Mobile Exposure Mobile Video and Art Festival 3: "Life in the Global Village"

Microcinema International is putting out a call for their third annual short film traveling festival of films made BY mobile devices, Mobile Exposure.

This year they are expanding the definition of mobile devices to include wearable computers as well as portable gaming systems and have added an interactive art.

This year's theme of Mobile Exposure is "Life in the Global Village", where we ask what it means to live in a world where mobile technologies continue to put us in increasingly closer proximity to one another, other places, and other cultures.

Items like the Egyptian voting scandal mentioned on your blog are topics that we'd like addressed in this year's call.

Newt Gingrich makes apology on YouTube

On Wednesday, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who's mulling a White House run, apologized in a YouTube video for his recent remarks equating bilingual education with "the language of living in a ghetto." CThe Washington Post reports.

"The apology was delivered in English and Spanish, with the three-minute Spanish video, "Mensaje de Newt Gingrich," subtitled in English. Can't get any more bilingual than that."

RFID Tags Keep Sponges Out Of Surgery Patients

Siemens and other companies are starting to embed RFID chips in surgical sponges, reports The Raw Feed.

"Doctors attached RFID chips to surgical sponges and then waved a wand over a patient after surgery. The chips alerted the doctor if a sponge was left inside 100 percent of the time".

According to ABC Action News, "out of the 40 million surgeries performed in the United States each year, about 1,500 Americans will leave the operating room with a surgical instrument left in their body. Sometimes it does no harm, but in some cases the consequences are deadly."

Free Mobile Broadcasts to Be Available Nationwide in May

According to The Korea Times, as of next month, South Koreans will be able to watch free TV programs on their mobile handsets not merely in Seoul and its vicinity but also across the country.

"The Ministry of Information and Communication yesterday said it gave licenses to KBS and MBC, the country's two top TV outlets, to start nationwide mobile broadcasting called terrestrial DMB.

... Terrestrial DMB debuted in December 2005 for the first time in the world but its coverage has been restricted to Seoul and the surrounding Kyonggi Province."

PixelMeTV: user generated mobile porn

PixelMeTV allows users to upload (porn) videos and then receive a percentage of the income when the clip is downloaded. Pocket Picks reports.

We’re planning to turn the PixMeTV platform into the first place that ordinary members of the public go to buy and sell their home-made adult mobile movies” Ed Baker, Director of PixMeTV told Mobile Business".

Teens charged over camphone filmed gang rape

Sydney police say they have now charged all five teenagers arrested over a gang rape, filmed using a mobile phone camera. [via News.com.au]

"... Police say the alleged sex attack was recorded on a mobile phone video camera. Copies of the video are circulating among school students, and police warn anyone caught sending the footage faces up to three years' jail.

Police are now trying to stop the video circulating and to trace who has possessed it, and passed it on."

Police Search For Suspect Caught On Camera Phone In Queens

Police in Queens are searching for a suspect wanted for grand larceny, aided by a cameraphone picture.
NY1 reports.

"A man riding the Q-27 from Queens bus snatched a T-Mobile Sidekick out of the hands of a passenger while the bus was pulling up to a stop.

The man then ran off the bus, but the passenger followed him and used her camera phone to take his picture. "

Camera phone bumblebee watch

Scotland's Bumblebee Conservation Trust, in what is considered a first, will invite the public to send in bee sightings so it can build up a map of where its 25 species are.

Dave Goulson, of the trust, said people would get help identifying the different species.

He said: "People with digital cameras or a camera on their mobile phones can send us pictures of the bumblebees in their garden and we will send them back an identification. If people send us the date and a postcode of where the bumblebee was seen then we will be able put together a national map."

Related - Cellphones identify birds The Swiss Association for the Protection of Birds has launched a short code enabling mobile uses to connect to a WAP site, so that bird lovers can identify a birds' song by browsing through a database.

