Cell phones help filmmakers reveal unseen Africa

Resourceful African filmmakers are using cell phones tell their stories in spite of political censorship. CNN reports.

Kiripi Katembo Siku, an art school student from the Democratic Republic of Congo is one such director who shot his first film using only a mobile phone.

The ingeniously devised "Voiture en Carton" ("Cardboard Car") provides a rare glimpse of street-life in Kinshasa, the country's capital, while highlighting the lengths filmmakers must go to in circumventing the eye of the law.

While the country's name implies freedom of speech, filmmakers in the country's capital are restricted by government censorship.

To get around these problems, Siku came up with a novel plan.

He attached his mobile phone to a toy car, set it to film, and gave it to a young girl to pull behind her on a piece of string as she walked through the streets of Kinshasa.

The film runs for seven minutes, during which time the toy car stops and starts (it also upends a number of times and has to be righted by Siku's young camerawoman) giving viewers a clandestine look at life in the capital -- the dancing feet of children, some teenagers gambling, and at one point a United Nations jeep passing by.

Siku is one of a number of filmmakers in DR Congo who say using a mobile phone allows them to film in ways that were previously impossible.

Read full article.

Prosecutor sued over semi-nude teen photos case

The American Civil Liberties Union sued a Pennsylvania prosecutor on Wednesday over his threats to charge three teenage girls with child pornography for allowing themselves to be photographed partly clothed with cellphone cameras. Reuters reports.

The case involves the growing practice among teens of "sexting," a play on the term texting, in which nude or semi-nude photos are sent on cell phones or posted on the Internet.

Pictures showing two of the girls wearing white bras, and another standing topless with a towel wrapped around her waist were discovered by school officials in October 2008, the ACLU said. The pictures did not show any sexual activity.

... "Kids should be taught that sharing digitized images of themselves in embarrassing or compromised positions can have bad consequences, but prosecutors should not be using heavy artillery ...to teach them that lesson," said Witold Walczak, ACLU Pennsylvania legal director.

Streaming TV Episodes Coming to Blackberry

RIM is planning to announce a full-episode television service for BlackBerry users as early as next week at CTIA. The service is part of RIM’s effort to turn itself into an attractive multimedia option for non iPhone users. The streaming videos would most certainly coincide with the release of Blackberry App World.

[via GigaOM]

Find untagged photos of your Facebook friends with Face.com’s Photo Finder

This one is kinda scary because of how well it works. Face.com’s new Photo Finder application for Facebook helps you automatically discover public photos that you and your friends may have forgotten to tag — and it also lets you track untagged photos of your friends. The New York Times reports.

Face-recognition technology is itself not new, but Photo Finder’s twist is how it makes use of Facebook’s interface. The social network only shows you photos of yourself containing tags about you — your name and profiled, associated with you in a given photo. Up until now, untagging a photo is how you hide a photo from your Facebook friends — the other option is to use more advanced privacy settings that restrict photo viewing to specific friends, but I’m not sure how many people use that feature.

With Face.com, your friends can bypass such social engineering to directly stalk you, or visa versa as the case may be.

Read full article.

Slate's Shoot The Recession Project

Last week, Slate launched Shoot the Recession, a project in which they asked their readers what the economic crisis looks like to them.

The response on the photo-sharing site flickr, where a group page has been set up to collect contributions, has been bullish. As of this writing, the Flickr pool is home to more than 200 pictures.

[via Slate. Picture above from diong: I met him wearing the sign while taking pictures during the St. Patrick' s Day Parade, Indianapolis, Indiana (March 17, 2009). ]

Fifty-four percent don't need mobile video

FierceMobile Content reports on a new consumer study issued by global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing firm Accenture:

-- 79 percent of subscribers still use their mobile phones primarily as a channel to communicate via voice, text and email

-- 54 percent indicating their don't want or need mobile video services

--14 percent of users surveyed contend mobile services are too expensive and 9 percent add that video-enabled handsets are too expensive as well

-- When asked if the availability of mobile content would drive them to upgrade their mobile data plan to include video services, 70 percent replied "to a very little extent."

