"Taking Pictures with Mobile Phones" by Peter de Ruiter

Peter de Ruiter is a photographer and a writer (from The Netherlands) of books on photography, helping people to take better pictures with their digital camera. He has just started writing his 4th book on the subject: Taking pictures with mobile phones (cover left). It will be published in The Netherlands by November 2006.

In his last book (December 2006) I already included a booklet called 'India by photo mobile'. It contains 'the forst photo report with a camphone ever', as wel as tips on how to make better use you camphone. See pictures on www.fotomobieltje.nl.

Celebrate the moment. Don't photograph it

An English photographer is urging the people of the world to take a day out and stop taking pictures, reports the BBC.

"Becca Bland has launched "non-photography day" - planned for 17 July - through a Website together with a sticker and flyposter campaign in various cities in England.

She's even suggesting a "non-photography police" - a dedicated group who would tell people about the day when they see them taking pictures on the street.

She explained that she wanted people to "put your camera down and appreciate the moment you are in". "Experience life in an unmediated fashion, without anything in front of your eyes. Live in the moment," she added. "

Related:

-- Camera Phones Kill Memories

-- Cameraphone Insight

-- Snap unhappy - digital photography's dirty little secret

-- Capture the moment with eyes, not cameras

-- Picture Phones mark a change in social record-keeping

-- The future of digital cameras

-- Digital era 'a threat to memories'

-- How camera phones will affect print and digital cameras

Nokia plans new mobile TV trial

Reuters reports that Nokia will launch a commercial mobile TV trial with radio and TV operator Teracom in Sweden later this year.

"The test, to be run in Stockholm from October to December, will allow 400 consumers to watch 14 TV channels and listen to four radio channels using Nokia N92 mobiles, the Finnish company said in a statement.

Nokia said it also would supply the broadcast system for the pilot scheme, using DVB-H (digital video broadcasting handheld) technology, which bypasses regular telecoms networks by broadcasting directly to mobile phones."

Flickr searching for the best user photos

In a bid to come up with five of its users' best images, the photo-sharing site Flickr, is currently having a contest to do just that. Daniel Terdiman reports on News.com.

To participate in The Blink of an Eye contest, users can each submit one photo, and then a panel of five judges will sift through them (there are already 1,490 images up for consideration) and choose the best five.

Those shots will then be put on display for a one-night exhibition at a gallery in New York in August."

Being the star of your own commercials

Personalization and viral marketing reaches new heights with Personiva, a company which transforms brands into personlized experiences. [via digg]

How does it work?

Your customers upload their picture. Personiva instantly puts your customer in your commercial. Your commercial becomes their commercial.

Your customers can then share their commercial with family, friends, on the Web, on mobile phones, on portable players.

Your customer's friends and family upload their pictures. Personiva instantly puts them in your commercial. Your commercial becomes their commercial.

They share their commercial and soon your reach millions of new customers in a highy personal, engaging ways.

Who's using it? Hewlett Packard is.

Rocketboom is to charge advertisers $85,000 a week

Rocketboom is said to be drawing 300,000 viewers a day to it's videoblog, and is about to start charging advertisers $85,000 a week, reports The Economist in an article entitled "Blogging off", June 15th edition.

The article is about Robert Scoble's leaving Microsoft to join PODTech.net, "a rising star in video podcasting, which is now far more fashionable than blogging and potentially far more lucrative. It seems that Mr Scoble is most impressed by Rocketboom, " writes The Economist.

SAY CHEESE, YOU SLEAZE!

Camera phones are becoming the frontline defense for women to stop subway perverts in their tracks, experts say, reports The New York Post via Alan Reiter's Camera Phone Report.

"Self-defense pros say the power to humiliate flashers and gropers by exposing their overexposure with a snapshot is an even more powerful weapon for women than a can of Mace or kick in the groin.

A plan proposed by City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. consists of posting photos of convicted gropers and flashers inside subway."If it were up to me, I'd expose these sleazy riders to the third rail," Vallone told The Post. "But since exposure is what they want, that's what they should get. There should be a public wall of shame on every subway line."

... But while many say technology could turn the tide against this age-old crime, others aren't content just to take pictures.

"Why do that?" asked Diana Tavarez, 23, of Manhattan, waiting on the platform at the Rockefeller Center station. "Just punch them like a true New Yorker would."

Other vigilante schemes:

-- Mothers recruited as camera phone vigilantes - Mothers armed with camera phones are helping Manteca Police (California) collar young vandals trying to trash Woodward Park

-- Holla Back The Holla Back NYC website encourages women to photograph sexual harassers and post the photos for the world to see.

-- Harlow council uses MMS to catch vandals - The town is encouraging people to take pictures of anti-social acts on their mobile phones and then text them to a special number along with details of where the vandalism has occurred.

