New age devices

NEC, a leading company in broadband networking and the mobile Internet, is looking to breathe new life into the industry with new age devices, reports Mobilemag via favorite Gizmodo.

Wacca : A tech accessory bracelet will supposedly incorporate sensors, allowing the device to capture appropriate angles for its snap shots, despite being worn on the wrist.

Nave: Is an attempt to replace current video phones and web cameras. Instead of having an incriminating lenses pointing directly towards you, this nifty little device has a 360 degree viewing capability, allowing for an involved conversation session.

MTV Video Music Awards Photoblog

The MTV Video Music Awards at New York's Radio City Music Hall were photoblogged last night. Missed the Madonna/Britney Spears kiss though!

Thanks Mike!

Reading the technological tea Leaves

Human resources departments are just beginning to rewrite policies and handbooks in order deal with emerging technology such picture phones, videophones and PDAs that will soon be able to play full-length movies, reports Central Daily.

Policies that prohibit employees from tape recording, videotaping or taking pictures on company property are becoming commonplace. Those guidelines will almost certainly hold up in court when expanded to cover pornographic materials downloaded to an employee's personal cell phone, if viewed in the workplace.

"In the days before e-mail, you never had harassment that contained electronic correspondence. Now, nearly every harassment case contains an allegation of a harassing e-mail. This is one of those things, some would say, employers have a duty to monitor." says Ron Chapman Jr., a Dallas employment lawyer.

Verizon Wireless offers iPhonebook for picture messaging

Verizon Wireless announced iPhonebook will be available with its Get It Now service for the LG VX6000 handset, allowing customers to use their wireless phones to e-mail pictures.

"With iPhonebook, users can download contact phone numbers and e-mail addresses directly from Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Palm Desktop Personal Information Manager to store in Get It Now-enabled phones. Then when a picture is taken, it can be sent to any e-mail address stored in the phone", according to RCR News .

Cameraphone gaming

I posted this story in Textually.org in the gaming section, so I apologize for those of you who read both blogs, but it's really relevant to both.

The BBC covering The Game Developers Conference Europe in London, describes some of the mobile games being showcased, with insights into the sort of things keeping Japanese thumbs busy, such as virtual pets, pronunciation puzzles and games that are the quality of PlayStation.

But what is of interest to Picturephoning are the mobile games mentioned which make use of picture phones:

-- "Some of the games available seem designed to appeal to teens. Mr David Collier -- of Namco, one of the most successful Japanese mobile game publishers -- showed off a virtual pet game from Panasonic, which is reminiscent of the tamagotchi craze.

The game uses the handset's camera to create food. When the pet is hungry, it shows a picture of a type of food like an apple.

You then have to take a picture of something red, which the phone interprets as an apple and feeds to your pet.

The game also lets you send food to a friend's pet via an infra-red connection.

-- Mr Collier demonstrated another game which creates a fighting character based on your photo.

It interprets your image to give your character speed and power. You can then send this to a friend's mobile to do battle".

The Camera Phone's Dirty Little Secret

Forbes has written an interesting article outlining some of the shortcomings of camera phones and the not-always-so-easy task of sending pictures.

"Despite the fact that 10 million camera phones are expected to ship by the end of this year, exchanging pictures the way that they do on TV commercials are actually only possible between people who use the same carrier. And even then, the process doesn't quite work as advertised. Quite a few keypad clicks are required to see the photo sent.

One would expect that carriers would be racing towards interoperability to boost sales, but so far there has mostly been foot-dragging. "Carriers look at applications like this as a means of getting and keeping customers. They want customer to feel like they'll lose something if they switch providers." says Waryas. The Enderle Group's Rob Enderle adds that carriers see establishing standards as enabling the competition".

Consumer Reports Tests Camera Cell Phones

Consumer Reports tested five camera cell phones and their service providers; T-Mobile AT&T, Cingular and Sprint, reports WPXJ, and according to their findings, your best bet is the Sanyo SCP-8100 phone with Sprint service, its streamlined design making it the easiest to use.

High-pixel Camera Phones to Hit the Market

Camera phone module manufacturers specializing in complementary metal oxide semiconductors, or CMOS, are now poised to upgrade image quality of products to 1 million pixels.