Other findings of the Accenture report:

-- The percentage of consumers watching video on a mobile phone rose from 12 percent in late 2007 to 14 percent in late 2008

-- The percentage of consumers accessing the mobile web rose from 8 percent in 2007 to 23 percent in 2008

-- About a third of respondents indicate web browsing is one of their top three favorite mobile applications

-- Almost 25 percent indicate listening to music on their mobile phone browsing is one of their top three favorite mobile applications

Although consumers are reluctant to embrace multimedia on their mobile phones, Accenture reports a growing number of respondents are embracing new forms of digital entertainment: Baby Boomers ages 45 and up are increasingly playing videogames on the go and listening to music via MP3 player, although they remain far behind Generation Y in actual usage.

In addition, Boomers are adapting to new digital platforms like blogging, social networking and Internet video, but remain far behind younger generations.

3D porn for iPhone without special glasses

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, now iPhone lovers can use their hot devices to view steamy adult videos in 3D.

Adult Entertainment titan Pink Visual is filming porn videos that can be viewed in 3D on iPhones encased in Wazabee 3DeeShells tailored for the popular Apple mobile devices by German firm Spatial View .

3DeeShell is described as "protective skin" that iPhones can slide into. A window built into the shell allows 3D viewing without special eyeglasses.

Watch video demo.

Babelgum bids to break into US mobile video market

Italian Internet company Babelgum launched Friday a new video-to-mobile service in the United States, its bid to break into the world's most developed smart phone market and spread beyond its current Web-based model. The IHT reports.

Babelgum offers bite-size videos, usually around three minutes long, viewed on smart phones — generally defined as mobiles that combine traditional telephony with Internet capabilities.

The business model seeks to make money through advertising, keeping the video free to viewers.

The U.S. service launched with five channels dedicated to music, comedy, film, nature and the environment and urban culture and trends.

Read full article.

YouTube Mobile App: 90% faster

Yesterday, YouTube posted a blog entry about their new Mobile YouTube app. It's been optimized for Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60 devices, enabling the YouTube page to load 90% faster with simplified search, navigation, selection after search, and video playback features.

The application can be downloaded at m.youtube.com. Watch video demo on YouTube.

[via TG Daily]

Passport Photo app

No need for a professional photographer or a photo shop to take your passport photo, thanks to newly released Passport Photo app.

This application allows you to use a picture from your saved photos or take a new one then size it to the correct format (in duplicate) required by both US and UK passports standards.

Great.

Movies on a Samsung mobile

Korea's Samsung Electronics has launched a service allowing its customers to buy or rent movies and TV series to download to their mobile phones. stuff reports.

The breadth of Samsung's offering, which includes over 500 blockbusters from top studios Warner Bros, Paramount and Universal, makes it competitive with other mobile media offerings from Apple and Nokia.

Samsung Movies, a dedicated virtual store for Samsung customers, launches initially in Britain and Germany and will extend to other key European markets later in the year, Samsung said in a statement.

Cropulator app crops and rotates images

The new Cropulator iphone app allows for quick cropping and rotating of images using simple tools.

Get rid of unwanted image areas by tapping and dragging while either maintaining the aspect ratio or not. Ever take a crooked photo? Not a problem. Just draw a line along a horizontal or vertical edge in Rotate mode and voila, the image automatically straightens. But wait, it gets better. If the crop rectangle has not been adjusted, rotating will automatically crop the image.

Barcodes to store videos

Scientists have developed what they claim are new barcodes big enough to hold images or video which can then be downloaded by camera phones. The India Times reports.

A team at Edith Cowan University in Australia is looking for a way out for multimedia data to be stored in barcodes and retrieved with a mobile phone camera snapshot, allowing software such as ringtones to be “downloaded” from mediums like magazines.

They have named it the Mobile Multi-Colour Composite (MMCC) 2D-Barcode, the media reported.

Lead scientist Dr Alfred Tan said, "The MMCC is a colour 2D barcode designed for storing high capacity data on printed media and displays, tailor made for camera mobile phone applications.

"Using the MMCC, the user can retrieve digital content to their camera mobile phone directly from the barcode by capturing an image of the barcode and decoding it on their mobile."

