikiPic Bookmarklet".

WikiPic has managed to let loose our "exclusive" bookmarklet feature, that lets anyone connect to the WikiPic platform using a simple button that takes the WikiPic experience with you anywhere on the internet. We like to call it a "punchbag" because simply, you can throw as many punches and kicks at it, and it will handle whatever is thrown at it, because it is robust in terms of platform but we're working on making it as integrated into the global web platform as possible.

We believe this update is the key to making WikiPic more committed to it's purpose - we want to give users a chance to share information of images used in reference in their identity, or business in real-time to let them understand about images. There's a chance you will never like that kind of information, but some people will, and that is what will make WikiPic matter to them.

For a couple of weeks, our development team will keep a strong eye on the progress of WikiPic, and we will be constantly collecting feedback by users. As we receive frequent feedback, we will understand what is mostly required and of course, we will implent them as soon as possible (within hours to a couple of days) and this will result in us having a polished tool for our network, of course by then we will be able to remove any limits for the BETA period and let anyone go monkey on it.

The best things about the new bookmarklet are what we need to tell you:

• Ultimate scanning, and significantly faster than the WikiPic platform alone.
• Can scan up to 20 images in one single request (at the moment).
• You don't need an account to use the bookmarklet.
• It's free for anyone to use, no subscription or invite required.
• Share each request with friends (one page saved per user at a time, within 15 minutes prior to request).
• Enables you to take the WikiPic power with you anywhere on the internet.

Not only does it help you with your experience, it really does help us when you use it:

• We are able to instantaneously track sources for images when we process them.
• The platform updates instantaneously about any changes to images uploaded on the internet.
• Improves the original index of our image network, so people can find out when it was firstly discovered.
• Provides capability for WikiPic to expand on the technologies it provides to the audience.

Ready to take on the power of WikiPic? Click here to put it on your browser.

Thankyou again for making WikiPic what it is today,

Bilawal Hameed,

CEO/Founder of WikiPic Limited

Updates

As we've been in many situations in the past week, WikiPic has been in a very standard mode. We haven't worked on the architecture, and it has been empty ever since, but remember, Ferple Limited, the company behind WikiPic is still a early day project and it will be a project that will help the world and WikiPic is unfortunately our lowest on our list.

As of recently, we have started retransitioning some experiments and changes towards the WikiPic platform. We are trying to make our technology as immediate as possible, and we are already working on a bookmarklet that is intending to become really powerful, however we're still trying to get it to work with JavaScript. And, because WikiPic doesn't employ a JavaScript engineer we're going to struggle with getting this implented but as our group expands we will have more capabilities of letting JavaScript be more fluent across the WikiPic platform.

If you're extra clever, you would of seen that we had displayed our site on Flippa recently. We are in a unconfirmed transition deciding if the new buyer and WikiPic are transacting for many reasons. Selling our site will help other people improve what we have already created for WikiPic, and we know that this project is going to be successful but that time that we don't have to improve the architecture for WikiPic.

API Changes

We've added sources to our API, because people were complaining that they couldn't see where the image was externally hosted. However, we will begin to implent privacy rules as some websites have stated that they don't want hotlinking and we could end up doing exactly that. For that reason, we'll end up only providing the site URL and preventing the actual image source from appearing - this gives the same capability of finding out what type of sites, while also giving privacy to those who want it.

Regardless of the site sale, we're going to let the API still stand as long as we're in control. Remember, the 28th December 2009 at 0.00AM GMT and we'll shut it down permanently as a general source. After that, we'll either do it on an free API key basis, or through a typical per-request charge so that we can ensure that anyone can make WikiPic a part of their own application. Testing and developing is fun, but if there's any improvements you wish to have, let us know because we appreciate and do respond to regular feedback.

Image Cache

We're beginning our site phase 2, where we will begin to transition all of our improvements to the platform. Firstly, we're going to implent a cache system where uploads will be read by a token assigned to the first line of a graphic source. This helps us make it easier to process requests without having to encode the whole image, and the cache will delay our network by up to 90 hours, however this cache only applies to how we read an image, NOT an article - otherwise we wouldn't be real-time, would we? :)

SEO

If you're someone who has been researching our background on the internet, you'll see that we are already an authority website on Google. So that means articles on our platform will become priority to any other source, however we're still a long way from making WikiPic global, and for that reason we will be playing with our system and how it approaches to everyone in the coming months so that you're never let down on your travel to the image library.