"The move is expected to spur domestic mobile phone companies that have been reluctant to adopt high mega-pixel camera modules into new strategies, boosting the image quality of photo phones from the present 300,000 pixels to 1 million level", according to Korea IT News.

Leading CMOS camera phone module makers are set to roll out 1 million-pixel modules for mobile phone companies such as Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics in Ocotober of this year.

AOL launches blogging service

America Online on Monday officially launched their new feature called AOL Journals in an effort to piggyback on the grassroots popularity of Web logs, or "blogs", reports Business Week. The new feature is offered as part of its proprietary online service, but users will be able to update their blogs through the AOL Web site, AOL Instant Messenger and their cell phones.

According to an insider, AOL Journals already has about 7,000 users and has jumped up into the top 200 on AOL searches according to Suzan Mernit's Blog via Dave Winer's weblog.

Europeans snap up camera phones

The poor quality of low-resolution photos taken by mobiles with built-in cameras has not prevented users paying money to send pictures via their phones, reports CNN.

The good news in numbers:

-- By December 2003, "the number of Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) users in Western Europe will have risen to an estimated 4 million people.

-- By the end of this year, $51 million would have been spent on people using MMS, with this figure expecting to rise to $2,970 million by 2007, according to Tim Mui, senior analyst of mobile devices at IDC.

-- Picture messaging makes up 95 percent of all MMS according to Mui.

-- Camera phones are most popular in Britain, Germany and Italy, accounting for 58 percent of the total Western European camera phone market, according to Dunn.

-- The lowest sales are seen in Ireland".

T-Mobile aims to boost picture messaging through events

T-Mobile is hosting five concerts in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Dallas and Los Angeles, which will be supported through a range of mobile services.

Concert goes will be encouraged to take their camera phones to the events and send pictures to a special web-site, where people from around the country will be able to watch a live webcast of the music. Users will also be able to download themed ringtones and receive trivia on their favourite artists by text message, according to PMN.

The BBC trials two way MMS service at the Notting Hill carnival

The BBC offered a two way MMS service at the Notting Hill carnival -one of Europe's largest events - this weekend in the UK, as a free trial for both 02 and Vodafone customers, according to 160characters.org .

Carnival goers were invited to send in their camera phone snaps by MMS or email to the BBC London team. In addition to being posted online - check out the slideshow - the best pictures were sent out to participant's mobiles.

This is the first time the BBC have sent outbound MMS. But the BBC has been receiving MMS pictures by email in BBC's News Online "In Pictures" section, enabling readers to submit their own photos to the news mix since last March, to capture their everyday life, and the BBC has even put up calls for photo assignments, such as asking the public for photo essays in the run-up to World AIDS Day on December 1 and the February Peace in Iraq London demonstrations.

And in a related festival event, this year, the The Edinburgh Festival!
offered picture phone users the opportunity to participate in a competitition, "Photograph your festival" to win a Nokia 7250i and a weekend at the Carlton Hotel. cf Photograph your Edinburgh Festival!.

Forecasting the use of cameras in mobile phones by examining weblogging in Poland

Justin Hall for the TheFeature.com, looks into the impact of cameras in mobile phones, changing not only the way we interact with our devices, but the way we interact with our governments, our pop stars, strangers and our most intimate relations. And Justin forecasts the use of cameras in mobile phones by examining weblogging in Poland.

"As camera phones grow increasingly popular in each country where they are offered, the chance for a snapshot will loom large with every occasion. There should be a massive explosion in citizen photography. And as people begin snapping away around the world, it's not going to be long before they want to share their photographs online".

New Moblogs on the Block

mLogs is a free hosted mobile blogging service, allwoing users to create their own customized web site. They can send text messages, pictures and even record their own voice and save it as an mp3 on their mLogs web site.

Xeni Jardin on boingboing picked up blogger co-founder Evan Williams' phonecamblog and moblogging.org has an entry dated August 14 entitled "Links a'plenty", listing new mobloggers with "the prize for best named new moblog going to Click Mo Mukha Mo".

Jong-Zuid: First picture soap opera for mobile phones

Holland, the country who brought to television the first "Big Brother" reality show in 1999, is now innovating with the first picture soap opera, Jong-Zuid. The technology is not exactly MMS, but WAP-push, a function of most color-screen phones. It's sort of a "photo romantic" (at least that what they used to be called in the Netherlands, "roman photos" in French), a story involving love and romance told through pictures and read by adolescent girls.

