Reel Health: Tanzania is a project of Remedee that explores how mobile technology can be used as a powerful storytelling and media-making tool in low-income and underrepresented communities around the world. [ThinkInnovation]
In the summer of 2010, a team of filmmakers trained ten medical and health students in Tanzania how to use cell phone cameras to document their lives and their country’s health crisis.
The videos you see here are proof that you don’t have to be a professional filmmaker to tell a powerful story, and you don’t need bulky, expensive equipment. With 5 billion cell phone subscriptions worldwide, mobile technology is opening a doorway for citizen media makers anywhere in the world to become agents for change.
New research shows that the summer of 2011 saw more people using their mobile phones to take photos than ever before. GigaOM reports.
Cellphone camera usage has taken off significantly in the past eight months alone, according to a “Summer Photo Usage Survey” sponsored by Photobucket, which polled more than 2500 participants during July. Fully 58 percent of respondents said they had used a camera phone to capture and share photos, up from 27 percent during the company’s 2010 Holiday Survey conducted in December.
Increasingly, people aren’t just using their cellphone cameras to capture static images. 45 percent of survey respondents said they use a mobile device to capture video at least once a week, while 17 percent said they use a mobile device to take video at least once a day.
Read full article. Case in point, photo above taken this summer in Lucerne with my iPhone.
The BBC reports on a website called Tubecrush.net which posts pictures for viewer rating, of good looking men traveling on the subway.
Adam Moger was travelling on the Northern line in South London one Sunday morning, when his photograph was secretly taken by someone using a mobile phone.
It wasn't until three days later when his friends contacted him, that Mr Moger realised his image was now part of an online trend.
His picture appeared on the website Tubecrush.net and a connected twitter account, and his looks and fashion sense were being rated online.
Tubecrush.net invites commuters to send in pictures of strangers they find attractive or eye-catching. Subjects must be men travelling on the London underground.
Sounds like an incredible invasion of privacy, but apparently, the London Underground is considered a public place so is fair game for photographing strangers.
The images and videos of bloody fighting in Libya can be hard to watch, but they are easy to come by, reports VentureBeat.
Everyone has stuff like this,” a rebel fighter said to a Reuters reporter in Misrata, as he showed cell phone video of government tanks entering the city and video of what he says was an unarmed doctor shot by Gaddafi troops, bleeding to death in the street.
Cell phones have become a valuable weapon in Libya’s uprising. Mummar Gaddafi’s attempts to shut down rebel forces’ ability to communicate were repeatedly thwarted by cell phones. Not only that, but the phones were capturing evidence of war crimes. Government soldiers and rebels alike took videos and pictures of fighting.
These will be digital recordings of evidence used in future trials.
According to the BBC, a smart phones become more accessible, some with built in speech and Braille output, it is possible for people with sight loss to get slivers of visual assistance when there's no one else around to ask.
Want to know what colour your shirt is? Use a colour detector app. Want to know if it is still daylight outside? Use a light detector app. Want to read a notice on your work's noticeboard? Use a text recognition app, of course.
The most recent visual assistance product to hit the app store is VizWiz. As well as giving you automated image recognition from intelligent software, it throws your questions open to a small band of volunteers standing-by on the internet - a human cloud, willing to donate ten seconds of their time here and there to describe photos which come in.
A group of Purdue University researchers have been working with police for the better part of a year to develop technology that will transform Android smartphones carried by officers into portable graffiti databases. Journal and Courrier reports.
The project is being introduced as GARI, for Gang Graffiti Automatic Recognition and Interpretation.
"You take a picture with an Android mobile phone, and it not only records the image, it also records the GPS coordinates, the date and time," said David S. Ebert, Silicon Valley professor of electrical and computer engineering.
"It can provide some analysis right on the phone and also can access a more extensive database of graffiti on a server."
Photovine, Google's answer to the mobile photo-sharing craze, went live in the iTunes App Store yesterday.
The app, which is only available on iOS to start, puts a somewhat unique spin on social photo publishing by grouping images into common themes, or "vines."
Sending cell phone pictures of medications before taking them may provide a simple but effective way to monitor compliance with prescribed treatment for methamphetamine addiction, reports a study in the September Journal of Addiction Medicine, the official journal of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. [via NewsWire]
Clinicians asking their patients to photograph themselves while taking medications may serve as another way of stressing the importance of medication taking," according to the new research by Gannt P. Galloway, Pharm.D., and colleagues of California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, San Francisco.
The researchers provided camera-equipped cellular phones to 20 patients taking a prescription medication (modafinil) to treat methamphetamine dependence. Before taking their daily medication, patients were instructed to take a picture of the capsule in their hand, then e-mail the photo to the research center.