Adult filtering

That's incredibly right, we're going to make a start on our adult filtering system. Behind the works, since day one, we've already been working on filtering images (hence why there's no bad images on our service, right?) and it will be under <filter> on our API that indicates 1 or 0 weither the image has been marked as adultery. It's great for image hosts that don't want to moderate their platform, and lets anyone to go automated on their platform.

Thanks!

Bilawal Hameed,

CEO/Founder of WikiPic Limited

As you may have already of figured, we've been working hard to improve the day-to-day experiences we give to thousands of people who want to help us change the way we understand the internet. Under the works, we have been working on testing our phase-based improvement to reading images. Our solution works effectively on a large scale, but we needed to utilize the capability of today's internet.

I'll go into depth about how the phases will be handled. For each phase, we will decide a huge change to the way we have programmed this technology to work into WikiPic. We will only use three phases which will constitute of the following: develop, improve, finish. If you havent already realized, we won't integrate our new technology in our technology because of the early usage of the day. We already process a lot of requests through our server API, and that's in beta, so we really want to make the best of our technology before we make it go worldwide

During the new year, we're looking at making our technology really hit the doors and we'll look at making our API purely powerful and let the big boys doing the utilization and talking. We hire some of the best engineers in the industry in order to help us program our business, so don't you worry, we will have WikiPic on the top track very soon!

So, all I can really say is have a good play with it, and let me know on any problems (we're working on the similarness algorithm). So help us change the face of the internet, forever!

Thankyou,
Bilawal Hameed,
WikiPic CEO/Founder

As of recently, WikiPic are now experimenting with some technology that checks the similarness between images across the WikiPic network. This technology enables us to give even deeper findings, and discover how much of a percentage the images match because of it, we'll even provide you with data.

Remember, the WikiPic archive is capable of having billions of images so don't feel embarassed to make your contribution to our global image library project. We've never been so happily enough to tell you to keep uploading, because we are definately a project that is here to stay, today, tommorrow, and next week.

Remember, the possibilities to this type of major upgrade to our project - there's many people who have told us when adult content has ever been uploaded any similar matches can automatically be removed. This eliminates little jobs that require audits to uploads on websites, but our globally controllable network could be the answer to a more safer, securer, and powerful internet infrastructure. We want to help you!

AJAX API

Yeah, right.. we have JSON - but there's people who want it to be even simpler than that without evening placing JSON within their applications. We will be working on embeddable scripts to place within your web pages that is completely interactive with any web application which is great for little things such as sharing an image, etc.

WikiPic CDN API

We have been in talks with many other companies, and we believe another prospect of our business is to make our application seamlessly integratable into other web applications. This would be for companies that use image security, cache, or any other type of system. Basically, a normal site would simply link to our server with the image data and we scan it in our servers and automatically ping it to update to another similar image.

Twitter API

That's right.. Twitter is something we will need to utilize. That means, we're working on enabling transfer uploads to TwitPic, TweetPhoto, and scores of other Twitter photo uploading sites. Uploads will be executed within "milli"-seconds so don't worry, we'll be built in the core of the internet very soon.

Libraries

If you're uploading on WikiPic, you will want to upload more and more to see what's there. And, in order for us to make things more organised we are working on a library section where all images will automatically be placed but can be changed.

Also, we'd love to get your feedback on the progress!

Thankyou,

Bilawal Hameed,

CEO/Founder of WikiPic Limited

Firstly, we are now a Microsoft BizSpark startup and now we're able to get into a bit more reliability for our startup. This doesn't necessarily affect our service, however we will have a slightly more supported project as we are now a part of the BizSpark project which was created by Microsoft for startups.

Thanks, and we hope to start posting more information about WikiPic shortly.

Howdy guys,

Let's be clear -- when we mean major, that means we're modifying your experience for the better. As we head to further accomodate our service, and possibly expand to a larger userbase, we're looking to let WikiPic fly as high as.. well, it can go. But, we're always taking things one at a time but since we're rolling them out really fast we like to call them "bulk" updates. Like always, here's some more excellent updates for you!