According to the scientists, by taking a photo of the barcode, users can download complex information, such as videos, voice recordings or text, directly to their mobile -- this information will be transferred to the mobile regardless of whether it is connected to the Internet or a mobile.

"The system is particularly suited for use in areas with limited Internet access. The MMCC can encode and store multimedia content such as ring tones, video clips and games, so that these can be delivered to any camera mobile phones anywhere without the need for mobile connectivity.

"It could also encode and store multimedia tourism contents in foreign languages so that tourists with a camera mobile phone can listen to the commentary at remote tourist sites, without the need to read English," Dr Tan said.

Image from Eurotechnology.

Teens caught 'sexting' face porn charges

According to USA Today, a growing number of teens are ending up in serious trouble for sending racy photos with their cellphones.

Police have investigated more than two dozen teens in at least six states this year for sending nude images of themselves in cellphone text messages, which can bring a charge of distributing child pornography. Authorities typically are notified by parents or schools about so-called "sexting."

... In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Juvenile Court Judge Thomas O'Malley struggled to figure out what to do with eight teens, 14 to 17, caught trading nude cellphone pictures of themselves. He says the father of one of the girls found the images.

If the 17-year-old who sent the nude photos to an ex-boyfriend were convicted of a child-porn charge, he says, she would be a registered sex offender for 20 years.

"These kids have no record, not even a parking ticket," says O'Malley, a father of four teens.

He required each to do community service and to ask peers if they knew sexting was a crime. They told O'Malley they surveyed 225 teens; 31 knew.

Related:

-- Sexting: New, Dangerous Teen Trend

-- Sexting - fears as teens targeted

Flickr Photos Become Stock Photography at Getty Images

According to Mashable, Getty Images, the popular site for print and media stock photography buys, is hoping to make the search for, and purchase of, high quality Flickr images for commercial purposes thanks to the Flickr Collection - which made its debut last night.

In the exclusive partnership that was initially announced last July, Getty Images editors handpicked photographs from Flickr’s community of 3 billion images and plans to refresh the collection with thousands of new ones each one month.

Read full article.

Spiderman guides Sony Ericsson into South Korean market

Sony Ericsson is calling on a superhero to help it enter the tough South Korean market. On Tuesday the company launched its brand with a version of the Xperia X1 cell phone that comes with the full Spiderman 3 movie loaded onto every handset.

[via The Industry Standard]

Michelle Obama, the homeless and the cameraphone

A story from The Los Angeles Times on First Lady Michelle Obama volunteering at a soup kitchen for homeless people, created controversy because one of the diners took her picture with a cameraphone: "If this unidentified meal recipient is too poor to buy his own food, how does he afford a cellphone? And if he is homeless, where do they send the cellphone bills?"

T Steel, site administrator of The Moderate Voice offers a stinging reply.

For all you types that look at the above picture and scoff so smartly, let me break something down for you, ghetto smarts style (I volunteered at homeless shelters for 10 years in inner city Detroit, Michigan USA):

1. Many pre-paid cell phones come with cameras.

2. Pre-paid cell phones are inexpensive at legal vendors.

3. Pre-paid cell phones and non pre-paid cell phones are frequently stolen and sold on the street DIRT CHEAP ($2 to $3 a phone many times).

4. Many homeless people buy the pre-paid cell phones and walk around with no service BUT still take pictures.

5. The same homeless people hold on to those cell phones and it is the first thing activated when they get more cash.

6. Many homeless people have only one way to be contacted, the cell phone. Thus it is HIGH priority especially in job searching.

7. Many homeless people are homeless because of loss of a job and inability to find solid work.

8. Homeless doesn’t mean shiftless or lazy. When jobs showed up at homeless shelters, everyone wanted one DESPERATELY.

9. There have been many programs in inner cities to provide cell phones to homeless and poor people for safety reasons (emergencies, etc). Don’t believe me? Safelink Wireless, please educate those not in the know!

...

Criticism of this photo and situation is pointless, nonsensical, quite petty, and loopy.

The PhotoChaining blog

The PhotoChaining blog is a continuous project where people practice the art of leaving memory cards in public places to be picked up and used by others, who then do likewise.