-- Snap a picture of a traffic offender - The Transport Ministry of Malaysia invited the public snap pictures of traffic offenders and send them to the Hall of Shame section of a newly launched road safety website.

Good reading:

-- Cell Phone Vigilantes - A well written and well rounded article by Bennett Gordon from Understanding the next revolution on cameraphones, citizen journalism, the privacy issues surrounding localisation and the availability (for a fee) of cell phone records.

KTF tests global webcam calls

Mobile communication technology reached new heights with a recent test of international webcam conversations using mobile phones, reports JoongAng Daily.

"KTF tested the call between Korea and Germany by connecting its HSDPA network with Germany's largest mobile communication company T-Mobile's W-CDMA network. The test took place Friday ― the day Korea lost to Switzerland in the World Cup.

... The HSDPA system is a 3.5-generation mobile technology, which is a level higher than third generation W-CDMA. The technology allows high-speed transfers of data, which makes webcam conversations possible."

Always in the camera's eye

These days, surveillance cameras aren't just mounted on buildings and satellites, controlled by government and businesses. Now they're carried by a nation obsessed with its own image. USA Today reports.

"Kids snap cellphone pictures at parties and instantly put them on the Web; fans who nab photos of unsuspecting celebrities share them on celebrity-watch sites. The guy in the car next to you is leaning out of his window, taking a video that he later uploads to a video site where it could be seen by dozens or hundreds of people — maybe even millions.

... While many, especially young people, think it's all fun, privacy watchers are eyeing the new trend, trying to gauge just how it will affect us legally and shape us socially.

"We're going to be a society where tons and tons of photographs and information about us are available online without our consent," says Jason Schultz, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Privacy is sometimes something we don't realize we value except in hindsight."

It's not that most citizen videographers are looking to violate anyone's privacy.

Aside from the legal issues, however, social scientists worry about the way the ever-present lens already is affecting society.

Just the knowledge that cameras are everywhere can "have a chilling effect," says psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It can give people "a sense of living your life on camera and living your life potentially being watched."

That changes behavior, adds Howard Rheingold, an author and consultant on online communities. "It forms an environment in which the assumption that there's a camera around is more and more part of your daily awareness. This assumption you're being watched internalizes surveillance."

World Cup Camera Phone Contest!

The The RegHardwareis launching it's own mobile World Cup competition, to find out which camera pone takes the best shots.

In their own words:

"Can a Nokia take a more striking snap than a Motorola? Does a Sony Ericsson punt a better picture than an LG? Is Samsung a player? We'd like you to help us find out.

Every day throughout the remainder of the FIFA World Cup 2006 tournament, starting Monday, 26 June 2006 we'll run what we think is the best World Cup-related picture taken on any camera phone and emailed in by Reg Hardware readers the day before.

... The only rules are that shots have to be taken on a phone and they must be correctly emailed to competitions@theregister.co.uk with "world cup" in the subject line. The compo closes at midnight BST, 9 July 2006.

You also need to tell us where and when the pic was taken, by whom and - crucially - on what kind of handset.

... You'd don't have to attend a match to take part, but photos snapped at the event will score extra points."

The Talking Camera. For the visually impaired

Not a camera phone, but interesting and who knows, maybe someday this device will be a phone too.

Gizmag reports on a talking camera launched by the National Federation of the Blind for the blind or visually impaired.

Its called the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader and combines a digital camera with character recognition software and with text-to-speech conversion technology.

Users need only hold the Reader over print-a restaurant menu, an airline ticket, a business card, a school assignment, an office memo-and in seconds they hear the contents of the printed document played back in clear synthetic speech.

... The Reader reads most printed documents, address labels, package information, and instructions with ease. It offers readers a choice of hearing a full page, or just a few lines for identification purposes."

Fixr

fixr offers to close the gaps in the digital record of your life, like a missed photo opportunity. All you need to do is submit a detailled description of the moment you missed to fixr and they'll find you a flickr photo to match it.

[via [BB-Blog]

freeSTYLE. A singing music video created entirely from cell phones

Cell phones offer an extension of one's identity. Users can send messages to freeSTYLE and, in return, they will hear and see their messages free-styled back to them with an added beat. Guided by a hip-hop beat of choice, users can hear and see their mobile presence in the form of a living music video.

By Dana Karwas, a media artist whose work and academic interests span the spectrum between art, architecture, and technology. She has taught at Harvestworks NYC digital media center, Columbia University, and will be presenting a workshop at Ubicomp 2006.

[via Beyond TV]

Extortr

Spotted on Scoopt blog. A spoof extortion site involving camera phones or any other camera for that matter.