Who invented the camera phone? It depends

The heartwarming story of how Borland founder Philippe Kahn invented the camera phone in a hospital room while his wife was having a baby is being put under the microscope by C/Net's editor, Michael Kanellos, who claims it's not quite accurate, and that Kahn was "not the first person to cross-breed the digital camera and the cell phone".

"This part is true, Kahn's wife did have a baby in January 1997 and Kahn did rig up all that stuff and post pictures to a Web site. The experiment eventually led to LightSurf, which he sold for $270 million to VeriSign in 2005.

But earlier, in 1994, Olympus released a camera called the Deltis VC-1100, which contained built-in functionality that let users upload digital photos over cellular and analog phone lines.

More details and a timeline of the technologies that followed...

Related: - Baby's arrival inspires birth of cellphone camera — and societal evolution

EGYPT: Video blogs expose vote fraud in referendum

Egyptian blogs have published amateur video footage purporting to show ballot stuffing and vote fraud in a nationwide referendum on constitutional amendments which opposition groups say was rigged, reports Asia Media via Smart Mobs.

"A handful of video clips, most of which appear to be taken by mobile phone cameras and circulated on Egyptian blogs and websites, contain some of the first images of alleged fraud in the vote and could reinforce the accusations of vote-fixing.

In one of three clips, a man purported to be an election official in the Nile Delta appears to mark names on a voter list, then folds a pile of ballots and stuffs them into a transparent vote box. A close-up of one of the ballots shows it is marked with a "yes" vote.

Justice Ministry officials declined immediate comment."

I found one video on Youtube entitled Election Fraud in Egypt

Rogers launches video calling service that turns cellphones into webcams

With a new service launched Monday by Rogers Wireless Inc., cellphone users will for the first time in North America be able to use video calling on their handsets, allowing them to see and hear the person they're talking to in real-time via webcam. cbc.ca reports.

"To see each other, callers at both ends of the conversation have to use the Rogers Vision Samsung A706 handset model.

The webcam is set up so that users have to face the screen and talk over a speakerphone. Users can also click a button to activate a camera on the opposite side of the phone to show the person on the other end of the line what they're seeing.

The phones also offer high-speed Internet and multimedia services, including mobile television and downloadable radio and video-on-demand clips from sources like YouTube.com, XM Satellite and Rogers MusicStore."

Andy Warhol Branded Cameraphone

In the continued spirit of celebration of pop culture artist Andy Warhol, Cingular and Nokia have announced the launch of a limited edition Andy Warhol branded camera phone, to be released this summer.

The phone will feature a 3.2 megapixel camera with a zoom for portrait taking and will instantly upload photos to an online gallery, where they will be "warholized".

The cylindric shaped cell phone will be multicolored, reminiscent of his famous Campbell soup can renderings and will come pre-loaded with an image gallery of some his most famous paintings as well as a ringtone that will say in his own voice: "In the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.”

It will be packaged with a numbered print of his "cell phones" painting (picture left). Retail price is expected at $1,500.

[via e-mail press release]

New Bar Codes Can Talk With Your Cellphone

The New York Times has a lengthy article on barcodes read by cameraphones, allowing users to connect everyday objects with the Internet - and the many ways this technology has been used in Japan for years now. And how it's (slowly) starting to appear in the US, such as on several state drivers’ licenses or on some mailing labels, mostly for commercial use.

"In their new incarnation, cellphones become a sort of digital remote control, as one CBS executive put it. With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen.

... The most promising way to link cellphones with physical objects is a new generation of bar codes: square-shaped mosaics of black and white boxes that can hold much more information than traditional bar codes. The cameras on cellphones scan the codes, and then the codes are translated into videos, music or text on the phone screens.

... In Japan, some highway billboards have codes large enough for passing motorists to read them with their phones. Hospitals put them on prescriptions, allowing pharmacies to instantly scan the medical information rather than read it. Supermarkets stick them on meat and egg packaging to give expiration dates and even the names of the farmers who produced them.

One of the most popular uses in Japan has been paperless airline tickets. About 10 percent of the people who take domestic flights of All Nippon Airways now use the codes on their cellphones instead of printed tickets."

Read more.