Caption that goes with picture above: I found the Rosa memory card in a bus in San Francisco - USA around mar.3, 2009.

How to participate in the project:

1. Take funny/original/humoristic/creative photos with your own camera (use a cheap memory card) .

2. Write a note in which:

- you explain in few words the PhotoChaining concept to the "finder".

- you provide a name* to the memory card (research on PhotoChaining to ensure that the designated memory card name has not already been allocated. If so, choose an other name).

3. Put the memory card and the note in a transparent plastic bag.

4. Leave the plastic bag in a public place (be sure people see the memory card in the bag).

Milan Exhibit Offers MMS of Artwork to Thwart Covert Camphone Snappers

To get around camera phone snappers who covertly snap artwork in museums where it's strictly forbidden, an exhbit in Milan has come up with a wonderful and obvious solution. Zoomata reports.

The recently-launched Samurai exhibit in Milan features some text-enabled works.

For the cost of a text message, exhibit organizers send you a picture of the work, plus a detailed description of it. In this case, there was more information about the Elk-horned warrior from the Edo period than in the exhibit.

It’s also a better pic than you’d be able to take on the sly. You can download it from your phone as a 60KB image — and then send it as a postcard if you fancy.

Sony Ericsson wants to take extreme photographs of you

Sony Ericsson has launched a campaign to create the ultimate Facebook profile picture after it announced its C510 phone will come with a new application that allows users to have statuses updated automatically. TechRadar reports.

The handset will be launched on 3, and Sony Ericsson will be taking a team of professional photographers around the country to allow people to have the 'perfect' Facebook profile pic taken, complete with Photoshopping to reduce any flaws / help if you're desperately ugly.

... You will be able to make it look like you're sky diving, bungee jumping or snowboarding if you're one of those lazy folks that likes the idea of doing dangerous things.

Flickr Opens Up Video Uploads for Everyone

Almost a year ago Flickr added the ability for Pro users to upload up to 90 second videos. Today they’re announcing that they’ve lifted the restriction to Pro users to include everyone, meaning that any Flickr member can now upload and share videos on the site.

[via Mashable]

Boost Mobile armpit commercial illustrates what's wrong with mobile carriers

Catch Boost Mobile's latest TV commercial on YouTube, using women’s armpit hair as a simile to illustrate what’s “wrong” with most mobile carriers.

[via TrendHunter]

Putting movies on mobiles

The first ever mobile film awards got a touch of Hollywood glamour as it was hosted by multiple Oscar winner Kevin Spacey. The BBC reports.

Describing his involvement, he said: "When I started to hear about MoFilm, I started to hear about what they were trying to do with respect to short films and content being able to go on to people's phones.

"And in some cases realising that, in some countries, this might be the first time they ever see a movie," he said. "They won't see it on that big screen, they'll see it on a small one."

Many aspiring filmmakers are frustrated by the lack of opportunities to screen their work but mobile phones are increasingly being seen as a new platform for these short works.

The MoFilm competition received 250 entries from more than 100 countries. Entries were restricted to films that were five minutes or less in length - ideal for viewing and sharing on mobile phones.

An independent jury then selected a shortlist of five film-makers from which a winner was chosen by an audience voting using their phones at the Mobile World Congress.

Read full article.

12seconds.tv: Video Twitter

In a sign of our times, a video version of Twitter that allows anyone to share moments of their lives in short, 12 second video clips is gaining traction among the geek crowd. From The Sydney Morning Herald.

"We're all about status updates and we're all about sharing short bursts of video moments ... you don't need to watch a 10 minute video of your friends at the bar - broadcasting 12 seconds is plenty, " according to 12seconds.tv founder Sol Lipman.

... Users simply record a 12 second video using their PC webcam or mobile phone and send it straight to the site via email or MMS. The site takes care of the rest and can automatically publish a link to the video on the user's Facebook page, Twitter account or blog.

Most recent phones are supported - even the iPhone, which is not capable of taking video. A free 12seconds iPhone app available on Apple's iTunes App Store lets people take three photographs and record a short audio clip, which is then processed into a pseudo-video.

Previously: - 12seconds.tv: The real video Twitter