• Whenever you login, all the images you uploaded without an account will become assigned to your newly signed in account.
• Our API is now slightly mitigated between Ferple network and WikiPic network, so it should progress around 10-20% faster.
• We have turned on our beta robots: currently scraping around 1,000/images a day. I'll discuss further into the post.
• The cloud now supports up to the last 250 images uploaded, so you get a better insight of today's uploaded images.
• Minor updates to our server configuration to prevent server hydration, so that we use full resources for heavy loads.
• WikiPic is releasing a new competition soon - win up to $500 and access to our free WikiPic API for life.

WikiPackers 2009

It's always great to introduce something new to our network, and it's called "WikiPackers" which means whoever can help build the most powerful utilization for our API, basically the most innovative application on top of our service. That means, scripts, pages, applications, anything that utilizes our API or service will be considered. Even integrating it in a unique way would be excellent for us to consider you. We'll pay you $500 cash and possibly a free API for life, but we're willing to split the prize with any strong competitiors we believe deserve it, and it can be yours simply by applying and emailing us at "wikipackers2009@wikipic.net" and we'll investigate your app. Closing date is 28th December 2009 (yes, when our API is closed for public beta) and our winner will be chosen on the 29th December 2009, so don't worry, it will definately be some good stuff.

Roboting Technology

Let's be honest, this only has two purposes: to find out image popularity, and to build up our index. It gives a larger advantage to any application that wants to ultimately build on our one-of-a-kind platform.

As soon as WikiPic introduces "mass" analytics, it will one of the most powerful and the "first" real-time image analytics system, that will measure images from the web and will update in real-time based on popular content from popular third parties such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook. WikiPic's fast encoding technology has made it one of the most innovative companies of the year, and we're looking extremely forward to giving such capability to enhance the web and potentially millions of application built to serve anyone.

Lift to server capabilities

If you don't already know, we had a major server outbreak around 30 minutes ago, and received a lot of uploads in a really quick period, maybe some sort of viral effect, I don't really know yet. It would take a while for our statistics to update and officially let us know what happened, but until then, we have upped our server limits to the highest capabilities, so don't expect our database to lag, we'll let it go freely with simply the "down" message rather than ugly server errors. This is hopefully the last we'll see of that, and I'm glad we can do it properly bit-by-bit.

Public API BETA

That's still going strong, and we're looking for the best developer to possibly find a good way to utilize our platform to possibly get hired or receive free credits to permanently build on our platform free. There's tons of opportunities, so build the application that want, and you're absolutely limitless to the capabilities you can go with WikiPic API - especially when our service hits rock top.

We are going to shut it down on the 28th December 2009, ready to expand to new potential levels and letting you know what the world's going for WikiPic.

Finally, here's a list of updates we're working on right now:

• Share articles with users on Facebook,
• A little message for newly uploaded photos, so you are able to get a larger insight.
• We will optimize our platform a bit more, and will also simplify the login process.
• Possibly, a iPhone application where it uploads your photos to the service and pings back data about the imagery.
• Integration with some of the largest web apps.

We'll keep you posted as it comes (don't forget to follow us on Twitter - @wikipic).

Bilawal Hameed,

CEO/Founder of WikiPic

It's all correct folks, something many of you have been waiting for.

As you may or may not realize, WikiPic's main heart and soul comes from the technology and innovation it's parent company, Ferple Limited has been able to give us. Now, WikiPic evolves on that piece of technology by enabling any web developer until the 28th December 2009 to demonstrate, exemplify, or playground with our basic API that we will be improving over the weeks until we transition our closure from the beta to the stable for the new year 2010.

On January 1st 2010, we'll be releasing our API to the world using our parent's platform, Ferple. They are already working on a multi-million dollar architecture aswell as a framework that will become one of the largest developer frameworks in the world, and WikiPic will be developed to a standard that we believe Ferple has been enabled to let us fly on.

As soon as we transition closure, we will slowly begin to notify our developers, and most likely we won't have the same platform on Ferple - but we are releasing our current API to give you full, exclusive advantage to the possibilities of using WikiPic in your application.

We are looking for some of the brightest people out there who can develop a really good use for our API, and through this we'll be looking for people to employ at Ferple/WikiPic. If we don't hire you, we'll credit up to 20 people with $100 credit on the Ferple infrastructure (that's $2000 just on our API) for those who can show us that they know how to innovate like WikiPic.

Demo of the PHP class in action.

Download our free PHP class of our new API.