The patients took 95 percent of their prescribed medication based on pill counts and 94 percent based on MEMS. In contrast, based on cell phone photos, the estimated adherence rate was 77 percent. Analysis of weekly data collected by all three methods suggested that the cell phone method tended to underestimate treatment compliance, compared to pill counts.
Mobile video finally is getting traction among users. In a recent Ipsos/Yahoo survey in the last year, video use just across the mobile Web was up by a third. MediaPost reports.
As mobile users come to expect fatter pipes, they don't balk at the sight of a video play button on their phones.
Under most 3G networks, buffer lag and consistency of experience are improving to the point where streaming media is a viable medium. But in most cases involving video, marketers either have to rely on the traditional pre-roll messaging, a branded video effort that pulls people in, or perhaps an SMS push that links to a video.
One alternative that gets too little coverage and attention in the U.S. especially is MMS, Multimedia Messaging Service. This platform works via the SMS channel in pretty much the same way. Unlike the other forms of mobile video advertising, MMS can send a video clip (generally of a very small size) to an SMS inbox for viewing with the phone's native player.
This gives MMS a potential reach far beyond the 35% of the U.S. Market comprised by cell phones. Many feature phones actually do have multimedia playback capabilities, and of course almost all modern phones receive text. And the beauty of MMS is that it shares SMS's greatest strength as a marketing tool - it is the message no one ignores and usually reads in minutes of receiving.
There's something uniquely appealing about the strips of snapshots produced by the classic photo booth, and a new app brings similar capabilities to today's mobile devices. PopBooth is a free app that can turn four photos into a strip for sharing on or offline.
PSFK reports on Google video's app update which now lets you rent movies on your Android phone.
This update, which was rumored early last month, now allows users to watch movie rentals from the Android Market as well as personal videos stored on your smartphone. The app also lets you manage the movies you’ve rented and displays a list of the most-rented titles.
The goal of the software, called Theia, is to give searchers a near-realtime view of what is being photographed on with now-ubiquitous camera phones. It’s like that bit in The Dark Knight where Batman turns every phone in Gotham into a sonar/microphone, except with pictures and it’s for real.
The group of developers contacted me to say that the group of developers has abandoned the project. They created an experimental app using tools from Face.com and tested it with 30 of their friends. Their plan had been to release a Facebook app to the public so that people in the UK could volunteer to scan riot photos to see if any of the ne’er-do-wells were friends of theirs.
They also gave me access to the app to give it a try. The results were too disappointing for the digilantes to actually release it.
It wasn’t identifying people it should (friends of the guinea pigs) with high degrees of confidence, and it was saying with relatively high degrees of confidence that rioters were people who they were not.
In my test, the app was 22% sure that this alleged thief is a marketing acquaintance of mine in New York and it was 58% sure that this troublemaker is a teacher I know in California.
The above image is from the UK police Flickr account, asking members of the public to assist in identifying pictures they post of the rioters.
A new app has arrived at the iTunes store that may violate Apple's own policy of keeping pornographic material off its app store. Cnet reports.
The company has given its blessing to the Cinemax Max Go app, which provides on-demand access to movies and programming on mobile devices to the cable channel's subscribers. The app also includes a Max After Dark tab, which allows streaming of some of the channel's softcore programming, which helped earned Cinemax the nickname "Skinemax."
The app includes a disclosure that states users must be at least 17 years old to download the app because, among other things, it includes "frequent/intense sexual content or nudity." It also contains parental controls designed to prevent children from viewing racy material. However, as first pointed out by GigaOm, the programming being made available on iPads appears to violate Apple's own anti-porn policy.
According to The Long Beach Post, Police Chief Jim McDonnell has confirmed that detaining photographers for taking pictures "with no apparent esthetic value" is within Long Beach Police Department policy.
McDonnell spoke for a follow-up story on a June 30 incident in which Sander Roscoe Wolff, a Long Beach resident and regular contributor to Long Beach Post, was detained by Officer Asif Kahn for taking pictures of
... This policy apparently falls under the rubric of compiling Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) as outlined in the Los Angeles Police Department's Special Order No. 11, a March 2008 statement of the LAPD's "policy … to make every effort to accurately and appropriately gather, record and analyze information, of a criminal or non-criminal nature, that could indicate activity or intentions related to either foreign or domestic terrorism.
Above: A photo taken by Sander Roscoe on June 30 at Edgington Oil Company before he was detained.
Accordiing to a ComScore press release, in June 2011, 14 million mobile users in the U.S., representing 6.2 percent of the total mobile audience, scanned a QR or bar code on their mobile device.
Favorite Jan Chipchase on the facial recognition revolution for CNN.
... The mainstreaming of facial recognition technology, which through smartphones will literally be in the palm of your hand. The ability to identify someone at a moment's notice by snapping a photo of him or her, to trigger an immediate influx of data about the person behind the face, will forever change the world.