What's interesting is that Jong-Zuid actually has famous Dutch TV-soap actors starring in it.

Viewers can either follow the episodes on the website or sign up for updates on their cell phone where they receive several times a day, pictures and a short text underneath describing a situation. See the demo online - in Dutch, but you'll get the message!

(Thanks Mitch!)

Big Brother technology for everyone

Glasgow-based Essential Viewing has produced a video software package which, it claims, can send high quality streaming video over narrow bandwidth connections.

The software called 'Essential Video Military Edition' is said to compress video to an extremely high level while maintaining video quality and sends it over any network with very low latency. Previous versions of the technology could only send still pictures.

The system has already been picked up by the US Navy for use in Iraq and is to be offered to security and police forces around the world.

According to PCPro , this means 'a soldier or intelligence agent in the field can film an on-going situation and relay what he can see in realtime.

The company plans to develop a version for use on mobile phones that will enable anyone to view high quality video of their home, office or car.

snapping your locker

Young Japanese users take pictures of the lockers with their camera-equipped phones before they leave. cf Cell phones open lockers.

U.S. photo messaging market to reach $440M by 2008

More happy forecasting. In yet another study, this time by the Zelos Group, the U.S. market for photo messaging services is expected to grow from $10.3 million in 2003 to $440 million by 2008.

The study predicts that in the short term camera phones will not replace high quality digital cameras. Camera phones will be used for social interaction and for posting quick pictures to the Web.

The study does predict that the market will eventually emerge for high-end digital camera phones, but that these handsets will not arrive in the U.S. in volume for 18 months. High-end camera phones will not rival stand-alone digital cameras until 2005, reports Fierce Wireless

Camera phones likely Christmas presents

In yet another study on picture phone sales, this time released by analyst firm ARC Group, more than 55 million consumers worldwide will own camera-phone handsets by the end of 2003, more than doubling from the 25 million mobile units sold in 2002, according to InfoSync.

Locate camera phones thanks to "Spy Finder"

For businesses worried about protecting their trade secrets and want to do more than just pin a note on the door warning visitors that camera phones are banned from their premises, they can buy a Spy Finder for a hefty $2,895 price tag, enabling to quickly identify and locate hidden cameras. The device is sold by Canadian company Spy Stuff, specializing in the retail of state-of-the-art security (spy) products.

Asia Pacific to rule Mobile Data

Telecompetition's "Worldwide Mobility Report: 2003" summarized by Unstrung is so filled with stats, predictions, estimated sales and advanced mobile data revenue figures, mobile subscribers in different regions of the world, that it's a must reference for anyone trying to nail the future or needing to beef up their Power Point Presentation for a wireless conference.

Random Excerpts:

-- "Asia Pacific will lead the world in adoption of multimedia enhanced "Advanced Mobile Data" services with $19B in annual revenue and a 40% share of the world market by 2005".

-- "By 2007, two of the top three countries are in the Asia Pacific Region. In first place is China, where mobile data subscribers are expected to quadruple to 256M subscribers, making it the single largest market for both mobile voice and mobile data. The United States will then be the second largest market with 211M mobile data subscribers. Japan is third, with 102M mobile data subscribers."

Photoblogging the Blackout

People are using camera phones to capture and view images concerning the blackout. See pictures posted to blackout.textamerica.com. Thanks Michael!

A surge of electricity to western New York and Canada touched off a series of power failures that left parts of at least eight states in the Northeast and the Midwest without electricity, according to the NY Times.

TeLUS Mobility offers wireless "Picture of the Day" from The Canadian Press

Services offering mobile subscribers picture alerts instead of text alerts from newswires on their handsets is definitely a fast growing trend.

Following last week's post on sports photo agency Empics plan to offer picture alerts of the latest sports news to mobile phones, wireless operator TeLUS Mobility and The Canadian Press Picture Service (Canada's national multimedia news agency) have announced that TeLUS clients across Canada can now download images from today's top news stories directly to their wireless phones.

This new"Picture of the Day" service, provides clients with the latest sports, entertainment, news or business photo highlights.

Clients choose a category when signing up for the service - sports, entertainment, news or business - and receive a free text message each weekday linking them to descriptions of the day's pictures from their selecte categories. Clients are charged only for images actually downloaded, according to a press release in newswire.