View the documentation of the API.

So, get your engines ready, and get developing.

We'll be looking forward to see what you can develop with our professional API infrastructure.

The global WikiPic network will be down today (anytime through the day) for up to 30 minutes, as we're attaching on a petabyte attachment to our network. This is a system that gives WikiPic the ability to invest time into working on new technology, and let us build the largest image network on the internet, and we'll be able to make publishing images online even safer and securer than ever.

Other than the maintenance, we've got a few good things to say:

Firstly, something we are REALLY happy to talk about, is our hard development to work on a TEN layer image reading technology. It might sound boring and lame, but by working on such developments, we will be able to read over images swiftly and always end up reading them as accurate as possible when we do, as our system automatically reads images and grabs the most powerful area of the image so we can uniquely identify it. This gives us two advantages: even faster reading, and even more accurate uploading matches. There's no loss, except we might consume a little more server resources, however it's possible we can sort this out in the future.

Secondly, When our image platform is completely stable (at the moment, it isnt), we will create our developer platform to help other players make a Wikified application. Wikified is an registered subsidary of WikiPic Limited, specifically designed for applications that wish to develop WikiPic in their application, and become Wikified (as an expression). Any business or application can become Wikified. Wikified applications will have the ability to do so much in their applications effortlessly: check if images are valid, decode images to get unique hashcodes, read images, check current images, and progress image popularity. As the development course goes further into action, we'll be working on more and more features for our developers to use in their own apps, but by interlinking your app into our huge network you are helping us and your app get some extreme Wikifiedness. We'll love to talk about this as it goes, but this is a big priority and will be worked on as soon as we believe it's ready to go live.

Thirdly, it's pure awesomeness. WikiPic is foreseeing some pretty bad concepts to our system, and while we have some awesome technology, we don't currently have a useful concept, as some people have told us. Right now we are strongly revising our concept and so we'll be throwing HUGE changes in WikiPic and our popularity system will be taking off very soon. We're really liking the features that are being thrown out into the WikiPic atmosphere! :)

That's all the news we've got, but there's some other considerations we need to discuss:

As we're slowly growing, many of you need to acknowledge that our application needs a lot of tweaking and we understand that some general uploads don't work. We're working really hard on doing that, as our general technology has been under works for a long time, but since it is a very intense server provider it may not be able to handle it live for some situations. We'd expect it sometimes to go a bit tad boring on us, but within a short amount of time (hopefully before we're popular) it will be good.

For now, we're checking that these files don't work (which obviously weren't tested during our experimentation period, apologies):

• Renaming a file, and then uploading it on "Windows"-based OS computers. It's based within their technology, we'll fix it soon.
• Images which have a higher bit rate than 364-bits won't upload as our server cannot decode them into a 8-bit format (it gets confused).
• Manually programmed images, such as "robots" or applications using a really outdated version of "GD" encoding library.
• Images made using non-guideline following programs, and do not render in a understandable format. Our technologies follow over 300,000 type of potential software matches however the market grows and we can't compete to work with all that decide to use their own technique (only the popular ones will be determined).

Other than that, Happy Wiki-ing!

Since we're entering the Amazon Startup challenge this year, and if we do get into this year, we're going to need to open slightly early.

We have sent out our press release out a couple of hours ago, and have notified a couple of major news companys, local and national. This is the opportunity of letting our site go on the loose to the public, and we're absolutely anticipated to find out how big this company intends to grow through the simple usage.

All the issues have been sorted, DMCA, copyright, CC license, company trademarks/registration, and many other things. We just expect our company to grow and grow, and it's only going to take time before we become a part of a majority of the image-side of the web.

WikiPic intends to release a fully flexible API program where anyone can integrate WikiPic's technology into their own applications, and we're so flexible we can make the internet revolve around you. Thousands of dollars of experimentation and research has proven that WikiPic has a lot of things up our sleeve, but we don't like ruining suprises, so you're simply going to have to wait.

Also, don't expect our design to stay, we're working on a really extremely big one as we talk. It's just going to take a couple of months for it to be finished with our upcoming version, as we're working on it, so simply enjoy WikiPic and we'll be working hard to improve your experience.

Find us on the following networks:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/WikiPic/125769131906

http://twitter.com/wikipic

Thanks,

Bilawal Hameed,

CEO/Founder of WikiPic Limited