iPhone 4 shot film to be presented at Berlin's short film competition

Top South Korean sales agent Finecut is to handle international rights to Night Fishing, the film that was recently shot on an iPhone 4 by Oldboy director Park Chan-wook and his brother Park Chan-kyong. Film Business Asia reports.

Several short films have been made using camera phones and Korea even held an iPhone 4 film festival in October, but Night Fishing is the first to receive a theatrical release in the country.

International distributors will get to see the film in Berlin's short film competition section. Finecut, which previously represented Park's breakout Oldboy, will be responsible for closing deals with buyers at the European Film Market.

The 33-minute mostly black-and-white film follows a fisherman who encounters a female shaman and goes from this life to the next.

It was made with regular film equipment, but substituted eight different phones with various lens attachments for conventional movie cameras. It cost $133,000, its budget financed by KT, the local distributor of the iPhone in South Korea.

Read more.

Cell Phones with 16-megapixel cameras

Renesas, the Japanese producer of camera chips which merged with NEC, has announced that it would soon make a sensor that would allow the production of 16-megapixel cameras.

The new chipset will enable continuous shooting that will be five times faster than camera phones currently available on the market.

[via HTlounge]

YouTube Video of Protests in Egypt

Despite apparent efforts by the government to disrupt communications among the protesters — some of whom responded to a call to protest posted on Facebook — by blocking mobile phone service and access to Twitter, many participants and observers managed to post accounts, images and video of the demonstrations online.

Read full article in The Lede.

Bill would let 'sexting' NJ teens avoid charges

According to Phlly.com, New Jersey teenagers caught texting or posting sexually explicit photos online could avoid prosecution under a measure that would give first-time offenders the chance to complete a diversionary program.

State Assemblywoman Pam Lampitt of Camden, who is sponsoring the bill said it's important to teach teens the potential consequences of their actions without saddling them with a permanent criminal record.

The bill won unanimous support from both parties in a committee and is headed for the Assembly floor. A version must also pass the Senate for it to become law.

[via Switched]

Related:

-- Court Says Parents Can Block ‘Sexting’ Cases - In the first federal appeals court opinion dealing with “sexting” — the transmission of sexually explicit photographs by cellphone — a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled in March 2010, that parents could block the prosecution of their children on child pornography charges for appearing in photographs found on some classmates’ cellphones.

Spain Pioneers QR Codes to Track Ancient Artifacts

The Center for the Studies of Archaeological and Prehistoric Heritage (CEPAP) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona have developed a process using bi-dimensional data matrix (DM) codes or QR codes to ID and track ancient artifacts, from kraters to potsherds. ReadWriteWeb reports.

Previous methods of on-artifact ID shared one thing in common: it was painfully easy to rub out, rub off or scratch out the identifying number of code written directly on or in the artifact. That process also ran the risk of marring the object.

The CEPAP team has tested this process for two years, affixing QR tags on everything from sword blades to bone remains.

Read full article.

YouTube Trends Catches Moscow Airport Bombing Aftermath

YouTube's new Trends channel has posted video of the immediate aftermath of the bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo airport yesterday morning, which officials are calling a terror attack. The death toll as of the time of this post was more than 30 people. The New York Times, Drudge Report, and other promiment media are already linking to the video below. Could Trends be turning into a hub for breaking news video?

[via FastCompany]

Recording a Police Officer Could Get You 15 Years in Jail

Citizens recording their public interactions with police sure seems like the kind of thing that would prevent corruption, harassment and bad behavior by cops. Just don't do it in Illinois, where it's punishable by up to 15 years in prison, according to The New York Times.

[via Gizmodo]

The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks

A very interesting article from The Atlantic on the role played by Facebook in Tunisa.

There has been a lot of debate about whether Twitter helped unleash the massive changes that led Ben Ali to leave office on January 14, but Facebook appears to have played a more important role in spreading dissent.

One early sign that Tunisians felt Facebook could be useful: Back in July, bloggers hotoshopped a picture of Mark Zuckerberg to show him holding up a sign that read, "Sayeb Sala7, ya 3ammar," the slogan for a freedom of expression campaign late in 2010.

According to Tunisian bloggers and activists, the ability to upload video to Facebook drove its usage because many other video-sharing sites had been blocked by the government.