Who wouldn't want to know more about the people in the world around them?
Imagine being able to pull up a résumé, Facebook profile, tax records and vital statistics just by taking a photograph. Consider how this will change social interaction and dynamics in public spaces - on the streets, at a conference, on campus, at an anti-government protest, in the personal care aisle of your local supermarket and in nightclubs.
... The technology is already here, and it’s not just in the form of government agencies on the lookout for terrorists or criminals. There exist fun mobile-phone apps like FaceDouble that analyze faces and compare them to those of celebrities, a contemporary parlor trick fueled by algorithms and some retailers are building up profiles of consumer's shopping behaviors via one-way cameras in shop displays.
In addition, with each photo and detail about your life you're posting online, you're adding to a rich, constantly updated dataset: Who in your social network has "checked in" to the same restaurants via foursquare; friends tagging you in a photo as you roll up to a bar; your geo-tagged Instagram photos.
These are the building blocks that the facial-recognition software can cross-reference, building a profile of you based not only what you write or has been written about you, but about what you look like and have looked like. Even if you don’t state your ethnic background anywhere on LinkedIn or whether you are married with children, a scan of your photos and other people's photos featuring you will make it far easier to deduce.
File under good to know. The Social Times explains what to do if you have make a presentation and the venue doesn’t have a configuration appropriate for a traditional projector and screen. [via Paul Swanson+]
Upload your presentation to SlideShare.net. SlideShare transforms PowerPoint files into a slide deck that is viewable in web browsers including mobile ones.
How to get consumers using their smartphones to engage withe brands and retail promotions? SixteenNine reports. [via Paul Swanson+]
The preview version of the report is based on both observation and research on how consumers use their smartphones when they shop and takes on working with interactive QR codes in a Best Buy – a retail described as well ahead of the curve in terms of the in-aisle mobile experience.
Best Buy often earns praise in this regard, because it provides QR hang tags on many store items that a consumer can scan with their phone to get detailed information and product reviews. But in many ways, the promise of convenient, informative mobile usage in-store remains unfulfilled there. The report by the digital marketing agency finds people need guidance on what to do. Following are a few examples that illustrate the scope of Best Buy’s opportunity for improvement:
-- No entrance signage mentions its QR code program;
-- No staff invites consumers to use their mobile phones to scan;
-- No visible signs state that a Best Buy smartphone app is available;
-- No available signage instructs how to download and use a QR code scanner;
-- No signage communicates the difference between scannable codes and nonscannable codes;
-- No ads or flyers promote the experience a consumer can expect to enjoy from the various codes, including QR.
Awesome. A laundry list of all the arguments for integrating signage (ideally digital) in-store to better the understanding and level of activity.
Almost 60% of people say they are NOT familiar with QR codes at all. Meanwhile, 46% of people who use QR codes, scan them for discounts. And 42% of those people have used them as a Ticket, with 62% of those saying it was a concert ticket. Take a look for yourself below!
Visa is accelerating its adoption of both NFC and EMV contact technology in the coming years. US chip suppliers for both technologies will have to "support merchant acceptance of chip transactions no later than April 1, 2013."
As rioting continues to roil the streets of London, local police forces are turning to the Web to help unmask those involved in the torching and looting. Bits reports.
On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Police of London posted a set of photos on Flickr showing people they believed to be participants in the riots. Right now the images are primarily from the Croydon and West Norwood neighborhoods in south London, although the site says that more will be posted soon.
With the initiative, called Operation Withern, the police are asking the public to identify anyone they recognize from photographs captured by CCTV surveillance cameras in areas where stores were looted. They say on the Flickr page that they hope to “bring to justice those who have committed violent and criminal acts.”
A new Google Group called “London Riots Facial Recognition” has appeared online, in the wake of the riots that rocked the U.K. capital over the weekend. The group’s goal is to use facial recognition technologies to identify the looters who appear in online photos. TechCrunch reports.
The group appears to be thoughtfully considering its actions, in threads titled “Ethical Issues,” and “Keeping Things Legal,” for example. They’ve also stated that “it’s important we only use legal sources for images.”
However, there’s a major “creepy” factor to this undertaking, too. The idea that a group of people would team up online to use (misuse?) facial recognition technologies in this way, notably outside professional law enforcement channels, seems like a modern take on vigilante style justice, where the torches of the angry villagers have turned into APIs and algorithms.
At this point, it’s already clear that the iPhone has become the camera many people use on a daily basis. The iPhone 4 is now by far the most popular camera on Flickr. But some upcoming changes in iOS 5 point to an even brighter future for the iPhone as a camera. We’re likely to see an explosion of photo apps as a result. Image/photo processing will become much simpler to implement and execute.