Extortr

You're being blackmailed using the most technologically advanced extortion service in the world, Extortr . If you haven't already, you should go to the web address in the email you were sent, to check that the photo or video that we have is genuine. If it's not, lucky you — you can let the timer next to it expire witout worry. If it is genuine, we recommend clicking on the "Pay Now" button as soon as possible in order to make sure that the material stays private.

And read the fine print:

This isn't actually a genuine web site. It's just a joke..

Alan Reiter launches Mobile Television Report blog

Alan Reiter who's well known by picturephoning readers for his Camera Phone Report, launched a new blog a few weeks ago that I've been meaning to mention, Mobile Television Report, all about the global business of mobile television. Add to your RSS feeds!

DoCoMo To Release Camera-Free Corporate Cell Phones

NTT DoCoMo is launching a mobile phone this month without a camera function, targeted to corporations - "to prevent data leaks caused by employees photographing documents or other sensitive information", according to Nikkei.net.

Related:

-- Siemens new business phone - without a camera - The company's marketing stand on the SP65 is that it is a phone which "supports corporate security policies which prohibit employees to use handsets with cameras".

-- "Camera-less" cell phone - "Camera-less" - the selling point behind the launch of a new handset, the T-Mobile SDA.

-- Sprint puts lens cap on camera phones - The corporate backlash against mobile phones with built-in cameras has spurred Sprint to remove the lens from one of their best-selling models.

The word: Sousveillance

New scientist reports on sousveillance.

"... Sousveillance is a French play on the word surveillance. Literally, it means "watching from below", while all those surveillance cameras in shopping centres and railway stations watch you from above. Sousveillance is the democratic version of the surveillance culture: the watched are turning cameras on the watchers.

One of the first to use the term was Steve Mann, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, Canada, and co-author of Cyborg.

Image left: Sousveillance as a situationist critique of surveillance. This wearable wireless webcam imitates surveillance cameras common in casinos and department stores. [via wikipedia]

Related:

-- Mobile Phone Sousveillance In Action Again

-- The Connected Camera Fights Back

RFIDsec launches privacy-enabled RFID tag

RFIDSec announced the availability of the "world's first series of RFID solutions that completely block unauthorized access to a RFID tag," according to the company press release. [via RFIDNews]

" With the RFIDsec goods, you get the possibility of differentiated access using a patent pending and secure access management system.

You also get the option of shutting off the tag at the point of sale - using the RFIDsec unique feature "Silent Mode."

Nick Jr. offers previews on Web, telephones

As further evidence of its commitment to be everywhere its audience is, Nick Jr. is using Web and mobile platforms to give a glimpse of its newest animated preschool show before it hits TV. Reuters reports.

"Beginning Tuesday, the network will launch music videos and character segments of "Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!" simultaneously on wireless carriers, Nick Jr. video, Nick Jr.'s broadband service, on air, and over "The Wubbcast," a video podcast of preschooler programming."

Anti-Camera' System Blocks Unwanted Digital Photography

The Georgia Institute of Technology reports that researchers have completed a prototype device that can block digital-camera function in a given area.

"The small-area product could prevent espionage photography in government buildings, industrial settings or trade shows. It could also be used in business settings -- for instance, to stop amateur photography where shopping-mall-Santa pictures are being taken.

The system works by looking for the reflectivity and shape of the image-producing sensors used in digital cameras." You can hear more about it in today's show on mobuzz.tv.

Related:

-- 'Privacy zone' blocks camera phones - Iceberg Systems' Safe Haven, testing in 2003, could automatically switch off camera phones to protect industrial secrets and private areas.

Happy Slapping hits Singapore

Color renderings from The Electric New Paper's account of a "happy slapping" incident in Singapore, where three girls assaulted another girl.

" Such aggression is not new, said Mr David Kan, counsellor and executive director of the Family Life Centre.

All that is new is how assailants are using handphone cameras to record their actions, as such video recording becomes more commonplace.

... Mr Adrian Lim, the managing director of Tyem Academy which equips out-of-school youths with career academic programmes, has seen videos showing girls beating up other girls.

He explained that such clips are the teenagers' way of saying 'don't play punk with me. I'm quite fierce; see what I'm capable of'.

Mr Lim said: 'This is reality TV brought to the handphone level."

Camera phones now used by robbers on subways

In the Philippines, according to Inq.7, after identifying potential victims near a subway's ticket booth, robbers use their cameraphones to photograph them and send the snapshots on to an accomplice further down the line - who robs their bag.

Camera offers slimming feature

File under wish list for camera phones.

One of the fun effects of HP's new Photosmart R927 digital camera is the "slimming" feature, making subjects look 5 to 15 pounds thinner, reports BizToolBelt via digg.

"This 8.2 megapixel camera offers 3 levels of slimming, with the option to undo the effect should the result turn out awkward. The original picture is saved separately.

