April 3, 2007
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
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