Nissan Motor Company has begun slapping QR codes on vehicle window stickers as so-called “silent salespeople” according to the company. Mobile Marketing Watch reports. [via Paul Swanson+]
You’ve likely waited to visit a dealership after-hours to look at a vehicle you’re interested in simply to avoid being hounded by a salesperson. Nissan recognizes this and hopes QR codes can help provide the information potential buyers want, without having to suffer through a salesman’s pitch.
The QR codes link users directly to a mobile optimized page that includes videos, features, vehicle inventory levels and more. The codes work with any smartphone reader app and is first being offered on the 2012 Nissan Altima and Sentra lines. The company plans to roll out the solution to its entire fleet eventually.
Japan-based chemical and tech company Asahi Kasei has developed a small healthcare product that makes it possible to instantly access all medical data on a specific person with a PC or smartphone, via RFID, using the FeliCa smart card tech. TechCrunch reports.
In an emergency situation, doctors or paramedics can tap Felica-equipped equipment against the device to view medical data of its owner, for example the blood type, date of birth etc. on the screen in seconds.
Asahi Kasei says that the entire medical history of patients can be stored. If doctors need to view very large files, for example X-ray images, the device can make access possible by letting users click on links that lead to that data (but stored on external servers).
Up to this point, points out TIME Techland, we've seen maybe 2% of augmented reality's latent potential. For the most part, applications of the technology have ranged from utterly useless, to transparently gimmicky, to "oh hey, that's kind of cool."
But now, web retailers might want to start jumping onboard the augmented reality train with new software from Los Angeles-based Zugara, which is using the technology to create something of an online dressing room.
Zugara is dubbing it the "webcam social shopper" in a partnership with U.K.-based retailer Banana Flame. Shoppers will need to step back 4-feet from their computers to make the frame work and as an added touch, the interface will utilize Xbox Kinect-like motion controls to navigate menus from a distance (see the video above).
Well, this is scary. Researchers have created software that uses public information to ID basically anybody just walking down the street. Stalkers, rejoice. Everyone else, time to find a comfortable mask that you'll never take off. Gizmodo reports.
Using facial recognition software and databases made of publicly accessible photos (profile photos from Facebook and LinkedIn that don't even require logging in to view, for example), researchers from Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University set up on a busy college campus and snapped pictures of willing passers by.
They were able to positively identify a 31 percent of these strangers within seconds.
The same company behind the technology that allows bank customers to deposit checks by camera phone is entering the healthcare business. MobileHealthNews reports.
Mitek Systems, Del Mar, Calif., is now offering its mobile imaging technology through an API so smartphone app developers can automate paper-based processes.
The new Mitek Mobile Imaging Cloud, which runs on the Amazon Cloud, captures images through smartphone cameras, extracts data from each image, populates forms and forwards the information to appropriate channels. Suitable healthcare documents might include paper prescriptions, physician superbills, insurance forms and patient history forms, according to DeBello, because they represent such tedious processes.
Healthcare “is one of our priorities,” Mitek CEO James DeBello tells MobiHealthNews. “Providers are trying to engage patients and consumers in a better user experience,” DeBello says.
He gives the example of a submitting expense reports and receipts to get reimbursed through a healthcare flexible spending account. “I literally have to go to the copy machine to copy my bills and receipts, fill out a form by hand, then fax the form by hand,” DeBello laments. If all goes well, a check shows up by snail mail a few days later.
Instead, how about snapping a picture of each document to populate an electronic reimbursement form that gets submitted in a matter of seconds? As soon as the FSA administrator approves the charges, payment gets sent electronically.
In the summer of 2010, a team of filmmakers trained ten medical and health students in Tanzania how to use cell phone cameras to document their lives and their country’s health crisis.
New research shows that the summer of 2011 saw more people using their mobile phones to take photos than ever before. 
According to the 
A group of 
Sending cell phone pictures of medications before taking them may provide a simple but effective way to monitor compliance with prescribed treatment for methamphetamine addiction, reports a study in the September 
Mobile video finally is getting traction among users. In a recent Ipsos/Yahoo survey in the last year, video use just across the mobile Web was up by a third. 
There's something uniquely appealing about the strips of snapshots produced by the classic photo booth, and a new app brings similar capabilities to today's mobile devices. 
After a group of digilantes formed a 
A 
How to get consumers using their smartphones to engage withe brands and retail promotions? 
Visa is accelerating its adoption of both NFC and EMV contact technology in the coming years. US chip suppliers for both technologies will have to "support merchant acceptance of chip transactions no later than April 1, 2013."
As rioting continues to roil the streets of London, local police forces are turning to the Web to help unmask those involved in the torching and looting. 
Well, this is scary. Researchers have created software that uses public information to ID basically anybody just walking down the street. Stalkers, rejoice. Everyone else, time to find a comfortable mask that you'll never take off. 