DoCoMo Cell Phone Can Test Whether Drivers Have Been Drinking

According to Nikkei.net, NTT DoCoMo Inc. has developed a system that will let bus, taxi and truck companies use cellular phones to determine from remote locations whether their drivers have been drinking alcohol.

"To conduct such a test, a small breath-alcohol sensor is attached to one of DoCoMo's FOMA 3G handsets. The driver breathes into the sensor and the results of the test are transmitted via FOMA's network to a manager's personal computer.

To prevent cheating, the manager will be able to verify whether the driver in question performed the test by using FOMA's videophone functions."

Related:

-- Siemens working on breathalyzer cellphone (2004) - Siemens is supposedly working on a mobile phone with a gas sensor built-in. "This sensor could be used for dedecting the alcohol concentration in the users blood via breath analytics. The sensors could also be used to detect ozon concentration in the air or if the user has bad breath.

-- German Mobile Phone to Detect Bad Breath - Siemens is developing the first mobile phone that will detect unpleasant odors. "A research team in the southern city of Munich is developing the device using new sensor technology. It examines the air in the immediate vicinity for anything from bad breath and alcohol to atmospheric gas levels," the spokeswoman said. "Some people take smelling good rather seriously."

Are you Circle Worth? Video Contest

The AtomFilms Website is calling on consumers to submit original short films.

The contest invites wireless phone users to submit video clips, filmed on their wireless handset, featuring their circle of friends and family.

Alltel Wireless is giving away cash prizes to the most interesting and unique Circles of friends in its Are You Circle Worthy? Video Contest.

The 10 most entertaining, original, and creative videos will win $1,000 and have their video displayed on AtomFilms for the public to vote on a winner. The Circle deemed most outrageous will take home $5,000. Entries are due by 11:59PM PT 7/10/06.

Click here for the official rules.

Yahoo Wants Citizen Journalism

Yahoo! News plans to launch a citizen video-journalist news service at the end of June that will act as a collection and publication site for news videos generated by the public. Red Herring reports.

"Sources involved in discussions with Yahoo News said the project, which has been in development for months, will introduce an upload capability that will take the PC out of the connectivity loop, so amateur video journalists can upload footage directly from the location of the event.

The idea for the citizen journalist site was inspired by the aftermath of London bombings a year ago, where dramatic photos taken by average citizens with cell phone cameras lent an aura of immediacy to the dramatic events."

Party-goes take camera phone photos of dying 15 year old girl

Partygoers who saw a 15-year-old girl fatally shot at a middle school graduation party used their camera phones to record images of her as she lay dying, reports CBS via Alan Reiter's Camera Phone Report.

This reminds of another horrific story that happened in Birmingham lat July, where youths used camera phones to take pictures of a young boy who impaled himself on his bicycle, hampering the work of firefighters.

Italian directors shoot 93-minute film with cameraphone

Italian directors have completed a 93-minute documentary they say is the first feature film to be entirely shot by such a technique. (Not the first by my books*, but the longest - a 35mm feature film entitled Sugar Man was shot with the Sony Ericsson W900i last year).

Called "New Love Meetings," it was filmed in a MPEG4 format with a Nokia N90 -- a regular, higher-end cell phone on sale around the globe, documentary co-director Marcello Mencarini said.

"With the widespread availability of cell phones equipped with cameras, anybody could do this," Mencarini said in a telephone interview from Milan. "If you want to say something nowadays, thanks to the new media, you can."

[PhysOrg via The Raw Feed]

*The world’s first full-length movie to be shot entirely on cellphones - entitled SMS Sugar Man - was wrapped up in Johannesburg last Fall. The 35mm feature film was shot by Aryan Kaganof, the prolific writer/director of numerous feature films, shorts and videos.

car-parazzi - Am-I-hot(rod)-or not

car-parazzi is all about cars and car-sighting snaperazzis. A new twist on Am-I-hot(rod)-or not. [via digg]

Founded by car-crazy kids, they invite sports car, classic or hot rod lovers to send in their car photo or video sightings - and vote on their favorites.

"3G for all" Program

At a meeting yesterday in India, the board of the GSM Association approved a "3G for all" program to bring 3G multimedia services and mobile Internet access to many more people in both the developed and the developing worlds. [Press Release]

"Over the next few months, a group of operator members of the GSMA plan to establish a core set of common requirements for 3G handsets to create the economies of scale that will allow mobile phone suppliers to rapidly bring down the cost of manufacturing these high-tech devices.

Under the initiative, which builds on the success of the GSMA's Emerging Market Handset programme, mobile phone suppliers will compete to design a 3G handset that meets the operators' common requirements.

The GSMA will endorse the winning handset, which will be widely deployed by operators participating in the program.

Links to articles related to low cost handsets