The videos -- shot shakily with cameraphones -- created a link between what was happening on the streets in the poor areas of the country and the broader Tunisian population.

But it wasn't just videos that people were sharing. All kinds of information passed between Tunisians. For activists as well as everyday people, Facebook became an indispensable resource for tracking the minute-by-minute development of the situation. By January 8, Facebook says that it had several hundred thousand more users than it had ever had before in Tunisia, a country with a few more people than Michigan. Scaled up to the size to the U.S., the burst of activity was like adding 10 million users in a week. And the average time spent on the site more than doubled what it had been before.

Read full article.

Hipstamatic: the app that adds instant nostalgia to your iPhone snaps

The Guardian reports on the Hipstamatic app for iPhone that brings back the look, feel, unpredictable beauty, and fun of plastic toy cameras from the past.

A trend for thrift-store artiness isresponsible for one of last year's biggest-selling iPhone apps. Hipstamatic gained greater legitimacy in November, however, when New York Times snapper Damon Winter used his iPhone for a shoot in Afghanistan. Winter's unobtrusive photographs of US soldiers subsequently made the paper's cover.

Read full article.

Video That Triggered Tunisia’s Uprising

Tunisia’s uprising began in the impoverished town of Sidi Bouzid, where a street vendor whose wares were confiscated by the police set himself on fire outside of a government building in December. The Lede reports.

The desperate act of the vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who later died of his injuries, led to immediate protests in Sidi Bouzid. Video clips of those first protests, recorded on mobile phones and posted on the Internet, spread across Tunisia and the Arab world when they were shared on Facebook and eventually broadcast by satellite news channels like Al Jazeera.

Read full article.

Appearing Virtually at a Store Near You ...

A promotion for Esquire magazine allows iPhone users to have their picture taken with a virtual image of the model Brooklyn Decker at Barnes & Noble stores. The New York Times reports.

Ms. Decker is not setting foot in the actual stores, but is appearing virtually through a novel use of GPS technology with broad marketing potential. Using an iPhone with a special app, visitors to the stores can select from among several poses by Ms. Decker, who then appears in the center of the viewfinder and is superimposed wherever the smartphone is pointed.

Participants can pose beside her likeness, and some poses — like Ms. Decker blowing a kiss to her side — seem incomplete without an object of ardor in the frame. Users are prompted with the option of posting the images to Facebook or e-mailing them to friends.

Read full article.

Can Your Camera Phone Turn You Into a Pirate?

Nick Bilton reports for The New York Times on how he and his wife searching for interior design ideas for a new home, snapped a dozen pictures of book pages with their iPhones in order to share them later with their contractor. But they left the store without buying the books.

Later that evening, Bilton writes that he felt guilty and wondered if he and his wife had broken any laws by photographing those pages. So he turned to Julie A. Ahrens, associate director of the Fair Use Project at the Stanford Law School.

The core issue here is that you are creating a copy of something rather than buying it,” she said. “Is it morally incorrect? Maybe. But it depends how much of the book you copy, and what you do with that copy, that would determine if it was illegal.

Read full article.

This article reminded me of similar concerns when camera phones first became popular in Japan. Publishers even launched a campaign to stop "digital shoplifters".

Related:

-- Digital shoplifting in Japan, a growing concern for publishers (2003)

-- Japan's 'digital shoplifting' plague (2003)

130 million photos uploaded to Flickr every month

Flickr, just one of a number of popular photo sites, saw 130 million photos uploaded to the site each month. From Internet monitoring service Pingdom's research report creating a picture of the year online.

[via Bits]

German firm develops internet eraser for photos

A German firm is poised to launch software allowing users to have photos uploaded to websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Flickr erased automatically after a certain time, its head said. The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

The software should prevent the increasingly frequent occurrence of someone being refused a job or running into other embarrassing difficulties after posting a photo that maybe should have been kept private.

Before the user posts the photo, he or she drags it into the programme which assigns it an electronic key that is valid for a limited time period, said Michael Backes, founder of X-Pire.

If someone wishes to view that photo later, the server checks whether the photo has "expired" and blocks it from being displayed if its time is up.

Read full article.

16 megapixel camera phones coming

Renesas Technology, which makes the modules for phone cameras, has announced the availability of kit that could lead to smartphones with 16 megapixel cameras. Mobile Entertainment reports.

