There’s two trends – the Cloud and the Crowd – afoot in the software world, and if these trends have gotten buried by all the day to day trivia, let me give you a quick rundown on how they’re changing our industry.

Way back say two years ago, one of the first checks you’d write launching your startup would be to a graphic artist for a couple thousand dollars to execute your new company’s logo. It wouldn’t be cheap, but it would be good and they’d been recommended to you as someone who did good startup logos.

Now what you’d do is spend $39 at 99designs.com to post a design contest for your new company logo for say 1/4 of what you would have paid and let the crowd of 31,000 graphic artists submit designs to you. Then watch as 56, 92 or 124 (actual numbers) designers submit logos for your consideration. Joe the Graphic Artist might be good, but is he better than a hundred other graphic artists?

I was doing some research a few days ago in order to update an old article about effectively choosing colors for websites posted on the Resources section on Avangate website. My goal was to aid web developers with useful instruments for choosing the colors that should best suite their business.

I thus came across a very useful tool, DeGraeve Color Generator that knows how to extract the palette of colors from various websites, just by providing an URL. Besides that, this instrument can be used to extract colors from photographs.