Microsoft-Intel phone to launch soon

Something not to look forward to... Does the world really need a Microsoft phone? This autumn, the likes of Nokia and Texas Instruments will face the combined might of Intel and Microsoft, as the pair launch a new mobile phone.

The new phone, called the Mio8380 will run on Microsoft's Smartphone 2002 operating system.

Apart from standard voice functions, the new phone will be capable of playing music and video, sending e-mail, taking pictures and keeping a diary, according to details on the Mitac Website., according to Electronic News net.

Police test “snap trap” approach

Tayside Police (Scotland) are equipping officers with 6 picture phones donated by Mobile operator Orange, for a trial-run crime-busting initiative to tackle persistent graffiti vandals, according to an article in the Evening Telegraph.

The innovative pilot, the only one of its kind in Scotland, means officers can now photograph graffiti and identify individuals responsible for multiple instances of vandalism by looking at distinctive signatures and styles.

Divisional Commander, Chief Superintendent Ian Alexander said, “The pictures can be emailed straight from the scene and stored on a database, a bit like fingerprints. We collect the images and can charge an individual with numerous offences rather than just one.”

MMS a big hit in Abu Dhabi

A staggering 75,000 mobile phone users have joined (Abu Dhabi) Etisalat's multi media messaging (MMS) service in just one month and officials expect the rush for the service to continue, according to The Gulf News.

Though it's off to a great start, Etisalat is hosting a series of consumer road shows in the major shopping malls in the UAE. The campaign includes setting up MMS stands that will host mobile phone experts and advanced handsets to educate the public on the MMS services. Visitors can use those handsets to send and receive MMS messages and register with the service there.

Elsewhere, other (more fun) campaign :

As part of its marketing campaign to promote the T68i mobile phone with add-on camera, SonyEricsson hired 120 actors last year to play tourists and invite passers-by to take their picture using the new multimedia phone. Critics hailed it as the ultimate in guerrilla marketing but SonyEricsson insisted the 60-day campaign was all in good fun.

The $5 million campaign ran in seven US cities and the actor-tourists targeted attractions such as the Empire State Building in New York and the Space Needle in Seattle, according to the BBC.

Vodafone Germany launches MMS video clip service

Vodafone Germany has launched a weekly service that sends the MTV Top 10 videoclips as Video MMS messages to Vodafone subscribers every Monday, according to Moco News.

Chinese firm unveils mobile wrist cameraphone

A James Bond-Q style gadget has been launched by a Chinese Government-run electronics conglomerate, CEC (China Electronics Corporation). It's a tiny, pricey wristphone that packs in features found in larger phones, such as a keypad, colour screen and camera, according to ZDNet.

One shudders to think how such a gadget could be misused... if one masters the tiny keypad unobtrusively. Are wirstwatches next to be banned from fitness centers?

[photo from Gizmodo]

Camera phones click in U.S. market

The camera-phone craze appears to have officially hit the United States, with Sprint PCS and Verizon Wireless both boasting of millions of picture messages passing over their networks every month, reports RCR News.

-- Sprint, which sold the first integrated camera phone in the United States in 2001 has announced that it's subscribers have sent more than 10 million pictures over its PCS network in the second quarter.

-- Verizon Wireless announced its customers shared more than 1 million picture messages in less than 30 days since the service launch July 8.

"The big hurdle in North America is interoperability. Right now, the sender and receiver of a cell-phone image have to be on the same network for instant, peer-to-peer messaging. The hurdle is not technical; it's economic and political. It comes down to money and territory. The various carriers have to decide how to divvy up the revenues." said analyst Tony Henning with Future Image.

Firefighters are testing an emergency photo messaging scheme to help save more lives

Fourteen Scottish officers have been equiped with camera phones on a trial basis, and will be sending picture of injuries to doctors (of Queen Margaret Hospital in Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy's Victoria Infirmary) by MMS before patients reach the hospital. Seeing the images beforehand will allow the doctors to assess how serious the injury is, allowing for vital treatment in the early stages.

The trial in the Fife region will run for six months and then its impact will be reviewed, according to the BBC.

In a related post on Picturephoning.com, Doctors use picture phones, senior doctors at a Welsh hospital are allowing interns to send them picture messages of an X-ray by mobile phone, to speed up the diagnosis and suggested treatment process.