Samples have already been shipped that can reproduce a 1920 × 1080 image resolution and high-speed continuous shooting at 15 frames per second at 13 megapixels.

It aims to start commercial production from March 2011.

With 3D and hi-def phones coming, this could be quite a year for mobile video/imaging. But not such a good one for battery life.

Google Googles app uses phone camera to solve any puzzle

According to The Daily Mail, Google Goggles can find the answer to any Sudoku puzzle.

An update for mobile phone application Google Goggles can now use a handset's camera to snap a pic of the puzzle and, via the internet, whiz back the solution in seconds.

Google Goggles, available on the iPhone and Google Android phones, is intended mainly for price comparison information and general web searching. But by capturing images and sending them to the company’s central servers, the firm’s enormous web archive will find the answer just as if it were searching for a term entered as text.

Read full article.

Foursquare Surpasses 1 Million Photo Check-ins

Foursquare said in a statement today that over a million photos have been uploaded to its service by the week ended January 9, 2011.

The Location-based service currently has more than 5 million registered users, and is growing at a rate of (at least) 1 million new registered users each month.

[via WWWery]

Phones expected to reverse camera market growth

The glory days of the digital camera market are coming to an end.

So concludes analyst firm iSuppli, which forecasts modest growth in coming years followed by decline as new camera phones take over - all of which have cameras with resolutions as high as 8 megapixels.

[via CNet CES]

Andre Agassi Showed Camphone Pic of Steffi Graf to boost an auction

In an effort to spice up an auction for an autographed dish, tennis legend Andre Agassi offered to show the winner a naked picture of his wife, Steffi Graf, right on his cellphone. The dish sold for over $4,000.

[via Gizmodo]

Polaroid and Lady Gaga at CES

Polaroid execs, with the help of new creative director Lady Gaga, took the wraps off a new line of photo-capturing gadgets yesterday at CES. Mashable reports.

Dubbed the Gray Label, or GL, the new products - including a pair of sunglasses which captures and displays images and video on the lenses with it's data sent to a USB earpiece. Images (not video) can be sent to a printer via Bluetooth.

Read more. Picture from Mashable.

Philippines: Murdered politician photographed his killer before he was shot

A local councilman shot to death on New Year's Eve in the Philippines accidentally photographed his killer pointing a gun at him just before pulling the trigger. [boingboing via The Washington Post]

In the photo left, victim Reynaldo Dagsa's smiling family members are posed against a car; the alleged killer is at left, and an alleged lookout is at right. The photo led to the arrest of two suspects, one of whom was a car thief out on bail, presumed to be looking for revenge against Dagsa.

Facebook users upload record 750M photos over New Year’s weekend

A record-breaking 750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over New Year's weekend, the social network announced Tuesday afternoon.

Photos is arguably Facebook's most popular feature, and one that the social network has improved through a number of product updates this year.

[via Technology Live]

Google Exploring Possible Payment System For Phones

Google is considering building a payment service that would enable users to make purchases by tapping or waving their mobile phones against a register at checkout, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the plans.

The service could be introduced this year, the sources said. It is based on near-field communication, or NFC, technology, which can beam and receive information wirelessly from 4 inches away.

Read more.

Blind Man "Sees" Color with iPhone App: His Personal Story

CBS News speaks to Austin Seraphin who is blind. He uses an iPhone app called Color Identifier to describe the colors around him.

... My eyes can actually see single shades of colored light, but actually having a small device I can point at an object and hear a range of colors gives me a whole new level of awareness.

This sense of liberation has carried over to all areas of life, becoming a new feeling of independence. Having a suite of communication and visual aids in my pocket at all times gives an unparalleled feeling of security. Technology like the iPhone makes it all possible.

Read full article.

Over 3.5 million Nokia N8 sold since launch 3 months ago

Noki'as 12 megapixel camera, the first model running on Symbian 3 operating system, is one of Nokia N8 strongest selling points and it has received good critics among reviewers, reports Esatp.

Several reputable camera magazines and web sites rated the N8 as an excellent camera phone much because of the Carl Zeiss optics and not because of the user interface.

The independent Finnish research firm Inderes said yesterday that 3.5 to 4 million Nokia N8 devices were estimated to have shipped since launch.

Read full article.